Magazine brings international awareness

by Jaclyn Roco
Arts & Entertainment Editor

Once in a while, when in a pensive mood, I will actually attempt to look outside of my selfish existence and find out what else is going on around the world.

This time was no different. While sitting in the computer laboratory, all by myself, I unconsciously picked up a magazine that was in front of me.

The magazine did not appear familiar (some of the writing was in another language), and the cover indicated that the publication was made for Palestinians in America.

Well, I figured, perhaps this magazine would help give me the other side of this never-ending story -- the war that appears to be ongoing.

I flipped through the pages and the words suddenly blurred when I saw a certain picture.

A fire--a fire so big--burned the page so brightly. And in the middle, were a couple of bodies, charred bodies of innocent victims of yet another mishap.

Immediately, my pensive mood was all but destroyed, I sought the page that contained the story.

The story was as sad and gruesome as any act of terrorism done to this country. And as deliberate as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were, I wonder if the attacks done to these women were justified.

The women, apparently, were students who attended a religious school. Because their uniform did not meet the dress code, (Palestinian women are required to be covered in rough, tunic robes from head to toe) school police accosted them, and forced them to remain inside of the school premises. Shockingly enough, the same building they were locked up in, was being evacuated at the same time.

A fire had erupted, and the police, lost in the evacuation process, forgot about the three or four women they had left behind to burn to death.

My hands trembled with outrage that such a thing could occur.

And thoughts, perhaps violent thoughts, entered my head. I wanted to kill and hurt so bad, that the images in my mind began to transform into a series of heated figures thrashing away at each other.

In the middle was I, the victor in the war. But then I came back to reality.

I was an American after all and the events in the story did not affect me.

Then again, they did.

Again, another instance of overpowering had occurred against the 'weaker' sex.

The women of Palestine had grown up in a world that is hard for me to understand.

To be continually hidden behind their veils...to be continually subjected to degradation because of their gender...to never know the feeling of the wind blowing in their hair...how do these women do it?

The women that died had actually allowed the police to lock them up in a building because they were wearing their clothes incorrectly?

I just do not understand!

Is religion supposed to be that strong, that everything, clothes, food, culture­life!­is supposed to revolve around it?

Even the writer in the article wrote something along the lines of the faith being too harsh on the women of Islam.

I agree with that!

And I'll continue to wonder from this day forth, that if I was the woman behind the veil, how I would feel like, burning inside of a building, because of a government that placed the law over the life of a female.

Jaclyn Roco, a junior journalism major, is arts and entertainment editor of the Campus Times. She can be reached by e-mail at rocojax@yahoo.com.