SINCE 1981
VOLUME 54
ISSUE 6
September 27 -October 4, 2016
UTSA UTSA will be offering a master’s degree program in geoinformatics in the Fall 2017 semester. Five different departments will be overseeing the interdisciplinary program, which focuses on processing large amount of geographic data and satellite-collected remote-sensing data.
Texas This weekend at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, TX Attorney General Dan Patrick lambasted transgender bathrooms, Black Lives Matter protesters and criticized public state universities for their use of research funds and the percentage of tuition payments schools set aside to help needier students afford college. On how universities can spend research money, Patrick stated, “I don’t want to pay an English professor with research dollars, and give them half a semester off, to write a book about the love life of William Shakespeare that no one cares about and no
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one is going to read.
U.S.
Jury selection has begun for the trial of Dylan Roof, the 22 year old charged with murdering nine people in a black church in Charleston, S.C. last year. Over 3,000 potential jurors are being sifted through in assisting the decisions on 33 federal charges against Roof, who will also face a separate state trial.
World Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of America (FARC) leader Rodrigo Londoño formally ended the country’s 52 yearlong civil war through a peace treaty. The treaty requires FARC members to surrender their weapons and participate in reintegration programs.
Science Researchers from Princeton University have found that atmospheric oxygen levels have dropped 0.7 percent in the last 80,000 years after analyzing trapped air bubbles in ice cores around Antarctica and Greenland. Of this oxygen, 0.1 percent has been lost in the last 100 years.
Photo courtesy of Omar Akram, MSA
MSA reaches out to combat Islamophobia Tania Siddiqi Staff Writer
@ThePaisano news@paisano-online.com “I try not to wear Muslim Student Association (MS) T-shirts in public because I don’t want someone to single me out, which has happened to me before,” said Omar Akram, a UTSA student majoring in biology. Quantifying “Islamophobia” is a tall order. The FBI’s 2014 Uniform Crime Report found 1,140 instances of “anti-religious hate crimes,” and out of that number, 16.1 percent of cases were considered “anti-Islamic” or “anti-Muslim.” Statistics like this imply a climate in which Islamophobia is prevalent; however, a counting up of crimes can miss the role that noncriminal attitudes and beliefs also play in the qualitative development of a xenophobic and Islamophobic culture A 2016 Republican presidential hopeful, Ben Carson, said he believed Islam was inconsistent with the values and principles of the United States, charging that the faith is “inconsistent with the Constitution.” Donald Trump Jr., son of the GOP nominee, recently tweeted a photo comparing refugees, many of them Arab and Muslim, to poisoned skittles in a bowl. Islamophobia isn’t exclusive to the Republican Party. Democrats recently staged a sit-in while pursuing legislation calling for stricter background checks before gun purchases and a ban on assault weapons, the focus of their protest coalescing around a demand to bar people who have been placed on the “terror watchlist.” Critics such as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University, called the watchlist a politicized “Arab and Muslim database” because the “federal government has already admitted that
almost half of the people on the list have no connection to terrorism at all.” For Taylor, many of these individuals are profiled as “enemies of state” on the assumption that they’re Arab or Muslim. In Florida and Nevada, hate-crime chargesare pending against men who placed bacon on mosque doors. On Eid-Al-Adha, a holiday celebrated by Muslims around the world, the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce was set on fire. In August of this year, the imam of Al-Furqan Jame Masjid was shot and killed in what many believe but has not yet been proven to be a hate crime. Members of UTSA’s Muslim community have said they too can feel this anti-Islamic sentiment. “As much as I would like to be upfront about who I am, I still worry a lot about resembling what some prejudiced people may believe a typical Muslim looks like,” Akram said. “I worry about whether growing a beard, a common practice among Muslim men, might hurt my chances at getting a job due to employers who secretly hold biased views against Muslims. I make sure not to stop in certain cities when I drive back home
women and their children were assaulted in Brooklyn, N.Y. The perpetrator pushed a stroller carrying the children to the ground and attempted to remove the hijab of one of the women. “Living as a Muslim woman becomes scarier and scarier with every attack,” says Amina, a psychology student at UTSA. “I wear hijab, I cover my body, and anyone who sees me knows I am a Muslim.” The Georgetown University “Bridge” initiative published a special report entitled “When Islamophobia Turns Violent: The 2016 Presidential Elections” that shows the connection between terrorist attacks and the uptick in Islamophobia that Amina is worried about. The report found AntiMuslim violence remained significantly higher in 2015 than before 9/11, with American Muslims approximately six to nine times more likely to suffer such attacks. Attitudes about Islam in the U.S. have followed a negative trend over the last 15 years. Amina shared a memory of when she was verbally harassed. “I was walking through
“As
much as I would like to be upfront about who I am, I still worry about resembling what some prejudiced people may believe a typical Muslim looks like”
Omar Akram, biology student to Dallas because of how little diversity those towns have, which increases my chance of sticking out. I wish I could go anywhere and appear however I would like, but that’s just not something that many Muslims, especially of Arab and Asian descent, can safely do.” Islamophobia also impacts the lives of Muslim women, particularly those who wear a hijab. This month, two Muslim
the parking lot, texting on my phone, and all of a sudden, I hear someone say, ‘The thing on your head is degrading to women in America.’ It took me a couple of seconds to process what this person was saying,” she said. “When I looked up, there was this man, sitting in a car, looking directly at me. I was caught completely off guard. I was so confused as to how I’m degrading women in America.”
AminaI walked to her car and called my dad, crying. “It was the first time that anyone had made such a rude comment to me in the seven or eight years of wearing hijab. I was truly shaken by what this one person had said,” she explained. Despite this, she went on to say, “I’m not going to change the way I live. I’m going to keep living my life the way I choose to.” This year, the Muslim Students Association (MSA) has proposed a way to address anti-Muslim sentiment and include members of the UTSA community. Kareem Salama, President of the MSA, said, “We have
been trying to organize a panel that’s open to faculty members and religious leaders across San Antonio. We’ve gotten UTSA involved through the College of Education.” “We would like to spend time talking about the positives of Islam,” he said. “Once people get to see us as a student population, in terms of how we interact with people and the characteristics that we try to embody, they will begin to understand that we’re (students) just like them.”
National Voter Registration Day hits UTSA Adriene Goodwin News Assistant
@hey_adreezy news@paisano-online.com There are seven more weeks until Election Day. Despite the ever-growing election fatigue, various efforts across the state and at UTSA are striving to build a bridge between constituents and political participation. The Rowdy Vote Coalition, a self-described “voter-participation coalition including several UTSA organizations,” will be tabling and registering voters on National Voter Registration Day (NVRD), Tuesday Sept. 27. The holiday was established in 2012 after 6 million people did not participate in the election because of registration difficulties, confusion or misinformation about registration deadlines. Bipartisan support of the holiday has helped it gain nationwide recognition as a valuable tool for civic engagement. The unity across partisan lines is evident in the successful efforts of Rowdy Vote to bring together organizations of differing views for the common goal of voter registration and
participation on Sept. 27. Organizations affiliated with Rowdy Vote include the Student Government Association (SGA), Texas Freedom Network, Secular Student Alliance (SSA), Spectrum, Black Lives Matter, UTSA Center for Civic Engagement and Students for the Right to Life. A comprehensive list of organizations affiliated with Rowdy Vote can be found on their Facebook page. Rae Martinez is one of the founding members of Rowdy Vote and a field organizer covering San Antonio and San Marcos for the Texas Freedom Network. A liberal arts sophomore at the Alamo Colleges, Martinez represents how Rowdy Vote involves college students and like-minded young people across the city. “We’ll have events where each organization will bring their own table supplies and table as their organization, (but) together as a coalition which is really cool,” said Martinez about Rowdy Vote. “Other times we’ll have unmarked tables, and we’ll all come together to volunteer. That’s how we’ll be doing it for Voter Registration Day.” See NVRD, page 2