AMHERST — Students at the University of Massachusetts' flagship campus are going ape over a recent email from resident assistants ordering them not to crack jokes about Harambe, the fallen Cincinnati gorilla who happened to have a very similar name as that of a designated African heritage student living area.
"We wanted to take a moment to address some phrases that are being written on the whiteboards — specifically ones involving 'Harambe,'" read an email sent over Labor Day weekend to freshmen students living at UMass-Amherst's Sycamore Hall. "We understand that social media has been popularizing Harambe in some crude ways, which may appear as funny to groups of people.
President Obama's foreign policy has been a subject of intense debate over the past eight years, particularly concerning his actions in the Middle East. While his decisions have earned praise from some and scorn from others, there is one curious aspect of his foreign policy that has gone unnoticed by many; the president's harsh rhetoric and actions concerning secular dictators in the Middle East, and his willingness to tolerate and even cooperate with Islamist regimes.
When the Egyptian protests began in January 2011, the president gave the protesters very vocal support. "Egyptians have made it clear that nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day," he said in a statement on the day that President Mubarak stepped down amid protests. He praised the election of Mohammed Morsi, even though the party Morsi represented had close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, Morsi's promise to release terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman from American prison and his statements calling Israelis the descendants of apes and pigs showed that he was more than a merely nominal Islamist.
