We, the members of the OSU community, are profoundly concerned about recent developments regarding the removal of the OSU Divest initiative from this year's election ballot. It is imperative for our university to cultivate an inclusive environment where every voice, regardless of origin or perspective, is valued and acknowledged.

The decision to exclude the OSU Divest initiative appears to be a deliberate effort to stifle pro-Palestinian viewpoints and hinder constructive dialogue on divestment. Despite the Judicial Panel acknowledging procedural ambiguities and inconsistencies in bylaw interpretation, the proposed solution of a potential re-hearing and special election unfairly penalizes OSU Divest, prolonging an unjust situation unnecessarily.

Ohio Attorney General David Yost – part of the state’s far-right GOP super majority – is deliberately blocking not one but two proposed constitutional amendments backed mostly by African American activists, they claim.

Ohio is the second most voter-purged state behind Georgia and has some of the worst gerrymandered district maps in the country. Many would think that any Statehouse would reverse such undemocratic practices, but this is Ohio, now a MAGA stronghold, which passed HB 458 and signed into law by Gov. DeWine in 2023. HB 458 enacted the nation’s strictest voter ID law and other provisions restricting voters.

Concerned the Ohio GOP is desperately trying to restrict African American voters, a coalition of civil rights groups is leading a grassroots effort to put the “Ohio Voters Bill of Rights” to a statewide vote, which they say would modernize Ohio’s election system with pro-voter policies, such as same-day voter registration and expanded early voting options and locations, among other provisions.

Jared Kushner, a former US official whose relationship to power is that he married the wealthy daughter of a man who was later to become the US president, once attempted to teach Palestinians how to handle their own struggle for freedom.

 In 2020, he advised Palestinians to stop ‘doing terrorism’, summing up the Palestinian problem in the claim that ‘five million Palestinians are (..) trapped because of bad leadership’, not the Israeli occupation or US support for Israel. 

First you call them terrorists. Then you say you’re defending yourself. Moral problem solved!

You can kill as many of them as you want.

Well, maybe there will be consequences later (and maybe not), but for the moment you have overcome your own moral barriers and can start doing your job as a soldier: killing people. And in the process, you are making the world – your world, not theirs – safe. War is such a paradox: killing one’s way to peace. But apparently it’s humanity’s primary organizing principle.

Citizens of America, citizens of Israel, citizens of Russia . . . citizens of the world . . . this has to change! Now is the time to end war, by which I mean transcend war: disarm, demilitarize. We’re killing the planet; we’re living on the brink of nuclear suicide. Creating and dehumanizing an “enemy” isn’t going to create peace, but rather, just the opposite. We’re spreading hell across the planet, and not only does war always come home, it continues to create an endless cycle of death and destruction – simply to justify itself.