The costs of college tuition are rising, but apparently, so are the costs of high school graduation gifts. The latest graduation gift fad? Breast implants.

Yes, you read that correctly. The number of young women getting breast implants has increased by 300 percent — and a large chunk of those are requesting them for graduation gifts. After all, what better time to get new breasts than before you head off to college, where no one knows you — or your “real” breast size?

Never mind the health risks. We’re talking about people who are young and impressionable, people who think that size is all that matters. It’s no secret that we live in a culture where image reigns. Changing that might be next to impossible. So the real question we should be asking is why are parents footing the (very expensive) bill to give their daughters breast implants? Perhaps the centrality of image in our culture doesn’t become less important as we become older (and presumably wiser). Perhaps the idea that larger is better is so engrained in female minds that it’s being handed down from one generation to the next.

But in the process, it seems mothers who buy their daughters breast implants are also handing down something else: A belief that they’re not good enough, that they should get what they want rather than learning to embrace their bodies for what they are. In other words, they pass down a culture that doesn’t demand change, instead allowing them to accept and assimilate into a culture that isn’t necessarily female-friendly and that doesn’t breed self-confidence.

Laura Nathan-Garner

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That it was only a handful of people, gathered together for less than half an hour, who witnessed the birth of a new Iraq probably saved Iraqis and the Coalition forces many lives; let us hope, however, that this handover ceremony was not reflective of how the new Iraqi government will operate. Secrecy and speed defeated, at least for the moment, the increasingly violent insurgents, but it is precisely the qualities of secrecy and haste that the new Iraqi government must avoid.

Making Bush and Blair seem particularly devious and secretive, the BBC reports:

Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair — apparently the only leaders at the NATO summit aware that the handover was taking place — exchanged smiles and a brief handshake after consulting their watches.

With 160,000 Coalition troops still in Iraq, in addition to the privately contracted security services — less official but no less prominent — the immediate effects of the handover may be difficult to discern. The New York Times reports that the new American embassy in Iraq will be “the world’s largest,” and will manage the staggering sum — eight billion dollars — that will be channeled into Iraq as reconstruction aid.  

If Dr. Iyad Allawi, the new Iraqi Prime Minister, should impose some form of martial law in the coming days to control the bloody chaos that is Iraq, the birth of a new Iraq may become an even more nervous occasion. The vacuously buoyant note — “Let freedom reign!” — that President Bush jotted to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice could not strike a more dissonant note with the very cautious optimism on the ground in Iraq.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Plunging into the increasingly competitive market for the Arabic-speaking audience, the BBC has announced plans to develop an Arabic-language TV station. While Al-Hurra (The Free One), the recent American incursion into Arabic language television, was reviled — Tishrin, a Syrian newspaper, denounced it as “part of a project to re-colonize the Arab homeland that the United States seeks to implement through a carrot-and-stick policy,” — the BBC’s project might well become successful.  

The question of journalistic independence and national partiality is a legitimate concern, since the British Foreign Office will provide the BBC with funding for its venture into Arabic-language TV. Government funding, however, certainly doesn’t preclude journalistic integrity or local popularity and acceptance. While some may regard the American Al-Hurra — to which Congress allocated a $62 million budget for its first year of operations — and its radio equivalent, Radio Sawa, with little more than deep suspicion and loathing, the BBC is both popular and respected.

The BBC World Service radio news broadcast has 1.8 million listeners per week in Baghdad, Basra, and other major cities in Iraq, and it is the largest international radio broadcasting station in the country. These impressive statistics are in spite of the fact that the British Foreign Office currently finances the BBC’s numerous World Service radio stations. The BBC World Service offers news in 43 languages, and an estimated 45 million listeners worldwide tune into the BBC’s English-language radio service.

The BBC’s Arabic-language TV programming, then, may emerge as a healthy competitor for Arab satellite stations, such as Al-Jazeera, which boasts an estimated audience of 35 million viewers in the Arabic-speaking world. Granted, the figure of 1.8 million BBC listeners pales in comparison to Al-Jazeera’s 35 million viewers, but while Al-Jazeera both feeds and panders to a sense of pan-Arab solidarity, the BBC may be able to trade on its reputation as a reliable and accessible source of news. And the BBC knows its competition: When Al-Jazeera was founded in Qatar in 1996, it lured and successfully poached a number of former BBC Arabic staffers.  

Mimi Hanaoka

I just spent 72 hours with 73 American high school exchange students in a hotel south of Los Angeles International Airport. Last night at 1 a.m. PST, the last of them caught their flight to New Zealand. For the first time in a few days, I headed home to my own bed.

I’d agreed to serve as a volunteer Group Leader for AFS, an internationally respected non-profit exchange service. This week in Los Angeles, AFS sent American high school students to live in Japan and Australia for the summer. In the hours before departure to their respective host countries, AFS walks students through an intensive orientation in which students are introduced to different communication techniques and behaviors which will aid them in their transition to life in their new home.

“Does this orientation really help?” one student headed to Japan asked us over dinner.

Good question. Did I remember any of my pre-departure orientation before I spent a year in Italy? I tried to remember back to 13 years ago. We were high school students stopping in New York for two days before heading overseas to our prospective host families in Italy. Excitement, anticipation, and nerves exhausted us; it was the first time many of us had ever been away from our parents. In the college dorms where our orientation was held, there were more than 50 of us, full of hormones and newfound independence, and we all had something in common: we were all giving up what we knew to be safe and familiar to spend a year of our lives in a foreign country.

I don’t remember much of what our Group Leaders said to us. No doubt they covered the intricacies of high-context and low-context cultures, non-verbal communication, and ways to better integrate into our host families and communities, just as we had with these students. Mostly I recall the students I met at that orientation, and our experiences together during that year, and how our lives have changed in the years that followed.

“Yes,” I told her. What would I have wanted to hear, on the eve of my own departure? I didn’t tell her that her time abroad would change her. The re-entry to one’s native culture after spending time in a host country is often more challenging than leaving home in the first place. How much can parents understand what their children experience while they’re away? My own time as an exchange student was difficult, as were the first years I spent trying to reacclimate to my natural home. Looking back, I found the most comfort in the empathy shared by other exchange students who became my friends, those same people I met during the orientation, with whom I shared nothing else in common.

The time has come for you as well to open your hearts and receive the secrets that Heaven is disclosing in this age through me. In one sense, I am a human being living with a physical body like each of you. But in the context of Heaven’s providence, I am God’s ambassador, sent to earth with His full authority. I am sent to accomplish His command to save the world’s six billion people, restoring them to Heaven with the original goodness in which they were created.

These are the words of Rev. Sun Myung Moon from a March ceremony in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington D.C., which honored the reverend and businessman and was attended by more than a dozen lawmakers. Paul Smith describes a video of the ceremony in the Chicago-based blog Polis, focusing in on the actions of Illinois Democrat Danny K. Davis:

It’s a longish video, but you need only watch the first few minutes which focus on the March 23rd event at the Senate Office Building. In it, we see Rep. Davis reading from a poem written by Moon, some treacle about a “crown of glory.” Moments later, during the “highlight” of the evening — the “Crown Peace Ceremony” in which Moon and his wife are enrobed and various figures come before them and bow [a pang in my heart as I hear the name of the Congressman of my home district in Maryland, Roscoe Bartlett, announced] — Rep. Davis, wearing a set of white gloves, brings Moon a crown on a velvet pillow. (House Speaker Denny Hastert (IL 14, R) is also named in the video as having sent congratulations to Moon.)

“Does Congressman Danny Davis (IL 7, D) have some explaining to do?” asks Smith.  

I think I can state without hyperbole that this video is truly one of the most unsettling things I have seen: to see members of Congress participating in a cult-like ceremony in which a right-wing media tycoon and leader of a controversial church is proclaimed the messiah is nauseating. I’m not a Christian or even religious for that matter, so it’s not as if I’m offended by Moon’s claims (except on an intellectual level, of course). Is it really necessary to state that I am disturbed to see our elected representatives credulously and subserviently going along with it?

Davis, while not a powerful Congressman, has been a reliable liberal and advocate for the poor, as he was during his time as 29th Ward alderman in the Harold Washington [Chicago’s first Black Mayor] era. What’s he doing not just allowing himself to be seen cavorting with Moon, but actively participating in a cult-like ceremony? Should Illinois democrats … be concerned? And how do South and West Side black ministers — a large base of political clout for Davis, a Baptist — feel about it?

While other politicians who were present at the ceremony have distanced themselves from Rev. Moon, Davis has been less apologetic. Speaking to Christopher Hayes of the Chicago Reader, he offered, “You know the Boy Scouts have rituals that they go through and they make individuals Eagle Scouts and they give awards and presentations.”

Davis has a point. We do have rituals left and right in our society — religious ones, secular ones and many that hover somewhere in between. But very few of them have our senators and representatives listening to, let alone crowning, keynote speakers that go on like this:      

The five great saints and many other leaders in the spirit world, including even Communist leaders such as Marx and Lenin, who committed all manner of barbarity and murders on earth, and dictators such as Hitler and Stalin, have found strength in my teachings, mended their ways and been reborn as new persons. Emperors, kings and presidents who enjoyed opulence and power on earth, and even journalists who had worldwide fame, have now placed themselves at the forefront of the column of the true love revolution. Together they have sent to earth a resolution expressing their determination in the light of my teaching of the true family ideal. They have declared to all Heaven and Earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity’s Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent. This resolution has been announced on every corner of the globe.

But I’ll let Smith have the final thought. After all, this is one of a growing number of important news stories that marinates in the blogs before being cherry-picked by the big print boys. Tune into Polis for Smith’s ongoing Moon-Davis Watch.  

Davis dismisses the event as “symbolic” and yet fails to grasp that it’s precisely the symbology of this religious ceremony taking place on government grounds with governmental countenance that’s set this whole thing in motion. Davis comes across as a dupe or a low-rent flak for Moon, and I don’t know which is worse. In any case, Davis is clearly willing to risk being seen as a loony cultist rather than running afoul of Moon, for what reason, we still do not know.

Benjamin Helphand

Invitation to a Beheading: It’s not just a book by Vladimir Nabokov anymore. It’s the latest craze on CNN and every other mass-media outlet.

It seems to be the newest form of so-called terrorism — one that physically pains me to hear about and think about. Not only does it make me wonder why or how anyone could resort to such an act of violence, but it invites all sorts of interesting metaphors. For instance, I’ve long heard about the three-headed hyrdra. If you cut off one of it’s heads, it just grows back. The analogy has often been used to describe the futility of attempts to resist the State. The beheadings that have become the newest fad overseas are no different. There will undoubtedly continue to be repercussions, acts of violence committed by the United States and its allies against the perpetrators, or those closely associated with them.

So what do the beheadings accomplish? They’re a means of flexing muscles, reminding us that those who feel the United States and its allies have wronged them are here and won’t disappear. They are essentially attention-grabbing techniques, but beyond that, what’s the purpose? What else are they trying to tell us? And does their invitation really alter the political landscape of the world through our eyes or theirs?

Laura Nathan-Garner

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Kim Sun-il, a South Korean man kidnapped last week and held by Islamic militants, has been beheaded, as the militants had said they would do. The South Korean foreign ministry confirmed his death, and the Associated Press was reporting it this afternoon. He is the latest to be killed in this way. There was Nicholas Berg. And then, there was Paul Johnson.

Paul Johnson was beheaded in Saudi Arabia Sunday. Before Johnson died, an anonymous letter posted online offered the most religiously empathetic attempt so far to save his life. The letter showed up on websites trafficked by al-Qaeda supporters. The writer of the letter, who signed off as “Saad the Believer,” said he was a Muslim friend of Johnson’s. If Johnson was harmed, he wrote, “I will curse you in all my prayers.”

So far, this letter shows the only public and even remotely effective approach to saving the American hostage’s life. In all the dogmatic public statements about the U.S. policy against negotiating with terrorists, you have to wonder where Americans living abroad can find hope, if they should have the misfortune of being kidnapped and threatened with death. This letter might be it. This letter showed an alternative to the ethnocentric arrogance to which all cultures can fall victim. The letter spoke in the religious language of the militants, appealing to the beliefs that they publicly claim to hold, even if their actions defy so much of what other Muslims believe.

Paul Johnson still died, but the letter written on his behalf offers a glimmer of the cultural understanding that is so clearly now a matter of life and death. The letter was someone’s last-ditch attempt to derail a hopeless course. Its significance is its display of respect, the kind of respect you show by acknowledging that even as your beliefs are diametrically opposed, you accept that others see the world differently. This is the kind of respect that has a chance of saving a man’s life.

Vinnee Tong

Sierra Leone surely qualifies as one of the many little hells on this earth. Apart from diamonds, the country has little else to bring a glimmer of hope to its economy. What it does have is political instability, a landscape and a people ravaged by a decade of civil war, and the recrimination that is the natural result of post-civil war reconstruction.

But for the women in Sierra Leone, childbirth may also be a life-sentence of ostracism and humiliation. If it were not horrific enough that approximately two in every 100 women die during childbirth, due to inadequate medical care, an inordinately large number of child-bearing women are afflicted with fistula, or vesico-vaginal fistula, whereby, due to complications during pregnancy, a woman is condemned to a lifetime of incontinence.

Fatmata Kargbo is one of the approximately 5,000 women — in a country of five million — to be afflicted annually with the easily curable condition of fistula. She is regarded as unclean and jinxed, lives in solitary humiliation, and earns a living by chipping rocks for builders.

Fatima states: “Everyone deserted me – my husband deserted me, my friends deserted me. I know I will never have a husband, I will never have a boyfriend, I will never have a baby. So I just live by myself.”

The condition is cheaply curable, at 180 U.S. dollars, but there are so many women with the condition that it would take 50 years to treat the backlog of women in Sierra Leone, according to Elizabeth Hunter, the head midwife at Mercy Ships, a Christian medical charity ship that was recently moored outside of Sierra Leone’s capital.
  
Such tragic afflictions should remind us of the pressing need to specifically examine women’s issues within the broader context of regional political and economic studies. While most of Sierra Leone lives in absolute poverty, these women, stripped of social and family networks of support, are cast into their own private little hells.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Indicative of the confused and paranoid bigotry that has seeped into the fabric of American life in the post-9/11 world, students at the University of California at Irvine have denounced the desire by some Muslim students to wear a stole at graduation on the basis that the stole condones terrorism and suicide bombings.

Never mind that stole in question features strictly religious inscriptions — one side of the stole would have the innocuous and pious phrase “Lord, increase my knowledge” sewn into it. The other side would feature the shahadah, which is the Muslim confession of faith.  

Larry Mahler, the president of the UC Irvine chapter of the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi referred to the episode about the stoles and stated: “I am offended by that … What they are doing is ratifying the suicide bombing that killed innocent people.”

The inappropriate and unconditional politicization of religion is troubling enough, but this incident at UC Irvine is born of ignorance fanning the flames of religious intolerance. It points to a blunt equation: Islam is terrorism.

The term “terrorist” is problematic in itself — after all, it is the contingency of politics that may define one group as “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan and another group as “terrorists” elsewhere — and the inherent association of Islam with extra-legal violence is deeply troubling and shameful. It speaks not only of ignorance and religious intolerance but a sad readiness to associate the religion of 1.3 billion Muslims with terrorism.

Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan and an expert on Islamic movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia, provides insightful commentary on the situation at UC Irvine and a thorough explanation of what the shahadah is.  

To associate Islam with terrorism in the way that the students at UC Irvine have done is to forgo understanding, encourage bigotry, and promote the polarization of communities.

Mimi Hanaoka