I began writing for this paper shortly after September 11, 2001. Four years and many columns later, my column comes to an end in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian. Through this time, I have tried to voice my perspective in the pages of this paper. This perspective, the view of an Arab Palestinian, is hard to find in the media today, yet here at the university level, I was given permission to narrate and for this I am grateful.

Looking at the world around me I can see that an Arab or Palestinian perspective is not welcome. In fact, there are many people who wish to silence writers like myself because they know they will be exposed and their interests will be harmed. As long as print media continues its struggle to survive amidst lower sales it will continue to produce a product for sale and will move further from reporting on the realities which concern us and I, for one, will resist this.

To my critics, who upon reading my opening lines may have already said, “good riddance to bad rubbish,” I say “thank you.” Thank you for reading my column. Thank you for entertaining my ideas. There are certainly people who disagree with me very strongly but they still read. I respect them the most and I know that I have contributed to planting the seeds of change in their minds and cracking the edifice of propaganda upon which their understanding relies.

Often I am asked why I write about similar topics and how I can be so persistent. Often I am asked why I do not write about anything “good”. There are simple answers to these questions. Perhaps most importantly is that the media dominated society we live in gives so little room for a perspective like mine. It is necessary to do all that is possible to be heard.

Also, there are two images that hang above my desk that stare me in the face as I write every week. The first is a character image from a political cartoon. The image is of a barefoot child holding a sword with his back facing me. The tip of this sword is a fountain pen reminding me that even the weak have powerful weapons in print. Adjacent to this image is a line written in Arabic calligraphy from an Iraqi poet that reads “My ink is black. Do not ask me to draw a rainbow.” It is hard to focus on the miscellaneous rights when there are so many wrongs which need to be corrected first. Besides, we write about what is wrong because we want change and if everything were right there would be no reason to criticize.

We can never forget that we are in a constant struggle to make the world a better place. If we go through life without challenging the status quo, the generations that follow us will start years behind in a world, which could have been better. The burden falls on us to strive for principles that are in the interest of the greater good. Equality, freedom, education and human rights, the great goals our society has yet proven it has the courage to fight for and we must be the catalyst for this change.

We must ask the difficult questions because they will not ask themselves. Every human struggle for freedom from oppression is our struggle. Be it the Palestinian struggle or the struggle for equality in the United States, they are all fights we should be sharing in because if we do not oppose oppression as it happens under our watch we have become the oppressor.

We must ask why so few people control so much wealth. We must ask why certain nations are dictating standards they themselves do not follow. We must ask what has led a man to die for what he believes in. We must ask what the interests of each party involved are. We must ask why “they” hate “us”. We must ask who “they” are and perhaps even more importantly we must find out who “us” really is.

As I close my last column I begin to think of the future of the debate on this campus. I wonder when is the next time a Palestinian perspective will be consistently voiced in the pages of this paper. I can only hope that the pen I lay down is picked up by others who are willing to ask the difficult questions. I hope that others will resist those who wish to silence them, by crowding people and perspectives behind racist walls. All that is for certain is that as this last column comes to an end the struggle only continues.