WEATHER A&E PHOTO STORY SOCIAL MEDIA FFollow us on TTwitter Musiq Soulchild Volunteers bring @@spartandaily brings the ‘Magiq’ bikes for tykes BecomeB a fan oon Facebook High: 83° ffacebook.com/ Low: 55° PAGE 5 PAGE 8 sspartandaily Spartan Daily Serving San José State University since 1934 Thursday, May 5, 2011 spartandaily.com Volume 136, Issue 50 Obama: ‘Teach-in’ No bin Laden analyzes photos Middle East McClatchy Tribune uprisings WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama decided against Matt Young releasing pictures of Osama bin Staff Writer Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. forces, saying that doing so could pose a security risk and would be In January of this year, an “Arab inconsistent with American val- Revolt” occurred, with people ris- ues. ing up against the Hosni Mubarak “We don’t trot out this stuff regime in Egypt en masse. as trophies,” he told CBS’ Steve What caused it, where is it go- Kroft. “The fact of the matter ing, and what are the implications is, this was somebody who was for the United States? deserving of the justice that he Shariat Lin, president of the received. And I think Americans San Jose Peace and Justice Cen- Photo: Jesse Jones / Spartan Daily and people around the world are ter, brought together a panel of Senior philosophy major Samantha Pedrosa, sophomore Samantha Plescia and psychology major Denisse glad that he is gone. But we don’t scholars on the topic for a ‘teach- Mendez work on recreating the Venus. need to spike the football.” in’ with a series of interlinked pre- After 48 hours of briefi ngs on sentations, followed by a Q-and-A the bin Laden assassination that session. sometimes were inaccurate, the The event, though complex in president and his administration the issues presented, contained called a halt Wednesday, refusing Dressing Venus: some pragmatic information, even to release neither the photograph if it wasn’t as in-depth as some, as that many had been clamoring for attendee Donna Wallach would nor any more details about how have preferred. bin Laden met his end. Wallach, sporting a hat fes- Obama said that after seeing Exploring body image tooned with buttons featuring slo- the photos himself, and based on gans, such as “Support Palestinian DNA testing, he is “absolutely Rights: End U.S. Funding of Israel” certain” that bin Laden is dead. and “The Patriot Act? That’s so Conspiracy theorists would Nate Morotti rine dated from between 22,000 and top 8 percent of women in our na- 1984,” said she liked the event, but not be satisfi ed even if a photo Staff Writer 24,000 BC featuring an overweight tion, and we want people to know the information presented didn’t was released to the public, he de- nude woman with large protrud- that it is okay to be proud of what explain as much as she had hoped cided. ing breasts and an exaggerated labia. they look like.” for. There was internal disagree- In the modern age of supermod- It was discovered in 1908 and later The event consisted of coloring “It was good. I think it needed ment about whether to release els and Photoshop, one of the most named the Venus of Willendorf. cut-out clothes to put on photocop- to be like a seminar,” she said. “I pictures of a slain bin Laden, but talked about issues in global culture The event is part of Respect Your ies paper dolls of Venus of Willen- don’t think a two-hour event can the president’s most senior Cabi- is the issue of body image and what Body week, where women are en- dorf, which was meant to show that present all the information that net members concurred that it it means to be beautiful. couraged to take care of themselves any type of body can be considered needed to be talked about.” was best to keep the photos secret These are the topics the group by eating healthy and exercising beautiful, according to the members She complimented the fact that because they were too infl amma- Womyn on Womyn’s Issues hoped while also promoting a healthy body of the club. many on the panel had lived in the tory, a senior White House offi - to address in its “Paper Venus of Wil- image and higher self-esteem for “Society reinforces those ideals of Middle East and presented infor- cial said Wednesday. lendorf” event on Wednesday in the women across the nation, according what women are supposed to be,” said mation she called “pretty power- But CIA Director Leon Pa- Mosaic Cross Cultural Center in the to the Women’s Resource Center. Bonnie Sugiyama, the director of the ful.” netta has seemed more open to Student Union. “The most pressing issue when campus Women’s Resource Center. The people involved were con- releasing the photos, saying in “The Venus of Willendorf is the it comes to body image for women Other events being put on by nected with the events in the Mid- interviews they would come out earliest example of a 3-D image of a is conforming to what the media Womyn on Womyn’s Issues include dle East in a variety of ways and eventually. woman created by man,” said Saman- says a person should look like,” said a “Vanity Fair Reshoot” where wom- included educators from around The White House had ordered tha Plescia, a member of Womyn on Denisse Mendez, another member en get to remake an issue of Vanity the world, according to the Peace an intelligence analysis to gauge Womyn’s Issues. “It’s the fi rst image of Womyn on Womyn’s Issues. “This Fair Magazine using more realistic and Justice Center, the event orga- whether public disclosure might we have of a woman and it’s very dif- media image of what women should and diverse body types and a presen- nizer. ferent from the modern idea that we look like, like supermodels, is admi- tation by Barby and Vic Ulmer of the have of what women should look like.” rable, but people also need to realize San Jose Peace and Justice Center on see OSAMA page 2 The image comes from a fi gu- that that is only representative of the U.S. foreign policy. see ARAB page 3 Professor pairs with ‘Desert Flower’ to fi ght mutilation Lyell Marks lion, to battling rapists and poverty, a way that was so graphic that no one Staff Writer Dirie overcame a cruel burden of ad- who reads this will even question if versity that few girls her age could this is the right thing to do,” she said. possibly carry. Miller has been at SJSU for the As a young college girl living in Miller’s tale tells of Dirie’s strug- last six years, originally fi nishing the rural Pennsylvania, Cathleen Miller gle but also aims at illuminating the story while she was an Master of never could have envisioned a sce- issue of female genital mutilation, a Fine Arts student at Penn State Uni- nario where she would be telling the horrifi c rendition of what has been versity. story of a girl from Somalia who had traditionally called a “circumcision.” What Miller describes in the pag- run away from an arranged marriage What Dirie was unable to escape es of her book started as a tribal prac- and haunting cultural tradition. was a cultural practice that has ex- tice in African countries that were With more than 11 million copies isted in Somalia and other African mostly hunter gatherer societies. of her book “Desert Flower” being countries for roughly 4,000 years, She said the men of the tribe sold worldwide, Miller, an SJSU Eng- one that kills one-fourth of the girls would return home from hunting lish assistant professor, said their alli- who the operation is performed on, trips that would span months, fi nd- ance had to be something more than according to Miller. ing their wife pregnant with what coincidence. “To call it a circumcision is really a couldn’t possibly be their child. “It was total destiny,” Miller said. happy euphemism,” she said. “Some- “They fi gured, well, we’ll cut off “She believes it and I believe it. What thing that kills 500,000 little girls her clit so she doesn’t have any inter- are the chances that a white gal from a year is not a cultural practice we est in having sex,” Miller said. “Then the south and a black supermodel need to propagate.” we will sew her up so it’s physically from Africa pair up and write a book Miller said the procedure is per- impossible for her to have sex.” together?” formed on roughly 2 million girls What Miller said is the most de- “Desert Flower” is the story of every year, an operation that involves pressing part of this practice is that Waris Dirie, who left her home in cutting off the clitoris (sometimes culturally, women are the advocates Somalia at age 13 to escape a mar- with glass or a razor blade) and sew- for the procedure and young girls riage arranged by her father to a man ing them back up with little or no Photo: Michelle Terris / Spartan Daily with a white beard and cane. anesthetics. SJSU Assistant Professor Cathleen Miller (right) poses with the Masai From being face to face with a “I wanted to write about FGM in see MILLER page 2 people she interviewed for her forthcoming book. 2 NEWS sPARTANDailY Thursday, May 5, 2011 OSAMA THIS DAY IN HISTORY ..