Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, one of the nation’s most influential neoconservative commentators, visits Bates College to discuss the impact of Sept. 11 on American foreign policy at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 23, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

Presented by the Bates College Republicans, the event is open to the public at no charge. For more information, please call Nathaniel Walton, vice president of the Bates Republicans.

The Bates co-sponsors of Kristol’s visit are the offices of the president and the dean of faculty; the departments of anthropology, political science, sociology, and theater and rhetoric; and the Bates College Historical Society, College Lecture Series and Representative Assembly. The Young America’s Foundation is also a major co-sponsor.

Kristol is editor and publisher of the Washington-based political magazine The Weekly Standard, which he helped found in 1995. An early and forceful advocate for the removal of Saddam Hussein, Kristol is widely considered a leading spokesperson for the political right.

He is the author or editor of several books including The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission (Encounter Books, 2003), which he co-authored with Lawrence Kaplan, and regularly appears on Fox News Sunday and other Fox News programs.

“The Bates College Republicans hope that through bringing William Kristol to campus, the Bates community will better understand the nature of U.S. foreign policy after Sept. 11,” said Walton. “There are few individuals in politics or media today who can speak with as much clarity or foresight on this subject as Mr. Kristol.”

Prior to starting The Weekly Standard, Kristol led the Project for the Republican Future, where he helped shape the strategy that produced the 1994 Republican congressional victory. During the George H.W. Bush administration, he served as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, and was chief of staff to Secretary of Education William Bennett under President Reagan.

Before coming to Washington in 1985, Kristol taught politics at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in government and holds a doctoral degree in political science, also from Harvard.

Layli Miller, who argued a landmark legal case establishing female genital mutilation (FGM) as a basis for U.S. asylum, discusses violence against women at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 28, in Bates College’s Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Avenue. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Miller is executive director of the Virginia-based, non-profit Tahirih Justice Center, which provides legal aid and social services to protect human rights for women. She co-wrote Do They Hear You When You Cry (Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1998), the story of Fauziya Kassindja, who fled her native Togo as a teenager rather than undergo ritual genital mutilation.

Kassindja spent more than a year imprisoned in this country before her refugee status was legally established. A summer intern for Kassindja’s lawyer, Miller became Kassindja’s friend and champion. Despite early setbacks, in 1996 Kassindja’s legal team won a Board of Immigration Appeals decision establishing FGM as grounds for asylum.

Miller’s talk at Bates is titled The Global Impact of Violence Against Women: Is International Peace Attainable Without the Eradication of Violence Against Women? She will relate violence against women to the treatment of refugees and U.S. immigration and asylum law, issues increasingly relevant in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

For more information about the lecture, please call 207 786-6330.

“While Islam strongly links religion and politics, Islamic law very strongly prohibits suicide,” says Caspi. “Some will say that Islam is to lead the world, but it is to do so by persuasion. The Prophet accepted Christianity and Judaism as monotheistic traditions and called them ‘people of the Book.’

“There has been no Muslim sage who has condemned in a strong , unequivocal way that this act is not the way of Islam,” says Caspi. “Why do we not hear this from the imam of the al Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem, from the authorities on Islamic law at al-Azhar University in Cairo? Why do we not hear from the imams in Mecca and Medina?”

“Privately, they condemn the extreme actions of so-called fundamentalists. Publicly, they don’t speak out because they and their families live under the threat of extremists.”

A native of  a small Israeli village near Hadera, Caspi grew up as a Yemenite/Kurdish Jew speaking Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic. His journey of 62 years has led him away from his seaside village to an accomplished international career as both a poet and scholar of Islamic and Hebrew biblical literature.

With a B.A. from Hebrew University, an M.A. in psychology from Santa Clara University and a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies from the University of California at Berkeley, he taught for 25 years at the University of California at Santa Cruz with intervening residencies at Oxford, St. Johns’ and Hebrew and Haifa universities.

With deep roots in both the traditions of Islam and Judaism, Caspi’s connection to both Islamic and Jewish cultures serves as the cornerstone for his philosophy of mutual respect in the political arena.

A month after suicide-terror attacks in New York City and Washington D.C. killed almost 6,000 people, fear still locks the voices of the eminent Middle East clergy of Islam, says Mishael Caspi, an Israeli Islamic and Judaic scholar and visiting professor of religion at Bates College.

“While Islam strongly links religion and politics, Islamic law very strongly prohibits suicide,” says Caspi. “Some will say that Islam is to lead the world, but it is to do so by persuasion. The Prophet accepted Christianity and Judaism as monotheistic traditions and called them ‘people of the Book’.

“There has been no Muslim sage who has condemned in a strong , unequivocal way that this act is not the way of Islam,” says Caspi. “Why do we not hear this from the imam of the al Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem, from the authorities on Islamic law at al-Azhar University in Cairo? Why do we not hear from the imams in Mecca and Medina?”

“Privately, they condemn the extreme actions of so-called fundamentalists. Publicly, they don’t speak out because they and their families live under the threat of extremists.”

Other topics that Caspi could discuss:

· How the internal divide between Shia and Sunni Muslims expresses itself politically.

· His assessment that successors to Yasser Arafat will quickly surface at his death, and there will be a negotiated peace creating a Palestinian state within six months of Yasser Arafat’s death – or a civil war among Palestinian factions. Arafat, he says, can no longer be the broker for peace because Israelis will never again trust him.

A native of a small Israeli village near Hadera, Caspi grew up as a Yemenite/Kurdish Jew speaking Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic. His journey of 62 years has led him away from his seaside village to an accomplished international career as both a poet and scholar of Islamic and Hebrew biblical literature.

With a B.A. from Hebrew University, an M.A. in psychology from Santa Clara University and a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies from the University of California at Berkeley, he taught for 25 years at the University of California at Santa Cruz with intervening residencies at Oxford, St. Johns’s and Hebrew and Haifa universities. With deep roots in both the traditions of Islam and Judaism, Caspi’s connection to both Islamic and Jewish cultures serves as the cornerstone for his philosophy of mutual respect in the political arena.

Nobel Peace Prize nominee Elise Bjorn-Hansen Boulding will discuss how the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks might affect prospects for world peace in a lecture at Bates College at 4:15 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 11, in Chase Hall at Bates. Part of the Muskie Archives Lecture Series, the event is open to the public free of charge.

Boulding will examine the September attacks in light of the United Nations Decade for Peace and Nonviolence, which began this year. Titled “The United Nations Decade for Peace and Nonviolence: What Do We Do?” Boulding’s lecture at Bates will offer a vision, she says, of “how we can respond to the events of Sept. 11 in a way that will break the cycle of violence, begin to deal with the underlying issues that caused it and create more peaceful relations in the future.”

“The United States has been emphasizing unilateralism,” Boulding says. “Now what we’re learning is that we have to listen to the rest of the world, and to learn more about cooperation among states and communities in order to achieve common goals.”

A professor emerita of sociology at Dartmouth College, Boulding is an activist well-known in the international peace movement. She was a co-founder of the International Peace Research Association, has held leadership positions in a variety of other prominent peace organizations, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.

Boulding’s long list of publications includes the books Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History (Syracuse University Press, 2000), Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent World (Syracuse, 1990) and One Small Plot of Heaven: Reflections on Family Life by a Quaker Sociologist (Pendle Hill Publications, 1989). She was born in Norway and lives in Massachusetts.

The Edmund S. Muskie Archives constitute the largest U.S. collection of research materials involving a politician who was not president of the United States. The archive offers a vibrant series of public programs that relate to issues in which Muskie, a former U.S. senator and secretary of state, was influential.