Thanks to the Snews team for theses clips of the US election shenanigans in the SOAS common room. I wanted to post something using the new
12second TV facility but my bloody computer crashed at the 11th hour :-(
The JCR was PACKED and is a very good sign that people are engaged in what could be the most important election campaign in US history.
SNEWS correspondent, Yelden Sarybay described the scenes: “The atmosphere was crazy! People cheered at every projection of Obama winning a state.”
However, there was a lot of cynicism. During Obama's powerful but pretty vacuous speech speech reflecting on his campaign’s recurring theme of “Change”, there was a fair amount of heckling . When he spoke sbout the American soldiers that have lost their lives in iraq someone shouted 'what about the dead Iraqi's?'. When he made promises about a number of things people shouted 'but how/when?' etc.
To keep with the theme we all chipped in to put on 'American' food-Pizza's, Hotdogs (vegan of course-this is bloody SOAS after all), homemade, delicious cookies, popcorn etc. And there was plenty of beer swilling!
Prior to the close of polls we invited speakers from a variety of campaigns and organisations.; Campaign Iran, Stop the War, AWL, Somali Society etc. Martin Smith from the SWP gave a great analysis of the Amercian political scene and layed the ground to quell any over enthusiastic Obama supporting.
No doubt SOAS is behind Obama but will be keeping up the pressure to try to ensure he keeps his (empty) promises.
2 comments:
It was amazing and impressive to see how politically aware soas students are. I drove past the LSE at 5:30 am and they had organised something similar, and yet with a student body which has more US students, there event was non existent. I think we should all congratulate Clare and Elly on a well organised event! A good idea all round.
You're not gonna score any brownie points here Amjad :-p
In fact John Angliss organised most of it. This is what is great about SOAS, everyone chipping in.
Twas great tho, huh?
See you at the next UGM.x
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