The Justice

The allegations of the Brandeis Group against JRC are not only accurate but in large part they are not strong enough to detail the torture inflicted by Dr. Israel. I must advise that I received a call a number of months ago from a concentration camp survivor and she said that Hitler kept claiming that his treatment was appropriate and since nobody stopped it six million Jews died. She thanked me for standing up to a similar tyrant and compared the torture of students at JRC and the claims that it is working and helping people to Hitlers allegations of cleansing. Although there is a dramatic difference, the infliction of pain on unsuspecting students whose disorder is their only problem in the guise of cleansing must be appreciated by the people of Mass.
Minor shocks is a description that is only claimed by
Dr Israel and the intensity of the shock is checked by noone outside the school.The Mass political structure appears afraid to deal with Israel's army but in the end Justice will be served. Here in NY, as an atty who knows what is really happening at this house of horror, we are working on getting it stopped. Keep on doing what you are doing at Brandeis as Dr. Israel seems to like to blog with your students and just maybe somebody will make a difference. The children inside need that kind of attention!!!!!!!!!!

As a member of BSAJRC, I am personally offended by these allegations that we used propaganda and scare tactics to confuse students into signing our petition. First, I would like to address the statement that we distributed literature comparing the Judge Rotenberg Center to Abu Ghraib. The only reference was a political cartoon on the cover of Mother Jones magazine, which had been published roughly two weeks before our first meeting. We have no control over what sort of cartoons Mother Jones published, and we were only trying to demonstrate the amount of press that our issue has received (we also displayed several copies of The Justice). Furthermore, political cartoons are meant to exaggerate political issues. I recently saw a cartoon of Hillary Clinton flying around on a broomstick, but I doubt that anyone believes that the cartoonist is attempting to point out that she has magic powers.

On the issue of whether or not the children are being tortured, I?ll admit that torture is a very strong word. Furthermore, it is correct that we used to word torture for the purpose of attracting attention, being that the purpose of tabling is to draw people to your cause. However, the JRC has been known to punish children by strapping them to a board and shocking them again and again for a predetermined period of time. Also, the center?s ?treatment? has resulted in several deaths. It?s true that this punishment is nothing like what is happening at Abu Ghraib, because those prisoners are protected by the Geneva Convention and it is illegal to use such aversives on them. However, the State of Massachusetts has not seen fit to enact similar laws to protect its own children, which is why we feel the need to campaign by any means necessary to raise awareness about the Center and to end the use of aversive therapy once and for all.

Taylor Shiells' Op-Ed from last week's issue of [i]The Justice[/i] regarding Brandeis Students Against the Judge Rotenberg Center's rhetoric is a series of misconceptions about our group.

It appears Shiells' primary complaint is with our use of the word "torture" on the banner we hung from our table in lower Usdan. Torture is not, as Shiells states, solely an interrogation method; the American Heritage Dictionary defines torture as "Infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion" and "Excruciating physical or mental pain." Anyone who has read accounts of the pain inflicted upon students at the JRC would agree that torture is certainly an apt word to describe the two-second shock inflicted for offenses like nagging, swearing, or falling asleep in class. Matthew Engel, an attorney at the Disability Law Center in Western Massachusetts writes, "I had the lowest voltage of the GED administered to my arm and it was the most intense pain I have ever experienced." If that isn't torture, then what is?

The satirical cartoon comparing the JRC to Abu Ghraib is designed to represent the hypocrisy of America as a country that supposedly values human rights and yet allows unnecessary pain to be inflicted on those who do not deserve it. The cartoon is not designed to portray the JRC as being exactly like Abu Ghraib, but rather to illustrate a similarity of principle in the outrage over both situations--we are supposedly a nation where every person has inherent dignity, but both the center and the prison are affronts to that dignity.

Shiells praises STAND, the Student Anti-Genocide Coalition, but this group actually employs the same methods as ours. Using Shiells' logic, the STAND coalition is disrespecting the student body by using the extreme word "genocide" before each individual student comes to their own conclusion about the situation in Darfur. Of course this notion is ridiculous; there is genocide in Darfur and STAND is doing an excellent job of raising awareness on campus. Our use of the word "torture" is no different. There is torture at the Judge Rotenberg Center, and it is our mission to raise awareness of this torture and eventually put a stop to it.

Taylor Shiells,
If you want to be a stickler on the meaning of the word torture, that's fine- we'll do that. Let's do it the old fashioned way. The Oxford English Dictionary defines torture as "the infliction of severe pain as a punishment or a forcible means of persuasion" or "great suffering or anxiety", as can be seen at http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/torture?view=uk. As is apparent in this definition, torture DOES NOT need to be "a means of interrogation or for the purpose of cruelty", as you contend. Your narrow and ill-informed definition of the term does not make BSAJRC's use of the word incorrect. Working with the correct definition provided by Oxford, one can easily see that JRC DOES torture its students. The GED shock device used at JRC is applied to painfully punish students who misbehave, and misbehavior there can be defined as loosely as talking out of turn or letting their head droop in class for five seconds. I want to emphasize the word 'painfully'; we have read reports of outsiders who have tried JRC's GED device and jumped out of their chairs or described the shock as the most pain they have felt in their life. Matthew Israel says it feels like a bee sting, but a reporter investigating the center once said it feels like a thousand simultaneous bee stings. Unless you have looked into such reports about the GED yourself, Mr. Shiells, you have no basis and no place to call the shocks "mild". The GED also serves as a means of persuasion, that is, a reason for students to behave a certain way. So JRC's shocking methods fulfill both halves of Oxford's first definition of torture. As for the second definition, "great suffering or anxiety", there is obviously a great deal of suffering that goes along with these painful shocks, and who wouldn't be anxious in every waking moment, knowing that even a small mistake could get them electrically shocked?
So you claim that our presentation of the facts insults the Brandeis community. You hold that by sharing our opinions and asking others to share their own with us, we "inflame and confuse the community". Mr. Shiells, it is YOU who insults the Brandeis community. You imply in your article that the students of Brandeis are incapable of understanding the distinction between the cold, hard facts that BSAJRC presents and the ideology that has led our group to oppose the JRC. We present the facts and we present our conclusions, but from the facts anyone can form their own opinion. To contend that hearing BSAJRC's conclusions will prevent other Brandeis students from drawing their own shows a disgusting lack of faith in our peers.
Your use of the term "scare tactics" keeps finely with the abrasive and fallacious nature of the article. A quick search through the Encyclopedia Britannica Online for "scare tactics" brings up, among others, an article about Stalin's diplomacy and another about British censorship in colonial America. The actions of BSAJRC are by no stretch of the imagination comparable to anything that could be called scare tactics. Scare tactics are designed to instill fear in those that they are directed at. The goal of BSAJRC here at Brandeis is to INFORM the community about the situation at the JRC. The term you chose to describe our publicity campaign connotes threats, lies, and an abuse of misplaced power. The only power we have here on campus is the power to share information and thoughts with the Brandeis community, a power that is owed to everyone here, and that we are therefore justified in utilizing. No one should be scared by what they learn about the JRC (unless they're personally worried about ending up there). As citizens of a civilized world, we should be upset that the actions of the center are allowed to occur, and we should all do our part to stop them.
Your attempt to contrast BSAJRC against the Student Anti-Genocide Coalition is painfully flawed. How can you say our sign bearing the word 'torture' is too emotionally charged while idolizing a group with "Genocide" in its name? True, these words have emotional effects, and they are subjective terms. Those guilty of the Darfur incident do not call it genocide, and if asked to defend themselves they would likely claim that genocide is an unsuitable term, just as you say that torture is an unsuitable term for JRC's practices. But if groups opposed to what's happanening in Darfur are justified in calling it genocide, then we are just as free to say that JRC tortures.
Mr. Shiells, your fear that BSAJRC is seeking to destroy the integrity of activism at Brandeis reflects nothing other than your own lack of understanding of activism and of what we are trying to do. Activism is a product of passion. When people are passionate about an issue, they organize and spread their views to those with sufficiently open minds to listen. There are two sides to every issue, so every cause that activists take on is inherently controversial. There will always be those who agree with the activist's position and those who do not. Look at any activist cause from the past- Vietnam, Tiananmen Square, the civil rights movement- there are always dissenters to the activist cause, and the dissenters always condemn the language used by activists because it exposes the atrocity taking place. Activism is inherently biased, because without a strong belief that the situation that one is protesting is wrong and the conviction to express that belief publicly, there is no activism.
As much as I respect your enthusiasm for healthy criticism, Mr. Shiells, your article "Extreme rhetoric clouds shock debate" crossed the line in many places, especially in its opening sentence. The few moments you spent with us at the table in Lower Usdan clearly did not give you an accurate impression of what we are doing, not that it would have been easy to grasp the scope and nature of this movement in such a short time. However it was apparent that you tried only feebly to understand our explanations and most likely had your mind made up before arriving in Usdan, or at least as soon as you saw the sign. Your questions were aggressive and you would not allow the answers to affect your opinion of us. Journalistic integrity is at least as important as activist integrity, because when people want objective information they look first to the press. As a reporter you have a duty to the Brandeis community to either look at all sides of a story, or write only about things that no one cares about. The JRC issue deserves honesty, it deserves integrity, and Brandeis Students Against the Judge Rotenberg Center has been delivering.

I take issue with your classification of the shocks as "mild".

The voltages and durations of the JRC shocks are public, so if you are as well educated as you claim, do the math or use Google to find what these shocks will do to a person's skin and nerve tissue.

Still think these shocks are "mild"?