The Opinion Pages

The traditional Thanksgiving editorial starts off by remembering the Pilgrim Fathers. You never, for some reason, hear about the Pilgrim Mothers. They have been added parenthetically in the lead of the Wikipedia article about the Pilgrims for the sake of political correctness, but there’s no link to any article about them. There must have been Pilgrim Mothers, of course, because otherwise there wouldn’t have been a Society of Mayflower Descendants. -more-

This is in response to the Nov. 20 commentary, “Fairness and Climate Change Demand MTC Attention,” by Richard A. Marcantonio, an attorney with Public Advocates Inc. -more-

In director Sam Peckinpah’s 1962 classic, Ride the High Country, movie legend Randolph Scott yells to a bunch of Southern gunmen, “Hey you red-necked peckerwoods.” This was possibly a first in the history of film when one white character leveled a double-barreled racial epithet to other white characters. -more-

An Israeli infantry unit entered the Gaza Strip early this month, violating a five-month-old truce between Israel and Hamas, the party now ruling Gaza. The Israelis set up camp in a family’s home, and as clashes with Palestinian militants followed, they called for air support. So it was that, on Nov. 4 and 5, while the world’s attention was focused on the U.S. election, Israeli aircraft fired missiles that killed six Palestinian militants. -more-

The more I study Riya Bhattacharjee’s “hate crime” article in the Sept. 25 Daily Planet, the more troubling I find it. -more-

There was much hope when the Oslo Peace accords were signed in 1993. However, the peace process was derailed when Dr. Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarch on Feb. 25, 1994, and the massacre was avenged 40 days later by the first suicide bombing inside Israel in the city of Afula on April 6, 1994. The peace process received further blow when the Prime Minister Isak Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995, as he was leaving a rally in Tel Aviv in support of the Oslo process, by Yigal Amir, a radical right-wing Orthodox Jew who opposed the signing of the Oslo Accords. -more-

In the academic world of our forward thinking and innovative universities, why should a broad over-arching societal issue such as climate change be confined to the department of environmental science? The environmental changes will certainly impact us all, therefore our learning institutions are starting to look at ways to bring in a broad spectrum of subjects into the dialogue, hoping to stimulate different ideas and new ways of dealing with the climate crisis. -more-

Barack Obama was elected by people who hope that he will change the political direction which this nation has taken over the last seven years of the Bush regime. When he takes office he will have the power to undo some of the damage of the Bush administration. But he will not do so because he does not owe his political allegiance to the majority of people in this country, but rather to the small class of people who live on the exploitation of the masses here and throughout the world. These are the people he will serve, regardless of the wishes of millions who voted for him. He may tinker with some of the programs of the Bush regime, but he will fail to reverse the fundamentally fascist trajectory. -more-