Opinion

Last week, as a cold December was coming to an end, my father, Warren Peters (known to everyone from his Princeton ‘34 classmates to his great-grandchildren as “Pete”) departed from his life on this earth. He’d been around for almost a century: Born in 1912, he enjoyed 93 years of vigorous good humor, and endured three more recent years of much-diminished mobility and mental acuity with good grace, dying at 96. -more-

LEAVE ARTISAN DISTRICT ALONE -more-

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Things are seldom what they seem -more-

Take a walk through Berkeley’s West Side manufacturing and light industrial district, north of the fancy Fourth Street retail strip where the swells go to shop. You’ll see a few industrial plants puffing their last breaths, and plenty of weedy lots surrounded by chain link fences with plastic bags blowing around inside. -more-

On Dec. 4, three weeks ago today at the Berkeley High School Auditorium was the scene for the 12th annual Mario Savio Lecture, given by Robert Kenney, Jr. Because of UC administration’s refusal to settle a labor dispute on campus, RFK Jr. refused to talk there. His address was preceded by the “Young Activist Award,” given to an organizer of immigrant women in New York City. One of her accomplishments was to help taxi dancers unionize; she even convincing the dance hall patrons, the $2 a dance ticket men who were also immigrants, to empathize with the dancers. -more-

In “Berkeley Schools Top Bad Air Quality List” (Dec. 17, 2008), Kristin McFarland writes that the air quality in Berkeley schools is among the worst in the nation, as reported recently by USA Today. As a Berkeley parent, I am deeply upset about this, especially given Berkeley’s reputation as one of the greenest cities in our country. I am particularly shocked at how long our local government has let Pacific Steel Casting (PSC) pollute our air. I would like to comment about a few items from Ms. McFarland’s article. -more-

The university is gearing up to build a big student-housing complex on what it calls the “Anna Head West” parking lot. This project poses complex and vital issues, including ones regarding the UC-owned and historic Anna Head property itself and the project’s relationships with the also-historic surrounding neighborhood. -more-

Berkeley ‘s Peace and Justice Commission (P&J) has voted overwhelmingly to deny the Berkeley Public Library (BPL) a waiver of the Nuclear Free Berkeley Act. -more-

Because of the holiday break, we have an unusually large number of letters and commentaries this week. Our first thought, to save space, was to run the commentaries on the situation in Palestine and Israel on the web only, leaving only local topics in the print edition. But then one of our advertising sales people relayed the following message from one of her faithful retail advertisers: “Two customers came in the store over the Holiday and BLASTED me for running ads in your paper saying the paper is biased towards Palestine... .” -more-

Israel’s attempt to wipe out Hamas is understandable, but dumb. No country in the world is going to ignore the provocation of rockets being launched from a neighboring territory day after day. If Mexico had a group of anti-imperialist South Americans bombing Texas, imagine how long it would take for the United States to mobilize a counterattack. Israel has every right to respond. -more-

Last year on my birthday, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan. This year on my birthday, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) began bombing targets in Gaza to stop the rain of rockets falling on Southern Israel since the end of the ceasefire with Hamas on Dec. 19. I wonder what next year’s birthday will bring. -more-

Israel’s PR machine has successfully controlled media coverage of the Gaza invasion by preventing journalists from entering Gaza and even preventing U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, Professor Richard Falk from entering the country. Instead of exposing Israeli restrictions, our media is parroting Israeli government talking points and broadcasting video supplied by the Israeli military. There is also no shortage of local Zionists to spin and justify every Israeli crime. -more-

Much of the reportage on Israeli’s response to the Hamas rocket and mortar attacks gives the reader the impression that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a relatively recent event. What is sometimes lost in such coverage is the deep background. Of course, Hamas has much to answer for, but the present conflict is but the latest chapter in a long saga stretching back to the creation of Israel in 1947. Then, the United Nations partitioned the land, allotting the Jews 55 percent of Palestine. The Arabs did not agree to this partition. In the 1948 “war of independence” (called the “El Naqua,” the catastrophe, by the Arabs), Israel ended up with 78 percent of the area of Palestine. This war displaced 750,000 Palestinians and over 450 Arab villages were erased. -more-

We have been waging war on terrorism for seven years and the threat of terrorism at the global level looms just as large today as it was when we declared war on terrorism. I believe we need to shift the paradigm for action taking to “Making peace with terrorism.” The desired goal of any war too is to establish peace. However this is not any war and the actions we take by declaring war on terrorism are not the same that we will take by working on the paradigm of, “Making peace with terrorism.” -more-