Worst Public Forum Piece Ever; Thanksgiving

[Mike Hansen]

I decided to read the opinion section of the newspaper (Salt Lake Tribune) today, something I hadn't done in a while. I stumbled upon this beauty in the Public Forum:

Airports and Israel

Published Nov 29, 2010 05:50AM

Updated Nov 29, 2010 03:03PM

How stupid can the people in Washington get? If they really want to make flying safer, and without all the pat-downs and naked body scanning, all we have to do is stop supporting Israel!

In fact, the ideal thing to do would be to go back to Nov. 29, 1947, and do another vote on the partition of Palestine. Instead of voting to allow a Jewish state to exist in West Asia, we could vote against allowing partition, which would make Israel illegal.

The only reason Israel exists today is because that vote in 1947 came just a couple of years after the Holocaust and everybody felt sorry for the Jews. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the result of creating Israel has been that the United States has supported the Zionists and Israelis to the point that 1.5 billion Muslims hate us so much that some are trying to put bombs on airliners.

Even though they haven’t brought down any planes lately, they’re sure making life miserable — and expensive — for all of us. Al-Qaida has already won.

(from http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion/50735488-82/israel-vote-1947-partition.html.csp)

No wonder I'm so happy in the engineering computer labs at the U. No political discussions! After reading this I thought about how much I'd like to thank the producers of Fluent, Gambit, and MATLAB for keeping my sanity intact.

Continuing on the tangent of gratefulness, this Thanksgiving was outstanding. The words "I earned this" and "thank you" mean a hell of a lot more as an openly rational, honest, proud, and entirely selfish person. Thanksgiving with conscious recognition of these traits is a very good holiday.

Mike

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Mike,

I certainly feel your pain on reading that.

Bigotry is ugly and it just doesn't stop.

I am glad you have found your oasis. It sounds like a wonderful place to be.

Michael