Free Speech
By Hank Silverberg #282
"The right to extend your fist ends just before my nose."
--attributed to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
I have watched the anti-Israel protests that have been going on across this country with very mixed emotions. As a Jew, I fully support Israel as a Jewish state, and the need for Israel to continue to defend itself against Hamas, Iran or anyone else who threatens its existence.
But as an America I also understand the right of anyone in this country to protest what has become a brutal war.
Protest is an American way of life. As a form of free speech, it is AS important as the right to vote, the right to trial by jury, the right to own property or the right to be free from government intrusion into our private lives.
But there is something eerie in many of the pro-Palestinian protests underway on American college campuses and elsewhere. They have the look and feel of anti-Semitism rather than anti-war protests, and in many cases they are.
In a recent discussion in one of my classes, a young student was defending the protests when I asked her about the slogan used by many of the protesting students.
"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." If it's not clear to you, the reference is to the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
"So if that becomes an independent Palestine," I asked my student, "what happens to the ten million or so people who live there now?"
She paused in thought for a moment.
"They can go back to where they came from," she said.
"They did," I said, that's what created Israel. Jews in Israel are not 'colonizers'. They have returned to their indigenous origin in the land of their ancestors."
She didn't understand. And that is at the root of the problem.
I have some sympathy for Palestinians. They have been used and abused by the Arab world for more than seven decades. The Iranians are using them right now to further their goal to control the region like the old Persian Empire. In the past, Nassar and Kaddafi used them to bolster their own power. Jordan fought a war to kick the Palestinians out in the 1970's when the Hashemite Dynasty was threatened, and to this day, Egypt won't let any Palestinian refugees come in.
The dispute has never been about land. It has always been about religiously motivated political power.
A two-state solution has been offered more than once, but rejected on the Arab/Palestinian/Persian side because it might actually produce peace in the region and squash the idea of pan-Arabism.
What should be even more obvious to those protesting, is the abuse the average Palestinian is getting from their own leaders. The leaders of Hamas live in luxury in Qatar, while Palestinian children die in the streets of Gaza. When the aide trucks finally started rolling into Gaza, they were quickly surrounded by armed men who then spirited them away, most likely to Hamas fighters, leaving women and children to starve.
On the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority really has no authority, their leaders steal aide money, provoke confrontation in the name of freedom while at the same time, when there is no violence, benefit economically from work and commerce with Israelis.
But most of the protestors you hear speaking don't talk of this. Instead, they have fallen victim to disinformation and propaganda of the Arab press, or the lack of in-depth coverage in the American media. They blame Israel and the United States for the brutality of the war, forgetting of course, that it was all touched off by a barbaric attack last October aimed not at military bases or the Israeli government, but at unarmed women and children living peacefully in small farming communities (Kibbutzim).
I was tempted to lecture my student on the lack of free speech in the Arab world where such protests would land protestors in jail, or worse. But I didn't. It was clear she had no historical context for the present events in the Middle East or an understanding that the chant was not about giving the Palestinians their own state, but instead a call to eliminate Israel and the Jewish people who live there.
If you run into one of these protests, take a chance and ask one of the protestors what that chant means. You will understand.
Of note: Israel has a population of 9.4 million. Though officially a Jewish state, it is very diverse. The country's 2021 census shows 6.9 million Jews (74%), l.99 million Arabs, (21%), and 472,000 (5%) who are something else, including Druze.
To put this in context: In the United States, where there is no official religion, 90% of the population is Christian. In Iran, where there is an official religion, 98.5% of the population is Muslim.
All is not as it seems in the Middle East without historical context. Unfortunately, no one is teaching that anymore.
The Great Leap Backwards!
Here is another example of efforts by the GOP to take America backwards.
Louisiana Republicans are pushing a bill to repeal a
The current state law says teenagers have to be given a 30 minute meal break if they work for at least five hours. The proposal would eliminate that requirement.
The change is being proposed by state lawmaker Roger Wilder, who says, "I believe that our young adults can make decisions without a babysitter. I believe this age group is capable of deciding if they would like to change jobs if they’re in an environment that does not help them."
Not coincidently, Wilder owns a number of Smoothie King franchises across the state, which of course, are mostly staffed by teenagers.
Organized labor is against the change, with the leader of the state's AFL-CIO saying there are more important issues for the legislature on which to focus.
Since 2021, 28 states have introduced bills to weaken child labor laws, and 12 states have done so, including such things as increasing the maximum hours teenagers are allowed to work, even on school days.
Mars On The Economy Plan
How much is a piece of Mars worth? A recent independent review says it could cost between $8 billion to $11 billion by 2040 to go to Mars, pick up rocks and soil and bring them back to Earth for study. That's on NASA's to-do list, but Administrator Bill Nelson says that's too much money and too late. So now he is asking private industry to come up with other options for that program.
NASA is facing across-the-board budget cuts and Nelson wants to avoid gutting other projects just to get a sample of the Martian surface. The Perseverance Rover has already gathered 24 core samples in tubes since it landed in 2021, and they want to get at least 30 more from other parts of the planet in an effort to find out if the Red Planet once contained life. 
(NASA/JPL Mars surface
from the Insight Lander 2018)
NASA wants to get some of those samples back to its lab by 2030 for no more than $7 billion. The samples will help decide where astronauts land on Mars in the 2040's.
Let's just hope the work does not go to the lowest bidder, and that NASA chooses someone other than Elon Musk's questionable Space X company to do the job.
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/nasa-seeking-faster-cheaper-way-210944423.html
Dumbest Quote of The Week!
This week's dumbest quote comes from Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, who used to be a judge. She was chatting with some of the other "no-brains" on Fox about some changes made to the board game Scrabble, which is still produced by Milton Bradley and its parent company, Hasbro.
Apparently, there's a new version out in Europe that promotes playing Scrabble in teams and bans the use of certain racial slurs. As they have for years, the makers of Scrabble have added some new words that can be used, like "Zomboy". I looked it up and it has to do with a British music producer, and probably is not used in the United States. But language changes and language-based board games have always been updated with new vocabulary.
Such new words and their meanings keeps the folks who make dictionaries like Webster's in business. Apparently, you can also play official Scrabble now without keeping score, though I know people who have done that for decades.
Milton Bradley has also changed the color of their traditional beige wooden tiles. All this was too much for Pirro and her crew. She said this as they opened their "discussion" of this "controversial" issue:
"Scrabble is dumbing down for the Woke," she proclaimed.
Some of her colleagues thought the changes were made to attract Generation Z. Well, guess what? Times change. Games change. People change.
I have played Scrabble since I was about ten, and my ten-year-old grandson is a great player, scoring more than 200 points most of the time we play. We play the traditional way, but we use a "large print" version where the plastic letters are white. It's a version that makes it easier for the vision impaired or folks who have trouble handling the smaller tiles. I wonder if Pirro would call that "woke" too.
If the newer version now in Europe comes to the USA and gets people away from their cell phones and back to the dining room table with their families, how can you argue against it? There's nothing "woke" about that.
Pirro used to be a County Court Judge, and at one time the District Attorney of Westchester County, New York. Fox has done New Yorkers a great service by putting her on TV where she can just sound stupid, and getting her out of the courthouse where she might have done some real harm.
(Your suggestions and comments are welcome)
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