In response to Religious forum, “What does your religion say about good and evil?” March 2

We are taught that honorable people do not cheat, lie or steal, nor tolerate those who do.

There is no evil, only criminal behavior. There is ethical behavior. There are gray areas in ethics and we are learning to teach ethics in our medical professionals, etc. The question of what is “moral” gets confused with what is “sinful” versus what is ethical.

I learned yesterday that before the Industrial Revolution, parents picked the spouse for their child.  It was an economic and political affair. How about that for a choice of words?

Children were expected to work at farm tasks at an early age. They were looked upon as little adults.

What makes smart students write such BS? Why do we respect religious witch doctors who teach such nonsense?

Who invented terms such as “angel,” “Satan,” “our spiritual development,” “ultimate goodness” and “progress spiritually?”  What about ghosts, witches, demons and UFOs? How about the fact that when I do spell check on this e-mail, “Satan” requires a capital letter but not “god?” Someone at Yahoo! must be playing with me, correct?

I think humans need to know if they are happy or not, and so we need a philosophy. Here is mine.

Dick McManus

UW alumnus, class of 1975

Free health care not a good idea

The first job I had after graduating high school was as a delivery man for the largest florist in Houston.

My duties included traveling to private residences, businesses, funeral homes and hospitals — Houston has one of the largest, most advanced medical complexes in the world. Most of the hospitals were a pleasure to deliver to, as they allowed access to the nurses’ station and I always enjoyed the labor and delivery floor. I could look through the glass at the newborn infants.

The worst place to go — even surpassing the funeral homes — was the Veterans Administration Hospital. They made me go to the patients’ room (four or more patients in a ward) and invariably there was always the stench of urine and someone moaning loudly or calling aloud for assistance. It did not matter what floor to which I was directed. I doubt things have changed much in the interim.

It seems to me that in our stampede toward “national health care,” we should all visit our local VA hospital and speak with a few of the registered patients there to find out how well they like the original form of U.S. “free” health care. Maybe a trip to a nursing home funded by Medicare/Medicaid would also make a nice side trip.

Margaret Thatcher said, “The only problem with socialism is that eventually, you always run out of someone else’s money.”

I say, where there is no competition, there is no excellence.

Konrad Lau

Sedro-Woolley, WA

Mark Emmert should take a pay cut

Last Friday, I overheard a conversation on the bus regarding Mark Emmert and the UW budget deficit. I usually don’t listen in on other people’s conversations, but this one was too good to pass up. The subject matter was similar to what had been on my mind for quite some time. The conversation was specifically about Emmert’s salary and the number of job cuts. For those that don’t know, Mark Emmert’s annual salary is $1.2 million, $905,000 of which comes from the UW. Out of the $905,000, he is given a base salary of $620,000, a deferred compensation of $250,000, a retirement match of $23,000 and a car allowance of $12,000. I am not saying that Mark Emmert’s salary is too high. As a matter of fact, if the economy were in a better shape, I think the UW should pay him more. Emmert has made significant contribution to the UW. To name a few, he established the Husky Promise program, brought in over $2.6 billion in funds in 2008, and played a part in helping establish the Michael G. Foster School of Business — his accomplishments should be recognized and rewarded.

However, for someone to simply accept a $905,000 salary when jobs are being cut due to the budget deficit is a little bit difficult for me to swallow. According to the town hall meeting March 3, the budget deficit is expected to result in 600 to 800 job cuts. If Emmert halved his salary, he could save up to 10 jobs. Although 10 is relatively insignificant to 800, 10 is still 10 more than zero. Ten is 10 more families with financial stability during this economic hardship. Many university presidents across the country are taking the responsibility in their own hands. Stanford’s president John Hennessy voluntarily axed his salary by 10 percent. WSU President Elson Floyd asked for a $100,000 salary cut and Eastern Virginia Medical School president Harry Lester, who only makes about $300,000 annually, is taking a 5 percent cut to his salary.

Instead of having the UW faculty — who only make about $164,000 — forgoing their annual pay raise, I think the president of the school should be the one stepping up to the plate.

Khoi Nguyen

Senior

Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology

Why are we celebrating Jack Hamann's career?

Friday night, the UW Alumni Association sponsored what its Web site refers to as a “celebration” following a lecture by Jack Hamann. What exactly are they celebrating? A sloppy and obscene political whitewash of inconvenient local history.

The subject and crowning achievement of Jack Hamann’s career represents a classic case of the procedural journalistic sleaziness I fear no society could ever fully shake regardless of the empowered interests or perspectives it serves.

A few years ago, Italian American author Dominic Moreo published Riot at Fort Lawton, an in-depth study of the August 1944 riot at Seattle’s Fort Lawton installation that left an Italian prisoner of war hanging lifeless from a rope. It is immediately obvious why Jack Hamann was approached by local bigwigs to write On American Soil, a laughably far-fetched, politically motivated revision of the story when you read this sentence: The murdered Italian prisoner of war Guglielmo Olivotto was last seen by Italian soldiers being carried off by several of the hundreds of African-American soldiers who stormed the Italian barracks with knives, clubs and hatchets, hospitalizing dozens.

Hamann’s ostentatiously PC thesis — that Clyde Lomax, a white military policeman, seized upon a tiny window of opportunity with superhuman strength and speed to scare off Olivotto’s African American attackers and lynch Olivotto himself in order to frame the former — is not only stated as fact by local politicians, it is enshrined in local and federal government policy. Last summer, a pompous ceremony was held at Fort Lawton to shower plaques, medals and praise on the rioters, whom the Secretary of the Army and city officials declared to be “heroes” who “deserved the blessings of the angels.” The first rioter to attack the Italian barracks, African American soldier Samuel Snow, was even scheduled to be the guest of honor at the Seafair Torchlight Parade! Such transparent political gestures — Friday’s “celebration” included — represent a glaring insult to victim Guglielmo Olivotto, the Italian American community, the living relatives of Clyde Lomax and the law-abiding majority of African Americans, who need no reduced standards or whitewash to live honorable lives.

Seattle officials and media have a history of flagrantly whitewashing or suppressing murders of white people — Kris Kime, Mike Robb, James Paroline, Ed “Tuba Man” McMichael, etc. — by a tiny minority of African American citizens. Such dishonesty, some of it no doubt conscientiously motivated, has proven to be bad medicine for the illness of racial tension we’d all love to move beyond. If establishment media cannot learn to embrace the responsibility of reporting politically inconvenient news and local sentiments, it will have itself to blame when it is left behind.

Samantha Chase

Beacon Hill, Seattle

Fairness during the current economic crisis?

In one of my classes, I read Don Quixote by Cervantes. Justice is the force that moves Don Quixote in his adventures (reality vs. idealism). However, reality has a substantial impact in our lives. This morning at my clock station, I found a posted paper that explained the procedures for personal reduction and layoffs. Consequently, as a custodian at the University of Washington, I confront the reality of layoff.

The impact of layoffs for custodians will be enormous. For example, the average custodian makes between $24,000 and $26,000 gross pay for year. If the Facilities Services Department wants to save $1 million from its budget (annually), it needs to eliminate around 42 positions. Consequently, the impact for the University of Washington Facilities Services and for the workers (workload) will be tremendous.

Custodians arrive at 5 a.m. to the different university buildings around campus. They are the first to arrive and one of their duties is to report and solve some building problems. For example, flooding, elevator malfunctions, cleaning entrances, etc. Also, during inclement weather, custodians need to report at the university’s facilities, even if the university is closed (as the past December 2008).

Custodians receive one of the lowest salaries at the University of Washington. For example, custodians received a .25 percent salary raise in the last contract agreement. The average amount is $20 every two weeks or $40 per month. The raise will take place in July 2009. However, custodians will not receive the .25 percent raise. President Barack Obama and Gov. Chris Gregoire compromised to freeze their salaries and for those in their administrations that make more than $100,000 per year. The gesture is an act of solidarity with the average American worker. Custodians are one of the most diverse employees at the University of

Washington. However, the shadow of layoff can hit our department. Custodians often hear about sacrifices in our departmental meetings. But does the Facilities Services administration follow Obama and Gregoire’s example?

Finally, Don Quixote wants to impose justice and fairness through his adventures. On the other hand, I am using only the freedom of speech that the First Amendment guarantees me.

Carmelo Gonzalez

UW custodian

In response to letter to the editor by Edward Alexander, March 6

In his editorial “Israel Apartheid Week”, Edward Alexander dodges important questions about Palestine-Israel and the nature of Zionism, which is the ideological basis for the state of Israel.

Israel does not equate Jewish identity. Zionism is the belief that historic Palestine should become a homeland exclusively for Jews. There are many Jews who do not support Israeli apartheid. There are many Zionists who are not Jewish. Being a Zionist means supporting the demolition of Palestinian homes while families are still inside, keeping Palestinians imprisoned indefinitely without charge in Israeli jails and the construction of armed, gated, Jewish-only neighborhoods on stolen land.

Anti-Zionists call for an end to the state of Israel because it is defined by racial hierarchy. When anti-Zionists say that Israel must fall, we do not mean that Jews living in historic Palestine must be driven out. Rather, a new democratic government must be formed in all of historic Palestine in which every citizen, Jewish, Palestinian or other, has equal power.

The issue is intertwined with our struggles here, not only because our tax dollars support Israeli apartheid, but because we too are fighting for democracy and against white supremacy. The Demilitarize UW Coalition is demanding that UW divest from businesses that profit from Israeli apartheid.

We must take democratic control of our university to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Afrose Ahmed,

Demilitarize UW Coalition member

Professor Alexander’s essay “Israel Apartheid Week,” excellent as it is, omits important background to last week’s shameful bigotry against Israel, displayed on campuses around the world. Nary a mention is made of Zionism as the legitimate national movement of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland, going back millennia.

Or that on Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to partition British Mandate Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. Omitted too is that the U.N.-divided Western Palestine (remember, Eastern Palestine had already been given to the Arabs — see Jordan) into Arab and Jewish states precisely to reflect the preponderance of Jewish and Arab populations and culture; to wit, the Jews were the majority in the sliver of land partitioned for the Jewish state. The great irony is that the Jews recognized the Arab state, but the Arabs recognized neither the Jewish state nor their own, instead choosing to invade the fledgling Jewish state at its birth.

Flash forward to 1967, when again the Arab world was braced, in the words of Egyptian leader Nasser, “to drive the Jews into the sea.” Never mind that Israel was able to miraculously avert its own destruction by preemptively striking its enemies. Where was the outcry for a Palestinian state on the territories of the West Bank and Gaza, controlled between 1948-1967 by Jordan and Egypt, respectively? Deafening silence.

“But what about those territories now, occupied by Israel for the past 41 years?” goes the refrain.

Again, collective amnesia rears its lethargic head. The causes of military necessities like checkpoints and a nonviolent separation barrier outside Israel proper are ignored. Forgotten too is the fact that these territories have been disputed since 1967, but more importantly, that Israel offered most of them to the Palestinians in 2000-2001. At Taba in early 2001, Israel’s most generous offer included over 96 percent of contiguous land in the West Bank, all of Gaza (subsequently relinquished unilaterally to the Palestinians in 2005), Palestinian control of their holy sites in Jerusalem as well as the Arab neighborhoods of eastern Jerusalem — where they could declare their capital — the right of return to all Palestinian refugees (and their several million descendants) to the new Palestinian state and $30 billion for those refugees. The counter-offer proved to be the launching of a terror war against Israel proper, known as the Second Intifada.

After sustaining hundreds of devastating civilian casualties from suicide bombings in cafes, buses, discos and other public places, Israel was compelled to reenter a West Bank that was already largely under Palestinian Authority control. Since there has yet to be a resolution to the hostilities, a state of de facto belligerency continues, made more problematic by the ascent of Hamas, avowed enemy of the Jews, sworn to their destruction (see the Hamas Charter), into the Palestinian polity. Witness the uninterrupted launching of ever-more-sophisticated rockets and missiles from Gaza, now effectively Judenrein.

Yet the bigger question remains: Why is Israel singled out and held to an impossible standard of perfection, when all around her real apartheids are daily occurrences? Where is the outcry from the “progressive” community about gender or religious apartheid in Saudi Arabia? Where are the gay community’s protests on college campuses against sexual apartheid in Iran, Sudan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Yemen? Homosexuality in these countries is punishable by imprisonment, flogging, stoning, hanging or beheading. Or race apartheid in Sudan, where the enslavement of blacks continues unabated?

The sad conclusion to be drawn is that charades such as “Israel Apartheid Week” can only be explained by a wish to delegitimize the Jewish state prior to its destruction. The real message behind these invidious campaigns is to call into question Israel’s very right to exist. How infinitely tragic that “progressives” would align themselves with such malevolent forces dedicated to the destruction of the one state in the world, tiny as it is, of the Jewish people. It’s equally tragic that these same “progressives” urge upon Palestinians an all-consuming devotion to the destruction of their Israeli neighbor’s society instead of to the building of their own. In so doing, they have contributed mightily to the ruin of the very people whose welfare they claim to promote.

David Brumer

Alumnus, School of Social Work

Edward Alexander (3/6 Daily) never lets inconvenient facts get in the way of his opinion. Let’s look at some of his assertions:

“There have never been apartheid laws in Israel.” He ignores the West Bank, where most occupied Palestinians live. In the West Bank, there are checkpoints that only stop Palestinians. There are roads set aside for Jews only. Zionist settlements have much greater access to services and water than the Palestinian villages that still exist. Inside Israel “proper” (the pre-1967 borders), Israeli Arabs are second-class citizens, with, for example, fewer rights to buy land than Jews have. The state of Israel is proclaimed to be a “Jewish state,” which means that non-Jews by definition  have fewer rights than Jews.

Jews throughout the world have the automatic right to become citizens of Israel. No other religious group does. The area of Israel proper only became a majority Jewish state when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled by armed force in 1947-48. Their descendents have no right to return to their former homes inside Israel. This is the ultimate apartheid — the minority of Palestinians who remained in Israel after most were expelled have formal rights. However the vast majority are excluded altogether. They are kept apart — how is this not apartheid?

Alexander then likens Israel to other states that he says define themselves as Christian or Muslim. There is one overwhelming difference: Israel proclaimed a Jewish state in a land that was not majority Jewish. To establish their state, the Zionists had to expel the vast majority of the then-current inhabitants — and forbid them or their descendents from ever returning. Israel is a colonial settler state founded on the expulsion, dispossession and oppression of the vast majority. Often the Zionists claim that the Arabs left voluntarily. Ian Pappe, an Israeli historian, debunks this definitively in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

However, if they left voluntarily, as the Zionists claim, why not let them return now? The reason is that the Zionists are committed to  maintaining Israel as a Jewish state and a supposedly democratic one. They could not have a majority Jewish state if the expelled Palestinians and their descendents were allowed to return — so they forcibly keep them out to this day.

Of course, we should be critical of any state that defines itself by religious criteria. But Israel is in a league by itself in defining itself this way in a land where most people did not adhere to its religion.

Israel is unique in another way as well: It is by far the largest recipient of U.S. aid of any country. It does the bidding of U.S. imperialism. As Richard Nixon said, for the U.S., “it is cheaper than the 6th fleet.”

After the recent invasion and destruction of Gaza and the continued blockade against it, it takes a lot of gall to still defend the state of Israel. It takes willful refusal to face the fundamental facts of its founding and continuation.

U.S. taxpayers fund the continued oppression of Palestine. It is time that we support Israel Apartheid Week and build a strong movement against U.S. government complicity in Israeli crimes.

Steve Leigh

Program coordinator, Department of Health Services