All summer I worked in a lab listening to National Public Radio. Every day it seemed one of the shows was devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Experts representing both sides would come on the show and proceed to disagree for the next hour. Every one of these shows was the same and after about a dozen of them I asked myself, why doesn’t NPR do something more relevant with its airtime, like broadcasting random small claims court disputes? Then it hit me, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a big, fat, greedy toddler that wants all the attention to itself, and unfortunately gets it.
Then I came back here to read one article after another about the Campus Watch Web site. Campus-watch.org is stupid. Honestly, if I started a Web site listing every anti-Catholic Church reference I have heard from professors at this school, I would max out the bandwidth available for the whole Internet. I do not complain about this because I did not come to this school to hear my beliefs validated every second and never criticized. If I wanted a school where Catholicism would rarely be attacked I would have gone to Notre Dame. Conservatives have railed against bias in academia for over 30 years with absolutely no results. Personally, I take comfort in knowing that most Americans seem to be conservative, as witnessed by Tuesday’s election results. Israel supporters should find solace in the fact that within the U.S. government, support for Israel is completely unchallenged.
But the people who scream bloody murder over campuswatch.org aren’t making any real points themselves. After all, the more they complain the more attention the Web site gets.
To illustrate the heightened that attention the Israeli-Palestinian issue always demands, consider this. After a couple of incidents this fall in which anti-Semitic graffiti was found in the Shoreland, the school sent