Talk Show Hosts for Zion
Politically Incorrect’s Bill Maher goes to bat for the Jewish State
It’s not easy being a pro-Israel student nowadays, that is unless you’re a guest on ABC’s late-night television show Politically Incorrect. In that case, one can just relax and let the show’s host do the talking.
That’s what two Los Angeles-area Jewish college students discovered when they were invited on the show along with a pair of Arab students to discuss the Arab-Israeli conflict. The show’s host, comedian Bill Maher, spent so much time aggressively challenging his Arab guests that the two Jewish students could barely get a word in edgewise.
It was pretty clear that the acerbic Maher wasn’t going to be neutral when he opened the show by asking: “So given the recent state of escalated violence in Israel and the West Bank, let me ask you this question, ’cause a lot of people are saying now that the Palestinians really do not want to live in peace with Israel. What they wanna do is annihilate them. There are 280 million Arabs that surround the State of Israel. There’s 4.5 million Jewish Israelis. Now, we all know that the Israelis could annihilate the Palestinians if they wanted to, militarily. They have the bomb. Even if they didn’t use the nuclear bomb, they could do it with conventional means. They’ve never done that. Flip the script. What if for one hour, one crazy Sadie Hawkins hour, the Arabs had the ability to annihilate the Jewish State? Do you think things would be different? Do you think they would show the restraint that Israel has for over 50 years?”
Nor did his partisanship stop there. At various points in the show, Maher chastised the Arabs for failing to accept the 1947 United Nations proposal to partition Palestine, used profanity to refer to efforts to equate Zionism with racism, and even brought out a map of the Middle East to illustrate how much smaller Israel is than its Arab neighbors.
It Takes a Sit-in to Raise a Wage
Harvard’s president approves pay increase for university’s lowest-paid employees
Nearly nine months after the conclusion of a building occupation by student activists, Harvard University’s new president, Lawrence Summers, has agreed to raise the salaries of the university’s lowest-paid workers.
Summers announced the university’s adoption of what he called the “core recommendations” of the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies (HCECP) on January 31. He agreed to raise the minimum pay scale for hundreds of Harvard’s lowest-paid workers to between $10.83 and $11.80 an hour. He also agreed to require sub-contractors working for the university to provide their employees with wages and benefits that are “substantially equal” to those paid to Harvard employees doing equivalent work.
The HCECP was established by Summers’ predecessor as part of an agreement to end a 21-day occupation of the university’s administration building by members of the Harvard Living Wage Campaign. Summers’ announcement, however, did not go far enough to satisfy campus living wage activists. In a statement, the Harvard Living Wage Campaign complained that Summers failed to address “crucial elements” of HCEPC’s proposal, “including affordable health benefits, protection for workers’ rights to organize, and provisions against bad-faith bargaining.”
And, more importantly, the campaign faulted Summers for failing to adopt its central demand, a “living wage” policy under which the university’s minimum pay scale would rise with cost of living increases. The statement said that “by rejecting the community’s long-standing call for a living wage, echoed by eight of the HCECP’s nineteen members–including a majority of its students and workers–Summers has failed to enact a solution that will end poverty at Harvard in the long run.”
