An editorial feud last spring about Israel in this very newspaper reached the middle east recently, and proved to be the final step in facilitating the peace process. Says Ariel Sharon, “Sure, I’m a real hardass and all that…excuse me, hardLINER. But even I can’t resist the argument made by Lawrence student Salem Hijazi, that ‘the blood of Palestinian martyrs’ will mix with the dirt in our streets to create something wonderful.”
Sharon decided to give up the Gaza Strip, especially after reading Dan Whiteley’s editorial that said Israel didn’t deserve all the special territory, Dan was pretty sure.
PLO Chairman Yassir Arafat was most aptly struck by the subtle arguments of LU sophomore Eric McNaughton, whose argument was quite persuasive.
“McNaughton is clearly correct,” said Arafat, who added that the ‘Palestinian martyrs’ bit made him proud.
President Carter, on the other hand, enjoyed the clarity and balance of Professors Glick and Kosanky’s responses, while still admiring the tenacity of the youths.
Sharon, perhaps, summed it up best: “For a great many years, we’ve taken this conflict seriously. It took, though, the half-truthed, recycled editorials by some privileged midwestern brats and international students to make us realize how silly this whole damn thing is.”
In scientific fields, the cloning ethical impasse is about to be resolved, due to a series of editorials in January by Peter Gillette, Mike Lee, Megan Brown, and Eric Lanser.
“Gillette’s editorial was hardly relevant enough to anything to be offensive,” said Freshman Studies Director and bio professor Beth DeStasio. “It was actually just some very stream-of-consciousness literary criticism of Frankenstein that was so ill-executed that Goldgar actually started DEFENDING Mary Shelley.”
It was Lee’s editorial, comparing all cloning supporters to computer-animated puppet Yoda, that made the greatest impact on Destasio, and–through the Associated Press’s subsequent reprintings of the article– the entire scientific community.
“Sure, Megan and Eric made some decent points the next week, but I couldn’t help but thinking, ‘They’re agreeing with a puppet, and a fake puppet at that,'” said reknowned scientist Steven Hawking, who must have had a cold or something because everything he said was just in a nasal monotone.
See Peter Gillette’s op-ed on page 6, entitled “I oppose Steven Hawking because he is silly.