It’s like she doesn’t get it. Was she really apologizing to basketball players?

but i think you might be mis-intrepreting her remarks. She did not say Palestinian’s are all suicide bombers. She said Palestinian suicide bombers. There is a difference, unless you want to deny the fact that there are in fact Palestinians that are suicide bombers.

And I agree with her statement about kids growing up being “brainwashed”, for a lack of a better word, in regards to their athletic talents and their responsibilities in the classroom.

Obviously, she meant that the suicide bombers were raised that way. Her mistake was to generalize it by referring to “people in Palestine”. Obviously, not everyone there is a suicide bomber nor was raised that particular way.

Bernstein realized her mistake and apologized. End of story.

She’s talking about basketball for goodness sake. Leave politics out of it.

It certainly seems that there an inordinate number of Palestinian suicide bombers and their juvenile recruitment is well documented.

But I don’t really get the analogy. It would be more correct if she was addressing kids who are raised to not worry about school because you can just live on the streets. That, like suicide bombings, is always bad. However, making it to the NBA is a good goal (unlike suicide).

1) The comment was stupid and the apology is ridiculous. You have every right to be offended.

2) That doesn’t mean you should be offended. It’s Bonnie Bernstein – a pretty faced sideline reporter with no credibility. She knows as much about Palestinian people as I do the Poincare Conjecture.

The point is, if you become angry when an uninformed meathead whom you don’t know and whose ramblings have no effect whatsoever on yourself or anyone around you or on the day to day operations of your life spouted off about something they know nothing about, then that’s a tough world you’ve constructed for yourself to live in. (And just as an aside – stay the heck away from the internet).

However, a major media outlet like ESPN allowing idiocy like that to be broadcast could use a reality check. You won’t change the stupidity of Bonnie Bernstein with your campaign, but you might just get ESPN to think twice. It’s the longest of longshots though

“Oh wow, TWO Dicks.”

“She’s only apologizing because she got caught.”

Not a good idea for her to dabble in the politics of a centuries-long conflict halfway around the world. Especially in this post-September 11 world we live in. Had she left the analogy aside and just stuck to the main point of young athletes being sheltered and conditioned psychologically to never quit and compete with all your might, she would’ve been fine.

Bernstein said “people in Palestine are taught to think that dying in the name of God is a good thing”. I can understand how that can be taken as a blanket statement of an entire society, and I can understand how some would find that offensive. Sort of like how every Catholic isn’t a member of Operation Rescue bombing planned parenthood clinics, and every Republican isn’t in lockstep behind the President’s foreign and domestic policies, and every Cubs fan isn’t a Chad or Trixie that goes to Wrigley Field only to drink and pick up on the opposite sex. SOME people are like that, but not EVERY person.

I would have taken offense, too. There was no point to the ignorant ramble in the first place and then to say, “religion and politics have no place on public airwaves” is weak. In reality, if there was more OPEN AND INTELLIGENT talk about religion and politics on public airwaves, maybe people wouldn’t be so misinformed and quick to label.

since there are too many people just waiting to bitch about shit like this.

It doesn’t matter what is said regarding topics like this, anyone can twist the words around for the good of their argument. Bonnie should not have gone there since no matter how she worded any statement, she could have been ridiculed. I won’t even try to comment on her knowledge of the topic, because I simply do not know.

What’s wrong with these topics is the generality of everything. Since there is a group of people there ( I don’t know the percentage ) that are hell-bent on destroying the West, the rest of the folks get lumped in.

But the perception is based on what is presented in the media. During the news on 9/12/01, there was the video of [some, certainly not all] Palestinian’s dancing in the streets in hearing the news of the strike and destruction of the Twin Towers, the Pentagon hit and the PA field crash. It’s those images that resonate so clearly with so many for such a long time. I mean what kind of people do that?

I have 2 colleagues that based on their ethnicity, should utterly hate one another based on that silly logic, but they do not because they each choose to take the higher road. One person is a Pakistani, the other is Indian.

I also have Korean and Japanese colleagues that get along with each other. OMG call 60 minutes, they can’t do that. Yeah, right. They too chose to take the high road.

But then on the same token – and this is what hurts all of us going forward – I have another colleague who because he was picked on as a child because he was Korean-American, chose to tell me how it was hard for him to believe Polish guys in our organization could be friends with me because I’m German. Are you kidding me? None of us Poles/Germs ever thought of that and these Polish guys are some of my best friends. Because it doesn’t matter, we’re all American.

But instead of over-reacting and getting all pissed off about it, I just let it roll off my back, consider the source of the statement and moved on. And on top of that, I’m so decoupled from my “native” land, not only do I not know how to speak German, both sides of my family have been here in the Chicago area since before the civil war. But to this guy, that did not matter.

This all comes down to the action of the US about 60 years ago, the immediate recognition by the US of Israel declaring its independent statehood. There are parts of the world (coincidentally some of the same parts that deny the holicaust ever happened) that take that action as a degradation against their people, when that is simply not true.