Last Tuesday, Gov. Jim Doyle visited the campus in honor of the Pavilion’s grand opening. Ah yes, the renovated athletic facility, an impressive new home for the Panthers.

And how proud of them we are, since the men’s basketball team won the Horizon League championship and reached the NCAA tournament Sweet 16 last year — not to mention their notable presence this year. Our players are heroes, representing us across the nation to other universities.

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The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Student Association elections went down as we all hoped they would: there was only one infraction and it was nothing significant enough to make anyone question the results or say that one side cheated. No one could be happier than me.

Except that I still see some flaws in the way elections are held here. Let’s be honest, elections at UWM are somewhat of a joke.

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People who are nominally familiar with the Arab-Israeli conflict are most certainly familiar with the issue of Palestinian refugees. When Palestine was partitioned into Jewish and Arab states, the Jews accepted the plan, but the Arabs utterly rejected it. Shortly thereafter, the surrounding Arab countries — Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq — invaded Israel in the hope of wiping it off the map before it could even breathe. In the ensuing battle, some 600,000 Arabs either fled their homes or were driven out. Israel had survived its bloody birth.

In the decade following Israel’s creation, however, Jews who had been residing in Islamic lands found themselves surrounded by an increasingly hostile population. Some 900,000 Jews were coerced or frightened into fleeing their homelands following lethal riots and discriminatory legislation. Most ended up in Israel where they started new lives. To this day, slightly over half of Israel’s Jewish population is compromised of those Jewish refugees and their descendents.

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I believe the endings to most movies are obvious. But the audience for “United 93” knows what is going to happen and the movie is still suspenseful and well done. I could not help but think about a slightly different ending.

No disrespect for the American heroism that took place that day, but what if our military shot down United Airlines Flight 93? I have a hard time believing that the same reaction of universal respect for the heroes that day would have been extended to our military, even though it still would have been Americans taking down a terrorist-hijacked plane filled with Americans in order to thwart the terrorist plan.

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