I was so unbelievably pissed off during journalism class today. I can't even begin to explain how I felt or what I wanted to say but couldn't because I was too enraged to even try formulating coherent sentences stating my viewpoints. I just sat there with a million thoughts going through my mind, and every time I even attempted to articulate my thoughts before raising my hand to have my say, I just couldn't. I was too angry to do anything but sit there.

What happened was we started discussing the Israel and Palestine conflict, which is what the topic of discussion has been for the past week or so. I swear my teacher needs to give some sort of crash course for the people in my class to understand the situation, even just the basics. It's not that I have a problem discussing it in a class with people with little to no knowledge about the situation, it's just that there are people in there, other than the ones with no knowledge, that choose to assert their thoughts in such a way that it's downright offensive and uncalled for. For example, a girl in my class innocently stated after being informed by my teacher about the background of the conflict, "we should just let the Palestinians move to Alaska or somewhere." As strange as her comment was, she didn't mean anything by it, and I don't think her comment was meant to be taken seriously anyway. The boy that sits behind me replied with a chuckle, "we can't. They like to kill people." Okay, so I'm completely against suicide bombings and unjust murder, too, but what the heck? Way to look at both sides of the conflict. Why do people choose to completely ignore what the Israelis have done to the Palestinian people? Thousands of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli raids on settlements. Hundreds of Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli troops during the intifadah. Just last month, a thirteen year old Palestinian girl walking home from school was shot by twenty bullets. The troops that were responsible believed the girl was sent by Palestinian militants to lead them away from the outpost so they could be attacked by snipers. The girl's family said she was on her way to school. Her bag contained only school books. Tell me, what did she do to deserve her death? So many Palestinians have been displaced from their homes which were destroyed, as if they had no right to the land whatsoever. Earlier, the same boy had commented, "Palestinians are simply not willing to share. They're fighting for the land with the Israelis, the land that was declared as Israel, a home for the Jews after World War II." What about the Palestinians that were already there? This struggle has been going on way, way before World War II, for over a thousand years.

It just made me so frustrated. Other quite ignorant and baseless statements were made but I won't go into them or else I'll get even more annoyed. The most I can do I speak up. Tomorrow, after I do a little more research on the conflict tonight, I'm going to bring up all these points as well as others in class. I know the whole background and history of Israelis and Palestinians, but I just want to kind of "fine tune" everything and collect my thoughts so I don't come off as someone that doesn't know what the heck she's talking about.

Anyway, other than journalism class, today was an okay day. My AP European history teacher bogged us down with a ridiculous number of assignments to do over Thanksgiving break, which I find extremely irritating because I wanted to actually enjoy the long weekend and not spend every waking minute working on school-related stuff. Oh well. I guess I should have expected this considering it's an AP class, and AP classes are meant to be absolute time consumers. Truth be told, I enjoy the class, but sometimes it can get overwhelming.