Via talk_politics - Israeli poll

Haaretz has gone behind a paywall, but the Guardian reports on the results of a recent poll in Israel. While certainly the current situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories is unusual in a variety of ways, I think the results show the dangers of a population considering themselves exceptional.

More than two-thirds of Israeli Jews say that 2.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank should be denied the right to vote if the area was annexed by Israel, in effect endorsing an apartheid state...

...58% believe Israel already practises apartheid against Palestinians...

A third want Arab citizens within Israel [my emphasis; these are Israeli citizens] to be banned from voting in elections to the country's parliament. Almost six out of 10 say Jews should be given preference to Arabs in government jobs, 49% say Jewish citizens should be treated better than Arabs, 42% would not want to live in the same building as Arabs and the same number do not want their children going to school with Arabs.

Almost half the poll's respondents said Israeli Arabs should be transferred to the Palestinian Authority...

Obviously, since some of the figures hover around half the population, the results have also been met with dismay and criticism by many within Israel: 'A commentary by Gideon Levy, which accompanied the results of the poll, described the findings as disturbing. "Israelis themselves … are openly, shamelessly and guiltlessly defining themselves as nationalistic racists,"
"It's good to live in this country, most Israelis say, not despite its racism, but perhaps because of it. If such a survey were released about the attitude to Jews in a European state, Israel would have raised hell. When it comes to us, the rules don't apply."'

Etymological note: ghetto "was originally used in Venice derived from the word Borghetto, meaning Little Borgo, a cluster of homes and buildings often outside Italian city walls, to describe the area where Jews, tradespeople or agricultural workers were compelled to live."

Online college

Nice TIME article that investigates several approaches. It starts with a pretty memorable hook:

On Sept. 17, the Pakistani government shut down access to YouTube. The purported reason was to block the anti-Muslim film trailer that was inciting protests around the world.

One little-noticed consequence of this decision was that 215 people in Pakistan suddenly lost their seats in a massive, open online physics course. The free college-level class, created by a Silicon Valley start-up called Udacity, included hundreds of short YouTube videos embedded on its website. Some 23,000 students worldwide had enrolled, including Khadijah Niazi, a pigtailed 11-year-old in Lahore. She was on question six of the final exam when she encountered a curt message saying “this site is unavailable.”