Wonderful post - to lose a son this way is unimaginable. I am a UCLA grad and have never been excited about that claim (except for the hospital) until now. Surprised and gratified to know Prof Pearl teaches there. Husband and father are USNA grads and are constantly embarrassed by Carter who the Academy Alumni Asso slobbers over. Thanks again and God Bless the Pearl family.
At my own university, UCLA, a symposium last week on human rights turned into a Hamas recruitment rally by a clever academic gimmick. The director of the Center for Near East Studies carefully selected only Israel bashers for the panel, each of whom concluded that the Jewish state is the greatest criminal in human history. The primary purpose of the event was evident the morning after, when unsuspecting, uninvolved students read an article in the campus newspaper titled, "Scholars say: Israel is in violation of human rights in Gaza," to which the good name of the University of California was attached. This is where Hamas scored its main triumph -- another inch of academic respectability, another inroad into Western minds.
My goodness. I never made the connection between Professor Pearl of probabilistic AI and the slain journalist. His indictment of the end-justifies-the-means approach of the terrorist sympathizers participating in public and academic discourse appears quite accurate.