Here is an excerpt from Ralph Nader's recent article in CounterPunch:

According to The Nation magazine, the great Israeli human rights  organization B’Tselem, reports that the primitive rockets from Gaza,  have taken thirteen Israeli lives in the past four years, while Israeli  forces have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the occupied  territories in the past two years alone. Almost half of them were  civilians, including some 200 children.

The Israeli government is barring most of the trucks from entering Gaza  to feed the nearly one million Palestinians depending on international  relief, from groups such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency  (UNRWA). The loss of life from crumbling health care facilities,  disastrous electricity cutoffs, gross malnutrition and contaminated  drinking water from broken public water systems does not get totaled.  These are the children and their civilian adult relatives who expire in  a silent violence of suffering that 98 percent of Congress avoids  mentioning while extending billions of taxpayer dollars to Israel annually. UNRWA says “we are seeing evidence of the stunting of children, their  growth is slowing.” Cancer patients are deprived of their chemotherapy,  kidney patients are cut off from dialysis treatments and premature  babies cannot receive blood-clotting medications.

The misery, mortality and morbidity worsens day by day. Here is how the  commissioner-general of UNRWA sums it up, “Gaza is on the threshold of  becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of  abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and-some would  say-encouragement of the international community.”

Ralph Nader apparently gave the students at my journalism school a gift... copies of Eric Alterman's book What Liberal Media? in their mailboxes. Apparently he just called up Richard Roth, one of my professors, and said he'd be sending over 1,200 copies of the book. A columnist for The Daily Northwestern smells something fishy, though I think he might be reading a too much into this.

Did Nader have an ulterior motive for giving me a book that obviously has an agenda? Probably, but that in and of itself didn't appear that threatening to me. I can deal with people telling me what to believe politically.

It's the free gift part that sometimes gives me problems. For example, several weeks ago, I took a tour of the Miller Brewery in Milwaukee, Wis. The tour, along with the beer samples, didn't cost a cent.

I wondered why Miller wouldn't charge for the tour. That is, until I realized that immediately following my visit, I purchased Miller High Life.

Woah buddy, just because you get a free lunch doesn't mean you have to eat there again! Nader clearly wants to promote his ideology among journalists. So he sent some j-school students a book. This shouldn't change anyone's opinion unless the book is persuasive and someone decides to read it.