How Not To Enhance Security: Simply Wish It Away

Perverse, unhinged from reality: How else to describe the furious protest by the campus left at the Borough of Manhattan Community College to a proposed security management program? [“Protest Over ‘Homeland Security U,’ ” Jacob Gershman, Page One, December 26, 2004]

At a time when their own democracy and, Indeed, civilization itself are locked in deadly combat with barbaric terrorists, and in the very city most devastated by the terrorist acts on September 11, just what do these professors and their acolytes consider “repressive” and “scary”? Not terrorism itself but rather education about, and how to protect against, terrorism. So contorted is the leftist mindset that some BMCC faculty members are reported to have warned that courses on security and safety will “drive away…students, especially immigrants” – as though the latter are somehow so childlike as to believe that threats can be wished away by not talking about them!

Meanwhile, in the real world, members of the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century sound the alarm about the need to fortify our borders and ports against terrorism, and for New York City to develop viable medical and other plans for responding to potential dirty-bomb and bio attacks by terrorists. And elsewhere, for example in Iran, students and professors who know the true meaning of “repression” and “scary” endure imprisonment and torture in their struggle against tyranny. For the safety and freedom of us all, including that of the delusional left, let us urge campus administrators such as BMCC president Antonio Perez not to permit security to become a forbidden topic on the nation’s campuses.

CANDACE DE RUSSY
Bronxville, N.Y.
Ms. De Russy serves on two public higher education, and several higher education reform, boards.

Castro Loathes U.S., Not Christ

How lucky we are in America to have newspapers like The New York Sun that are “free” to completely ignore the most pertinent in their editorials. In your piece on the Christmas displays in Cuba [“Christmas in Cuba,” Editorial, December 17, 2004], you make it seem like the Cuban problem with the gaudy Christmas display was the religious aspect. Of course you know that the problem actually had to do with the blatant political provocation attached to the display – the number 75, which signifies the number of those arrested last year as agents of American policy.

The other fact that readers deserve to know is that Cuba ignored Christmas for 30 years because the holiday coincided with the most important harvest of the year – vital to the county’s prosperity. Many of us are used to distortion when hearing from the press on Cuba, but to ignore the two most essential facts hits a new low.

MATTHEW GLESNE
Los Angeles, Calif.

Suspend U.N. Criticism

Despite the many critics of goodwill [“Annan Watch,” Foreign, December 8, 2004], Kofi Annan has made remarkable progress working recently with Secretary of State Powell to create a growing Schindler’s List of survivors among the endangered Christians, Muslims, and tribalists of south and west Sudan. I beg everyone to suspend their criticism of the United Nations secretary-general until after January 1, 2005, when negotiations are scheduled for completion. Over 100 black ethnic groups are endangered in Sudan. If they are sitting on oil or other natural resources, U.N. negotiations are the only solution and Messrs. Powell and Annan are moving the talks in the right direction.

DAVID SLOTKOFF
Manhattan

U.N. Criticism Reinvigorated

Claudia Rosett’s article [“Annan’s Son Took Payments Through 2004,” Page One, November 26, 2004] shows even more of the tip of this gigantic iceberg called the oil-for-food program.

The reputation of the United Nations is permanently tarnished and weakened by this scandal. Kofi Annan needs to step down immediately and do everything he can to aid in the investigation before there is nothing left of an outdated and no longer useful body.

KEITH ORSINI
South Portland, Maine

England’s Ban on Foxhunting

The newly enacted ban on foxhunting with hounds in England [“Sport of Foxhunting Outlawed in England,” Beth Gardiner, Foreign, November 19, 2004] is not only a blow to England’s rural economy, but will, in all probability, also be a blow to the English fox.

With foxhunting ended and all the jobs and cash it provided gone forever, English farmers need no longer restrain themselves from treating foxes as vermin and poisoning them. And unlike the recreational hunters, they would have no incentive to preserve the species for future hunting, and would not respect the “cubbing season” or any other limits on the killing. There’s a better than fair chance the nation’s flourishing fox population will be reduced to a pitiful remnant in a few years. All around, this is a classic example of fixing something that wasn’t broken.

BARNES WALDRON
Manhattan

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