Halls of Academia

Submitted by Arlinda DeAngelis (United States), Dec 28, 2002 at 18:18

It is interesting that Foner and Gilmore chose former President Carter as an example of responsible dissent.

As a president, Carter was nothing short of disastrous: we had one of the highest rates of inflation in our history, based his foreign policy on the sole principle of human rights which prompted him to give away the Panama Canal, Castro emptied his prisons into Miami and Islam took American hostages whom Carter failed to get released.

Under the first Democratic president since he was voted out of office, Carter negotiated the treaty with Korea to stop its nuclear weapons program in exchange for $40 million dollars, oil and food. Korea, a government so corrupt that its impoverished population has resorted to cannibalism to feed themselves, violated the treaty. In addition to that brilliant piece of diplomacy, Carter sold out his country by accepting the Nobel Peace Prize and the accompanying $100,000. The prize was given to him with an anti-American speech which described America as an imperialist war mongering country which wanted Iraqi oil.

America has every right under the Constitution to defend its interests. Iraq has violated every UN resolution since the the Gulf War. It has fired on UN sanctioned American and British planes in the no-fly zone. The "beast of Baghdad" killed five thousand Kurds in a biological weapons experiment, exterminated thousands of people living in Southern Iraq and killed tens of thousand of Iranians.

Iraq supports, conducts, trains and pays terrorists to kill Americans and Israelis along with threatening to destabilize the world over oil. Foner and Gilmore should be ashamed of themselves for equating the US with imperial Japan which attacked a peaceful democracy, America and went on a killing rampage in China. Imperial Japan was a corrupt, vicious and suicidal government very much like Iraq, which attacked Kuwait and then went on a killing rampage against the Kurds and Southern Iraqis.

Thank you Professor Pipes for reminding Gilmore and Foner that patriotism and responsibility are not dirty words. The academic freedom enjoyed by universities are the product of a freedom loving country, hated and criticized by two unworthy academics.

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