| OPINION
| OCTOBER 21, 2005
Letters
Bush’s speech unfairly targeted
Muslims
President Bush’s Oct. 6 speech at the National Endowment for
Democracy was for public relations to boost his low rating. It also
promoted hatred and religious bigotry against Muslims. The terrorists
bin Laden and Zarqawi do not represent more than a billion Muslims.
Islam eulogizes moderation and abhors extremism, terrorism, fanaticism,
oppression and subjugation.
Terror has existed in America for hundreds of years. The killing
and dispossession of Native Americans and slavery are an example
of that.
“Here in the United States, we were founded as a nation that
practiced slavery, and slaves quite frequently were killed even
though they were innocent,” said former President Clinton
in a speech at Georgetown University Nov. 7, 2001. He added, “This
country once looked the other way when a significant number of Native
Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land and their
mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully
human.”
Muslims didn’t kill millions in South America, Cambodia, Vietnam,
the Philippine and other places around the world. Muslims didn’t
drop nuclear bombs on Japan and chemical and biological bombs on
Vietnam. Why is it that when a Jew or Christian kills someone, religion
is not mentioned, but when a Muslim is charged with a crime, it’s
Islam that goes on trial? It is obvious that after the collapse
of the Soviet Union, the West declared the war against Islam and
Muslims.
The invasion of Iraq is not to free the Iraqi people from “our
puppet,” the brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein. The Reagan administration
alledgedly supplied Hussein with the chemical and poison gas used
against the Kurds. In Vietnam, it was the deadly chemical poison
Agent Orange. In Iraq, the U.S. military is dispersing millions
of pounds of weaponized radioactive and poisonous ceramic uranium
oxide gas.
Paul Wolfowitz, former Deputy Secretary of Defense and a neoconservative,
has said bluntly that we went to Iraq for oil.
— Kassem El-khalil is a civil engineering alumnus
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