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Also this issue: Arrested Development Basket Case The Jackson Jive |
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July 25-31, 2002
mailbag
(Re: Cover story, “Pipes’ Dreams,” Daniel Brook, July 18, 2002)
Thanks, Dan and City Paper, for taking time to objectively address the most important issue of our time. I don't know if Daniel Pipes is a bit off-base in labeling so many Arab groups as extremists, but it makes me sick any time one of the Arab community's talking heads gets on TV and whines that they're the victims of prejudice.
No, the victims are the 3,000 dead in New York and D.C., and the millions of Americans who are the targets of militant Islamists entering the U.S. I don't know about the rest of your readers, but I'm not looking forward to having my mother blown to pieces by some asshole from the Middle East who can't get a job and thinks Allah told him that murder is a blessing.
They have declared war on us, and a war is not won by being kind, sensitive and politically correct. Tough cookies!
Geoff Martin
Philadelphia
I believe Daniel Pipes when he says that he's "willing to pay" the price for having innocent people spending time in prison -- because the people who are in favor of profiling will never have to worry about themselves or their family members being rounded up and carted off to jail under the cover of "homeland security."
When Oklahoma City's Murrah Federal Building was bombed, people like Pipes were all set to do exactly what they're doing now -- until it was discovered that Timothy McVeigh was behind it all. I don't recall reading about any "secret detentions" of anyone fitting his description: young, Caucasian and United States Army-trained.
I'm sure when the innocent people are finally released, no consideration will be given to how being wrongfully jailed affected them or their families. And that goes way beyond hurting someone's feelings.
Mark F. Walker
Philadelphia
To call Daniel Pipes a scholar or an expert on anything is a gigantic stretch; a mouthpiece for the most extreme, belligerent and bigoted elements of the American and Israeli right is more like it.
Last April, as Ariel Sharon's troops were destroying the Palestinian infrastructure on the West Bank, I remember watching Pipes proclaim on MSNBC that within two or three weeks suicide operations would become a thing of the past. Need one say more about the credibility of this crackpot?
Ben M. Joseph
Philadelphia
(Re: Cover story, “What Is Queer?,” Sam Adams, July 11, 2002)
In answer to the rhetorical headline "What Is Queer?" I would suggest that purposefully ruining a young child's life to satisfy your own sexual desires would be one answer. Posing on the cover of a paper smiling like Patty Duke while encouraging others to engage in a perverted lifestyle that increases your statistical chances of being a victim of or engaging in the following: suicide, murder, sexually transmitted diseases, alcoholism, drug abuse, depression and physical abuse, not to mention eliminating your DNA from the gene pool, would be another. Oh, and how about suggesting that what appears to me to be a 5- or 6-year-old has actually "come out of the closet"?
Those are the first things that come to mind when you ask the question, "What is queer?" I am sure there are more.
Pathetic. Selfish. Shallow. Vapid.
Nice issue.
Marc Moran
Hopewell, N.J.
