Correspondence
Correspondence JOHNNY NO SENT ANTHRAX DAVID TELL is right to use handwriting analysis to question the FBI's assertion that the person who wrote the anthrax notes was a native English speaker...
...Idiomatic word usage also seems to be a problem for our terrorist: "We have this anthrax" might just be a misuse of "this" to mean the anthrax the victim just inhaled, or it might be a grammatically correct attempt to point out that they had a particular kind of anthrax...
...Both family and faith strive to balance the possibly brutal consequences of overemphasis on personal competitiveness with the need to be oneself...
...BET MULLIGAN Inverness, FL PLEASE HELP YOURSELF HOW TRUE Christopher Caldwell's Casual about American service employees is ("A Sorry State," April 15...
...Northwest Airlines recently opened a new terminal at Detroit Metro Airport...
...I hesitate to call someone a friend who doesn't quite qualify...
...The Weekly Standard must continue to try to hammer sense into those who think there is any possibility to overcome Islamic terror by negotiating with it...
...In other words, the Holocaust as history is used at NCSS to reinforce a particular worldview, one that is hypercritical of America, market democracies, and the West...
...The first two days the terminal was open, they could not even get the trash picked up, which was a nice way to start...
...Europeans' equating Israelis with Nazis is their attempt to erase whatever residual guilt they may feel about their role in the extermination of 6 million Jews...
...I have had many conversations with Israeli Arabs during my 55 years here, and I must say their attitude toward violence tends to be that terror is a must and that the state of Israel has no right to exist...
...You will see nothing but a filthy building...
...I thought the essay went a bit easy on his writings, but that it was terrific overall...
...More likely though, the writer would use a future tense, such as "you are going to die," emphasizing what is coming...
...These cry out for the attention of those who love to insist "Never Again...
...There is plenty of Christian theology (as in Galatians in the New Testament) that shows that freedom coupled with responsibility, encouraging individualism, is an essential experience of faith...
...FAYE REICHWALD New York, NY A CASUAL ACQUAINTANCE THE MAY 6 Casual by Joseph Epstein hit on a dilemma that I have been trying to resolve for some time now ("Sorry Charlie...
...This selective and tendentious use of history by NCSS needs to be criticized vigorously...
...History is still too central to most social studies programs for it to do that— especially, as she notes, in Texas and California, whose dominance of the textbook adoption process influences many other states as well...
...We know that the same thing can happen in Christianity...
...Correspondence JOHNNY NO SENT ANTHRAX DAVID TELL is right to use handwriting analysis to question the FBI's assertion that the person who wrote the anthrax notes was a native English speaker ("Remember Anthrax...
...ALTHOUGH IT IS COMFORTING for Jews to be linked somehow to other people, David Brooks is wrong in his assessment of the most enduring "phobia" of the past century ("Among the Bourgeoisophobes," April 15...
...The triumph of Islam means the end of the civilized world as we know it...
...As the writings of Qutb reveal a radicalized Islam that should be paid more attention, we likewise cannot pay enough attention to the fact that Islam as a rule makes invisible half its population...
...English has a confusing number of present tenses, and a native speaker would say "you are dying now," "now, you have begun to die," or "you have been dying since you opened this letter...
...Take a picture of the terminal today then come back in two years and take another picture...
...What about K-Mart...
...I am a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, but I am grateful for D'Souza's analysis that brings to the forefront one of the many dark faces of Islam...
...All we're looking for is a little courtesy and help when we need it...
...I am frankly astonished that few other news journals have written about his influence on Islam...
...The term "friend" implies a special relationship...
...This is true even in more "conservative" denominations...
...KENNETH A. KILLIANY Intensive English Program Catholic University of America Washington, DC SOCIAL STUDIES LIBERALS KAY HYMOWITZ is exactly right about the triumph of an anti-patriotic, global-oriented feel-goodism within the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), the key secondary social studies teachers' organization ("Anti-Social Studies," May 6...
...This question has been weighing heavily on my mind because the usual media outlets seldom mention it, just as they never mention Qutb...
...I know them when I see them, but I don't know what to call them...
...Both "family values" and religion appropriately address this dichotomy...
...I had no knowledge of Qutb or his writings until September 11...
...A native psycho might want to quote the evil emperor from Star Wars, who chose a tense that clarified his role in ensuring that "and now, young Jedi, you will die...
...What is more than an acquaintance but less than a friend...
...Many of these sessions make linkages with a select group of other injustices: the Armenian massacres, the oppression of Native Americans, slavery in the United States, and, of course, racial or ethnic prejudice today...
...JONATHAN BURACK Stoughton, WI THE SAGE OF TYRANNY DINESH D'SOUZA's summary of Sayyid Qutb's operating assumption—that radical Islam is superior because it makes Allah-driven "virtue" the only purpose of civilization—and his answer—that freedom is a gift from God that generates virtue—are both startling and powerful claims ("Osama's Brain," April 29...
...At each of the past four annual conferences, anywhere from a dozen to two dozen sessions have been devoted to the Holocaust...
...To begin with, "you die now" is a classic foreigner's trip-up over the simple present tense, which is only used for repeated actions...
...However, history at NCSS is often quite ahistorical and usually skewed heavily to promote NCSS's leftward ideological bent...
...In the former case, a native speaker would intuit that you can't "have" your anthrax and "send" it, too, and so would say something like "we just sent you this anthrax...
...Islam fell into poverty and into a rather cynical and radical fundamentalism like Qutb's because of gradual political corruption in which the state became supreme...
...I teach English to foreigners and could spend 10 minutes explaining to my students why this is not idiomatic English...
...ERRECA STORY Mesa, AZ IN THE LINE OF FIRE WILLIAM KRISTOL's analysis of Saudi crown prince Abdullah's meeting with President Bush fits exactly with the situation here in the Middle East ("Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch," May 6...
...And no sessions to my knowledge have ever been devoted exclusively to these leftist genocides...
...Unfortunately, as in many academic fields today, a spirit of self-criticism of this sort is absent in NCSS but for a tiny group of contrarians who labor nobly in profound isolation...
...Yet to call them an acquaintance doesn't describe certain relationships accurately, either...
...Linguistic analysis alone almost guarantees that the sender grew up speaking another language...
...One relevant example of how this works is its handling of the Holocaust...
...But Caldwell should look further than the service industry...
...I work in Arlington...
...of constant concern to me, as an Israeli citizen, is the naivete of the American people in believing that there is any difference between the Jews and believers in other religions in the eyes of Islam...
...April 29...
...I would only add this: While Hymowitz is correct to point out NCSS's hostility to real history, the organization does not by any means ignore historical topics at its conferences or in its publications...
...Meanwhile, I am aware of only one instance of a linkage in these sessions of the Holocaust to the Ukrainian terror famine, the Stalinist Gulag, or any other Communist horror of the past century, though some of these dwarf even the Holocaust in sheer numbers killed...
...Of course, given how bad bureaucratic English is, it is not surprising that the FBI would miss all this...
...Because the same management and employees with the same attitudes just moved from the old terminal to the new terminal...
...But we shall see if they get that attention at NCSS...
...I am willing to bet, therefore, that in spite of NCSS's Holocaust infatuation, no future sessions at its conferences will deal with the Nazi-like levels of anti-Semitism in the Arab world now or the rising tide of leftist and Muslim anti-Semitism (as opposed to the Le Pen variety) in Europe...
...After the thousands of pages I have read in the past six months, the only woman mentioned is Golda Meir, and that fills about two or three paragraphs in From Beirut to Jerusalem...
...Sometimes I think K-Mart employees work for the CIA because you can never find them when you need assistance with something...
...After the terrorist attacks, I went on a reading binge, from Peter Bergen's Holy War, Inc...
...Islamists are not open to negotiating, and President Bush and Americans should take note that that option does not exist...
...RICHARD JOHNSON Metamora, MI ANTI-SEMITISM FOREVER...
...What about retail...
...In the latter case, a native speaker would say something like, "Look what kind of anthrax we have," but then the note would be addressed to the investigators, and not the victim, which seems unlikely...
...Virtue, in all simplicity, must have a lot to do with a person's balancing his or her own personal expressive aims with the real needs of others...
...The recent attacks on Jews in Europe should convince us that this ideology of hate has not been defeated and that its focus on a small minority touches not just Israel but Jews everywhere...
...BRURIA RIMONI Israel...
...Therefore it is vital that more outsiders to the profession of Hymowitz's stature throw open the window on NCSS and let some fresh air in...
...No economic theory can explain the almost mythic strength of anti-Semitism...
...But some libertarian scholars, such as Rose Wilder Lane and Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, have pointed out the great cultural, and rather worldly, achievements of Islam a millennium ago...
...BILL BOUSHKA Minneapolis, MN I READ DINESH D'SOUZA's "Osama's Brain" concerning Sayyid Qutb with great interest...
...Is this "women don't exist" stuff really just a result of radical Islam or truly a reason for it...
...So Qutb's is only one view of Islam...
...to Karen Armstrong's The Battle For God to Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem to Robert Fisk's Pity the Nation...
...Anti-Semitism is the most durable ideology of the past and perhaps the next century...
Vol. 7 • May 2002 • No. 34
