Violence over cartoon justified for Muslims

Dear Editor:

I should like to answer Ms. Heather Scarlett’s guest column (“No need to protest U.S. over religious cartoon”) when she asks, rhetorically, why Muslims around the world are burning American flags and storming embassies. The answer is simple: You attack, and continue to attack us, everywhere and at every opportunity – not just with drawings but with bullets.

You invaded us in Iraq. You attacked us in Somalia; you support the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir and the Jewish aggression against us in Palestine.

You erected a giant torture chamber at Guantanamo, Cuba that puts the communist nation which surrounds it to shame. (Take my word on this, young woman. My father spent time in Castro’s prisons.)

You sack the wealth of the Muslim countries, from Nigeria to the Arabian Peninsula, and set up puppet presidents and kings who rule the people by man-made, American-inspired law, not the Quran and the practices of our Holy Prophet (Peace be upon Him), whom you desecrate for serving as the perfect model of justice.

You boast of being the “citadel of freedom,” yet your law is the law of the rich, for the rich, who buy your elections. You have destroyed nature with your pollutants more than any other nation in history.

You are a nation that permits the production, trading and usage of drugs, gambling, the sex trade, spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past such as AIDS, and turns women into commodities for sale and to sell products from liquor to dog food. This Westoxification you spread into the Muslim nations by way of propaganda, bribery and corruption.

The ill done to the Muslim nations must be requited. The Muslim child does not cry alone; the Muslim woman does not cry alone; and the Muslim man is already at your gates.

Dr. Assad Pino

Associate Professor of History

Smoking ban infringes on property rights

Dear Editor:

The Feb. 20th editorial on the proposed smoking ban failed to address the most fundamental issue: property rights. In a capitalist country like the United States, property owners reserve the right to govern their land as they see fit.

The smoking ban is a gross infringement upon that right. There are enough smokers and non-smokers that smoker-friendly and smoke-free establishments can operate profitably in the same town.

The lack of smoke-free bars and restaurants exists because the anti-smoking movement refuses to seek investors to finance such businesses.

They refuse to seek such investors because they do not believe in property rights; they are socialists. Opening new businesses would require the anti-movement to be capitalists. Socialists love to complain; however, they refuse to use the current system to change things. Instead, they lobby the government to do everything for them.

The smoking ban is not about cigarettes, health or any other heart-warming cause. It is about chipping away at a constitutional right which hinders their more baneful goal: Government micro-management of our lives.

Rick Wittkopp

Senior history major