This letter is in response to Joey Korenman’s Letter to the Editor (“Time to stop being politically correct,” Nov. 18, pg. 10). Obviously Joey here has not picked up a dictionary recently and read the definition of terrorism, so in the name of education, I will for him and for the readers of The Daily Free Press. According to Webster’s Dictionary, terrorism is “the act of coercing thorough intimidation.” Webster did not mention anything about ethnicity or religion of the people committing the act. I find it odd that Joey does.
To make Webster’s definition clearer to Joey, let me provide a few examples of groups that have “coerced through intimidation.” One such organization would be the Ku Klux Klan. I think we can all agree that this organization’s purpose was, and is, to rid themselves of people of different ethnicity and religion. They attempted to accomplish their goal through intimidation, by tying a person of color to a rope and hanging him by his neck from a tree to die. Yet, under Joey’s conclusion that “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim,” the KKK would not be a terrorist organization. They are Protestant.
I hear Joey saying that this is a rare case of … Protestant rage. Well how about other non-Muslim organizations that have employed terror as a means of coercion and intimidation such as the Aryan Nation, the Neo-Nazi party, IRA, Khmer Rouge, the Shining Path, the Death Squads in El Salvador, the Basque Fatherland and Liberty, Aum Shinri Kyo and, of course, the Irgun. So Joey, I am sorry to say that it is not only Muslims who form terrorist organizations, but also people coming from the United States, Germany, Cambodia, Peru, Central America, Spain, Japan and, of course, Israel. That is a whole lot of terrorists! And they come from all over the world in every shade of color and stripe of faith.
If you want to racial discriminate against people who have a history of terrorism you need not look further than a mirror. Hopefully Joey will also look up ignorant in the dictionary.
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