September 20th, 2005 by Jemaleddin Cole

The Wash­ing­ton Post pub­lished the fol­low­ing letter to the editor on August 30th:

The Aug. 11 news arti­cle ‘An Injured Soldier’s Story’ by The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Peter Carl­son con­veys pre­cisely the mes­sage that Islamists want to send. After describ­ing a patri­otic, lik­able young man who suf­fered ter­ri­ble, painful, dis­abling wounds for his coun­try, the arti­cle tells us that when Terry Rodgers was being treated at Walter Reed, he declined to meet with Pres­i­dent George W. Bush because he believes that the president’s ‘ego is get­ting people killed and muti­lated for no reason.’ To make sure that we get the point, Mr. Carl­son adds: ‘This wounded sol­dier has lost faith in his leaders.’

Why? Because, accord­ing to Mr. Rodgers, ‘[I]t’s gonna go on as long as we’re there. There’s always gonna be insur­gents trying to blow us up. There’s just too many of ‘em will­ing to do it. You’re never gonna catch all of ‘em. And it seems like they have unlim­ited amounts of ammu­ni­tion. So I don’t think it’s ever gonna end.’

Osama bin Laden and his best writ­ers could not have crafted more skill­ful pro­pa­ganda aimed at demor­al­iz­ing Amer­i­cans and defeat­ing the U.S. in Iraq. This arti­cle is a more far-​reaching and dan­ger­ous weapon than the bomb that wounded Mr. Rodgers. The Wash­ing­ton Post is abus­ing free­dom of the press by giving aid and com­fort to the enemy in time of war. We must not let them do what their anti-​Vietnam War ances­tors did in the 1960s and 1970s — turn­ing mil­i­tary suc­cess in the field into despair and defeat on the home front.

Martin E. Wein­stein
Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus
Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois
Inter­na­tional Pol­i­tics
Davos, Switzerland

(I’ve reprinted it here as I can no longer find it online to link to it.)

Pro­fes­sor Wein­stein, is, I believe, a care­fully con­structed make-​believe pro­fes­sor. I refuse to believe that a real man of let­ters would :

1. Believe that Osama has a writ­ing staff as though he were a late night talk show host,
2. Describe the Viet­nam war as a mil­i­tary success,
3. Think that Islamic ter­ror­ists are hang­ing out in their caves read­ing The Post (”Hey Khaled, are you done with the Style sec­tion yet? I wanna read Gene Weingarten!” “Keep your turban on, Abbas, I’m work­ing on some­thing for the Style Invitational.”),
4. Crit­i­cize the Post for print­ing the truth because the truth is “demoralizing Amer­i­cans and defeat­ing the U.S.” while at the same time “giving aid and com­fort to the enemy.” “Ignorance is Strength” much, Professor?

So clearly some­body is having fun with the Post. This is either the work of Stu­dents for an Orwellian Soci­ety or the Fafblog’s Medium Lobster.

For those con­ser­v­a­tives (Hello Elmen­dorf!) who don’t under­stand what I’m talk­ing about, here are a few clues:

• “Ignorance is Strength” is one of the slo­gans of Ocea­nia, the set­ting for George Orwell’s 1984.
• We lost Viet­nam, and not because of any­thing printed in the paper.
• George Bush’s ego is a bigger threat to Amer­i­can lives than any­thing printed in the paper. Remem­ber when he said, “Bring ‘em on” to the insur­gents, and the insur­gents killed 49 coali­tion troops that month - 13 more than the month before? That’s what I’m talk­ing about.
• If you take a walk through the his­tory sec­tion of your Library, you’ll notice that sui­cide bomb­ings are pri­mar­ily the tactic of occu­pied peo­ples. But more inter­est­ingly, once the occu­pier leaves, the bomb­ings stop. Mean­ing that bomb­ings will con­tinue as long as we have troops in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

In any case, good work, you merry pranksters! You really got the Post this time!

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