In his Nov. 1 letter, Eugene DiMagno claimed my Oct. 1 letter was anti- immigrant (no, anti- illegalimmigrant) and anti- Muslim( no, anti- radical Muslim). He chided me for defending contemporary Cold War historical revisionists, removed from the passions of the time and buoyed by new documents, who defend Sen. Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade.
DiMagno suggests his ideological opposites are "Know Nothings." To paraphrase former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, we sometimes "don’t know what we don’t know," and DiMagno won’t know what he doesn’t know until he studies my suggested list of historians and sources.
Recent attempted and actual terrorist attacks in and outside the U.S. vindicate the "fear" that Islamic extremists, not their opponents, cause. President Obama responded well to the Arab cargo plane mail bomb incidents, and refrained from again asking us not to "jump to conclusions."
President Roosevelt did caution Americans against "fear itself," but then FDR violated U.S. neutrality laws to confront our real enemies, and signed wartime agreements with Britain before America entered World War II.
Leftist historians traditionally blame America rather than our enemies for conflicts. Recently deceased Communist sympathizer Howard Zinn’s popular American history textbooks are filled with anti-American diatribe. Some American historians blame America for Japan’s World War II aggression. Moral equivalence is an allegedly objective but biased premise. Political correctness is something else to legitimately "fear."
ADVERTISEMENT
Thomas Ostrom
Rochester
