To the Editor:
In his August 4th letter to the Editor, Mark Klobas criticizes the U.S. for appeasing nations such as China while simultaneously condemning European trade with "outlaw" nations such as Cuba, Iraq and Libya, making reference to "the old phrase about glass houses and stones". Yet Mr. Klobas has omitted mention of a far more powerful example proving his point; our active support of a nation which exposes our house's moral mortar to be delicate Venetian glass. And understandably so. Unlike the European media, the American media and political establishment have bent over backwards to keep this facade of mortar as intact as possible, and legitimize U.S. support of a nation which has ethnically cleansed (as estimated by our own State Department) a million of an ethnic minority from its ancestral lands under the guise of military necessity.
It is a nation which has been receiving the third largest amount of aid from American taxpayers' coiffeurs after Israel and Egypt, and which we have armed with devastating weapons systems--including a system so technologically advanced that even Israel has not been supplied with it, and so destructive that human rights organizations worldwide have protested that it will be used against civilians with devastating consequences.
It is a nation which even our own State Department has acknowledged as a leading human rights violator, with transgressions such as torture, extrajudicial executions and forced virginity exams for women being widespread and endemic. It is an outlaw government which, unlike Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya, continues to occupy a European nation which it had brutally invaded two decades ago in violation of international law. It is a nation which has begun claiming the undisputed territory of a close European NATO ally of the U.S. and has threatened a military invasion in pursuit of its territorial expansion.
It is a nation which is spending millions to retain Washington's most influential PR firms and political spindoctors to influence American foreign policy. A nation whose actions brought the ugliest word in the human vocabulary into existence, "genocide", having committed the first mass extermination of another people in our century. Worse yet, it is a nation which is spending millions more for the sole purpose of genocide denial and in pursuit of an offensive and false historical revisionism right here in the U.S. through the outright purchase of scholars and university chairs within our most prestigious universities.
It is not surprising that your readers are unaware of the destruction and depopulation of over 3,000 Kurdish villages by government forces; of the fact that the U.S. has supplied 85% of this violent country's arms imports and has given it $6.6 billion since 1980; of the first foreign sale of 120 of the U.S.'s most advanced surface-to-surface missile, the Army Tactical Missile System; of the perennial Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports of widespread torture and hundreds of civilian killings; of the tragic invasion and ongoing occupation of Cyprus; of the open threats of invasion of Aegean islands such as Gavdos and Imia which have clearly been recognized as Greek territory under international law; of the appointment of individuals such as Professor Heath Lowry--an ardent denier of the Armenian Genocide who had been in the employ of the Turkish Government--as head of the "Ataturk Chair of Turkish Studies" at Princeton University after a $1.5 million endowment from the Republic of Turkey.
Mr. Klobas makes no mention of America's illicit support of Turkey because the Times and other mainstream American media sources have not properly done their job of informing the public on this most insidious Achilles' heel of our nation's foreign policy image.
Very truly yours,
Phillip Spyropoulos, Esq.
Director