David Goldstick’s Monday letter accused the Daily’s editorial board of being swayed by the “personal vendetta” of Omar Tesdell on issues dealing with the Arab world. Goldstick said that Tesdell, because he is of Arab descent, supports appeasing terrorists.

Goldstick makes assumptions, including racist ones. He implies that Tesdell is a rabid ideologue who can’t think through two sides of an argument because he’s Palestinian-American. Getting information from Tesdell’s Web site, he says only that Tesdell is Arab and ignores the fact that Tesdell has lived in Iowa since 1988 and is very familiar with American discussion of international issues.

These false assumptions have historic precedent. When college students started to question the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the CIA assumed good Americans couldn’t possibly question their own government’s policy. The CIA spent untold time and money trying to prove that phantom Communists had infiltrated the minds of these intellectuals who had come to see viable peaceful alternatives on their own or by way of philosophies like that of Martin Luther King Jr. We can’t assume that it’s even Tesdell’s voice dominating the board’s opinion. And to infanticize Tesdell like the CIA infanticized the thinkers of the `60s is to insult Tesdell as a person. Tesdell may have a broader perspective than some of us because of his background but he isn’t a brainwashed tool of violent extremists. He’s in fact an advocate for peaceful solutions. We should be thankful the editorial board isn’t made up of students who only echo the rhetoric we’re fed from Bush, Ashcroft and Rumsfeld.

Katherine Westholm

Junior

History