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Hernando Today

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 12, 2008

Kudos To Fagan For Work On Bayport Park

Re: Landscape Rules At Bayport by Tony Marrero

Thank you for your article about the renovated Bayport Park.

I wish to speak for one Hernando County resident whose first impression as we visited the park was, well, here is a project accomplished with excellence! My roots are Minneapolis, a beautiful city of lakes and parks that were given priority attention to embellish their natural splendor. We have lived in this county for 13 years which was a far cry from what we left.

We need to impress our visitors that this is a class area in which to live. I, for one, vote for and applaud Pat Fagan's leadership in bringing this first-class project to reality.

Hopefully this park availability will be well marketed to prospective residents and visitors to our emerging community.

Mrs. Evon Boyer

Brooksville

Rall Distorts Left With Anti-American Lenses

Re: Ted Rall's column "Defense Of Iran"
Ted Rall is no spokesman for the "liberal point of view." Obama and Hillary Clinton would reject practically everything he says. He epitomizes the far left viewpoint which uses anti-American lenses to distort, or ignore, every fact favorable to our country. Were Rall a secret agent for the Iranian government, he would deserve the high salary Ahmadinejad would give him.

"Iran," asserts Rall, "isn't an enemy. It's a regional rival, a competitor, and a relatively good-natured one at that." An enemy, he further claims, "is a country with which a nation is at war," and since we are not at war, Iran cannot be our enemy.

Two responses can be made to this slippery nonsense. Etymologically, "enemy" derives from the Latin word for unfriendly, hence, an adversary, a foe - an individual can be your enemy or one nation hostile to another. It need not al all involve war.

More importantly, Iran is not "relatively good-natured" toward us. She regards us unequivocally as an enemy. Listen to her leaders. Her supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khomeni declared in 2006: "We have enemies ... Death to America ... It is the great Satan." In the same year, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati prayed, "May Allah, by virtue of the Hidden Aman, remove the evil America and Israel from humanity." Ayatollah Emami-Kashani declared a year earlier, on Iranian TV, "If you Americans behave with disrespect - even just a little bit - the Iranian people will punch you in the mouth so hard that all your devouring teeth will fall out."

Mr. Rall strangely regards these religious leaders as "good-natured."

But how about President Ahmadinejah? Does he disagree with the clique of radical clerics who run the theocracy? Not at all. He called today's Iraq, "the command base of the enemy" and on Oct. 20, 2006, he declared "the whole world knows that America and England are the enemies of the Iranian nation." And "Your doomed destiny will be annihilation."

For Rall, Iran can regard us as the enemy to be destroyed; but we should not regard Iran as an enemy, even though (as Rall omits to mention), it supplies arms and funds to Hisbollah, Hamas and other terrorist groups, and sends arms and special forces into Iraq to kill American soldiers.

Finally, Rall mocks the idea of thinking that Iran wants us to surrender since its "modest military" cannot occupy our country. Ahmadinejah refutes him: America must "bow down before the greatness of the Iranian nation and surrender.

If you don't accept this, the Iranian nation will later force you to surrender and bow down." Surrendering" for Iran means the U.S. should leave the Middle East, stay in its own borders, let Israel accept annihilation, and allow the great nation of Iran to have its atomic bombs and dominate the entire region.

Oddly, and no doubt accidentally, this is Rall's solution, too. Let's give up our aggressive behavior and stay at home. "Citizens of the United States should feel secure. We border big oceans and two close allies." Could an Iranian propagandist, recommending an isolationist position for the U.S., put it more concisely?

(All quotations from Iranian leaders are from the easily accessible volume, "In The Words Of Our Enemies," edited by Jed Babbin.

Dr. Arnold Silver

Brooksville

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