Letter: Duke professor defends terrorists in commentary

As a Duke alumnae, I should comment on Ebrahim Moosa's piece found in the Sunday Jan. 19 edition of The Washington Times, entitled "Peace Patina Under Glass." It did not surprise me that given his ideological history of disparaging America and Israel, Moosa portrays Islamic fundamentalist terrorists as pitiful freedom fighters struggling against the "imperial" West. According to Moosa, in defense of terrorist Palestinian groups, there is no moral equivalence between Israel's right to self defense and the Palestinian "resistance" movement. He's right about that only in the opposite direction; Israelis do not celebrate in the streets when Palestinian civilians are accidentally killed in the crossfire. But Palestinians march around the streets with the Qur'an in one hand and an AK-47 in the other rejoicing the bloodbaths they organize and execute. Moosa claims Muslims want to live in free societies like the United States, but is this why they choose to rally around leaders like Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein? Is this why they are oppressing half their populations? And finally, yes, President George W. Bush is hell-bent on going to war with evil Muslims who want to destroy America just as Osama Bin Laden is hell-bent on destroying Western civilization. Perhaps the only "moral cretins" here are apologists such as Moosa.