Message for Al Qaeda

A brilliant and powerful message for Al Qaeda’s supporters.

But your message would have been so much more effective if, at the end of your third paragraph, where you list “waves of immigration,” you had also included another significant immigrant group now fully integrated in American society: Arabs.

Primo Vannicelli

Cambridge, Mass.

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Al Qaeda’s Ayman Zawahiri using an out-dated racial pejorative, “house slaves,” in an effort to embarrass President-elect Barack Obama and the United States is ironic because it was the Arab sub-Saharan slave trade with the Portuguese that fueled the transatlantic slave trade. So I say “right on” and “amen” to your editorial bringing him up to date.

During World War II, Hitler and his terrorist Nazi movement tried a similar tack citing racial discrimination and the lynchings of Negroes in the South. Joe Louis, the heavyweight boxing champion, on being inducted into the Army, commented, “There ain’t nothing wrong with this country that Hitler can fix.”

After years of progress in race and human relations -- even though residual racism and sexism persist -- there are no lessons we can learn from Al Qaeda.

Alex J. Norman

Long Beach