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LETTER TO THE EDITOR
I just received my Sept. 23 issue of Washington Technology. As I was reading through it, I was shocked and saddened to see the cartoon on page 54.
This is exactly the kind of cultural and racial stereotyping that is at the root of why so many people around the world today have come to hate America.
We are living in an era when innocent U.S. citizens, who happen to be Arabs or Muslim, can be chased down by a phalanx of state troopers because someone in a Shoney's restaurant thought she overheard them hatching a bomb plot. In that kind of atmosphere, I find it particularly reprehensible that a publication owned by the Post-Newsweek organization should itself be feeding these kinds of stereotypes.
If you have not done so, I strongly suggest that you visit the Holocaust Museum. There is a section devoted to cartoons taken from German newspapers in the 1930s that depicted Jews as rats and vermin. The drawing of the man holding the ID cards in the cartoon on page 54 of WT is frighteningly similar to the way Jews were drawn in those Nazi-controlled German publications.
I look forward to your apology for this cartoon in the Editor's Note section of an upcoming issue. If you need any motivation to do so, I suggest that you read John Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage."
William Sisolak
Washington, D.C.
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