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July 4, 2003 A few days following 9/11 a shocking email message popped up in my computer. It was from a guy in India – an educated fellow and a rather sophisticated writer. I'd never heard of him, and the reason his mail came to me was simply that an acquaintance in San Diego received it in response to Internet business advertising, and forwarded it to me. The message from the Indian was seething with the most extreme kind of vitriolic hatred for the USA. The main point: "I'm glad about the attack on the World Trade Center, and I wish that kind of attack would happen every week somewhere in the USA." At first I regarded him as a hateful idiot unworthy of any response. However, I couldn't resist. My first email was the beginning of a series of exchanges in a debate that has raged at white-heat intensity for the better part of a year. Why my computer hasn't burned up, I'll never know. "SK" lives in Bombay, and he says his philosophical and political orientation is typical in all parts of India. Summarizing it, he argues that America is by all means the number one "terrorist" nation on the planet. The CIA is worse than Hitler's SS. Our military is extending US power to over 100 nations of the world. Our people are benighted and ignorant because the US media moguls are spinning and duping our population. Our support of Israel is evil per se, and the war against the Saddam regime was "illegal." All of that rubbish from a citizen of a country that worships a variety of gods ranging from cows to rats! As a former anti-communist writer and editor during the Soviet era prior to the fall of the Berlin wall,I remembered enough of the communist ideological trash to perceive in SK's writings the color red. Confronting him about it triggered a quantum intensification of his wrath. I had nailed a liar, and the knowledge that his true nature had been exposed was more than he could handle. As the debate raged on, It occurred to me that any foreign aid going to India was probably so much money down the proverbial rathole. So I looked it up. Believe it or not, the USA is doling out $160 million a year to India which, according to SK, hates everything about us. And this doesn't include any additional funds that might be leaking through to India via the Asian Development Bank, the International Development Association or the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. A few other countries receiving US millions are Jordan, Egypt, Gaza (home of Hamas), Algeria, Ethiopia, China, Bolivia, Brazil, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru and Trinidad/Tobago. Egypt despises America, and has the distinction of contributing Bin Ladin's right-hand assistant in terrorism. All of which should cause any rational American to ask if our leaders think they can buy good will with money. Many nations that are showing their fangs and boiling over with hatred for our nation, its free government and prosperous economy, are receiving huge financial grants at the expense of the American taxpayer. And those grants are feeding the incubators of evil ideology and murderous wrath that would, at the slightest opportunity, come to devour us. Let's give some thought to a novel idea ... that the funds expended in foreign aid are all too often simply driving spikes into our national coffin. It's great to express love toward less fortunate populations ... but let's express it with something other than our money. Much of our foreign aid is worse than a wasteful boondoggle; it's a measure of the death wish of the most enviable republic in human history. ------------ Email H. Edward Rowe: edrowe@lvcm.com Comment on this column in the forum. ------------ |
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