No excuse for those who hate
COLLEGE students often tweak the nose of ``the establishment'' by welcoming views most Americans find repugnant. This happened last fall when Khalid Abdul Muhammad, the Nation of Islam's No. 2 man behind controversial Minister Louis Farrakhan, spoke at New Jersey's Kean College....
He bemoaned that history condemns the Holocaust, ``but don't nobody ever ask what did they do to Hitler?... a German, in his own country, would almost have to go to a Jew to get money. They had undermined the very fabric of the society.''...
Amazingly, this doctrine for genocide drew cheers from the black Kean College audience. However, it's gratifying to report that won't happen at Atlanta's Emory University. The Black Law Students Association has pointedly withdrawn an invitation to Muhammad to speak there. Let's hope other student groups, whatever their color, follow suit.... Black hatemongers must be treated with the same contempt as white hatemongers. You don't see many Ku Klux Klan leaders being invited to address college audiences, much less getting cheered.
- The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle Welfare dependency
AMERICANS are facing a bona fide crisis these days - but it's not the one President Clinton and his administration keep telling us about. Much as they would have us believe that the health-care cost spiral (which is slowing) and a gap in health coverage merit a radical redesign of an essentially sound system, society is crumbling under the weight of the welfare state.
Welfare is subsidizing illegitimacy and holding neither biological parent answerable. That phenomenon, more than anything else, is turning more and more young men into unguided missiles, bent on lives of crime. It is turning more and more young women into largely uneducated and unemployable welfare mothers-in-waiting. Mr. Clinton's real work lies in ending ... welfare dependency. Instead, he would squander his time and our money on fixing a health care system that isn't broken.
- Clovis (N.M.) News Journal Clinton's tough talk
PRESIDENT Clinton's endorsement of the ``three strikes and you're out'' provision of the Senate's crime bill in his State of the Union message is a master stroke. For by doing so he has deprived Republican opponents of ammunition they might have used to paint him as soft on violent crime....
Mr. Clinton is proving an enigma. One minute he dazzles with his motivation, youth, and grasp of issues. The next he seems a shifty amateur whose personal integrity is being daily called into question. His address ... should go a long way to redressing the balance - especially with the marked improvement in the US economy since he took over.
- Gulf Daily News, Manama, Bahrain US embargo: not the way to help Cuba
IF the United States can resolve its differences with [Vietnam], a country with which it was at war two decades ago, it seems strange that the normalizing of relations with Cuba is hardly discussed in Washington....
Those parts of the [US] embargo [against Cuba] that deal with communications should be ended - allowing the Cuban people to gain some sense of what is going on in the outside world. Restrictions covering basic food and medicines should be lifted - helping to deprive Fidel Castro Ruz of the charge that the US is either trying to starve Cuba or leave it without the ability to tackle disease. Then Washington should make it clear that - if Cuba complies with the economic conditions for joining the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank - it will not object to Cuban membership of those two institutions. This would provide incentive to change economic policies: political changes in Cuba's overarching state are then almost bound to follow.
- Financial Times, London
