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Letter: Wrong about attackers

Although Barbara Owen — in her letter “Enough is enough” (Commentary, The Aspen Times, Dec. 7) — doesn’t go the way of Bernie Sanders in suggesting that Islamist violence is partly a consequence of global warming, she does pin it primarily on “poverty, exclusion and suffering” that have their way with “young, marginalized and mentally unstable people.”

Was Syed Farook any of these or subject to such deprivation? With a college degree and a decent, meaningful government job, was he any more marginalized than, say, Mohammed Atta — the son of a lawyer and a member of an affluent farming and trading family, who himself was a student of engineering with a degree in architecture — or psychiatrist and medical major Nidal Hasan?

No, the depravity of all three of these individuals can be laid at the feet of their evolving theology and social philosophy. To paraphrase the old Bill Clinton campaign slogan, “It’s the religion, stupid.”



In the questionable equivalence Owen then draws between Farook and Robert Lewis Dear, she employs the slippery passive voice in asserting, “It has been ruled that” the claims made in the Daleiden Planned Parenthood videos are “blatantly false.” Ruled by whom, and on the basis of what evidence? What congressional investigation or court review produced such a conclusion?

Owen deplores advocates who “manipulate the truth and create coercive propaganda.” So do I.




Chad Klinger

Basalt