9/11 Speech

9/11/03 | Larry Sand

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9/11 SPEECH

Good morning. Thank you for showing up at this ungodly hour, but it is appropriate for remembering an ungodly event. My name is Larry Sand. I am a middle school American history teacher in LAUSD. Today is the 2nd anniversary of our second day of infamy. Unlike the first one, Pearl Harbor, this second day of infamy has lead some sectors of our population to blame us for those tragic events. They say we had it coming. And the focal point of these hateful thoughts is none other than the American college campus.

We may have been victorious in Iraq but we are losing the culture war at home. The war here is very much alive. In short, ladies & gentlemen, our universities have been hijacked. They have become political forums to disseminate anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda under the guise of free speech and advocacy. The following is a tiny sampling of the quotes coming out of the mouths of college professors:

University of Texas professor Robert Jensen has written that the terrorists’ acts were “no more despicable than the massive acts of terrorism…that the U.S. government has committed during my lifetime.”

Rutgers University professor Barbara Foley wrote that “whatever (the terrorists’ attacks’) proximate cause, its ultimate cause is the fascism of U.S., foreign policy over the past many decades.”

Professor Howard Zinn of Boston University wrote, “We need to think about the resentment all over the world felt by people who have been victims of American military action – in Vietnam, in Latin America, in Iraq.”

Evergreen State College of Olympia, WA professor Larry Mosqueda wrote, “If we multiply by 800-1,000 times the amount of pain, angst, and anger being currently felt by the American public, we might begin to understand how much the rest of the world feels as they are continually victimized (by the U.S…”)

History professor Richard Berthold of the University of New Mexico stated that he enjoyed the Pentagon suffering a terrorist attack: “Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote.” This was said to his freshman class…the afternoon of September 11, 2001.

The situation is even worse in the Middle East Studies departments at our elite universities. Campus Watch points to a particularly egregious situation at the University of Chicago. It seems that anyone who is vaguely pro America or pro Israel is simply not hired.

I need to stress again – this is typical, and not surprising given how one-sidedly political our secondary education system has become. Recent research by the American Enterprise Institute showed that over 90% of faculty in the arts and sciences are affiliated with the left or left-leaning causes. All citizens, not just those with children in college, need to be concerned with this situation.

Even in the lower grades the 5th column exists. The left wing NEA announced a year ago that it was providing lesson plans to teachers – not to remember or mourn the tragic events of 9/11 but to caution students that no particular group was responsible for the attacks. The plans urged teachers to discuss historical instances of American intolerance such as the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor.

What can we do? To paraphrase Edmund Burke, evil will triumph when good men and women do nothing. Please, when you go home today, get on the internet and check out some of the groups who are fighting this monster: The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the National Association of Scholars, Campus Watch, Frontpage and Young America’s Foundation. I have a list of organizations and their website addresses and will supply them to you today.

To put it simply, we need to get more active. The other side is winning. We need soldiers, civilian soldiers, to mobilize so that we can reclaim our universities. We owe nothing less to our children, and nothing less to the people who were slaughtered two years ago today. Thank you.