Letter to the Editor

Re “The West’s debt to the Arabs,” by Dan Rottenberg (Editor’s Notebook):

Tunisia as a way to collective sanity? Let’s hope so. But in my 90-day trek around the Mediterranean to celebrate my 50th birthday in 1977, my pit stop in Tunisia between Algeria and Egypt was a puzzle.

Yesterday a young “German” Kosovan Muslim killed two Americans on their way to Afghanistan and wounded two others at Frankfurt’s airport. He tweeted with a gun, not a phone.

Still, if global optimism is good enough for Moses and a Reconstructionist Dan, I’m holding my crossed, ex-Christian, fingers. Hard.

Patrick D. Hazard
Weimar, Germany
March 4, 2011

Writer's note: I almost asked the editor to kill his edited response. Here's what he killed. "Tunis was a puzzle. I hiked out to Carthage straightaway. It was completely empty! Except for a soldier waggling an AK47 at me to stop shooting pictures (of what turned out to be the President's House!) When I got back to the city, a local explained Carthage's emptiness (it was Muhammed's birthday!) and why I was silenced with an AK47."