Dissatisfaction

To the Editors of The Crimson:

What is The Crimson afraid of?

In the past few weeks, The Crimson has taken every possible opportunity to attack and ridicule the Harvard Conservative Club. When your increasingly vituperative editorials and articles brought no response from the Club, you descended even lower than usual into the gutter to attack me personally in a recent editorial.

While drainpipe journalism is nothing new to The Crimson your attacks on the Conservative Club are. In the past few years the Conservative Club has offered a notable counterpoint to prevailing liberal opinion on the Harvard campus. We have hosted speakers including Senator Eugene McCarthy, now Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, Nestor Sanchez from the Dept. of Defense, leaders of the Nicaraguan contras, Professors Richard Pipes, Harvey Mansfield, and many others. The views of these and other speakers receive wide currency outside Harvard, if not necessarily on campus, and we have found that many students are interested in hearing these viewpoints even if they do not always agree with them.

In addition to speakers, the Club has organized rallies against Soviet aggression, sponsored a New England college conservative conference which featured speakers including George Gilder, and collected donations for the Afghan freedom fighters. Nor have we shirked controversial issues. For example, during the movement to ban nuclear weapons research in Cambridge, the Club hosted the vice president of the Charles Draper labs and helped organize students on campus to help defeat the research ban.

Yet, The Crimson always studiously and consistently ignored all of these activities, regardless of the number of students who attended or the importance of the speaker. At the same time the paper has been very careful to search out and cover the smallest liberal events. For example, the Club's anti-Soviet rally (which took place a few weeks after the American invasion of Grenada) received the barest mention on the last page of the paper, even though over 150 students attended. By contrast, four weeks ago when 13 (count them, 13) pro-divestiture students sang in front of Derek Bok's office, The Crimson gave them a long front page story.

But after two recent Club events, the hosting of the South African Consulate-General and of Dr. Paul Cameron, The Crimson can't seem to print enough about the Conservative Club, with most of the coverage bad if not downright offensive. In the case of Dr. Cameron, whom we invited to participate in what we hoped would be a debate with a member of the Gay and Lesbian Students' Association, The Crimson has distorted Cameron's remarks over and over, with the distortions getting worse each time. The truth is that Cameron advocated only a quarantine of victims of AIDS, and explained that the various practices of male homosexuals, prostitutes, and intravenous drug abusers tend to transmit diseases such as AIDS. The U.S. Army has already taken the step of discharging AIDS victims and restricting those with the AIDS virus, and the gay community in the U.S. has recognized the health hazards of certain sexual practices and has taken admirable steps to discourage these practices. Seen in this context, and stripped of the near-hysterical distortions by The Crimson, Cameron's remarks are not very radical at all.

But the core issue here is that The Crimson, that bastion of '60s throwbacks and "sophisticated" Establishment liberals, seems to have a morbid fear of any conservative movement at Harvard. When some students advocated divestment from companies that do business with the Soviet Union, the same Crimson which keeps the South Africa divestiture movement alive moved quickly to attack divestment from the USSR with haughty and vicious editorials--using the same arguments Derek Bok has used against divestiture from South Africa.

The Crimson has every right to express its liberal opinions straight out of the Dark Ages. But you should draw the line at deliberate insults aimed at individual students or at attempts to distort the facts so as to ridicule undergraduate organizations. I found your latest foray in the former category, in which you referred to me as "SyKahane," deeply offensive. Meier Kahane is a militant racist who has called for the expulsion or extermination of Arab Moslems in Israel. As a Moslem and a national from the Middle East, I find the label of Kahane comparable to referring to the president of Harvard Hillel as Yasir Arafat. Since the editors of The Crimson know me rather well, I must assume that this insult was intentional and deliberate.

Finally, as for your attempts to discredit the Conservative Club, I ask you to consider two things. First, think about the many Administration officials, well-known academics, and foreign dignitaries who have spoken to or for the Conservative Club. Then consider the large number of Harvard officials and others who absolutely refuse to talk to or be interviewed by The Crimson. Mir Saied Kashani '86