Teach-ins and the Crisis that We Face Together



I write to you because I cannot refrain from noting the 
challenge our civilization faces and how we as a society 
are shrinking from it. Many of you are tenured academics 
sequestered in an intellectual paradise, compared with 
the other people who must daily meet the demands of 
"productivity" put before them as ever escalating minimums. 
Thus, you cannot imagine the impact of recent terrorist 
events on people trying desperately to get by. Many, very 
many, feel overwhelmed; going from fear to freight, they 
feel that they can no longer cope. Think of them, please, 
as you go through your daily campus routine; for it is 
they that make your scholar's lives possible and their 
willingness to spend their hard earned money decides what 
kind of retirement you face, as it is on their spending 
that decides the fate of the stocks on which depends you 
pension. If they give up now, you will join them in the 
ruins of their despair.

I have aged losing my feeling that academics are to the mind 
what clergy is to the soul. I had not followed what developed 
in social sciences and humanities as they became increasingly 
irrelevant to the real world. I tended to judge the status of 
academia from the hard sciences, where new discoveries 
constantly amaze. It is to be expected therefore that, 
as one who so deceived himself about academics, I should have 
reacted in horror to what I saw when I considered the study of 
Cold War history at the university level. Yet, despite my 
outpouring of bile, I must say that what I saw at teach-ins 
these last few weeks has been most pleasantly surprising. It 
seems that when stripped of their professorial pompousness, 
facing others on an even playing field, academics proved to 
be a wealth of critical thinking-- that's the kind of thinking 
that comes from an intuitive sense of reality and careful 
cognitive analysis of the facts, such as are known.

I write to you, therefore, to plead with you to promote 
discussion-- ever more intensely. For, when the next blow 
befalls us, we will realize how little impact our official 
bravado has had on the "martyrs of Allah" and how little means 
the "Grand Alliance" which the US is clumsily compromising 
itself into in order to have bin Laden's passive and active 
supporter states on our side. As Pres. Bush comes to realize 
that he has repeated his rade of doing what needs to be done 
for the half-hearted "alliance" with Moslem states, he will 
flouder and will desperately grasp at straws. I estimate that 
the US can survive at most three more icidents like Sept. 11th, 
and then it will begin to fall apart, losing its essential "open" 
character, thus killing itself as it tries to fight back. 
Medicine has come to know that most diseases are over and 
inappropriate bodily defence reactions to invasion. Such fatal 
chronic illness will befall us if we try to carry-on as a 
security-state. 

I have and continue to argue that at this time the lesson of 
the Cold War is invaluable. Our power has always been as a 
"deterrent" power. We survived 50 years after WW II, and 
persevered, because  we invested fully in a credible deterrence 
to any and all foes. The Mullahs in Iran and their agents in 
Iraq that made binLaden's efforts possible, providing his 
agents "wet identities" in preparation for their assault on 
"The Great Satan"-- the USA-- even before we went to war, 
gives an idea of the real issues at stake. There is no 
political solution because this is not a political war. 
It is a war of faith-- a *crusade* in reverse by the Moslem 
World against the Judeo-Christian World. It was brought to 
us because the Mullahs concluded that our global modernization 
is irresistible to their flock. And so, when you can't save 
the sinners, you kill the devil!

We must respect the will, faith and determination of our foes. 
They will send suicide terrorists against us. Millions 
volunteer because that cleanses their sins and grants them 
entry into Paradise-- a place that is the exact opposite of 
their lives on earth. But the Mullahs know that without them 
to continue facilitating union into cells of Moslems from all 
sorts of nations and sects-- Moslems sans frontieres, 
if you will-- and they, therefore, are not willing to die. 
That is the key to our stopping this Crusades in reverse. 
We must deter the Jihad by threatening to eradicate the Mullahs-- 
not by wasting the really few good men we have, but by using our 
ICBMs to eradicate from the face of the earth the places where 
they live and from where they facilitate the formation of 
suicide cells.

In conclusion, I argue that we must deter a repeat of Sept. 11th 
by indicating what power we have and that before the *third* 
event-- that is, after the forthcoming second-- we will eradicate 
from the face of the earth the places where we know the Mullahs 
to be. In no way can the "martyrs for Allah" match our ability 
to destroy. And, none of the mass of passive Moslems who would 
be swept into a gradually escalating struggle would support 
testing our determination, once we make our warning clear. 
President Bush has often said, "I want to make it perfectly clear..." 
Yet there has been no clarity coming from him that makes future 
terrorism untenable, from the Mullahs' point of view. All that 
he has done is to indicate that we are willing to squander the 
few Americans who volunteer for such a suicide mission to go 
chase terrorism's "middle management"-- binLaden and the Taliban-- 
in the mountains of Afghanistan. This is shades of the LBJ "flower 
of our youth" speech of 1965-- passionate bravado at the beginning, 
leading to floundering pleas for "negotiations and resignation at the end.

I feel the horror of my proposal. But I also personally felt the 
horror of the Twin Towers catastrophe. Everyone in New York City 
does too. Don't wait for your town to be targeted or for the 
freedoms you cherish to be abrogated or for the economy on which 
you depend to collapse. Show your willingness to keep life sacred; 
but if it is to be lost, we will not accept the slaughter of the 
peoples of the Judeo-Christian World just because we do not want 
to kill innocents in the Moslem World. We must make clear that 
when they, the Mullahs, call for Jihad, they risk extermination. 
Only our determination will deter, will save our people-- and 
theirs-- further bloodshed. Let us call off our Keystone Cops 
search for bin Laden. Let our lack of reaction to Sept. 11th 
bespeak our swift and absolute reaction after the next event. 
Next time we don't talk, we don't search, we don't shoot-- we 
pulverize!

I hope you all will discuss this life and death struggle that 
has been inflicted on us and on the Moslem World by the Mullahs 
of Teheran, initiated by Khomeni. They slit the throats of 
hundreds of thousands of helpless Moslem "sinners" whose only 
crime was to be attracted by our global modernity. But now, 
in full compliance with the Kohran, they go after the source 
of evil-- the "Great Satan," the USA. Don't underestimate their 
will, don't under estimate the magnitude of their bloody plans, 
and, above all, don't underestimate their ability to draw in an 
endless supply of Moslems ready to cleanse their sins as "martyrs 
for Allah" in order to get to Paradise.

Our will as a civilization is all we have with which to make 
our nuclear power credible. Whether you agree with me or not, 
I plead with you to organize teach-in after teach-in to get 
everyone to exchange his/her views with everyone else. This 
opportunity to jaw, jaw, jaw, that the academics have invented 
could prove their greatest contribution to the survival of 
our Western way of life. We need to be an open society to 
survive and to survive we must be a credible deterrent. 
We have the means, now we must convince ourselves, our 
friends and our foes that we have the will. Our will alone 
will save mankind from further bloodshed, in my view. What 
do you think? Please take the time to let me know. Thank you 
and may God-- who is also Allah-- inspire us to find a way 
to peace instead of destructive bloody war.

My thoughts are with the innocent victims who were just 
trying to get by.

Daniel E. Teodoru

Please pardon my spelling and syntax. I have great difficulty 
at the keyboard and Yahoo's spell check is out of order.