lives have changed forever. We have all changed forever.
Now we face a war, possibly a very long and costly war, to find and punish the cowardly monsters of this dastardly act to make certain that what they did to our country will never happen again.
President Bush and his advisors carefully and thoughtfully took three weeks to prepare what needed to be done and to identify the culprits.
Most Americans and most countries of the world are in support of his actions. However, there are some people who vigorously disagree. As pacifists, they want us to think about this issue very carefully, assume the dead roach position, study and understand why part of the world hates us - these pacifists believe that love and patient understanding will get us through this.
I see it as a recipe for annihilation. If, in our efforts to be humanitarian and help other nations, we may have harmed them —well, let’s deal with that and fix it later, after we destroy the animals who are committed to destroying us. Now back to the station’s comment line…Until about a year ago, we had Jim Hightower, a reasonable Democrat, on KOMY. Suddenly, Hightower was replaced by Peter Werbe, probably by the syndicator of both.
We had no contract with Werbe. But we kept him on for a year, and businesses did NOT want to sponsor him. Werbe is an extreme leftist whose mission is to tear down the opposition, and President Bush has been his favorite target for ridicule. In fact, many regular listeners complained about him and stopped tuning in to our station.
Well, Werbe’s comments may have played well with some and may have been fair game in normal times, but these are NOT normal times. We’re now engaged in a war.
So as of several weeks ago, Werbe is no longer on KOMY. Now he goes on the internet, states his case, in third person — is that cowardly or what? — spins it and screams foul and claims that his free speech rights are violated! Is this nuts? Now a number of angry listeners are using the station comment line to say some very ugly and menacing things. Others are sending angry e-mails and few have signed their names.
Please understand that we, the owners, have been the sponsors for Werbe’s show for a year, and we no longer choose to subsidize him. Bottom line: Werbe has a right to his free speech and we have the right not to have him on our station.
Maybe these listeners could find a place for Werbe on public-supported radio. His kind of rhetoric is welcomed by some in peacetime, but now we are in a battle for the very survival of our way of life. And we do not wish to be an active party for political divisiveness which will give aid to the enemy and weaken our country’s resolve! Our men and women in the armed forces, who are fighting this war for us and may be dying for us, must know that we are with them. We cannot withstand another Vietnam War fiasco, when the country was bitterly divided and torn apart.
The chilling truth is, this may be our only chance to get it right — we destroy the enemy or they destroy us. And make no mistake —this is their agenda! I believe our mission is clear. We must, as a country, come together.
To paraphrase the words of Benjamin Franklin, spoken at the signing of the Declaration of Independence: “We had better all hang together or we will surely hang separately.”
Dear God, please bless America!
25
(October 31, 2001) A Lying Opportunist Peter Werbe, leftist talk host on KOMY, was dropped from our schedule several weeks ago. As a result of that action, he never did lose his right to “free speech,” despite his rantings on the subject. In addition to public radio, there are about thirty-five stations in this market, most with more powerful signals than our little one thousand watt station. Surely one of those stations would have carried his program.
BUT…..that was not Werbe’s plan … he chose to use his departure from KOMY to go online, present himself as a victim, obtain worldwide FREE publicity, and claim that his first amendment right of free speech was denied. (Pretty smart, actually, if he wasn’t so dishonest…) He deliberately fomented hate against us, the owners of KOMY, under a false premise simply to promote himself. The first amendment has nothing to do with a person’s right of free speech, and Werbe has known that all along.
As owners of a commercial radio station, it is our legal right to offer programming that we believe a majority of our listeners would enjoy. Werbe certainly did not fit that description. Many listeners used the station comment line to characterize him as arrogant, rude, mean-spirited, and other various expletives. There wasn’t one advertiser willing to sponsor him.
Even if this were not wartime, we were about to let him go … too many listeners were tuning us out.
Last Saturday, 10/28, Werbe agreed to be a guest on the two-hour weekly Saturday Special. Unable to handle the criticisms of several callers, he walked out of the show after the first hour. As a result if this incident, we received an astounding number of emails full of hate and indignation because we “deprived” Werbe of his free speech rights.
If you are one of those gullible souls who bought into his big canard, your anger at us is misplaced. Your anger should be directed to Wormy — I mean Werbe — the lying opportunist. You have been snookered … and we have been the victims of deliberate character assassination.
26
Local attorney Gil Stein wrote a letter to the Santa Cruz Sentinel recently, saying that anti-Semitism is alive and well at UC Santa Cruz. The Sentinel, on November 18th, also reported that anti-Semitism is increasing on college campuses throughout the country. How is this possible in institutions of higher learning where parents of college students pay as much as $ 100,000 for four years so their children can become educated, fair-thinking members of society? Because Gil Stein’s letter is very worrisome, I will repeat portions of the letter along with my own thoughts so that many others in this area can be made aware of the ugly situation, which, if not confronted, will escalate just as it did in Germany in the early 1930s. Please listen, then register your outrage with the local chancellor and those irresponsible members of the faculty. Remember: When good people remain silent and do nothing, bad things happen and evil takes hold. It’s called ‘the sin of omission.’
Gil’s letter refers only to this campus where anti-Israel faculty and students intimidate Jewish students who express support for Israel. You won’t believe the following, but it’s true. Tenured professor Nancy Stoller, who teaches at this campus, was caught red-handed, removing flyers posted by pro-Israel students. This incident happened last year, but the then-chancellor just looked the other way.
Pro-Palestinian speakers receive university sponsorship, while pro-Israeli speakers are denied sponsorship by those same departments. The university promotes diversity, but not diversity with which they disagree. This policy of looking the other way when certain speakers spout racist venom needs to stop. Academic freedom should not be a cover for bigotry. All campuses should also be open to speakers who do not represent the views of the ”politically correct.”
Kudos to Gil Stein for uncovering this ugliness. I say shame on the biased and gutless faculty and leaders who encourage prejudice to fester in places of higher learning. We The People must vigorously protest to those accountable. Our publicly financed universities must no longer become institutions of hate and selective discrimination.
27
Looking back, a really sad aspect of California’s budget disaster has been the behavior of too many self-serving state and county lawmakers. These officials, who betrayed us, were elected in good faith. They must share the blame for the reckless decisions which have taken our Golden State
