Web Letters: Gaza Crisis Spills Onto Basketball Court

Mr. Zirin is obviously naïve. Perhaps he has never before witnessed anti-Semitism. Well, he has now gotten a taste of it. It is not pretty.

Can you imagine the uproar in the world if a Turkish basketball team were to visit Israel and the Israelis were to riot against them? You would never hear the end of it. There would likely be twenty or more UN resolutions protesting Israel as some type of demonic empire.

Can you imagine if Turkey suffered rocket attacks for weeks and months from the Kurds and took action to defend itself and its civilian citizens? If the Kurds had threatened to establish a Kurdish empire in Turkey, and Turkey bombed the Kurdish sections of Iraq, and then went in to take out the weaponry that threatened its civilian citizenry--do you think there would be an outcry that Turkey had no right to do what it did? Do you think the Turks would be chastised for creating an alleged humanitarian crisis? Doubtful, wouldn't you say?

It is only Jews that are supposed to lie down and wait to be slaughtered.

Mr. Zirin, grow up.

Leonard S. Miller

Fair Lawn, NJ

Here is another "political" sports protest in which I took part. This one was directed at the home team.

In the fall of 1963 (indeed, around the time Kennedy was shot), the University of Chicago after a lapse of many years attempted to bring football back to its campus. The university was not attempting to relive its glory days as a Big Ten power but merely was trying to start all over again from the bottom. But this was much too much for us budding young intellectual students (I was a freshman). At the first game about fifty of us sat in on the fifty-yard line of Stagg Field (of "first nuclear reaction under the stands" fame). We had our own "cheerleaders" and had the pleasure of being lectured from the sidelines by bullhorn by a philosophy professor/dean of students about the rights we were violating by our protest.

We were wildly successful. Not only was the game canceled, but UC did not bring football back for five years--not until 1968, when we had all graduated.

Gene Taback

Oakland, CA