Letter to the Editor: Students should be wary of librarians

In his column "PLO: Perkins Liberation Organization?," Nathan Carelton makes specific charges of bias against the Israeli-Palestine and Iraq websites that the Perkins Library has affixed to its main page.  In this column, Carelton demonstrates that left-leaning news sources on both sites vastly outnumber right-leaning news sources by 14-to-1 and 7-to-1 margins.  He further argues that Hamas should not be labeled as a "political group," as the U.S. State Department and the European Union deem it a terrorist organization.  He appeals to the library to balance out this bias, and implicitly calls for the removal of only two sites: a cartoon site featuring the Star of David fashioned out of barbed wire, and SAFE, which incorrectly reports that 18,000 items are missing from the Iraqi National Museum.

Somehow, David Ferriero, in his response to Carelton's piece, has interpreted this as a clarion call for censorship.  He offers no evidence of this assertion, save the ridiculous claim that the news sources listed---like al-Ahram, al-Bawaba, al-Shar al-Awsat and al-Jazeera---all offer "unbiased coverage."  This is mind-bogglingly absurd.

Even more absurd is Ferriero's claim that memri.org is inappropriate for a website on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because it tracks the anti-Semitic passages that regularly occur in Arab dailies (like the ones listed above, which Ferriero deems "unbiased").  In effect, Ferriero argues that the issue of anti-Semitism is entirely unrelated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  This is an insult to Duke's entire Jewish community.  Moreover, it offers even more proof that Duke students should be wary of librarians indeed.

Anna Stroman

Trinity '02