To the editor:
I was appalled to see the advertisements paid for by campustruth.org published in the Yale Daily News this week.
I understand that these are paid advertisements that do not reflect the views of the YDN, but surely the hateful and bigoted sentiment these ads incite and pander to do not deserve to figure on your pages, or on those of any other serious newspaper. I will spare you the many hypothetical examples of equally hateful advertisements that would surely not have been published by your paper.
Although the campustruth.org Web site claims that its ads are “designed to spur students to think through the issues and see the facts in their true context,” their effect is quite the opposite. The ads portray an entire people as terrorists and murderers, which is deplorable for reasons I cannot begin to enumerate.
I call on the YDN to reconsider its decision to run the ads and to suspend further publication of any similar advertisements immediately. I also believe that the YDN’s readers deserve an explanation as to why the ads were published in the first place.
Sam Freeman ’05
October 31, 2003