Sunday, April 22, 2007

Withdraw the troops

From South Korea.

The US in Korea site is quite an eye-opener! Let's just start with the subject that got me there: teaching. The site makes it clear that KTU, with 90,000 members, isn't the mainstream teachers' group there, but it's hardly small or fringe.

This excerpt is pulled from an an essay, Teaching Anti-US/USFK Thought To Children, from the site. [USFK is U.S. Forces/Korea]

Then came revelations about a highly anti-American "lesson plan" - that contained many, many pages - located on the KTU website and distributed to its several tens of thousands of members. The blatant nature of the propaganda value of the "teaching" material also (thankfully) created a backlash, but — it found some sort of favor with President Roh Mun-Hyun. He criticized the plan intially, but then changed his mind after discussing it with his base of support - the one that carries as part of its platform a healthy dose of "bad America" and "USFK cancer."

Dennis Prager has suggested, in the light of anti-American sentiment in South Korea, we have a vote. If as few as one third of the South Korean population wants the U.S. troops to leave, then we pull them out and let them handle their own defense against North Korea.

We could probably offer most of Europe the same "deal".

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