Letters to the Editor for March 16, 2019

Denying forgiveness to Muthana is rejecting Christian values

American ISIS bride Hoda Muthana wants to return from Syria. Guy Farmer agrees with Trump that she shouldn’t be allowed to come home because on the day of her birth her father was a U.N. diplomat exempt from U.S. citizenship laws. Farmer believes “we should slam our golden door right in Ms. Muthana’s photogenic face.”

Here are the facts. Hoda was born in Hackensack, N.J., on Oct. 28, 1994. Her father, Ahmed Ali Muthana, left the Yemeni diplomatic service on Sept. 1, 1994. According to the Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic Relations, diplomatic immunity ends when the diplomatic position ends.

But in 2016, Obama’s State Department changed the rules retroactively. It found that since the U.S. wasn’t notified of Ahmed’s status change until February 1995, he hadn’t been “within the jurisdiction of the United States” at the time of Hoda’s birth, notwithstanding the fact that she’d been issued U.S. passports in 2005 and 2014. The government, revoking natural born citizenship by changing the rules 22 years after the fact, is breaking new legal ground, especially as it’s based on a technicality that had never been an issue before.

ISIS was founded on a particularly violent and revenge-oriented interpretation of Islam. Christianity, by contrast, is devoted to forgiveness and redemption. Hoda Muthana accepts responsibility for her teenage mistakes, is willing to face justice and is asking us for forgiveness and redemption. If our response is to slam the golden door in her face, whose values have we embraced, theirs or ours?

Rich Dunn

Carson City

Student seeks help for class project

Hello, my name is Braden and I am doing a project for my class’s novel study. It is for the book The Watsons Go to Birmingham. I am writing letters to editors in the state of Nevada. I wanted to learn more about Nevada. It is a state that I haven’t learned that much about and I hope your newspaper can change that.

I am hoping to see if your readers can tell me why they like Nevada. I would like to hear some interesting facts about Nevada also. If they could also have a copy of the newspaper that would be awesome. Thank you for your time to read this. If you have any questions, you can contact my teacher’s email at aweisser@queenofpiece.cc or call her by her phone at 574-255-0392, ext. 123.

Braden

Mishawaka, Ind.

Antidepressants are not benign

I was interested in your article on former NHL goalie Clint Malarchuk’s “mental health issues.” I’m so glad he is finding some relief and has the support of his family.

I did cringe at the statement, “What is going on here is a chemical imbalance of the brain,” though. I thought the same thing until I decided to go off the drugs, crashed and burned and then did some research to find out what was happening to me. I had been on the stuff for more than 20 years and foolishly quit over a two-week period. I found survivingantidepressants.org and discovered hundreds of others who were struggling as well. It was there that the book Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker kept coming up. I believe everyone who is considering going on or off these drugs should read this comprehensive book and also check out www.madinamerica.com. The pharmaceutical companies pay big bucks to “influence” doctors and others to perpetrate the chemical imbalance myth. Some doctors merely do so from ignorance, others are colluding with big pharmacies for fun and profit. These drugs are definitely not “benign” as I was told by my pharmacist when I filled my very first prescription all those years ago. More than three and a half years later, I am still struggling with the effects of many years on the drugs and my abrupt cessation. If I can help even one person by putting this information out there, it will have been worth it.

Sharon Colley

Mound House