Workers dismantle a pro-Palestine encampment on the campus of Stanford University on Wednesday, June 5, 2024, in Palo Alto, Calif. A group of 13 pro-Palestine Stanford University students were arrested Wednesday morning and removed by law enforcement after barricading themselves themselves inside the office of the university’s president. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
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Stanford protesters
display typical ignorance
Re: “Stanford protest leads to 13 arrests” (Page A1, June 6).
The recent article about protests at Stanford over the Israel-Palestine debacle is both sad and pathetic. I’m old enough to have been at — not in — the Bay Area college protests in the 60s. Both exhibit the same flaws of logic. While one cannot deny the intensity and often true desire for justice, by far most of the participants are sadly uninformed and ignorant of the past.
The Standford protest was typical. As Hilary Clinton pointed out recently, such protests show an immense ignorance of Mideast history, so they are misguided from step one.
In addition, their centuries-old rhetoric is still childish. Invariably they begin with a list of “non-negotiable demands.” That is by definition a nonstarter for any negotiation.
Lastly, they confuse a right to protest with a right to disrupt the lives of others.
Jake Sinclair
Palo Alto
Trump is not the man
to lead diverse nation
I have read so many articles about “what the Trump conviction means for the 2024 election.”
What it means to me is that the American voter will have a choice between a convicted felon or an honest citizen for president. And, what does it look like and say about our country that we have a choice like that? We have a democracy. The requirements for eligibility for president are 35 years of age and born in the United States. It does not require that you be honest or of high morals. And, we leave it to citizens 18 years or older, but not a felon, to decide who can lead such a diverse population in such a dangerous world.
I fear for our democracy.
Kathryn Marzolf
San Jose
Justice, not politics,
drove Trump verdicts
Re: “Trump’s strategy could hurt him at sentencing” (Page A3, June 4).
According to loyal MAGA followers, Donald Trump’s criminal convictions were purely political, although 12 New York jurors unanimously agreed that Trump feloniously violated state law.
This jury decided that unlawful falsification of business records (by Trump) had occurred in a conspiracy to promote the election of a person (Trump) to a public office by unlawful means. New York State had the foresight to declare such criminal conspiracies a felony (regardless of the political affiliations of the conspirators). That law’s purpose may be confusing to some but is certainly not politically partisan.
Clandestine election interference poses a grievous attack on our democracy, but the irony here is palpable. The most obstinate fabricator of “rigged election” stories in American history is convicted of criminally meddling in his own 2016 presidential election. Memo to Trump: In this country, juries (not judges) convict criminals, and no one in America is above the law.
Jerry Meyer
San Jose