Hate mail
The National Rifle Association (NRA), the most powerful pro-gun lobby in the United States, is leading a campaign to literally flood the Sri Lanka Mission to the United Nations with letters and postcards protesting an upcoming conference on small arms.
Ambassador Prasad Kariyawasam of Sri Lanka, president-designate of the two-week long conference beginning Monday, told IPS that the NRA campaign is totally misguided because the meeting is “not aimed at banning small arms or controlling weapons that are legally manufactured, purchased or traded in conformity with national laws”.
At last count, his Mission had received over 100,000 letters, post cards and email messages — most of them arriving at the staggering rate of about 4,000 per day — all of them with an identical anti-U.N. message in what appears to be a rigidly coordinated letter-writing and hate-mail campaign for which the NRA is notorious in this country.
Hate mail? Really? Or, you know, concerned folks voicing their opinions.
June 22nd, 2006 at 9:49 am
You KNOW when something hits home, the squealing is so loud.
Hate speech, my ass. They don’t like being told “We won’t do what you say”.
June 22nd, 2006 at 9:52 am
If I were to write this guy a letter, it would likely be legitimate hate mail.
The famous statue of a Colt Python (a real weapon of war, of course) with its barrel twisted was donated by Belgium (if I recall correctly), which, if I also recall correctly, deported several hundred thousand Jews to Germany in WWII.
I don’t really think we need artistic lectures from Belgium or any other European “ally” that we spilled vast amounts of American blood to liberate.
When I visited the UN last summer, all I could think about was smart bombs and daisy cutters.
If their countries are so great and ours is so bad, we need to implode the building (I would certainly go to NY to witness the implosion), bulldoze the rubble into the East River, and let the UN relocate to some third world hell hole like Kofi’s home country of Ghana, or Sierre Leone, Somalia, Liberia, etc.
I am sure that the diplomats would enjoy the trappings and offerings of some of their home venues.
June 22nd, 2006 at 12:09 pm
4,000 letters a day? Is there some reason for picking especially on Sri Lanka, or are delegations from countries big enough to find on a map getting even more?
June 22nd, 2006 at 6:02 pm
Interesting. Seems a more flexible definition of “hate mail” is applied here, no? I assume the normal hate mail ingredients were absent. You know, like threats of violence and so forth. Is any dissenting opinion now deemed to be hate mail?
I suppose any mail anti-gun groups send is merely political activism.
June 23rd, 2006 at 12:03 pm
Without reading all the letters they got, we cannot say that what he is terming “hate mail” was just opinions and polite dissent. I’m sure there were some very angry and perhaps hateful letters mixed in there with the legitimate protests and complaints.
100,000 letters and nobody swore at them or said anything about how they hate the United Nations or called them names? Come on now.
June 25th, 2006 at 10:07 am
I sent one of those pieces of “hate mail”. I would say that it’s “hate response” to mail that insists on a basic human right that the UN doesn’t recognize.