Free Republic

The Brooklyn teacher who sent an American soldier demoralizing letters written by sixth-graders apologized yesterday and admitted blame. In a statement issued by the Department of Education, social studies teacher Alex Kunhardt said he regretted offending Pfc. Rob Jacobs. His statement, however, did not address whether he either coached the students or read their missives — which accused soldiers of committing atrocities in Iraq — before mailing them.

Bloomberg Defends Troop-Trashing Letters New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is defending letters sent to an Iraq-bound GI by a sixth grade class in Brooklyn that trashed America's military heros as war criminals. Asked about the letters on Tuesday, the liberal Republican explained, "Well, look, we have freedom of speech and you certainly cannot go around censoring what people want to write." Bloomberg's defense came just hours before the teacher who supervised the project, Alex Kunhardt, offered a full public apology to Pfc. Rob Jacobs, who received the toxic diatribes last month while awaiting deployment in South Korea. "I deeply...

Another case of not teaching the "3 R's" instead of multi-culturalism.

February 23, 2005 -- Mayor Mike says one reason many young Americans are deployed in harm's way overseas is to defend the right of junior high school pupils in Brooklyn to act like jerks. But who said otherwise? Nobody ever claimed that Alex Kunhardt's sixth-grade class at JHS 51 in Park Slope didn't have the right to pen politically charged, fundamentally disrespectful letters to an American GI stationed in Korea — or that Kunhardt himself didn't have the right to drop them in the mail (after maybe having coached the authors just a little bit?). The issue is not rights,...

An American soldier overseas is fuming over letters he received from Brooklyn middle-school children accusing GIs of destroying mosques and killing civilians in Iraq. Pfc. Rob Jacobs of New Jersey said he was initially ecstatic to get a package of letters from sixth-graders at JHS 51 in Park Slope last month at his base 10 miles from the North Korea border. That changed when he opened the envelope and found missives strewn with politically charged rhetoric, vicious accusations and demoralizing predictions that only a handful of soldiers would leave the Iraq war alive. -snip- The letters were written as a...