[summer]

But the spineless and liberal University of South Florida administration is wrong, and America's reputation abroad will suffer from it.

Steve, I disagree with you -- USF was right to fire him, but they were wrong to wait so long. There was a newspaper article Pogy showed me about the rising concern over public safety on that campus, and matters leading up to such increasing tension, and when the public safety is at stake, you have to act, or risk greater potential troubles, both legal and otherwise, later. The USF administration knew there was a risk to the safety of its students, and on that basis alone, I think they had a duty and obligation to eliminate whatever was causing the unsafe condition -- in this case, it was this professor, whatever his religion.

[Steve Eisenberg]

Summer wrote in reply to my criticism of President Genshaft & Co.: "when the public safety is at stake, you have to act, or risk greater potential troubles, both legal and otherwise, later. The USF administration knew there was a risk to the safety of its students, and on that basis alone, I think they had a duty"

Thank you summer for a good intelligent reply.

The part of your reply I quote above gets to perhaps the biggest reason why USF should have held off on the firing. The firing was giving in to not just donor blackmail, but far worse was giving in to death threats. Death threats = terrorism in my book. If they were to fire him at all, USF should have held off until after the death threatener was behind bars. Now that the man is fired, threats will stop, making it hard to catch the threatener, and the threatener will feel he's gotten away with something. Next time, emboldened, he'll push the envelope farther. It doesn't matter that the threatener(s) are probably one of the rare Jewish terrorists rather than one of the much more numerous Islamist terrorists. In my book, they're all going down.

I've only been on FreeRepublic a few days, and one disturbing theme I've found is that there is a high concern with safety and low-risk. No conservative would have seen safety concerns, let along a concern with avoding lawsuits, as trumping principle before the 1960's. In the short run, giving in to the "disruption" caused by death threats may give safety. Thank God President Bush did not choose to give us such short term safety in response to September 11.