To the editor:

The Feb. 26 editorial bashed Al Gore for bashing the United States in a meeting he attended in Saudi Arabia. In the process, the Journal-World severely and unwarrantedly bashed Islam. Your writer said, “He went out of his way in such company to bash the United States while supposedly trying to lay the groundwork for better relations between the free and the Islamic world.”

Drawing a “cold war” comparison between the United States and its ever-shrinking list of allies as being the free world and the Islamic world being not free is a careless blunder at best and is, in any case, an untrue statement. Trying to paint the Islamic world as not free will do nothing to help our citizens understand the nature of the cultural divides and misperceptions that color their thinking and that of some of our elected officials.

Al Gore may have deserved the bashing, but Islam does not, especially in these times when moderates and clear thinkers are doing all they can to be heard above the din of radical and malevolent minorities attempting to subvert the faith for their own political purposes.

Graham Kreicker,

Lawrence