Dear editor
In a recent letter Mr. Steve Hodge provided us with another of his diatribes against all things military.
It is certainly an opinion that he is fully entitled to both hold and express, and that freedom of speech is, in fact, guaranteed by the men and women of the CF that he casually dismisses as a "peacetime army."
Ontario has the Highway of Heroes, we do not, how soon we forget.
Opinions are one thing, however drawing racist parallels are another. He described the piles of cut weeds as "a blackening Babi Yar..." For those readers who are unaware, Babi Yar was the scene of the single largest mass killing by the Nazi regime during its campaign against the Soviet Union. In a 48-hour period, 33,771 Jews, innocent men, women and children, were lined up in row after row in a ravine and shot. That ravine, just outside the city of Kiev, was named Babi Yar.
As the war continued the final death toll of innocents, prisoners, Gypsies, and civilian hostages, slaughtered in Babi Yar approached 150,000. For Mr. Hodge to compare cut weeds to the piles of dead innocents of the Holocaust is remarkably offensive, and I am disappointed that such statements get published.
J. Ambler,
Courtenay