Blowback – a perfect storm from Lan Quoc Nguyen on the issues of the pro-communist Viet Weekly in the L.A. Times

 
Lan Quoc Nguyen is president of the Garden Grove School District Board of Education

The ongoing protest against Viet Weekly is a natural response from those who have felt insulted by the publication over the years. The author mentions the article that is often cited as the basis of the protest, but that is merely the straw that broke the camel's back. Viet Weekly always boasts of having found a new form of journalism by a young generation of reporters in Little Saigon. In reality, these self-styled journalists have managed to insult some person or the community in almost every issue of the publication. When the call for protest came, it brought together all elements in the community to build up a perfect storm against the newspaper…

 The persecution continues even today and did not end some 30 years ago, as many like to believe. Non-Vietnamese may not understand why a display of a communist symbol can invoke such intense reaction. But to many Vietnamese, these symbols bring back the nightmares that they lived through or risked their lives to escape from. They want to forget the past and get on with their lives, but they cannot tolerate the kind of provocation that Viet Weekly and Mr. Tran Truong exhibited to their faces…

The protest against Viet Weekly is only a natural response to the journalism menace practiced by the newspaper. To judge the protest against Viet Weekly, one must understand what the publication truly did to many of those protesters.

 
This is as much as I can publish to be within the copyright guarantees of the U.S. Constitution.  To read all of Lan Quoc Nguyen’s “Blowback” article in the L.A. Times, go here:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-nguyen14sep14,0,2124873.story?coll=la-opinion-center

Jean Libby, editor

VietAm Review

http://vietamreview.blogharbor.com