In recent years, we have seen increasingly severe attacks on our Judeo-Christian symbols and traditions.

As an American of German extraction having lived for 12 years each under Hitler’s totalitarianism and Stalinist communism in post-war East Germany, I am only too familiar with this phenomenon.

In the now defunct Soviet Union, Santa Claus was changed into “Father Frost” and the Christmas tree into a “New Year’s tree.”

Jeff Jacoby says this in his article in the Conservative Chronicle of Dec. 14: “As a practicing Jew, does the knowledge that scores of millions of my fellow Americans do all those things make me feel excluded or offended? On the contrary. It makes me feel grateful to live in a land where freedom of religion shelters the Hanukkah menorah in my window no less than the Christmas tree in my neighbor’s.”

The latest flap in this so-called culture war seems to be the reluctance of business clerks to say Merry Christmas to their customers.

So next year and in the future, whatever our wimpish and spineless corporations are telling their clerks, we, as proud and free Americans, can easily beat the rap by exercising our precious right of freedom of speech and religion and saying Merry Christmas to the clerk at the checkout counter.

At a time when Western civilization and America is under attack by totalitarian Islamo-fascism, these self-inflicted attacks against our culture and traditions can only be called the suicide of the West.

Klaus D. Kuck, Lewiston