October 25, 2008

Dear President Young,

It has recently come to our attention that your University, the oldest institution of higher education west of the Mississippi, will be holding the “7th ‘Macedonian’- North American Conference” on November 5th. Based on historically verifiable facts, we contend that your institution’s academic creditability is jeopardized by permitting such a conference that propagates revisionism, propaganda and hate speech. Upon our review of the conference’s program, as noted on your web site, beyond any academic discourse regarding a Slavic linguistic idiom, there will be presentations by apologists of communist human rights abuses, including but not limited to, the abduction of 28,000 Greek children during and after the Second World War.

To date, over 332 academic scholars have co-signed a letter to President Barack Obama in opposition to such historical revisionism your institution is now facilitating. As a former Professor and Director at Columbia University, you might be interested in noting that two current Columbia faculty members, Professors Mylonopoulos and Lougovaya, are signatories of this letter.

July 21, 2008

Dear Mr. Gruevski,

Please know that our Federation is the largest Hellenic-American organization of its type in the United States and represents well over One-Hundred (100) Hellenic-American Organizations in the Greater New York area. Accordingly, following a thorough and detailed review of your recent open letter to Konstantinos Karamanlis, the Prime Minister of the Hellenic Republic and inasmuch as many of our member societies represent geographical areas of Greece that were either directly or indirectly impacted by the historical events you addressed in your referenced letter, we felt prompted, and appropriately so, to respond to you.

We are convinced that if you and your Government acknowledge the historical injustices that were committed against the Hellenic people during and after the Second World War and take redressive measures, then and only then can the relations between your former Yugoslav republic and the Hellenic Republic flourish. As you correctly state, we cannot now change history, but as the old saying goes, "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes”.