Helix editor's rejection letter sparks debate

This isn't really the kind of news that would be in a newspaper or such, so sorry if this is inappropriate for this thread.

This sort of controversal story has been widely discussed all over the internet today. Luke Jackson recently posted a rejection letter on LJ from William Sanders, an editor at Helix, a SF magazine, where he was trying to get a story published. You can read the full letter here.

Quote :

I’m impressed by your knowledge of the Q’uran and Islamic traditions. (Having spent a couple of years in the Middle East, I know something about these things.) You did a good job of exploring the worm-brained mentality of those people - at the end we still don’t really understand it, but then no one from the civilized world ever can - and I was pleased to see that you didn’t engage in the typical error of trying to make this evil giggle sympathetic, or give him human qualities.

First of all: Wow. The prejudice right there is enough to start a good amount of discussion.
But then Sanders tries to defend himself which you can read here.

Quote :

Son, hasn't anybody ever told you that public posting of a private email message is contrary to the rules both of accepted internet practice and common courtesy?

I do appreciate your efforts to be fair - certainly far more so than most of the other people in this ward, ah, group - but the fact remains that you've done something both socially and professionally unacceptable in posting it at all. So if you had any idea of submitting anything else to Helix, forget it. I won't work with people who pull this kind of s***.

I suppose this is what I get for trying to be a nice guy, and give you a little encouragement rather than the standard thanks-but-no-thanks form rejection. Silly me.

(I notice, too, the presence in the lynch mob of another person I've tried to help, and to whom I thought I'd been particularly kind. No good deed, etc.)

Of course none of these people have read the story, and so they fail to grasp the context - that I was talking not about Muslims, or Arabs, or Oompa Loompas or any other religious or ethnic group, but about terrorists and violent extremists. (That being, after all, what your story was about.)

Aaand then Luke responds on his blog. This thing has gotten huge, despite Luke's repeated attempts to close it. At first, people were worried about whether or not it was okay to post rejection letters online, but then the talk of racism started.

my thoughts::No matter what Sanders says in his counterargument, he still showed a good bit of prejudice and racism, though at first, a lot of people didn't really know what they were talking about. Which didn't help much. However Sanders' use of the words 'those people' and assumptions of 'the civilized world' and just his use of the word 'sheet head' shows us that his views of these people are aimed toward groups of people in the world around us--not just the characters in Luke's book. Whether posting these letters is accepted practice or not, it still happens all the time, and, if this letter didn't have so many general assumptions, most people wouldn't have thought twice about it. Regardless, it raises a lot of discussion about prejudices in SF/F and publishing that don't normally get noticed, which can be found all over the interschmo. If Luke really wanted to get published in Helix, it was probably a stupid idea for him to post that letter, but after a lot of the debates that followed, I'm gonna have to side with the opinion that Sanders was wrong to assume that this letter would not be talked about online, and, regardless of his beliefs, should not have even put those assumptions in the letter in the first place. [this also started discussion about SF and POC and Post-a-rejection-letter Friday] Has anyone else heard about this? maybe took part in the discussions?