Interesting POV ...
>Copyright: 2001 Las Vegas Review-Journal
>Contact: letters@lvrj.com
>Website: lvrj.com
>Details: mapinc.org
>Author: Vin Suprynowicz
>Note: Vin Suprynowicz, the Review-Journal's assistant editorial page
editor,
>is author of "Send in the Waco Killers." His column normally appears
>Sunday.
>
>ARE WE TOO POLITICALLY CORRECT TO APPROPRIATELY DEFEND OUR WAY OF LIFE?
>
>I worry our adversaries may have it right -- America is no longer virile
>enough, America no longer has the resolve, America has become too silly and
>"mommified" and caught up in politically correct fibs and fripperies to win
>a protracted struggle for our very existence against a force as elemental
>as the Islamic fundamentalist drive to destroy capitalism, western values
>... the modern world as we know it.
>
>Last Friday evening, after 84 hours, CNN and the other networks started to
>scrape bottom in their attempts to fulfill their "24-hour" commitment to
>covering the destruction of the World Trade Center. One of the network
>talking heads was interviewing a spokesman for the New York Police
>Department, and asked a question that made the fellow look temporarily
>uncomfortable.
>
>"What about profiling?" she asked. "Some of our callers have expressed
>concerns about profiling" of Arab-Americans
>
>"We're going to do whatever's necessary to protect America," the crewcut
>fellow replied. "But we'll stay within the letter of the law."
>
>An adequate response as far as it goes -- and I know how hard it can be to
>"think on your feet" in those circumstances.
>
>But a missed opportunity to say, "I've instructed all my men, and I want to
>say to the American people here tonight, that there are plenty of good,
>loyal Americans who are of Middle Eastern origin, or Arab extraction. I
>hope this country learned from our mistake of 1942, when they wrongly
>rounded up and interned all the Japanese immigrants, and even American
>citizens of Japanese extraction.
>
>"But having said that, let's suppose you're about to board a
>transcontinental flight, and I'm the security officer assigned to spend a
>few minutes interviewing your fellow passengers, and there are three people
>who have attracted my attention. One of these passengers is an Asian woman
>from Texas. One is a black man from Boston. And the third passenger who's
>caught my interest is a visitor to our country from Saudi Arabia, whose
>name is Mahmood.
>
>"Do you think maybe I ought to spend most of my time chatting with Mr.
Mahmood?
>
>"If you do, you've just endorsed 'profiling.' You see, 'profiling' became
>an issue in this country because of the allegation that police are more
>likely to stop and question young black men when they see them somewhere
>where they appear to be out of place, on the theory that young black men
>commit more than their fair share of crimes. The problem is, young black
>men DO commit more than their fair share of crimes. And like it or not, Mr.
>Mahmood IS more likely to be a hijacker."
>
>Political correctness costs lives, and lies and euphemisms and double-talk
>invite confusion and mistakes. If our limited security resources are
>expended tossing the luggage of every black and Asian and Scandinavian air
>passenger in a relentless search for deadly TOENAIL CLIPPERS and plastic
>picnic knives, those resources will not be available to run a better
>background check on a young minimum-wage contract janitor named Fatima
>Mujahadeen, who's going to be alone in your plane later tonight, vacuuming
>the seat cushions.
>
>Have "things in America really changed"? Let's suppose a common-sense
>employer actually summons up the nerve tomorrow to tell an applicant for a
>job on the 80th floor of the Sears Tower in Chicago, "Miss, I'm not going
>to give you this job because you're in a wheelchair, and in an emergency
>like Sept. 11 we'd all have to leave via the stairwells, and you wouldn't
>make it. Not only that, OTHER employees here might lose their lives coming
>back to help you, as happened at the World Trade Center."
>
>Do you think the courts and the federal anti-discrimination agencies would
>tell that aggrieved job-seeker, "He's right. Things in America changed last
>week, and we're now gone back to operating on a much older principle,
>called 'common sense' "?
>
>Or would that straight-talking interviewer lose his job as the company
>still got dragged through the courts in another million-dollar Americans
>with Disabilities Act lawsuit, as though nothing had changed at all, and
>we're still willing to sink giggling into the sea, counting angels on the
>heads of pins and finding new grievances and liabilities everywhere, even
>as our enemies plot their next attack?
>
>In a nation where there's a systematic campaign afoot to demonize the
>ownership of firearms or skill with firearms, where does anyone imagine
>we're going to find the skilled marksmen needed to fight a war for our very
>survival?
>
>I've been accused of sounding somewhat bellicose of late. In fact, I hate
>war. I don't want war. I've long said we should stop meddling in a hundred
>global "hot spots" from Bosnia to the Horn of Africa where we can
>accomplish little but to make ourselves new enemies.
>
>But, that said, I also agree with the late Barry Goldwater that -- when
>you've done all you can to avoid war and war has been thrust upon you
>anyway -- the thing to do is to fight to win, to kill as many of the enemy
>as you can as fast as you can, no matter how many mewling Johnson-McNamara
>gradual-escalation liberals ridicule you for "viewing the world through a
>rose-colored bombsight" (an actual campaign slogan of that renowned 1964
>"pacifist," Lyndon Baines Johnson).
>
>Are we serious about winning a "war against terrorism"? President Bush
>could begin by declaring an end tomorrow to the fruitless and expensive
>"War on Drugs." If heroin and morphine were legal, their prices would
>quickly drop by more than 90 percent. What do you suppose that would do the
>profitability of the Afghan poppy crop?
>
>Think of how many police and intelligence resources could be immediately
>diverted to tracking terrorists.
>
>And how would that compare to the effects of the administration's current
>"War on Drugs" hysteria?
>
>"Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti- U.S. terrorists, destroy every
>vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush administration will
>embrace you," wrote columnist Robert Scheer in a May 22 Los Angeles Times
>essay headlined "Bush's Faustian deal with the Taliban."
>
>"All that matters is that you line up as an ally in the drug war, the only
>international cause that this nation still takes seriously. That's the
>message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of
>Afghanistan, the most virulent anti-American violators of human rights in
>the world today.
>
>"The gift ... makes the U.S. the main sponsor of the Taliban and rewards
>that 'rogue regime' for declaring that opium growing is against the will of
>God," Mr. Scheer continued.
>
>"Never mind that Osama bin Laden still operates the leading anti-American
>terror operation from his base in Afghanistan, from which, among other
>crimes, he launched two bloody attacks on American embassies in Africa in
>1998," Mr. Scheer reminded his readers a mere four months ago.
>
>I hope I'm wrong. But I worry our adversaries may have it right -- America
>is no longer virile enough, America no longer has the resolve, America has
>become too silly and "mommified" and caught up in Politically Correct fibs
>and fripperies to win a protracted struggle for our very existence against
>a force as elemental as the Islamic fundamentalist drive to destroy
>capitalism, western values ... the modern world as we know it. |
