Under the affirmative action program now pending before the Supreme Court in
Adarand Constructors v. Mineta, each of the 12,000 boys born in Pakistan last
year who were named "Osama" would be granted preferential treatment
over American-born whites. They just have to immigrate here. Our government
discriminates against native-born Americans in favor of Pakistanis.
The Department of Transportation has established quotas (or "goals," as the regulations insist) for the government's pet victims. The discriminatory regulations are being challenged by the Adarand Construction company, which is not owned by a woman, a Pakistani or some other currently preferred ethnic group.
It's especially appropriate that it is construction contracts at issue in the Adarand case, since the money now funding Osama bin Laden's slaughter of Americans came from his family's construction business. The New York Times has called the discriminatory scheme a "watered-down affirmative action program" and wondered what the white complainant was kvetching about.
One of the patriotic Americans who flew a bombing raid over Afghanistan last Sunday was a guy named Vinnie. A few more bombing raids and President Bush will be able to cruise over Afghanistan in a Piper Cub puddle-jumper without risk. But guys like Vinnie are discriminated against by their own government in favor of Pakistani immigrants named "Osama." (And women. Hey! Wasn't women in the military a great idea until we had a war?) The Bush administration supports the discriminatory regime.
If Islam is not responsible for terrorism, why is Vinnie responsible for slavery? I'm just trying to get the rules straight on collective guilt. It's perplexing to hear liberals carrying on so about how peaceful most Muslims are. That's surely true, just as the vast majority of whites oppose slavery. But the very same people who are anxious to quell the rare anti-Arab hate crimes in response to 19 Arabs attacking America are the ones who are usually found ginning up hate crimes against whites for slavery.
According to an article in The Washington Post last week, far from blaming Muslim immigrants to this country, Americans are showering them with love bombs. Some of the stories were sweet, such as churches and synagogues sending support to a mosque that had been spray-painted with anti-Arab graffiti.
But many were not responses to any skinhead attack at all. It was just Americans flooding Muslims with flowers, cards, gifts from store managers and free meals at restaurants. All this merely for belonging to the same religion as the cold-blooded killers who recently attacked America.
One Muslim woman described eating at Chason's Country Buffet in Winchester, Va., with two non-Muslim friends a few days after the attack. When the waitress approached their table, they assumed it was to throw them out. But instead, the waitress "handed them the $30 they had paid for their food, saying the restaurant wanted to give them a free meal."
Belonging to the same general ethnic group as people who held slaves more than a century ago doesn't get you a free meal anyplace. Not just a "vast majority," but no white American owns a slave. How about liberals hugging us? No, no. Only Muslims are immune from collective responsibility.
The pope has issued apologies for everything from the Holocaust to the execution of a 15th-century Czech reformer. The Southern Baptist Convention apologized for slavery and the United Methodist Church for an 1864 massacre of Indians. Bill Clinton apologized so often -- except for his own execrable behavior -- that you expected him to start showing up at police stations confessing to crimes he didn't commit. (But not the many he did commit.)
Only the West's guilt is collective, omnipresent and unbounded.
Unless it is guilt for something America is doing right now and that could be stopped -- like abortion. It is unseemly to talk about the nation's current sins, especially if you're Jerry Falwell. We're supposed to wait for the 28th century's Bill Clinton to issue some impotent, meaningless apology.
Immediately following Lexington and Concord, when the fate of short-lived revolution was very much in doubt, Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her husband describing her neighbors dying by the score of smallpox. As David McCullough writes in his best-selling biography of John Adams, "heartsick, searching for an answer to why such evil should 'befall a city and the people,' Abigail had pondered whether it could be God's punishment for the sin of slavery."
The ACLU immediately demanded an apology. And we're still apologizing. By "we," I mean "Vinnie." Someday, liberals will have a theory as to why American-born white men must be punished to remedy the sins of abortion.