INTOLERANCE IN AMERICA: MULTICULTURALISM FAIRY TALES

INTOLERANCE IN AMERICA:
MULTICULTURALISM FAIRY TALES
by Murray Soupcoff, The Iconoclast

November 13, 2002

Today's multicultural moment is brought to you by a group of aggrieved Muslim high-school students in Columbus Ohio. The protestors walked out of their classrooms last week at Brookhaven High School because they said they were not allowed the time at school to say their Ramadam prayers. In fact, according to Columbus Public Schools spokesman Michael Straughter, the district was not saying the students couldn't pray at school, but simply not during instructional time.

Regardless, as you might guess, this event appears to have become a media multicultural cause celebre in Columbus -- another unfortunate opportunity for the media and the multiculturalism lobby to celebrate the "ugly racism and intolerance" of mainstream America and the continued insensitivity of Americans to the needs of cultural minorities. Never mind all the hollow rhetoric we normally hear, regarding the importance of separation of church and state, when Christian students petition schools for the opportunity to set up extra-curricular clubs for biblical study or the right to say a silent prayer every morning.

In fact, behind all the shrill accusations of racism and cultural insensitivity thrown out by today's multiculturalism lobby is the covert message that the United States is an intolerant nation that oppresses its racial and cultural minorities. And it's likely that the circumstances that prompted last week's questionable classroom walkouts in Columbus will be distorted and mythologized into yet another apocryphal tale of oppression of cultural minorities in America.

What can we make of this increasing divisive cultural phenomenon? Well, years ago, the pioneering anti-feminist iconoclast, Christina Hoff Sommers, wrote a series of articles detailing how a number of feminist myths about male "oppression" in our society could be tracked back to purely fictitious charges or doctored statistics repeated a sufficient number of times that they took on a life (or "truth") of their own. Interestingly, today the same myth-making racket is being practised by the multiculturalism crowd, constantly disseminating multicultural "myths" about horrendous acts of discrimination and bias against blacks and members of selected ethnic minorities (can you say "Muslim Americans," boys and girls?).

Of course, the most blatant case of deception and misinformation in a widely-accepted multicultural fairy tale came in the form of the alleged "church burnings" inflicted by hate-filled white supremacists against black churches throughout the south several years ago. This liberal-left racial myth is still frequently trotted out to justify special legislation against "hate crimes," or sometimes to simply indict "racist America" and show what a racist hellhole America truly is (thereby explaining such acts of racial liberation as the terrorist acts of 9/11).

The alleged racist church burnings were so terrible that they impelled then President Bill Clinton to suffer the painful symptoms of false recovered-memory syndrome as he tearfully recalled witnessing traumatic church burnings in his youth that scarred his psyche forever -- even though it was later demonstrated that the church arsons Clinton alluded to did not occur when he said they did (or simply did not occur).

In particular, as William McGowan demonstrated in his book, COLORING THE NEWS: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism (Encounter Books), what the "racial hate" crowd failed to report was that many of the reported black-church fires were set not by a conspiracy of violent white supremacists, but by blacks seeking insurance money or drunken white teens simply seeking thrills. There was obviously a problem, but the nature and extent of the problem was misrepresented and then neatly packaged into another divisive American-racism myth.

Another "racism" myth that has been used to justify the most odious anti-American hate speech by left-wingers is that the Viet Nam War was a unjust war in which American blacks were used as cannon fodder by the white establishment, dying in disproportionate numbers as they fought an unjust war against a well-intentioned Third World insurgency. Well, let's leave it to future historians to sort out whether the Viet Nam War was a just or unjust war on America's part (we're inclined to define it as a just but ineptly-fought war on America's part). But as David Horowitz has convincingly demonstrated, the myth that blacks suffered and died disproportionately in this war, as opposed to whites, is simply that -- a myth.

Here's how Mr. Horowitz so articulately debunked this racism myth in a post 9/11 FrontPageMagazine.com opinion piece in November, 2001:

One of the most widespread of these myths is that black Americans fought and died in extraordinarily high proportions in the Vietnam War relative to the rest of the population. This was ostensibly the result of American racism and is a reason given by many blacks (a left-wing minority to be sure) for why they are so ready to betray their country in the current war and line up with Osama bin Laden and his friends.

This came up the other day in an e-mail exchange with a black friend of mine. The short answer (and truth) is that the only ethnic group that died in greater numbers than their proportion in the population in the Vietnam conflict was whites.

Here are the facts:

During the Vietnam War era (draft era to be precise) blacks of military age made up 13.5 percent of the total population, but only 9.7 percent of the Vietnam era military forces were black.

88.4 percent of the men who actually served in Vietnam were white.

10.6 percent of the men who actually served in Vietnam were black.

86.3 percent of the men who died in Vietnam were white.

12.5 percent of the men who died in Vietnam were black.

86.8 percent of the men who were killed in actual battle were white.

12.1 percent of the men who were killed in actual battle were black.

In sum, while the percentage of blacks of military age was 13.5 percent of the population, they accounted for 12.1 percent of the deaths in Vietnam.

And so it goes. All of which leads to the latest multicultural fairy tales being circulated via the liberal-left media, this time regarding anti-Muslim bias in America in the aftermath of the tragic events of 9/11 -- with most of these tales being neatly packaged and disseminated by today's multiculturalism lobby, spearheaded by The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Not surprisingly, in an article last month on the Tech Central Station Web site entitled America the Tolerant: Miscounting anti-Muslim bias, Howard Fienberg took a closer look at CAIR's statistics and concluded that only a small number of the reported incidents appeared to be blatant instances of anti-Muslim bias or discrimination -- despite the contrary interpretation popularized by CAIR which makes the phenomenon appear to be a serious and far-reaching social problem.

In his own words, here's how Mr. Fienberg sums his interpretation of the CAIR stats:

Mazhar Tabesh, a motel owner in Salt Lake City, saw his business burn down on July 21. Police investigated the incident as a hate crime, but on September 11 the police arrested Tabesh himself on suspicion of setting the fire. The incident, and the date, illustrates a problem America has had to face over the last year. Has resentment at the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks translated into increased abuse of American Muslims? Or is that threat overstated? A careful review of the data available on anti-Muslim incidents over the past year suggests that America has remained a tolerant society.

According to Howard Fienberg, the souce of most of the data on anti-Muslim incidents is the Muslim civil rights report issued annually by CAIR. And not surprisingly, CAIR purports to have detected an annual upward trend in the number of anti-Muslim bias incidents every year since 1996, especially since the events of 9/11 occurred. For example, according to Fienberg, CAIR compiled 1,516 incident reports of "9/11 backlash," including "denial of religious accommodation, harassment, discrimination, bias, threat, assault and even several murders" in the period between March 2001 and 2002. However, when Howard Fienberg carefully sifted through the reported "incidents," he discovered that "not all the cases are obvious instances of anti-Muslim discrimination or bias."

For example, 293 cases revolved around what Fienberg calls matters of perception -- individuals who believed they were being discriminated against because they were not hired, were fired, were treated rudely, and so on. Further, as Fienberg notes, other incidents were classified as "discrimination" mainly because the victim of a crime or negative act happened to be Muslim, although there was no supporting evidence that the particular crime or act was motivated by bias (for example, rude treatment at various Motor Vehicles Departments -- "discriminatory" behavior hardly unfamiliar to most Americans).

In fact, considering that the United States boasts a population of 280 million people, Fienberg points out that it's really suprising that the number of bona-fide documented cases of apparent anti-Muslim activity in the United States is as small as it is. And certainly, the kind of slights that are experienced by Muslim Americans pale in comparison to the real suffering experienced by Christians in Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and the Sudan.

Moral of the story? Don't believe everything you read in the mainstream press about acts of racism and cultural intolerance in America -- or everything that Dan Rather and Peter Jennings have to say about the alleged problem. You might just be hearing another multicultural fairy tale. ***

© 2002 The Iconoclast

Murray Soupcoff is the author of 'Canada 1984' and a former radio and television producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He also was Executive Editor of We Compute Magazine for several years, and is now the Managing Editor of the popular Canadian conservative Web site, Iconoclast.ca

Image provided by the author