Tuesday, July 09, 2002

Mark Steyn Rules!
A teaser from his latest column in the National Post:
Whatever you do, don't call it a hate crime

I'm a dead white male, as you can tell from the above picture. Suppose on Martin Luther King Day I went to the offices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and shot the receptionists. How many nano-seconds do you think it would take before the attack was being characterized as racially motivated? Your top Olympic hotshot could ingest every steroid on the planet and he couldn't beat that time.

Suppose it was Judy Garland's birthday and I went to my local gay bathhouse and opened fire on the fetching young men handing out the towels. How many minutes would tick by before the word "homophobia" was heard?

Or suppose it was the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and me and my semi-automatic swung by the abortion clinic ...

Well, you get the idea. On the Fourth of July (hint) a guy went to the airport in Los Angeles, sauntered up to the ticket counter of El Al (hint) and fatally shot two people and wounded three. How many folks hearing the news on a quickie radio update honestly expected it to be anyone other than a Muslim male of Middle Eastern origin? Obviously, Underperformin' Norman Mineta, the scrupulously sensitivity-trained U.S. Transportation Secretary, would have been wary of jumping to conclusions. Were he running the LAPD, he'd have pulled in a couple of elderly nuns and Kelli-Sue, a trainee hairdresser from Des Moines.

But, fortunately for the final death toll, El Al has its own security and so the suspect, after firing 10 rounds, was himself killed. And whaddaya know? He wasn't an elderly nun but a 41-year-old Egyptian male! His name wasn't Kellie-Sue, it was Hesham Mohamed Hadayet!

This stunning development seems to have completely disoriented the FBI. I quote from The New York Times headline: "Officials Puzzled About Motive Of Airport Gunman."