So, Why Did Asians Vote For Obama?

The other day I wrote about the perplexing fact that more than 70% of Asian-Americans voted for Obama. I can understand (somewhat) the mindless century-long Jewish attachment to the Democratic Party (the Democratic Party is the American Jewish religion), but Asians?

I noted that Asians are the prime victims of the liberal Democratic policiy of racial preferences in college and professional school admissions. Quotas are used to keep down the number of Asians as they were used against Jews decades ago.

Yesterday, I came across a New York Times report on a law suit challenging admissions policy for elite New York City high schools:

The complaint, filed with the United States Education Department, seeks to have the policy found in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and to change admissions procedures “to something that is nondiscriminatory and fair to all students,” said Damon T. Hewitt, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, one of the groups that filed the complaint.

At issue is the Specialized High School Admissions Test, which is the sole criterion for admission to eight specialized schools that, even in the view of city officials, have been troubled by racial demographics that are out of balance [my emphasis].

Although 70 percent of the city’s public school students are black and Hispanic, a far smaller percentage have scored high enough to receive offers from one of the schools. According to the complaint, 733 of the 12,525 black and Hispanic students who took the exam were offered seats this year. For whites, 1,253 of the 4,101 test takers were offered seats. Of 7,119 Asian students who took the test, 2,490 were offered seats. At Stuyvesant High School, the most sought-after school, 19 blacks were offered seats in a freshman class of 967.

“I refuse to believe there are only 19 brilliant African-Americans in the city; it simply cannot be the case,” Mr. Hewitt said. “It is a shameful practice and it must be changed.”

The test-only rule has existed for decades, as have complaints about its effect on minority enrollment. In May 1971, after officials began thinking about adding other criteria for admission, protests from many parents, mostly white, persuaded the State Legislature to enshrine the rule in state law.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said at a news conference on Thursday that the schools were “designed for the best and the brightest” and that he saw no need to change the admissions policy or state law.

“I think that Stuyvesant and these other schools are as fair as fair can be,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “There’s nothing subjective about this. You pass the test, you get the highest score, you get into the school — no matter what your ethnicity, no matter what your economic background is. That’s been the tradition in these schools since they were founded, and it’s going to continue to be.”

A bill introduced in the Assembly last session sought to give the city power over admissions to the schools. But it was not brought to a vote, said Michael Whyland, a spokesman for the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver. “We’ll look at the issue and study it,” Mr. Whyland said. “Of course we want to make sure everyone has equal access to all our schools.”

A city Education Department spokeswoman, Deidrea Miller, said the department “has launched several initiatives to improve diversity.” Those include a free test-preparation course aimed at poor students…

One student at Bronx Science spoke the truth which will probably land him in sensitivity training hell:

“African-American and Hispanic parents don’t always seek out extra help for their kids and their kids don’t score as high,” said Manjit Singh, a senior. “But it’s the same test for everyone, so how can it be discriminatory? If you can’t handle the test, you can’t handle the school, and you’re taking up someone else’s spot.”

What a strange idea: “You get the highest score, you get into the school, no matter… your ethnicity…[or] economic background.” Let’s hope Bloomberg doesn’t go wobbly like he has on the police “stop and frisk” policy that has mainly kept New York, since the 90′s, from descending into a state of nature .

The stereotype about Asians is they care deeply about their children’s success, particularly in education. So again: Why are Asians voting for Obama and the Democrats?

Brother Joe From Da Hood

Crazy Joe is at it again, but I wonder whether this time he isn’t so crazy. What he is doing is accusing the Republicans of wanting to return black folks to slavery. He was speaking from a teleprompter in front of a mostly black audience. Was this merely a case of demented old Joe straying off message?

I suspect that this plays well with a majority of black voters which is probably why the Obama campaign says they’re “down with it.”

Let me be the first to declare Joe the first black vice president. A few years ago he described Obama as “clean and articulate,” and now he’s talkin’ like a brother.

It’s like the old Dick Gregory observation about the late Michael Jackson: Where else but in America can a poor black boy grow up to become a rich white man?

Only in America can a poor white Irish-American kid from Scranton grow up to become the first black Vice President of the United States.

Is this a great country or what?

Romney To Israel: You Built That

Since 1967, American presidents have assured us that Israel is an “ally” of the United States while, simultaneously, maintaining an “evenhanded” stance between the Israelis and the Arabs. Despite the contradiction, it has been a given among foreign policy mavens that such an “honest broker” approach is the only one that could possibly lead to a peace agreement.

After 45 years, perhaps we can safely conclude that evenhandedness has not worked.

Which brings us to Mitt Romney’s trip to Jerusalem where he committed political incorrectness by praising Israeli “culture” and dissing that of the Arabs. Could it be that Romney was signaling a shift in American Middle East policy, were he to be elected President, which would reflect what most Americans, except the loony left, actually believe?: that Israel’s open democratic culture is vastly superior to the Arab tradition of authoritarianism, violence, and state sanctioned crimes against women, gays, and non-Muslims.

Maybe what Romney is saying is that Western “tolerance” of the Islamic world is a failure in the same way that Angela Merkel, David Cameron, and former president of France Nicolas Sarkozy have declared multiculturalism (read: tolerance of Islam’s medieval traditions) an abject failure.

So maybe telling the Arabs exactly what we really think of their “culture” along with increased efforts to develop all of our energy sources at home or from Western sources would work where sucking up to Muslims and energy dependence on the Arabs have clearly failed. That seems to be the message Romney is sending, that he would approach the Israeli-Arab conflict and relations with the Islamic world in a different, more honest manner.

As Brett Stephens writes in today’s Wall Street Journal, Romney’s honesty is a welcome contrast to Obama’s disingenuousness:

…When detractors think about Israel, they tend to think its successes are largely ill-gotten: Somebody else’s land, somebody else’s money, somebody else’s rights. It’s the view that Israel gets an unfair share of foreign aid from the U.S., and that it takes an unfair share of territory from the Palestinians. It’s also the view that, as the presumptive stronger party in its dealings with the Palestinians, Israel bears the onus of making concessions and taking the proverbial risks for peace. As the supposed underdogs, Palestinians are not burdened by any reciprocal moral obligations.

By contrast, when admirers of Israel visit the country, they typically marvel at everything it has planted, built, invented, re-imagined, restored, saved. Israel’s friends think that the country has earned its success the hard way, and that it deserves to reap the rewards. Hence Mitt Romney on Sunday: “You export technology, not tyranny or terrorism. . . . What you have built here, with your own hands, is a tribute to your people.”

Animating one side of this divide is a sense of admiration. Animating the other is a sense of envy. Could Mr. Obama have uttered lines like Mitt Romney’s? Maybe. But you get the feeling that scrolling in the back of his mind would be the words, “You didn’t build that.” …

Down The Path of Humaneness

The mass murder in Aurora, Colorado has produced the now all-too-predictable reaction from one pillar of the Democratic Party news media – ABC News and its “investigative reporter” Brian Ross, who reflexively went on the air to link the Tea Party to the murderer.

I doubt that ABC and Ross’s apology will deter the usual Democratic Party media hacks, like Paul Krugman and Frank Rich, from trying to make a similar political connection. And I am also certain that the Obama team is, as I write, trying to come up with some very tasteful and nuanced talking points that somehow implicate the Republicans in the murders. Something like: You didn’t do that, the Republicans did!

So before we go off on another deep search into the long dark night of the American soul, we should ponder what the Wall Street Journal‘s Sohrab Ahmari wrote about the trial of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik:

…There was something very dignified about [the trial]. Breivik’s guilt was established beyond the shadow of a doubt; he readily confessed to his crimes. The point of these proceedings was to officially and in the name of the court memorialize the lives that could have been had Breivik not cut them short.

Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people last year, makes a farright salute as he enters the Oslo district courtroom at the opening of his trial.

The Norwegians are a famously austere people, not prone to emotional outbursts. The trial of their greatest mass murderer reflects the Norwegian national character.

“Every single person who’s dead needs to be presented,” Shabana Rehman Gaarder, a Pakistani-Norwegian comedian and writer who has been covering the trial, told me. “Norwegians are not giving Breivik one single feeling. They’re not looking at him, they’re not showing even a tiny bit of their anger. It’s a proud way to say to Breivik, ‘You don’t exist.’”

The Norwegian way of justice has its limits, too. “You Americans could never handle a trial like this,” a German television reporter sneered at me during a smoke break. Like many Europeans, he looked down at the U.S. justice system for its supposed violence, including the persistence of the death penalty here.

But then it’s worth remembering that the maximum sentence the court can impose on Breivik under Norwegian law is 21 years, with the possibility of renewing his detention if it’s later determined that he remains a public danger.

Norwegian prisons are often described as the world’s nicest. And as the London Telegraph reported in May, prison officials may even hire outside “friends” to keep Breivik company. Norwegian law holds that no prisoner—not even Breivik—should ever find himself in total isolation. That would be too cruel.

All this sounds outrageous—and it is. Norwegian society has advanced so far down the path of “humaneness” that it cannot put someone like Breivik to death, let alone jail him for life. It’s a society that can only deal with evil on clinical and judicial terms, not moral ones. That sensibility has never sat well with Americans, but it’s increasingly making inroads among us. The very term “evil” sounds old-fashioned. But that’s exactly what Breivik and the Colorado killer represent.

Aren’t We All “The Help”?

I know I have brought up the issue of race in the last few posts which, ipso facto, makes me a racist, but here’s more evidence that I like to wear sheets and burn crosses.

I watched the hit movie The Help last night. Well,to be honest, I only watched the first minute or two. I have a standing rule which stipulates that I will not continue watching a movie past the point at which it sinks to utter, ax grinding stupidity.

With The Help, the stupidity started right off-the-bat. The Help, I have read, depicts the lives of black maids somewhere in the South during the days of Jim Crow. I assumed that it was going to be a tear-jerking guilt trip which would reward modern, white liberal viewers with a self-congratulatory boost to their already enormous sense of moral superiority over their benighted parents and grandparents.

But of course I had to watch it. How could I not when so many of my liberal friends and relatives had asked in earnest piety: Have you seen The Help?, in much the same tone in which people asked, “Have you seen Schindler’s List?” (A politically correct morality test parodied hilariously on an episode of Seinfeld in which Jerry is caught “making out” with his girlfriend during the movie.)

But why couldn’t I get past the first minute of The Help? The film opens with a writer, a white woman I guess, interviewing an elderly black woman. The writer asks something like, How did it feel to spend your life raising white children when someone else was looking after your own children? which caused the elderly maid to become emotional over, I assume, all that she had missed while she was raising “white people’s children.”

That’s when I stopped watching. I know I’m a heartless old fart, but I just could not rise to this emotionally contrived bait.

The scene raised a question that has been on my mind a lot these days, as opposed to the horrible dark ages of the recent past: How does it feel today for millions of women of all races to be working 15 hour days sucking up to customers, clients, and/or their bosses while someone else raises their children? And how do these women feel about the many organizations and self-appointed individuals who claim to represent and speak for “women” when they pressure women to abandon their children to others and pressure the taxpayers to subsidize and enable the outsourcing of child care?

Yes, I know that many women have to work to support their families, but so did the black maids who earned money raising white children.

The only difference seems to be race. Black people working for white people when they might have been with their own children is unjust. But remove the racial angle and, voila, women working long hours and neglecting their children is called progress and liberation.

What Mothers Want

So despite the best efforts of the women’s movement over the decades to convince women that motherhood and child rearing are plots devised by men to imprison them, most women haven’t received the message. Kay Hymovitz writes in today’s Wall Street Journal:

…All over the developed world women make up the large majority of the part-time workforce, and surveys suggest they want it that way. According to the Netherlands Institute for Social Research, in 2008 only 4% of the 70% of Dutch women who worked part-time wished they had a full-time job. A British Household Panel Survey interviewing 3,800 couples discovered that among British women, the happiest were those working part-time.

A 2007 Pew Research survey came up with similar results for American women: Among working mothers with minor children, 60% said they would prefer to work part-time, while only 21% wanted to be in the office full-time (and 19% said they’d like to give up their job altogether)…

Europe to Jews: Move On or Else

Bado Le Droit

Mark Steyn tells us of the precarious nature of Jewish life in Europe:

…Pitch the Western world a decade or two down the road, riven by an ever-more-fractious tribalism between blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims, and the one surviving nonagenarian neo-Nazi white supremacist will be at the retirement home. But it’ll still all be his fault.

The Toulouse assumptions were particularly deluded. If the flow of information is really controlled by Jews, as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright assured his students at the Chicago Theological Seminary a year or two back, you’d think they’d be a little better at making their media minions aware of one of the bleakest stories of the early 21st century: the extinguishing of what’s left of Jewish life in Europe. It would seem to me that the first reaction, upon hearing of a Jewish school shooting, would be to put it in the context of the other targeted schools, synagogues, community centers, and cemeteries. And yet liberal American Jews seem barely aware of this grim roll call. Even if you put to one side the public school in Denmark that says it can no longer take Jewish children because of the security situation, and the five children of the chief rabbi of Amsterdam who’ve decided to emigrate, and the Swedish Jews fleeing the most famously tolerant nation in Europe because of its pervasive anti-Semitism; even if you put all that to the side and consider only the situation in France… No, wait, forget the Villiers-le-Bel schoolgirl brutally beaten by a gang jeering, “Jews must die”; and the Paris disc-jockey who had his throat slit, his eyes gouged out, and his face ripped off by a neighbor who crowed, “I have killed my Jew”; and the young Frenchman tortured to death over three weeks, while his family listened via phone to his howls of agony as his captors chanted from the Koran… No, put all that to one side, too, and consider only the city of Toulouse. In recent years, in this one city, a synagogue has been firebombed, another set alight when two burning cars were driven into it, a third burgled and “Dirty Jews” scrawled on the ark housing the Torah, a kosher butcher’s strafed with gunfire, a Jewish sports association attacked with Molotov cocktails…

Here’s Toulouse rabbi Jonathan Guez speaking to the Jewish news agency JTA in 2009: “Guez said Jews would now be ‘more discreet’ about displaying their religion publicly and careful about avoiding troubled neighborhoods. … The synagogue will be heavily secured with cameras and patrol units for the first time.”

This is what it means to be a Jew living in one of the most beautiful parts of France in the 21st century.

Well, you say, why are those Jewish kids going to a Jewish school? Why don’t they go to the regular French school like normal French kids? Because, as the education ministry’s admirably straightforward 2004 Obin Report explained, “En France les enfants juifs — et ils sont les seuls dans ce cas — ne peuvent plus de nos jours être scolarisés dans n’importe quel établissement”: “In France, Jewish children, uniquely, cannot nowadays be provided with an education at any institution.” At some schools, they’re separated from the rest of the class. At others, only the principal is informed of their Jewishness, and he assures parents he will be discreet and vigilant. But, as the report’s authors note, “le patronyme des élèves ne le permet pas toujours”: “The pupil’s surname does not always allow” for such “discretion.”

Metropolitan Toulouse has a population of 900,000 or so, about the size of Jacksonville, Fla. Imagine if, in Jacksonville, synagogues were firebombed, and kosher butchers shot up, and Jewish schoolkids gunned down, and, in the dull, placid months between the spasms of front-page attention, the cold, ongoing Jew-hate were so routine that it was no longer safe for a Jew to walk his own city with any identifying mark of his faith, or for his child to reveal his Jewishness at school.

In Toulouse, much of the Jewish community arrived after the religio-ethnic cleansing of French North Africa in the Sixties and Seventies. What they fled has followed them to the Midi-Pyrénées, and now it’s time to move on again — as it is elsewhere in Europe. “Jews with a conscience should leave Holland, where they and their children have no future, leave for the U.S. or Israel,” advised Frits Bolkestein, the former EU commissioner and head of the Dutch Liberal party. “Anti-Semitism will continue to exist, because the Moroccan and Turkish youngsters don’t care about efforts for reconciliation.”

Thus, posterity’s jest. Pre-war Europeans would never have entertained for a moment the construction of mosques from Malmö to Marseilles. But post-war Holocaust guilt, and the revulsion against nationalism and the embrace of multiculturalism and mass immigration, enabled the Islamization of Europe. The principal beneficiaries of the Continent’s penance for the great moral stain of the 20th century turned out to be the Muslims — with the Jews on the receiving end, yet again.

It won’t stop there. Mijnheer Bolkestein is not (yet) asking what else those “youngsters” don’t care for, but like many other secular Continentals with no interest in Jews one way or the other he’ll soon find out. [all emphasises mine]

The Black Boy’s Burden: Other Black Boys

While the Democratic media and the usual race hustlers continue to portray a fantasy America where, typically, young blacks are hunted down and murdered by racist whites while the authorities seem not to care, crime expert Heather MacDonald reports from planet earth:

…is the [Trayvon] Martin shooting emblematic of a larger problem [than the issue of self-defense law]? Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the mainstream media here and abroad certainly are portraying it as such. That larger problem, of course, is lethal white racism and a criminal-justice system allegedly indifferent to the killing of blacks. At a rally Thursday night in Sanford, Sharpton said that “Trayvon represents a reckless disregard for our lives that we’ve seen for too long,” and warned that “they,” presumably whites, would try to trick black protesters into violence by “send[ing] in provocateurs.” “Blacks are under attack,” said Jesse Jackson on Friday from Chicago. “Targeting, arresting, convicting blacks, and ultimately killing us is big business.” MSNBC analyst Karen Finney claimed that “racist rhetoric” used by Rush Limbaugh and several Republican presidential candidates was responsible for Martin’s death.

So determined has the New York Times been to fit the shooting into its favored racial story line that it has been referring to the Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic,” contrary to its usual practice of referring to Hispanics without any additional racial characterization. The fact that Zimmerman’s father is white does not explain this departure from the Times’s racial protocols; the Times’s one-drop rule still applies to Barack Obama, who is, according to the Times and every other media outlet, America’s “first black president.” (The Grey Lady referred to Zimmerman for the first time on Friday simply as “Hispanic.”)

Times columnist Charles Blow dealt with the complicating factor of Zimmerman’s ethnicity with a simple duality: “Trayvon is black. Zimmerman is not,” he wrote last Saturday, presumably conferring on Zimmerman putative white status. The Rainbow Coalition has apparently broken down.

Blow went on to claim that it is the “the burden of black boys in America” to be at high risk of being shot by non-blacks: “This is the fear that seizes me whenever my boys are out in the world: that a man with a gun and an itchy finger will find them ‘suspicious.’”

Blow is right about one thing: Black boys do face a much higher chance than non-blacks that they will be shot when they are “out in the world.” Black males between the ages of 14 and 24 were seven times more likely to die of homicide in 2007 than white and Hispanic males of the same age group combined. But the danger they face comes overwhelmingly from other black males, whose homicide offending rate in the 14 to 24 age category was nearly ten times higher than that of young white and Hispanic males combined. (The federal government’s crime data puts Hispanics and whites in a single category of “white,” thus overstating the non-Hispanic white offending and victimization rates). Most homicides are intraracial, but the chance of a black being killed by a white or Hispanic is much lower than the chance that a white or Hispanic will be killed by a black. Seventeen percent of what the FBI calls “white” homicide victims in 2009 were killed by blacks, compared to 8 percent of black homicide victims who were killed by “whites.” There were two and a half times as many white and Hispanic victims of black killers in 2009 as there were black victims of white and Hispanic killers, even though the black population is one-sixth that of whites and Hispanics combined. If Hispanics were removed from the category of “white” killers of blacks, the percentage of blacks killed by Anglo whites would plummet, since a significant percentage of what the FBI calls “white”-on-black killings represent gang warfare between Hispanic and black gangs. (Needless to say, there is no reason to think that racism plays a more frequent role in white-on-black killings than in black-on-white killings.)

Blow’s fear that his children will be blown away by a white is particularly ludicrous in New York City. Blacks commit 80 percent of all shootings in the city — as reported by the victims of and witnesses to those shootings — though they are but 23 percent of the population; whites commit 1.4 percent of all shootings, though they are 35 percent of the population. Add Hispanic shootings to the black tally, and you account for 98 percent of all of the city’s gun violence. In New York, as in big cities across the country, the face of violence is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic.

No evidence has yet surfaced to support the charge that the failure of the Sanford police to arrest Zimmerman results from racial bias, as opposed to ambiguities in the application of Florida’s self-defense law and the absence of eye-witnesses to the killing. But if such evidence of racial indifference does emerge, it would be not only shameful but also a great exception to the practice of police departments across the country. Far from showing a “reckless disregard for [black] lives,” in Sharpton’s words, it is the police and prosecutors who are the most reliable responders to black victimization, trying relentlessly to put together a case even when the witnesses to crime refuse to cooperate. Most police chiefs will say that they could solve every inner-city killing if the people who saw the crime or know the perpetrators came forward, instead of obeying the “no snitching” code.

And it is the concerted efforts of police departments across the country to bring safety to urban neighborhoods that have played a central role in the 50 percent drop in the black homicide victimization rate from 1991 to 2008. In New York City, over 10,000 minority males are alive today who would have been killed had homicide rates remained at their early 1990s highs; the largest cause of that crime drop is the New York Police Department’s policing revolution, which has created an unprecedented sense of urgency about protecting lives. The NYPD’s weekly meetings at police headquarters, known as Compstat, focus relentlessly on one overriding question: How can we save more people — overwhelmingly minorities — from being victimized by crime? Many an NYPD commander has lost his post because he has not had an adequate answer to that question…

[T]he racial storyline that has been imposed on the shooting does not fairly represent contemporary America. That storyline is not just wrong, it is dangerous, because it only feeds black alienation and anger. Family breakdown, not white racism, is the biggest impediment facing blacks today, producing such casualties as the 18-year-old gangbanger who fatally shot a 34-year-old mother picking up her child from school in Brownsville, Brooklyn, last October. Sharpton and the national media didn’t show up for that killing, just as they don’t for the thousands of other black-on-black killings each year…

As for President Obama, he might have given us a real profile in courage the other day in his my-son-could-have-been-Trayvon remarks by urging Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the Democratic media and the million marching hoodies to shut up until all the facts are known. As of now, it will be all but impossible for the shooter to receive a fair trial.

And if he’s tried and acquitted (God forbid!), we can then thank Al, Jesse, and yes, Barry for the Rodney King type riots that will surely ensue.

The Million Hoodie March?

Criminal Wear

Perhaps someday we will know what happened between shooting victim Trayvon Martin and his alleged killer George Zimmermann. Surely, we can all agree that the violent death of an unarmed teenager is a bad thing, whatever the circumstances.

Having said that, I must say a word about the plethora of “million hoodie” marches sprouting up around the country to protest this sad incident.

At my local bank branch, there is a sign on the door which reads something like this: Before entering this building, you must remove head wear, scarves, and dark glasses. Being me, I have often wondered whether the bank has yet been sued or cited by the ACLU or some other organization of First Amendment ambulance chasers, like Amnesty International.

Obviously, my local bank branch manager neither cares about his (or her) customers’ attire, nor does he (or she) wish to be hauled in front of the Thought Police. So why the sign? Could it have something to do with the fact that the preponderance of bank robbers, smash and grab jewelry store thieves, and other such criminals are almost always dressed in hooded sweat shirts and dark glasses? Just asking.

Yes, I know: Not everyone dressed in a hooded sweat shirt is a criminal. However, most thieves and other street criminals seem to prefer the hooded sweat shirt-dark glasses look. And even white guys so dressed are likely to evoke a reflexively suspicious response from his fellow Americans. So perhaps suspicion of hoodie wearers isn’t about racism or “hate.”

I actually own a hooded sweat shirt which I was wearing while walking around mid-town Manhattan a couple of months ago. When I pulled up the hood, my wife gave me a horrified look, observed that I looked like a criminal, and demanded I wear my beret the next time. Obviously, she preferred to be out and about with a presumed French intellectual rather than a guy who knocks over convenience stores.

Mmmmm…Which is worse -a French intellectual or a purse snatcher? (I’m thinking, I’m thinking!) But since that night in New York, I have refrained from wearing the hood in public. I recommend that others of all races, religions, and genders do likewise…unless, of course you are a criminal or wish to be thought of as one.

What’s Worse Than Actual Dead Jews?

Just Another Guy Named Mo

While American Jews prepare for their upcoming Passover seders, during which Rick Santorum and/or Rush Limbaugh will replace Pharaoh as the latest nemesis of Jews and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Sandra Fluke and Barack Obama will will vie for the role of Moses, back on planet earth a few lonely observers seem to get it.

From the reliably insensitive Mark Steyn:

The killer of French schoolchildren and soldiers turns out to be a man called Mohammed Merah. The story can now proceed according to time-honored tradition:

Stage One: The strange compulsion to assure us that the killer is a “right wing conservative extremist”… The insistence that the killer was emblematic of an epidemic of right-wing hate sweeping the planet is, regrettably, no longer operative. Instead, the killer isn’t representative of anything at all.

So on to Stage Two: Okay, he may be called Mohammed but he’s a “lone wolf.” Sure, he says he was trained by al-Qaeda, but what does he know? Don’t worry, folks, he’s just a lone wolf like Major Hasan and Faisal Shahzad and all the other card-carrying members of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. All jihad is local.

On to Stage Three: Okay, even if there are enough lone wolves around to form their own Radio City Rockette line, it’s still nothing to do with Islam…

And then, of course, Stage Four: The backlash that never happens. Because apparently the really bad thing about actual dead Jews is that it might lead to dead non-Jews: “French Muslims Fear Backlash After Shooting.” Likewise, after Major Hasan’s mountain of dead infidels, “Shooting Raises Fears For Muslims In US Army.” Likewise, after the London Tube slaughter, “British Muslims Fear Repercussions After Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.” Oh, no, wait, that’s a parody, though it’s hard to tell.

Look…isn’t it just a teensy-weensy little bit to do with Islam? Or at any rate the internal contradictions of one-way multiculturalism? No, it’s not a competition. Most times in today’s Europe, the guys beating, burning and killing Jews will be Muslims. Once in a while, it will be somebody else killing the schoolkids. But is it so hard to acknowledge that rapid, transformative, mass Muslim immigration might not be the most obvious aid to social tranquility? That it might possibly pose challenges that would otherwise not have existed — for uncovered women in Oslo, for gays in Amsterdam, for Jews everywhere? Is it so difficult to wonder if, for these and other groups living in a long-shot social experiment devised by their rulers, the price of putting an Islamic crescent in the diversity quilt might be too high? What’s left of Jewish life in Europe is being extinguished remorselessly, one vandalized cemetery, one subway attack at a time. How many Jewish children will be at that school in Toulouse a decade hence? A society that becomes more Muslim eventually becomes less everything else. What is happening on the Continent is tragic, in part because it was entirely unnecessary.

Meanwhile back in Obama’s America, NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly seems to be “disturbing” a lot of New York Jews and other liberals like Attorney General Eric Holder by keeping close watch on mosques and Muslims in general, even outside of New York City, especially those Muslims who like to vacation on the lovely beaches of Pakistan and Afghanistan, as the Toulouse “lone wolf” liked to do. One French government official said that the only way they could’ve captured the latest guy named Mo before he murdered Jewish kids would have been to turn France into a “police state.”

I mean, how many times does a French citizen of Algerian descent have to travel to Pakistan and/or Afghanistan before the cops raid his apartment and drag him down to headquarters for some serious conversation?

To my American Jewish relatives and acquaintances: Yes, I know we don’t live in France; however, if you are planning to hold your Passover seder at an identifiable Jewish sight, it wouldn’t hurt to budget for a well-armed couple of guards outside along with the matzoh and gefilte fish.