Posted on 07/16/2004 6:28:10 PM PDT by quidnunc
What do you make of this story about 14 Syrian musicians whose in-flight bathroom use was more coordinated than a synchronized swimming routine? It sounds a lot like the kind of dry run James Woods witnessed and which I recounted in this excerpt from The Face Of The Tiger. The other point it seems to confirm is the sheer constraints under which an advanced western society can wage war in an age of political correctness. It’s not just the weediness of Norm Mineta but, as I note below, a broader unwillingness to speak the truth about who it is who’s trying to kill us. I don’t see why, for example, US Immigration would refuse entry to a harmless British novelist Ian McEwan on the grounds that the honorarium for his speech in California was too much – a law they invented on the spot, by the way – but wave through bands of Syrian musicians to tour the land. America barely has diplomatic relations with Syria. Is it really so necessary to maintain open access for Syrian “artists”?
When political correctness got going in the Eighties, the laconic wing of the conservative movement was inclined to be relaxed about it. To be sure, the tendency of previously pithy identity labels to become ever more polysyllabically ornate (“person of colour”, “Native American”) was time consuming, but otherwise PC was surely harmless. Some distinguished persons of non-colour, among them Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, even argued that conservatives should support political correctness as merely the contemporary version of old-fashioned courtliness and good manners.
Alas, after September 11th, this position seems no longer tenable. Instead, we have to ask a more basic question: Does political correctness kill?
Consider the extraordinary memo sent three weeks ago by FBI agent Coleen Rowley to the agency’s director Robert Mueller, and now all over Time magazine. Ms Rowley works out of the Minneapolis field office, whose agents, last August 16th, took action to jail a French citizen of Middle Eastern origin. Zacarias Moussaoui had shown up at a Minnesota flight school and shelled out 8,000 bucks in cash in order to learn how to fly 747s, except for the landing and take-off bit, which he said he’d rather skip. On investigation, he proved to have overstayed his visa and so was held on an immigration violation. Otherwise, he would have been the 20th hijacker, and, so far as one can tell, on board United Flight 93, the fourth plane, the one which crashed in a Pennsylvania field en route, as we now know, to the White House. In Mr Moussaoui’s more skilled hands – Flight 93 wound up with the runt of Osama’s litter — it might well have reached its target.
Ms Rowley and her colleagues established that Moussaoui was on a French intelligence watch list, had ties to radical Islamist groups, was known to have recruited young Muslims to fight in Chechnya, and had been in Afghanistan and Pakistan immediately before arriving in the US. They wanted to search his computer, but to do that they needed the okay from HQ. Washington was not only uncooperative, but set about, in the words of Ms Rowley’s memo, “thwarting the Minneapolis FBI agents’ efforts”, responding to field-office requests with ever lamer brush-offs: How could she be sure it was the same guy? There could be any number of Frenchmen called “Zacarias Moussaoui”. She checked the Paris phone book, which listed only one. After September 11th, when the Minneapolis agents belatedly got access to Moussaoui’s computer, they found among other things the phone number of Mohammed Atta’s roommate.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Best line I've heard all day.
“person of colour”, “Native American”
I've lived long enough to hear "Negroes", then "colored", then "black", and now "African-Americans". With all due respect to my friends of Negroid ancestry, I stopped at "black". As far as "Native American", I am of European ancestry, I am white, and I am also native American. I was born in this country, so I am entitled to be called a native American. If those of Indian ancestry want something different, why not "aboriginal Americans"?
No offense intended to anyone.
People have a right to call themselves whatever they want.
That is the funniest thing I have seen in ages!
Steyn nails it again.
isn't it amazing? ... all this wasted time looking at senior citizens, blah blah blah ... looks like it has Slings and Arrows handle on it
|
The Origins of Political Correctness
An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind
Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AIA conferences including the 2000 Consevative University at American University |
I make it a truly terrifying story. Even more so because the government is so determined to do the wrong thing.
But they have no right to force the rest of us to go along with their wishes.
Who is forcing you? I've never been forced to say anything I don't want to say in my life.
You would not believe the hassle I saw 3 Dutch tourists go through in MIA.
All of them had all of their carry ones rifled through, they had to take off their shoes, they went over them again and again with the wand, etc.
It was so ridiculous, not to mention the backup it caused in the line.
2 of them were better looking than the podium girls in the Tour de France.
Good thing we're keeping such an eye out on Dutchmen, they're your typical terrorist.
It wouldn't be quite correct. Second wave aboriginal Americans, maybe. (They got rid of the first wave folks much more completely than the Europeans "got rid" of them. The first wave folks were probably related to the "aboriginal Japanese", who were displaced to the northern most Japanese islands by invaders from what is now Korea. Third wave would be Aleuts and Inuits (Eskimos in the old vernacular. Europeans are 4th wave, although that had several sub-waves.) And of course we mustn't forget the involuntary immigrants from Africa, in part in courtesy of Arab "traders".
I prefer just Americans myself. But I guess since I'm English-German-Norwegian-Heinz57 - American, what I prefer doesn't count for much. (Just found out last week, that Great Grandma Kunz was a Lee(sp?) born in Norway and I'm in my mid 50s!)
Don't be facetious. Political correctness attempts to intimidate people into going along with speech codes that they normally would not accept.
I'm not being facetious. If you don't want to say something you don't want to then don't. Political correctness never stopped me. Why should it stop you esp. since here on FR where you can say what you want as long as you don't insult someone.
nuh uh they dont.
Well okay hehe
You ARE being facetious, using a super-narrow definition of the term "force" to mis-state the issue.
I never said political correctness stops me. It doesn't. I still object to (getting back to the original topic) changing the names of things, actions, ethnic groups, whatever for the sake of getting the political upperhand and then demanding that others go along.
You said, "People have a right to call themselves whatever they want." That's both true and irrelevant. They do have that right. The rest of us have an equal right to not care.
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