November 8, 2002: Today's multicultural moment is brought to us today by a group of aggrieved Muslim high-school students in Columbus Ohio. The protestors walked out of their classrooms yesterday 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 is not saying the students can't pray at school, but simply not during instructional time.
Regardless, as you might guess, we have another media multicultural cause celebre on our hands -- 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 interests of cultural minorities. Never mind all the hollow rhetoric we're deluged with, regarding the importance of separation of church and state, when Christian students petition schools for the opportunity to set up extra-curricular clubs for Christian study, or the right to say a silent prayer at school every morning.
In fact, behind all the shrill accusations of racism and cultural insensitivity thrown out by today's multiculturalism lobby is the untruthful libel that the United States is currently an intolerant nation that oppresses its many racial and cultural minorities. And you can be sure that the circumstances prompting yesterday's questionable classroom walkouts in Columbus will be distorted and mythologized in the future into yet another apocryphal tale of the continued oppression of cultural minorities in America.
What can we make of this increasing divisive 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 increasingly practised by the multiculturalism crowd, constantly disseminating multicultural fairy tales about nefarious acts of blatant discrimination and bias against blacks or 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 horrific terrorist acts of 9/11).
The alleged racist church burnings were so terrible that they impelled then President Bill Clinton to suffer the travails 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 his 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 left-wing beliefs and charges 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 to fight an unjust battle against a well-intentioned Third World insurgency. Well, lets 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 foolishly-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...........
Multicultural Crayons 8 Count Regular Size