[ALBSA-Info] This made it to WSJ

[Bejko, Kreshnik]

Hate-Me Crimes		

	

'	Hate Me' Crimes		
By Mark Steyn, a columnist for Britain's Daily Telegraph and Canada's
National Post. Having successfully introduced the novel legal concept of the
"hate crime," progressive opinion has now taken it to dizzying new heights:
the hate-me crime. In a traditional hate crime, you beat someone up not just
for his fake Rolex but because you hate him on the basis of his race, creed
or color. With the new hate-me crime, you beat someone up because you hate
him on the basis of his race, creed or color -- and hey, that's cool, he's
OK with it, so feel free to take another swing.			
The other day, Robert Fisk, of the British newspaper The Independent, was
set upon by a gang of Afghans. Mr. Fisk has had decades of experience in the
Muslim world and is a widely acknowledged expert on the subject. That's to
say, since Sept. 11, he's got pretty much everything wrong. (Sample Fisk
headlines: "Bush Is Walking Into a Trap," "It Could Become More Costly Than
Vietnam," "How Can The U.S. Bomb This Tragic People?")
You can understand why Mr. Fisk has been in low spirits of late: The
much-feared "Arab street" is as seething and turbulent as a leafy cul-de-sac
in Westchester County; and poor old Afghanistan's reputation as the humbler
of empires has gone south since Mullah Omar contracted out homeland defense
to a bunch of Saudi, Paki, Brit and Californian losers.
But last weekend the people finally roused themselves -- and beat up Fisky!
His car broke down just a stone's throw (as it turned out) from the
Pakistani border and a crowd gathered. To the evident surprise of the man
known to his readers as "the champion of the oppressed," the oppressed
decided to take on the champ. They lunged for his wallet and began lobbing
rocks. Yet even as the rubble bounced off his skull, Mr. Fisk was shrewd
enough to look for the "root causes":
"Young men broke my glasses, began smashing stones into my face and head. I
couldn't see for the blood pouring down my forehead and swamping my eyes.
And even then, I understood. I couldn't blame them for what they were doing.
In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to the
Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or
any other Westerner I could find."


It's not their fault, he insisted, their "brutality is entirely the product
of others" -- i.e., George Bush, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, you. And in a
flash, the gloom of recent weeks lifted and Mr. Fisk turned in the heady,
exhilarating columnar equivalent of a Sally Field acceptance speech: you
hate me, you really hate me!
You'd have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter. Even as a mob
is trying to kill him, he absolves them of all responsibility. It's
"entirely" America's fault. Noam Chomsky, eat your heart out. Any old Ivy
League professor can give droning speeches about America's "silent
genocide"; any European Union minister can swan off to U.N. gabfests in
Durban to apologize to Robert Mugabe for Western civilization. But, at a
stroke, Mr. Fisk has dramatically raised the bar for standards of Western
self-loathing.
By way of contrast, consider another Afghan story his paper carried: a call
by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and others for "a full inquiry"
into whether or not U.S. forces in Afghanistan are guilty of torture.
Torture? My God, what are our boys up to? Well, it seems "very disturbing"
"threats" were made to a member of the Taliban and captured on videotape.
The offending party was the CIA team of Mike Spann and his comrade, known
only as "Dave." They were at the Qala-i-Jangai prison, interrogating the
celebrated Marin County Taliban, born John Yoko Ashram Fonda Country Joe And
The Fish Walker Lindh but now going under the name Mustapha Jihad.
Mike and Dave seem to have been doing a good cop/bad cop routine on the
"poor fellow," with Mike quietly pointing out that "there were several
hundred other Muslims killed" at the World Trade Center and Dave stomping
around in the background using the f-word a lot and muttering that Little
Johnny must "decide if he wants to live or die."
Had the Marinated Muslim spent less time in the madrassa mastering the ways
of his adopted people (how to brandish your AK-47 without getting it snagged
in your floor-length beard) and more time watching American pop culture, he
would have recognized the Mike/Dave scene from "There's Something About
Mary." But Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch thinks Dave's "threat" would,
under international law, be considered torture. Sticks and stones may break
my bones, but words are illegal and constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
We can't bring Mike Spann before a war crimes tribunal because unfortunately
Tali-Boy's fellow prisoners rose up and beat, kicked and bit the CIA man to
death before booby-trapping his body with grenades. But British SAS
commandos managed to rescue Dave and he could certainly be prosecuted by an
international court. If the U.S. refused to extradite, Dave could be tried
in absentia. Perhaps he could even be bitten to death in absentia.
These two stories usefully clarify the peculiar pathology of the antiwar
left. On the one hand, we need international investigations if Americans are
insufficiently decorous in their questioning. On the other, it's perfectly
justifiable for disaffected Muslims to target Western civilians purely on
the basis of their ethnic identity. On the one hand, we can't do anything
right. On the other, they can't do anything wrong. The Fisk Doctrine, taken
to its logical conclusion, absolves of responsibility not just the
perpetrators of Sept. 11 but also Taliban supporters who attacked several of
Mr. Fisk's fellow journalists in Afghanistan, all of whom, alas, died before
being able to file a final column explaining why their murderers are
blameless.
In recent weeks, some of us have found it hard to suppress the occasional
titter at President Bush's attempts at Islamic outreach. But it testifies,
if nothing else, to Mr. Bush's humanity: He believes the third-graders at
the Sword of the Infidel-Slayer Elementary School in Kandahar are at heart
no different from those in Crawford, Texas. He may be naïve about this: It
could be that, even if he sat down to read "'Twas The Night Before Ramadan"
to a bunch of six-year-olds in Yasser's toxic classrooms in Ramallah, the
little tykes would think it sucked compared to Suicide Bombing 101. But at
least, whenever he talks about anyone, Texans or Tajiks, Afghans or
Australians, the old right-wing Big Oil stooge accords them fundamental
dignity as human individuals.
By comparison, every argument the enlightened antiwar progressives make has
at its core the proposition that these people are primitives: They are no
more culpable for tearing you apart than a pack of hyenas would be. As Mr.
Fisk sees it, the mob who mugged him and robbed him were "truly innocent of
any crime except being the victim of the world." Not true. They had a
choice, and to deny that they had a choice is to dehumanize them far more
than Pentagon euphemisms about "collateral damage" do.
Before the scenes of shaven Afghans cheering their liberation disheartened
the peaceniks, you could go to most any college town and see signs saying
"Stop your racist war!" As they no longer seem to need the placards, I was
wondering if we warmongers could borrow them. Because the intellectual
assault being waged by the extreme left is explicitly racist. To old-school
imperialists, these excitable Pashtun types were the "lesser breeds without
the law" (Kipling). To self-loathing multiculturalists, they still are.
Or, rather, they're still "without the law" but now they're the "superior
breeds" -- their moral integrity confirmed by their resistance to such
concepts as individual responsibility. Rousseau's "noble savage" was savage
because of his isolation from the West; the Chomsky-Fisk-Said "noble savage"
is savage precisely because of the West, which you've got to admit is a
dandy improvement, if only in terms of heightening the delicious masochistic
frisson.
If I were, say, Abdullah Abdullah, the new Afghan foreign minister, I'd be
getting a bit sick of the exquisite condescension of Western liberals. From
1886 to 1973, Afghanistan was one of the more peaceful corners of the planet
-- at least when compared to, oh, Germany, Italy, France, Poland, Russia,
Japan and China. There's no reason why it can't be again. The Bonn talks
went well. The new cabinet includes a woman. The interim government starts
next week. And the only Yankee war crime to get steamed up about is the
robust vocabulary of one agent: "Hey, hey, CIA/How many naughty words did
you use today?"
It must all be very disheartening for the massed ranks of Western
doom-mongers. But, c'mon, don't beat yourself up over it. As Robert Fisk
well knows, there's plenty of Afghans who'll do it for you.