Saturday, July 09, 2005

Yellow Peril Redux

Predictably, Margaret Wente is at it again, fussing out loud about Muslim immigration. She's in good company: the present Pope wants to keep the infidels out of Europe too. As the sickening drama of tit-for-tat unfolds around the globe, racist undercurrents are bubbling to the surface.

More than a century ago, the target of this benighted fear-mongering was known as the "yellow peril." Unrestricted Japanese and Chinese immigration was the nightmare then. The Hearst chain ranted against this alleged threat to civilization. Sometimes the phrase "yellow terror" was substituted. Labour leader Samuel Gompers put it in blunt terms by today’s standards: "The superior whites had to exclude the inferior Asiatics, by law, or, if necessary, by force of arms."

Er…sound familiar? Here is Wente: "The bitter truth is that it’s not Tony Blair's support for the war [in Iraq] that’s come back to haunt him, so much as Britain's lenient asylum laws…It's not for nothing that London's nickname is Londonistan.” Across Europe, she continues, "unassimilated Muslims are a growing problem."

Following every incident like the London bombings, Muslim communities in Europe and North America wait for the other shoe to drop, and it doesn't take long--the death threats, the vandalism, the assaults, the smears. These communities are composed of decent folk, who have not been slow to speak out against the attacks. Thank goodness the media is beginning to report this, giving the lie to claims that moderate Muslims have been "silent."

But there is always a handful of columnists, provided with a privileged soapbox by the press, who positively enjoy whipping up intolerance. Bob Fulford over at the National Post has been pounding away on the anti-Muslim drum for some time now: his latest contribution to outreach and understanding was a vitriolic attack on Canadian Muslim leader Mohamed Elmasry, not for failure to denounce the London bombings (he did), but for worrying out loud about the inevitable backlash against ordinary, decent Muslims.

And today we have Margaret Wente, a right-wing American import who had openly derided what she calls Canada's "flourishing racism industry," referring, of course, to our institutional efforts to counter racism. Clearly unsatisfied with merely defaming whole communities this time, she also takes a nutty and libellous swipe at fellow-columnist Rick Salutin, calling him an "apologist for terror."

Good copy, maybe. But lousy, mean-spirited, inflammatory contributions to public debate.

3 comments:

JimBobby said...

Whooee! Yer on the money a hunnert percents worth, DawgieBoy. This here bizness o' blamin' the entire race fer what a few terrists done is what racism is. These here idjits sez free countries oughta be less free. That's jest what the terrists want. All the tuff talkin' is only natural but blamin' the bunch is like blamin' all Canajuns fer Karla Homolka or blamin' all Merkins fer Timmy McVeigh.

When folks spread the blame across the whole of Islam, then they're incitin' violence against innocent folks. That ain't right, sez I.

Yores trooly,
JimBobby

AJSomerset said...

Wente has previously made a big deal out of shootings involving Jamaicans in Toronto.

She likes to set up a little straw man, complaining that we're all too politically correct to admit that the shootings are Jamaican gang killings, or that bombings involve Muslim terrorists, or whatever. It's false, of course, because these things are part of the stories that are widely reported. But she wants them to be the whole story.

Par for the course in Wenteville.

That PC straw man is her whole schtick, actually. Witness the recent "7 things you can't say in Canada" nonsense. She's kind of a one-trick pony.

Mark Richard Francis said...

Wente:
"The bitter truth is that it’s not Tony Blair's support for the war [in Iraq] that’s come back to haunt him, so much as Britain's lenient asylum laws…It's not for nothing that London's nickname is Londonistan.” Across Europe, she continues, "unassimilated Muslims are a growing problem."

What? The UK has caught the terrorists already? They must have. Otherwise, how would Wente even know to argue this?

Oh, right. Intolerant knee-jerking.