Posted 7:16 PM by Floyd

Thursday the Mercury News ran an editorial decrying the "problems" faced by America's Muslims since 9/11. I present an excerpt, which also serves as a justification for the scare quotes:

During the days that followed Sept. 11, Muslim, Arab and Sikh Americans became victims of anger and ignorance. Dozens of incidents of hate, from strangers' slurs to job discrimination, firings and physical harassment, were reported to the police and civil rights groups. As Mercury News writers Karen de Sa and Michael Bazeley make clear in today's editions, the trauma lingers for those who experienced it.

Slurs are a major problem? Have de Da or Bazeley ever been to a high school? A sporting event where the visiting team is razzed?

Sean Rawlings did an admirable job of putting the issue in perspective with his letter to the editor:

I'm getting tired of all the rhetoric in the media lately about American intolerance. ...look at tolerance elsewhere. In India earlier this year, more than 50 Hindus were killed by Muslims. The reaction? Hundreds slaughtered, homes burned to the ground and omen raped by enraged nationalists. In Muslim Pakistan, on not one but several occasions, Christian churches have been attacked by grenade and gunfire from Islamist thugs.

What was the death toll here? Two: one Sikh gentleman in Arizona and a Muslim Arab in California. While the loss of life is deplorable, this does not make a case that the United States is a seething hotbed of murderous racist rage, and I deeply resent the implication.

Eddy L. Harris travelled in Africa around 1990 and wrote a wonderful book about his experiences called Native Stranger. A more recent book in this vein was Keith Richburg's Out of America. The pattern of the books is the same: A black American goes to Africa to find his roots, to find companionship with his race, and instead discovers poverty, disease, and mass murder. While Richburg was shocked, angry, and betrayed, the prevalent tone in Harris' work is sympathy and angst.

Harris travelled down the west coast of Africa. He went from Mauretania to Senegal at a time when the two countries were hostile to each other, though not at open war. Immediately after he arrived in Senegal, violence exploded:

"Senegalese are being slaughtered in Mauretania ... their throats are being cut and their bodies hacked to pieces with machetes."

...

Forty thousand blacks -- Tukolor, Fulani, and Wolof -- were forced out of Mauretania. Hundreds and hundreds were killed. Their throats were slit and their heads cut off. Women were disembowled. Men were castrated.

In Dakar, the Senegalese responded in kind to the grisly stories coming out of Mauretania and went on a rampage of retaliation. Crowds crazed with anger flooded the streets. They rounded up Mauretanians to lynch them, to club them to death, stone them to death, burn their bodies and pillage their shops."

Remember this the next time you hear someone whine that America is intolerant and racist.