Round-up

1. In this article someone wants to shock us with the news that Racism is Alive and Well (RAW: a phenomenon which I've written about many times before) in the world today. Gasp! Who would have guessed? Liberals like this always claim that "most people think racism is no more", but they can never actually quote anyone or give any examples of anyone who thinks this.

Anyway, Ms Laura Donovan goes on to invoke the FBI's 2006 hate crime statistics, which show that there was "a rise of 7.8 percent from 7,163 to 7,722 criminal incidents which targeted victims or property as a result of bias against a particular race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic or national origin or physical or mental disability." OK, fair enough, although Ms Donovan doesn't seem to acknowledge that in a country with a population of 300 million, seven and half thousand hate crimes is not actually very much, relatively.

So having mentioned all of this, why does she then only go on to discuss racism against black people? Is she aware that Jews suffered the second-highest amounts of discrimination? And, perhaps more tellingly, is she aware that the same figures showed that whites in America were the third-highest victims of hate crimes? I'm guessing not. But if she does know, she's clearly deliberately ignoring this facts. Because racism against black people is worse than any other form of hatred, it seems.

2. This long piece about racism is generally sensible and unsensationalist. But I find it problematic that at one point it says: "Racial Hierarchy Began With Slavery". And indeed, slavery was and is an awful thing. But what bothers me is that the article then only goes on to mention the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, which lasted from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. It makes no mention of the Islamic slave trade, which lasted from the seventh to the nineteenth centuries (and still continues in some places today), and brought suffering to approximately six and a half million more people than white slavery did. Once more all the blame, all the responsibility for the world's ills is placed on Whitey, even though he no longer needs to apologise. Meanwhile, the Islamic world is never called upon to apologise for the misery it brought to the world, including among many black slaves from North Africa. Why not?