Oh, Editor, Where Art Thou?

I don't usually go off on the idiocy of national pundits any more, because there are plenty ready to take up the cudgel, but Michelle Malkin is considered a newspaper-worthy columnist in these parts, and I just couldn't let this syndicated piece go by.

It shows that even when racists have a point, they can't make it without exposing the bias that drives them:

Three years ago, I wrote about a mock terrorism drill at a public school district in Muskegon County, Mich. Instead of Islamic terrorists, educators substituted Christian homeschoolers. Yes, Christian homeschoolers. Here was the description of the school drill plan:

"The exercise will simulate an attack by a fictitious radical group called Wackos Against Schools and Education who believe everyone should be homeschooled. Under the scenario, a bomb is placed on the bus and is detonated while the bus is traveling on Durham, causing the bus to land on its side and fill with smoke."

Flabbergasting, but true. In the wake of 9/11 and the jihadists' carnage against schoolchildren in Beslan, Russia, the school chose to prepare their students for an attack by Christian homeschooling "wackos," not Muslim suicide bombers.

Malkin's concedable point. Schools doing disaster response drills don't need to conjure up scenarios that demonize a particular group. But she couldn't stop there. Oh, no. She takes schools to task for failing to use Muslim terrorists in the scenarios. And she cites multiple examples of Muslims attacking schools.

That's right. Jihadists in Kentucky? Suicide bombers hitting Amish schools? Muslim extremists at Columbine? Well, no. All of her examples occur overseas in largely Muslim countries.

In fact, according to a federal study of school attacks:

Almost all of the attackers were current students at the school where they carried out their attacks (95 percent, n=39).  Only two attackers were former students of the school where they carried out their attacks at the time of those attacks (5 percent, n=2).

I thought one thing that made newspapers better than blogs was they had editors.

Comments

[Diane]

Well....
I have been on premanent disability for the past 10 years becasue of an attck by a student. Not Muslim, not foreign, home grown.
Malicious Malkin is a first generation AMerican. She would do well to remember how much of our violence in America is done by AMERICANS!!!!!
Why is she not screaming about the assault and murder rate?

[LJ/Aquaria]

Malkin has never wrapped what little of a brain stem she has around the fact that most terroristic acts in this country are performed by white people and a rather large percentage of them "Christians."

We all know the "greatest hits": Branch Davidian, OKC, schoolyard shootings (almost all of the shooters have been white), the Unabomber, assassinated abortion doctors, attempting to bomb the Olympics, lynchings, stockpiling chem weapons in East TX, KKK and its assorted clones doing their usual b.s., dragging a black man to his death, beating a gay man and leaving him to die. And those are just a few off the top of my head.

So, yeah, the school had every reason to present as the most realistic scenario of a terrorist attack a homegrown threat. And they went to where it was most likely to come from. Because that's where most of our terrorism has come from.

BTW, school shootings have been around a long time. My mother's cousin told me that, during the 50s, a kid came into his small East TX school and shot up people. Rather than running around like their hair was on fire, the school closed for a few days for everyone to grieve, but, to them, the most important thing was to get back to normal, as soon as possible. And normal was not having cops crawling all over the place, or frisking kids. They thought it would frighten the kids too much, inflict more damage to keep reminding them about what had happened--let them see that life goes on, etc. Of course the kids could talk about things with their teachers if the memories became overwhelming, but there wasn't this unhealthy fixation on dwelling on it or wallowing in it, over and over and over.