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April 24, 2007

Beware Of Dangerous Ham Sandwiches? (Updated)

There is such a thing as dhimmitude and PC run amuck, and when you hear from Fox News that a middle school student is being charged with a hate crime for leaving a ham sandwich on a picnic table for Somali Muslim students to see, one can only think of both having been taken over the top. After all, Muslims should assimilate into American culture, not the other way around - that's being a dhimmi and is a sure way of ushering in sharia law. However, "Diane" in the Lewiston School Superintendent's Office says that Fox News and Associated Content have it all wrong. It wasn't a ham sandwich, it was a ham bone (updated: actually a bone with some ham left on it from a ham dinner) - thrown on the table with other students looking on and snickering, and the middle school student has been suspended for a malicious incident, not a hate crime.

Here's what Associated Content (one can only hope it was written tongue in cheek) has, which has apparently been subsequently parroted by Fox News (I love Fox - they just must have got it wrong here):

According to Superintendent Levesque, "the school incident is being treated seriously as a hate incident." Police are currently investigating the matter alongside the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence, who is also working with the school to create an anti-ham "response plan."

"We've got some work to do to turn this around and bring the school community back together again." Said Levesque, "These children have got to learn that ham is not a toy, and that there are consequences for being nonchalant about where you put your sandwich."

"Placing ham where Muslim students were eating as an awful thing," said Stephen Wessler, the executive director of the Center for Prevention of Hate Violence. "It's extraordinarily hurtful and degrading. They probably felt like they were back in Mogadishu starving and being shot at. No child, Muslim or normal(sic), should have to endure touching a ham sandwich."

When I first read this I was prepared to write that one could only imagine that the student held Muslim students down and force-fed a botulism-laden pork sandwich to them. However, Diane, speaking for the superintendent, says what actually happened is not as it was written at Associated Content or reported on Fox News. Of course we do have the little problem of School Superintendent Levesque being quoted by Associated Content, and if the poster didn't make it all up, had been smoking funny weed, or was writing satire, one can only assume that the team of Levesque indeed bordered on being PC run amuck dhimmis that have subsequently been "enlightened" by the attention their statements and actions have initiated.

And by the way, for now, we'll give Steven Wessler, Executive Director of the Center for Prevention of Hate Violence (I never even dreamed there would be such a thing) the benefit of the doubt and assume he was misquoted in saying, ""No child, Muslim or "normal," should have to "endure touching a ham sandwich."" Surely he didn't mean to imply that Muslim students weren't "normal," nor that "touching a ham sandwich" relates to some kind of torture. Surely he meant to say, "Muslim or non-Muslim," unless of course the Muslim students were in some way "abnormal" (i.e. radical Islamists or had three right hands, or two heads). As for the part about having to "endure touching a ham sandwich," if it was a ham sandwich, how could in any stretch of one's imagination that be anything near like being shot at, or blown up in a suicide bombing, or tortured in some other evil manner? Surely, Mr. Wessler has been misquoted, or has since realized how his statements come across to ears of reason and common sense. Sympathizing with the concerns of others is appropriate, irrational responses to cultural differences, at the expense of continuing Western societal norms is quite another. And then there's the matter of "dhimmitudious" reactions that actually aid and abet the Islamists' agenda. CAIR would surely be doing back flips if this incident turned out to be as originally reported.

Posted by Abdul at April 24, 2007 10:05 AM