Washington Sniper John Allen Muhammad is scheduled to die at 9:00 PM Eastern time. Like Major Hasan, he’s a Muslim, and like Major Hasan he served in the US Army, but unlike the jihadi Major, he’s an African-American–a convert to the Nation of Islam. During the sniper attacks, in spite of a good deal of evidence, and the fact that other Muslim terrorist attacks were happening a lot of people in the media and in law enforcement seemed to really want the sniper to be an “angry white male.” After Muhammad and his partner in crime Lee Malvo were captured, Mark Steyn wrote:

After weeks of assurances that the sniper was an “angry white male”, it turns out the only angry white males connected to this story are the ones in America’s newsrooms. On Thursday, after being informed that the two suspects were a black Muslim called Muhammad and his illegal-immigrant Jamaican sidekick, The New York Times nevertheless reported in its early editions that the pair were being sought for “possible ties to ’skinhead militia’ groups”. The Feds had already released a photo of Muhammad looking like one of the less goofy members of the Jackson Five and, though one should never rush to stereotype, it seems unlikely that a black Muslim with big hair would have many “ties” to skinhead militias.

The only shred of evidence for this is that African-Americans in general aren’t very good shots. This is for once not because of IQ or any racial difference in average ability, it’s because of urbanization.

Most African-Americans live in cities these days, and don’t get much chance to go hunting or join rifle ranges. John Allen Muhammad, however, had an Expert Rifleman’s Badge.

For some of our coverage at the time of the arrests, see:

Reacting By Race To The Washington Snipers By Sam Francis
The Washington Snipers: A Revolutionary Wind Is Blowing By Peter Brimelow

Here’s the AP:

Details emerge about Fort Hood suspect background

By BRETT J. BLACKLEDGE (AP) – 1 hour ago

WASHINGTON — His name appears on radical Internet postings. A fellow officer says he fought his deployment to Iraq and argued with soldiers who supported U.S. wars. He required counseling as a medical student because of problems with patients.

There are many unknowns about Nidal Malik Hasan, the man authorities say is responsible for the worst mass killing on a U.S. military base. Most of all, his motive.[More]

The word Muslim, which you’ll notice does not appear as a modifier to the word “radical” in “radical Internet postings”. The word Muslim first appears in this story 365 words down, in reference to the fact that Islam is unpopular in the army.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Hasan’s aunt, Noel Hasan of Falls Church, Va., said he had been harassed about being a Muslim in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and he wanted out of the Army.

“Some people can take it and some people cannot,” she said. “He had listened to all of that and he wanted out of the military.”

There’s more about the Muslim background, but they’re still radically puzzled about his motive.(The photograph above shows Nidal Malik Hasan wearing Muslim dress in 7-Eleven on the morning of the attack.)

More from Tim Blair:INFORMATION LEARNED, CONCEALED.

Mark Steyn is talking about it on Rush Limbaugh. (Listen here.)

Mark Steyn writes

Speaking of which, how about this bit of obscure triumphalism? Chris McNally of Yellowknife points out this curious opening in a recent CHRC speech to the disgusting UN “Human Rights” Council:

Thank you, Mr. President.

I speak on behalf of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, a National Human Rights Institution accredited with A status.

“A status”? Is that good or bad? And on what scale? What “status” does Saudi Arabia have or North Korea? Or are they out of letters by then? And is this an internationally recognized credential of humanrightification or just something you can download off the Internet for $19.99?

I looked it up–it’s something you get from the UN Human Rights Council and if you don’t get a nice certificate like you get from the Universal Life Church, (Basic Ministry Package–$39.99!)you do get a “UNOG identity badge” which will let you into the Palais des Nations in Geneva. But you can’t get it unless you agree to something very boring called the Paris Principles which embody a kind of independence similar to what we in Western Civilization think of as “judicial independence.” The problem with this is that said possessors of the The Internationally Recognized Credential Of Humanrightification are supposed to be independent of their own countries, or if sufficiently globalist, of any country at all. That means that they don’t support any pesky local rights like freedom of speech, or the right to keep and bear arms, they support internationally recognized norms. And those are pretty scary, if you live in a country that’s already free.

Ann Althouse on Canada’s hate speech laws:

Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant testify about the completely out-of-control pursuit of hate speech in Canada.

I won’t attempt to summarize. Listen to the testimony before Parliament’s Justice and Human Rights Committee. What has gone on in Canada is truly revolting. The procedural abuses are astounding, and to think that it was all done for a goal that is itself illegitimate — crushing offensive speech.[More]

The text of Ezra Levant’s prepared speech gives his opening statement first in English, then in French, since it’s addressed to Canada’s bilingual parliament. As far as I can tell from the YouTube, he didn’t actually deliver it in both languages. This horrifyingly boring procedure is common in Canada, and may be coming to the US right along with hate speech legislation. I saw it in video of the “Million Immigrant March” three years ago.

Listen here to Christopher Caldwell, author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, being torn to shreds by a liberal NPR radio host called Tom Ashbrook, the intellectual equivalent of being savaged by a rabbit.

Caldwell’s performance is so pitiful that even Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey, brought on to provide “balance”, intervenes to protect him.

Needless to say, this phenomenon is intensely frustrating to VDARE.COM’s Editorial Collective, any one of whom could have done better. How come Caldwell didn’t at least say, when asked to give an example of how Muslim immigrants threaten Western culture, that they make support of Israel more difficult? What NPR host could handle that?

But, curiously, Caldwell also shrinks from being associated with the neoconservatism of his Zionist employer, the Weekly Standard, protesting feebly that the London Financial Times, where he does a column, is anti-neocon.

My theory: Caldwell has made an absolutely conscious decision not be confrontational, even though he’s written a confrontational book. We’ve noted this tactfulness in his writing elsewhere. And people/ pundits/ talkshow hosts are even more sensitive about losing arguments in person–which is why the Wall Street Journal’s Steve Moore has been declining to debate me for the last few years.

There’s a whole species of conservative pundits who keep a toe-hold in the Main Stream Media by avoiding hot-button issues - you could call it “George Willism“. And immigration turns out to be pretty well the ultimate hot-button issue.

Of course, this puts Caldwell in an absurd situation. But no more absurd than Mark Steyn, who, as View From the Right’s Larry Auster has been pointing out for years, has been banging on about the danger of Islam without ever making the obvious connection with Muslim immigration.

Now Steyn has actually admitted that

For a notorious blowhard, I can go a bit cryptic or (according to taste) wimpy when invited to confront that particular subject head on. On the CBC last year, I was tap dancing around various socio-cultural generalities when the host, George Stroumboulopoulos, leaned in in that way he has and cut to the chase: “You mean [pause and knowing glance to camera] immigration?”

I thought of bolting for the nearest exit, but, at such moments, I usually take refuge in the formulation that a dependence on mass immigration is always a structural weakness and it would be prudent to address it as such. But in the end my line’s a bit of a dodge.

Steyn still doesn’t say why he has been indulging in this “dodge”. But I guess this curious balancing act (why raise these subjects at all?) has worked for him, and for Caldwell.

I am not sure, however, that it is working for the West.

Read Larry Auster’s typically devastating critique here.

“A bad poem on an old French statue is not an immigration policy.” writes Kathy Shaidle. She’s linking to Mark Steyn and Brenda Walker on the subject of the Statue of Liberty and its famous Emma Lazarus poem. Mark Steyn was responding to something Mark Krikorian said

Much of the way we think about immigration today is shaped by the experience of Irish coming here in the mid-19th century and Jews at the turn of the 20th century. These two immigrants streams are the only major ones that bear any resemblance to the poem’s “tired,” “poor” and “huddled masses” fleeing for their lives, never to look back. For sure, the Irish and Ashkenazim have had an outsized influence on America, if no other reason than they helped shape the character of the newly industrializing cities of the East Coast, but their numbers are a small share of our nation’s historical immigration flow. And yet too many open-borders folks see in every one of today’s immigrants someone fleeing the Potato Famine or being chased out of Anatevka by the Cossacks.

This doesn’t necessarily translate to a specific policy position. You could, for instance, take from this insight the lesson that our immigration policy needs to be more like that of the Persian Gulf states, where large numbers of foreigners come and go to work but aren’t incorporated into our society (I’ve argued against that view here and elsewhere). Or you could conclude that we’ve outgrown the mass-immigration phase of our nation’s development and it’s time to move on. But in either case, we need to disenthrall ourselves from the mythology of the Mother of Exiles.

I’ve written about the Statue of Liberty here, saying

“This whole thing is very strange. Imagine a hypothetical foreign country with immigration problems explaining its policy this way: “We used to have sensible immigration laws, but someone built this damn statue.” You’d think they were mad.”

Mark Steyn has a review of the musical Wicked up on his site. The musical is “dark prequel” to The Wizard Of Oz, in which good is evil and evil is good, and “everything you thought you knew” about Oz was wrong. But what struck me was the way the Wicked Witch acquired victim status–“The Wicked Witch, an outsider “misunderstood” because of the colour of her skin, is the real good witch.” Aha! It was the greenness, not the wickedness that caused the problem, was it? Well, I suppose there was a lot of color prejudice in those days. It wasn’t until Star Trek started airing in the sixties that green-skinned women could get good roles.

Mark Steyn’s request of the week is an old column from before 9/11:

The Bush administration, for example, has inherited an awkward court case from its predecessor, in which it feels obliged to defend ‘affirmative action’ quotas in federal highway construction contracts. Three decades ago, ‘affirmative action’ meant that the 10 per cent of the population who were black got a bit of preferential treatment over the remaining 90 per cent. But, with the ever-spreading tide of victim culture, so many other groups have been dealt into the game that two-thirds of the population qualify as ‘presumed disadvantaged’, the various categories extending into the dozens to embrace Pacific Islanders, women, veterans, and people from ‘Juvalu’, which doesn’t seem to exist but is most likely a typo for ‘Tuvalu‘. Neither Tuvaluans nor Juvaluans have suffered historic, systemic discrimination in the US, but if a federal highway contract is up for tender and the choice is between, say, a tenth-generation Yankee or a Juvaluan who just got off the boat, you’re obliged to give it to the guy from Juvalu.

Nearly 70 per cent of the population are entitled to preferential treatment over the remaining 30 per cent - white men, the sole surviving non-victim group in American society, and thus the only people you’re allowed to victimise.[SteynOnline - DURB AN' DURBER, originally published in the Spectator, September 8, 2001]

See also Homicide of the West, by the late Sam Francis, on the same subject.

Kathy Shaidle made a highly successful speech on Canada’s Human Rights Commissions in London, Ontario. You can read it here. Check out this part on the “No Irish Need Apply” urban legend:

The original mandate of the HRCs was to deal with discrimination in employment and accommodation.

A really embarrassing female politician asked Mark Steyn about one famous example, when he recently testified at Queen’s Park about the HRCs and Section 13. She brought up the hoary old chestnut about signs in store windows that read NO IRISH NEED APPLY.

As Mark Steyn explained to this poor woman, because he’d read about it first on my blog, the real trouble with No Irish Need Apply signs is that they never existed.

Richard Jensen of the University of Illinois studied the issue and wrote:

The fact that Irish American vividly “remember” NINA signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists.

The complete absence of evidence suggests that probably zero such signs were seen at commercial establishments, shops, factories, stores, hotels, railroads, union halls, hiring halls, personnel offices, labor recruiters, anywhere in America, at any time.

(…) However, the professor continues:

Irish Americans all have heard about these signs—and remember elderly relatives insisting they existed. The late Tip O’Neill remembered the signs from his youth in Boston in 1920s; Senator Ted Kennedy reported the most recent sighting, telling the Senate during a civil rights debate that he saw the signs when growing up.

(And we all know how reliable Senator Kennedy’s accounts of his personal experiences can be.)

I’d be happy to speculate later about what this  says about Irish psychology, but for now, let’s concentrate on the fact that the politician who confronted Mark Steyn with that would-be zinger merely showed herself to be terribly concerned about a hundred year old case of job discrimination that was completely make believe.

Kathy Shaidle has a book! Shaidle, who wrote First They Came For… Canadian “Hate Speech” Totalitarianism Is Not New, for us, has an entire book on the subject of Canada’s Human Rights commissions. It’s in ebook form, or you can get it in paperback:

The ebook isn’t a free download, unlike Steve Sailer’s new book. The difference is that we’re a foundation, surviving on the generous donations of readers, while Kathy Shaidle is freelance writer who is self-supporting through her own contributions. She’s also being sued by a Canadian bureaucrat over things that would be lawsuit proof in the US under Sullivan v. New York Times, so if you do pay the ten dollars for the download, you’ll be helping a good cause.