I am really, really, envious of John Derbyshire.

He has just has won the “Worst Person In The World” award from Keith Olbermann for saying, as Michelle Malkin did last night, that the dead students should have fought back. [Video]

I’ve been saying that for some time, Kathy Shaidle has been saying it for years, the late Sam Francis said it.

Why can’t we win prizes like this? All we get are annoying diatribes from David Brock.

Runners up for “Worst Person” include Nathanael Blake, of Human Events, for agreeing with Derbyshire and Debbie Schlussel for saying “Remember that the next time you hear President Bush and Condi Clueless waxing lyrical about how we need more foreign students in America.”

The technical name for not fighting back is “cowardice.” One professor died bravely, giving his life in order to door protect his students. That’s courage, and he should be awarded some kind of medal. But compare it to the behavior in this email Michelle Malkin received:

We heard pretty much continuous shooting for the next minute or so, and I said, “Shouldn’t we barricade the door,” because we were sitting ducks with no way out inside that room if he opened the door. A couple more people floated the idea that “We need to barricade the door, NOW.” But I was too scared to even move, much less move the teacher’s desk.

Finally one of the guys in the front of the classroom was brave enough to get up and move the desk in front of the door to prevent outside entry. About twenty seconds later, the shooter rattled the doorknob trying to get in. When he couldn’t get in he fired two shots through the door (single solid piece of wood) and left. We heard him go in to 206 (the room across the hall) and shoot the people in that room. If we hadn’t put the barricade up when we did, I and all my classmates would be dead.[Michelle Malkin: Carnage at Virginia Tech;
Readers point to campus ban on self-defense;|More video, plus student e-mail]

This is cowardice, and the student in question, (I won’t name him) should receive some kind of non-medal.

It starts with him being too terrified to move, even to barricade the door, the a different, slightly braver student barricades the door, which later in the email becomes “if we hadn’t put the barricade up when we did” and they are all happy to hear the gunman go away and kill some other students.

And here’s another point: the professor I mentioned, Liviu Librescu, 76, died protecting a bunch of young men and women of military age who were bravely, bravely, bravely, running away.

Somehow, that doesn’t compute. Perhaps it was because he was born before the modern age of cowardice.

By the way, it usual when a writer, (such as myself, or John Derbyshire) blogs about some public display of cowardice, to send him ranting emails accusing him of chickenhawkery, and asking “What would you do…?” All such emails will be ignored unless accompanied by a credible challenge to an actual duel.

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, there was an attempt going around D.C. to kill my American Conservative article “Obama’s Identity Crisis” before I’d even finished it. Now, the would-be censor, some guy named Alexander Konetzki, recounts in the Washington Monthly his heroic effort to silence my questioning of the Presidential candidate’s media image:

(more…)

Via Ann Althouse’s blog, ["My parents are actually worried about retaliation against Asians."] I see another report of unwarranted backlash fears Brenda wrote about, which of course haven’t come true. (The blog Occidentalism reminds us that when two Korean girls were killed in road accident by the American troops who have guarded the Republic of Korea for the past 57 year, Koreans indulged in an orgy of hate, rioting and beating white people.)

There’s also this claim by Margaret Cho,

I look at the shooter’s expressionless face on the news and he looks so familiar, like he could be in my family. Just another one of us. But how can he be us when what he has done is so terrible? Here is where I can really envy white people because when white people do something that is inexplicably awful, so brutally and horribly wrong, nobody says – “do you think it is because he is white?” There are no headlines calling him the “White shooter.” There is no mention of race because there is no thought in anyone’s mind that his race had anything to do with his crime.

Althouse asks

Do Americans deserve this criticism? Is “so much attention is focused on the Asian-ness of the shooter”? If we want to avoid bigotry, let’s also think about whether it’s right to characterize Americans this way.

Here’s the thing about crimes committed by white people in American, crimes like the Texas Tower shooting in 1966, or the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or the Columbine Massacre. They’re all characterized by both the American mainstream media, and even more so by the British and European media, as “American crimes.” And what they mean is white American crimes, since black American crime, while greater in absolute numbers gets far less coverage.

When they say an “American gun culture,” or an “American culture of violence,” what they mean is a white American culture of violence. The black American culture of violence gets less coverage, and what anti-Americans think of as the crimes of America (in foreign policy, or whatever) are the crimes of white America.

Trust me, white people get blamed for a lot, including, of course, by Margaret Cho,.

Earlier I reported that the AAJA had asked reporters “to avoid references to the race of Cho Seung-Hui, the student who killed 33 people at the Virginia Tech campus yesterday.” A number of people have complained about them doing this, but they’re still at it.

AAJA : News : AAJA News : Media Advisory: Continuing Coverage on Virginia Tech Shooting
Media Advisory: Continuing Coverage on Virginia Tech Shooting

AAJA Shares in Litany of Condolences: Like the rest of the nation, the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) expresses its condolences to victims, survivors and their families and friends as they cope with the tragedy and loss of lives at Virginia Tech. The following advisory was issued to media on Tuesday, April 17.

Contact: Janice Lee, 415-346-2051, JaniceL@aaja.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SAN FRANCISCO (April 17, 2007) — Now that the identity of the suspected shooter at Virginia Tech is known, AAJA cautions the use of his heritage or immigrant status in news coverage.

We understand the need to research the background of Seung-Hui Cho (first name is pronounced “sung hee”) and to provide details about him as a nation struggles to make sense of the horrific incident.

But we are disturbed by some media outlets’ prominent mention that the suspect is an immigrant from South Korea when such a revelation provides no insight or relevance to the story. [Emphasis added]

The fact he is not a U.S. citizen and was here on the basis of a green card, while interesting, should not be a primary focus in the profiling of him. To highlight that suggests his immigration status played a role in the shootings; there’s been no such evidence.

We remind the media that the use of racial and other identifiers must be accompanied with context and relevance. Without it, we open the door to subjecting an entire people to unfair treatment or portrayal based on their skin color or national heritage.

First of all, the idea that someone’s race or national origin “provides no insight or relevance to the story” is a lie–it’s incredibly relevant. A citizen of one country shoots 60 residents of another country, killing 32 of them and it’s not relevant?

Anyway, relevance is not the Asian-American Journalists [send them mail] decision; it’s the decision of the journalists and the readers.

But here’s a question:if someone’s race and nationality aren’t relevant, why is the AAJA (along with other similar organizations) always whining that there aren’t enough minority journalists?

The Today’s Letter from an Afrikaner Refugee underscores how national identity and culture must be at the center of the immigration debate.

In early 2004, I met a girl who lived in Arizona. I asked her what she thought about Prop 200 (which would have restricted privileges given to illegal aliens.) She supported it, but said she felt like a hypocrite because her family moved into a conservative Tucson suburb from South Africa and overstayed their visas. They had made friends there, and her neighbors did what they could to get her family legal residency (they succeeded.) Nonetheless, they were all virulently against illegal immigration, and legal immigration from Mexico.

This girl, probably not wanting to be perceived as a racist or at least make her neighbors look racists, said the double standard had to do with the fact that there family was well off, she went to private school and they wouldn’t go on welfare. Nonetheless, it seems clear that both she and all her neighbors recognized, even if they didn’t admit it, was the problem with immigration, whether it was legal or illegal had little to do with rule of law, national security, or whatever justification they wished to give, but rather who was immigrating. I would have never guessed this girl was an immigrant had she not told me, and their family were able to seamlessly assimilate into American culture. Hispanics who have been here for generations, have yet to do so.

Yet, many restrictionists eager to prove they are not racist, have needlessly gone after the White South Africans. In 2006 FAIR president Dan Stein’s Stein Report jubilantly proclaimed “Supreme Court Knocks Down Another Bad Asylum Decision by 9th Circuit” What was the ruling? The 9th Circuit court had given refugee status to White South Africans who had faced threats from local blacks. [Read the decision in PDF]

In general, I don’t really like pontificating off unique and/or extreme events. (For example, Koreans have extremely low murder rates, so this mass murder isn’t at all representative of a general pattern for them. Cho may well have doubled the Korean murder rate in America for the year, or even decade.) The sample size for these type of events is too small to determine a previously unobserved trend.

Nonetheless, let me toss out a bit of wholly unwarranted speculation about the influence of recent South Korean pop culture. South Korean movies and music (e.g., hip hop by returning Korean Americans rappers with street cred in Asia because they grew up on the mean streets of San Marino or wherever) are super cool now in Japan. The trendier Korean movies are, I hear, awfully violent. I made it through about ten minutes before fleeing of the popular South Korean film “Oldboy,” which makes Quentin Tarantino’s movies look like Erich Rohmer’s. It’s part of a series with “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” which I managed to avoid completely. (Not all South Korean films are quite so carnage-filled.) I have no idea if the shooter was a fan of pop culture developments in the country he left when he was about ten, but it’s a possibility.

A more likely connection to pre-existing social patterns is between this loner who first shot a coed whom he considered his girlfriend (while the poor girl seemed to disagree), and the frustrations caused by the Dating Disparity.

Or then again, he may have just been plumb crazy, so speculating won’t get us anywhere. We shall see…

A Taiwanese-American reader adds:

“On Virginia Tech, I don’t think the media has really examined why the gunman majored in English and his working-class parents let him pursue a major that has very little job prospects and therefore prospects for good relationships with women. Most students of his social circle are urged to find a good major for a good job such as accounting, medicine, law, pharmacy, engineering etc. I recently had a conversation with an older Chinese gentlemen and he said, in his days in Taiwan, if a young man majored in in the humanities, it was impossible for him to find a wife.”

[Crossposted at Isteve.com]

In such a grim week, it is pleasant to get some good news. Yesterday morning, an email from the proprietor of the interesting anti-Mexican-merger website Oklahoma Corridor Watch arrived. It alerted me to the victory in the Oklahoma State Senate of the patriotic forces: the bill discussed here on Saturday seriously discouraging the presence of illegal immigrants in the state passed overwhelmingly, 41-6.

The proposal — House Bill 1804 — passed after lengthy debate. It now goes to the House, which previously passed an earlier version of the bill.

House author, Rep. Randy Terrill, R-Moore, expects
it to pass easily.

“For all practical purposes, this bill is sitting on the governor’s desk,” Terrill said.

(Immigration bill approved by Senate after long debate By Barbara Hoberock and Leigh Bell Tulsa World April 17 2007)

The Governor, Democrat Brad Henry, is apparently hiding under his desk. He ran advertisements last election declaring himself against illegal immigration and now faces a

…measure is described as the toughest state immigration bill in the nation

(State Senate Approves Sweeping Immigration Legislation KOTV.com April 17 2007)

Representative Terry sounds happy and the Governor’s staff does not

(Terrill) urged Henry to sign the bill… called “veto-proof” because it passed the House 88-9 and the Senate 41-6.
“Governor Henry supports responsible and effective immigration reform, but he will not pass final judgment on this bill until he has had an opportunity to closely review the final version of the legislation,” said Paul Sund, his communications director.

(Capitol: Senate passes illegal-immigration measure By John Greiner NewsOK.com Tuesday April 17 2007 Access requires free registration)

Also not happy are the national MSM. Of the 80 news stories carried by Google News on the legislation at this writing, two thirds are actually about the State Senate approving the Water Melon as the state vegetable. That story has appeared all over the country. At present, only Oklahoma news outlets have reported on the illegal immigrant measure, even though it is certain to be a national trend setter.

It depends what the definition of “good” is, I suppose.