Redneck Nation (18 page)

Setting aside the “Republican budget cuts turned me into a looter” nonsense, the cultural condescension drenching this statement
is nauseating. I know lots of people who make “different inferences for young black men” than they do for others. I grew up
with these inferers, watched them gather around burning crosses among the scrub oaks of Lexington County, South Carolina,
and heard their ignorant claims of white supremacy and the inherent inferiority of black culture. I just never thought I would
hear a black lawyer north of Ohio make these inferences, and without an objection from the local black community and civic
leadership. But then again, what would the purveyors of southern-style victim status object to? Sims is merely preaching from
the gospel of cultural exceptional-ism, which is the accepted doctrine in the Redneck Nation.

Fortunately for reason and justice, the judge in this case rejected the “looting as an alternative lifestyle” argument and
he gave the looters a race-neutral sentence. The judge argued, as I do, that even if you were a member of a social or ethnic
group that accepted and promoted crime and violence as a norm, there is no reason for the rest of us to accommodate your cultural
proclivities.

And there are indeed cultures of death and violence jockeying for our attention, as every American learned on September 11,
2001.

I had hoped that one of the unintended bits of collateral
damage of 9/11 would be the death of multiculturalism. How could Americans continue to make the southern argument that no
culture was inherently bad or good after three thousand of our fellow citizens were killed by practicing members in good standing
with modern Muslim fundamentalism?

In the days immediately after the terrorist attacks, Confederate-style multiculturalism was clearly on the ropes. TV ads appeared
that would have been unimaginable in the ethno-maniacal era of Clinton. The most moving ad I saw featured child after child
from various ethnic groups and religions, each announcing solemnly and with determination, “I am an American.” It was as though
our nation’s entire supply of hyphens had been wiped out in a single blast. You could almost feel David Duke and Al Sharpton
cringing in their lairs.

But the loyalty to our Union didn’t last. Soon there were black firefighters in Florida complaining about riding in trucks
flying the American flag, while one of them insisted “that isn’t our flag.” (So, can I get you a Confederate one?) Then some
American Muslims began complaining that all this talk about fighting terror should in no way discourage Palestinians from
killing Jews. And on and on.

If America ever needed an object lesson in the dangers of irrational multiculturalism and regional exceptionalism, we got
it in the aftermath of September 11 as we tried to apply Western values to the violent, arcane warrior faith of Islam.

If ever there was a candidate for thorough and utter cultural rejection, it is Muslim fundamentalism. As practiced in the
vast majority of Middle Eastern nations, Islam is a religion
of peace in the same way that Nazism was a philosophy of racial understanding.

“We understand that you are a Jew. Get in the truck.”

Even the most cursory review of the teachings of Islam (a word that means “submission,” not “peace,” by the way) reveals that,
in addition to the encouragement of admirable traits like compassion, self-control, and sobriety, it is a faith that teaches
its followers to kill in the name of God. Wake up, say your prayers, skip the bacon, cane your wife, kill an infidel, and
call it a day.

No other major Western religion in the twenty-first century allows for the killing of the unconverted. None. The tired arguments
that Christians launched the Crusades and have engaged in anti-Semitic violence miss the point entirely. Yes, Christians have
killed in the name of Christ, but they have always been hard-pressed to demonstrate that the killings were His idea. Western
culture is a violent culture
despite
the teachings of Christ, not because of them.

But look at the nations governing themselves by Islam and its laws, or
shari‘a
. These are places where, under direct orders of their faith and its recognized leaders, the government lops off heads, hands,
and other limbs in the name of Allah. You’ll also find the rejection of democracy, prohibitions on the practice of other religions,
public executions for “crimes” like adultery, and governmental support for fatwas ordering the death of infidels and blasphemers.

I laugh whenever I hear a modern American Muslim insist that these nations do not represent mainstream Islam. They remind
me of the earnest young woman at Oral Roberts University who tried to convince me that most
sorority girls are virgins. They both need to check their math.

Once again, multiculturalists ask me to accept the beheadings, stonings, and dictatorships as inappropriate perhaps for America
but part of the cultural life of the Middle East. Okay, fine. But what of the Muslim subculture in America that brings these
Neanderthal notions to us?

After the Twin Towers fell, many Americans were upset to learn that hundreds of thousands of Muslims live in America, as residents
and citizens, but feel no loyalty to the idea of America. They send their children to schools like the Muslim Community School
in Potomac, Maryland, where kids learn that the greatest government is an Islamic government and that democracy should only
be tolerated, not celebrated.

In an interview with the
Washington Post
, one Muslim seventh grader asked, “What does it really mean to be an American? Being American is just being born in this
country.” Another Muslim Community School student added, “If I had to choose sides, I’d stay with being Muslim. Being an American
means nothing to me. I’m not even proud of telling my cousins in Pakistan that I’m American.”

This school has 150 students, mostly from middle-class and affluent families. Their parents are educated and enjoying the
liberty and opportunity of America. And they are paying good money for their children to learn that this isn’t their country.

How fascinating it is that these academics have been around for years but until the terrorist attacks of 2001, nobody noticed.
Mullahs and imams have been preaching divided loyalties, supporting murderous fatwas, and sending millions of dollars to terrorist
organizations abroad like
Hamas and Hezbollah. But until 9/11, this radically anti-Western culture, active right in our communities, never caught our
attention.

Five toothless goobers get together in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and rant about establishing a white Christian nation and it’s
a full episode of
20/20
, but hundreds of thousands of Muslims gather each week to discuss the proper context in which to kill the infidels, and it
doesn’t even make the Metro section of the
New York Times
.

I’m not making the pathetic “The only group you’re allowed to hate is the straight, white Christian male” argument. I’m glad
to see the media hammer fall every time the pointy, empty head of the KKK pops up. But how did we end up with an America so
attuned to divisive ideas that calls for tax cuts are denounced on the floor of Congress as racist “code words” by Congressman
Charles Rangel of New York, but a mosque full of Muslims can openly support terrorists who target Israelis and nobody notices?

It’s easy, once you buy the southern notion of cultural exceptionalism, which is, of course, the entire underpinning of the
modern multicultural movement.

Perhaps it’s my inner redneck speaking, by the way, but I have no problem whatsoever denouncing Arab Muslim culture as a whole.
I’m not rejecting the idea that there are differences in culture, North and South, or West versus East. I’m rejecting the
redneck notion that you can’t tell the difference between the good ones and the bad ones, the argument that every culture
clash must end with “You wear your X and I’ll wear mine.”

In fact, I would argue that the violent, suspicious, and ignorant Islamo-facist living in Pakistan or Palestine today is the
cultural equivalent of the stereotypical redneck of
American lore. Modern Arabia is nearly a dead-on parallel to the Appalachian mountain society Mencken wrote about during the
Scopes trial. They cling almost blindly to their religious leaders, reject the very idea of rational, scientific thought as
being necessary, and view every outsider as a threat to the virtue of their daughters.

A year after the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks—even after the terrorist Osama bin Laden acknowledged his responsibility—media
reports indicate that vast numbers of these Muslim morons believe that the attacks were carried out by the Jews, with the
help of the CIA.

Gee, I have a handful of callers to my radio shows who think the same thing. They also believe in the Illuminati, the Trilateralist
Conspiracy, and that the fluoride in their drinking water is a scheme of the United Nations to make their brains more receptive
to low-frequency radio transmissions. Oh, and one more thing: Nobody takes these idiots seriously.

Aha, Michael! You mock Muslim culture for its paranoiacs but acknowledge that America has its own loonies as well. This proves
that every culture truly is equal!

Not quite. In America, people this stupid represent the fringe. In the Middle East, the fringe is everyone else.

Imagine, for example, if Pat Robertson appeared on tele-vision tomorrow and said, “I just got a message from Juh-EE-sus, and
he said for uh-you tuh go OW-ut and kill all the uh-abortion doctors,” every Christian sect would denounce him on the spot.
Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, even rural Pentecostals would put down their snakes long enough to say, “Hey. That ain’t right.”

But educated Muslims around the world openly support jihad terror. Respected imams instruct their followers to kill
in the name of Allah. When the leaders of the fifty-seven Islamic nations met in 2002, they couldn’t agree that an eighteen-year-old
who strapped herself with explosives and detonated them in a shopping mall was a terrorist. Far from denouncing these homicide
bombers who targeted civilians, these leaders of the Islamic world promised thousands of dollars in rewards to the families
of “martyrs.” But as the editor of the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
put it in April 2002: “One person’s suicide bomber is another person’s freedom fighter.” And as the southern plantation owners
would have gladly told you, “One man’s slave owner is another man’s caretaker.”

In fact, modern Muslims are in very much the same position as American Christians before the Civil War. Slave owners and their
allies used the Bible’s clear and indisputable acceptance of slavery to construct a theology of Christian slavery. They made
strong, Scripture-based arguments that slavery not only was acceptable but was, indeed, God’s will.

In America, this corrupt appeal to religion over justice didn’t work. The argument over slavery was settled at Appomattox,
not at divinity school. But the antislavery argument kept Christianity on the side of righteousness, rather than let it become
hijacked by self-interested extremists. Will modern Islamists step forward to wage a similar fight?

If not, then their rednecks will win, too.

M
ario Savio, where are you when we need you?

Where is the “eloquent, disheveled philosophy student” who, according to the
San Francisco Chronicle
, “kicked off the fiery Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley” in November 1964?

It could be argued that Mario Savio won the civil rights battle of the 1960s single-handedly. Standing atop a police squad
car in Berkeley, unsteady in his stocking feet, urging students to “fight the power,” Savio became the symbol of the most
fundamental of the civil rights over which America struggled: free speech.

And once speech—ideas, arguments, intellectual confrontation—became the battleground, the Old South was doomed to defeat.

And, oh my, how Mr. Savio must have appeared to Southerners hunched over their corn bread and collard greens watching Walter
Cronkite on their black-and-white TVs, sending a shudder through every white southern father with a daughter in a co-ed college.

There were no Mario Savios down South because Southerners have never cared much for the notion of freedom of expression. As
a southern friend once told me when I played the “free speech” card during an argument, “Michael, you got the right to say
whatever you want as long as you keep it to yourself.”

Free speech and good manners are irreconcilable values: Talk long enough and somebody’s gonna get hurt. So most civilized
southern households live by the dictum “If you can’t say something nice, shut up and drink.”

Then again, as a Southerner who never learned either to shut up or hold my liquor, I frequently ran into that other edict
of southern conversation: “I may not like what you say, but I will defend with my life the right to give you an ass whoopin’
if you open your big fat mouth one more time.”

Believe me, I know. I was banned from the South Carolina public radio network for making fun of the state legislature. Banned,
as in “forbidden to appear; silenced; censored by the government.” Only in the South, right?

What annoyed me is that I had done nothing wrong. My (unpaid) job at the time was to provide humorous commentary each week
for one of the insufferably humorless programs on our government-run radio network. Each week I wrote a commentary, submitted
the script for approval, recorded the approved text, and handed it over to be edited yet again.

One week my comments focused on a new ethics bill just approved by the General Assembly, a body that featured, at the time,
at least one felon convicted of election fraud. Any ethics bill he could support had to be topnotch, I opined, and besides:
“South Carolinians don’t
care about ethics in government. Bar all criminals from the state legislature, and there won’t be enough members left to convene
a quorum, much less provide the entertaining election scandals to which we’ve become accustomed.”