Another young Muslim woman is murdered by a family member, in this case her father, and the cable news outlets which can't give enough coverage to the murders of Caucasian women slain by relatives, can't be bothered to even report the news. John Avlon at the New York Post wonders why. He concludes that the media doesn't want to emphasize a story that discredits the multicultural narrative that the left has promoted for the last two decades.
Perhaps this is so, but I'm beginning to wonder. Could there not be a tincture of lower expectations among journalists when it comes to certain demographic groups? Might there be a feeling of well, that's just how these people are and one can't expect much better from them? Civilization is an achievement of white Europeans, and those others who have adopted their assumptions. Perhaps, buried in the psyches of a lot of journalists, is the assumption that a desert plant transplanted to a rain forest is still a desert plant and nothing will change it much.
Surely if a Caucasian American father murdered his daughter because she wanted out of an unhappy arranged marriage the media would be all over the story, especially if the father were a putative Christian. Perhaps the reason is that this is unusual behavior for white Christians, but when blacks in our cities kill each other by the tens of thousands every year, or Muslims kill their own daughters the media treat it as little more than a sad statistic. It's as if they think it would be somehow racist to call attention to the dysfunctionalities in these communities, and appearing racist is the very last thing a good liberal wants.
Yet isn't the real racism the refusal to hold people to the same standard as everyone else? Isn't the real racism the belief that some groups just can't be expected to behave in a civilized, moral manner? Isn't the real racism what President Bush has called the "soft bigotry of diminished expectations"?
Perhaps we do others no favors with all our talk of uneven playing fields, historical disadvantages, tolerating diversity and the equal value of all cultures. Perhaps the best thing we can do for other ethnic and racial groups in our society is to tell them that the standard white Americans are expected to meet is the standard that they are expected to meet, and that there are no excuses for failing to meet it.
As a society we need to adopt the same slogan that athletes live by: Excuses are for losers.
RLC