BURN BABY BURN
Race is so radioactive that no 'respectable' journalist will report on it honestly
BY KEN WARD

Nothing gets American jingoes going like a full-scale Paris riot. Shocked by the sight of rampaging Muslims and French-fried cars burning night after night, our pundit class blazed away with righteous condemnation and assurances that such things could never happen HERE.

After all, our system is so vastly superior. Our Africans are treated with the utmost respect. Our religious and racial tolerance knows no bounds. Our inner cities are urban oases compared with the baleful banlieue that ring gay Paree.

Apparently, these commentators don't get out much.

It's easy to mock the populist pomposity of egalitie, libertie, fraternitie. Certainly one can make a case that there is more opportunity and social mobility in the good ol' USA than one finds in old Europe.

But big, fatuous neoconservatives go overboard when they ignore the ethnic and economic fissures fracturing this country. Do they not remember the bleak backwater that was and is New Orleans (before and after Katrina)? Are they blind to the daily invasion across our southern border? Or to the steady rise and political exploitation of "hate crimes."

As useful idiots, Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are no better - and really no different - than "progressives" like Jeremy Rifkin, who penned the not-so-prescient book, The European Dream, touting continental superiority. Since Paris blew up in his face, this old lefty has been blessedly quiet.

These bourgeois analysts are so busy plumping for the global economy or parroting socialist dogma that they miss the fundamental problem plaguing both America and Europe: race.

Race is so radioactive that no "respectable" journalist will report on it honestly (e.g., you've probably never heard that black-on-white attacks are by far the most common cross-racial crime). Yet make no mistake: It is racial animus that sparks conflagration -- whether it's Islmofascists running amok in Toulouse or blacks trashing Toledo, Ohio.

For all the neocons' blather, America's blacks are Uncle Abe's nightmare. Their jobless rate nearly triples the national average, and 30 percent of unemployed blacks don't even look for work anymore. Amid a scourge of (unpublicized) black-on-white crime, more blacks are in prison than in college, three of every four black children are born out of wedlock and HIV-AIDS rates are epidemic. 

And blacks aren't even this country's biggest minority anymore. Where one-third of the births in France are by Muslim mothers, a majority of births in a growing number of U.S. cities are Mestizo (often taxpayer subsidized). As millions breaking the law to get here, illegal workers from Mexico and points south typically toil in a slave-like scheme that drives down wages for the rest of the underclass.

Ernesto Cienfuegos, rabble-rouser for the Aztlan movement in the Southwest, calls his folk "America's Palestinians" and predicts a racial explosion that will make the French disturbances look "tame."

Middle Americans dismiss these warning signs at their own peril. With minorities now the majority in our two largest states, California and Texas, this country's middle class is shrinking, benefits are disappearing and good-paying jobs are exported.

At the same time, government is metastasizing into a social-welfare state that panders to Third Worlders hooked on handouts. That may keep the lid on the pressure cooker, but for how long and at what cost? The only difference between today's Republican and Democratic parties is that the GOP will get us to Karl Marx Square (or Les Champs-Elysees) one day later.

Presiding over this transformation is a "conservative" president so steeped in multiculturalism that he quotes from the Quran and regularly hosts Muslim leaders at the White House. It's almost like 9/11 never happened.

Even if we dodge the next terrorist bullet, our leaky borders and combustible cities invite upheaval. A land founded by white Christian Europeans has devolved into a polyglot agglomeration where race - the historic core of national identity - is a divider, not a unifier. When peaceful Nazi demonstrations in support of beleaguered white families touched off black rioters in Ohio's heartland recently, the fuse is lit and the powder keg is full.

Like the feckless Jacques Chirac, George W. Bush stumbles along, appointing a succession of unqualified Latin American arrivistes to "run" what's left of our immigration, customs and border patrol agencies. While some 300,000 criminal aliens elude authorities' grasp, King George & Co. lobby for "legal" ways to import still more cheap labor.

Political hacks are abetted by politically correct drones in our Fourth Estate. "Europe will see growing ethnic tensions as birthrates drop and the continent is forced to rely on immigrants for its labor force," Errol Louis writes in the New York Daily News. Had Louis, who is black, stripped off his blinders, he would see the same time bomb ticking here.

The multicultural agenda of 21st-century America eerily echoes the communist palaver about us all being citizens of the world. Ironically, that also works for global capitalists, who never miss an opportunity to breach borders in the name of diversity and profits. The farther we go down that road, the more we resemble Brazil or Mexico ... or France - and the closer we get to the torch. LW

Ken Ward was assistant managing editor of the Las Vegas Sun and a freelance columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He writes from Florida. E-mail him at kenricward@juno.com.