I'm not prejudiced, but...

Last week, some idiot from the Fredericksburg, VA Free Lance-Star wrote a totally ignorant and transparently bigoted opinion piece extolling the virtues of the west for apparently stopping the Muslim barbarians from conquering the entire world. I will not post it here, but you can read it for yourself if you wish.

There were a couple of good responses to this article which can be found here and here. As the second reader pointed out, one of the more mind-boggling statements in the opinion piece were the author's defense of Serbian genocide of Bosnian Muslims during the Bosnian war.

But I'm not totally dismayed by the article. At least he wears his bigotry on his sleeve. The worst type of hate propaganda is that which disguises itself in supposedly unbiased commentary. The kind that says, "I'm not prejudiced--clearly--but let me pepper my article with carefully-chosen 'objective' factoids that will convince any reasonable person to share my hidden prejudices and embrace them as fact."

I found a really good example of this in a tourism guide of Israel that I read recently. A small section entitled "racism" appears at first to denounce racism against Arabs amongst Isralis, but then offhandedly cites examples of terrorist acts against Israelis. The section ends with a quote from a friend of his who "normally" holds a humanitarian political stance: "We've got to do something about these Arabs!" ....ahem.