Why I hate Michelle Malkin

My mom once told me that projecting the crimes of a few onto the shoulders of the many is very easy yet very wrong. When she said that to me, I was 14 had just been mugged and had my Walkman stolen. I had said some preposterous thing about blacks. I honestly don't even remember what it was

Even though this column is nearly three years old, it made me very angry. In it, Malkin describes the imbalance of covering Winona Ryder's shoplifting charge - a big story then - vs. not covering what she calls "the Wichita Massacre" - where 4 people were killed by two men.

Yes, the media has some messed up priorities. For instance, the Michael Jackson trial. What relevance does that have on anyone's life besides Mr. Jackson and the kid? Nobody's.

However, she gives a stupid reason why the Wichita murders should've been wall-to-wall coverage: the perps were black. She then says that had the four been people of color and the perps white, there would've been big coverage in the news. I think she's getting at the coverage of the killing of James Byrd, Jr. in 1998.

The difference, of course, is that Byrd's slaughter was racially motivated while the Wichita murders, as sad as they are, were not. The Wichita victims were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. The killers didn't seek them out, the four just happened to be home when the perps broke in.

It's like comparing apples to Diet Coke.

That's why I don't like Malkin. Too often, she tries to take race to places it doesn't belong. Like the War on Terror. She's written an entire book about how Japanese internment during WWII was good and even proposes that it wouldn't be so bad if we did it with Arabs today.

There are black racists out there, to be sure. I've encountered a few in my life, having grown up in mostly black neighborhoods. It seems to me that it's mostly older people. Those are the only black people that have had a problem with me. Well, them and the fathers of a few girls I dated in high school :o). But there's not this plan to kill white people that she seems to imply.

I think the bigger threat in the coming years, however, will not be racism, but xenophobia. Unfortunately, I see this more and more, with the term "Mexican" becoming a general derogatory word describing anyone of Hispanic origin.