BIGOTRY OR BRAVERY

The Guardian's Gary Younge's prominently featured opinion piece, "Take a potshot at the powerless, and you too can win a medal of valour ", is typical lefty rubbish. Younge starts off by characterizing recently departed Harvard president Lawrence Summers as unfit for the job:

And so it was last month that Summers resigned from Harvard having alienated much of the faculty, who were about to pass the second no-confidence motion against him in a year. During his short presidency Mr Summers notched up some notable successes but even more enemies. Clashes with one of the nation's most prominent black academics, Cornel West, prompted West to defect to Princeton.

Meanwhile Summers supported the army's right to recruit on campus. And most famously, last year he argued that women were genetically ill-equipped to excel at the highest levels of maths and science.

So, where are the powerless who are being potshot at? Cornel West certainly isn't powerless and probably deserved Summers' criticism:

Early in his tenure, he criticized high-profile African-American Studies professor Cornel West in a private meeting between the two, alleging grade inflation in West's introductory ethnic studies course and criticizing West for devoting too much time to extracurricular pursuits in political activism and spoken-word poetry, which he mistakenly characterized as rap music. West responded angrily and publicly, and later accepted an open invitation to transfer to Princeton University.

Wests' extra-curricular activities seem to be the crux of the confrontation:

Summers, in one of his meetings with West, allegedly accused West of devoting too much time and attention to political activities and traditionally non-academic pursuits, such as producing a hip hop album (the critically-panned Sketches of my Culture) at the expense of his teaching and academic responsibilities.

The Harvard Crimson reporting:

Summers enraged members of the Afro-American Studies department by meeting with West and reportedly criticizing the professor for his outside activities, including working with the Rev. Al Sharpton’s presidential campaign and recording a rap album during a medical leave of absence.

Then there's the matter of Summers' supposed attack on women:

The president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, sparked an uproar at an academic conference Friday when he said that innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers. Summers also questioned how much of a role discrimination plays in the dearth of female professors in science and engineering at elite universities.

Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on Summers' talk, saying later that if she hadn't left, ''I would've either blacked out or thrown up." Five other participants reached by the Globe, including Denice D. Denton, chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, also said they were deeply offended, while four other attendees said they were not.

Summers said he was only putting forward hypotheses based on the scholarly work assembled for the conference, not expressing his own judgments -- in fact, he said, more research needs to be done on these issues. The organizer of the conference at the National Bureau of Economic Research said Summers was asked to be provocative, and that he was invited as a top economist, not as a Harvard official.

Jeez, imagine lefty academic females being offended by globalization advocate Summers.

Summers is to be commended for supporting military recruitment on campus. Unless, that is, Harvard students are so feeble minded as to be unable to resist enticements to sign away their lives.

Anyway, Younge's point is that people like Summers aren't brave, they're bigots. This carries over to the publication of the controversial Mohammed cartoons:

It may still be the right thing to do - the weak should not be protected from criticism nor the strong denied praise solely on the grounds of their relative material strength. But those who choose Goliath's corner cannot then claim underdog status once David gets out his slingshot. Take the Danish cartoons. They were first printed in a country that supports the war in Iraq, where the far-right Danish People's party receives 13% of the vote and where, according to the Danish Institute for Human Rights, racially motivated crimes doubled between 2004 and 2005.

Younge then has a cry about "political correctness":

Over the last month "political correctness" has been used in the British press on average 10 times a day - twice as frequently as "Islamophobia", three times as "homophobia" and four times as "sexism". Its ubiquity is due in no small part to its flexibility. During that period it has been used to refer to the ill-treatment of rabbits, the teaching of Gaelic, Mozart's opera La Clemenza di Tito, a flower show in Paris and the naming of the Mazda3 MPS. But it's most commonly evoked to suggest that honest conversations are being curtailed by a liberal establishment intent on imposing its ideological beliefs on an unwilling public.

Quite where this establishment resides (other than in the minds of the right), where it gets its power and how it exercises it is far from clear - given the reactionary state of the world it is doing a terrible job. Since only about 5% of daily newspapers bought by people in Britain could be described as progressive, there is plenty of room in the national discourse for rightwing people to say whatever they want. And they do. But once this straw man has been invented, you need only knock him down to earn your medal of valour. It is true that some ways of behaving and speaking that were once mainstream are no longer acceptable.

If only 5% of papers bought by the British are progressive – which I doubt – maybe it's because of the whiny bullshit they're padded out with.

Update: Summers' position on military recruitment on campus has been vindicated:

A unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that universities that get federal funds must allow military recruiters on campus, even if their law schools oppose the Pentagon's policy prohibiting openly gays and lesbians from serving.

The high court upheld as constitutional a federal law dating back to 1994 that allows the government to withhold money from universities that deny military recruiters the same access to campuses given to other employers.