4/30/2004

The Editor-in-Chief of the Cornell Review, the campus publication which launced Ann Coulter and Dinesh D'Souza, shares a "hilarious" story. Given that I'm apparently too dense to get the joke, maybe some intrepid reader can explain it to me. A group of Cornell students sets up a mock-up of Camp X-Ray at which they act out detaining passing students in order to demonstrate the illegality of American human rights violations in Guantanamo Bay (a position I've taken here before). The Cornell Review sends a group of counter-protesters dressed up as Muslim terrorists to pretend to kill passing students, hoping to demonstrate that if not for America's handling of inmates in Camp X-Ray, all of those inmates would be out killing people. A group of other students, whom we'll call the counter-counter-protesters, begin mingling with the counter-protesters and yelling "All Muslims are terrorists! Kill all Muslims!" hoping to demonstrate what they see as the real message of the counter-protest. Then in comes the counter-counter-counter-protester. According to Paul Eastlund, Editor-in-Chief of the Review, Nick is an uber-conservative who we'd never met before, but who hung out with us pretty much all day, and he is one of the coolest guys I've ever met...Nick stayed around and helped deal with jerks and hecklers all day. Occasionally he shouted things like "Support the Middle East Glass-Making Program" and "They don't deserve 3 meals a day, they deserve a bullet to the head." At one point, a few hecklers decided to pretend they were with us, and shouted "All Muslims are terrorists!" and "Kill all Muslims!" Before we could insist that we weren't saying anything of the sort, Nick responded by shouting "All Muslims are terrorists!" and "Kill all Muslims!" They were dumbfounded. It was pretty hilarious. In other words, the Editor-in-Chief of the Cornell Review is glad that his guys showed those hippies a thing or two by responding to the allegation that labelling everyone in Camp X-Ray as a terrorist who should be shot to death demonstrates racism by...yelling racist things. You get it? Me neither. But maybe Jonah Goldberg, Editor-at-Large of The National Review, who linked the piece, can explain it to me. Update: Here