Racial preferences through the back door

On Tuesday, Michigan voters will be considering the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, a ballot measure that would make it unlawful for public employers, public contractors and public schools, to discriminate or grant preferential treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity, skin color, gender or national origin. The initiative was spearheaded by Jennifer Gratz, a white woman who was denied admission to the University of Muchigan and took her lawsuit to the Supreme Court, which ruled the university had violated the constitution, but still allowed that some use of racial factors was justified.

Calfornia's Ward Connerly, who led the similar Proposition 209 to passage in California 10 years ago, has been assisting her, and the San Francisco Chronicle is covering his efforts as an outside agitator. Of course, they don't use that term, but a bit of nuance may be there.

Civil rights groups like the NAACP and the Urban League have visited Michigan in recent weeks to oppose the initiative. And experts from UC Berkeley have gone to speak about the dropping proportion of African American students in California's public colleges and universities and the impact the ban has had on admissions at law and medical schools.

The article makes no mention of the efforts of some of these same groups in California, supplemented by academic insiders, to subvert if not flout the law in California. In a separate story on a separate day, the Chron reports in a deadpan tone on a conference at UC Berkeley of those who think we still need a butcher's thumb on the scale when it comes to certain special minorities getting into the elite campuses of the University of California system.

The University of California disproportionately serves the state's highest-income, best-educated families, and UC needs to look beyond test scores so high-school graduates from all backgrounds get a fair chance of being admitted, say two faculty reports released Friday. UC should consider dramatically cutting the number of freshman applicants guaranteed admission because their high-school grades and UC eligibility test scores are highest, the reports say.

At the same time, the university should drastically increase the number of slots awarded after a comprehensive review of all applications from students with at least a C average on UC-required prep courses, the reports say. Comprehensive review of a broader applicant pool would point up such qualities as leadership and "spark," according to one report, which argues that such factors are better predicters than SAT scores of a student's success..

Why on earth should admission to the most demanding and rigorous campuses be presumed to be a matter of distributional equity? It is a matter of who can understand, master, and use the education, not a matter of handing out benefits to aggrieved constituencies.

Membership on the Berkeley football team is not regarded as a matter of distributional equity. Where is the state's large Asian American population when it comes to the Cal Bears, who are Rose Bowl hopefuls this year? Cal and UCLA are playing Saturday and it will be broadcast on ABC for the nation to see. Please keep a count of all the Asian American players you see on the field. It won't be too demanding. Asian Americans constitute almost half the students at the two highly competitive campuses - because of their hard work and intelligence, not because they were handed a boon by an all-caring goverment.

The same goes for the football teams. The members were selected because of their excellence. I want to have future surgeons, lawyers, engineers, and philosophers gradauted by schools comprised of the best and the brightest, not some C-average students with hard luck stories.

If the football teams were selected on the racial distribution theory, nobody would be hjarmed the way an incompetent surgeon or engineer can cause harm. But nobody dares suggest such a system for football teams because the incompetence would be visible to everyone watching on TV and in the stadia, and there would be consequences.

The people have spoken in California, as they will speak in Michigan next week. The elitists who condescend to certain minorities by the bigotry of lower expectations insult the voters, subvert the law, and damage higher education and society through their intended back door manipulation of the admissions systems. They are despicable, yet self-righteous.

I hope Michganders follow California and Washington State, and pass this initiative. It is time to say "no" to the racial engineers and their racism.

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OLD FEMINIST NONSENSE BEING CHALLENGED

Dozens of student athletes and coaches from colleges that have lost their teams because of Title IX enforcement will be rallying at the U.S. Department of Education headquarters today to urge reform of the federal anti-discrimination measure they say is unfair. The rally is being billed as the largest event ever held to protest provisions of Title IX that instruct colleges receiving federal funds to ensure the proportion of male and female athletes reflects the general student population. About 150 people are expected to participate in the 11 a.m. event, organizers said.

Leading today's protest will be representatives of 10 varsity teams at Virginia's James Madison University. The teams are slated to be eliminated next July to comply with Title IX. Sixty-one percent of the 17,000-member JMU student body is female and 39 percent male, so under Title IX, 61 percent of athletes should be women. The JMU teams affected include seven men's and three women's teams or a total of 144 students and 11 coaches. "Men and women are standing together in this protest," said Jim McCarthy, spokesman for the College Sports Council, a national coalition of college coaching groups, as well as coaches, athletes, parents and educators.

He noted that an official of the Independent Women's Forum, as well as the coach and all members of JMU's women's swimming team, will be among the protesters. The women's swim team would not be cut, but members want to make it clear that they object to the loss of JMU's male swimming team and nine other teams, Mr. McCarthy said.

Other teams to be cut are men's archery, cross country, gymnastics, indoor track, outdoor track and wrestling, and women's archery, gymnastic and fencing.

Today's protesters will include Wade Hughes, who recently lost his job as wrestling coach at Howard University because of Title IX enforcement. "The same thing happened to him two years ago at George Washington University," Mr. McCarthy said.

Title IX legislation dates back to 1972. But Mr. McCarthy said it was guidelines President Clinton added in 1996 that said "schools had to make athletic rosters identical with enrollment which made quotas inescapable." He and others seeking the abolition of the proportionality requirement would like to see it replaced with surveys colleges would provide students when they register to assess their ability and interest in participating in various sports.

Lilian Dorka, an Education Department spokeswoman, said some protesters today will be meeting with the department's two most senior civil rights officials after the rally. Asked whether the proportionality provisions of Title IX could be changed, she said that would be "a very complex issue," and there would "first have to be a legal assessment."

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JIHAD UPDATE

Australia: Australia's foremost Muslim cleric triggers an uproar when he likens women who don't wear an Islamic headscarf to "uncovered meat" and blames them for attracting sexual predators. "If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or the park . . . and the cats come and eat it," says Sheik Taj al-Din Hilali, "whose fault is it, the cats' or the uncovered meat? If [the woman] was in her room, in her home, in her headscarf, no problem would have occurred."

Afghanistan: The kidnappers of Italian photojournalist Gabriele Torsello threaten to murder him unless Abdul Rahman, an Afghan Christian convert, is returned to Afghanistan and handed over to an Islamic court. Rahman lives in Italy, which granted him asylum earlier this year, when he faced the death penalty under Afghanistan's sharia law for converting from Islam to Christianity.

Iran: The president of Iran calls Israel "a group of terrorists" and threatens to harm any country that supports the Jewish state. "This is an ultimatum," warns Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the elmination of Israel and the United States. "Don't complain tomorrow." Days later, the deputy director of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization confirms another stride forward for the country's illicit nuclear program: With the injection of gas into a second cascade of centrifuges, Iran has doubled its uranium-enrichment capacity.

Thailand: Islamist terrorists bomb a column of Buddhist monks as they collect offerings of food in Narathiwat, a city in southern Thailand. One person is killed; 12 are injured. The attack is the latest in a bloody week that has included multiple shootings and another fatal bombing.

France: Another Muslim intifadah rages in France. Hundreds of cars are torched nightly and passenger buses set ablaze with Molotov cocktails. One such fire in Marseille leaves a 26-year-old woman in a coma with burns covering 70 percent of her body. "We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists," says police union leader Michel Thoomis. "This is not a question of urban violence any more. It is an intifadah, with stones and firebombs." So far this year, more than 2,500 police have been wounded in clashes with rioters.

Britain: In a "true Islamic state," sexually active homosexuals would be executed, says Arshad Misbahi, an imam in Manchester's Central Mosque. According to interviewer John Casson, the imam explains that while executions "might result in the deaths of thousands," they would be worthwhile "if this deterred millions from having sex and spreading disease."

Not all the news is bad. NATO forces have recently killed scores of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan . Czech intelligence agents thwarted an Islamist plan to seize the Central Synagogue in Prague on Rosh Hashanah, hold the Jewish worshipers hostage, and then blow up the building with its occupants. A proposal to let Muslim taxi drivers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport refuse service to passengers carrying alcohol was scrapped in the wake of vehement public opposition. And the world's mightiest fighting force continues to kill Islamofascists in Iraq, currently the key battleground in the global jihad.

But there can't be much question that at this point in the war against radical Islam, the radicals are on the march. From Ahmadinejad's swagger to Hezbollah's war on Israel to the plot to blow up jetliners leaving London, our enemies are aggressive, relentless, and unequivocal in their determination to defeat us. Meanwhile, Western Europe is turning into Eurabia before our eyes, as a fading native population with its effete secular culture of pacifism and relativism is superseded by a surging Muslim cohort. Most Muslims are not Islamists or terrorists, of course. However, most of them keep quiet in the face of the radical offensive. That is all the radicals need to keep driving the jihad forward.

"If this country lets down its guard, it will be a fatal mistake," President Bush said last week. Yet too many Americans seem unable to recognize the threat, or to believe that they, their liberties, and the lives of innumerable human beings are truly at stake in a deadly global war. But radical Islam is not going away. Like Nazism and communism, it is (in Senator Rick Santorum's words) "an ideology that produces the systemic murder of innocents." Like those earlier totalitarianisms, it will go on murdering until it is crushed. Like them, it is impervious to appeasement and contemptuous of weakness. The longer Americans sleep, the farther the jihad advances.

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