Boomba Boom!

I spent enough time at university fighting the culture wars to know a set-up when I see one. For a hypothetical example, imagine the head of a school's English Department has been exposed as nothing but a sex-obsessed fraud and intellectual failure who hides behind post-modern language so dense it woud make a David Foster Wallace re-write of the tax code look like the crisp, clipped prose of James Ellroy. One can bet dollars to donuts that within days one of the good professor's sympathisers will write an unkind, very un-P.C. word on his classroom's chalkboard and anonymously report the incident to the campus media, in the hope of turning people against all those right-wing nasties who want to keep Shakespeare in the curriculum.

So when I read that a Dutch Islamic school was blown up a week after Theo van Gogh was slaughtered in Amsterdam for exposing some unpleasant truths about the religion of peace, I couldn't help thinking it was a set-up. While the UPI, quoting the BBC, spins the attack as "another in a recent series of anti-Muslim acts," color this special-ed kid unimpressed.

Think about it: Here we have a minority group that all of a sudden needs some big-time sympathy and get its victim status off double-secret probation. And, oh yeah, just happens to have a lot of explosives lying around...