Suppose that, in some country that vaunted itself on its record
of human rights, in North America or Western Europe, there was a cardiac
hospital whose waiting-list for heart-surgery numbered both black and white
patients. Now suppose that
the hospital had -- not surreptitiously and shame-facedly, but quite openly and
unabashedly, even as something to pride themselves on -- a hard-and-fast
rule: So soon as a white becomes a
candidate for surgery, he automatically zooms ahead of all the blacks on the
waiting list; and so on
forever. Assuming that, as
in most places, the demand for the surgical service always slightly outpaces
the supply, the upshot is that no black could ever receive heart surgery.
This morning there appeared a radio essay by the
Dutch-Moroccan academic and journalist Fouad Laroui, Je fume, donc je suis,
reporting just such a case, in the north of ultra-bien-pensant
Holland; only, with one
difference: The group
continually sent to the back of the bus
are not blacks, but smokers.
And such is the climate of political correctness there
reigning, that the principal challenge to this invidious rule has come, not from the quarter of
general societal welfare and logic (shall such exclusions be applied, on the
same grounds of ills abetted by personal behavior, to other risk groups, such
as the obese or homosexual?), but
rather, from the ranks of Identity Politics themselves! For the Turks resident in the
Netherlands have -- not opposed the rule per
se, but merely demanded that they themselves be excepted, as a group, on
the grounds that, in their culture, smoking is not an individual choice, but an
ethnic identity badge: Among Turks, a man wears a moustache, and smokes; un-point-c’est-tout.
Laroui regularly reports on issues affecting Muslims in his
current country of residence, les
Pays-Bas; and generally to
defend them. But in this
case, he twits the Turkish case for absurdity, pointing out that it is a
slippery slope down which other groups can be expected to snowboard, as some
already had: Muslim Somalis in
Holland demanded group exemption from Dutch anti-narcotic laws, on the grounds that
qât is part of their culture.
(Such an exemption was successful in the United States, in the case of
Amerindians and peyote.) He
does not, however, take explicit exception to that hospital regulation
itself; perhaps deeming such
comment superfluous in the case of so evidently overweening a rule, but perhaps
not.
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