Polacks: white since 1939!

I bet you thought my first entry in a millennium and a half would be something interesting. Or at least something about how FOX News and the Republican Party, with the naming of Tony "Siddown, You Darn Hippies" Snow as his new press dissimulator, have pretty much stopped pretending they aren't the same entity. But no, I'm just bitching about Lileks.

I got a call from the Washington office; turns out that my column had been rendered moot by events...I had written about a march in Belgium – 80,000 showed up to protest the murder of a kid in the train station. Two bad guys stabbed him for his MP3 player, and security cameras suggested they were North African. I did not want to do another column about Europe’s Immigrant Peril, partly because it’s a difficult subject to sum up in 650 words with the necessary nuance, and partly because the real news angle seemed to be the identity of the fellow who convened the march: a Muslim member of Parliament. I used that as a segue into this case, where an immigrant woman had been let off the hook by a British court for baby-shaking because she “didn’t know how to behave in the West.”

Well, they arrested the murderers, and they turned out to be Polish. No way to write around that, and it made my second example look bad: "okay, well, that crime wasn’t committed by immigrants, but I’ve got a bad Muslim over here!” So we scrapped it all.

So, correct me if I'm wrong here. What Lileks seems to be saying is, he had wanted to use this case, where it appeared that immigrants had killed a kid, to segue into another story about how an immigrant killed a kid, but it turned out that the immigrants in question were white people instead of Muslims, and this left him with nothing to write about, because, I guess, child-murdering immigrants are acceptable as long as they're not brown-skinned moon-worshipers.