Costs of Multiculturalism

Voula Papachristou, the comely Greek triple jumper you've never heard of, has found out just what it's like to be convicted on a ill-defined charge. After the long-limbed lady tweeted a "racist" joke about African immigrants to her native land, the Helenic Olympic Committee booted her off the team.

 What was the joke? "With so many Africans in Greece, the West Nile mosquitoes will be getting home food!!!" she tweeted. Athletic officialdom was not amused.

What was racist about the comment, given that Papachristou, apparently a strong Greek patriot, did not express any negative opinions about Africans, is a mystery ... at least to normal people. She did not traffic in what the left believes are standard racist tropes. She did not say that Africans are more violent or disposed to crime than Greeks. Nor did she claim they are less intelligent than the descedents of Homer, Plato and Aristotle. She told an off-color joke, as it were.

She is also guilty of supporting the Golden Dawn party, which, while admittedly sounding a little extreme, opposes immigration; in other words, they would keep Greece for the Greeks. Perhaps that, as Patrick Cleburne wrote, is the real crime.

That said, the pronouncement of guilt and Papachristou's sentence for "racism" call to mind the late Joe Sobran's assessment of "anti-Semitism."

In 1995, Sobran expostulated thusly:

It’s pointless to ask what “anti-Semitic” means. It means trouble. It’s an attack signal. The practical function of the word is not to define or distinguish things, but to conflate them indiscriminately — to equate the soberest criticism of Israel or Jewish power with the murderous hatred of Jews. And it works. Oh, how it works.

When Joe McCarthy accused people of being Communists, the charge was relatively precise. You knew what he meant. The accusation could be falsified. In fact the burden of proof was on the accuser: when McCarthy couldn’t make his loose charges stick, he was ruined. (Of course, McCarthy was hated less for his “loose” charges than for his accurate ones. His real offense was stigmatizing the Left.)

The opposite applies to charges of “anti-Semitism.” The word has no precise definition. An “anti-Semite” may or may not hate Jews. But he is certainly hated by Jews. There is no penalty for making the charge loosely; the accused has no way of falsifying the charge, since it isn’t defined.