Racial vagueness

I just had a look at an online survey, which contained the following question:

What is your primary racial/ethnic background?

• White/European American
• Black/African American
• East Asian/East Asian American
• South Asian/South Asian American
• Latino/Hispanic American
• Native/American Indian
• Middle Eastern/Arab American
• Other/Can't remember (specify below).

"Can't remember?" That implies that once upon a time you knew where your roots were, but somehow you just forgot. Now I can just about understand that with a family as complicated as my wife's, which is Turkish/Kosovo Albanian/Bosnian/Kurdish (with possibly a dash of Armenian). But given that the choices there correspond pretty closely to physical types, it's decidedly odd. I'm trying to imagine someone looking in the mirror, and saying "Hmmm, so does my olive skin mean I'm Hispanic American or Arab American? Never could remember that one. Oh hang on, a lot of people from the South of Spain or Italy look a bit like me, so might that make me a European American? Damn my bad memory!"

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Pastor John Hagee has declared that the Antichrist will be gay and at least partially Jewish. This presents us with an eschatological problem. Aren't the Jews supposed to be converted in the Last Days? And if this happens, won't the Antichrist be converted? Or, if he's only partially Jewish, partially converted—at least enough to give him second thoughts. That could really rain on the parade.

More Lies About Kosovo

From an article on Alternet (of all places!):

The Serb/Albanian conflict offers damn near perfect lab conditions to prove my case that birth rate trumps military prowess these days, because the Serbs always beat the Albanians in battle, yet they’ve lost their homeland, Kosovo. Here again, we can blame Woodrow Wilson and his talk about "rights." In places where tribes hate each other, a tribe that outbreeds its rival will become the majority, even if it can’t fight. So, after generations of skulking at home making babies, letting the Serbs do the fighting, the Albanians finally became the majority in Kosovo and therefore the official "good guys," being oppressed by the official "bad guys," the Serbs. At least that's the way the nave [sic] American Wilsonian types like Clinton saw it. So when the Serbs fought back against an Albanian rebellion in Kosovo, and dared to beat the Albanians, Clinton decided to bomb the Serbs into letting go of Kosovo, the ancient heartland of a Christian nation that had spent its blood holding off the Turks for hundreds of years.

The Kosovo Albanians proved that military skill doesn’t matter, because they tried and failed to conquer Kosovo the old-fashioned way: armed rebellion by the Kosovo Liberation Army. It was a wipeout: local Serb militias, a bunch of tired middle-aged part-timers and cops, crushed the KLA. What happened next is a beautiful illustration of the way losers win these days: the Albanians took the bodies of KLA men who’d been killed in battle, stripped all weapons and ammo from them, and showed them to gullible Western reporters as victims of a Serb “massacre.” It was a massacre, all right, but only because the KLA couldn’t fight worth a damn. Alive and armed, they were a joke; dead and disarmed, they helped win Kosovo by making their side the "victims," which led directly to U.S. military intervention.

This is not just inaccurate, it's positively evil. Let's leave aside the historical fact that Albanians are descendants of Illyrians, who occupied most of the Adriatic region some time in the Iron Age, while the Serbs only turned up in the sixth century—it's still ancient history (well, early medieval history). As Flashman says in one of George Macdonald Fraser's novels, if we'd all stayed put, Ur of the Chaldes would be pretty crowded by now. As I see it, your homeland is wherever you were born, and the idea of a "historical homeland" (or "ancient heartland"), whether it's for Serbs or Albanians or, for that matter, Arabs or Jews, is a dangerous idea.

What amazes me is that someone is still trying to portray the Serbs as victims. OK, they've had some rough times throughout history, largely as a result of being batted about between the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, but that's a bit like saying the Nazis were victims because of the Treaty of Versailles. Yes, I'm sure Serbs spent a lot of blood holding off the Turks a couple of centuries ago, but that doesn't win them any brownie points now, and it's certainly no excuse for all the "ethnic cleansing", massacres, torture and mass rape they've been up to in more recent times. Neither is there any excuse for denying it by blaming fast-breeding Muslims.