Thursday, September 23, 2004

Demonizing squared 

Speaking of Malkin earlier, she and edubloggers like Joanne Jacobs and Number 2 Pencil are having a field day with this story.
A terrorism response drill in Muskegon, Michigan featured an unusual enemy:
The exercise will simulate an attack by a fictitious radical group called Wackos Against Schools and Education who believe everyone should be homeschooled. Under the scenario, a bomb is placed on the bus and is detonated while the bus is traveling on Durham, causing the bus to land on its side and fill with smoke.
#2 calls it correctly:
In this day and age of political correctness, it is probably true that the school district could not have named any group without creating a firestorm (including, sad to say, white supremacists or Islamic terrorists, both of whom have attacked American citizens in the past). But in that case, why define the group at all? The focus was, as it should have been, on the rescue mission itself; the school could have given the fictional terrorist group a meaningless acronym for a name, and left it at that.




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