Race Whoring

It's still a thriving area of practice in the legal/political profession.

The usual suspects -- plus one holier-than-thou world power -- are calling on the U.S. military to repent for its treatment of Muslim chaplain James Yee (a.k.a. "Yousef" or "Yousif" Yee).

Refresher: Yee's the Army captain who ministered to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Seven months ago, Yee was arrested on suspicion of espionage. He spent 76 days in solitary confinement; the case didn't materialize; he was convicted on lesser charges of adultery and downloading pornography. Last week, the Army Southern Command chief who oversees military operations at Guantanamo dismissed those convictions.

What more do Yee and his sympathy circle want? They want the government to grovel and beg forgiveness for being too aggressive in defending against potential terrorist sympathizers and abettors. In a letter to President Bush, Yee's lawyer complained of guards who "refused to provide him with a liturgical calendar or prayer rug and refused to tell him the time of day or the direction of Mecca." Comparing it to the victimization of gay soldiers, commentator Andrew Sullivan condemned the military's enforcement of the Uniform Code of Military Justice against Yee as "disgraceful, foul and malicious." And now, along with Arab-American and Asian-American activists trying to turn Yee into an international human rights poster boy, comes the Communist government of China.

According to the Zhongguo Xinwen She news agency, the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, Sha Zukang, blasted the U.S. for "racial discrimination" and cited "the recent case against Chinese American Yousef Yee" as an example of America's "domestic human rights situation." The absurdity of turning this into a racial issue is topped only by the sanctimony of Ambassador Sha, representative of the Falun Gong-torturing, political dissent-steamrolling, one-child-policy pioneers in Beijing, who fulminated that "the United States should look at itself in a mirror." Captain Yee's stateside defenders, such as Cecilia Chang of the San Francisco Bay Area-based grievance group Justice for New Americans, likewise pretend he was viciously singled out for being the child of "immigrant minorities." Chang complained, "Many people who don't look very 'American' are being targeted."