But many were not responses to any skinhead attack at all. It was just Americans flooding Muslims with flowers, cards, gifts from store managers and free meals at restaurants. All this merely for belonging to the same religion as the cold-blooded killers who recently attacked America.
One Muslim woman described eating at Chason's Country Buffet in Winchester, Va., with two non-Muslim friends a few days after the attack. When the waitress approached their table, they assumed it was to throw them out. But instead, the waitress "handed them the $30 they had paid for their food, saying the restaurant wanted to give them a free meal."
Belonging to the same general ethnic group as people who held slaves more than a century ago doesn't get you a free meal anyplace. Not just a "vast majority," but no white American owns a slave. How about liberals hugging us? No, no. Only Muslims are immune from collective responsibility.
The pope has issued apologies for everything from the Holocaust to the execution of a 15th-century Czech reformer. The Southern Baptist Convention apologized for slavery and the United Methodist Church for an 1864 massacre of Indians. Bill Clinton apologized so often -- except for his own execrable behavior -- that you expected him to start showing up at police stations confessing to crimes he didn't commit. (But not the many he did commit.)
Only the West's guilt is collective, omnipresent and unbounded.
Unless it is guilt for something America is doing right now and that could be stopped -- like abortion. It is unseemly to talk about the nation's current sins, especially if you're Jerry Falwell. We're supposed to wait for the 28th century's Bill Clinton to issue some impotent, meaningless apology.
Immediately following Lexington and Concord, when the fate of short-lived revolution was very much in doubt, Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her husband describing her neighbors dying by the score of smallpox. As David McCullough writes in his best-selling biography of John Adams, "heartsick, searching for an answer to why such evil should 'befall a city and the people,' Abigail had pondered whether it could be God's punishment for the sin of slavery."
The ACLU immediately demanded an apology. And we're still apologizing. By "we," I mean "Vinnie." Someday, liberals will have a theory as to why American-born white men must be punished to remedy the sins of abortion.