On Diversity and Strength

Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.

- General Casey on the Fort Hood shootings

When is diversity a strength? Religious diversity let to troubles in Northern Ireland. The diversity between Israelis and Palestinians along the Persian coast has not been strengthening. Canada has Quebecois separatists, Russia has Chechnyan rebels, China has Tibet. Which of these situations exemplifies strength drawn from diversity?

And yet there are countless cases of diversity creating strength. Where would America be without Christopher Columbus of Spain, Sacajawea of the Shoshone, Fredrick Douglass, our Irish Catholic President Kennedy, or Martin Luther King? Generals von Steuben of Germany and Lafayette of France were vital to the colonies' victory in the Revolution, itself motivated by the philosophies of the Scottish Enlightenment. Alexander Hamilton, father of the American system of economics, was half-French Huguenot, half-Scottish, and born out of wedlock in the Caribbean. Spiritual, gospel, blues, jazz, and rock 'n' roll music all arose first from African-Americans, and form the basis and origin of virtually all pop music. Bruce Lee, Muhammad Ali, and Pat Morita (Mr. Miyagi) taught us to fight with honor, igniting an American obsession with martial arts. American society would be utterly different and dramatically worse without these champions from their diverse backgrounds.

But to invoke diversity to protect a murderous shooter is offensive and irrational. Regardless of his religion or ethnicity, he's a murderer who is documented to have long held radical anti-American ideas, even supporting attacks against the US military that protected his dangerous advocacy as an American freedom.

It is not freedom to protect that which destroys freedom. It is not diversity to protect that which violently attacks diversity. One who wishes an institution to fail should not be part of that institution; it is no failure of diversity to remove him from it, ideally before he guns down it's internal supporters.

For diversity to endure, tolerance must be denied those who are seeking to destroy it. To support diversity is to see this madman not as a Muslim that must therefore be sacrosanct and protected as a symbolic protection of all Muslims from group discrimination, but as a mad individual who deserves condemnation for his individual crimes. If others pursue his same crimes, let them be punished for their personal actions. If others share his same religion but reject his actions, they are innocent. But if individual Muslims in the military start confusing the extremism with the mainstream, how are they any better than white Americans confusing mainstream American Muslims with Al-Qaeda killers? It's the same vicious confusion, and should be condemned and punished equally regardless of the ethnicity of the confused person.

That's what the strengthening kind of diversity is: equality in judgment, blind to race, creed, or other background. General Casey is rejecting it in favor of special immunity for minorities, a repugnant and intolerable inequality that protects Muslims from the same criticisms to which all other Americans are subject. His use of the word "diversity" is a destructive lie.

In all fairness, the murderous shooter was actually right about one minor thing from back before he went nuts: he argued that Muslims should be able to request and receive conscious objector status and opt out of violent confrontation with other Muslims in the Afghani and Iraqi fronts. German American soldiers were stationed in the Pacific Front in WW2 by the same good reasoning, to protect against brother fighting brother or, worse, our soldiers switching sides. Except then it was a universal requirement and I only advocate the option be available.