Roger Cohen: The Racist Scourge

Roger Cohen is an opinion writer for the New York Times.

LONDON — Soon after I was born my father moved our family from Britain back to his native South Africa to become dean of the school for black medical students at the University of the Witwatersrand. Blacks were obliged to live separately from whites, a principal reason for his having left Johannesburg in the first place....

Once he arrived to hear an Afrikaner policeman scoffing at a young black woman who was close to qualification as a doctor: “You think you’re some clever student, but really you’re just a Kaffir.” (The insult is now legally actionable in South Africa.)

Racism is stupidity’s recourse. There are plenty of stupid people in the world. Apartheid survived for almost a half-century, a system based on the view that the only thing blacks were good for was to work as hewers of wood and drawers of water. It had its American parallels: Jim Crow laws were on the books for almost a century....

Hatred of Muslims in Europe and the United States is a growing political industry. It’s odious, dangerous and racist. Thanks to my colleague Andrea Elliott, we now know the story of the orchestration of the successful anti-Shariah campaign in the United States, led by a Hasidic Jew named David Yerushalmi who holds that “most of the fundamental differences between the races are genetic.” The rightists in Europe using anti-Muslim rhetoric are true heirs to the Continent’s darkest hours....