Why did the entire Western political establishment march in sympathy with the seasoned  and very political cartoonists who drew vile anti-Islamic images in a publicly circulated magazine, while the same Western establishment – or at least its American subsidiary- comes down hard on some barely adult  (19-year old) frat boys mouthing racial slurs on a bus-ride with other frat boys?

What’s the difference?

As usual, it amounts to whose ox is being gored.

We marched with Hebdo, because that suited government objectives in foreign policy, and we don’t march with Oklahoma, because, equally, that suits the government’s domestic objectives.

Think about it.

The culpability of the Hebdo cartoonists was far greater than that of the fraternity students.

They were experienced professional newsmen, who had a history of selective provocation in the service of neoconservative political and military goals (see here).

The frat boys were youngsters (19 and 20), apparently drunk,  with no obvious agenda beyond expressing crude sentiments they probably picked up from adults in their circle.

The Hebdo cartoons were disseminated for public consumption in France, where the interaction between Muslims immigrants and native French is incendiary.  The cartoons were released in a context of a global ‘war on terror” directed mainly against Muslim cultures. A global war in which millions have died and whole nations have been uprooted and destroyed.

The frat boys voiced their opinions in what they assumed was a private group of like-minded peers. There was no intent to disseminate it to the public, especially not to blacks.

The Hebdo cartoons are easily seen as an act of provocation directed at an embattled religious culture .

Their lewdness was not simply “expression” but act  – the images  crossed the line into pornography  that forced the viewer into participating as voyeurs.

The frat boys’ chant was not directed at anyone and the reference to lynching in it, while ominous, is not actually an explicit threat to anyone, even within the context of the song.

The Hebdo cartoons were published by free, private citizens, civilians, who were not censored in any way.  The reaction of other free agents or civilians to them – however violent –  do not fall under the provisions of  First Amendment law, although they certainly do constitute criminal actions (murder).

The Oklahoma students attend a government university, making this by definition a First Amendment issue.

It is settled constitutional law that the government cannot punish the speech of citizens, especially those not directly employed by it,  if  that speech does not directly endanger the lives of anyone.

Public university speech codes are mostly unconstitutional.

I don’t suggest for a moment that the Oklahoma fraternity chant – as it is represented in the media  – is anything but disgraceful and repulsive.

But the legal distinctions are clear and easily verified.

Meanwhile, from a political angle, the boys are an easy target…. and a favorite one too.

The racist deep South, steeped in pre-war bigotry is the red rag that the liberal establishment (is there any other?) most often waves in front of the population in its ceaseless effort to demonize traditionalist cultures that form the only resistance to its relentless program of homogenizing and atomizing populations.

But it is more red herring than red rag.

Nearly as many blacks died at the hands of blacks in 6 months in 2012 than were killed by lynching between 1882 and 1968, and while that fact does not in any way, shape, or form, exonerate that era  of its evil, it surely convicts this one of a different evil.

What that  might be is irrelevant, really.

Whether institutional racism is the villain of this era, or gang wars, or drug policy, or welfarism, Dixie is the architect of none of these.

The Great Society welfare programs that broke the back of the  black family (and, increasingly, the white family) might have been enacted under Lyndon Baines Johnson, a good old boy if ever there was one, but they were hatched by left-wing ideologues like Richard Clowen and Frances Fox Piven, professors at Columbia University, one of the roosts of the liberal establishment.

When the next cell-phone recording catches one of those worthies with their intellectual and moral pants around their knees, let me know what they’re saying about free speech on American campuses.

Meantime, I’m marching with the Nazis at Skokie.