Cohen. Does she look easily offended?

CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Mark Steyn :: And merry Xmas to you all — A column worth reading!

Many of these odd anti-Christmas anecdotes seem to stem from people who have appointed themselves as guardians of taste and propriety. How do people get like this and why are there more of them than ever before? What follows is an excerpt of an excellent column by Mark Styn commenting on the banning of Christmas songs at a skating rink because someone was Jewish and in the rink.

Here’s the overlooked problem. All this sort of thing does, especially for children, is make them think that Jews hate Christmas. Thus Jews hate Christ. And, golly, Jews killed Christ, right? No? All of this stems directly from specific liberal white do-gooders who generally dislike the Jews. This “Happy Holidays” thing again blames something on the Jews. In this case the anti-Christmas message. There may, in fact, be a Jewish person or two who dislike Christmas, but these are, I’m certain, a small number. A traditional mercantile type would say, “Christmas is good for business, what’s not to like?” Seriously, this is really about antisemitism, not anti-Christmas. Think about it.

This article goes on to point out how stupid all this is since Sasha Cohen is on a “Christmas” PR tour lighting Christmas trees in various towns. Cripes! FYI, the median IQ of Riverside is twenty points lower than Toad Suck, Arkansas.

A high school choir [in Riverside, California] was asked to stop singing Christmas carols during an ice skating show featuring Olympic medalist Sasha Cohen out of concern the skater would be offended . . . ”

I hasten to add this Sasha Cohen is not the Sacha Baron Cohen of the hit movie ”Borat.” The Olympic S. Cohen is a young lady; the Borat S. Cohen is a man, though his singlet would not be out of place in a louche Slav entry to the ice-dancing pairs. Likewise, the skater-puts-carols-on-ice incident seems as sharply satirical of contemporary America as anything in ”Borat,” at least in its distillation of the coerciveness of “tolerance”:

“A city staff member, accompanied by a police officer, approached the Rubidoux High School Madrigals at the Riverside Outdoor Ice Skating Rink just as they launched into ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’ and requested that the troupe stop singing . . . ”

The cop and the staffer — “special-events employee Michelle Baldwin” — were not acting on a complaint from the celebrity skater. They were just taking offense on her behalf, no doubt deriving a kinky vicarious thrill at preventing a hypothetical “hate crime.”

Did the cop look like this guy?