And ....?

French actress Brigitte Bardot has been convicted of inciting racial hatred for writing a book that portrays Muslims in a negative light, reports the AFP.

Bardot and her publisher were fined 5000 Euros for the book, A Cry in the Silence. The court ruled that Bardot had deliberately tried to draw a link between Islam and terrorism by mentioning the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

In the book, Bardot wrote that she was "against the Islamisation of France! This obligatory allegiance, this forced submission disgusts me.... Our ancestors, the elderly, our grandfathers, our fathers have for centuries given their lives to push out successive invaders."

Two civil rights groups, the Movement Against Racism and For Friendship Between People and the League of Human Rights, brought the lawsuit because they said it incited violence against Muslims.

Ich Bin Ein

A politician in the UK has filed a formal complaint against one of his opponents because the opponent urged voters to reject him because of his German heritage, reports the Daily Post.

Green Party candidate Klaus Armstrong-Braun says his Labour opponent, Derek Butler, referred to him by the racist term while campaigning in Deeside. Butler referred to Armstrong-Braun as the "German from Broughton."

“With emotions running high over D-Day this kind of thing stokes up hatred against Germans,” Armstrong-Braun said.

Butler later apologized for the crack.

If This is the 'Last Haven,' Then ...?

A university professor (who else?) has found yet another form of egregious profiling going on in our world today and describes it as the last haven of discrimination, reports the Grand Rapids Press.

Denis Preston, a professor of English and linguistics at Michigan State University, says people routinely use speech to determine the race or socio-economic status of a speaker and consequently discriminate against people based on that information.

The report says laws currently don’t reflect the ability of Americans to identify people on the basis of language, something that obviously needs to be corrected immediately.

Poor Al

Liberal firebrand Al Franken was forced to apologize for an on-air quip ridiculing someone as a hermaphrodite during his radio show.

According to Bodies Like Ours, an intersex support group, Franken was insensitive when he said conservative talk show host Sean Hannity was “born a hermaphroditic conjoined twin” and “the doctor who delivered him and his twin reacted in horror at their birth.”

Following a flood on angry email, Franken apologized for “furthering the unjustified stigma attached to these conditions.” He said an estimated one in 2000 people are born with atypical genitalia, which, like conjoinment, is a naturally-occurring bodily variation.

“I am sorry for the ill-considered joke,” he said.

Whatever Happened to Integration?

A group of Muslim academics in the U.K. accused the state school system of being institutionally racist because there are not more publicly-funded schools that cater exclusively to the needs of Muslims students, reports the Guardian.

In a Muslims on Education policy document calls on the government to roll back mixed-sex classrooms, set aside special prayer rooms for Muslim students, require religious education for all students, mandate religious awareness training for teachers and staff and create special classes on Islamic subjects.

Britain's largest minority community should have access to more Muslim state schools and non-Muslim schools should adapt more fully to the community's needs, the report’s authors contend.

Charitable in Madison

An elderly couple in Madison, Wisc. has stepped up and donated $2,500 to the local Boy Scouts after the city council there forbade a local fundraiser from giving any money to the organization, reports the Associated Press.

Last week, the Madison city council banned organizers of the annual Rhythm and Booms fireworks display from giving any money from the fundraising event to the local Boy Scouts chapter. The move was in protest of the organization’s ban on openly homosexual leaders.

Following the fracas, however, Maurice Reese and his wife, Arlene, said they would pick up the slack and fill the gap in the Boy Scout’s funding. So despite the city council’s spite, hundreds of Boy Scouts will once again help collect donations for local youth-oriented charities at the event this year.

'Multicultural Crisis'

The School of Education at the University of Oregon is in a full-blown “multicultural crisis” because a speaker at a career guidance workshop suggested that people interviewing for jobs make direct eye contact and use firm handshakes when meeting with their prospective employers, reports the Daily Emerald.

During the Career Beginnings conference in February, a student of color suggested that her culture does not encourage such interactions. The speaker then launched into an explanation that failure to follow his advice might lead a “blemish effect” that can harm the interviewee’s chances. The student of color interpreted that to mean that her culture was “a blemish” and was distraught.

The incident has prompted students of color to demand diversity training for the entire staff, a five-year plan to address issues of cultural sensitivity and new procedures for handling complaints from distraught students.

Sneak Attack

Dallas Cowboys coach Bill Parcells is being excoriated for describing his assistants’ sneaky plays as “Jap plays” during a news conference, reports Knight-Ridder.

Parcells was asked about his assistant coaches’ approach and replied that they were going to use “what we call `Jap plays.' OK? Surprise things." He paused for a moment before saying, "No disrespect to anyone."

American Asian groups contacted by reporters covering the event called the remark racist, dehumanising, insensitive, offensive and disturbing. But an actual Japanese person who was there said it was no big deal.

" I wish everyone would just forget it. I admire Coach Parcells very much," said Akira Kuboshima, editor of American Football Magazine in Japan.

River Ruckus

Managers of a public park in Virginia stopped members of a local church from using a river running through the park for Baptism ceremonies lest they offend people of other faiths in the park, reports the Associated Press.

Members of the Cornerstone Baptist Church wanted to use the Falmouth Waterfront Park outside Fredricksburg for their 30-minute ceremony because they don’t have a baptismal pool at their church.

But officials at the park halted the proceedings, saying non-Christians swimming nearby might be uncomfortable with the event.

Even the ACLU said park officials were probably out of bounds. ''If the park rules allow people to wade and swim in the river, then they must allow baptisms in the river,” the group said in a statement.

Update: Park officials have since reversed the decision.

The Man in Action

The folks at the ACLU have discovered a new law enforcement bugaboo to obsess about, this one called “behavioural profiling.”

In an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe, Carol Rose and John Reinstein of the Massachusetts American Civil Liberties Union deride the law enforcement practice of scanning crowds for people who are acting suspiciously as merely another form of malicious racial profiling.

They the case of one King Downing, the national coordinator of the ACLU's Campaign Against Racial Profiling, who was asked to produce an ID one time when coming off a plane at Logan International Airport in Boston.

Downing derided the officers’ attempt to keep the peace with an innocuous request as yet another example of The Man harassing innocent Americans. "From what I've seen," he said. "Behavioral profiling is just another word for racial profiling."

Pantomime Problems

Government officials who arrested more than 100 people for trading in black bear parts are being labelled racist because most of the people they arrested are Korean, reports the Associated Press.

An undercover sting operation in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley targeted buyers of black bear parts, which are considered to have medicinal properties in some Asian cultures. Most of those charged in the operation received probation or suspended sentences with fines or restitution; none have been ordered to actually serve time.

Critics of the operation are calling it culturally insensitive. They are also irked that agents who didn’t speak English informed the customers that what they were doing was illegal by using the pantomime, for example, of being led away in handcuffs.

They called the latter an "unacceptable and degrading way to signal the situation's severity to a vulnerable population not fully integrated into the United States."