OpinionJournal - Featured Article - 'Jews, Hindus Not Wanted'

While Americans are vying for gold in the replacement of individual rights with group rights, our friends across the pond sometimes do us one better. The automatic exclusion of members of two of the world's major faiths from performing jury duty in a case of terrorist threats in London does seem to be one step--but only one--ahead of our own institutions.


When it came time, late last month, for the English courts to try radical Muslim cleric Abdullah el-Faisal on charges of inciting race hatred and the murder of "nonbelievers," particularly Jews and Hindus, the presiding judge took special precautions to assure the Jamaican-born preacher a fair trial: He excluded from the jury all Jews, Hindus and their spouses. This extraordinary step by an experienced judge in a cosmopolitan Western country may simply be an instance of the court's not wanting someone likely to identify with the intended victims to be on the jury. (If such were the case, the judge could have questioned potential jurors individually for actual bias.) On the other hand, it could be another step in the trend, emphatic already in the American legal system, of equating a citizen's race or ethnicity with his probable point of view or, more radically still, his ability to judge his fellow citizen fairly on the evidence.[...]


The Supreme Court will presumably get involved in this increasingly pervasive social, political and legal controversy when it decides the constitutionality of the University of Michigan's affirmative action program. However that case turns out, one hopes that the court will demonstrate sufficient wisdom to save us from a system where citizens will be chosen for, or excluded from, positions on juries, in colleges, and in the workplace, on the basis of race and ethnicity rather than individual merit and character, and where group-identity bean-counting becomes confused with efforts to eliminate racial and ethnic discrimination. The case in London is a cautionary tale of what our future might hold.