Huh? Sometimes the stupidity and irration of the New York Post are just mind-boggling. Today, Arnold Ahlert, one of the least loony of the Post's regular columnists, actually tried to draw a connection between terrorism and language.

HERE's a modest suggestion for helping America fight terror: make English the official language of the United States. * * * [Immigrants have established] autonomous communities which have purposefully separated themselves from mainstream culture. That in and of itself has the potential to foster terrorist activity.

No, Mr. Ahlert, it does not. Quite the contrary, giving people some control over their culture and embracing diversity defuses tensions and resentments, producing more peace, not more strife.
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Compare Turkey's attempts to eradicate Kurdish culture, which produced guerrilla warfare and terrorism, with the peaceful integration of tens of millions of Hispanics into American society.
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Immigrants are actually assimilating faster and more completely than ever before in our history. Hispanics often lament that their children don't want to speak Spanish, ever, even among themselves when no anglo friends are around. They have to take Spanish as a foreign language in high school to cope with the grammar, and even when they try to speak Spanish, their sentences are peppered with English words and expressions because they either can't come up with the Spanish equivalent or the English better expresses what they want to say.
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Ahlert and other language alarmists would seem not to know our history. It was commonplace in this country for entire neighborhoods to be islands to themselves, where the only language people would hear around them was Italian or German. Tho the children might learn English, with difficulty, in school, the parents rarely or never did, relying instead on their children or the local priest to translate for them when the need arose.
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Now, thanks to the multiplicity of English-language oral and written materials available in every home in every neighborhood, most immigrants themselves learn enuf English to get by, enjoy a TV show, and make themselves understood outside their own neighborhood. That never used to happen.
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Their kids become fluently bilingual in very short order, and within two generations, at most, the bulk of the descendants of immigrants have completely lost their ancestral language.
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My father's family is primarily Dutch, from Upstate New York. They arrived in the 1640s and 1650s, when that region was New Netherland, a Dutch colony where everybody (except the Indians) knew Dutch. The historian of the Schoonmaker Family Association (part of the Huguenot Historical Society in New Paltz, New York) told me that Dutch was still spoken by some members of the family until about 1912! So much for quick assimilation in 'the good old days'.
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Were the Schoonmakers and Hasbroucks terrorists? The British thought so, since they served in the Continental Army that drove the British out of New York and helped establish this country. But they never rose in rebellion against the United States, unlike those good old English-speaking boys of the South!
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Linguistic diversity emphatically does not breed terrorism. The reverse is true: linguistic intolerance incites resentments that can, and, all over the world, have produced violence.
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English does not need any help in eradicating immigrant languages. It is doing a fine job all by itself, because (aside from its spelling) English is an extremely powerful language, intrinsically and culturally. It is simpler than any other major language. For instance, in regular verbs there are at most two forms in each tense: I/you/we/they talk, he/she/it talks; I/you/we/they have talked, he/she/it has talked; and in the simple past, I/you/we/they/he/she/it — everybody! — talked.
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Small wonder that people rush to embrace it, not just for its utility in communicating across neighborhoods and borders but also for its simplicity and cultural sweep.
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France has to pass laws requiring the use of French, out of fear that French students and businesses will abandon French in France! We have no reason to worry about the future of English in its very heart and bastion, the United States.
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And we certainly don't have to worry that tolerance breeds terrorism!
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(Responsive to "Fight Terror, Speak English", column by Arnold Ahlert in the New York Post July 26, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,782. The figure hit 1776 early yesterday — with no mention in media that I saw — but swiftly moved up.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:05 PM