The big sensational news story this morning is about the gay student at Rutgers University who jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge.
Tyler Clementi, a budding violinist, was surreptitiously taped by his roomate on webcam in a gay sexual encounter. The roomate, one Dharun Ravi (above left) in cahoots with a friend, one Molly Wei (above right) then broadcast the explicit images over the internet.
Truly a dirty trick, if there ever was one. Irrespective of what one might think about the nature of Clementi's acts, any decent libertarian-minded person will defend the right of consenting people to do what they will in the privacy of their own rooms.
What strikes me as odd, is the scarcity of photos of the alleged perpetrators, who have been charged with two counts of invasion of privacy.
If the dirty tricksters had been white male athletes or fraternity boys, the mainstream media would have been salivating and calling for a lynch mob. Just recall the outrageous media behavior during the phony rape allegations against the white male members of the Duke LaCrosse team.
But alas, the evildoers here were the children of recent immigrants -- in Ravi's case, from India and in Pei's, from China.
These are people of color. These are beloved "new Americans." In the media's playbook, they're supposed to be perpetual victims of white American treachery.
So when they turn out to be lower than pond scum, the media clams up. Photos of these Asian creeps are hard to find on the internet.
But as the savants at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights chant, "our diversity is our strength."
