Ivory Towers Teem With Invertebrates

Boston talk radio host and author Michael Graham writes, “Cambridge, the proud capital of liberal self-importance, has its own Peace Commission, Human Rights Commission and even a Women’s Heritage Project…And it’s also a pretty good place to beat your wife”:

Over the Memorial Day weekend, 27-year-old Tommy Le of Pennsauken, N.J., was shopping at the CambridgeSide Galleria, when he got into a dispute with his wife over another woman. What ensued was a clear violation of the Cambridge Human Rights Ordinance (Chapter 2.76).

As the Cambridge Chronicle reported:

“A witness told police he saw Le push the victim to the ground, kick her in the midsection while she was on the ground and punch her in the face before dragging her outside of the mall.”

When confronted by police, Le acknowledged that he had hit his wife “a little bit,” the Chronicle wrote.

But police didn’t have to take his word for it. Hundreds of CambridgeSide shoppers witnessed the entire beatdown. Not one of them did anything to stop it.

Well, there was one woman. Seeing that none of her fellow shoppers were going to act, she approached Le and “asked him to stop,” according to police. When he declined, she returned to her shopping.

I’ve spoken about this story to several Cambridge locals, all of whom immediately insisted that CambridgeSide Galleria “isn’t really Cambridge.” And its shoppers, they assured me, are certainly not PLU (People Like Us).

Which must mean they’re not insufferable, liberal elitists.

I realize that this display of calloused indifference isn’t unique to Cambridge. Last May a Northeastern student was shot repeatedly in her Mission Hill apartment. And though several neighbors heard the shots, nobody called the police.

And most of us have seen the video of a pedestrian run down on the streets of Hartford, Conn., and the even more disturbing images of passers-by glancing at the fallen man and continuing on their way.

But the assault in Cambridge resonates with more hypocrisy because it occurred in a community of chest-thumping liberal activism. Cambridge’s designations as a Nuclear-Free Zone, a Sanctuary City, a human rights haven and whatever else (Vegan-Friend Village?) invite a higher level of scrutiny.

What Cambridge is, in fact, is a place where people talk about human rights, women’s rights, etc., but where the idea of actually doing something to promote these rights is unimaginable.

It’s what Mark Steyn describes at the “Free Tibet” syndrome. Cambridge is crawling with the kind of liberals who drive Volvos covered in “Free Tibet” bumper stickers, but if America ever sent troops to actually liberate Tibet, these same bumpers would be covered in “War Is Not The Answer” stickers.

Only if the president had an (R) after his name. Jeanine Garofalo gave the game away herself in 2003 when she admitted that political protesting went to ground during Bill Clinton’s various foreign incursions in the 1990s (including lobbing cruise missiles into Iraq and drafting a policy of regime change, of course) because, “It wasn’t very hip.”