Should Foreign Names Be Allowed in the City Where Ground Zero Is?
Your neighbors: can you trust them? Well, more than you could 100 years ago, when kindly "Mr. Smith" next door may have been a dirty German who changed his name. Today, foreigners just rub our faces in their un-American pronunciations.
Sam Roberts has a wonderful piece in the NYT today detailing the century-long decline of the practice of immigrants Americanizing their names once they get here. He digs through current NYC name-change records and finds that not even Muslims are worried about name discrimination any more: "one older couple changed their last name from Islam to Khan, but they said they were conforming to other younger family members rather than reacting to discrimination." But at the end of the story, we're treated to this note:
Sam Roberts's grandfather arrived in the United States as Samuel Rabinowitz. His family first changed the name to Rubin, then to Roberts.
Ohhh...so the liberal New York Times is hiring secret undercover Jews to give a free pass to any terrorist Muslin who wants to run around The City Where 9-11 Happened openly flaunting their bin Ladenesque name? It all makes sense now.
