Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Hate crime laws are unnecessary and dangerous

The fair-minded liberal Alexander Cockburn adds his voice to warnings about the forthcoming "hate crime" laws, in The Hate Crime Bill: How Not to Remember Matthew Shepard. Cockburn is among the few journalists who reveal that it was never clear if Matthew Shepard was assaulted because he was a homosexual. In spite of this, an entire "gay" industry has grown up around, and profited off this case, including Shepard's mother.

Excerpts:

We’ve got the Hate Crimes Bill, aka the Matthew Shepard Act, aka the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, before Congress and far advanced on its repellent journey towards the statute book. ...

The Matthew Shepard Act is a ham-handed attempt to right injustice by establishing different legal treatment for some classes of crime victims. The proposed statute classifies as "hate crimes" attacks based on a victim’s actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. America is well on its way to making it illegal to say anything nasty about gays, Jews, blacks and women. "Hate speech," far short of any direct incitement to violence, is on the edge of being criminalized, with the First Amendment gone the way of the dodo. ...

The gay lobby has gone into overdrive for just such a hate crime law ever since Matthew Shepard got beaten to death in 1998 by two roofers on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming. It’s actually somewhat unclear whether the roofers, one of whom was high on meth at the time, murdered Shepard because they specifically hated gays. Anyway, the murder has put them behind bars for the rest of their lives using tough existing laws. But, starting with Shepard’s mother, Judy, the $100,000-plus head of the Matthew Shepard Foundation, gay and "human rights" groups have been fundraising on Shepard’s "gay martyrdom" ever since. ...

Federal and state hate crime laws are unnecessary and dangerous. As always, the challenge is to apply existing laws in a manner that constitutes justice, no matter who the victim may be. ... Five gay groups have publicly criticized a bill currently before the New York State Legislature―the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act―that provides sentencing enhancements for hate crimes. Let others join them. It’s disgusting to see liberals rushing into the sentence-toughening business.

Read entire article here.

See also:

Understanding 'Hate Crime' Laws: There's more to them than meets the eye

Abolish all 'hate crime' laws
Read more!

Get used to torture

Imprisoned for life, without a trial? For centuries, this was the norm in many countries around the world, and is still in some places. However, the New World's America was blessed with a Constitution designed to prevent any such travesty from taking root on these shores. Yet every now and then a despot comes along, an Abraham Lincoln or a George W. Bush, who decides that, not only does his bountiful wisdom place him above all law, it also grants him the right to contrive his own laws.

Today, the major enablers of those who would deny due process to American citizens are the people who call themselves "conservative patriots." Jacob Hornberger offers some stark truths about such people in The Right to Torture Americans.

Excerpts:

Conservatives are protesting a federal judge’s ruling that torture victim Jose Padilla’s civil lawsuit against former Justice Department attorney John Yoo be permitted to continue. The conservatives feel that Yoo, who authored some of the infamous torture memos for the Bush White House, should be immune from lawsuits from Americans who were tortured as a natural consequence of such memos.

Let’s sum up what conservatives (and neo-conservatives) are saying about the America in which we now live. They’re saying that the federal government now wields the power to torture Americans and that Americans had better get used to this new way of life. Any American who is tortured should forget about ever suing any federal official who either does the torturing or who authorizes or facilitates it.

At the same time, conservatives say that federal torturers should be immune from criminal liability for torturing Americans, no matter how many criminal laws against torture they violate. ...

What Jose Padilla’s lawsuit is exposing is the harsh truth about the country in which we now live. Padilla is an American citizen. He was tried and convicted in a federal district court of a federal criminal offense, to wit: terrorism, and he is now serving time in a federal penitentiary for that crime.

But prior to the time that Padilla was convicted, federal officials incarcerated him in a military dungeon run by the Pentagon, where he was held for years and intentionally denied a speedy trial and due process of law. U.S. officials made it clear that if they wanted, they could keep Padilla incarcerated for the rest of his life without a trial. ...

Padilla’s civil lawsuit is not just about him. It’s about what federal officials, including those in the Pentagon and the CIA, can now do to all Americans.

Read complete article here.

See these related articles by Jacob Hornberger:

Padilla’s Lawsuit against Yoo to Proceed

The Pentagon’s Power to Arrest, Torture, and Execute Americans

See also Glenn Greenwald's NPR's ombudsman: Why we bar the word "torture"

Read more!

Saturday, June 27, 2009

The reality of rape in England

If you've been following the demise of once-civilized, stiff-upper-lip England, where policemen did not even carry guns, then you know what has happened to it during these years of open borders immigration and the overturning of its legal system to favor the new arrivals. Over the past two decades, crime has gone through the roof as English locals have tried to acclimate to the new cultural trends being brought to their shores.

As staunch supporters of anything-goes immigration, the British mainstream media have become masters at covering up the criminality of foreigners. Here is an unusually candid article by Sorious Samura, a British African who, on June 22, produced a documentary for television on the subject of rape. Below are excerpts from his article, Gang rape: Is it a race issue?

In 1999 I witnessed a gang rape in Sierra Leone. I was forced to watch a group of rebel soldiers taking it in turns to rape a young girl in front of an audience of jeering men. It was the height of the civil conflict and rape had become a devastating weapon of war. When I moved to Britain I believed I had escaped such horrific sexual violence. As my Dispatches investigation tomorrow night shows, I was mistaken. Gang rape is happening here – and what I have found most disturbing as an African is that a disproportionate number of these attacks are being carried out by black or mixed-race young men. ...

In December, nine schoolboys, some as young as 13 at the time of the attack, were convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl. She was dragged between tower blocks in Hackney where she was threatened with a knife, hit and raped during an ordeal that lasted an hour and a half – some of which was filmed on mobile phones. In January, three men were convicted of gang raping a 16-year-old with learning disabilities for two hours before dousing her with caustic soda in an effort to get rid of the evidence. ...

In other instances, as some of the victims in our film describe, girls can unwittingly walk into a trap, innocently visiting someone's house to listen to music or watch a film only to discover that a group of boys are lying in wait. Or they might be hanging out with friends in a park and suddenly realise they have become surrounded by a group of boys intent on sex. ...

I found there was concern among black communities about this violence. The Rev Joyce Daley, from the Black Parents Forum in Hackney, told me that gang rape is not a rare or one-off phenomenon. It is happening on a regular basis. She said: "It could actually explode on our very streets." Steve Griffith, a youth worker in King's Cross, said: "I see too much abuse of young women on the streets." ...

Sheldon Thomas, a youth worker in Brixton, said: "We've got a generation that looks at sex as if it's nothing, and treats disrespecting women as if it's nothing. These guys are like 13, 14 and 15, and their actual attitudes towards young girls – towards sex – is mind-blowing. It's actually leaving you asking: where are their morals, where are their values?"

Read complete article here.
Read more!

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Palin, still the darling of the mainstream media

My, my, Miz Palin is really playing the aggrieved victim to the hilt, isn't she? She and her acolytes have obviously decided that this is the way to go, in order to shut down her opposition. Is it working for you? Now she's fighting "malicious desecration." I thought that "desecration" referred to sacred things, not to hyped up photos of one's offspring. "Babies and children are off limits," she opines. Coming from Palin, that's got to be some kind of sick joke. What would she know about children being off limits? After publicly desecrating her own children, now they're sacred?

Palin is as laughable as ever, and here is another great Paul Mulshine column on the "conservative" Diva. An excerpt from Why the liberal media love Sarah Palin:

It has long been my contention that the most regrettable development in American politics has been the takeover of the Republican Party by those denizens of the heartland who tended to infest the Democratic Party until quite recently. And I find further confirmation of this in the events involving Sarah Palin and that joke told by David Letterman.

The joke involved may have been tasteless. But taste is not Palin's strength. She first came to prominence parading her pregnant daughter and the daughter's soon-to-be-ex-fiance around the national Republican convention.

Recently the lad has been making the rounds of talk shows informing the country that Palin let him share a room with the poor girl when she was a mere 17 years old. Perhaps I'm revealing my age, but when I was a young lad in the tutelage of the nuns, that sort of lapse would have been considered more scandalous than a mere joke on late-night television. Yet the more Palin's supporters hear of this kind of thing, the greater their ardor for her potential presidential candidacy in 2012.

Most of these people seem to perceive Palin as some sort of a conservative political leader. Nonsense. She has never given any indication that she has an identifiable political philosophy, conservative or liberal. She is not so much a political figure as a sort of national fertility symbol, the Venus of Willendorf reborn as the Venus of Wasilla. ...

Read complete article here:

For more on our favorite Mother-Leader, see our previous lists of posts here and here and here.
Read more!

Friday, June 19, 2009

The Naval Academy and "diversity"

When was the last time we got this kind of honesty and candidness from a white man who is attached to a job he wishes to keep? Here are excerpts from an article by Bruce Fleming, an English professor at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, describing the path that political correctness based in multiculturalism has taken at the Academy. (Did you know there is remedial tutoring even at the great military academies once reserved for the best and the brightest?) Fleming writes:


The Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead announced in Annapolis recently that "diversity is the number one priority" at the Naval Academy. The Naval Academy superintendent, Vice Adm. Jeffrey Fowler, echoed him. Everyone understands that "diversity" here means nonwhite skins. ...

A "diverse" class does not mean the Naval Academy recruits violinists, or older students (they can't be 23 on Induction Day), or gay people (who are thrown out) or foreign students (other than the dozen or so sent by client governments). It means applicants checked a box on their application that says they are Hispanic, African American, Native American, and now, since my time on the Admissions Board of the Academy, where I've taught for 22 years, Asians.

Midshipmen are admitted by two tracks. White applicants out of high school who are not also athletic recruits typically need grades of A and B and minimum SAT scores of 600 on each part for the Board to vote them "qualified." Athletics and leadership also count. ...

SAT scores below 600 or C grades almost always produce a vote of "not qualified" for white applicants. Not so for an applicant who self-identifies as one of the minorities who are our "number one priority." For them, another set of rules apply. Their cases are briefed separately to the board, and SAT scores to the mid-500s with quite a few Cs in classes (and no visible athletics or leadership) typically produce a vote of "qualified" for them, with direct admission to Annapolis. They're in, and are given a pro forma nomination to make it legit.

Minority applicants with scores and grades down to the 300s with Cs and Ds (and no particular leadership or athletics) also come, though after a remedial year at our taxpayer-supported remedial school, the Naval Academy Preparatory School. By using NAPS as a feeder, we've virtually eliminated all competition for "diverse" candidates. ...

All this is probably unconstitutional. That's what the Supreme Court said about the University of Michigan's two-track admissions in 2003.

Once at Annapolis, "diverse" midshipmen are over-represented in our pre-college classes, in lower-track courses, in mandatory tutoring programs and less challenging majors. Many struggle to master basic concepts. (I teach some of these courses.)

Read complete article here.
Read more!

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

As relevant today as yesterday – 01

From time to time, I shall link to articles originally written for the former hard copy newsletter, or for Issues & Views-The Website (now an archive), to highlight features whose themes are still relevant. This is the first of such posts.

The ongoing reparations fraud [2004]
What makes the current reparations movement a fraud, whether at Brown University or in the country at large, is the attempt to depict slavery as something uniquely done to blacks by whites. Reparations advocates are doing this for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks: That's where the money is.

See also:
Reparations and Irresponsible Demagogues

• • •

No escape [2004]
Until recent years, it was left to prison authorities and each state to determine how best to handle its prison population. Policies were set by wardens and/or state personnel, including decisions about racial and ethnic housing assignments. In general, separation of the races, especially blacks and whites, met with consensus among prison administrators and the inmates as well. But as the social policy of integration in this country took the form of a quasi-religion, becoming a virtue unto itself, some prison officials were forced to abandon common sense policies designed to keep the peace. Prisons came under the inspection of social engineers, who were determined that prison life reflect the standards being imposed on mainstream society.

See more on this prison case (especially Supreme Court Justice Thomas's dissent) in:
The overzealous integrationist court

• • •

When they came for the Baptists . . . [2003]
Anyone who claims that law enforcement saves its most punitive weapons only for the coloreds, and especially for blacks, should pay attention to the case of Matt Hale. ... If you still have any lingering doubts about the dying state of the Constitution, the treatment of Hale should remove those doubts. Even people who despise the teachings of Hale and his World Church of the Creator express astonishment at what is being done to an American citizen, whose primary offense is the thought crime of "hate."

See more on the Hale case in:
Free Speech For Some, But Not For All


• • •

Besieged with Political Correctness from the left and right [2005]
Conservatives have borne the brunt of speech codes and related policies, and have comprised the vast majority of speakers who have been shouted down when they enter the campus public forum. Too many on the left have not spoken out against such forms of censorship, probably because the other side’s ox was being gored. ... The last thing American campuses need is censorship from the right piling onto the preexisting censorship from the left.

• • •

Bringing down families [2002]
These sentences are imposed regardless of a person's role in the crime or other mitigating factors. In this bizarre legal world, prosecutors, not judges decide which charges to bring and determine the final sentence. Many judges are on record for their opposition to mandatory minimum sentencing, especially in cases of the young and/or naive who are seduced by clever drug dealers to act as couriers. The consequences of these immoral sentencing laws are horrendous--mothers of young children incarcerated for periods that span their children's youth; siblings separated from one another, never to be reunited in a family setting; families torn apart, often for good. All because a parent committed an act that is made foolish only because the laws are foolish. They are victims of zealous "drug warriors," who have succeeded in ratcheting up into felony crimes actions that once were misdemeanors.

See more on unjust sentencing laws in:
When judges don't judge
When did we get this mean?
When did we get this mean? - Part 2
Trying to be tougher than the next guy

• • •


There but for the grace of God....
[2002]
And so it was that I came to be born in Detroit and that thirty-five years later, a black man born in white America, I was in Africa, birthplace of my ancestors, standing at the edge of a river not as an African but as an American journalist--a mere spectator--watching the bloated bodies of black Africans cascading over a waterfall. And that's when I thought about how, if things had been different, I might have been one of them--or might have met some similarly anonymous fate in one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. and so I thank God my ancestor survived that voyage. . . . .

• • •

Will rights be restored? [2002]
The war against terrorism is different. Because the struggle is against a shadowy network of adversaries rather than a nation state, it is virtually impossible even to speculate when it might end. ... Indeed, it is not clear how victory itself would be defined. ... The concept of victory becomes more elusive if the goal is the eradication of all terrorism from the planet, as administration officials have sometimes hinted. That is a guaranteed blueprint for perpetual war.

• • •

Trying to fill those recruitment quotas [2005]
Damien Cave tells of other recruiters who have been breaking enlistment rules for months, even hiding police records and medical histories of prospective recruits. One recruiter claimed that his commanding officers have encouraged such deceptions, to meet the Army's recruitment quotas. The recruiter told Cave, "The problem is that no one wants to join. We have to play fast and loose with the rules just to get by."

• • •

Mind-altering greed [2002]
All you have to do is attach money to it (like $400 per child), and then sit back and watch the diagnoses of the supposed "illness" increase by the tens of thousands. ... With more than half of those 7,000,000 children also prescribed Ritalin, the stock-market value of its manufacturer, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, has also soared. Now that company and others are working to introduce a host of new drugs into the classroom, including Prozac and Luvox, which has just been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for pediatric use. The industry is looking to even greater growth as the pill brigade is targeting pre-school toddlers. The use of psychotropic drugs, like anti-depressants and stimulants, in two to four year olds more than doubled between 1991 and 1995.

• • •

Exposing search and seizure abuse [2001]
If the Founders did, indeed, think of the press as the watchdog of government, it must have been journalists like Karen Dillon whom they hoped would do the watching. Last year, Dillon wrote a series of articles that revealed the nature of "asset forfeiture," the practice whereby law enforcement officers can seize the property of citizens, whether or not any crime has been committed. ... Dillon's articles show how the country's "drug warriors" enrich themselves through this search and seizure ploy, and how important to them is the continuance of the "drug war."

See also:
Raids and more raids
Asset forfeiture, or legal looting
Justice attained through luck, not rights

• • •

Closing the floodgates [2004]
Over the years, England's leaders, as well as those in other Western countries, including the United States, disdained advocates of immigration restriction and eschewed common sense. ... In the U.S., where hospitals are going bankrupt and closing under the burden of a never-ending stream of migrants, the end does not seem near. In California's San Fernando Valley, the region's oldest hospital announced that it will fold by the end of the year, which will bring to six the number of announced shutdowns of such facilities in a little over a year.

See also:
The battle for immigration reform heats up
Immigration: Betrayal By Black Elites

• • •

Five more years for your thoughts [2004]
The brazen, unconstitutional nature of these "Gotcha!" laws, contrived by politically powerful interest groups to penalize American whites, have been cited by legal scholars, lawyers, and lots of just plain, ordinary citizens, who are not deaf, dumb and blind. ... How does one tell if a fight really centered around race, or religion, or gender bias? A court should not have to speculate on such a subject, since, in this case, its only role should be establishing punishment for the actual crime of assault -- the physical, tangible crime, not the "thought crime."

See also Blog post:
Abolish all 'hate crime' laws
Read more!