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Apr 9, 2010

Witnesses: Soldiers look on as setters beat 2

 


Witnesses: Soldiers look on as setters beat 2

Ma'an – 09/04/2010

Hebron – Two 19-year-old men were transferred to a Hebron hospital for treatment Wednesday after being harshly beaten by Israeli settlers near the Ibrahimi Mosque, locals said.

Witnesses identified the two as Muhammad Abdul Raouf Al-Muhtaseb and Rushdi Al-Muhtaseb, both 19, and said soldiers looked on as settlers attacked the men and did nothing to interfere.

On 31 March a similar incident was reported, with A'teiyah Yousef Maswada, 31, transferred to hospital following an attack by some 10 settlers outside of the mosque.

Palestinian police reported the attack, and eyewitnesses including Christian Peacemaker Teams corroborated the account, with Israeli police unavailable for comment by phone.

Shopkeepers in the area said the man was en route to the Ibrahimi Mosque when he was assaulted, and was described as having a bloody face, CPT reported, noting that witnesses said the man did not go to the hospital. By the time Israeli police arrived on the scene, the CPT observer noted, shopkeepers said the settlers had fled.

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Congressional Vote on Goldstone Most Detrimental for Israel and the U.S. - By: Noura Erakat and James Marc Leas

 


Congressional Vote on Goldstone Most Detrimental for Israel and the U.S.

By: Noura Erakat and James Marc Leas

 

The House vote condemning the Goldstone Report, which encourages Israel and Hamas to conduct "credible" independent investigations of war crimes committed in Gaza, may help Israeli leaders avoid prosecution in the short-term. However, the House vote will have long-term detrimental effects on Israel and the U.S.'s moral authority. While the vote increased the likelihood of a US veto in the UN Security Council, it will not stifle calls for justice. On the contrary, the Congressional vote increases the likelihood of a worldwide campaign to push the UN General Assembly, the International Criminal Court, or other countries, under universal jurisdiction, to take action against the Israeli war crimes committed in Gaza. Campaigns for boycott, divestment and sanctions are already growing rapidly and likely to be accelerated by US and Israeli intransigence.

The House Resolution railed against the Goldstone Commission for failng to recognize Israel's right to self-defense "against relentless rocket and mortar attacks." However, the self-defense claim propagated by Israeli and U.S. politicians alike since the initiation of Operation Cast Lead, is inconsistent with both the facts and the law.

Within weeks of entering into the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire agreement, Hamas rocket fire had come to a near halt. According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), the ceasefire was so successful that it brought "normal life and "calm" back to Israeli towns near Gaza. In an article titled, "One Month of Calm Along the Israel-Gaza Border," posted on July 27, 2008, the MFA even lauds Hamas, stating, "Publicly, Hamas leaders have stated time and again that the lull is a Palestinian national interest. On several occasions, Hamas members have arrested Fatah operatives who were involved in firing at Israel and confiscated their arms."

Calm prevailed for four months until Israeli forces broke the ceasefire agreement on November 4, 2008, as reported in a New York Times article, "Israeli Strike is First in Gaza Since Start of Cease Fire." . While the world's gaze turned to one of the U.S.'s  most historic elections that day, Israel launched an armed incursion into Gaza, accompanied by aerial bombing, killing six Hamas members. Hamas rocket fire immediately followed the Israeli attack catapulting the region into a renewed wave of violent hostilities. Two weeks later Israel's largest circulation paper quoted Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak admitting that "the recent waves of rocket attacks are a result of our operations, which have resulted in the killing of twenty Hamas gunmen" (Ynet News November 20, 2008). Barak's admission, consistent with the fact that Israel broke the ceasefire, makes Israel's self-defense claim  baseless.

 

Still, Hamas offered to reinstate and extend the ceasefire a month later on December 23, 2008.  ("Hamas: Willing to renew truce" Ynet News December 23, 2008.) Israel refused, ducking the chance to reach a diplomatic agreement that would have again ended rocket fire and brought the security desired by Israel. Instead, Israel chose massive escalation and four days later launched a gruesome aerial offensive against Gaza.

On the Offensive's 17th day, Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni boasted that Israel was "going wild–and this is a good thing" ("Israeli cabinet divided over fresh Gaza surge," The Independent, January 13, 2009). The targeting of civilians described in the Goldstone Report seems to corroborate this Israeli attitude as Israeli forces attacked targets in Gaza that had nothing to do with Israel's stated military objective of stopping rocket fire. Israeli forces targeted schools, hospitals, factories, agricultural land, the only flour mill in Gaza, an egg farm, thousands of private homes, government buildings, and Palestinian civilians.

The Goldstone Report concluded:

 

"While the Israeli Government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right to self-defence, the Mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole." (Goldstone par. 1883)

Although the principle of proportionality, a pillar in the laws of war as well as an element of self-defense in international law, has been a matter of significant controversy, there exists one unequivocal standard of proportionality around which no controversy exists: the prohibition on the targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. As demonstrated not only by the Goldstone Report, but the reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, and the National Lawyers Guild, Israeli forces directly targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure during its 22-day offensive, thereby rendering null any legal argument for self-defense. The only rebuttal to these charges against the Israeli Army is a military investigation conducted by the Israeli Army of itself- an investigation nearly unanimously deemed insufficient and partial. (see "Operation Cast Lead: The Elusive Quest for Self-Defense in International Law,"http://www.lawrecord.com/files/36-rutgers-l.-rec.-164.pdf)

Thus, neither the facts nor the law support an Israeli self-defense claim. Rather than condemn Israel's act of aggression, ongoing occupation and humanitarian blockade of the Gaza Strip, Congress produced a  pungent piece of manipulative delusion: that Israel's onslaught of Gaza constituted an act of self-defense. The  House is now on the record disavowing international law and international accountability mechanisms. People around the world will be persuaded that protests, boycotts, and divestment campaigns are all the more necessary, and they will look to places outside the US political establishment for justice.

 =========================================================================================================================================================

 

The Palestinian Rights Page

http://www.alhewar.org/INTIFADAH%20PAGE/the_new_intifidah.htm

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SPY CASE: The Dark Underbelly of Israel's Security State

 


The Dark Underbelly of Israel's Security State

aletho | April 9, 2010 at 12:19 pm | Categories: Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism | URL: http://wp.me/pIUmC-26b

The Anat Kamm Affair

By JONATHAN COOK | April 9, 2010

Next week 23-year-old Anat Kamm is due to stand trial for her life -- or rather the state's demand that she serve a life sentence for passing secret documents to an Israeli reporter, Uri Blau, of the liberal Haaretz daily. She is charged with spying.

Blau himself is in hiding in London, facing, if not a Mossad hit squad, at least the stringent efforts of Israel's security services to get him back to Israel over the opposition of his editors, who fear he will be put away too.

This episode has been dragging on behind the scenes for months, since at least December, when Kamm was placed under house arrest pending the trial.

Not a word about the case leaked in Israel until this week when the security services, who had won from the courts a blanket gag order -- a gag on the gag, so to speak -- were forced to reverse course when foreign bloggers began making the restrictions futile. Hebrew pages on Facebook had already laid out the bare bones of the story.

So, now that much of the case is out in the light, what are the crimes committed by Kamm and Blau?

During her conscription, Kamm copied possibly hundreds of army documents that revealed systematic law-breaking by the Israeli high command operating in the occupied Palestinian territories, including orders to ignore court rulings. She was working at the time in the office of Brig Gen Yair Naveh, who is in charge of operations in the West Bank.

Blau's crime is that he published a series of scoops based on her leaked information that have highly embarrassed senior Israeli officers by showing their contempt for the rule of law.

His reports included revelations that the senior command had approved targeting Palestinian bystanders during the military's extra-judicial assassinations in the occupied territories; that, in violation of a commitment to the high court, the army had issued orders to execute wanted Palestinians even if they could be safely apprehended; and that the defence ministry had a compiled a secret report showing that the great majority of settlements in the West Bank were illegal even under Israeli law (all are illegal in international law).

In a properly democratic country, Kamm would have an honorable defence against the charges, of being a whistle-blower rather than a spy, and Blau would be winning journalism prizes not huddling away in exile.

But this is Israel. Here, despite a desperate last-stand for the principles of free speech and the rule of law in the pages of the Haaretz newspaper today, which is itself in the firing line over its role, there is almost no public sympathy for Kamm or even Blau.

The pair are already being described, both by officials and in chat forums and talkback columns, as traitors who should be jailed, disappeared or executed for the crime of endangering the state.

The telling comparison being made is to Mordechai Vanunu, the former technician at the Dimona nuclear plant who exposed Israel's secret nuclear arsenal. Inside Israel, he is universally reviled to this day, having spent nearly two decades in harsh confinement. He is still under a loose house arrest, denied the chance to leave the country.

Blau and Kamm have every reason to be worried they may share a similar fate. Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet, Israel's secret police, which has been leading the investigation, said yesterday that they had been too "sensitive to the media world" in pursuing the case for so long and that the Shin Bet would now "remove its gloves".

Maybe that explains why Kamm's home address was still visible on the charge sheet published yesterday, putting her life in danger from one of those crazed talkbackers.

It certainly echoes warnings we have had before from the Shin Bet about how it operates.

Much like Blau, Azmi Bishara, once head of a leading Arab party in Israel, is today living in exile after the Shin Bet put him in their sights. He had been campaigning for democratic reforms that would make Israel a "state of all its citizens" rather than a Jewish state.

While he was abroad in 2007, the Shin Bet announced that he would be put on trial for treason when he returned, supposedly because he had had contacts with Hizbullah during Israel's attack on Lebanon in 2006.

Few experts believe Bishara could have had any useful information for Hizbullah, but the Shin Bet's goals and modus operandi were revealed later by Diskin in a letter on its attitude to Bishara and his democratisation campaign. The Shin Bet was there, he said, to thwart the activities of groups or individuals who threatened the state's Jewish character "even if such activity is sanctioned by the law".

Diskin called this the principle of "a democracy defending itself" when it was really a case of Jewish leaders in a state based on Jewish privilege protecting those privileges. This time it is about the leaders of Israel's massive security industry protecting their privileges in a security state by silencing witnesses to their crimes and keeping ordinary citizens in ignorance.

Justifying his decision to "take the gloves off" in the case of Kamm and Blau, Diskin said: "It is a dream of every enemy state to get its hands on these kinds of documents" -- that is, documents proving that the Israeli army has repeatedly broken the country's laws, in addition, of course, to its systematic violations of international law.

Diskin claims that national security has been put at risk, even though the reports Blau based on the documents -- and even the documents themselves -- were presented to, and approved by, the military censor for publication. The censor can restrict publication based only on national security concerns, unlike Diskin, the army senior command and the government, who obey other kinds of concerns.

Diskin knows there is every chance he will get away with his ploy because of a brainwashed Israeli public, a largely patriotic media and a supine judiciary.

The two judges who oversaw the months of gagging orders to silence any press discussion of this case did so on the say-so of the Shin Bet that there were vital national security issues at stake. Both judges are stalwarts of Israel's enormous security industry.

Einat Ron was appointed a civilian judge in 2007 after working her way up the ranks of the military legal establishment, there to give a legal gloss to the occupation. Notoriously in 2003, when she was the chief military prosecutor, she secretly proposed various fabrications to the army so that it could cover up the killing of an 11-year-old Palestinian boy, Khalil al-Mughrabi, two years earlier. Her role only came to light because a secret report into the boy's death was mistakenly attached to the army's letter to an Israeli human rights group.

The other judge is Ze'ev Hammer, who finally overturned the gag order this week -- but only after a former supreme court judge, Dalia Dorner, now the head of Israel's Press Council, belatedly heaped scorn on it. She argued that, with so much discussion of the case outside Israel, the world was getting the impression that Israel flouted democratic norms.

Judge Hammer has his own distinguished place in Israel's security industry, according to Israeli analyst Dimi Reider. During his eight years of legal study, Hammer worked for both the Shin Bet and Israel's Mossad spy agency.

Judge Hammer and Judge Ron are deeply implicated in the same criminal outfit -- the Israeli security establishment -- that is now trying to cover up the tracks that lead directly to its door. Kamm is doubtless wondering what similar vested interests the judges who hear her case next week will not be declaring.

Writing in Haaretz today, Blau said he had been warned "that if I return to Israel I could be silenced for ever, and that I would be charged for crimes related to espionage". He concluded that "this isn't only a war for my personal freedom but for Israel's image".

He should leave worrying about Israel's image to Netanyahu, Diskin and judges like Dorner. That was why the gag order was enforced in the first place. This is not a battle for Israel's image; it's a battle for what is left of its soul.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.

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THE LYING TONGUE OF NEW YORK'S FORMER MAYOR

 


THE LYING TONGUE OF NEW YORK'S FORMER MAYOR

desertpeace | April 9, 2010 at 19:27 | Categories: Associate Post, Corrupt Politics, Israel, zionism | URL: http://wp.me/pahWK-34Y
Ed Koch's lying tongue
By Khalid Amayreh

Ed Koch is a delusional Zionist supremacist who is desperately struggling to maintain the relevance of Zionist mythology, especially in Europe and North America.

And like all Zionists, the former New York mayor, seems to have little regard if any for truth and honesty.

This is why he constantly reproduces old lies and discredited canards in an effort to re-colonize and brainwash people's minds about the reality of Zio-Nazim as embodied by the Satanic creature known as Israel.

In his latest rambling screed of lies, published in several Zionist publications, including the Jewish settler mouthpiece, the Jerusalem Post, Koch lambasted President Obama's ostensible insistence that Israel halt its frantic settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Koch went as far as comparing American efforts to resolve the Palestinian plight with the policy of appeasement adopted by some European governments toward Nazi Germany prior to the outbreak of the Second World War.  "There is a foul whiff of Munich and appeasement in the air, he recently wrote.

"A harbinger of what is to come is Obama's willingness to throw Israel under the bus as an attempt to court better relations with the Sunni Arab countries. "

For Koch and like-minded Zionists, asking Israel to rein in Nazi-minded Jewish settlers, stop stealing occupied Arab land and freeze the expansion of Jewish-only colonies on land belonging to another people is tantamount to throwing Israel under the bus, according to these arrogant dogs and sick thugs.

For them, only allowing Israel to slaughter every Palestinian man, woman and child would be a sufficient proof of America's friendship with Israel, a state that  murders children in large numbers, drops white Phosphorus shells over civilian neighborhoods and then claims it did it for self-defense.

An aggregate Zionist racist and liar from the 1950s, Koch repeats one of the most notorious lies once echoed by another pathological liar, former President Bush who claimed that Muslims and Arabs hated the U.S. because of "our freedoms and liberties" not because of America's dark embrace of Israeli Nazism.

Koch wrote: "Hatred of the US has little to do with what we do and a lot to do with what we are - a free, secular and democratic country that protects the rights of women and minorities."

Well, Mr. Koch is effectively committing adultery with language as he does with truth by regurgitating these stale lies. In fact, one of the main reasons for Arab-Islamic animosity toward the US government is exactly the apposite of what this old Zionist thug is saying.  In truth, it is America's enduring and wanton embrace of tyrannical Arab regimes that deny their masses human rights and civil liberties (such as the right to elect their own rulers and freedom of speech and expression) that generate hatred for America's policies in the Arab-Muslim world. (The other two reasons have to do with America's dark embrace of Israel's territorial expansion and America's anti-Islam posture).

Hence, one can argue rather candidly that Koch is either an irredeemable, willful ignoramus, who is unlikely given his long career in politics and familiarity with the issues of the Middle East, or a pornographically odious liar that lies as often as he breathes Oxygen, which is the more likely probability.

More to the point, in his defense of Zio-Nazism, Koch claims that any balanced American approach toward the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, would result in the escalation of inter-Muslim violence, as if the racist thug was concerned about the loss of non-Jewish lives and shedding of non-Jewish blood.

He nonchalantly invokes a statement by the former Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin which really embodied Zionist diabolical sanctimony and murderous self-righteousness.

Begin, a certified war criminal, was quoted as saying following the Sabra and Shatilla massacres near Beirut in 1982, that "Gentiles kill Gentiles and they come to hang the Jews."

Well, true the Christian militias did carry out the actual killings at the two refugee camps, but it was the Israeli occupation army, the Wehrmacht of the time, that abetted, enabled and facilitated the slaughter."

Why does Koch, an old man with one leg in the grave and the other walking, choose to ignore this cardinal, obvious fact. Is this how Jews ought to behave. Shame on the depraved liar.

Besides, since when an irredeemable mass murderer and child killer, a Hitlerite of Menachem Begin's caliber can be trusted as a paragon of truth when he himself boasted in his book "the Revolt" about his role in the notorious massacre of Dir Yasin?

So what is it that which Koch is barking at and what does he want? Is he trying to tell the US administration that Israel, a country situated 10,000 kilometers away, must be allowed to retain and perpetuate its control of US congress, government, media and politics even at the expense of American national interests? Is he trying to tell the American government and people that what Israel is doing in Gaza is a kosher genocide and that as such it should be allowed to continue and linger for as long as necessary depending on the mood and whims of the  Judeo-Nazi clique in Tel Aviv, especially the genocidal settler leadership?

In addition to his manifestly criminal tribal loyalty to the Nazi-like entity, Koch is also scandalously morally duplicitous when it comes to the issue of democracy.

He criticizes the Obama administration for allowing the American-puppet Afghani leader Hamid Karazai to win a second term despite the reported widespread vote-rig, arguing that the US behaved undemocratically.

In recent weeks, Karazai threatened to change the "rule of the game" with the West, especially with the Obama administration, saying "If you (the Afghan Parliament) and the international community keep pressuring me, I swear that I am going to join the Taliban."

Koch's lamentation about Karazai's reelection shouldn't be understood as an expression of commitment to democracy.

After all, Koch has always been and continues to be a firm supporter of the genocidal Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, which was imposed following Hamas's election victory in 2006.

In other words, Koch supports democracy only if its serves Israel's and international Zionism's global interests and goals, including the liquidation of the Palestinian cause, the creation of a huge Jewish-Zionist empire in the Middle East and probably world domination as well.

However, if democracy produces leaderships that truly reflect the masses' collective will, as in occupied Palestine and as it would in many other Arab and Muslim countries, then Koch will come with a thousand arguments against democracy….because in the final analysis what counts, as far as he is concerned, is not people's natural right to freedom and democracy, but rather the Jewish people's "right" to enslave and torment "the goyem" by virtue of being "the chosen people."

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Prof. McWhorter; What’s Holding Blacks Back?

 

City Journal Home.
John H. McWhorter
What's Holding Blacks Back?
It's black attitudes, 
not white racism, that's to blame.

Winter 2001

When I was ten, my mother made me read Roots cover to cover, and she'd coax me to curl up beside her to watch old newsreels of black civil rights protesters being hosed, beaten, and dragged off to prison. We watched Norman Lear sitcoms, so I'd learn from Archie Bunker and crew what blacks had faced in the past. Later, she made sure I read accounts of black America before the civil rights movement. I learned of black lawyers working as office clerks, black classical musicians stuck orchestrating cheap stage revues, brilliant black professors trapped in threadbare segregated colleges; I read of the Scottsboro Boys, Emmett Till, and the assassination of Martin Luther King.

Such things filled me with horror—but then with relief, even triumph. After all, wasn't the point of All in the Family that Archie was powerless in the face of his daughter and son-in-law's racially progressive positions? Didn't his black neighbors have the moral upper hand—and wasn't it they, not Archie, who got to move to the Upper East Side? By my twenties, in the 1990s, I felt grateful and excited to live in times of bracing progress for my race.

Yet during the decade I came to realize that this feeling made me odd man out among most black Americans. In every race-related debate—whether over Rodney King, O. J. Simpson, the Million Man March, Ebonics, or affirmative action—almost every black person I knew, many with backgrounds as comfortable as my own, started from the fierce conviction that, decades after the Civil Rights Act, whitey's foot remains pressed upon all black Americans' necks. For most black Americans, the rapid increase of the black middle class, of interracial relationships and marriages, and of blacks in prestigious positions has no bearing on the real state of black America. Further, they believe, whites' inability to grasp the unmistakable reality of oppression is itself proof of racism, while blacks who question that reality are self-deluded.

Doubtless some black leaders mouth the ideology of victimhood for political advantage: "Confrontation works," as Al Sharpton has calculatingly observed. But most rank-and-file exponents of the "racism forever" worldview really mean it. Their conviction rests on seven articles of faith, carefully passed from person to person at all levels of the black community. These beliefs, rather than what remains of racism itself, are the biggest obstacle to further black progress in today's America. And all are either outright myths or severe distortions of truth.

One: Most black people are poor (and middle-class blacks are statistical noise). Almost half of the blacks surveyed in a Gallup poll supposed that three out of four black people live in inner cities. Yet in 2001 most black people are neither poor nor even close to it: by any estimation, middle-class blacks outnumber poor ones. And at last count, only one in five blacks lived in the inner city.

Two: Black people earn 61 percent of what whites do. Though accurate as a nationwide median in 1995, this figure is dragged down by the disproportionate number of single black welfare mothers. Black two-parent families earned 87 percent of what white two-parent families earned in 1995. Also distorting the median is the disproportionate number of blacks who live in the South, where wages are lower overall. If you look only at specific areas rather than at the nation as a whole, black household earnings in 1994 exceeded whites' in 130 cities and counties across the nation.

Three: An epidemic of racist church burnings has swept across the South. There was never any such thing: about 80 black churches were burned from 1990 to 1996—but then over seven times that many white churches burned as well.

Four: The CIA created the inner cities by pumping drugs into them. This one pops up in pamphlet after pamphlet at leftist marches and gatherings; it is taught to many black college students. But theSan Jose Mercury's charges on this score proved false. Yes, some CIA agents aiding the Nicaraguan contras decided to look the other way and allow them to profit from some drug sales to California, but that's hardly a plot to addict blacks in all of America's inner cities.

Five: Because black men are disproportionately incarcerated, racism reigns eternal. This belief assumes that blacks do not commit crimes any more frequently than whites. But if black men make up almost 50 percent of the prison population, they committed roughly 42 percent of violent crimes in the 1990s, and many studies have shown that, when severity of crime and past record are taken into account, there is no bias against blacks in the criminal justice system. At its inception, the War on Drugs, often interpreted as a "War on Blacks," had the strong support of the Congressional Black Caucus, whose members aimed to stem inner-city violence. If these black officials, who at the time exhorted Congress to "save our communities," were racists, then the definition of this term is beyond my comprehension.

Six: Racial profiling is racism. It can be—but just as often isn't. In some parts of the country, black men are so overrepresented in criminal activities that police officers, white and black, would be shirking their duty not to concentrate on them. Sure, sometimes profiling ends up detaining more blacks than their rate of conviction for the targeted crime justifies, as with drivers recently stopped and searched for drugs in New Jersey. But even here, officers generally have acted less out of race hatred than out of a pragmatic assessment that they can fill their quotas faster by focusing on a group that commits a disproportionate share of crime. Inappropriate, yes—and widely condemned as such: indication Number 674 that racism is on the wane.

I have always suspected that today's profiling-must-stop contingent secretly believes that whitesdeserve black crime as retribution for oppression. But to halt all profiling would increase the number of blacks murdered, mostly by other blacks. And black leaders would cite this rise as further evidence of racism, as happened in New York in the 1980s, when cops turned a blind eye to a wave of black crime. Many of those crying racism about today's New York City policing were sounding the same call about the Dinkins administration's lax policing.

Seven: Excessive police brutality against blacks shows that racism reigns eternal. Certainly blacks have suffered greater police brutality than whites. But this constitutes not the prevalence of overt racism, but its last holdout; as Orlando Patterson argues, you'd expect racism to persist longest precisely among undereducated keepers of order working under conditions likely to spark impulsiveness. And most important, the police brutality situation is improving rapidly. For example, though I think Officer Justin Volpe would not have brutalized a white suspect as he brutalized Haitian Abner Louima, his expectation that the "blue wall of silence" would protect him proved false. In the Diallo and Dorismond killings, the undertraining of police officers to deal with chaotic, tense situations was much more at fault than white racism—and, of course, black officers have been involved in similar cases across the country, though such cases don't get headlines in the liberal media.

These articles of faith add up to a deeply felt cult of victimology that grips the entire black community. Some subscribe to it fiercely; most accept it as a valid point of view, at least. The "serious brother" who launches into a tirade about the War on Blacks at a party sets heads nodding all over the room.

You'd think that a group committed to advancement would avoid such an obsessive focus on the negative, especially when the negative steadily fades from year to year. But blacks, inevitably, suffer from a classic post-colonial inferiority complex. Like insecure people everywhere, they are driven by a private sense of personal inadequacy to seeing imaginary obstacles to their success supposedly planted by others. Once the 1968 Kerner Commission report fueled that tendency by positing that American racism was an institutional, systemic matter rather than a merely personal one, black leaders and thinkers, haunted by the oppressor's lie that blacks were inferior, worked obsessively to find evidence, often fantastical, of "the system's" evil.

In the grip of this seductive ideology, blacks have made the immobilizing assumption that individual initiative can lead only to failure, with only a few exceptionally gifted or lucky exceptions. Yet many groups have triumphed over similar (or worse) obstacles—including millions of Caribbean and African immigrants in America, from Colin Powell to the thousands of Caribbean children succeeding in precisely the crumbling schools where black American kids fail. Indeed, thinkers such as Thomas Sowell and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom argue that American blacks could have advanced—and were advancing—even without the civil rights legislation of the sixties and the racial preferences of the seventies, since black unemployment was at an all-time low in the mid-sixties, and the black middle class was already growing fast. But these facts can't outweigh the almost narcotic pleasure that underdoggism provides a race plagued by self-doubt.

Blacks aren't the only people who've sabotaged themselves through victimology. Take the eerily similar case of the Boston Irish, the target of contempt and discrimination in nineteenth-century America. By the 1920s, when anti-Irish bigotry had receded greatly, historical memory allowed Mayor James Michael Curley to maintain power by stoking Irish resentment very like today's black resentment. Curley found "anti-Irish" sentiment everywhere: merit hiring systems were "anti-Irish"; "Anglo-Saxon" culture was fatally diseased. Even today, the remnant of this mentality still traps members of South Boston's Irish community in crummy housing projects full of idle adults who have high rates of substance abuse and even speak a local dialect it takes a little while to wrap one's ears around. In South Boston, as in South Central, a fatalistic skepticism that you can rise above your community and a deeply embedded wariness of mainstream culture thwart ambition even where opportunity is available.

The victimology cult has in turn engendered a cult of black separatism. Inspired by the Black Power movement of the 1960s, which violently rejected whites as terminally evil, today's separatism, in the same vein, flirts disastrously with the idea that, because white racism ineluctably drives black people outside the bounds of civic virtue, blacks shouldn't be seriously punished or morally condemned for criminal behavior. Black transgressiveness is understandable, even "cool." A typical consequence of this view was the feting of the four black youths who maimed several people in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict, with the Nation of Islam setting up a defense fund for the "L.A. Four." The most recent manifestation of the idea was Jesse Jackson's intervention when a Decatur, Illinois, high school suspended for two years seven black teenagers who injured bystanders during a gang fight at a school football game. Jackson painted this response to thuggery as a racist attempt to deny "our children" an education.

The worst result of the sense that black America is a fundamentally separate realm is a widespread cult of anti-intellectualism. Consider the data: even in middle-class suburbs, increasing numbers of middle-class black students tend to cluster at the bottom of their schools in grades and test scores. Black students whose parents earn $70,000 a year or more make median SAT scores lower than impoverished white students whose parents make $6,000 a year or less, while black students whose parents both have graduate degrees make mean SAT scores lower than white students whose parents only completed high school.

Why? All through modern black American culture, even throughout black academia, the belief prevails that learning for learning's sake is a white affair and therefore inherently disloyal to a proper black identity. Studying black-related issues is okay, because learning about oneself is authentic. But this impulse also implicitly classifies science as irrelevant, which is the direct cause of the underrepresentation of minorities in the hard sciences. The sense that the properly "black" person only delves into topics related to himself is also why you can count on one hand the number of books by black Americans that are not on racial topics.

The belief that blacks and school don't go together has its roots in slavery's refusal to let blacks be educated. But it gained strength in the mid-1960s, when black separatism rejected traits associated with whites as alien, and black students, in this spirit, began teasing their fellows who strove to excel in school as "acting white," a much harsher taunt than merely dismissing them as nerds. When I was four—and this is my very first memory—a group of black kids in the neighborhood stopped me and asked me to spell a word. When I did, one of them directed his little sister to hit me repeatedly. I later watched a friend of mine treated similarly for answering such questions as, "How far is it from New Jersey to Florida," and I'll never forget being asked by one of his tormentors, "Are you smart?" in the menacing tone you'd use to ask, "Did you steal my money?"

The "acting white" charge—which implies that you think yourself different from, and better than, your peers—is the prime reason that blacks do poorly in school. The gifted black student quickly faces a choice between peer group acceptance and intellectual achievement. Most, out of an utterly human impulse, choose the former. Even if they open themselves to schooling in college or later, their performance all too often permanently suffers from the message they long ago internalized that "the school thing" is an add-on, not a mix-in.

The prevailing orthodoxy lays the blame on other factors, of course, but none of them withstands scrutiny. The fact that the children of working poor immigrants, including black Caribbean and African immigrants, often do well in school, disproves the claim that their working-class roots deny today's newly middle-class blacks the "cultural capital" to teach their children to excel in school. The success of Southeast Asian immigrants' children in the same terrible inner-city schools in which black students fail disproves the Jonathan Kozol gospel that it is the "savage inequality" of school funding that makes black kids fail. Though Kozol's followers counter that immigrants are an inappropriate comparison because they are a "self-selected" population, rich in initiative, Latinos are also self-selected immigrants and yet lag behind in school almost as much as blacks—which shows that culture plays a major role among immigrants. Finally, educators often assert that white teachers are biased against black children, dousing their initiative early on and then tracking them away from advanced placement classes. However, studies repeatedly suggest that teachers track based on demonstrated ability—and, again, black Caribbean and African children do fine, despite presumably suffering the same treatment as native-born blacks.

Finally, what of Claude Steele's influential argument that middle-class black students underachieve in school because fear of confirming the stereotype of black mental inferiority makes them choke up on tests? I know from my own experience that there's a grain of truth in this argument. But a tiny grain: after all, college assignments are not composed to test racial abilities. And all these conventional arguments neglect the elephant sitting in the middle of the room: if black students who try to achieve in school get sharply teased for it and threatened with ostracism, why would we notexpect this to be the main cause of their academic underachievement?

One well-studied case decisively confutes all the conventional arguments. In tony suburban Shaker Heights, Ohio, funding is generous, support programs aimed at black students (about half of the student population, not an alienated minority) abound, there is no ability tracking (students track themselves), and such racism as can be found is too intermittent to destroy the academic curiosity of a human being of normal resilience. Yet blacks there cluster at the very bottom of the school, and black students report that they come up against the "acting white" charge whenever they try to excel. One girl interviewed there knuckled under to this teasing and saw her grades plummet, while white students interviewed talked about how, in many of their cliques, doing well in school was "cool." Districts all over the country, including Evanston, Illinois, Prince George's County, Maryland, and Nyack, New York, report similar results.

Victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism underlie the general black community's response to all race-related issues. The response to affirmative action is a case in point. Blacks see it as a policy that appropriately bends the rules for a people denied the opportunity to compete on a level playing field—a notion that in 2001, when middle-class blacks are a massive and thriving group in American society, can only seem plausible through the lens of victimology. The defense of affirmative action on the grounds of "diversity" is an expression of separatism. After all, since there are not enough black students to be admitted to selective schools on the same merits as the other students, beyond a certain cut-off point blacks are being valued as much for their distinct and separate cultural traits as for their academic accomplishment. This is a state of affairs, moreover, that requires a strong dose of anti-intellectualism to accept without discomfort. And the same anti-intellectualism rests content with the flimsy reasoning behind all defenses of affirmative action: that because black students are overrepresented in underfunded public schools, for example, it is immoral for colleges to require a top-quality dossier from the black child of a doctor and a corporate manager, or that, as William Bowen and Derek Bok argue in the sickeningly overpraised The Shape of the River, affirmative action ought be continued indefinitely because its first generations of beneficiaries didn't mind it and are happy with their lives.

Today, these three thought patterns impede black advancement much more than racism; and dysfunctional inner cities, corporate glass ceilings, and black educational underachievement will persist until such thinking disappears. In my experience, trying to show many African-Americans how mistaken and counterproductive these ideas are is like trying to convince a religious person that God does not exist: the sentiments are beyond the reach of rational, civil discourse.

After I gave a talk at a black bookstore outlining why the conventional explanations for black students' underperformance don't hold water, a matriarchal figure simply dismissed my argument by pronouncing that America is "set against" black students, period—to the applause of the entire room.Time magazine's Jack E. White wrote a disparaging review of my new book, Losing the Race ("Come on, Professor"), which simply repeated the traditional explanations of what holds black students back, as if he hadn't been able to take in my chapters arguing against just these points. During another talk I gave on the book, one black schoolteacher kept interrupting to insist, fantastically, that when black students accuse others of "acting white," they are criticizing these students for not teaching their peers how to excel in school as well.

There was a time when fighting and decrying institutional racism was the main task at hand, and blacks of my generation owe a debt of gratitude to those who did it; our comfortable lives would be impossible without their efforts. Today, though, these people are well-intentioned relics of another era, an era they in their moment helped us to get past. Our main concern must be with new generations, who can fulfill their potential only in an America where victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism don't flourish among black Americans. There are two main paths to this goal.

First, it's time for well-intentioned whites to stop pardoning as "understandable" the worst of human nature whenever black people exhibit it. The person one pities is a person one may like but does not truly respect. Certainly whites must keep extirpating vestiges of racism, even within their own souls. But for David Howard to concur with his firing by Washington mayor Anthony Williams for using the word "niggardly" is condescension, not compassion; for Nathan Glazer to reverse his longstanding opposition to affirmative action because whites "owe" black people is to cast blacks as characters in a morality play, not to usher living human beings out of a historically conditioned wariness of school.

Second, it's time for our selective educational institutions to eliminate affirmative action in admissions. This policy may have been useful in the 1960s in creating a black middle class. Today, however, the children of Bowen and Bok's happy campers are hobbled from top academic performance not by poverty and residual bigotry, as their parents often were, but by a sense of spiritual separation from the whole endeavor of learning, an estrangement that set-aside policies and lowered standards cannot help. To achieve in any endeavor, people need incentives. As long as top colleges exempt black students of all classes from serious competition, their admissions officers shouldn't wonder why so few black students submit top-class dossiers. Only without such a policy will parents, teachers, and school boards, genuinely alarmed at drop-offs in "diversity" in institutions of higher learning, start to help black children become truly competitive for selective schools. What happened after California ended legalized racial preferences in 1995 is a case in point. Programs exploded throughout the state to prepare minorities to be competitive and to eliminate their financial barriers to college.

Eliminating affirmative action will also help dispel black college students' resentment-tinged anxiety that their white classmates dismiss them as affirmative action picks. It will promote richer interracial contact among students poised to become the nation's leaders. The tacit understanding is that white students somehow ought not suspect that blacks got in under the door—but this is a hopelessly unrealistic fiction, given that in 28 selective schools in 1989 less than one in four white students with SAT scores in the 1250-99 bracket was admitted, while three out of four black ones with the same scores got in, as The Shape of the River reports. The black student who can confidently claim to be on campus for the exact same reasons that white and Asian students are there is less likely to embrace the myth, which many black college students cherish, that whites are all covert racists.

I believe the time is ripe for such changes. People often ask me how black people have receivedLosing the Race, expecting me to describe a fearsome litany of invective and condemnation. Sure, I've gotten some of that—one letter or e-mail a week, perhaps, along with the predictable tirades on black radio call—in shows. Doubtless plenty of blacks who don't call in or write me also find the book repulsive. But almost all the letters and messages I've received from African-Americans from all walks of life all over the country have been positive. At last count I've heard from over 200 blacks, most telling me that my book says things they have long despaired of hearing from our so-called civil rights leaders. Black college students write, telling me that my book helped them understand the internal, cultural factors working against achievement. Older blacks write, agreeing with me that there was a crucial and damaging change in black ideology in the mid-1960s. I have even received three laudatory letters from black prisoners, all recounting how they subscribed to the party-faithful line in their youth but have rejected it since. I have also taken relatively little abuse on the radio shows: as one black man said to me calling into one of them, "Man, black people aren't yelling at you because they think you're wrong; they're just mad that you're saying it where white people can hear you." My views, I've concluded, are really not so out of step.

Perhaps 20 years from now mainstream black thought will join me in stressing individual initiative and integration. And perhaps the national media will get on the bandwagon too. Today, when I'm interviewed on TV or in the paper, a disparaging comment from some black leftist inevitably is part of the story, though when a Derrick Bell or a June Jordan is interviewed, never do reporters feel the need to bring in Shelby Steele or Walter Williams for their "alternative viewpoint." Let's hope that in 2021, the networks won't feel that any talk of black personal responsibility needs to be balanced by victimology from some fading anachronism like Ishmael Reed or Maxine Waters. That's when we will know that we are past the coded fraud that passes for interracial discourse today and have made the kind of progress that yesterday's civil rights' leaders would recognize and applaud.


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Peace.

Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
ReporterNotebook@Gmail.com
Amazon's: DEBATING THE HOLOCAUST: A New Look At Both Sides by Thomas Dalton

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