Friday, April 29, 2005

Illegal immigrants targeting Spain

BBC News:

Police on the border between France and Spain have taken in hundreds of illegal immigrants for questioning as they try to take advantage of a Spanish amnesty.

The amnesty allowing illegal immigrants working in Spain to obtain permanent resident status was launched on 7 February and runs until 7 May.

It only applies to illegal immigrants who have lived in Spain since last August and hold a work contract there.

But it has encouraged young men to try to enter Spain from further afield.

French border police say most of those detained are from Pakistan and India.

Illegal immigrants are arriving from Paris, Germany and even Italy in the hope of obtaining Spanish residence permits so they can remain in Europe.

Some have lived in France for several years, but without papers or residence permits.

Dozens have apparently tried to cross from France into Spain by car, train, or on foot - but many have been stopped by Spanish police.

They are then driven straight back to France for questioning, a task made more difficult because some of the young men claim not to speak English, French or Spanish, and the police have no Urdu or Hindi translators.

That means the police cannot explain their rights, and so are obliged to let them go - with many making a renewed attempt to enter Spain.

News and Blogosphere:

SPAIN: MORE IMMIGRANTS AS AMNESTY DEADLINE DRAWS NEAR

Spain: Immigrants found off coast

Democratic governor leads nation in restoring felons' rights

Christina Bellantoni:

Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, who has returned voting rights to more felons than any other governor in state history, also leads the nation in restoring felons' rights.

Mr. Warner, a Democrat, has restored the rights to 2,157 felons since taking office in January 2002 and has denied the requests of 134 felons.

Among governors of the 14 states that deny voting rights to felons, Mr. Warner has restored more voting rights than any other chief executive, according a report from the Sentencing Project, a District-based criminal-justice advocacy group.

"When you look at the number of recent restorations from other governors, there's nobody who is really even close," said Ryan King, research associate for the Sentencing Project. "Governor Warner has been at the forefront of really using his restoration powers responsibly and quite frequently."

Several grass-roots organizations yesterday announced a campaign to aid 10,000 convicted Virginia felons who want to vote again. The coalition of groups, based in Virginia and in the District, will urge Mr. Warner to restore the right to vote to thousands of eligible petitioners before he leaves office in January.

"Right now, we're making a major push," said Sandra Brandt, one leader of the effort. "We see the opportunity with Governor Warner. It's time — this is the time to really put some pressure on to try to get it done."

Felons who have their rights restored are allowed to vote, run for and hold public office and serve on juries.

I guess Democrats have no choice but to restore voting rights to criminals since fewer and fewer law-abiding people are willing to vote for them.

The European Union and Islamic immigration

James Lewis:

Ordinary people from France to Sweden are under assault by a new underclass of angry, resentful, and often violent Muslim youths. In France they live in vast housing projects into which police are afraid to go. They are dead set against democracy and tolerance for others. Instead, they want to turn France into an Islamic theocracy. With rising immigration and high Muslim birthrates, that will happen soon enough. Fear has therefore gripped the French middle class. When Jacques Chirac’s government defended Saddam Hussein at the UN, it did so in good part because it was frightened of its own Muslim population.

Normal people have understood the dangers of uncontrolled immigration for a long time, but the power class simply sneered at them. They forbade the collection of crime statistics for different ethnic groups, so that today North African youths roam the subways of Paris, mugging victims without fear. The police are useless. Demographic trends now point to the extinction of ethnic French culture in only a few decades. France is becoming Muslim, yet Brigitte Bardot was prosecuted simply for telling the truth.

Today the European Union is planning to raise Turkey to full membership, which would turn a steady stream of immigrants into an unstoppable flood. Border control will disappear. While most Muslims are probably fine people, a violent minority can always terrorize a passive majority. In US history, when Italian immigrants started to come in large numbers, most were peaceful, hard-working, and became great contributors to our nation. But along with them came the Mafia, which has never been completely uprooted. So it is with violent fanatics in Islam.

Also the Mafia did not believe that they were on a mission from God unlike the violent fanatics of Islam.

Hate crimes against black lesbians in South Africa

Malena Amusa:

Steve Biko’s famous maxim “Black man you are on your own!” has found expression in South Africa’s only organisation specifically for black lesbians who are going it alone.

On Freedom Day, the Johannesburg-based Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW) marked the second anniversary of its “Rose has Thorns Anti-Hate Crimes Campaign”, which generated a petition urging the government to act against hate crimes against black lesbians.

FEW complains that neither the police nor the black community takes such violence seriously. “Hate crimes happen because people want to remind black lesbians that they are women, and of their role in society,” said the organisation’s Kekeletso Khena.

A 2004 survey conducted by OUT, an advocacy organisation for lesbians and gay men, revealed that black homosexuals are much more afraid of hate crimes than whites, with rape being the most feared form of violence.

Ten percent of the 145 black lesbians surveyed said they had experienced sexual abuse between 2002 and 2003 — 6% more than white lesbians.

“There’s a culture of treating women like children; when she’s out of line, you spank her,” said Khena (22). Her account of “coming out” is punctuated with tales of rape, rejection, and lack of family and community support.

She said the experience of black lesbians is significantly different from that of their white counterparts. “Unlike whites, black lesbians didn’t have access to a club culture where they could be with people who understood them.

“When a white woman is beaten up or raped, she’s got a job and legal aid, access to psychological therapy and her family’s support.”

Khena said she was first raped by a group of men at the age of 13. One told her he committed rape “because of girls like you”. Her mother told her “this is what happens to girls like you” — which she took as a reference to her not being a typical girl. She continued dating men despite being a lesbian, and was raped a second time by an ex-boyfriend. “I didn’t want to be a lesbian because of the stigma.”

A close friend raped Khena a third time because “he wanted to remind me what it’s like to be a black woman”. The aim was “to convert her to hetero-sexuality”. “I contemplated suicide and cried for months,” she said.

News and Blogosphere:

Discrimination mars Freedom Day celebrations

Jews leaving Israel for Russia

Jeremy Page:

LOOKING out from his sixteenth-floor office in a Moscow skyscraper, Arsen Revazov can hardly believe that this is a country where it was once illegal to learn Hebrew or celebrate Passover.

He emigrated to Israel 15 years ago — one of a million Jews who fled the Soviet Union to escape institutionalised anti-Semitism and economic stagnation. But today he is back in Moscow — with his wife and two children — living an openly Jewish life and running an advertising business.

“I just realised that there were so many more opportunities in Russia than in Israel. It is like the difference between New York and Arizona,” Mr Revazov, 38, told The Times. “Almost all my friends in Israel have come back, too.”

An estimated 100,000 Jews have returned to Russia in the past few years, sparking a dramatic renaissance of Jewish life in a country with a long history of anti-Semitism.

President Putin will cement Russia’s new relationship with its Jewish community today when he begins the first visit to Israel by a Soviet or Russian leader.

“This sends a message to the world that the Moscow-Arab coalition is over,” Berl Lazar, one of Russia’s two chief rabbis, said. “It’s eerie that it is happening at Passover. Here, during our holiday, the Russian President is visiting the Holy Land.”

The Soviet Union was one of the first states to recognise Israel in 1948, but later severed ties and backed Arab regimes to balance US support for Jerusalem.

Relations were reopened in 1987, when President Gorbachev allowed Soviet Jews to emigrate. Roughly one in four Israelis is now of Russian origin.

Ironically, this is probably great news for the Palestinians since the more Jews that move to Russia the more Israel's demographics will shift in favor of the Arabs.

Asian-Americans want a boycott because of "racist" remarks on radio show

David Porter:

Leaders of several Asian-American organizations Thursday urged a boycott of the sponsors of a radio talk show that made what they considered racist remarks.

They also called for a public apology from NJ 101.5 WKXW-FM and demanded the station fire the show's hosts, "Jersey Guys" Craig Carton and Ray Rossi.

"We are outraged by these bigoted comments," said Palisades Park Councilman Jason Kim. "101.5's message is offensive to all Americans regardless of race or ethnic background, and violates the American spirit of diversity and inclusion."

Station manager Eric Johnson said Thursday that Carton and Rossi would not be fired or suspended, but said that "going forward, we're going to make sure all our hosts are more sensitive to all groups."

During Monday afternoon's show, Carton made fun of Edison mayoral candidate Jun Choi, saying his name several times in a stereotypical Asian accent. He also criticized politicians that cater to minority voters.

"Here's the bottom line," Carton said, according to a transcript of the show. "No specific minority group or foreign group should ever dictate the outcome of an American election. I don't care if the Chinese population in Edison has quadrupled in the last year, Chinese should never dictate the outcome of an American election, Americans should."

Later in the segment, Carton again mimicked an Asian accent when describing stereotypical Asian behavior.

Members of several Asian-American groups took issue with the comments at a news conference Thursday.

"We are all immigrants or children of immigrants, whether we came here 300 years ago or yesterday," said West Windsor Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh. "We all have to stand up and say this is un-American. Freedom of speech must have a sense of responsibility."

Johnson defended the hosts, pointing out that Carton, who is Jewish, and Rossi, who is Italian, both frequently make fun of their own ethnic groups.

"They were making light of old-fashioned ethnic stereotypes. If in the course of that anyone was offended, we're sorry," he said, adding, "when you have an open mike for five hours, inevitably someone's going to get offended."

America in the 21st century: no free speech and no sense of humor.

Anti-Arab sentiments in Israel

Ferry Biedermann:

More than four years of violence between Israelis and Palestinians may have abated at least temporarily, but its effect is still being felt on relations between Jews and Arabs inside Israel. A string of recent polls, events and policy issues shows that both popular and official attitudes toward the country's Arab minority remain problematic.

From separate polls, it emerged that more than half of the Jewish population does not wish Arabs to live in their neighborhoods and that many Israelis would like to see the government encourage Arab citizens to leave the country. There has also been an upsurge of racism on football fields.

The Beitar Jerusalem football club was fined earlier this month after its fans shouted "death to the Arabs" among other slogans during a match against the largely Arab club Bnei Sakhnin. This comes in the wake of Bnei Sakhnin's captain Abbas Suan scoring the equalizer against Ireland in a World Cup qualifier. "Abbas Suan doesn't represent us," a Beitar fan had said earlier, echoing the view of most fans.

Arab and Jewish researchers agree there is a high level of antipathy between the two communities, but emphasize different causes. While a prominent Arab Israeli researcher points at the Jewish nature of the state and the inherent bias this has always brought, a Jewish political scientist says that the violence over the past four-and-a-half years has further polarized the communities.

The Arab researcher, Assad Ghanem from the University of Haifa, released a poll earlier this month that had been carried out for the Madar research center in Ramallah. The poll indicated that 42 percent of Israeli Jews want the government to encourage Arab citizens to leave the country. Another 40 percent did not agree.

"I'm fed up," Ghanem told IPS. "I will stop doing this kind of research, always presenting figures that show the same thing."

The other poll, in which it emerged that more than half the Jewish population does not want to live in the same neighborhood as Arabs, was presented to parliament last month on the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

The findings refer to Israel's Arab citizens, not Palestinians in the occupied territories. The Arab minority in Israel are the people who did not flee or were not driven out during the war of 1948/1949 when Israel was founded, and their descendants. They now make up some 1.2 million of Israel's 6.8 million citizens.

They have the vote and are represented in parliament, both by specifically Arab parties and in the major Israeli parties. Very few serve in the army, and their relationship with the Jewish state is ambiguous at best. They feel like second-class citizens, often have strong bonds with Palestinians outside the country, and are regarded by many Israelis as fifth columnists.

News and Blogosphere:

Racism in Israel

Most Israeli Jews say Israeli Arabs should emigrate: poll

Reconquista and illegal immigration

Tom Barrett:

At the current rate of invasion (mostly through Mexico, but also through Canada) the United States will be completely over run with illegal aliens by the year 2025. I’m not talking about legal immigrants who follow US law to become citizens. In less than 20 years, if we do not stop the invasion, ILLEGAL aliens and their offspring will be the dominant population in the United States.

According to US Border Control. “They will have made such inroads into the political and social systems that they will have more influence than our Constitution over how the U.S. is governed. The ugly consequence of an ignored U.S. Constitution is already taking place.”

The millions upon millions of illegal aliens streaming into the US are the foundation for what could be another attempt at secession by several US states. Many of them will use ill-conceived programs that reward illegal immigration to become US citizens. Other illegals will simply go to the polls and vote without taking the trouble to apply for citizenship. Together, these groups could form a voting block that could tear our nation apart.

Those of you who read the email version of this column should go to www.ConservativeTruth.org to see the map posted there. It shows the borders of a new nation proposed by influential Mexican nationals and Hispanic US Citizens. It includes six northern states of Mexican, as well as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and southern Colorado.

The idea of a Hispanic Homeland could be ignored as the pipedream of crackpots if a substantial majority of Mexican citizens did not support it. A Zogby poll of Mexicans done in June 2002 revealed that a substantial majority of Mexican citizens believe that southwestern America properly belongs to Mexico. They said that Mexicans do not need the permission of the U.S. to enter this territory. 58 percent of Mexican citizens agreed with this statement: "The territory of the United States' southwest rightfully belongs to Mexico." Only 28 percent disagreed with the statement.

News and Blogosphere:

Blatant Racism by the Pro-illegal Alien Crowd

How Is the United States Being Destroyed?

Does Bush Have a Plan He Forgot to Tell Us About?

MORE ON THAT "LOS ANGELES, MEXICO" BILLBOARD

Smile When You Say That, Amigo

Related:

U.S.'s bilingual education hastens Mexican conquest of Southwest

U.S. Immigration Policy Means Ethnic Cleansing of Euro-Americans

Immigration Policy Too Relaxed, Border Must Besecured

Schwarzenegger praises Minuteman border volunteers

LA Times:

Calling the nation's borders dangerously porous, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday praised the private "Minuteman" campaign that uses armed volunteers to stop illegal immigrants from crossing into the U.S.

Schwarzenegger said in a radio interview that the federal government is failing to secure the border with Mexico, and he cast the hundreds of private citizens who have been patrolling the Arizona-Mexico border since April 1 as a popular response to government inaction.

"I think they've done a terrific job," Schwarzenegger said of the "Minuteman" volunteers, who plan to expand to California in June. "They've cut down the crossing of illegal immigrants a huge percentage. So it just shows that it works when you go and make an effort and when you work hard. It's a doable thing."

The governor added that, "It's just that our federal government is not doing their job. It's a shame that the private citizen has to go in there and start patrolling our borders."

President Bush has denounced the Minuteman volunteers as vigilantes.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) expressed surprise that Schwarzenegger would be "praising efforts by untrained volunteers to patrol the borders. The best course … would be to add an additional 2,000 border patrol agents."

The leader of a Mexican American group called the governor's comments "shameful" and "nothing short of base racism."

"I think we're seeing the real Arnold Schwarzenegger. The mask has now fallen," said Nativo V. Lopez, state national president of the Mexican American Political Assn. "Those of immigrant stock should have no illusions about what his real sentiments and feelings are toward them."

News and Blogosphere:

California governor praises Minuteman volunteers watching Arizona border

Governor's kudos for Minutemen brings outcry

Schwarzenegger praises Arizona border volunteers

Ad Putting L.A. in Mexico Called Slap in Face

Schwarzenegger Praises Minutemen

Arnold: L.A. billboard should come down

Asian immigration and the Maori in New Zealand

Ruth Berry:

Winston Peters

Winston Peters has been criticised for "scaremongering" over Asian immigration again, with National also casting doubt on Statistics New Zealand's population projections.

The New Zealand First leader claimed this week that Maori would be outnumbered by Asians by 2021.

He cited Statistics NZ projections that Asian numbers would grow to 670,000 by then. But he omitted to mention that the projections said the Maori population would swell to 760,000.

Mr Peters stuck by his claim, however, arguing that Statistics NZ's definition of Maori ethnicity was "questionable" and its Asian population projections were frequently too low.

Both National and United Future attacked Mr Peters for scaremongering. National MP Pansy Wong said the Asian community remained unworried by Mr Peters' "latest bluster", as they were "getting used to his anti-Asian crusades, always timed to coincide with elections".

News and Blogosphere:

Turner: Here We Go Again

New Zealand – The Last Asian Colony

Peter’s Asian warning

Catching the Asian flu

Islamic leader blames women for rape

Sydney Morning Herald:

Political leaders have condemned comments from a Sydney Muslim leader that rape victims had no-one to blame but themselves.

Lebanese Sheik Faiz Mohamad, 34, has been quoted by a newspaper as telling a lecture at the Bankstown Town Hall, in south-western Sydney, that women who wore skimpy clothing teased men.

"A victim of rape every minute somewhere in the world. Why? No-one to blame but herself. She displayed her beauty to the entire world ...," Sheik Mohamed was quoted as saying in the lecture.

"Strapless, backless, sleeveless, nothing but satanic skirts, slit skirts, translucent blouses, mini skirts, tight jeans: all this to tease man and appeal to his carnal nature."

NSW Premier Bob Carr said the sheik could face criminal charges if he made comments which incited rapes.

"If anything the sheik says in future appears to be an incitement to the crime of rape ... I just want to assure him that the full force of the criminal law will be brought to bear," he told reporters.

News and Blogosphere:

Too bad rape is a crime of violence and not a crime of passion. This guy is an idiot

MEDIAEVAL IGNORANCE FROM A MUSLIM PREACHER IN AUSTRALIA

Aus. Leaders Condemn Cleric's Remarks on Rape

Satanic dress

Australian Cleric: Raped Women have Themselves to Blame

This just in...

Muslim "sheik" Slams Australian Women & Gang RAPE victims AGAIN So whats NEW?

Muslim sheikh: women who are raped have incited men's lust by dressing immodestly and only have themselves to blame

Rape, the police and suicide in Pakistan

BBC News:

Nazish Bhatti

One of Pakistan's top police officers has been appointed to investigate the case of a woman who threatened to set herself on fire over an alleged rape.

A parliamentary committee appointed the former inspector-general of Balochistan province, Shoaib Suddle, to the case of 17-year-old Nazish Bhatti.

Ms Bhatti said she was raped by a gang of men and then two policemen when she went to complain.

She withdrew her suicide threat after she was assured she would get justice.

Parliament's standing committee on the interior appointed the highly experienced Mr Suddle after hearing details of Ms Bhatti's allegations.

Ms Bhatti, a first-year college student, said she was abducted from Sialkot, an industrial city south-east of the capital, last month and held in captivity for several days.

She said she was gang-raped repeatedly by her abductors for three weeks.

Ms Bhatti said she managed to escape and reached a police station to report the crime. But two of the policemen on duty also raped her, she said.

News and Blogosphere:

I will burn myself alive if gang rapists go free, says victim

Girl threatens suicide for 'rape'

Pakistani rape victim threatens suicide

Rape and castration in Kenya

BBC News:

Kenyan members of parliament have unanimously passed a motion calling for convicted rapists to be castrated.

The motion opens the way for a new Sexual Offences Bill to be introduced.

Njoki Ndung'u, who moved the motion, said two women were raped every hour and said the police were too lax in prosecuting rapists.

"Kenya is becoming a nation of rapists where rapists go scot-free," she said. Some MPs said the motion would prevent Kenya becoming a haven for sex tourism.

The BBC's Gray Phombeah in the capital, Nairobi, says that rape is on the increase in Kenya and that last week, people were shocked to hear about a man who had made his handicapped daughter pregnant.

Ms Ndung'u, a women's rights lawyer, said that rape was being massively under-reported in Kenya.

She said police records show 2,308 rapes last year, while figures from pressure groups and health centres show almost 16,000.

She said many rapes were not reported because the offender was a relative or because of a reluctance to relive the experience in court.

News and Blogosphere:

Kenyan MPs 'work one day a week'

A Letter to the Kenyan National Assembly on Castration

Thursday, April 28, 2005

Black men and British prisons

Scharene Pryce:

The UK is the most punitive country in Western Europe and the latest figures suggest the number of prisoners hit an all time high in 2003, with 75,544 people being incarcerated.

And here are the demographics of the British prison population:

Ethnic minorities make up 24 percent of the prison population.

16 percent of the country’s inmates are black men, whereas three percent are Asian and 5 percent are classified as ‘other’.

31 percent of the female prison population is also black; although this number also includes women from foreign black communities.

Nonetheless, like their male counterparts, it appears to be a particular issue within the African-Caribbean community.

Related:

One in 100 Black Adults Now in Jail

Black prison population rises 60% under Labour

Twice as many black people in prison as on campus

Islamist threats in Europe

Claude Salhani:

The precise scale and reach of Islamist extremism in Europe is difficult to identify, but the terror threat -- including that of nuclear terrorism -- is real, warns a new report from the Brussels-based European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center.

At a hearing Wednesday delivered to the House Committee on International Relations, the Center's director, Claude Moniquet, pointed out gaps in precise intelligence data concerning Muslims in Europe, given Islam is not reported in the Europe Union census. Moniquet cited as example the lack of official figures of Muslims living in France, with estimates ranging between 4 million and 6 million.

Moniquet said public demonstrations by Islamists in Europe before 2000 "were a rare event." But since Sept. 11, 2001, "thousands of people" in France and Belgium took part in open demonstrations, such as the protests against the law banning the Islamic veil in French public schools.

Prior to the 1990s, Islamist political parties didn't exist in Europe, and though they still are not represented in parliament, they are making themselves heard. In Brussels, for example, in May 2003 the Party of Citizenship and Prosperity, which advocates radical Islam, won more than 8,000 votes.

European police and intelligence services have documented fundamentalists preaching hate in many European mosques, with youth associations often acting as front organizations for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Mounting anti-Semitism in some areas has made teaching the history of the Holocaust in schools attended by young Muslims impossible, and Muslims students are openly questioning the theory of the origin of life. Europe's prisons on the other hand, have seen the increase of its Muslim population, which is frequently in the majority.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, hundreds of suspected terrorists have been arrested in Europe.

"Each week police arrest additional suspects," demonstrating, says Moniquet, "that the number of people willing to go from ideas to action is growing."

News and Blogosphere:

Islam - Euro-Islamist threats

US report shows increase in terror activities

Islamist Terror Cells in Europe May Now Pose Biggest Threat to US Security

Experts: Islamist Terror Cells in Europe May Now Pose Biggest Threat to US Security

Dealing with Islamic extremists in the Netherlands

Reuters:

The Dutch secret service said on Thursday it had taken steps to deal with potential threats from Muslim youths turning to religious radicalism.

About 1,000 young Muslims are believed to have turned extremist in the Netherlands, some by accessing Web sites on their own or through contacts made in Internet chat rooms.

"Under the influence of an ultra-orthodox interpretation of Islam, youngsters are secluding themselves from society and in the most extreme cases they become prone for recruitment for the jihad," the AIVD Dutch intelligence service said in a statement.

The service has been criticised by the Dutch press for failing to prevent the November assassination of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh who criticised Islam.

But it said it was monitoring between 100 and 200 people suspected of links with terrorism, and will recruit about 700 people, mainly in its investigative branch, to improve operations.

It will also develop new "technical intelligence" measures such as advanced wiretapping equipment.

"The murder of Theo van Gogh was an enormous shock to our services. This does not mean that we thought a terrorist attack of this kind could never occur," the AIVD's head Sybrand van Hulst told reporters.

Van Hulst said several homegrown cells had appeared such as the "Hofstad group", suspected of threatening to kill politicians and apparently operating independently of international terrorist networks.

The pretrial court hearing of 12 young Muslim men suspected of belonging to the Hofstad group is due on Monday.

Van Hulst said those arrests had dealt a blow to extremists, but warned Van Gogh's murder could inspire similar acts, carried out by an individual.

A Dutch-Moroccan man has been charged with the murder.

News and Blogosphere:

AIVD: home-grown terrorists are biggest threat

Nation of Islam may intervene at Jefferson High over racial brawls

Gene Johnson Jr.:

During a forum this week on racially motivated violence at Jefferson High School, the president of the school’s Black Student Union said that she, like a number of other African-American students, was considering leaving the school for good out of fear of being “jumped.”

Meanwhile, Minister Tony Muhammad of the Nation of Islam pledged protection to students who feel threatened by what is described as a growing, palpable tension between blacks and Latinos on the campus.

Those were just two of the latest developments as parents, students, educators and the community at large continues to grapple with a series of incidents that have received wide attention and drew more than 100 attendees to a Tuesday night forum at Bethel AME Church.

Because of several recent altercations at Jefferson High School, officials have seen attendance drop by more than 50 percent on some days. For example, following an April 14 brawl 1,346 students were absent. After another scrape on April 18, nearly 1,100 missed school the next day.

“What I want to know is what are we, as African Americans going to do about it?” asked Mary Washington, the BSU president. “We are dying at Jefferson High School. Six percent there are [black] and 94.6 percent are Latinos. [School officials] threatened to take away my scholarship if I don’t sit down and shut up. And I won’t.”

Fifteen-year-old Stephanie Alonzo, who saw a friend knocked down and kicked several times during one of the brawls, believes that blacks and Latino should be separated when they aren’t in class. “The police let us fight,” said another teenager at the forum who declined to give her name. “I’m telling you the truth. What you hear on the news is a lie. They let us fight.”

While forum organizers said both candidates for L.A. mayor were invited to participate in the forum, Mayor Jim Hahn was not in attendance. Aides later insisted he had not received an invitation.

However, the challenger in next month’s election, Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, did show up. He said the city needs to form a black-Latino task force to address growing tension between African-American and Latino youth.

“We need to model for these young people black and brown unity,” he said. “They need to see two brothers working together ... and we need to demand that the school district protect our kids and have enough security personnel to do that. We don’t address conflict with a fight and make it worse. You talk it through. You try to figure out what’s going on and find a solution to it.”

For their part, school administrators have began enforcing a new campus ban on heavy belt buckles and white T-shirts — both of which can be used to signal gang affiliation, with the buckles also viewed as potential weapons. Teachers are continuing to conduct “days of dialogue” with their students.

Although security in and around Jefferson High has been beefed up in recent weeks, many parents and students insist it isn’t enough. Until the school district employs or utilizes more security, Muhammad — who organized the forum along with Bethel senior pastor Lewis E. Logan — told Washington and other black students that his organization would provide them with escorts to and from Jefferson High.

“We’ll be there [on Wednesday] and you’ll be under the Nation of Islam escort,” Muhammad said. “We’re going to walk with you and anybody else, you won’t have to worry. You give us a day and a time and we’ll be there.”

News and Blogosphere:

Los Angeles School Brawls Expose Black-Latino Tension

THE HUTCHINSON REPORT: LA Riots Thirteen Years Later (Can It Happen Again?)

Los Angeles School Brawls Expose Black-Latino Tension

How to profit on the downfall of America

Michael Brush:

Vigilantes worried about foreigners sneaking into the United States can send all the Minutemen they want to patrol the Arizona-Mexico border, but there’s no denying one simple fact.

The U.S. is in the midst of the biggest immigration wave in history. And barring an overhaul of U.S. immigration policy -- which admits 1 million legal immigrants a year -- that’s not changing anytime soon.

So while Americans lock horns in the immigration debate, cool-headed investors are quietly figuring out what companies will benefit.

Once again Wall Street puts lust for money ahead of love of country.

The achievement gap between blacks and whites has stayed the same since 1990

Kate N. Grossman:

The achievement gap between blacks and whites has stayed the same since 1990, and absent significant changes, the gulf could persist for much of the 21st century, according to new research by a University of Chicago economist.

Here are some of the possible reasons:

Neal laid out several variables that could explain these trends, though he did not endorse any theory. The factors disproportionately affected black parents and children starting in the 1980s.

These include dropping employment rates and wages for low-skilled workers, growing prison rates for black males, the crack epidemic, differences in black and white investments in their children and how they parent.

By 2000, for example, about half of the black males between 26 and 35 who dropped out of high school weren't working, and a quarter were institutionalized, usually in prison. Neal also reported a dramatic rise in mothers who never married among blacks with no postsecondary schooling between 1980 and 1990, as well as a drop in earnings for black parents of preschool kids. In 1980, blacks earned 68 percent as much as whites. By, 2000, it was 56 percent.

News and Blogosphere:

Black-White Achievement Gap Has Stopped Narrowing

Being mixed race in Korea

David Yeagley:

It wasn't her body that was exposed, but her race, or, shall we say, her 'real' race. Korean actress and producer Lee Yu Jin is down and out in South Korea. Why? The word is out: she's half American. She's a mixed race. Her white father was an American GI. She's 5'9", and was always suspect because of her height.

"People ask why didn't I come out earlier and why this is such a big deal, " the 27-year-old said. "It wouldn't be anywhere else, but Korea is still a closed society where people like to talk about the purity of the race."

Lee Yu Jin isn't alone in her plight, either. There's the popular singer "Sonya," television host Jennifer Yung Wisner, and basketball coach Kim Dong Dwang. Bi-racial persons are considered a downer, in a place like South Korea (to say nothing of Nort Korea).

Janet Mintzer, president of Pearl S. Buck International, says, "My impression is that there is more discrimination against Amerasians in South Korea than anywhere else in Asia and that it has not improved significantly." PSBI, a Pennsylvania-based foundation, is credited with coining the term "Amerasian," and works with the biracial children in not only South Korea, but also the Philippines and Vietnam, among other Asian countries in which the U.S. military has had a presence.

Just goes to show that racial bias is found all over the world and not just amongst white people.

NYC offers deal to bias attackers

Patrick Gallahue:

A group of teenage girls accused of a racially motivated attack on six Catholic schoolgirls have been offered a deal that could land them in jail for up to a year and a half.

City lawyers put out the offer yesterday, but the five suspects and their attorneys have until their next scheduled court appearance on June 1 to accept or reject the offer for a guilty plea of assault as a hate crime.

The charge carries an 18-month maximum sentence, but the judge in the case could impose a lighter sentence.

The five suspects — ages 13 and 14 — were allegedly part of a pack numbering as many as 30 kids that jumped six white girls in the Marine Park JHS basketball court on March 30.

The teens — identified by the city's Law Department as Sadira M., Akeylah P., Jessica P., Kedne L., and Vanna W. — shouted "black power" and "white crackers," according to the victims.

Cops nabbed five of the girls alleged to have been in the group but did not charge them with a bias attack, infuriating the victims' parents and roiling racial tensions in the neighborhood.

But on April 8, the city's Corporation Counsel Office — which prosecutes juvenile cases in family court — upped the charges to assault and menacing, including some counts as hate crimes.

The way liberals have perverted the justice system in New York I doubt that any of these thugs will see jail time.

Jonathan Bean: "racist" professor

Thomas Ryan:

On April 11, Jonathan Bean, a professor of history at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC), received the college’s “Outstanding Teacher Award.” But just two days later, Bean became the scourge of the campus, abandoned by teaching assistants and vilified as a purveyor of “racist propaganda.”

Behind Bean’s sudden fall from admired academic to campus Enemy Number One was a cabal of eight radical academics in the SIUC history department. Bean's offense was to have assigned as optional reading for his history class a 2001 Frontpagemag report titled “Remembering the Zebra Killings” by James Lubinskas. The class topic was “Civil Rights and Civil Disorder.” Bean's required readings for the class included the writings of Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Ella Baker, and Stokely Carmichael.

The offending Frontpagemag article which Bean made optional recounts what have come to be known as the Zebra Killings, a series of murders that took place in the San Francisco Bay area between 1972 and 1974, which left 71 people dead. The crimes shared a distinctive pattern: all the victims were white. The article, which contains facts first exposed in the 1979 book Zebra by crime writer Clark Howard, and subsequent reviews of the book in Time Magazine, reveals that five members the “Death Angels,” a sub-group of the Nation of Islam, carried out the majority of the attacks.

For the offense of making students aware of the existence of this article and these killings, the history department witch-hunters demanded Bean's head. Faced with this vicious, career threatening onslaught, Bean took the same course that Larry Summers had at Harvard, in attempting to defuse similar thought-control attacks by issuing an unwarranted apology to anyone to whom the reference to such an article might give offense.

The witch-hunters thirst for vengeance was hardly slaked by this gesture and the attacks by the history department radicals continued unabated. Led by Marxist professor Robbie Lieberman, Bean’s antagonists were determined to bring down Bean. Bean is a well-known campus libertarian and the only Republican professor of history at Southern Illinois University. The smear campaign against Bean represents only one battle in a larger ideological war raging inside the school. By denouncing Bean, leftists at SIUC hope to purge the last remaining dissident in the department so they can carry out their totalitarian agendas unchallenged by even a single politically incorrect voice.

The ferocity of the crusade against Bean was breathtaking. On April 11, an open letter denouncing Bean appeared in the op-ed section of the Daily Egyptian. Normally intra faculty grievances are aired in committee, not in the pages of the school newspaper. Bean was charged with downloading the article “from a site containing links to racially charged and anti-Semitic Web sites” -- two blatant lies -- and abridging it “in a way that disguised its full context.” Signed by professors Kay J. Carr, Germaine Etienne, Mary McGuire, Rachel Stocking, Natasha Zaretsky, and Robbie Lieberman, the letter expressed the professors’ “disgust with the article that was distributed in a core curriculum American history course.” Not satisfied with this auto da fe, the same professors placed an advertisement in the Daily Egyptian repeating their charges that the reference to the article (and the act of referring it) was racism.

News and Blogosphere:

Academic Freedom? Controversial article has teacher of the year in hot water

Mob rule at SIU

A Witchhunt in Carbondale

Corporate America and affirmative action

Steve Sailer:

The take home message to corporate executives is that it makes more sense to impose quotas on yourself now, than pay out 80 million and be forced to impose them later anyway. Most sizable companies long ago got the message and quietly put together these kind of programs to racially discriminate against their white employees.

The U.S. initiated racial quotas three dozen years ago when there were about seven whites for every black. The U.S. is a rich country and that ratio of payees to payers under affirmative action has proven affordable as the white to black ratio has been fairly stable over the decades.

But, in 1973, with almost no forethought, the federal bureaucracy added most immigrants to the ranks of quota beneficiaries, and the ratio of whites, who are expected to give up opportunities, to immigrants, who are aided by quotas, has been worsening ever since.

News and Blogosphere:

$80 Million Settles Race-Bias Case

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Students feel unsafe after racial brawls in LA high school

Nicholas Shields:

Jefferson High School, with an enrollment of about 2,400 students, has seen attendance drop by more than half on some days. The day after the first brawl on April 14, 1,346 students were absent. Attendance began to creep up, until the second melee on April 18. The day after that, nearly 1,100 stayed home. By last Friday, the absentee number had dropped to 585. It was at 385 as of Tuesday — still higher than normal, but the best number since before the melees.

Some worry the absenteeism is making it hard to move forward with the curriculum. Bryant said when she returned to school last week to pick up missed assignments, many of her teachers said she hadn't missed much because so many students hadn't shown up. The students who did attend spent some classroom time discussing the violence, she said.

"Kids vote with their feet," said Philip Saldivar, the Los Angeles Unified School District's director for the District 5 area in South Los Angeles where Jefferson is located. "If they don't feel safe, they'll walk."

Saldivar and other officials said they had been feverishly working to rebuild community trust in Jefferson, and the problems with attendance had been an alarming signal that those efforts might not be working.

Already, the district has banned white T-shirts, which officials believe sometimes signal gang affiliation. Heavy belt buckles with logos are also prohibited, because of their links to gangs and because they could be used as weapons. Officials have also split lunch period into two sessions to avoid large groups of students congregating.

Saldivar has stood at the school's main entrance each school day in the last week, greeting parents and fielding their questions. He said many parents wondered whether it was safe to send their children back to Jefferson, and much of what the district is doing is designed to make them feel comfortable about letting their children return.

"If the climate of the school is safe, they will be here," Saldivar said. "We have to make sure parents, students and staff promote a safe environment."

On Tuesday, the school held a "day of dialogue" in which students were encouraged to discuss their thoughts on the melees and talk about ways to make the campus safer. Students said they spoke about the tense relationship between Latino and black students, and many said they believed the atmosphere was still charged enough for another disturbance to occur. Jefferson's population is about 92% Latino and about 7% black.

Angela Germany, 16, attended one of the discussions. She moved from Arizona to South Los Angeles to live with her aunt last year. But after the violence, she said she planned to return to Arizona in July.

News and Blogosphere:

Experts Weigh in on Racial Tensions

It's up to gangsters to break the cycle

Hispanic gang eyed in Houston slaying

Juan A. Lozano:

A gang with roots in Central America is suspected in the deaths of a toddler and at least eight others here, and authorities are cracking down to prevent the group from expanding.

At least 20 members of Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, have been arrested in the Houston area in recent months, and the gang's reputed leader was arrested in south Texas in February, said Al Tribble, spokesman for the FBI's Houston office.

"We're just uncovering what kind of stronghold they might have," he said. "Our hope is we can disrupt them before they get organized."

The arrests in Houston come after a national crackdown on the gang that netted more than 150 arrests of Mara Salvatrucha members in seven U.S. cities, said Luisa Deason, spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Houston.

Authorities say Mara Salvatrucha was started by Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles in the 1980s. The gang is particularly large and violent, known for beheading enemies and staging attacks with grenades and machetes.

Sheriff's investigators arrested five members of Mara Salvatrucha after the shooting death of 18-month-old Aiden Naquin in Houston on April 12. Aiden was killed in his car seat when a man opened fire on the car driven by his father, Ernest Naquin.

Alleged gang leader Lester Rivera Paz, 29, of Honduras, was arrested near Falfurrias in south Texas after he illegally entered the country, authorities said. Rivera, who is accused of masterminding a Christmastime bus massacre in Honduras that killed 28 people, pleaded guilty earlier this month to illegally entering the country after previously being deported. He is set to be sentenced July 8.

Another MS-13 member, Jose Adonis Quintanilla-Perez, 24, was among 13 illegal immigrants arrested near Falfurrias on April 6. He is set to be tried on May 17 for illegally entering the country.

Federal officials and gang investigators believe MS-13 members from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador may be entering the United States more frequently because of laws targeting gang members in those countries.

Last month, former Homeland Security Deputy Secretary James Loy called MS-13 an emerging threat to the United States, referring to the gang and the al-Qaida terrorist organization in the same breath in testimony to Congress.

Deason, of immigration and customs enforcement, said authorities are trying to make sure Mara Salvatrucha doesn't become a bigger problem.

"They are involved in the smuggling of (immigrants), narcotics, guns and other criminal activity that makes them a serious threat to our security," she said.

News and Blogosphere:

A look at the Mara Salvatrucha Gang

Violent Gang With Roots In El Salvador Linked To Houston Slayings

Slain girl given benefit of doubt

Brunswick Co. Murders Could Be Gang Related

The New Face of Witness Protection

Asian gang beats Englishman in racial assault

Halifax:

Victim: Scott Gilling shows his injuries after he was kicked and punched

A TERRIFIED bank worker told today how he feared for his life after a racist attack by a six-strong mob.

Scott Gilling, 25, lay helpless as the gang punched and kicked him in the head.

He said the men laughed as they kicked him on the ground and called him a "white b*****d." He eventually staggered to safety leaving a trail of blood.

Mr Gilling suffered a broken nose, chipped teeth and extensive bruising and cuts. He is now recovering at his Ripponden home. Police today appealed for the public's help to trace the six Asian men. Det Insp Mark McManus, of Calderdale CID, said: "This was an unprovoked attack, believed to be racially motivated."

Mr Gilling said he had been on his way to meet friends when he was confronted by the group on Sunday evening. They attacked his car before turning on him.

News and Blogosphere:

Second race attack probed

Race and the U.S. prison population

Siobhan McDonough:

There were 726 inmates for every 100,000 U.S. residents by June 30, 2004, compared with 716 a year earlier, according to the report by the Justice Department agency. In 2004, one in every 138 U.S. residents was in prison or jail; the previous year it was one in every 140.

In 2004, 61 percent of prison and jail inmates were of racial or ethnic minorities, the government said. An estimated 12.6 percent of all black men in their late 20s were in jails or prisons, as were 3.6 percent of Hispanic men and 1.7 percent of white men in that age group, the report said.

News and Blogosphere:

Inmate population up, report says

U.S. Prison Population Rose 2.3 Percent in 2004

U.S. Prison Population Breaks Own Records, Again

Immigration, social security and an aging society

Steven A. Camarota:

Many advocates of high immigration argue that it fundamentally changes the nation’s age structure, and is very helpful in solving the problem of an aging society. Demographic data, however, show that immigration has only a very small impact on the problem. While immigrants do tend to arrive relatively young, and have higher fertility than natives, immigrants age just like everyone else, and the differences with natives are not large enough to fundamentally alter the nation’s age structure. The debate over immigration should focus on other areas where it actually has a significant effect.

Among this Backgrounder’s findings:

In 2000 the average age of an immigrant was 39, which is actually about four years older than the average age of a native-born American.

Even focusing on only recent immigration reveals little impact on aging. Excluding all 22 million immigrants who arrived after 1980 from the 2000 Census increases the average age in the United States by only about four months.

In 2000 66.2 percent of the population was of working-age (15 to 64). Excluding post-1980 immigrants it is 64.6 percent.

Looking at the full impact of post-1980 immigrants reveals that if they and all their U.S.-born children are not counted, the working-age share would have been 65.9 percent in 2000, almost exactly the same as the 66.20 percent when they are all included.

Immigration also does not explain the relatively high U.S. fertility rate. In 2000 the U.S. fertility rate was 2.1 children per woman, compared to 1.4 for Europe, but if all immigrants are excluded the rate would still have been 2.0.

Looking to the future, Census Bureau projections indicate that if net immigration averaged 100,000 to 200,000 annually, the working age share would be 58.7 percent in 2060, while with net immigration of roughly 900,000 to one million, it would be 59.5 percent.

Census projections are buttressed by Social Security Administration (SAA) estimates showing that, over the next 75 years, net annual legal immigration of 800,000 a year versus 350,000 would create a benefit equal to only 0.77 percent of the program’s projected expenditures.

It is not clear that even this tiny benefit exists, because SSA assumes legal immigrants will have earnings and resulting tax payments as high as natives from the moment they arrive, which is contrary to a large body of research.

Another liberal myth about the "benefits" of immigration bites the dust.

University bars Mexican student from class over poem

Matt Apuzzo:

Southern Connecticut State University barred a student from a poetry class after his professor said a poem he submitted contained veiled threats to sexually assault her and her 3-year-old daughter.

The student, Edward Bolles, said his poem entitled "Professor White," was meant to be a satirical piece about globalization. In it, a Mexican student named Juan has a sexual encounter with the daughter of his white professor.

Bolles' professor, Kelly Ritter, found the poem "disturbing," according to an April 8 campus police report, and said she believed the poem was a threat. University officials prohibited Bolles, who is Mexican, from attending his poetry class while he was investigated.

Bolles, a 36-year-old married father of two, said he and Ritter have had political disagreements in class. Bolles, a conservative, said he has disagreed with some of the liberal political themes in Ritter's poetry selections.

The same is true of the Bolles' poetic character, who pledges to "turn the tables" on his professor and has a tryst with her college-age daughter. While Bolles' acknowledges that Ritter inspired the poem, he said it was not a threat and said he did not know she had a daughter.

News and Blogosphere:

Conn. University Bars Student From Class Over Poem

Excerpt From The Poem 'Professor White'

Grad Student Banned From Poetry Class Over Poem

Passover and political correctness

Steven Plaut:

In recent years, Passover has undergone a make-over in the American Jewish non-Orthodox community, one that has converted it largely into a holiday devoted to celebrating human rights, protesting a long list of human rights abuses and promoting fashionable causes. The remake seems designed to make Passover a cosmopolitan holiday, one with a universal message in which all can join, in essence the Jewish answer to the Declaration of the Rights of Man of the French Revolution.

Back in the 1960s, a series of Political Correctness Haggadahs were written, in which the message of Passover was turned into a celebration of the civil rights movement in the United States. Arthur Waskow, the guru of the Tikkun-"Renewal" crowd, wrote at the time a Black Liberation Passover Haggadah, celebrating black militants like the Black Panthers, who were themselves coincidentally calling at the time for the annihilation of Jews. Later Political Correctness Haggadahs were devoted to homosexual rights, women's liberation, and assorted other faddish causes, not least of which was Palestinian "liberation". No doubt, this year will see fashionable Abandon Iraq and Restore Saddam Haggadot or No War for Oil ones. "Multicultural" Passover seders became vogue and trendy in some circles, in which the seder became a mixture of acclamations for human rights and freedom, taken from a wide variety of non-Jewish sources.

As yet another illustration, a few years back, the Passover cause celebre of American Jewish liberals was Tibet, with Tibetan officials invited to Passover seders, and where the leftist Religious Action Center (RAC) of the Reform synagogue movement called on Jews to hold Tibetan-freedom Passover seders in solidarity with Tibet. The RAC is devoted to the proposition that Jewish values are nothing more and nothing less than this year's leftist political fads, including gay "marriage", supporting affirmative action apartheid programs, and opposing all welfare reform.

In all of these attempts to recast Passover as the celebration of human rights, the Professional Liberals of the American Jewish Establishment (or PLAJEs, for short) seem to be overlooking one little point. And that is that Passover has absolutely nothing to do with human rights and is not at all a celebration of human freedom. Not that there is anything wrong with celebrating human rights, mind you. I would certainly not object to creating such a holiday, and my personal preference would be to hold it on Hiroshima Day, the day in which the A-bomb saved countless human lives and created the conditions by which freedoms could be extended to many millions of oppressed Asians.

For the record, Passover is the celebration of Jewish national liberation. It is one of three such Jewish holidays devoted entirely to celebrating Jewish national liberation, the other two being Hannuka and Purim, and the only one with Torah foundations. It is not the celebration of generic civil rights, nor even the celebration of freedom and dignity for oppressed peoples around the globe. It is the celebration of Jews achieving national self-determination and taking their homeland back by force of arms.

The only role that human rights play in the story of Passover is in showing that, under certain circumstances, human rights may be trampled upon for the greater good - namely, for Jewish national liberation. In order to achieve Jewish national liberation, God ran roughshod over the human rights of the Egyptians. He afflicted them with a series of plagues. He then killed all Egyptian first-born. While Pharaoh no doubt deserved everything he got, the entire Egyptian people were completely innocent, hardly responsible for Pharaoh's human rights abuses, subjects of collateral damages. They paid the price for Pharaoh's crimes and God saw this as necessary and just. The innocent first-born of all these innocent Egyptian parents, no doubt themselves nearly as badly treated by Pharaoh as the Hebrew slaves, were killed. And while it is not completely clear from the text, apparently the first-born of the non-Jewish slaves were also innocent victims. And then, even the first-born of the animals in Egypt were killed, a development that would no doubt have driven the animal rights movement to hysterical outrage. What on earth did those poor animals do to deserve such a punishment?

While all of the above involve the Almighty's decision to violate the legitimate human rights of the Egyptian people, human rights abuses in the Passover story are not restricted to the Divine. The Jewish slaves, before taking to the road, also take away the wealth and savings of the Egyptian people. While Pharaoh no doubt owed them some back wages, this wealth was in essence being taken from the innocent Ordinary Egyptians, and not necessarily only from the yuppie upper classes.

Incidentally, The poor sons of Haman, the 75 thousand or so Persians who get killed and the others who have their property confiscated by the Jews according to the Scroll of Esther, and all those innocent Greek Seleucid Republican Guards getting knocked off by the Maccabee Green Berets are other examples of human rights being unavoidably compromised when Jewish national liberation and independence is pursued.

Passover is, of course, hardly a glorification of these human rights abuses. It is simply a celebration of Jewish national liberation even when it was pre-conditioned upon a certain necessary amount of moral tradeoffs and realpolitik. The lesson is clear: When there is no choice, squeamishness over the "human rights" of innocent people is out of place. The human rights of the Egyptians in the story of Exodus count for no more than the human rights of innocent Germans and Japanese getting the hell bombed out of them in World War II, or innocent residents of Baghdad who were bombed as part of the campaign by the Coalition forces.

Such things are necessary in the real world. Human rights sometimes need to be compromised to protect Jews and achieve Jewish self-determination and other goals.

All of which is of course lost upon all those self-righteous PLAJEs whining about Israel shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at the Arab rioters and the fascist Palestinian hordes. And the lesson that innocent humans sometimes must be abused and have their rights compromised will no doubt serve as a refreshing reminder for all those designer-jean campus urchins marching in the current "peace marches" in solidarity with Saddam and bin Laden.

The real lesson of Passover is that Jewish national liberation and freedom does not come cheaply. The real world involves difficult choices and moral compromises and tradeoffs. Achieving a higher moral end often involves taking steps that would themselves be abusive or immoral on their own grounds, but are required in order to achieve the greater good. Such tradeoffs are the stuff with which moral posturers and self-righteous practitioners of recreational compassion cannot deal. It does not fit into their simplistic worldview and lazy armchair moralizing.

It is the great tragedy of the American Jewish community, or at least the non-Orthodox majority therein, that it is so overwhelmingly dominated by assimilated Professional Liberals and self-righteous practitioners of recreational liberal compassion, people whose understanding of political tradeoffs and public policy analysis never go any deeper than a good bumper sticker.

I find the involvement of African-Americans in Passover activities unusual since black Americans tend to idolize the ancient Egyptians and regard them as being of the same race. How do blacks reconcile their love of the ancient Egyptians with the fact that they are also the bad guys of the Passover story?

Gay club discriminated against blacks

Justin M. Norton:

In a case closely watched by San Francisco's gay community, a city commission found that the owner of a popular gay nightclub discriminated against black patrons and violated local civil rights codes.

After a 10-month investigation, the San Francisco Human Rights Commission found the club Badlands required multiple forms of identification from some black customers, used discriminatory hiring practices, applied a dress code only to black patrons and denied entry using other policies rarely applied to whites.

The commission also said Tuesday that club owner Les Natali referred to blacks as "non-Badlands customers'' who should be discouraged from patronizing the club, located in the city's predominantly gay Castro neighborhood.

News and Blogosphere:

Panel finds bias at Castro bar Owner denied entry to black patrons, commission reports

Gay Club Accused Of Discrimination

Is Badlands Bad?

Dicscimination in Discriminating Taste From the Discriminated Against

Americans want a tougher stand on illegal immigration

David Kelly:

The armed volunteers patrolling the Arizona-Mexico border may be the starkest sign of frustration with the nation's immigration laws, but across the country there is a growing populist movement also taking matters into its own hands.

In Washington, Colorado, Virginia and elsewhere, grass-roots organizations are forming to pass initiatives and pressure politicians into enacting laws denying benefits to illegal immigrants. There are already groups in seven states and more are expected by the end of summer. One congressman may even run for president on a platform of securing the border.

The issue, experts say, is affecting more people than ever before and the gap between the public and policymakers is widening.

"Immigration is now a national phenomenon in a way that was less true a decade ago," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies in Washington. "In places like Georgia and Alabama, which had little experience with immigration before, people are experiencing it firsthand. Immigrants are working in chicken plants, carpet mills and construction. It's right in front of people's faces now, which is why it's become a political issue where it wasn't relevant before."

Supporters of tougher enforcement say the rise of citizen groups is a natural response to the federal government's reluctance to repair a situation nearly everyone admits is broken.

"The issue is about elites, major financial interests and global economic forces arrayed against the average American voter," said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors strict immigration policies. "The depth of anger should not be underestimated."

In Cullman, Ala., James Burke, 57, is signing up volunteers to push immigration reform in the state Legislature. He says the influx of illegal immigrants working in chicken processing plants and construction has led to a rise in crime, decline in neighborhoods and depressed wages.

"Our goal is to stop illegal immigration and get rid of the illegal immigrants who are here. What I saw happen in California over 30 years is happening here in just a few years," said the retired ironworker. "If I were to break into your house, use all of your stuff, watch your big-screen television, eat your food, would you say, 'That man is a criminal' or 'He just wants a better way of life'? "

Not far away in Covington, Ga., Lee Bevang is also organizing.

"Georgia is one of the top destinations for illegal aliens," said the 48-year-old bill collector. "Folks here could always go out and get a construction job for a decent wage but the contractors have totally taken advantage of illegal aliens, paying them wages no American can live on. My husband has been laid off. The concern about this is just huge."

Georgia's migrant population has mushroomed, growing from between 25,000 and 35,000 in 1990 to 228,000 by 2000, according to government statistics.

Like her counterparts around the country, Bevang hopes to build a politically powerful movement that would, as she says, end the "free buffet" for illegal immigrants. "We are a generous country but now it's time to take care of our own people in need," she said. "We are losing our middle class."

Massachusetts and Nebraska have similar committees. In Colorado, activists are working to put an initiative on the ballot next year denying state services to illegal immigrants.

Such efforts in places so far from the southern border are testimony to the growing reach of immigration.

Department of Homeland Security figures show that from 1990 to 2000, the illegal immigrant population in Alabama went from 5,000 to 24,000; in Nebraska the number grew from 6,000 to 24,000, and in Arkansas from 5,000 to 27,000.

Though these statistics motivate many grass-roots operations, their real inspiration has come from Kathy McKee. She launched Proposition 200, which passed overwhelmingly last year in Arizona. The measure requires evidence of legal residence before people can vote or get state welfare services.

"The reason for this movement is that people have lost hope that the government is going to do its job," she said. "The people in Washington are listening to their contributors who are businesses, and businesses, almost without fail, want illegal immigration."

McKee started Protect Arizona Now and also runs Protect America Now. Like many, she was stunned by the numbers and wanted to do something about illegal immigration. There are between 8 million and 10 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. Southeast Arizona is the busiest corridor of entry, with about 500,000 arrests last year.

"The vast majority in every state agrees with us," she said. "All that remains is getting them all together."

News and Blogosphere:

The Populist Issue for 2008?

War bill shields I.D. Act from ax

Racial bias in NYC junior high school

David Andreatta:

A Manhattan junior high school has been ordered to undergo "sensitivity training" by the city Department of Education after an 11-year-old girl was bullied one too many times by racist kids.

Aurora Heim-Salgado, a sixth-grader at Wagner JHS on the Upper East Side, has been taunted, teased and assaulted by classmates because she's white, she and her parents believe.

The most recent attack occurred last week, when a 12-year-old Asian boy called her a "white bitch" and knocked her to the ground with a punch to the back, her parents said.

"My daughter has suffered because she is white," said the girl's father, Gregory Salgado. "She's picked on because she is some kind of symbol."

The racial makeup of Wagner JHS is similar to other public schools in the neighborhood, with a third of its students listed as white, a quarter listed as Hispanic, a quarter Asian and about 15 percent black.

Fed up with the beatings and insults against their daughter — and what they said was a lack of responsiveness on the part of school officials — Salgado and his wife filed a police report against the Asian youngster.

"If it was a black kid attacked by white students, it would be an uproar," Salgado added. "The school refused to accept that there is a reverse-racism problem."

Over the next 12 hours, the school suspended the Asian boy, cops gave him a juvenile-delinquency ticket, and the district superintendent ordered the school on a fast track to becoming a bully-free zone.

In the news:

Sensitivity Training For Upper East Side School

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Black Student Sent Hate Mail

Reuters:

A black student has confessed to sending racist hate mail to three fellow students at her Christian college, apparently because she was unhappy and wanted to be pulled out of the school, police said Tuesday.

"The notes became her way to leave the school (Trinity International University) by implying it was not a safe campus," said Kevin Tracz, chief of police in Bannockburn, Illinois, in a statement.

The unidentified female student was charged with disorderly conduct and a hate crime, Tracz said.

The handwritten notes received last week by two black and one Latino student prompted the school to send about 100 of its 1,000 undergraduate students off campus to hotels or private homes for a night. Students returned to campus the following day.

In the news:

Woman Arrested for Black Student Threats

Student Charged With Racist Threats

Black Woman Faces Hate Crime Charge

Analysis: Campus hate an education

Around the Blogosphere:

FAKING THE HATE

Health of Asian Immigrants Declines Over Time in the United States

Yvonne Lee:

In recent years prevalence rates of diabetes, heart disease and cancer has been increasing among Asian Americans. So far, there has been very limited research on the diet of Asian Americans’ and the impact on their health. As a result, the California Department of Health and the UCLA School of Public Health conducted a joint study on Asian Americans’ diet and exercise habits. It examines the differences between the Asian and American diet.

The study focuses on heavily Asian populated areas in San Francisco and Los Angeles examining first generation Chinese, Vietnamese and Hmong. These groups make up the fast growing Asian segment in California, nearly 20 percent of the state’s population.

According to Tu-Uyen Ngoc Nguyen, UCLA School of Public Health doctorate researcher, the traditional Asian diet includes plenty of vegetables and fruits, but as the first generation of immigrants become immersed in mainstream American life, they become influenced by the American dietary culture. As a result, they eat more fast food and less home cooking Though the interviewees hoped they could maintain their traditional dietary habits, because of convenience and lack of information on health or diet concepts, they could not.

As a result researchers stressed the importance of communicating and promoting the idea of healthy eating, dietary moderation and daily exercise to the Asian population.

After the survey, Nguyen believes Asian parents, teachers and community health organizations ought to strengthen counseling on the importance and advantage of traditional Asian dietary practices. In general he said that Asian food is healthier than American food. And only by starting with their own home can Asians pass the concept of traditional healthy diet to the next generation.

Nguyen also says the message may be different according to each individual Asian ethnic group, which may have different dietary practices and beliefs. Through this process children can also learn how to respect and recognize their diverse culture.

She pointed out that the California Department of Health recommends nine portions of fruits and vegetables a day, an increase from five portions. In addition it recommends some form of daily exercise for 90 minutes a day, up from 30 minutes. Nguyen explained some might think it is hard to achieve the five portions of vegetables and fruits. But in fact, one apple equals two portions and a plate of greens equals four portions.

Karen Lam with the Kai Ming Head Start program, which contributed to the survey, pointed out children in Asia have a higher rate of exercise compared to American children. This is because, she says, in Asian countries there are more opportunities to walk when they attend school or shop. But after they immigrate to America, a majority of Asian children often ride in a car instead of walking, thus decreasing their chances for daily exercise. For their children’s health, parents ought to pay attention to their children’s exercise, not only their children’s school achievement, she says.

In addition researchers say parents must also avoid buying junk food for their children. This can be difficult because of the prevalence of television advertising for fast food companies.

Despite healthier food available from home, many students also participate in school lunch programs which may not offer enough healthy food choices. For example, many schools sell pizzas, hamburgers and sodas. In order to be effective in promoting healthy dietary practices, schools and parents must take a joint approach.

A representative from Asian Perinatal Services, Asian family advocates, said when talking to parents, they discovered the parent’s eating habit had a direct impact on their children. If some parents don’t eat salad their children also did not eat salad. They may convey the wrong message that raw food is unsanitary and instead emphasize that food needs to be cooked before eating. At the same time vegetables lose vitamins if it is overly cooked.

It seems that immigration even causes problems for the immigrants themselves.

Slave Diets Healthier than Modern African American Diet

Pacific News:

Few people know about African slaves and their lifestyle. Believe it or not, the slaves were perhaps the healthiest Americans who ever lived.

We’ve all seen pictures and images of Black slaves suffering from thankless backbreaking work in the excruciating summer’s heat. The physical endurance and stamina required for this work made them strong.

However, we have now come to learn that it was the slaves’ diet that was primarily responsible for their near-perfect health. Their diet consisted of a huge variety of garden-grown vegetables.

Unlike today’s typical American diet, the slaves feasted on a huge variety of vegetables and fruits, which were in great abundance during the South’s extended growing season.

Research confirms that the slaves typically ate six to eight servings of fruit and vegetables daily.

How could this be possible? The typical field slave’s day consisted of 11 to 13 hours daily of consistent work. They were often in the field when the sun rose beyond the quiet horizon and continued in the fields throughout the day until almost dusk.

Breakfast and lunch as we know it didn’t exist for the slaves. They often ate raw vegetables or gathered fallen fruit and nuts from trees that surrounded their workplace.

This food would be the only food that was eaten all day until they returned home to their quarters. Once home, they would prepare communal meals for the entire slave community.

The items served at these nightly gatherings were the key to the slaves’ good health. Small gardens that were planted adjacent to the slaves’ cabins produced an abundance of fresh produce for the majority of the year. These gardens oftentimes produced 15 or more different vegetables.

The evening meal consisted of a vegetable stew or soup created from vegetables from the garden, and potatoes or rice from rations provided by the slave owners. These ingredients would be boiled in water until done.

The vegetables reflected what was available to the slaves at the time. Combinations including carrots, squash, onions, peppers, okra, yams, tomatoes, leafy greens, corn, rice and potatoes.

According to Wiley Mullins, creator of Wiley’s Healthy Seasonings and Spices, “The variety of produce consumed by the early African Americans provided them with stamina and nutritional empowerment necessary to do the demanding daily tasks that were before them.”

Mullins states, “Recent nutritional research endorses the need to daily consume a variety of produce, especially colorful produce. Different colored produce naturally contain different nutrients, and these nutrients work in the body to protect the body from illness and disease.”

The brilliancy of the slaves is as demonstrative as it gets on what one can do to secure wellness. Of course, regular physical exercise is a given, and the slaves certainly got plenty of that. Food was the key then and is certainly the key now to secure a “wellness” lifestyle.

Mullins says the slaves did four things right:

They ate whole natural plan-based foods daily. Meat and fish weren’t easily accessible, and were eaten very infrequently.

Lots of water was consumed daily. Water was the primary beverage, with very limited consumption of bark teas.

The foods eaten were simple and easily digestible. Raw vegetables, fruits and nuts were eaten during the day.

The dinner meal was a “powerhouse of nutrition” featuring a large combination of colorful produce.

Unfortunately, most African Americans today, like all other Americans, consume less than three servings of produce daily. Because so many meals are eaten away from home, oftentimes these servings consist of a potato or rice dish and no other colorful vegetable.

Ironic to think that one of the consequences of the end of slavery was a reduction in the health of African-Americans due to poor diet.

Dutch eurosceptics and the European constitution

BBC News:

Several opinion polls indicate that Dutch voters plan to reject the EU constitution in the 1 June referendum.

An internet poll released on Monday showed that 60% of respondents opposed the constitution.

The poll, conducted by the Institute for Public and Politics, asked 7,500 people how they were planning to vote.

A poll published on Sunday by the Centre for Political Participation similarly found that only 42% of voters backed the treaty.

Here is why the Dutch have turned against the constitution:

The Netherlands is one of the EU's founding members, and support for the bloc has traditionally been strong among the Dutch.

However, tensions over immigration and the high financial cost of EU membership have led to increasing Dutch euroscepticism ahead of the poll.

In the news:

Polls suggest a Dutch 'no'

Poll tips 'no' vote against EU constitution

Around the Blogosphere:

The EU Constitution: Plan B?

DeLay, Abramoff, Indian tribes and the Palestinian intifada

Michael Isikoff:

The pitch from superlobbyist Jack Abramoff was hard to resist: a good way to get access on Capitol Hill, he told his clients a few years ago, was to contribute to a worthy charity he and his wife had just started up. The charity, called the Capital Athletic Foundation, was supposed to provide sports programs and teach "leadership skills" to city youth. Donating to it also had a side benefit, Abramoff told his clients: it was a favored cause of Rep. Tom DeLay.

The pitch worked especially well among a group of Indian tribes who, having opened up lucrative gaming casinos, had hired Abramoff to protect their interests in Washington. In 2002 alone, records show, three Indian tribes donated nearly $1.1 million to the Capital Athletic Foundation. But now, NEWSWEEK has learned, investigators probing Abramoff's finances have found some of the money meant for inner-city kids went instead to fight the Palestinian intifada. More than $140,000 of foundation funds were actually sent to the Israeli West Bank where they were used by a Jewish settler to mobilize against the Palestinian uprising. Among the expenditures: purchases of camouflage suits, sniper scopes, night-vision binoculars, a thermal imager and other material described in foundation records as "security" equipment. The FBI, sources tell NEWSWEEK, is now examining these payments as part of a larger investigation to determine if Abramoff defrauded his Indian tribe clients. The tribal donors are outraged. "This is almost like outer-limits bizarre," says Henry Buffalo, a lawyer for the Saginaw Chippewa Indians who contributed $25,000 to the Capital Athletic Foundation at Abramoff's urging. "The tribe would never have given money for this."

Abramoff, a legendary lobbyist particularly close to DeLay, is also a fierce supporter of Israel—"a super-Zionist," one associate says. That may explain why Abramoff's paramilitary gear ended up in the town of Beitar Illit, a sprawling ultra-Orthodox outpost whose residents have occasionally tangled with their Palestinian neighbors. Yitzhak Pindrus, the settlement's mayor, says that several years ago the town was confronting mounting security problems. "They [the Palestinians] were throwing stones, they were throwing Molotov cocktails," Pindrus says. Abramoff's connection to the town was Schmuel Ben-Zvi, an American emigre who, the lobbyist told associates, was an old friend he knew from Los Angeles. Capital Athletic Foundation public tax records make no mention of Ben-Zvi. But they do show payments to "Kollel Ohel Tiferet" in Israel, a group for which there is no public listing and which the town's mayor said he never heard of.

The phrase "white man speak with forked tongue" comes to mind.

In the news:

Newsweek: US Jewish Lobbyist Funded Settler Gangs with Swindled Indian Tribe Money

Right-wing Jews Rally to Defense of Embattled DeLay

Youth funds siphoned to settlements

Around the Blogosphere:

Oy Vey and WWJD Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay and Ralph Reed

Tom DeLay took 1.1 million from Indians to fund Israeli terrorists and murders

For some African men AIDS is viewed as a sign of masculinity

PlusNews:

Rural men in southern Malawi are convinced that being HIV-positive reflects well on their masculinity and sexual prowess, a new study has found.

According to Canada's University of Alberta sociologist, Amy Kaler, a high number of sexually active young men say they are HIV-positive without having any medical evaluation or signs of AIDS, and also have misperceptions about how the disease is spread.

"They assume, first, that [AIDS] is everywhere and will eventually kill everyone and second, that the disease is extremely infective and if one has been exposed to the virus, one's days are numbered," US television station NBC, quoted Kaler as saying.

Journals of recorded conversation, or passing reference about AIDS between the respondents, show that not only did they associate manliness with HIV, but one man even corrects another by saying that he had slept with all the desirable girls in one particular village, and would be the sole cause of an AIDS outbreak there.

And people wonder why Africa is such a mess.

Dutch are moving to Canada

Doug Saunders:

So the van Ramshorst family, troubled by the changes brought about by immigration, have decided to become immigrants themselves.

With their move to Vancouver this summer, they are joining an unprecedented number of people from the Netherlands who have decided, in recent months, to make a new home in what they see as the more comforting and less divisive Canada.

The sudden exodus to Canada has taken the Dutch government entirely by surprise.

During the past year, and especially during the past five months, the number of Dutch citizens applying to depart for faraway countries -- notably Canada, as well as New Zealand and Australia -- has increased to levels not seen in the tiny nation's modern history.

Most of those emigrants, according to the people who help them make their moves, are leaving because of their complex and surprising feelings about the changes to Dutch society brought about by immigration.

For some, the desire to leave is a response to the immigrants themselves, and what many people here view as their violent, divisive, non-Dutch ways.

But just as many Dutch immigrants seem to be alarmed that immigration has turned their countrymen into angry, intolerant nationalists.

In just about every country in Europe, immigration has become the most significant political issue, by far, in public opinion, media attention and parliamentary action. In Germany, France, Britain and Italy, immigrants have become the dominant election issue.

Faced with shrinking, aging populations and the attendant economic costs, most European countries are badly in need of immigrants. In some countries, this has led to culture shock.

The ethnic cleansing and mass migration of the two world wars left many European countries with one dominant ethnic group, so the presence of large numbers of visibly different people has alarmed and alienated many residents.

Nowhere is this being more strongly felt than in traditionally tolerant, open nations such as Britain and the Netherlands.

While both countries face severe labour shortages and therefore cannot give up on immigration, the public reaction to the demographic changes has been nothing short of fury.

In the campaign leading toward the May 5 national election in Britain, polls show that immigration is by far the most significant issue to voters of all classes and backgrounds -- outpacing by an enormous margin other hot topics such as crime and taxation.

Even the governing left-wing Labour Party has felt compelled to adopt the angry rhetoric of the anti-immigrant right, and has promised to cut back the number of refugees accepted (if not the number of immigrants).

In the Netherlands, the reaction has been equally heated. But there, people are voting with their feet.

"The entire society is changing and people are longing for the world of 20, 30 years ago -- some people believe they can only find that by leaving," says Frans Buysse, a former Canadian embassy employee who runs Holland's largest agency for people wishing to emigrate to Canada.

Mr. Buysse can pinpoint the precise moment when the Dutch outflow became a full-scale flood. On Nov. 2, the libertine filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in a bloody throat slitting by a Muslim extremist while cycling on an Amsterdam street. To outsiders, it seemed a strange, passing crime. But the Dutch responded, within their tight-knit community, the way some Americans did to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Suddenly, people were noticing immigrant crimes, and committing crimes against immigrants: December saw the firebombing of several mosques and Islamic schools.

During the next four weeks, Mr. Buysse received 13,000 on-line applications from people requesting information on moving to Canada -- more than four times the usual level. Since then, this increase hasn't stopped. And, he says, the thousands of people he has helped move to Canada during the past few years have mentioned either immigration, or intolerance resulting from immigration, as a reason for leaving.

"For certain people, Nov. 2 was a confirmation of their beliefs," he said. "As a society, we have always been very tolerant to people from other places -- for hundreds of years, this has been the case -- but we have become so tolerant that some groups are influencing society in such a way that it starts to become intolerant. People are fed up with this."

I think the Canadians should brace themselves for a lot of European immigrants in the years to come.

Around the Blogosphere:

Double Dutch

Dutch Fleeing 'Liberal' Homeland In Record Numbers

A new wave of Dutch immigration


View My Stats