Torontonians display more racism than people in other parts of the country, the report concludes. It calls the finding “disquieting,” since Toronto is home to the largest number of racial-minority immigrants.

The findings suggest Toronto residents are reacting to the transformation of their city as it welcomes thousands of immigrants each year from dozens of countries. About 70,000 immigrants arrive there each year. The city is home to 44 per cent of the visible-minority immigrants in Canada.

“The rate of change in Toronto is incredibly high,” says the report’s author, Douglas Palmer. “You have a tremendously large number of people from quite different cultures coming into the city each year. É But there is also a question of how much, what rate of change can be tolerated.”

The opposite trend appears to be working in Vancouver, another rapidly changing city that is a magnet for immigrants. Vancouver has the second-highest number of minority immigrants in Canada, after Toronto. The city receives about 40,000 immigrants a year. Yet Vancouver residents are the most tolerant in the country, the report said.

Mr. Palmer said he can only speculate on the difference between Toronto and Vancouver. But Toronto receives more immigrants, and from a wider range of cultural, ethnic and racial backgrounds, he said.

In Vancouver, many of the immigrants are of Chinese descent, a group that is already well established there. And Asian immigrants, including wealthy investors from Hong Kong, are widely credited with fuelling an economic boom in the city. “Immigrants (in Vancouver) were sort of seen as saving the city from the recession, whereas in Toronto that isn’t the case,” said Mr. Palmer.

But he cautions that it’s all relative: “We’re not saying the people in Toronto are highly intolerant. We’re saying the people in Toronto aren’t as tolerant as the people in Vancouver.”

The findings challenge Toronto’s smug self-image as an island of harmony, says Antoni Shelton, the director of Toronto’s Urban Alliance on Race Relations, a research and advocacy group. His group has been warning of racist undercurrents that have accompanied the browning of Toronto. The conservative political climate in Ontario has also helped create a backlash against minorities, he said.

Lloyd Stanford, co-author of a book on race relations and Canadian public policy, says that intolerance tends to be greater the darker the skin colour.

“There are more blacks in Toronto. That may be part of it, to be quite blunt. People who are inclined to judge things in terms of colour would obviously feel strongest against people who are black, as against people who are brown or a mixture.”

Another academic who studies racial tolerance in Canada says he was surprised by the findings. His own research from the early 1990s showed that of the three Canadian cities that receive most immigrants, residents of Montreal were the least comfortable with different racial and ethnic groups, said John Berry, a psychology professor at Queen’s University. Vancouver residents rated most tolerant, followed by Toronto.

And even the researchers caution about drawing conclusions based on any one study. It’s difficult to measure people’s attitudes. Some respondents are reluctant to answer honestly for fear of appearing racist. And because Canadians generally see themselves as a tolerant bunch, they tend to unconsciously skew their responses to reflect a “liberal” response, notes York University anthropology professor Carol Tator, co-author of a book on racism in Canada.

Surveys can also easily be slanted by the wording or order of questions, or even by recent events. For example, results would be predictable if a pollster asked people about their attitudes towards immigrants or minorities the day after an immigrant of Chinese descent pushed a woman off a subway platform, said Mr. Berry, referring to a recent incident in Toronto.

Mr. Palmer’s report analysed three public opinion surveys conducted for the federal Immigration Department between November 1996 and February 1997 by the polling firms Ekos, Environics, and Angus Reid. The report was obtained through Access to Information.

A key question in the December 1996 Environics survey, designed to test tolerance, asked 2,000 respondents across the country to comment on the following statement: “Non-whites should not be allowed to immigrate to Canada.” The responses were rated on a scale of 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree). The lower the score, the greater the intolerance.

Residents in Vancouver scored highest at 4.67, followed by people in the Prairies at 4.64; Ontario, excluding Toronto, at 4.61; B.C., excluding Vancouver, at 4.43; Atlantic Canada at 4.38; Montreal at 4.42; and the rest of Quebec at 4.33. Toronto residents rated most intolerant, with a score 4.09. The Canadian average was 4.47.

The report also noted that overall, support for immigration has grown gradually since the recession of the early ‘90s.

How favourably people view immigration usually mirrors the unemployment rate. When economic times are tough, people are more likely to say Canada is taking too many immigrants. Attitudes also tend to sour when there has been negative publicity about immigrants, said Mr. Palmer.

Support hit a low in 1993-94, when polls showed slightly more than half of Canadians thought the country was taking “too many immigrants.” The most recent poll this summer showed that number had dropped to 41 per cent who believe Canada is accepting too many immigrants, while 47 per cent thought the number of immigrants was about right.

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S. African Old Guard Testifies to Commission (971015)

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Two senior apartheid Cabinet members apologized before South Africa’s truth commission Tuesday — one for failing to turn the tide of apartheid and the other for his role in issuing orders which police at times took as a license to kill political opponents of the white government.

Pik Botha apologized for his reluctance to investigate the killing and torturing of political opponents by white security forces during his 17-year tenure as foreign minister.

While denying he had personally authorized the killing of political rivals, Botha said his own conscience dictated to him that he had failed to help bring an end to apartheid.

He told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he recognized apartheid was immoral as far back as the 1970s.

“Not one of us in the former government can say today that there were no suspicions on our part that members of the South African police were engaged in irregular activities,” he said.

“The question is whether we should have done more to ensure that it did not happen. I deeply regret this omission. May God forgive me.”

Botha’s admission that apartheid was immoral was praised by commission chairman Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize.

“It requires a great deal of courage to come out and say what you did today. I believe this has made one of the most impactful contributions we have heard,” said Tutu, a retired archbishop of the Anglican church who stood up to successive white governments.

“No one of your political stature, coming out of your community, has said the policy of the National Party had no moral basis. In a way it is breath-taking.”

The truth commission is seeking to uncover the truth behind crimes and human rights violations committed on both sides of the apartheid divide. It can grant amnesty to perpetrators who confess in full to their crimes.

It was set up after South Africa’s first all-race election in 1994 brought majority rule, four years after the National Party began dismantling apartheid.

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Blacks and Asians ‘imprisoned’ by fear of violence (London Times, 980413)

BLACK people are more than three times as likely as whites to avoid going to football matches because of a fear of violence, a government report has found. While 3 per cent of white people avoided soccer games, the figure rose to 4 per cent for Indians, and 10 per cent for blacks.

The report says fear of crime haunts the lives of many members of the ethnic minorities, who worry more than white people about being attacked and feel less secure on the streets and at home. Although many would like to visit pubs and nightclubs, many black and Asian people avoid them.

The study suggests that fear about late-night travelling may be one reason why ethnic minorities also avoid going to the theatre and cinemas. “Ethnic minorities were more likely than white people to say they avoid certain events or activities that they would like to go to because of concern about crime or violence,” the report, Ethnicity and Victimisation, says.

“They perceive themselves to be at greater risk of crime than whites, worry more about falling victim of a crime and feel less safe on the streets or within their own homes at night. To a large extent this is a reflection of their higher risk of victimisation and harassment,” the report, based on an analysis of the 1996 British crime survey, says.

Almost 30 per cent of black people, 27 per cent of Indians and 22 per cent of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis avoided a range of events and activities because of fears of crime, compared with 13 per cent of the white population.

Only 2 per cent of whites avoided nightclubs compared with 7 per cent of blacks, 5 per cent of Indians and a similar figure for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. Large proportions of the Asian community usually or almost always go out at night accompanied by another person, said the study, which involved interviews with 2,608 people from ethnic minority communities. Forty-three per cent of Indians went out at night accompanied by another person compared with 36 per cent of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, 26 per cent of blacks and 24 per cent of white people.

About 200,000 black and Asian people are the victims of racial harassment and attacks each year, but fewer than half of all racial crimes are reported to police in England and Wales. About 15 per cent of crimes committed against members of the ethnic minority community were considered by victims to be motivated by race.

However, there is no evidence of big changes in the overall number of racially motivated crimes, the study found. The British crime survey is considered to be the most accurate study of crime as it is based on victims’ reports of all offences rather than those recorded by police.

The report said the main reason ethnic minorities were likely to become victims of crime was because they were more likely to live in inner cities, many were young and they tended to be low paid -all factors of high risk.

Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, said: “Tackling racism is crucial for every force. Building the confidence of all sections of the community is not a side issue. It should be at the centre of police activity.”

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Apartheid scientists stopped at nothing to preserve white rule (980612)

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — Amid revelations of chilling research projects designed to preserve white rule in South Africa, a court said today that the man who headed that campaign must testify.

In the past week, a host of apartheid-era scientists have told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about mind-boggling schemes nurtured in secret laboratories. They include poisoned chocolates, germ-warfare agents capable of singling out blacks, plots to slip Nelson Mandela, now the president, a drug that would cause brain damage.

Toxins were made and passed on to apartheid assassins, referred to in secret documents only by their code names “Chris” and “Koos.”

One scientist, Schalk van Rensburg, testified that a shirt laced with poison was given to an activist with the African National Congress, the black group seeking to end apartheid. The target, who was not identified, unknowingly gave the deadly garment to a friend, who then died.

Lawyers for the man who controlled the apartheid biological and chemical weapons program, Dr. Wouter Basson, have been trying to prevent him from having to appear before the Truth Commission. But today the commission ruled against Basson.

Basson sat grim-faced while the panel rejected his lawyer’s appeal to postpone his appearance because it could prejudice a possible criminal case against him. Basson allegedly produced and sold Ecstasy and other drugs while he was overseeing apartheid science projects.

Retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu said this week’s testimony was the most shocking he has heard as chairman of the Truth Commission, set up in 1995 to investigate apartheid abuses and heal racial divisions.

“Here are people of high intelligence, coldly and clinically in white laboratory coats, working on things they know were meant to be instruments of destroying people,” Tutu told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The scientists explained their actions by saying they were virtually brainwashed by government propaganda in the 1980s that promoted the idea that South Africa was on the brink of falling to communism and black rule.

“That was the psychosis that prevailed,” Daan Goosen, who headed a covert biological research laboratory, recalled Thursday.

“I was not thinking rationally at the time,” he said. “Today, I know I was wrong. You can’t do that to people, it is just not justifiable.”

Van Rensburg told the commission that any researchers who expressed reservations about their work, or who moved to break ranks, were in grave danger.

“We had been told in no uncertain terms, if you let the side down you are dead,” he said.

While the scientists have disclosed assorted grisly plans, there was no indication of any firm decision to actually employ the schemes against any large segment of the black population.

Mandela’s ANC won the country’s first all-race elections in 1994, ending apartheid. Responding to the scientists’ testimony, the party said the plots disclosed this week drew one obvious comparison for the old, apartheid government: The experiments of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

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Cross-burning, Justice Thomas and the ACLU (Washington Times, 021219)

The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments about cross-burning, a tactic of intimidation traditionally employed by the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize blacks. But chances are that, if you didn’t carefully scan the Dec. 12th newspapers, you may not have heard about what happened at the Supreme Court the day before — in particular, the powerful, compelling statement by Justice Clarence Thomas about the history of cross-burning.

On Dec. 11, the court heard arguments presented by the Bush administration and Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore that the Old Dominion’s 1952 law prohibiting the use of cross-burning in an effort to intimidate is constitutional. On the opposite side were three cross-burners, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, who contended that it is a constitutionally protected form of free speech.

The Virginia case before the Supreme Court involved three separate convictions under the Virginia cross-burning law. Two men, who were not members of the KKK, were convicted of burning a cross on the front lawn of a black neighbor after he complained about noise from a firing range in their backyard.

The third person convicted was a Pennsylvania man who led a KKK rally in Carroll County, Va., where a cross was set afire in full view of residents and passing motorists.

Michael Dreeben, an assistant U.S. solicitor general, argued in defense of the Virginia law. After he had finished speaking, Justice Thomas, a Georgia native, said Mr. Dreeben had actually “understated” the insidious nature of cross-burning. “There is no other purpose to the cross — no communication, no particular message. It was intended to cause fear and terrorize the population,” Justice Thomas declared. “We had almost 100 years of lynching and activity in the South by the Knights of Camelia and the Ku Klux Klan, and this was a reign of terror, and the cross was a symbol of that terror.”

During the brief minute or so that Justice Thomas spoke, “the other justices gave him rapt attention. Afterward, the court’s mood appeared to have changed. While the justices had earlier appeared somewhat doubtful of the Virginia statute’s constitutionality, they appeared somewhat convinced that they could uphold it as consistent with the First Amendment,” the New York Times reported.

Afterward, University of Richmond professor Rodney Smolla, an attorney for the cross-burners, told the court that the Virginia law should be stricken down — just as the high court had done a decade ago in creating a right to burn the American flag.

But the reality is that neither flag-burning nor cross-burning should be considered constitutionally protected free speech. There is no evidence that the Framers were First Amendment absolutists. And burning the American flag isn’t speech in the way that writing an article or calling a radio show or giving a speech happens to be; flag burning is properly understood as nihilism, and an act of contempt and hatred for the symbol of this country. Cross-burning is just a different form of anti-social behavior, an effort to terrorize members of certain racial and ethnic groups. Neither merits protection under the First Amendment.

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FBI: Hate Crimes Down in 2002 (Foxnews, 031112)

WASHINGTON — Hate crimes were down sharply in 2002 following a spike the year before that was blamed in part on anti-Muslim and Middle Eastern sentiment after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The 7,462 hate crime incidents reported to the FBI in 2002 represented a drop of nearly 25% from the 9,730 reported in 2001, the agency said Wednesday. The number also was below the 8,063 incidents recorded in 2000.

There were 155 hate crime incidents listed as anti-Islamic last year, down sharply from the 481 reported in 2001

In addition, there were 622 hate crime incidents listed in 2002 against ethnic groups that include people of Middle Eastern descent, down from 1,500 in 2001. There were 931 anti-Jewish incidents in 2002, slightly below the number in 2001.

Arab-American and Muslim advocates agreed that hate crimes dropped from 2001 to 2002. But they said these people still suffer disproportionate discrimination in the wake of the Sept 11 attacks and the Iraq war.

“There’s an uneasy relationship between the Muslim community and law enforcement,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Many Arab-Americans and Muslims fail to report crimes for fear of government harassment, said Dalia Hashad, attorney advocate at the American Civil Liberties Union.

People have grown fearful of contacting the FBI or local police because of government policies like forced registration of mainly Middle Eastern men, perceptions of police profiling in terrorist investigations and more restrictive immigration rules.

“Bringing yourself to the attention of the government if you are Arab or Muslim in this country puts you at risk of being questioned,” Hashad said. “You see people less willing to trust the government.”

Hooper said that even if anti-Islam hate crime has waned, people who appear Arab or Muslim still are confronted more often than in the past with indignities such as lack of service or tougher scrutiny at airports.

“It’s more your everyday, run-of-the-mill discrimination that Muslims are feeling,” he said.

For a crime to involve hate, authorities must show a bias by the offender against the victim’s race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity or disability. The hate crime numbers are based on reports to the FBI from more than 12,000 state and local law enforcement agencies.

Among other findings in the report:

—As in the past, racial bias accounted for nearly half of the 2002 incidents, with the vast majority of those — nearly 2,500 — involving crimes against blacks. Anti-white bias accounted for 719 hate crimes in 2002.

—Intimidation made up about 52% of all hate crime incidents, followed by vandalism or destruction of property and assault. Eleven murders and eight rapes involved some element of hate in 2002, the FBI report said.

—There were 1,244 hate crimes based on sexual orientation in 2002, compared with 1,375 the year before.

—There were more than 9,200 victims of hate crimes in 2002. There were also a total of 8,832 offenses committed in hate crime incidents, which sometimes involve more than one criminal charge.

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Hate crimes drop by 23%; about half of racial nature (Washington Times, 031113)

State and local law enforcement agencies last year reported 7,462 bias-motivated criminal incidents — known as “hate crimes” — to the FBI, about a 23% decline from 2001, the FBI said yesterday.

The number of reported incidents — from more than 12,400 agencies — included 11 killings motivated by racial, religious, sexual, ethnic and disability bias. More than 9,700 hate crimes were reported the previous year, a report of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting says.

The UCR report says nationwide more than two-thirds of the reported crimes were against individuals, while about one-third involved crimes, mostly vandalism, against property.

Across the country, the report says intimidation was the most frequently reported crime against individuals.

The report says 48.8% of the incidents involving individuals were racially motivated, 19.1% were based on a bias against a religious group, 16.7% were motivated by a bias against a sexual orientation, 14.8% resulted from an ethnicity or national origin bias, and 0.6% were based on a disability bias.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department announced yesterday the sentencing of one of two men who in 2001 attacked a group of black teenagers in Illinois as they walked home from a high school football game. The men shouted racial epithets, threatened to injure and kill the youths and demanded they get out of town.

Harley Hermes, 21, who had pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the civil rights of the four teenagers, was sentenced in federal court to 22 months in prison. Shaun Derifield, 23, also has pleaded guilty and is scheduled for sentencing Wednesday.

“The Justice Department remains deeply committed to investigating and prosecuting perpetrators of racial violence and holding them accountable for their actions,” said Assistant Attorney General R. Alexander Acosta, who heads the department’s Civil Rights Division in Washington.

According to the FBI report, 61.8% of the suspected hate crime offenders were white, 21.8% were black, 1.2% were Asian or Pacific Islander, and 0.6% were American Indian or Alaskan native. Groups composed of individuals of varying races made up 4.9% of the offenders. The remaining 9.8% of offenders were of unknown races, the report says.

The crimes were committed by 7,314 known offenders, the FBI said, 60% were of whom were white and 20% black. Individuals of varying races accounted for some of the remaining offenses, and the race was not known for some offenders.

Of the 11 killings, the FBI said four were because of racial bias, four with a sexual-orientation bias, two with an ethnicity or national-origin bias, and one with a religious bias. California led the nation with three hate crime killings, followed by New York with two. Arizona, Florida, Minnesota, Missouri, South Dakota and Texas each had one reported killing attributed to a hate crime.

In 2001, the number of hate crime killings was 19.

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World leaders fear new wave of anti-Semitism: Al-Qaeda behind synagogue bombings (National Post, 031117)

Turkish police inspect the devastation outside the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul yesterday, a day after the city was hit by two suicide attacks.

The leaders of France and Italy are to hold urgent meetings with Jewish leaders today to discuss car bomb attacks on two Istanbul synagogues and what is being described as a new wave of anti-Semitism.

A French Jewish body said it was convinced a new type of anti-Semitism was trying to take hold in Europe, responding to both the Turkish bombings and a fire at a Jewish school on Saturday outside Paris that was most likely arson.

“Today, we are convinced that a new anti-Semitism is trying to take root in Europe, under the cover of anti-Zionism,” the French Central Consistory said in a statement.

“We call on all our faithful to remain vigilant and to condemn the slightest anti-Jewish act so that authors of such misdeeds can be punished with the utmost severity.”

Yesterday, al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for car bombs that killed 23 people in two Istanbul synagogues. A statement received by London-based Arab newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi said al-Qaeda carried out the attacks because it believed agents of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, were in the synagogues.

The paper’s political editor, Khaled Elshami, said the statement also said al-Qaeda was planning more attacks around the world, specifically with car bombs, targeting Britain, Italy, Australia and Japan.

“We extend our deepest condolences to the families of the victims and heartfelt sympathy to the Turkish people, and especially the Jewish community of Istanbul in this time of need,” Bill Graham, the Foreign Minister, said yesterday. “Together we stand with them against anti-Semitism wherever it occurs.”

In Israel, a senior Foreign Ministry official warned of more attacks on Jewish interests, saying: “This dangerous phenomenon is only expected to increase.”

Salai Meridor, chairman of the Jewish Agency, which promotes global Jewish partnership, said: “The entire Jewish people are under anti-Semitic attack, anti-Israeli attack and a wave of terrorism.”

Nobody was injured in the fire early on Saturday in Gagny, north of Paris, where investigators found evidence that arsonists broke in and set two different fires. An annex to the main building of the Merkaz Hatorah school, which was under construction, was destroyed.

“The French republic cannot tolerate any anti-Semitic act,” Jacques Chirac, the French President, said in a statement. “More than anywhere else, school must be a place of tolerance and respect.”

Mr. Chirac will confer with Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and his ministers of Interior, Justice and Education today before receiving leaders of France’s 600,000-strong Jewish community, the largest in Europe.

The European Jewish Congress said it would hold an urgent meeting in Rome today with Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, whose country currently holds the EU presidency, to express its concern over the Istanbul bombings.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Los-Angeles based Simon Wiesenthal Center, said the attackers “want to cleanse Europe of Jews so that it will be all open territory for the fundamentalist Islam groups.”

He said the goal of Islamic fundamentalists echoed “the policy advocated by the Nazis during World War II.”

In France, Jewish synagogues and schools have been attacked repeatedly in recent years in violence the authorities usually link to poor Muslim youths incited by Israel’s tough policies against Palestinian unrest.

Israel’s ambassador in Paris warned yesterday that growing numbers of the 70,000-strong Jewish community in France were questioning their future.

“Many Jews in France are wondering about their future in this country,” Nissim Zvili told Israeli public radio.

Between 2,000 and 2,500 Jews are now leaving France each year for Israel, the ambassador added.

Saturday’s attacks were the latest in a series of strikes against Jewish targets in recent months. In May, a bombing campaign in Casablanca left 45 people dead at several targets that included a Jewish cemetery and a Jewish community centre.

A bombing at an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa a year ago left three Israelis and 13 Kenyans dead, while a simultaneous missile attack narrowly missed an Israeli charter airliner as it took off from the Kenyan resort.

Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, who flew to Istanbul to show solidarity with the small Sephardic Jewish community in the predominantly Muslim country, said on Saturday the Istanbul attacks “must be seen ... in light of the recent anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic remarks heard in certain European cities in recent months.”

A recent EU-wide poll found most Europeans regard Israel as the biggest threat to world peace. This month, Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, of Zorba the Greek fame, described Jews as “the root of evil.”

Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister, is due to embark on a trip to Italy next week in an attempt to bolster Israel’s image in Europe.

Mr. Shalom will also be heading northward across the Mediterranean to Brussels and Austria next week to persuade EU countries to act against anti-Semitism and adopt a “more friendly” attitude toward Israel.

The former head of Israel’s overseas intelligence agency Mossad, Ephraim Halevy, told reporters “the hostile atmosphere [toward Jews and Israel] in Europe has led to the terrorist acts like we have seen in Istanbul.”

Suicide bombers driving two vans loaded with explosives carried out the devastating attacks on two Istanbul synagogues on Saturday. Turkish media said each vehicle was packed with 400 kilograms of explosives and two corpses had been found with wires attached to them, suggesting they might be suicide bombers.

Security yesterday was being stepped up around Jewish sites in several European nations, but Muslim Turkey — Israel’s closest regional ally — sought to reassure the country’s tiny Jewish community.

“We have Jewish citizens in Turkey; there is no division between the two communities,” said Abdullah Gul, the Foreign Minister, adding: “An attack against them is an attack against Turkey.”

Standing by Mr. Gul’s side on the front steps of a local government building, Mr. Shalom expressed his condolences to families of the Muslim victims.

“These attacks against prayers were cowardly attacks carried out by extremists who don’t want to see countries that are sharing values of democracy, freedom and rule of law,” Mr. Shalom said.

Turks, kept behind security barriers by police, tossed white carnations yesterday in a sign of condolence.

Turkey, a secular nation that is NATO’s only Muslim member, enjoys warm relations with Israel. Turkey and Israel have carried out joint military exercises, and Turkey in 1948 became the first Muslim country to recognize the Jewish state.

Many Jews said the bombings would not frighten them away from Istanbul, their home for half a millennium.

About 25,000 Jews live in Istanbul and a few thousand more reside in the Aegean city of Izmir. Dwindling communities remain in the capital Ankara and in Antakya, Adana and Bursa.

“We are a 500-year-old community, we are part of this nation. People may be afraid, but we will not leave,” said Sabi Baruh, 64, born in the historic Jewish quarter of Galata near the Neve Shalom synagogue, rocked by one of the bombs.

One blast tore apart the façade of Neve Shalom, Istanbul’s biggest synagogue and the symbolic centre of Turkey’s 25,000-member Jewish community. However, all of the dead and most of the wounded had been attending services at Beth Israel, a temple in an affluent neighbourhood.

While at least six Jews were among the dead, most of the victims were Muslims passing by the synagogues when the bombs went off, a few minutes and five kilometres apart.

Yesterday, forensic experts found more human remains among the rubble, raising the death toll to 23. Of the more than 300 wounded, 71 people remained in hospital yesterday afternoon.

Turkish daily Radikal reported the Israeli intelligence service Mossad had warned Turkish intelligence units twice about attack plans.

Mr. Gul was vague when asked if Turkey had been warned.

“Information is continuously gathered. There were [security] measures around the synagogues. Parking was forbidden.”

Abdel-Bari Atwan, the editor of the al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, told Arab satellite television al-Jazeera from London the al-Qaeda statement was sent in an e-mail from a division called Brigades of the Martyr Abu Hafz al-Masri.

Yesterday, more than 4,000 Canadian and U.S. Jews began a four-day convention in Israel, planning to discuss such issues as immigration and anti-Semitism.

The General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities of North America, an umbrella organization that donates more than $260-million annually to Israel, brings together North American leaders and more than 3,000 Israelis.

At a news conference yesterday, convention leaders said they will not criticize the Israeli government.

“We’re going to support whatever they do,” said Stephen Hoffman, UJC president and chief executive officer.

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Behind CAIR’s Hate Crimes Report (Weekly Standard, 040506)

CAIR says bias crimes against Muslims are up 70% in the last year. Could that be true?

THIS WEEK the Council on American-Islamic Relations released its annual report “The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States 2004.” Newspapers (the Washington Post in particular) dutifully gave prominent play to CAIR’s claim that hate crimes against Muslims increased 70% in 2003. Little skepticism, however, was applied to CAIR’s shoddy information-gathering or its politicized interpretation of the “data.”

According to CAIR, George W. Bush’s war rhetoric is to blame for the “increase” in hate crimes. But ours is not a society in which hatred and bias begin at the top and trickle down into criminal acts committed by ordinary citizens. And CAIR’s report, along with the way it has been received, proves it. We live in a society of singular, hair-trigger sensitivity to slight, and CAIR is situated at the wacky, exteroceptors end of such interaction. Long before a painful stimulus registers in the reasoning parts of the brain, this hysterical organization screams bloody bias.

Media credulousness is perhaps the strongest evidence that American society is wallowing in gentleness. When someone claims to have been wounded, journalists (the great Victorian Gentleman in Tom Wolfe’s classic formulation) don’t question the witness. Even when the witness clearly has an axe to grind, as CAIR does. Yet common sense begs us to look askance at the evidence gathered by CAIR, which relies entirely on self-reporting.

CAIR’s form for reporting an bias incident is available online . Although the instructions emphasize contacting the police first, and suggest enclosing official supporting documentation, it’s not even clear how one would do so. The annual report seldom references such documentation. Which is not surprising, given how CAIR’s information-gathering process works: If someone merely emails CAIR with a message to the effect that they were the victim of bias, another “hate crime” is tallied, no matter its seriousness or credibility.

It’s almost humorous what tiny offenses pass as worthy of complaint in the CAIR report. That a student at the University of Houston “saw flyers and posters with false and degrading statements about the Qur’an and the prophet Muhammad” is apparently a civil rights matter. That a College Republican at Roger Williams in Rhode Island wrote in a student publication that “a true Muslim is taught to slay infidels” is treated with similar gravity.

Several of the report’s examples of anti-Muslim rhetoric (the only prominent ones come from Dr. Laura and Paul Harvey, the latter of which was followed by an apology) hinge on whether or not Islam promotes killing. But this is even a subject of debate within Islam. Also, that the question should be taken up with some interest by outsiders is, again, neither a civil rights matter nor evidence of hatred or bias. The issue is merely relevant to why al Qaeda and other Islamofacist organizations are at war with the United States. And, to put it tamely, it does not speak well of CAIR (or its purported constituents) that the organization does its level-best to close off such discussions.

None of the press coverage on CAIR’s report gives readers a sense of its patchwork quality. Although undermining the USA Patriot Act is the most important item on CAIR’s agenda, the report dismisses the legislation in about four paragraphs giving a distorted picture of controversial Section 215. Nor do the authors note when their evidence contradicts their thesis of increasing bias and decreasing vigilance against bias: In the same section where its truncated discussion of the Patriot Act appears, the CAIR report discusses two cases of government bias in which the rights of Muslims were loudly and effectively defended.

In one, the right of a Philadelphia police officer to wear her hijab to work was successfully defended by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In the other case, a judge was forced to apologize and resign for suggesting a Muslim appearing in his court was a terrorist. The report’s appendix, too, contains another such story in which a Muslim county employee was allowed to keep his job even though his Friday prayer obligations kept him out of the office all afternoon. The situation was resolved; the employee doesn’t need to be in the office and, it seems, doesn’t need to make up the hours. “I’m really pleased with result,” the employee told a California paper. “They [the county] treated me with a lot of respect.”

NOWHERE does the report’s lack of rigorousness show more clearly than in the section titled “Sample Cases.” “On February 28th,” reads the very first item listed as a hate crime, “two unknown males assaulted a Muslim student at Georgia Tech in Atlanta at night. The attackers beat him for no apparent reason and did not attempt to rob him.” Which means there is “no apparent reason” to call it a hate crime. Under the same heading are listed several instances of minor vandalism, broken windows, graffiti, a defaced “Iraqi display case” at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Muslim Students Association.

Quite a number of the sample cases produced by CAIR represent the kind of awkward but individually insignificant difficulties the arise from the meeting of different cultures in a

pluralistic society. That a Muslim student is asked to remove her hijab for her school identification photo is not proof of discrimination; it’s proof that our society hasn’t figured out what to do about hijabs in official identification photos. Molehills become mountains in many other cases reported by CAIR, as when Muslim airline passengers singled out for security inspection claim, ipso facto, that they’re victims of profiling.

Finally, some of CAIR’s complaints don’t even pass the laugh test: “A mother called CAIR California to report that on March 14th a school coach barred her daughter from participation in the badminton team because she wears a hijab.” Never mind the sourcing problem—it doesn’t take great powers of imagination to foresee “hijab” problems cropping up in high school sports programs. The most unintentionally funny—and weirdly sad—incident in the entire report is contained in a Newsday article included in the appendix: “A Muslim woman shopping in a Brooklyn toy store was assaulted by a man who slurred Arabs and flung a Mr. Potato Head at her, police said yesterday. The suspect’s father later said his son apparently acted out of grief because a friend in Israel had been killed by a suicide bomber in Israel.”

Despite itself, the CAIR report does seem to have happened onto some serious instances of bias crime, but they clearly represent only a small portion of what CAIR describes as increasing anti-Muslim activity. So until CAIR can distinguish between real crimes and flying Mr. Potato-heads, it would be best if their work were dismissed as the cheap agitprop it clearly is.

David Skinner is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.

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Racial Double Standard for Student Writer? (FN, 040423)

COVALIS, Oregon — Barred from writing columns for the Oregon State University Daily Barometer, senior David Williams is in the eye of a storm some call a racial double standard.

The newspaper’s editor fired him after he wrote: “I think blacks should be more careful in deciding whom they choose to support. They need to grow beyond the automatic reaction of defending someone because he or she shares the same skin color and is in a dilemma.”

Williams, who is white, was referring to examples such as when singer R. Kelly, who is accused of being a child pornographer, received a standing ovation at the Soul Train Music Awards. He also cited past support for O.J. Simpson and Allen Iverson.

“I guess this case has shown me that just because I’m a different skin color, the merits of what I wrote have been marginalized and ostracized to the point that I’m labeled everything in the book like racist, Nazi,” Williams said.

A similar article, written just two days earlier by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts drew no such outrage. Pitts, who is black, wrote: “Blacks ought to be more thoughtful about whom they choose to rally around, ought to be less automatic in leaping to the defense.”

Although Williams admits he read Pitts’ article before writing his own, he wasn’t fired for plagiarism. And he was canned only after protests erupted on campus.

“I think he was fired because he’s white,” said talk show host Lars Larson. “If he had been a black student saying the same thing ... as Leonard Pitts wrote the same thing ... Leonard Pitts’ opinion was welcome. His opinion was not.”

Black leaders on campus disagreed with Williams’ firing but admit they protested against the article and didn’t take the same action for Pitts because of their different races.

Williams “does not know the experiences African-Americans have gone through. He will never know that,” said Lauren Smith, president of the university’s Black Student Union.

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Racial and Ethnic Harmony Detected in New Ratings (Gallup Poll, 040708)

Most blacks and whites say black-white relations are good

PRINCETON, NJ — Gallup’s annual Minority Rights and Relations survey, conducted June 9-30, finds that the American public has mostly positive perceptions of relations between blacks and whites, as well as between other racial and ethnic groups in the country today. Specifically, 72% of Americans think relations between whites and blacks are either “very” or “somewhat” good; only 26% say they are “very” or “somewhat” bad. White-Hispanic relations receive a similar review, while white-Asian relations are rated slightly better and black-Hispanic relations are rated slightly worse.

Ratings for each of the four racial/ethnic pairs measured are more positive than results from Gallup’s first polling on this in 2001. The perceptions of black-Hispanic relations have shown the greatest improvement, with a 13-point increase in the percentage calling relations very or somewhat good — from 49% in 2001 to 62% today. There has been a nine-point increase in positive ratings of white-black relations (from 63% to 72%), and an eight-point increase in positive ratings of white-Hispanic relations (66% to 74%). There has been a five-point increase in positive ratings of white-Asian relations (76% to 81%), but this is not a statistically significant change.

The latest survey includes large oversamples of blacks and Hispanics that allow for statistically reliable analysis of their views, in addition to the views of non-Hispanic whites (hereafter referred to as whites). Whites, blacks, and Hispanics all have generally positive evaluations of relations between each group. However, there are some notable differences in their ratings.

* Whites have more positive perceptions of white-black relations than do blacks or Hispanics. Three-quarters of whites (74%) consider white-black relations good, versus 68% of blacks and 61% of Hispanics.

White-Black Relations

	Total	Non-Hispanic Whites	Blacks	Hispanics
	%	%	%	%
Good	72	74	68	61
Bad	26	25	29	31
Net Positive	46	49	39	30

* Whites and Hispanics share a more positive perception of white-Hispanic relations, compared with blacks. Seventy-four percent of whites and 76% of Hispanics, compared with 62% of blacks, believe white-Hispanic relations are good.

White-Hispanic Relations

	Total	Non-Hispanic Whites	Blacks	Hispanics
	%	%	%	%
Good	74	74	62	76
Bad	23	24	26	19
Net Positive	51	50	36	57

* Whites have a much more positive perception of white-Asian relations than do either blacks or Hispanics. Only 68% of blacks and 72% of Hispanics believe white-Asian relations are good, versus 84% of whites.

White-Asian Relations

	Total	Non-Hispanic Whites	Blacks	Hispanics
	%	%	%	%
Good	81	84	68	72
Bad	13	13	17	13
Net Positive	68	71	51	59

* Blacks overwhelmingly perceive black-Hispanic relations to be good, while Hispanics are a bit more negative, and whites are even more negative. Only 58% of whites and 68% of Hispanics, compared with 77% of blacks, think black-Hispanic relations are good.

Black-Hispanic Relations

	Total	Non-Hispanic Whites	Blacks	Hispanics
	%	%	%	%
Good	62	58	77	68
Bad	26	27	17	25
Net Positive	36	31	60	43

In fact, the “net positive” gap between blacks and Hispanics in their assessment of relations between their two groups is the widest of any interracial/ethnic pairing measured in the survey:

* Blacks’ rating of black-Hispanic relations: 60%age points net positive

* Hispanics’ rating of black-Hispanic relations: 43%age points net positive

* “Net positive gap”: 17%age points

By comparison, the net positive gap between whites and blacks in their ratings of white-black relations is 10 points (49% among whites, 39% among blacks). There is only a seven-point gap (50% among whites, 57% among Hispanics) between whites and Hispanics in their ratings of white-Hispanic relations.

A Different Question, a Different Finding

Contrasted with these generally upbeat results about the state of race relations in the country, a different question pre-supposing problems exist between whites and blacks finds a majority of blacks pessimistic that the problems between the two races will ever be worked out. Whites, on the other hand, are slightly more optimistic.

When asked, “Do you think that relations between blacks and whites will always be a problem for the United States, or that a solution will eventually be worked out?”, 57% of blacks say relations will always be a problem, compared with 44% of whites and 42% of Hispanics who feel this way. A slim majority of whites and Hispanics are optimistic that the problems will be worked out.

The long-term trend on this question shows that Americans were most optimistic about resolving black-white tensions at the time the question was initiated in 1963. Attitudes were noticeably negative during much of the 1990s — a decade marked by the Rodney King incident, the Los Angeles riots, and O.J. Simpson murder trial — but have been more evenly split since 2001.

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

Affirmative Opportunity: The president has a second chance to finally stop discrimination (National Review Online, 041206)

These ought to be heady days for values-voting Republicans, but legal and cultural conservatives are waiting with bated breath in one area that has long been important to them: affirmative action.

The record of the Bush administration during its first term on the issue of preferences according to race, ethnicity, and sex was mixed. The bad ended, but neither was there much positive to report. The government no longer promoted preferences, but it was not very aggressive in attacking them either and, worse, little was done to end the federal government’s own use of affirmative discrimination, especially in its contracting.

There were some exceptions to this do-nothing approach. The most famous were the amicus briefs filed by the Justice Department with the Supreme Court in the University of Michigan admission-preference cases. The administration argued that the university’s discrimination was illegal; even here, however, the position was squishy. The Justice Department had wanted to adopt a relatively clear line that a simple desire for “diversity” could not justify something as divisive and unfair as racial discrimination; the White House watered down the brief. As a result, the briefs punted on this fundamental issue, and instead said only that the University of Michigan’s program went too far (the Supreme Court agreed with respect to the school’s undergraduate admissions, but not with respect to the law school).

Another notable exception to the administration’s non-record in the first term has been the Education Department’s skepticism regarding the legality of university programs that are not simply racially preferential but actually racially exclusive. Some university summer programs, internships, scholarships, and the like have been explicitly limited to those of certain racial or ethnic groups, and absolutely closed to those of the wrong skin color or whose ancestors came from the wrong country. The Education Department has called such programs “extremely difficult to defend,” and most schools have now opened them up to all students, regardless of race.

It raises eyebrows, then, that two of the White House aides who are reported to have been behind the weakening of the Justice Department’s position in the Michigan cases are now slated to head the Justice and Education Departments: Alberto Gonzales and Margaret Spellings, respectively. These two agencies are the most important in the executive branch with respect to the issue of racial preferences, and so the appointments are worrisome.

On the other hand, Gonzales and Spellings are both famous for being loyal soldiers, and one hopes that the White House will give them — and the rest of the administration — clear marching orders in the second term. There is hope that it will.

The Republican-party platform adopted this summer states: “[B]ecause we are opposed to discrimination, we reject preferences, quotas, and set-asides based on skin color, ethnicity, or gender, which perpetuate divisions and can lead people to question the accomplishments of successful minorities and women.” This is exactly the president’s view. During the campaign, he said the same thing using virtually the same words.

It would be worthwhile, then, for senators to question Gonzales and Spellings during their confirmation hearings on these issues, and gain some reassurance that each will enforce the civil-rights laws in the same way for all Americans, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or sex. Conservatives should also insist that the civil-rights officials appointed under Gonzales and Spellings have a strong commitment to color-blind law.

In the second term, the administration should be more aggressive and proactive than it was in the first in implementing the principles that the party and the president have recently endorsed. Here is a list of what needs to be done.

First, the federal government should get its own house in order, especially with respect to contracting. Where it is possible to do so without changing a statute, the administration should end contracting preferences that discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex. Where statutes need to be changed, the administration should work with the Republican Congress to change them. A good place to start here would be the federal highway bill, which is up for reauthorization this spring, and about the constitutionality of which the Supreme Court has already expressed skepticism.

With respect to its own hiring and promotion, the federal government — especially the Office of Personnel Management and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — should end “affirmative action” policies that push agencies toward bean-counting, goals, and quotas. The EEOC has already taken some positive steps in this regard.

The federal government, through the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, requires private companies contracting with the federal government to set “goals and timetables” — which inevitably become quotas — on the basis of race, sex, and ethnicity. The regulations promulgated under Executive Order 11,246 are discriminatory on their face (requiring goals for some groups and not others), and the case law establishes that they are clearly unconstitutional; they must be changed.

The Justice Department’s civil-rights division should bring some lawsuits against state and local governments that use illegal contracting preferences, and against some public employers that use illegal hiring and promotion preferences. There is no shortage of such cases; all you have to do is read the newspapers. Unfortunately, local pols have always loved to distribute pork on a racial and ethnic basis; a lawsuit or two by the Justice Department would have a salutary effect on this too-common practice.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights needs to make sure that universities follow the Supreme Court’s command in the Michigan cases that any use of racial and ethnic preference be “narrowly tailored.” That means, for instance, that they are to be used only after race-neutral alternatives have been considered (and, if they have been tried, that they have failed); that racially exclusive programs are never to be used (since, by definition, they do not give the “individualized consideration” the Court demanded); and that race is to be at most a thumb on the scale, not the scale itself. Again, there is no shortage of university practices that would enable OCR to make these points. (OCR should also tell school districts that the Michigan decisions do not allow race-based assignments at the K-12 level.)

Finally, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — which is a quasi-independent agency, but the president appoints its chairman and general counsel — ought to target some companies that use illegal employment preferences. Once more, there is no shortage of them — start with Wal-Mart, for instance, which has announced this year that it will tie executive compensation to how well quotas are met — and a couple of high-profile lawsuits would do a world of good.

All this can be done in a way that will build the president’s political capital, not spend it. Preferences are overwhelmingly unpopular with the vast majority of Americans of all races, and the enforcement examples given above do not involve grey areas: They are instances of clearly illegal discrimination. The administration can challenge these practices while it also takes proactive measures to ensure that women and minorities are not discriminated against either, encourages creative recruiting practices that cast a wide net, and promotes economic and educational outreach to disadvantaged individuals of all colors.

— Roger Clegg is general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Sterling, Virginia.

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

A New Conversation on Civil Rights (American Spectator, 050104)

When Mary Frances Berry left the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in early December, after 25 years as either vice-chairman or chairman, she did so without the anticipated bruising public fight. (The Bush administration apparently changed the locks on the Commission offices and reassigned the bank accounts.) Berry, whom new vice-chairman Abigail Thernstrom characterizes as “a remarkably divisive person,” had a history of picking fights, and in fact took pride in it. The fights tended to devolve to a single issue: that Berry, representing all African Americans, had been discriminated against, and was going to get hers (and theirs) back.

Thus Berry rather remarkably discovered, when she took over as chairman of the loony-left Pacifica Foundation in San Francisco in 1997, that the Foundation’s five stations were largely run and listened to by “white male hippies over fifty” (her own words). When Berry tried to impose her own personnel policies roughshod on Pacifica (even arresting one on-air personality…on-air), Pacifica gave her the boot, as detailed in “There’s Something About Mary” in the June 12, 1999 issue of Slate.

No surprise, Berry’s chairmanship of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission fairly guaranteed that Commission proceedings, procedures, and pronouncements would be stuck in a radical 1960s “two Americas” outlook.

THAT WILL ALL CHANGE UNDER THELEADERSHIP of newly appointed chairman Gerald A. Reynolds. Reynolds, 41, a black Republican, has served as an assistant secretary in the Department of Education’s civil rights office. Ashley Taylor, a black Republican and a former deputy attorney general of Virginia, fills another seat on the eight-person commission. Thernstrom has been elevated to the vice-chairmanship. Vice-Chairman Cruz Reynoso, a former lieutenant governor of California, left with Berry. The Commission now has a conservative majority.

Thernstrom is a Harvard academic and author, with husband Stephan, of America in Black and White (Touchstone, 1997) and No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (Simon & Schuster, 2003). She looks forward to two developments from the newly constituted panel. The members will “take a hard look at the state of the current conversation about basic race, ethnicity, and gender-related issues.” Where Berry excluded or outright silenced opposing points of view, Thernstrom says the commission will “look at the spectrum of writing on [civil rights], far left to far right. What kind evidence is out there for what kinds of statements?”

A particular sore point here is that the Berry-led Commission published a report, without the concurrence of its minority members (all statements are supposed to be issued unanimously), accusing Florida of intimidating black voters in the 2000 Presidential election — this while the Commission itself did not interview a single voter who claimed to be intimidated.

By contrast, under new leadership, “I hope we’ll bring a kind of open-mindedness to our inquiries, so that they’re evidence-driven, rather than results-driven,” Thernstrom says.

Second, Thernstrom raps the “hostile and critical press” for buying into the notion that there is “only one important issue” in civil rights, “racial preferences, otherwise known as affirmative action.” Thernstrom is regularly identified as an opponent of affirmative action in the press. “I am not,” she insists. “I support affirmative action in its original sense, which is aggressive pursuit of equality in hiring and admissions.” She does not support affirmative action as currently defined, “which is racial double standards.”

THERNSTROM CALLS AFFIRMATIVE ACTION “YESTERDAY’S ISSUE.”

“Today’s issue,” she says, “is how we get to a level playing field by the end of high school. Today’s issue is the K-12 generation that ends up with racial double standards.” The Commission, Thernstrom says, needs to “start talking about why children of different groups aren’t learning enough. I don’t have any doubts about it, we can level the playing field. There’s nothing wrong with the kids, there’s something wrong with our educational system. Racial double standards camouflage the basic problem.”

New chairman Gerald Reynolds, interviewed by Stanley Crouch for his December 6 column in the New York Daily News, said much the same thing.

“What we must investigate,” Crouch quoted Reynolds as saying, “is what limits the quality of public education and keeps black and Hispanic students so far behind whites and Asians. We know the problems are not genetic. Is it teachers who are mediocre and sometimes incompetent, or is it lack of involvement of the students — or both? I think it is both.”

Reynolds added that “The violence in black and Hispanic communities is a civil rights issue as well, even though people don’t want to talk about it as such. We need to find out the successful techniques that have worked across the country that will take black and Hispanic kids to the top as opposed to holding them at the bottom.”

HACKNEYED AS MARY FRANCES BERRY’S inflammatory tactics had become, they nearly always assured sympathetic press. Her adherence to “yesterday’s conversation” on discrimination fit the template of the mainstream press. At the end, the lordly Washington Post even tolerated Berry issuing statements only through a public relations agency.

That cozy voyage with the Commission will undoubtedly come to crash on two conspicuous rocks: The Commission now has a black conservative face, which much of the entrenched culture finds intolerable. And, by emphasizing the inequities of K-12 education, the Commission will find itself identified with the President’s No Child Left Behind Act, a lightning rod for liberal criticism in politics and the press.

Given the heroic example — no other word for it — set by Commissioners Thernstrom, Russell Redenbaugh, and Peter Kirsanow over recent years, as they patiently wrote articles, issued statements, held meetings, and told the truth in the face of opprobrium and harassment, you have to figure the new Commission won’t shy away from the battle.

That battle figures to change the national conversation on race — a change long overdue. Some essential housekeeping has to come first. Berry has been accused by the General Accounting Office of mismanaging the Commission’s $9 million yearly budget — “an agency in disarray,” the GAO called the Commission. Reynolds has said his first job will be to conduct an audit.

Lawrence Henry is a writer in North Andover, Massachusetts.

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

Don’t let Democrats get away with race-baiting (townhall.com, 050107)

Mona Charen

There they go again: The Democrats are race-baiting — attempting to suggest that the Republicans purposely excluded or miscounted the votes of African-Americans in the 2004 election.

And why not? It worked so well last time around. The myth that African American votes went uncounted in Florida has achieved the status of conventional wisdom — never mind the little detail that it is completely false. And that myth has kept African American voters bitter and angry, which is precisely the way Democrats want them to feel. The more alienated black voters become, the more certain Democrats are that an essential constituency of the Democratic Party will remain loyal. The Democrats cast themselves as champions of the disenfranchised.

Now a group of Democrats led by Sen. Barbara Boxer has formally objected to counting Ohio’s 20 Electoral College votes because of purported “voting irregularities.” Michigan Democrat John Conyers asserted that in minority neighborhoods there was a particular shortage of voting machines, leading to long lines. Rep. Barbara Lee of California invoked centuries of oppression. Other members of the Congressional Black Caucus spoke of mysterious men who dressed as police officers and interfered with black voters. But just as in 2000, they have been unable to produce a single person who was denied his right to vote.

Republicans really ought to howl about this. By remaining silent in the face of these absurd yet damaging accusations, they give some credence to it.

In my new book “Do-Gooders,” I devote a chapter to race-baiting by liberals and note the irony that those who claim to be most solicitous of African Americans are actually cynically manipulating their fears and memories for their own narrow political reasons.

Remember the spate of black church burnings that seemed to be sweeping the Southern states? Democrats and liberals rushed to conclude that the KKK was riding again in the American South, and demagogues like Jesse Jackson were not above suggesting that conservatives had contributed to a climate that made church burnings possible. It turned out that there was no rash of black church burnings, but by the time those facts were verified, the lie had taken flight.

In the 2000 campaign, the NAACP ran ads suggesting that then-Gov. George W. Bush had condoned the gruesome dragging death of James Byrd by a couple of white skinheads in Texas. Though Bush signed the death warrants of the perpetrators, the NAACP, with the active collusion of then-Vice President Al Gore, spread the vile lie that Bush was somehow less than forceful in prosecuting those racist killers. It was a despicable charge, and it arguably did real damage to Bush in the 2000 race. Whereas he had earned 25% of the black vote in Texas in 1998, he received just 5% of black Texans’ votes in the 2000 presidential contest.

During the 1998 election cycle, Democrats ran ads on black radio stations that most unsubtly accused the Republican Party of malice toward blacks. “When you don’t vote, you let another church explode. ... When you don’t vote, you let Republicans continue to cut school lunches and Head Start. ... When you don’t vote, you let another assault wound a brother or sister.”

The Democrats know that they cannot win elections if they fail to get 85% to 90% of the black vote. This is because they consistently receive only a minority of the white vote. Keeping African Americans angry is a matter of political life and death to them.

But Republicans should not permit the smear to go unanswered. Democrats are willing to lie and sow discord in order to win elections. Republicans should be willing to tell the truth.

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

Paint It Blackwell: What Thursday’s inanity was really about (National Review Online, 050110)

Unlike the Jesse Jackson-led Democratic convulsions after the 2000 election was settled, Thursday’s shenanigans on the House floor were not primarily an effort to delegitimize George W. Bush’s presidency. ash

The number-one target of the protest of Ohio’s vote was the most promising African-American Republican politician in the country: Ohio secretary of state Kenneth Blackwell. A word count of the Congressional Record makes the case clearly: George Bush’s name was mentioned 109 times during the debate, while Ken Blackwell’s was mentioned 149.

When you take into account that many of the Bush mentions were made by Republicans, and that every mention of Blackwell was in a statement by a Democrat, it is clear who the real target of Thursday’s proceedings was.

With no black Republicans in the House, Senate, or any governorships, Blackwell is one of the highest-ranking elected African Americans in the GOP. On top of that, he is a true conservative, so much so that the Ohio Republican establishment and Governor Bob Taft find him intolerably irritating.

In 2000, the nasty attacks on Katherine Harris had nothing to do with Harris herself; she simply made a convenient target in the Democrats’ attempts to overturn the Bush victory, and then to delegitimize him. With Ohio, it really is about Blackwell.

As a party, the Democrats need to fear Blackwell. He is skilled, conservative, and on his way up. He could be governor in a couple years and who knows where he could go from there. So Democrats have an interest in sullying his name before it gets big.

After Thursday’s debates and the protests Ohio Democrats have raised since the election, once Blackwell’s name is mentioned on the national stage again, every major newspaper reporter will reflexively call him a “controversial figure” who is “at the heart of the much-criticized 2004 election in Ohio.”

If Blackwell is weighed down with this baggage before he gets too big, not only will a possible gubernatorial, senatorial, or presidential candidate be eliminated, but national Democrats will also continue pointing out the embarrassing whiteness of the GOP. If you lined up every elected Republican in Washington and all the governors, you would be looking at over 300 white faces. The only black Republicans in prominent positions are appointed. That’s bad PR for the GOP, and good news for the Democrats.

Miguel Estrada knows how this works. Democrats, as their memos revealed, found Estrada “especially dangerous because. . . he is Latino.” It’s not that Dick Durbin and Pat Leahy’s staff think Hispanics are inherently more “dangerous,” it’s that they don’t want to be seen opposing one for the High Court, when all of America will be watching. He had to be stopped before then.

The attack dogs of personal destruction succeeded with their preemptive strike on Estrada, and now they’ll try with Blackwell.

Estrada and Blackwell both suffered a particular brand of racism mostly practiced by Democrats against minorities. Democrats attacked Estrada’s conservatism, saying he clearly did not represent the views of the Hispanic community, much like how Clarence Thomas is said to be not truly black because of his political philosophy.

The presumption behind this attack is that while whites can believe anything they want, blacks and Hispanics need to follow their leftist “community leaders” or they are sell-outs.

Similarly, Blackwell is offensive to the Congressional Black Caucus because he doesn’t follow their strict orders. For the crime of being a black conservative, they skewer him. On the floor, Rep. Maxine Waters had this gem:

Ohio’s partisan secretary of state, Mr. Kenneth Blackwell, I am ashamed to say an African-American man has failed to follow even Ohio’s election procedures, let alone procedures that comply with Federal law and constitutional requirements. Our ancestors who died for the right to vote certainly must be turning over in their graves.

While Barbara Boxer and the congressmen who led Thursday’s inanity made themselves look bad, they may consider that a fine tradeoff if they can rub some dirt on a promising black Republican.

— Timothy P. Carney is a Phillips fellow and a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.

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Multicultural Madness: How Western Civilization has been turned upside down in one generation (WorldNetDaily, 050209)

Multiculturalism – the reigning philosophy of American culture, where Satanists and witches are equal to Christians and Jews, where a rat is equal to a boy, where ruthless, repressive, backward cultures are equal to Western Civilization – is explored as never before in the groundbreaking February edition of WorldNetDaily’s monthly Whistleblower magazine.

The issue is titled “MULTICULTURAL MADNESS: How Western Civilization has been turned upside down in one generation.”

“We’ve been planning this for a long time, and it’s a real treat,” said WND Editor and founder Joseph Farah. “In this wonderful issue, multiculturalism is sliced, diced and roasted up as shish kabob and served up to our readers as a delicious journalistic feast. It’s not only a stunning expose of multiculturalism and political correctness, but also a memorable celebration and affirmation of all that is truly American.”

“MULTICULTURAL MADNESS” documents how multiculturalism, which started on college campuses during the “cultural revolution” of the ‘60s, has succeeded in making America so confused, “politically correct” and “minority-sensitive” that it has all but forgotten its original, core, Judeo-Christian values. Because of rampant multiculturalism:

* American heroes from Christopher Columbus to the Pilgrims are now likened to genocidal racists and maniacal bigots.

* “Whiteness studies” – the latest incarnation of multiculturalism on America’s college campuses – teaches that “whiteness” is the underlying cause of practically every conceivable social ill and that white people are almost inherently evil.

* Devil-worship and witchcraft are now afforded the same respect as worship of God. For example, a Virginia judge ruled that officials in Chesterfield County discriminated against a Wiccan when they barred her from opening a government meeting with prayer. And Britain’s Royal Navy allowed a non-commissioned officer to conduct satanic rituals on board one of its ships, giving him his own satanic altar where he could dress up in black robes and perform ceremonies to worship the devil using bells and candles.

* Perversion and sexual criminality are now equated with traditional, monogamous marriage. In 2004, thousands of same-sex marriage ceremonies were conducted throughout the U.S. – in open defiance of the law – under the banner of fundamental fairness and non-discrimination. Polygamy may soon be legalized in Utah. Even adult-child sex – euphemistically called “intergenerational sex” – is making surprising headway into the mainstream, based on today’s pervasive climate of moral equivalence among all forms of consensual “love.”

This worldview whereby we declare all human cultures and moral codes, from the fairest to the foulest, to be equal in value is made possible only by the total abandonment of any objective standard of right and wrong.

And this confusion is now even compromising America’s ability to fight and win the “terror war,” hindering the government from clearly identifying who the enemy actually is:

From the Beltway snipers (who had praised 9-11 and threatened jihadi violence) to the Muslim pilot of Egypt Air Flight 990 (who intentionally crashed his plane into the Atlantic killing all aboard while praising Allah), to the killers who recently executed all four members of a New Jersey Christian family in the ritualistic Islamist way (multiple knife attacks and near-beheading) – the official response is always the same: reluctance, in the face of overwhelming evidence, to conclude that “Islamic jihad” was the crime’s motive.

Likewise, the press – the filter through which Americans receive their information – is also paralyzed by political correctness. Stephen Jukes, Reuters’ global head of news, decreed that the giant wire service’s 2,500 journalists should not use the word “terrorist” to describe terrorist acts.

“We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist,” he wrote in an internal memo. “We’re trying to treat everyone on a level playing field … To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack.”

9-11 was not “a terrorist attack”?!

At least one media organization is not in the grip of political correctness, says WND/Whistleblower Managing Editor David Kupelian.

“Unlike our colleagues at Reuters and CNN and the rest of the so-called ‘mainstream’ press – which isn’t very mainstream – we at WorldNetDaily aren’t confused about our loyalties or about what’s right and wrong, or about what made America great,” said Kupelian. “And this issue proves it. It delivers a sparklingly clear, in-depth expose of what multiculturalism is really all about – namely, hatred of everything Western, white, male and Judeo-Christian.”

The issue includes:

* “Wake up and smell the danger” by Joseph Farah

* “Multiculturalism as a threat to national security” by Joseph Farah, on how political correctness has paralyzed government in the terror war

* “Multicultural madness: How Western Civilization has been turned upside down in one generation” by David Kupelian

* “What does ‘Judeo-Christian’ mean?” by Dennis Prager, who explains that “everyone talks about it, but few understand its real significance”

* “Whiteness Studies” by Chris Weinkopf, exposing the latest fad in multiculturalism – teaching outright hatred of white people

* “Phony diversity” by Walter Williams, who shows that although colleges prize multiculturalism, they rigidly censor one worldview; can you guess which one?

* “A new way to push ‘gay rights’ in public schools” by Robert Knight, who reveals how multiculturalism has become a ‘Trojan Horse’ for advancing the homosexual agenda in the nation’s classrooms

* “For English, please press ‘1’” by Michelle Malkin, who asks, “Does America have an official language any more?”

* “Ya’ll pray now, ya hear?” in which Barbara Simpson looks at the decision to broadcast Islam over loudspeakers in one Michigan city, while Christian symbols are being extinguished from the same public square

* “America in 2050: Another country” by Patrick Buchanan, who offers a frightening look at the nation’s future if current trends continue

“This issue of Whistleblower is really special,” said Kupelian. “Yes, it shows with amazing clarity how and why the nation has gone nuts because of multiculturalism. But in the process, it also poignantly takes readers on a journey to the heart of the real America, to the national ‘melting pot,’ to the message of the Statue of Liberty, and to the real possibility that we could get the authentic America back again one day.”

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Asians Wronged: The unfairness of quotas (National Review Online, 050415)

by Jonah Goldberg

A recent column in the Metro section of the Washington Post barely caught anybody’s attention. Marc Fisher, a writer I have no reason to suspect as a member of the Insensitive Conservatives Union (he’s never at the meetings) or as an adviser to Larry Summers, wrote an interesting story about the trials and tribulations of Asian-American students at a local school.

These kids have pushy parents. They deal with the stereotype that they’re smarter or bigger study-geeks than everybody else. They take SAT prep courses in 7th grade and attend Chinese-language classes on Saturdays. Et cetera.

And then Fisher offers these intriguing 37 words: “Add the punishing quotas that Asian students face in the college-admissions game — colleges don’t admit to using quotas, but the numbers tell the story — and the result is pressure through every step of childhood.”

Huh. Interesting. This confirms data from California and Texas that when racial preferences are lifted, whites don’t gain much, but Asian admissions jump through the roof. At the University of Texas-Austin, when preferences were removed, Asian freshmen jumped to 18% in a state where Asians comprise only 3% of the population.

In other words, what is denied with Orwellian savoir-faire by defenders of the diversity-academia complex is just plain obvious to people who are not professionally or ideologically invested in denying the existence of the elephant in the corner: The diversity “racket” discriminates against some minorities for the benefit of other minorities.

At this point, most anti-quota tirades tend to follow fairly predictable lines about the merits of meritocracy, the “soft bigotry” of low expectations, etc. These are all important and worthy arguments. But I think the Asian-American example highlights a point that often gets lost: Diversity regimes would be unfair even if minority applicants were completely qualified.

Today, the debate over diversity is driven largely by the unavoidable fact that, on average, African Americans and Hispanics are less academically qualified than whites and various other demographic groups. This was highlighted a few years ago during arguments over the University of Michigan Law School’s quota system. Justice Antonin Scalia noted during oral arguments before the Supreme Court that the easiest way to increase diversity would be to lower the law school’s standards. If diversity is “important enough to override the Constitution’s prohibition of racial distribution, it seems to me it’s important enough to override Michigan’s desire to have a super-duper law school.”

This is where the Orwellian savoir-faire tends to kick in. The school’s lawyers, along with columnists such as the Washington Post’s David Broder and countless others, insisted that increasing diversity never comes at the expense of quality.

Well, if the trade-off didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be having this debate. If there were a surplus of high SAT-scoring, straight-A blacks and Hispanics, no one would sue because they lost their slot to a less-qualified minority. The entire affirmative-action controversy is predicated on the unavoidable fact that there is a greater demand for well-qualified blacks than there is a supply. Period.

However, even if that weren’t the case, this quest to make all of our major institutions “look like America” is still basically arbitrary and unfair. It’s simply absurd to think that the distribution of Chinese, black, white, Hispanic, Indian, Jewish, Hmong, and so forth in the society can or should be replicated at a given university. Indian Americans, for example, are hugely overrepresented in the ranks of hotel and motel owners in the United States. Harvard President Larry Summers got in a lot of hot water for thinking out loud about why women were underrepresented at the highest reaches of science. But his observations that Catholics are underrepresented in investment banking, and that Jews are underrepresented in farming, went largely unnoticed.

So what? None of these things suggests that these fields are hothouses of bigotry. Instead, it demonstrates that there are all sorts of reasons, some good, some bad, for the distributions of ethnicities in this country.

Fisher’s story about Asian students in the Washington suburbs illustrates the point. These kids — mostly Chinese and Vietnamese — are under intense pressure from their parents and peers to excel. This comes with all sorts of drawbacks. Some of the pressure isn’t positive; kids who don’t follow the Asian stereotype are called “twinkees” — yellow on the outside, white on the inside. But the benefits are tangible, or at least they’re supposed to be.

If, as a group, the kids of Asian immigrants work harder and do better academically than blacks or whites or Jews, is it fair for Harvard to say at some point, “Sorry, we’re full up on Asians,” simply because it had reached a quota based on the Asian share of the U.S. population? Some cultures are going to emphasize the importance of becoming a doctor more than others. There’s no principled reason why advocates of quota games for law schools shouldn’t support the same thing for basketball.

But all of this talk about groups obscures the most basic point. Racial and ethnic groups are supposed to be invisible to the government. Any other system is merely guilt — or credit — by association.

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An Asian student confesses — ‘we work harder’ (townhall.com, 050421)

Larry Elder (black writer)

Why do students from some racial or ethnic groups outperform students from other racial or ethnic groups?

Don’t bother raising that question at California’s Alhambra High School, where Asians make up 54% of the population and Latinos 38%. On the school’s 2004 STAR Test, which measures student proficiency, Asian students’ scores in English Language Arts for the 11th grade are 44%, with Latinos scoring 26%. In Mathematics, Asians in Algebra I scored 49%, and Latinos 12%. In Algebra II, Asians scored 55%, with Latinos at 19%. For Geometry, Asians scored 51%, and Latinos 11%.

Robin Zhou, a senior, wrote a school newspaper column called “Latinos Lag Behind in Academics.” Zhou asked, “So why are our Advanced Placement classes 90% Asian? Two factors contribute significantly that influence students’ academic progress from the first year of school. The first is cultural: many Asian parents, especially recent immigrants, push their children to move toward academic success, while Hispanic parents are well-meaning but less active. Since kids are concerned mainly with the present, little parental involvement often means they fail to realize that school is not an end in itself but a bridge to better things.

“Given that Asian students are often pushed harder and more consistently by their parents, it’s not surprising that a performance gap already exists by middle school. . . . The second factor maintaining the performance gap appears around then, the deliberate segregation of previously uniform student bodies into white- and blue-collar castes.”

For respectfully pointing out the elephant in the room, Zhou received threats. Some students — and at least one teacher — called him racist! Never mind that Zhou carefully wrote the article to avoid offense. “Using past scores as a measure,” he carefully wrote, “are Hispanic students not pulling their weight? The answer is clearly no. To deny that the Hispanic student population as a whole lags behind its Asian counterpart would be ignoring the cold statistical truth. Is this suggesting that brown people cannot think on the level of white and yellow people? Absolutely not. [Emphasis added.] But the difference is real, and it needs to be acknowledged and explained before it can be erased.”

Consider the plight of Scott Phelps, a teacher at Muir High School in Pasadena, Calif., for 12 years. Phelps posted an e-mail in a school district chat room — later distributing it to his fellow teachers — discussing recent scores of the school’s students on the Academic Performance Index. He committed the politically incorrect sin of wondering why low socio-economic African-American students, as a group, have historically scored lower on standardized tests, and why many seemed to lack academic focus. “If you look at their scores and track them over the years, you will see that they’re horrible,” said Phelps. “I’m not singling out a group. I’m not saying that low test scores are caused by low socio-economic students, I’m saying that low scores and low socio-economic students are directly related.”

Further, Phelps had the audacity to suggest that of the students who engage in disruptive behavior, black students are disproportionately involved. “Overwhelmingly,” Phelps wrote, “the students whose behavior makes the hallways deafening, who yell out for the teacher and demand immediate attention in class, who cannot seem to stop chatting and are fascinated by each other and relationships but not with academics, in short, whose behavior saps the strength and energy of us that are at the front lines, are African American. . . . Eventually, someone in power will have the courage to say this publicly. . . . Class is something they do between passing periods, lunch or nutrition break, when they chase each other in the hallways, into classrooms, yelling at the top of their lungs.”

The resulting uproar got Phelps suspended. The school board reinstated him only after town hall meetings in which parents and even some black students and teachers demanded that the popular and widely respected teacher return.

I have a friend who lives in mid-town Los Angeles. Years ago, he invited me to visit a small library at the corner of Olympic and Vermont, an area between the high-rises of downtown and Koreatown. It is about 70% Hispanic and 20% Asian. At around four-o’clock in the afternoon, outside the library, several Hispanic kids performed incredible tricks on their skateboards. They were jumping, spinning, twirling and showing off their considerable skills. My friend then said, “C’mon, Larry, let’s go inside.” Inside the library — standing room only — were Korean-American kids and their mothers. Not one Latino kid inside the library. Not one.

The diversity/inclusion/multicultural crowd wants not only equal rights. They want equal results. But results require hard work, sacrifice and discipline. Either that, or a really good government program.

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Black student confesses to ‘hate mail’ hoax (WorldNetDaily, 050427)

Campus evacuated minorities, got visit from Jesse Jackson

After an evacuation and a visit from the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a Christian university discovered that “racist hate mail” reported on campus actually was sent by a black student looking for a way to be pulled out of school.

The student at Trinity International University in Bannockburn, Ill., whose name was withheld, confessed she sent racist letters to three minority students.

As a precaution, the school sent about 100 of its 1,000 undergraduate students off campus to hotels or private homes Friday night.

Officials said their decision to evacuate was based partly on the timing, coming near the anniversaries of the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, the Oklahoma City bombing and the siege at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas.

Three anonymous letters were distributed through the school’s internal mail system in the last two weeks, a university spokesman said. The third threatened physical violence.

The student was charged with disorderly conduct and a hate crime, according to a statement by Kevin Tracz, Bannockburn’s chief of police.

“The notes became her way to leave the school by implying it was not a safe campus,” Tracz said.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson met Friday with Trinity President Gregory Waybright and the students who received the notes, saying the three expressed “reasonable fear,” the Chicago Sun Times reported.

“There is some disbelief this happened at a Christian university, but there is no hiding place from the pervasiveness of racism in our country,” Jackson said, praising the school’s response.

The evacuated students were back in classes Monday after returning to their dormitories over the weekend amid heightened security.

The school, affiliated with the Evangelical Free Church of America, also has campuses in Florida and California.

School spokeswoman Melissa Stratis called the episode “an agonizing moment for Trinity, one that is unprecedented for our university,” according to Reuters.

She said school officials are “heartbroken by this revelation because we consider each student a member of our family.”

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Suspect: Woman killed because she was white (WorldNetDaily, 050706)

‘As long as she had blond hair and blue eyes, she had to die’

On a videotape played during a court hearing yesterday, a murder suspect said his victim “had to die” because she was white.

“I never seen her before, and I didn’t care,” Phillip Grant, 43, said on the tape. “As long as she had blond hair and blue eyes, she had to die.”

According to a report in the White Plains , N.Y., Journal News, the 45-minute video statement also includes Grant claiming to have killed others and saying he is at war with the white race.

Grant, who is black, is charged with second-degree murder and third-degree criminal possession of a weapon in the fatal June 29 stabbing death of Concetta Russo-Carriero, 56.

“I want the death penalty,” he said. “I want to die. But I wanted to kill somebody white first.”

In the statement, recorded some five hours after the 1:15 p.m slaying, Grant said that, beginning at 11 a.m. that day, he walked around a parking garage, looking for a victim.

“I was thinking that the first person I see this morning that looks white, I’m killing them,” he said. According to the local news report, the convicted rapist said he did not approach an older white woman walking through the garage “because she had already lived her life.”

“I wanted to kill somebody who lived a lily-white lifestyle and was a closet bigot,” he said on the tape.

Grant told a detective on the video he chose Russ-Carriero after she thrust a stairwell door toward him as he was walking inside the garage.

“I have no remorse whatsoever, because she was white,” he said, adding that he believed he was fighting a race war.

During his statement, Grant claimed his mother was raped by whites when he was a child and that even his white friends have all turned out to be racists. He said since being released from state prison, people have followed him around, calling him a rapist and hurling racial slurs at him.

The Journal News reported Grant was convicted of three rapes in 1980 and spent 23 years in prison. In April, he was tossed out of homeless shelter because he refused to undergo a psychiatric exam.

“The videotape speaks for itself,” Westchester District Attorney Jeanine Pirro told the paper. “The victim in this case did not have a chance. (Grant) was determined to commit this crime.”

The judge has ordered the case to go before a grand jury.

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The ‘Native Hawaiian’ bill (townhall.com, 050715)

Ed Meese and Todd Gaziano

As well-informed readers of Townhall know, the U.S. Senate is scheduled to begin debate soon on S. 147, the falsely named “Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2005.” The proponents of this bill, some motivated by seemingly benign purposes and others by simple greed, argue that the legislation redresses ancient wrongs done to early Hawaiians by the United States. The bill purports to authorize the creation of an exclusively race-based government of so-called “native” Hawaiians to exercise sovereignty over native Hawaiians living anywhere in the United States. This “Native Hawaiian Government” supposedly could exempt these Hawaiians from whatever aspects of the United States Constitution and state authority it thought undesirable.

The United States Supreme Court ruled decisively that this approach is unconstitutional in Rice v. Cayetano (2000). Yet, the proponents of S. 147 believe they can avoid this ruling simply by passing a law that calls the descendants of so-called “aboriginal” Hawaiians an American Indian tribe. The bill would require the federal government to create a database of persons with one drop or more of “aboriginal” Hawaiian blood, organize elections for an “interim government” of this alleged “tribe,” and finally recognize the sovereignty and privileges and immunities (or lack thereof) that the new government establishes for its “tribal members.” Although Hawaii correctly argued in the Rice litigation that descendants of aboriginal Hawaiians are not an American Indian tribe, state officials have changed their minds—since that is the only way they can practice racial discrimination on behalf of a favored interest group. Hopefully, the United States Constitution is not so easily circumvented.

Whether its sponsors are well meaning or not, a Hawaiian analogy to American Indian tribes does not work. It does not work for a host of constitutional reasons and it will not work if the principles of the Fourteenth Amendment are respected at all. Hawaiians were never an American Indian tribe, and cannot become one by congressional decree. When the first western missionaries arrived on the islands, Hawaii was ruled by a powerful king in a feudal monarchy, not unlike some in Eastern Europe and the Far East at the time. Congress simply cannot create an Indian tribe, as that term is understood in the Constitution, or “recognize” an Indian tribe that never existed. If it could somehow do so, there would be no end to racial separatist “nations” that Congress could carve out of the United States population and exempt from the United States Constitution. This cannot be.

S. 147 is unconstitutional for more reasons than could be explained in an op-ed (the June 22, 2005 paper by Senator Jon Kyl for the Republican Policy Committee , contains an excellent summary of both the bill’s policy problems and constitutional defects), but the bill’s disregard for the United States Constitution is surpassed by the profound negative consequences that would result even if it were constitutional. It is unfortunate that racial separatists and other opportunists have persuaded the Senate Leadership to take up the bill. And, it’s a cause for real concern that the number of Senators supporting the bill supposedly exceeds 50 (through purported logrolling and vote trading). Thus, it is high time for scholars and patriots, who thought that this bill—like its predecessors—would never go anywhere, to speak out about its fundamental defects.

Here are some basic points Congress should be aware of as it considers S. 147:

- First, Hawaiians (regardless of blood purity) are not and cannot be an American Indian tribe. The term “Indian tribes” mentioned in the Constitution has a fixed constitutional meaning that can’t be changed by a simple Act of Congress. They are limited to the pre-existing tribes within North America, or their offshoots, that were thought to be “dependent nations” at the time of the framing of the Constitution. Such American Indian tribes must have an independent existence and predominately separate “community” apart from the rest of American society, and their government structure must have a continuous history for at least the past century.

- By these standards (and several other requirements), Hawaiians never could qualify as an American Indian tribe. The fact that they were “aboriginal” people is of no constitutional significance. That does not make a tribe. As the Supreme Court correctly noted in Rice, Hawaii was a feudal kingdom at the time western sailors and missionaries arrived. America has incorporated voluntarily or by conquest many areas controlled by other monarchs, republics, or other nation-states. Monarchies, republics, and other nation-states simply are not Indian tribes. Even if aboriginal Hawaiians were once organized in tribal governments, they have had no type of “Native Hawaiian Government” for over 100 years. Finally, there is no independent and separate community of their descendants. Hawaii is the most integrated and blended society in America, perhaps the world. There are no “native” Hawaiians living apart from other Americans. Hawaiians, whether they have pure, part, or no “aboriginal blood,” all live in the same neighborhoods, go to the same schools and churches, and participate in the same community life. In sum, Congress cannot create or recognize a tribe that never existed, or pretend that one exists based on sharing one drop of “aboriginal” blood.

- Second, no government organized under the United States Constitution may create another government that is exempted from part of the Constitution. Yet, this is what S. 147 purports to do by allowing the alleged new government to grant preferences and exempt itself from portions of the Bill of Rights as it sees fit. The “Indian law exception” is controversial enough, but it can exist only because real Indian tribes are not created by Congress or the states, but existed prior to the formation of either. Real Indian tribes predate the Constitution, even if some of them have split or reorganized for various reasons. Congress could end the treaties with existing Indian tribes (leaving the merits of such an action aside) if it chose to do so, because these “dependent nations” are still subject to some control. But Congress simply can’t create new governments, new nations, or new tribes on its own, and then exempt them from portions of the Constitution. If it could, the restrictions on government in the Bill of Rights and elsewhere would be of extremely limited value.

- Third, the Fourteenth Amendment does not allow such naked discrimination. The Fourteenth Amendment was adopted precisely to prevent a state from excluding certain of its residents from the privileges and immunities of citizenship, especially on the basis of race or ethnicity. The Fourteenth Amendment begins with the proposition that: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.” The next sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits any state from abridging any of the “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” And as most Americans know, this same section also prohibits the denial of equal protection to any person within a state’s jurisdiction. Thus, all United States citizens who reside in Hawaii are equally citizens of Hawaii and are entitled to enjoy all the privilege and immunities common to other citizens, including the protection against discriminatory laws—especially racially-discriminatory laws.

Apart from the insurmountable constitutional defects with S. 147, it’s a terrible idea to try to create a separate “Native Hawaiian Government” even if it could be done. It is an insult to the independent Indian nations to have their governments trivialized, and there would also be no end to the number of purely racist separatist governments that could be formed if Hawaiians were “made” a tribe. Real Indian tribes were not and are not organized along “racial” lines.

There are 562 tribes that the Bureau of Indian Affairs recognizes, and no one thinks that each represents a separate and distinct race. At the time of the framing, many tribes allowed Europeans and Americans to join and other members to leave. In short, they were not and are not “racially” exclusive. If sharing one drop of aboriginal Hawaiian blood makes a tribe, then Chicanos, Latinos, African Americans, Mexicans, indeed any ethnicity could become a tribe if Congress so decrees.

Even if Congress did no more harm than create a separatist Hawaiian government, that act would help destroy the wonderful and admirable blended society—”the Aloha,” if you will—that does exist in Hawaii, where intermarriage and the cultural mixing of Asians, Americans, Europeans, and others is a model for the rest of the United States. A separate “Native Hawaiian Government” is both offensive and nonsensical, except to racial separatists and greedy opportunists. Those burdened with liberal guilt about ancient wrongs should think seriously about the harm they would do to the very values they purport to espouse.

There are legitimate ways to preserve ancient Hawaiian culture and to protect historic trust properties for the benefit all Hawaiians. But S. 147 is not the answer. It must be dramatically altered to cure all of its constitutional and policy defects. Failing that, we believe Members of Congress and the President are bound by the oath they took to support the Constitution not to give effect to measures that violate it.

Ed Meese was the Seventy-Fifth Attorney General of the United States, serving under President Ronald Reagan. Todd Gaziano worked as an attorney in all three branches of the federal government. Meese and Gaziano now direct the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

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Riding the Bus as Equals (Christian Post, 051110)

Last week, civil rights icon Rosa Parks died at her home in Detroit, Michigan, at the age of 92. Parks was best known for her refusal to relinquish her seat to a white man and move to the back of the bus, which provoked the Montgomery Bus Boycott lead by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Park’s courageous action helped make others aware of the struggle for civil rights and acted as a catalyst for numerous other protests.

Dr. King once said that Parks’ arrest was the precipitating factor rather than the cause of the struggle against segregation: “The cause lay deep in the record of similar injustices .... Actually no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, ‘I can take it no longer.’”

Reformed theologian James Danne, in Dictionary of Christian Ethics, marvelously defined the problem of racism. He wrote: “Skin color or different national origins are racial differentia. These differentia are incidental and relative to what constitutes authentic humanity. When these relative differences are turned into absolutes, race turns into racism. When the relative factor of white skin color is absolutized, white racism emerges. When Hitler absolutized Nordic origin, Nazism was born. When a feature of race incidental to our humanity is absolutized, the race possessing this feature exalts itself as a superior race, develops the consciousness that it is the historic bearer of a transcendent destiny to lead the world, by whatever required means, into its future. Its manifest destiny, however, is only manifest in its peculiar racial difference.”

Few things in life are more ugly, even demonic, than racist attitudes and beliefs. Yet it has always troubled me that conservative evangelicals were largely silent during the battle for civil rights. In fact, many were attempting to justify prejudice by erroneously appealing to the Bible. The argument was that African Americans were the descendants of Ham, that God placed Ham under a curse, and this therefore justified the subjugation of black people. Not only was this unbiblical, dishonest and mean, but it was a clear example of proof-texting — using the Bible for one’s own wicked ends.

Sadly, the problem is not simply one of the pasts. Still many conservative evangelical churches are some of the most segregated places left in the country. Two occasions that illustrate this fact happened during my own pastorates. While serving one church, I suggested we include handing out gospel tracts during door-to-door visitation to the Black and Hispanic community in our city. I was quickly informed by some of the church’s leadership such action would produce a controversy that would likely result in my resignation or dismissal. Another time at a different church, I invited an evangelist from a darker ethnic background to speak. A prominent and influential member of that church told me, “You can be certain there will be some negative ramifications for getting that “sand n#*#*#” to preach.” These are not isolated instances. Currently, similar problems are quite prevalent everywhere in Bible-believing churches.

Racism in any form, however, ought not to ever be named among the people of God. By definition racism exalts itself above God and projects itself as God. It is one of the grossest violations of the fundamental import of God’s law as stated by Jesus: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself” (Luke 10:27). The apostle James contended: “But if ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors” (James 2:9). Respect of persons — or “favoritism,” as the NIV puts it in that same verse — is inconsistent with God’s grace.

In the Spring of 1999, Michelle Shocks — nine months pregnant and riding a City Transit bus in Seattle, Washington — struck up a conversation about her faith in Christ with another passenger. When the bus driver overheard what Shocks was talking about, she called Shocks forward and warned her that talking about religion could be offensive to others on the bus.

Michelle couldn’t believe she was being asked not to speak about her faith in Christ. She then moved next to the other passenger so they could continue their conversation more quietly. That’s when the bus driver angrily declared, “That’s it. At the next stop, both of you are off my bus.” Shocks, even though she was pregnant, had to walk a mile on the side of the highway in the pouring rain to get to her destination.

Describing this situation in his book, What If America Were a Christian Nation Again, Dr. D. James Kennedy declared that for many Christians today, it’s not simply go to the back of the bus, it’s “get off the bus.”

The circumstances surrounding Mrs. Shocks were an infringement upon her civil liberties. With great unanimity, Christian people across the nation were rightly outraged. But the incident poses a critical question for followers of Christ still demonstrating racist views and actions: If we are not willing to demonstrate the love of Christ equally and seek to defend the legitimate rights of all, how can we with credibility demand our own?

Rosa Parks showed that no one should be relegated to the back of the bus or ordered off the bus, so to speak, because of their race, color, religion or national origin. Everyone should ride as equals. As the Scriptures say, “God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him” (Acts 10:34-35).

_______________________________________________

Rev. Mark H. Creech (calact@aol.com) is the executive director of the Christian Action League of North Carolina, Inc.

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Change your ethnicity day (townhall.com, 060327)

by Mike S. Adams

The other day I logged on to my university’s website to investigate rumors that the administration has been using the site to exaggerate the number of minorities on our overwhelmingly white campus. After I heard a colleague’s extraordinary claim – namely, that there are more blacks on the front page of the site than on the entire campus - I was taken aback. So I decided to do a little experiment.

My simple experiment involved recording the races of the first 20 people I saw featured in the pictures that rotate in and out of the front page of http://www.uncw.edu/. The final count was three Asians (15%), eight Whites (40%), and nine Blacks (45%). The problem, of course, is that UNCW has always been around 90% white with a black population in the single digits – usually around 6%. (Author’s Note: There was a brief drop from 6% Black to 4% Black after the university spent its first one million dollars on improving diversity).

Those who believe that the discrepancy between a) the actual racial distribution of students, faculty, and staff at UNCW, and b) the distribution represented on the website is accidental are free to do so. They are also free to believe in the existence of Bigfoot and the validity of professional wrestling. I couldn’t care less. I’m just excited about a new idea inspired by this experiment.

My new idea is an official “Change Your Ethnicity Day” at UNCW. Actually, I got the idea from the Leadership Institute in Washington, DC. But, I’m not going to give them any credit. I got that idea – stealing people’s ideas without giving them credit – from Ward Churchill.

The Leadership Institute’s decision to launch a “Change Your Ethnicity Day” probably really was inspired by Ward Churchill. And knowing that Churchill got a job as Director of an Ethnic Studies program by saying he’s an Indian - without any actual proof, of course - will inspire UNCW students to participate in the event in massive numbers.

All UNCW students have to do on (Change Your) Ethnicity Day is to stop by the Registrar’s Office to have their race changed from White (or Asian, or Hispanic, or Native American, or “Other”) to Black. Once they do so, they will be eligible for lots of free stuff without having to earn it.

White students participating in Ethnicity Day don’t have to worry about getting in trouble for lying about race simply for their own personal gain. After all, they learned to do that from UNCW administrators who seek career advancement by telling lies about improving diversity without actually improving diversity. If that accusation seems harsh, just check out the website.

UNCW Ethnicity Day will also have some unforeseen benefits for Black students. Recently, numerous Black students began pressuring SGA Officer Candidates to promise to fight for more minority scholarships on campus instead of fighting for more merit scholarships. These students want to be judged by the color of their skin, not the content of their character.

After Ethnicity Day, there will be no need to worry about the “under-representation” of Blacks on campus. Almost everyone will be pretending to be Black after Ethnicity Day. And just pretending is good enough for an administration that specializes in make-believe diversity.

Nonetheless, I want to keep the minority scholarships after Ethnicity Day, even if every UNCW student decides to re-register as Black. Then, we will simply distribute the scholarship money at random. That makes sense – philosophically speaking - in light of North Carolina’s adoption of an educational lottery. I propose calling the minority scholarships “Junior King Luther Martin Scholarships” to reflect the university’s backward thinking on racial issues.

Of course, the greatest benefit of UNCW Ethnicity Day is that the sudden rise in the Black student population will help us get rid of Chancellor Rosemary DePaolo. By making her a national leader in make-believe diversity – and that makes sense in an age of make-believe racism – we can ship her off to a more prestigious university. I hear that Harvard has an opening for candidates with an innate weakness in math and science.

Sure, my idea for Ethnicity Day is controversial (thanks again, Ward Churchill!). In fact, few of you can probably believe I had the guts to write this column. But, there’s no need to worry. I can say anything about diversity because I’ll soon be Black. Before you know it, they’ll put me on the website.

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A new definition of racism (townhall.com, 060410)

by Mike S. Adams

Last week, a young black man accused me of racism – apparently in response to some of my recent columns including “Change Your Ethnicity Day.” The man to whom he made the accusation was also a black man. Unbeknownst to my accuser, the other black man was a guy I took into my home for four months while he was going through a rough divorce.

I have to hand it to him. After he told my accuser how much help I had been in a time of need, my friend put the accuser in an awkward position. Though he made him stammer incoherently, I think I could have handled the situation even better.

I have a form-response to spurious accusations of racism taken from the brilliant criminologist William Wilbanks. It involves asking the accuser these two questions: 1) “What is your definition of racism?” and 2) “How does it apply to the situation at hand?”

The response to my two questions is usually either a) total silence, or b) an apology. Had I been there last week to ask these questions of my accuser, it is likely that he would have chosen option “a.” But, since my recent columns on race have been drawing such bizarre criticism, I have decided to adopt a new strategy.

My new strategy is actually based on responses to two of the columns I published this school year. The “Change Your Ethnicity Day” column caused some black readers to dub me a racist for opposing affirmative action (because it is a form of racial discrimination). My “Welcome to UNC-We Love Black People” column caused some black readers to dub me a racist for opposing “African American Centers” and other measures that promote racial segregation.

Years ago, people who supported racial discrimination and racial segregation were called racists. Today, people who are opposed to racial discrimination and racial segregation are called racists - at least they are on campuses all across America. If the diversity movement has accomplished anything at my university, it has been to teach young blacks to model themselves after members of the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society.

But there is another rather obvious conclusion that comes from watching the “progress” made by the Offices of Campus Diversity in recent years. It is that these people are so arrogant as to presume that they may redefine racism whenever they see fit in order to garner support for whatever initiatives they deem fashionable at any given point in time.

So, perhaps, it is no longer advisable to ask the diversity nabobs to inform us of their most recent postmodern definition of racism simply because they are, yet again, making spurious allegations. Perhaps, instead, it is time for those of us who are tired of the diversity movement (that includes those tired of paying for it with hard-earned tax dollars) to come up with our own definition of racism.

Today, in my capacity as a candidate for the Office of President of the United States of America, I am proud to offer a new definition of racism. It follows here in all its simplicity:

Racism – is a pathological tendency to interject race into situations where it is not relevant, merely for personal gain.

And, of course, a racist can be defined as follows:

Racist – one who interjects race into situations where it is not relevant, merely for personal gain.

Under my new definition of racism, David Duke is still a racist but George Bush isn’t. And Bill Clinton is no longer our first black president. He’s our first racist president. And I’ll be damned if Hillary Clinton will be our second.

When I become President of the United States, I pledge to work hard every day to see that racists like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton get what they deserve; a very small but well-deserved federal unemployment check.

As your 44th President, I will also pledge to ignore racists rather than to spend all my time fighting racism. I have more important things to do like making the Fair Tax a reality and bombing Iran (in no particular order).

I realize that my strong language may turn off a few voters but that’s okay. If you don’t get the logic of my argument I really don’t want your support. In fact, you’re probably just a racist. I suggest you vote for the other candidate.

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Hey, Liberals! Lecture me about racism when you’ve stopped creating more of it (townhall.com, 061027)

By Mary Katharine Ham

I’m a racist. You’re a racist. He’s a racist. She’s a racist. Wouldn’t you like to be a racist, too?

This election cycle has sounded like a sicko version of that old Dr. Pepper ad. So many people are racists, it’s hard to keep up!

Let’s take a look at this week’s charges of racism, which come from the Left. They focus on two ads in the Tennessee Senate race. This race features Republican Bob Corker and Democrat Harold Ford, Jr. Corker is a white, former mayor of Chattanooga, and owner of a successful construction business. Ford is a black Congressman from a prominent political family in the state.

Here’s the TV ad in question. Go ahead and watch it. I’ll be here when you get back. The alleged racism lies in the fact that a white, blonde woman says, “I met Harold at the Playboy party,” and entreats him to call her at the end of the ad. The theory of those crying racism is that the idea of a white woman fraternizing with a black man was meant to conjure up some good Old South feelings about interracial dating.

It’s a serious reach to assume that was the intent of the Republican National Committee. Had they featured a black woman asking him to call her, I’m sure there would have been some coded message there as well, like, “Harold Ford should stick to his kind.” I don’t know how the liberal mind works, but I’ve gotta believe if it weren’t this racial overreach, it would have been another one.

People disagree with me on this. Republicans disagree with me on it. Ken Mehlman said he understands the other side’s point of view and Corker disavowed the ad on the grounds that it was “tacky.” Others have told me it was a Republican gaffe, racist or not, because it could be read as racist. Well, frankly, if we limit our political advertising things that won’t offend liberals, we will have no political advertising.

Try the other one on for size. It’s a radio ad, once again anti-Ford. Listen to it, here.

Now, the “racist” story behind this one is that there are drums as soundtrack to the parts of the ad that talk about Harold Ford. Liberal blogs have referred to them as “tom-toms” and “jungle drums,” and suggested that they’re meant to evoke images of Africa, the Dark Continent, thus turning off lily white Southern voters. Of course, it’s hard to make the argument that the anti-Ford ad is accentuating Ford’s ethnic “savagery” when the ad copy refers to his prep-school education and Northeastern roots.

Is it just me or does it feel more likely that the people who see and hear these innocuous ads and immediately jump to accusations of racism are the ones with the racial hang-ups, not Republican Southerners?

All of their theories, of course, are predicated on the idea that Tennesseans, and all Southern conservatives, are troglodytic racists who are boorish enough to vote against a man because he’s black and simultaneously sophisticated enough to pick up on very subtle coded political messages about his race.

I just don’t buy it. Listen, I understand that white Southerners are not wholly undeserving of such suspicions. Neither, certainly, are Republican operatives. I’ve lived in the South my whole life. I have seen much racial strife. But I’ve also seen much racial strife overcome.

The South is a resilient place full of warm people who don’t spend all their time thinking about race. It’s a place where black and white people live side by side, in greater percentages than any other region in the country, and where peace between them is the rule, not the exception.

Tennessee, in particular, was the first former Confederate state to ratify the 14th amendment and it had an anti-Klan law as early as 1868. It elected its first black member of the state General Assembly in 1873—Sampson W. Keeble.

More recently, the state has also elected Harold Ford, Jr. and his father before him to represent the 9th Congressional District from 1975 until now. Those are just a few things you can learn about Tennessee from a quick Google search. The same can be done for any Southern state. The South and its people are not the caricatures the Left makes them out to be.

Do we have a dark history? Yes, of course, but we’ve also proven surprisingly good at overcoming that history, and it never sits right with me when people ride into the South calling out racism where it doesn’t exist, creating more problems, sowing mistrust, and making it harder and harder for people suffering real racism to be taken seriously.

Some people criticized me a month ago for not being sufficiently quick to condemn both George Allen and Jim Webb as racists because of allegations that they had both used the n-word in the past. The allegations are a concern, to be sure, but I’m willing to listen to denials and apologies they offer now for 30-year-old offenses. Why? Because if you can’t believe that men can genuinely change their hearts on matters of race, then you cannot believe the South I love exists.

Sadly, many liberals don’t believe it does, so it’s easy for them to assume the worst of ads like the ones run for Corker in Tennessee this week.

Frankly, I get a little sick of being lectured on race issues by the same people who give a pass to Steny Hoyer for using the word “slavish” in reference to black Maryland Senate candidate Michael Steele. These are the same people who didn’t really mind that Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd used the n-word twice in a 2001 TV interview and didn’t squeal much at all when California Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante dropped the n-bomb during a speech in 2001. They’re the same folks who tolerate blackface Photoshops of Joe Lieberman and thick-lipped, offensive cartoons of Condi Rice.

The Washington Post has printed 168 references to Allen’s questionably racial “macaca” incident, and devoted but one reference to the fact that Webb used the word “towel-heads” in an interview last week.

It’s pretty clear that, for the media and liberals, condemnation for racism is not based on the credibility of the accusations. Instead, it’s handed down based largely on party affiliation. Racism becomes acceptable when perpetrated by a Democrat or a minority. It makes you wonder how serious they are about actually tackling the problem. I happen to dislike racism in all its forms.

Just today, I had to ban a commenter on my blog. It’s the first time I’ve ever done it. He was a liberal and a minority who had taken to using derogatory racial terms for white people. I have a blanket rule against racial slurs and he violated it. When I banned him, he wrote me an e-mail to tell me he was just “showing White people how it feels to be derided.”

Uh huh. He and the rest of the liberals like him can come back and lecture me when they’ve got another idea for fighting racism than creating more of it.

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Watson’s London Lecture Nixed in Wake of Race Remarks (Foxnews, 071018)

LONDON — A Nobel prize-winning scientist who reportedly claimed Africans and Europeans had different levels of intelligence is no longer welcome to deliver a lecture at London’s Science Museum, the museum said Wednesday.

James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering DNA, drew widespread outrage when he told The Sunday Times that Africans and Europeans did not share the same brain power.

• Click here for more on the Watson racial flap.

The newspaper quoted the 79-year-old American geneticist as saying he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”

He told the paper he hoped that everyone was equal, but added: “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

The comments drew condemnation from British lawmakers, scientists, and equality campaigners.

On Wednesday The Independent newspaper put Watson on its front page, against the words: “Africans are less intelligent than Westerners, says DNA pioneer.”

The Independent catalogued what it said were a series of controversial statements from Watson, including one in which he reportedly suggested women should have the right to abort their unborn children if tests could determine they would grow into homosexuals.

Watson, who serves as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, was due to speak Friday at a sold-out event at the Science Museum, but on Wednesday night the institution said Watson’s comments had gone too far and the lecture had been canceled.

This is not the first time Watson’s speaking engagements have caused a stir.

In 2000 Watson shocked an audience at the University of California, Berkeley, when he advanced his theory about a link between skin color and sex drive.

His lecture, complete with slides of bikini-clad women, argued that extracts of melanin — which give skin its color — had been found to boost subjects’ sex drive.

“That’s why you have Latin lovers,” he said, according to people who attended the lecture. “You’ve never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.”

Telephone and e-mail messages left with the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory after business hours Wednesday were not immediately returned.

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DNA Discoverer: Blacks Less Intelligent Than Whites (Foxnews, 071018)

One of the world’s most eminent scientists has created a racial firestorm in Britain.

James D. Watson, 79, co-discoverer of the DNA helix and winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in medicine, told the Sunday Times of London that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”

He recognized that the prevailing belief was that all human groups are equal, but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

• Click here to read the full Sunday Times of London profile.

Acknowledging that the issue was a “hot potato,” the lifelong Democrat and avowed secular humanist nonetheless said his beliefs were not an excuse to discriminate against blacks.

“There are many people of color who are very talented,” said Watson, “but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level.”

He told the interviewer, a former student of his, that he had recently inaugurated a DNA learning center near Harlem, and would like to have more black researchers at his lab, “but there’s no one to recruit.”

Steven Rose, a professor of biological sciences at the Open University in Britain, was quick to dismiss Watson’s comments.

“This is Watson at his most scandalous, “ Rose told the Times of London. “If he knew the literature in the subject, he would know he was out of his depth scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically.”

Watson is the former director and current chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory biological-research institution on New York’s Long Island, and both admired and infamous for bluntly speaking his mind.

In a British television documentary in 2003, Watson advised eliminating low intelligence through gene therapy.

“If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease,” said Watson, according to New Scientist magazine. “The lower 10% who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what’s the cause of it?

“A lot of people would like to say, ‘Well, poverty, things like that.’ It probably isn’t,” he added. “So I’d like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10%.”

He also touched upon sexual attraction in the same TV program.

“People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty,” Watson said. “I think it would be great.”

In 2000, he told a lecture audience at U.C. Berkeley that there was a correlation between a population’s exposure to sunlight and its sex drive.

“That’s why you have Latin lovers,” Watson said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “You’ve never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.”

The notion that intelligence tests and other scientific evidence shows that racial groups differ in intelligence, at least statistically, is not a new one.

It last gained popular attention in 1994 with “The Bell Curve,” a best-selling book written by Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein (who died before publication) and political scientist Charles Murray, which argued that intelligence was more important than socio-economic background or education in achieving success in American life.

The book does not explicitly ascribe a genetic, racial connection to intelligence, but Murray in his publicity tour to promote the book cited studies that human intelligence could be ranked by ancestry, with East Asians and European Jews leading the way.

That view was more clearly stated in 1995 by British-Canadian psychologist J. Philippe Rushton, whose “Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective” quantified dozens of differences between blacks, whites and Asians.

In the 1970s, electronics pioneer William Shockley, who won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics, said that the human race would suffer as less intelligent people outbred more intelligent ones, with the greatest damage to occur in the black American population.

Most sociologists, geneticists and psychologists reject the notion of racial differences in intelligence, pointing out that economic and social factors clearly influence IQ test scores.

The issue of race itself is scientifically controversial, with some arguing that it is a meaningless term and others saying that consistent traits occur among individuals of shared ancestry.

Watson is currently in Britain promoting his just-published new volume of memoirs, “Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science.”

“There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically,” he writes. “Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”

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DNA Discoverer Apologizes for Racist Remarks (Foxnews, 071019)

A Nobel prize-winning geneticist who sparked a furor after claiming that black people were less intelligent than white people moved to quell the controversy last night with an apology.

Dr. James Watson, 79, who won the Nobel Prize for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, told an audience in London that he was mortified by the public response after claiming that African and Caribbean workers were demonstrably less able than white ones.

His apology comes after his words were condemned by a government minister and members of Britain’s scientific community, and he was banned from appearing at the Science Museum in London. The controversy began with an interview last weekend when Watson was quoted as saying that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really”.

He went on to say that he hoped everyone was equal, but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true”.

Last night, at a book launch at the Royal Society, Watson withdrew the words attributed to him. “To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly,” he said.

“That is not what I meant. More importantly, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”

He claimed to be baffled at the words attributed to him by The Sunday Times Magazine. “I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said. I can certainly understand why people reading those words have reacted in the ways they have,” he added.

A spokesman for The Sunday Times said that the interview with Dr Watson was recorded and that the newspaper stood by the story.

Watson arrived in Britain yesterday to promote his latest book, “Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science.”

He has courted controversy in the past, reportedly saying that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine that it would be homosexual.

He has also suggested a link between skin color and sex drive, proposing a theory that black people have higher libidos, and claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured.

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Nobel scientist who sparked race row says sorry — I didn’t mean it (Times Online, 071019)

A Nobel prize-winning geneticist who sparked a furore after claiming that black people were less intelligent than white people moved to quell the row last night with an apology.

James Watson, 79, who won the Nobel prize for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, told an audience in London that he was mortified by the public response after claiming that African and Caribbean workers were demonstrably less able than white ones.

His apology comes after his words were condemned by a government minister and members of Britain’s scientific community, and he was banned from appearing at the Science Museum in London. The row was started by an interview last weekend when Dr Watson was quoted as saying that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really”.

He went on to say that he hoped everyone was equal, but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true”.

Last night, at a book launch at the Royal Society, Dr Watson withdrew the words attributed to him. “To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly,” he said.

“That is not what I meant. More importantly, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”

A spokesman for The Sunday Times said that the interview with Dr Watson was recorded and that the newspaper stood by the story.

Dr Watson arrived in Britain yesterday to promote his latest book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science.

He has courted controversy in the past, reportedly saying that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine that it would be homosexual.

He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, proposing a theory that black people have higher libidos, and claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured.

David Lammy, the Skills Minister, whose family moved to Britain from the Caribbean, said yesterday that the views expressed by Dr Watson would be seized upon by far-right organisations such as the British National Party. “It is a shame that a man with a record of scientific distinction should see his work overshadowed by his own irrational prejudices,” he said.

Mr Lammy’s statement came after the Science Museum decided to ban Dr Watson from delivering a lecture today because of his views.

British experts in intelligence and neurology last night condemned Dr Watson’s quoted views as discredited.

Baroness Greenfield, the neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, said: “There was a great uproar quite some time ago with a book called The Bell Curve which suggested that there were racial differences in intelligence. If Watson is citing this work, further work has found the findings not to be as simple as they implied and that there was a strong cultural factor involved.

“In any event, IQ tests can only ever be an evaluation of how good people are at IQ tests. It is a great shame that someone as distinguished as James Watson should make such comments.”

Jan Schnupp, a lecturer in neurophysiology at Oxford University, said: “No one has as yet managed to devise an intelligence test that can measure accurately how smart you are innately and Steven J. Gould’s excellent book The Mismeasure of Man explains very nicely how conventional ‘intelligence testing’ invariably stacks the cards against individuals from an Afro-Caribbean cultural background.”

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DNA Discoverer Retires in Wake of Race Remarks (Foxnews, 071025)

NEW YORK — James Watson, the Nobel laureate who sparked an international furor last week with comments about intelligence levels among blacks, has retired from his post at a prestigious research institution.

Watson, 79, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York announced his departure Thursday.

Watson was chancellor of the institution, and his retirement was effective immediately.

Watson was widely condemned last week for remarks he made in the Sunday Times Magazine of London on Oct. 14.

A profile quoted him as saying that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”

He said that while he hopes everyone is equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.”

He also said people should not be discriminated against on the basis of color, because “there are many people of color who are very talented.”

He later apologized, said that the published comments did not reflect his views, canceled his book tour of Britain and returned to the U.S.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suspended him from administrative duties Oct. 17 pending an inquiry.

In his statement Thursday, Watson said that because of his age, his retirement was “more than overdue. The circumstances in which this transfer is occurring, however, are not those which I could ever have anticipated or desired.”

Watson shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for discovering the double-helix structure of DNA.

In a written statement given to The Associated Press last week, Watson said he was “mortified by what had happened.”

“To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly,” he said. “That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”

On Monday, Watson canceled an appearance in Louisville, Ky., next month.

National Public Radio host Neal Conan was scheduled to interview Watson at the Kentucky Author Forum on Nov. 12 to promote Watson’s new memoir, “Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science.”

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Another Liberal Noose-Ance (townhall.com, 071017)

By Ann Coulter

Liberals are so invigorated by the story about a noose being found on an obscure Columbia University professor’s door that now nooses are popping up all over New York City. Liberals love to make believe the Night Riders are constantly at their doors.

I’ll be shocked by a noose appearing on a college campus the day an actual racist does it.

Could Columbia at least produce one student or professor who supports racism before holding another “rally against racism”? Every concrete example of the racism allegedly sweeping the nation’s campuses keeps turning out to be a fraud. Far from “institutional racism,” there is “institutional racial hoaxism” run amok in this country. Will anyone rally against that?

Out of legions, here are just a few hoax hate crimes on college campuses.

In 1997, at Duke University, a black doll was found hanging by a noose from a tree at the precise spot where the Black Student Alliance was to be holding a rally against racism. Two black students later admitted they were the culprits and were immediately praised for bringing attention to the problem of racism on campus. Indeed, four years later the president of Duke gave a baccalaureate address nostalgically describing the hoax as a “protest” against racism. Next stop: the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 2003, vile racial epithets were scrawled on the dorm room doors at Ole Miss, producing mass protests and a “Say No to Racism” march. And then it turned out the graffiti had been written by black students, against whom no charges were brought. A “Say Yes to Racism” rally at Ole Miss was later canceled due to lack of interest.

In 2005, obscenity-laced racist and anti-Semitic messages appeared on dormitory walls at the College of Wooster in Ohio. The fliers were instantly blamed on “typical white males,” even though all the letter I’s in the epithets were dotted with little hearts. Breadcrumbs left by the culprits included the message “Vote Goldwater” among the obscenities. The matter was dropped and flushed down the memory hole when the perpetrators turned out to be a group of leftist students led by a black studies major.

Just this year, anti-Muslim fliers were put out on the George Washington University campus — by leftists, including a member of “Iraq Veterans Against War.” When it was thought the leaflets were from the conservative group Young Americans For Freedom, the dean called for the expulsion of the culprits and the university demanded that YAF officers sign a statement disavowing “hate speech.” But when it turned out leftists had distributed the fliers, the matter was dropped faster than Larry Craig was dropped from Mitt Romney’s campaign.

The one real example of racism on a college campus in recent memory was perpetrated against white men of the Duke lacrosse team. As that injustice was being perpetrated, gender and ethnic professors at Duke kept droning on about the “racism and sexism” students “live with every day” — as the professors put it in an open letter that falsely presumed the players were guilty of rape. We don’t expect a rally against the prejudiced professors, but an apology might be nice.

Playing the game of He Who Is Offended First Wins, Americans seek status not by claiming to be rich or of royal lineage, but by portraying themselves as victims. In one recent hoax hate crime, a white woman professor at Claremont McKenna College said her car had been vandalized with racist and anti-Semitic graffiti, with the words “Shut Up!” spray-painted on the hood of her car.

She was not black or Jewish, but had recently converted to Judaism and spoke out against racism. So she was a victim! After the vandalism of her car, she promptly became Queen for a Day. Far from “silenced,” this anonymous mountebank was given a national microphone to bore us with her race-gender-culture theories. The campus was shut down for a day for anti-racism rallies in the charlatan’s honor. Then eyewitnesses identified her as the one who had spray-painted her own car, and the pity party was over.

These liberal racism-hunters are like dirty old men who spend their days poring through pornography in order to better denounce it — but enough about the Warren court.

Assuming against all reason and experience that the Columbia noose is not another hoax by a high-status victim, how is it that a pimply adolescent can cause such tumult in liberal New York City?

Liberals claim to believe the Klan has established a beachhead at Columbia University, Bill O’Reilly is head of the Manhattan branch, Rush Limbaugh despises the troops, I’m planning a pogrom from the heart of Manhattan, and George Bush is establishing fascism in America.

Some anonymous liberal hag on Air America Radio, which no one knew was still on the air, fell down outside her Park Avenue apartment this week, and her liberal colleagues were claiming it was Kristallnacht.

If it rains after a liberal washes his car, they say it’s a right-wing dirty trick.

Liberals love nothing more than these constant self-righteous-athons — as if they would ever have the courage to stand up for any cause not universally supported by everyone around them.

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Phony Indignation over a Phony Scandal (townhall.com, 071023)

By David Limbaugh

The dirty little secret about Sen. Harry Reid’s failed character assassination attempt against my brother, Rush Limbaugh, is just how contrived the Senate Democrats’ outrage was about the fraudulent allegation that Rush had impugned certain soldiers.

I won’t rehash the facts in detail, but essentially, Rush was falsely accused of calling troops who had expressed opposition to the Iraq War “phony soldiers.”

Not only was Rush not criticizing soldiers, but he was defending soldiers who had been criticized by pretend Iraq War veterans who had lied about their combat service in Iraq to gain credibility when they accused the actual soldiers there of unspeakable atrocities.

If Reid’s true instinct was to defend soldiers, he would have agreed with Rush’s criticism of the fake soldiers who lied about the real ones. He would have shared Rush’s outrage and demanded strict proof.

Sadly, the left all too often has unquestioningly accepted such horrible allegations against our soldiers. Sen. Dick Durbin assumed the worst of our soldiers in Guantanamo. Sen. John Kerry disseminated lies about our troops raiding Iraqi homes and assaulting civilian women and children. And Rep. John Murtha prejudged Marines guilty of murdering innocent civilians before they had even told their side of the story, much less been tried for the alleged crimes.

But did liberals express outrage against Durbin, Kerry or Murtha? No. They vigorously defended them. According to the loony left, the foreign-policy views of (leftist) veterans are sacrosanct and above criticism, even when they are themselves falsely impugning other soldiers. Obviously, the left’s loyalty isn’t to soldiers — it’s only to outspoken leftist soldiers.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews demonstrated this principle in graphic detail when he allowed his “Hardball” guests Graham Nash and David Crosby to go unchallenged when they maliciously claimed our troops were “killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.”

Nor did anyone else on the left — as far as I know — take Matthews to task for nodding with approval as these rockers slandered our soldiers as slaughterers of innocent women and children.

And when Harry Reid and his leftist colleagues, in the name of defending the honor of our troops, used the Senate floor and stationery to defame Rush with false allegations, no liberals had the intellectual honesty to admit the left has made a pastime out of slandering our soldiers. They just piled on with phony indignation.

Though Reid and his boys were lying every step of the way, there’s a reason those in their gullible base were so quick to leap to false conclusions about Rush’s purely innocuous statements and believe those lies: psychological projection.

While Rush would never consider condemning a soldier fighting to defend the United States, irrespective of his political views, the left often treats one’s political views as disqualifying him from legitimacy as a member of a certain group.

Consider how they treat blacks, like Clarence Thomas or Condoleezza Rice, who don’t subscribe to their leftist agenda. The left holds itself out as the savior of African Americans yet often treats with scorn conservative blacks.

To them, Thomas and Rice aren’t authentic blacks but Uncle Toms who not only aren’t entitled to protection against racial insensitivity but deserve to be subjected to it, as with the vulgar leftist racist cartoons depicting Condi Rice as a thick-lipped Aunt Jemima. Liberals didn’t hold their fellow travelers accountable for those racist caricatures because liberals aren’t champions of black people — they’re only champions of those blacks who subscribe to their political agenda and who will help keep them in power.

But I digress. If Harry Reid et al. wanted to be taken seriously with their manufactured fable about Rush, they shouldn’t have feigned outrage at him for allegedly criticizing soldiers. That just doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Then again, Reid knows he can get away with such abominable behavior because no lie is too low if it advances the cause — and there is no better cause in their minds than destroying their most powerful nemesis, Rush.

For absolute proof of this, you need look no further than a recent New York Times story reporting Reid’s thoroughly discredited lies about Rush as if they were fact. The Times also reported as legitimate Reid’s preposterous ploy to pretend he had been working in concert with Rush’s radio syndication partners to maximize proceeds from Rush’s unilateral auctioning of Reid’s letter attempting to smear him. This, even though everyone knows the only reason the letter brought more than $2.1 million (plus Rush’s match) was that it memorializes and showcases Harry Reid’s shameful abuse of power.

Alas, not everyone is as credulous as Reid would hope, as his cratering poll numbers in Nevada reveal. From what I hear, those aren’t phony numbers.

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

Ethno-Nationalism: The clash of peoples (Paris, International Herald, 080229)

By Jerry Z. Muller

Projecting their own experience onto the rest of the world, Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. They also find ethno-nationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths to demonstrate that it is a product not of nature but of culture, and ethicists scorn value systems based on narrow group identities rather than cosmopolitanism.

But none of this will make ethno-nationalism go away. Immigrants to the United States usually arrive with a willingness to fit into their new country and reshape their identities accordingly. But for those who remain behind in lands where their ancestors have lived for generations, if not centuries, political identities often take ethnic form, producing competing communal claims to political power. The creation of a peaceful regional order of nation-states has usually been the product of a violent process of ethnic separation. In areas where that separation has not yet occurred, politics is apt to remain ugly.

A familiar and influential narrative of 20th-century European history argues that nationalism twice led to war, in 1914 and then again in 1939. Thereafter, the story goes, Europeans concluded that nationalism was a danger and gradually abandoned it. In the postwar decades, West Europeans enmeshed themselves in a web of trans-national institutions, culminating in the European Union. After the fall of the Soviet empire, that transnational framework spread eastward to encompass most of the Continent. Europeans entered a post-national era, which was not only a good thing in itself but also a model for other regions. Nationalism, in this view, had been a tragic detour on the road to a peaceful liberal democratic order.

Yet the experience of the hundreds of Africans and Asians who perish each year trying to get into Europe by landing on the coast of Spain or Italy reveals that Europe’s frontiers are not so open. And a survey would show that whereas in 1900 there were many states in Europe without a single overwhelmingly dominant nationality, by 2007 there were only two, and one of those, Belgium, was close to breaking up. Aside from Switzerland, in other words - where the domestic ethnic balance of power is protected by strict citizenship laws - in Europe the “separatist project” has not so much vanished as triumphed. Far from having been superannuated in 1945, in many respects ethno-nationalism was at its apogee in the years immediately after World War II. European stability during the Cold War era was in fact due partly to the widespread fulfillment of the ethno-nationalist project.

Although the term “ethnic cleansing” has come into English usage only recently, its verbal correlates in Czech, French, German, and Polish go back much further. Much of the history of 20th century Europe, in fact, has been a painful, drawn-out process of ethnic disaggregation. The breakup of Yugoslavia was simply the last act of a long play. But the plot of that play - the disaggregation of peoples and the triumph of ethno-nationalism in modern Europe - is rarely recognized, and so a story whose significance is comparable to the spread of democracy or capitalism remains largely unknown and unappreciated.

When the European overseas empires dissolved, meanwhile, they left behind a patchwork of states whose boundaries often cut across ethnic patterns of settlement and whose internal populations were ethnically mixed. It is wishful thinking to suppose that these boundaries will be permanent. As societies in the former colonial world modernize, becoming more urban, literate, and politically mobilized, the forces that gave rise to ethno-nationalism and ethnic disaggregation in Europe are apt to drive events there, too.

This unfortunate reality creates dilemmas for advocates of humanitarian intervention, because making and keeping peace between groups that have come to hate and fear one another is likely to require costly ongoing military missions rather than relatively cheap temporary ones. When communal violence escalates to ethnic cleansing, moreover, the return of large numbers of refugees to their place of origin after a cease-fire has been reached is often impractical and even undesirable, for it merely sets the stage for a further round of conflict down the road. Partition may thus be the most humane lasting solution to such intense communal conflicts. It inevitably creates new flows of refugees, but at least it deals with the problem at issue.

Contemporary social scientists who write about nationalism tend to stress the contingent elements of group identity - the extent to which national consciousness is culturally and politically manufactured by ideologists and politicians. They regularly invoke Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities,” as if demonstrating that nationalism is constructed will rob the concept of its power. It is true, of course, that ethno-national identity is never as natural or ineluctable as nationalists claim. Yet it would be a mistake to think that because nationalism is partly constructed it is therefore fragile or infinitely malleable. Ethno-nationalism was not a chance detour in European history: it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit that are heightened by the process of modern state creation, it is a crucial source of both solidarity and enmity, and in one form or another, it will remain for many generations to come. One can only profit from facing it directly.

Jerry Muller is professor of history at the Catholic University of America.

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

That All of Us May Be One (Breakpoint, 080226)

By Mark Earley

Since 1926, February has been known as Black History Month. We often tend to think of it as just being something that schools celebrate every year. But a recent book by Edward Gilbreath, titled Reconciliation Blues: A Black Evangelical’s Inside View of White Christianity makes me think that maybe we should be thinking beyond that. The Church, Gilbreath believes, has a lot of thinking and learning to do about black history, and about race relations in general.

Gilbreath is editor-at-large for Christianity Today Magazine and director of editorial for Urban Ministries, Inc. Having spent his life in evangelical churches, colleges, and institutions, he knows the evangelical world inside and out. And while he loves that world, he and many of his fellow black evangelicals are troubled by many things they have experienced.

A black woman who “works at an evangelical Christian company” once wrote to Gilbreath, “The white Christians I encounter often display a shocking provincialism—a real naïveté about the world around them. Frankly, it is as if they are stunned to find out that their cultural, political, and religious frame of reference is not the only one.”

Looking back on his own experience, Gilbreath adds, “I got a rude awakening once I began to ascend the professional ranks at white evangelical institutions. . . . [It] smacked me upside the head in a variety of ways—the acceptable worship songs at church, the photos used to illustrate magazine articles and ministry ads, the feeling of always having to reeducate my white friends and colleagues. Sometimes it was as blatant as an offhand comment from a white superior at work like, ‘If we publish too many articles on the black church, our audience (i.e., white men) might feel alienated.’” While he got tired of playing the “race cop,” Gilbreath constantly felt a need to speak up for voices within the Church that he could not help feeling were being marginalized.

Instead of feeling that their perspectives are welcomed and valued, Gilbreath explains, nonwhite Christians often feel as if they are overlooked or, at best, considered “tokens” or symbols that churches or institutions can use to convince themselves they are being inclusive.

Gilbreath recounts incidents—like a black Christian leader who invited a white Christian to his home only to be rebuffed, or a publisher who featured offensive stereotypes in a Vacation Bible School curriculum. That should make white evangelicals stop and consider whether we are really taking the feelings of minority Christians into account, or just clinging to the status quo. At times we white evangelicals are so busy reacting against pervading political correctness in our culture that we go to extremes to avoid being seen as too “multicultural” or “diverse”—without thinking about how our words and actions may affect our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Edward Gilbreath closes his book with Jesus’ prayer for His followers, “that all may be one.” You know, if we are really serious about living a biblical worldview, all followers of Jesus, of all races and cultures, need to be serious about working together to make that prayer a reality.

And a good place to start would be reading Gilbreath’s Reconciliation Blues.

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

It’s Not Compassion — It’s Wright-Wing Racism (Townhall.com, 080320)

By Michael Reagan

Most of the media and their fellow liberals were positively giddy over Barack Obama’s speech Tuesday, all but comparing it to the Sermon on the Mount.

I won’t deny it was a masterful piece of oratory — the man can be spellbinding — but when you stop to consider what Sen. Obama was really doing up there on the podium, invoking the specter of slavery and Jim Crow and the era of “whites only,” it becomes clear that it was a con job designed to make the voters as giddy as he knew his worshippers in the submissive media would be.

The speech was meant to be an explanation and expiation of his guilt for his years of remaining mute in the face of the outrageous anti-Americanism spewed by his pastor and bosom buddy, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Until Tuesday, Barack Obama (you can’t use his middle name, which has now become the “H-word,” allegedly a code word for anti-Muslim rhetoric) had steadfastly denied he ever heard his friend and pastor make his hateful remarks. In the speech, however, he just kind of mentioned that. well, yes . he guesses he was aware of the Reverend Wright’s offensive rhetoric after all. Mea Minima Culpa.

He then launched into a defense of his friendship with the man he credited for bringing him to Christianity, and helping to form his social and political philosophy and set him on the path to a life of public service. Admirably, while denouncing Wright’s extremism, he refused to denounce the man himself.

Nobody expected him to declare Wright anathema and cast him into the outer darkness where there is weeping and wailing and the gnashing of teeth — one simply doesn’t do to that sort of thing to a longtime friend, benefactor and mentor even if he has been shown to have slipped the rails time after time.

What was not expected was Barack H. Obama’s use of a litany of America’s past racist offenses to justify not only Wright’s blatant hatred of white America but his suggestion that it was a sentiment shared by most African Americans. And that is simply not true.

Nor was it true, as Obama charged, that the Reagan coalition was created out of white resentment for affirmative action or forced busing.

He charged that “anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime. talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.”

Poppycock! These are not only outright falsehoods, but echoes of what Obama learned at the feet of Jeremiah Wright and now preaches as his own beliefs. He learned his lessons well.

When he suggested that my father’s coalition was based on anger over affirmative action and welfare he was peddling a blatant falsehood as egregious in its falsity as Wright’s charge that whites created AIDS to wipe out the black population.

Everything Obama said was directed at suggesting that while Rev. Wright should not have used such inflammatory language, he was somehow justified because of America’s white racism.

Try as he might, Barack Obama cannot claim the innocence of a lamb in his long years of worshipful association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. He was either fully aware of the seething racial hatred that motivated Wright, or something of a blithering idiot who can’t spot a racist hater when he spends years genuflecting at his feet.

Barack Obama is not an idiot. He is a brilliant orator who exudes charm and arouses near-worship from his host of giddy, hypnotized supporters. He is also a committed socialist and a talented salesman for his brand of Marxist snake oil.

Beware of camels bearing gifts, and politicians promising utopia.

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

Protests in South Africa Over Video Showing White Students Humiliating Black Workers (Foxnews, 080306)

Protests are continuing in South Africa after a video emerged showing four white university students humiliating a group of black cleaners.

At least 28 students have been arrested during the demos at the University of the Free State, where the video was made.They are accused of making threats against white members of staff.

The arrests have added to the tension on the Bloemfontein campus, which is still reeling from the tape’s release.

In it, the footage appears to show white students forcing the black workers to eat food contaminated with urine.

“We are calling for a national day of protest,” Tshitiso Nkgwedi, a representative of the Student’s Congress of South Africa announced during a march.

Most of those joining the demonstrations were young children when racist rule ended in South Africa.

But 14 years on, they are singing the songs of the apartheid struggle and denouncing what they claim is institutionalised discrimination at the once white-dominated university.

The college is now 60% black, but the halls of residence are still largely segregated according to race.

The Reitz hostel, where the white students who made the tape were living, has 110 students and just eight of them are black.

“As Afrikaaners, we feel threatened here,” Pieter Odendal said, insisting that far from being racist, white residents are actually the victims of racism in the new South Africa.

Hostel boss Chris Diepenaar agreed: “As a white man, you can’t get a job because those positions are given to people with a different skin colour.”

It is a view shared by a growing number of white South Africans, both on campus and beyond, who feel marginalised by the ANC’s policy of affirmative action and threatened by the high rates of violent crime.”We understand their concerns,” Professor Frederick Fourie, the Rector of the university said.

“Afrikaaners feel like they’re been squeezed in South Africa, and the hostel is a piece of territory they want to protect.”

The black students who come from communities plagued by poverty, as well as the same crime the whites complain of, have little sympathy.

“It’s the same here for all of us, we’re all victims,” one girl said.

As a snapshot of the new South Africa, the situation at the university is not encouraging. But the Rector is philosophical.

“People thought after Mandela that the race issues were over in South Africa, but every process of social change has its problems,” he said.

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

‘Ethnicity’ (Paris, International Herald, 080328)

Oxford Analytica

Successfully integrating diverse groups of citizens within a common national identity is one of the greatest challenges of modern international politics and state-building. In some previous eras, the main fault lines dividing citizens in many parts of the world revolved around social class.

However, since the collapse of the Soviet Union ethnic conflicts have again achieved salience. The Cold War decades limited the potential for such conflicts — although some of the struggles associated with decolonisation movements offered portents of the potential for ethnicity to again serve as a primary flashpoint for violence and political hatred on the global stage. Three recent events highlight the politically incendiary role of ethnicity:

Kenyan elections. The December general election in Kenya was a bloody debacle, which returned President Mwai Kibaki to power through a victory of questionable legitimacy. Violence flared after Kibaki’s main challenger, Raila Odinga, challenged the result. Under the surface of politically driven ‘ethnic’ clashes — with Kalenjin, Luo and other militias attacking Kikiyu communities in diverse areas of western Kenya, leading to reprisals by Kikuyu militias there and in other parts of Kenya — are longstanding grievances related to the distribution of land and the centralisation of political power. Politicians since independence, but in particular since the return to multiparty politics in the early 1990s, have exploited these grievances in ethnic terms. The violence, which left over 1,000 dead and hundreds of thousands displaced, was not caused solely by the elections, which merely served as convenient cover for these political agendas.

Tibet. Riots by ethnic Tibetans in Lhasa and in other Tibetan areas exemplify how ethnic differences can complicate profoundly state and nation building. Chinese officials responsible for propaganda and state policy have long maintained that Tibetans are a well-integrated ethnic minority within China’s social fabric. Yet most Tibetans see themselves as quite distinct from other Chinese; a small minority continue to seek independence on that basis within the geographic borders agreed during the Simla Convention of 1914. Significantly, economic development has apparently not diminished the desire among many Tibetans for ethnic self-determination. This tendency may be counter-intuitive, but it is not uncommon elsewhere in the world.

Tibet is an example of an ethnic conflict in which a defined ethnic group seeks real autonomy within (or independence from) a state with a dominant group that is capable of holding these desires in check. The Basques of Spain are a familiar instance. This often results in low-level conflict that may ensure for generations, absorbing considerable resources and political energy before any resolution is achieved.

Kosovo. The recent outbreak of violence in northern Kosovo exemplifies another strain of ethnic-based conflict. The Serb minority in Kosovo is refusing to accept the legitimacy of the self-declared government in Pristina or the authority of the ethnic Albanian-dominated police force. The UN and NATO are providing some security, but this cannot represent a stable, long-term solution. All Serbs, both in the province of Kosovo and in Serbia proper, believe that Kosovo is historically part of Serbia and see Western acquiescence in Pristina’s unilateral declaration of independence as a violation of national sovereignty — even though Albanians make up the vast majority of the population of the province, which used to enjoy autonomy under the 1974 Yugoslav constitution. Some Serbs hope to make northern Kosovo ungovernable from Pristina — perhaps ultimately allowing Belgrade to hang on to this slice of territory.

Politics of ethnicity. These conflicts demonstrate several key features of ethnicity as a political phenomenon:

• Potential for violence. Ethnic distinctions can engender deep hatreds capable of expression in violence. Even in stable societies pernicious expressions of ethnic hatred are manifest, as for example in the persistence of sporadic acts of anti-Semitism in France. Many societies contain ‘minorities at risk’, or minority groups against whom violence may be suddenly and unexpectedly directed.

• Difficult to suppress. Ethnic identities and ambitions are deeply-rooted and very difficult to alter. A common perception of history maintains ethnic loyalties through traditions and beliefs — both the positive or aspirational and the aggrieved — across generations.

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

Snapshots: Church’s Influence on U.S. Racial Landscape (Christian Post, 080525)

Jesse McGee points to trophies he won in local marathons. He mentions his work with youth and volunteer school programs. He praises his church’s efforts to deliver scripture lessons to inmates.

For more than an hour, the 84-year-old church deacon, who is black, chats about his life, largely ignoring the subject at hand: racism.

It isn’t until his wife, Warine, sheepishly shares that their son’s wife is white that McGee offers a confession: He had been uncomfortable with the union for nearly 30 years — until his Bible study class offered enlightenment.

His story represents a snapshot of how America’s racial landscape is navigated daily, often with religion as guidance.

The issue of race drew sharp focus as Barack Obama’s contentious split with his longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, played out in a national glare. In response, the United Church of Christ and National Council of Churches USA called on 10,000 ministers to initiate a “sacred conversation on race.”

“The realities of race have not been addressed adequately,” says the Rev. John Thomas, president of the UCC. “Racism continues to demean and diminish human lives in this country.”

To listen in on that conversation, Associated Press reporters across the nation engaged pastors and parishioners about their individual experiences with racism.

They talked with a choir soprano whose faith fueled her defiance of racist laws, and with members of an all-white congregation that took the risky move of hiring a black pastor. They interviewed ministers who act as a conduit between the alienated and those who would judge them.

They found personal stories, like McGee’s, where religion can soothe a painfully sensitive dialogue and help summon mutual respect.

The conversation, which grew loud and rancorous around the Wright episode, started long before and continues afterward, but in softer tones that show the faithful want to be constructive, want to make progress, want their voices heard. Listen.

___

The picture on the fireplace mantel at McGee’s home in Jackson, Miss., shows a young man whose cream-colored skin hints at his mixed-race heritage.

It is far more than the likeness of a grandson — the offspring of the union between McGee’s black son and white daughter-in-law. For this grandfather, the picture also is a reflection of a black man’s spiritual journey through the painful past of a Jim Crow society to acceptance and love that ended at a church altar.

It was 1972 when McGee’s son, James Brooks, told him he had done something that was unfathomable in the older man’s mind. Brooks had married a fellow graduate student at the University of Michigan — a native New Yorker, and she was white.

The young couple moved to Mississippi that year to teach at what is now Jackson State University. The campus had been the site of racial violence that left two black men dead in 1970.

From the beginning, McGee was beset with unease.

“I had to work on that one. I was raised here, and that was a no-no. I know what would happen to you here if you just looked at (a white woman),” McGee said. “I’ve gotten past that now. When we started studying about ‘one blood’ that was a big help.”

At New Hope Baptist Church, Bible study classes have been reading about the concept that all God’s people are connected. In small groups, hovering over Bibles, members were taught that mankind is descended from Adam and Eve and that blood shed by Jesus Christ is a means to salvation for everyone of every race.

The spiritual revelation has not, however, erased the root of McGee’s concern.

“In the South, the white man and white woman have always had more freedom than the black man and the black woman,” he said.

Jean Brooks understands her father-in-law’s feelings. “He’s a wonderful, remarkable human being. If you think of his life experiences: ... he’s been to war in World War II as an African-American.

“He’s had his share as a Mississippian with race. I think their concern about my race was mostly concern about their son. They didn’t want their son to get injured by being seen with me,” she says.

Racism “prevented him from having opportunities,” James Brooks adds. “Racism is institutionalized in Mississippi.”

The McGee family embraced Jean Brooks, and they began where differences should begin: with consideration and respect.

___

The victim was an unarmed black man shot 50 times on the eve of his wedding. The police detectives acquitted in the New York case: black, Hispanic and white. Like so many who questioned the outcome, the Rev. Gabriel Salguero wasn’t surprised by an e-mail asking what he had to say about racial injustice.

His reply, profound in its brevity: “Love.”

Salguero shared his response with the multiracial congregation he has served for nearly three years. His wife and co-pastor, Jeanette, translated his every word — periodically switching between English and Spanish as her husband did.

Another e-mail followed asking what the pastor meant.

“It means you are committed to sitting at the table to hear a different narrative,” Salguero said. “Listen.”

“Escucha.”

Salguero, who has relatives on the police force, negotiates the minefields of racial injustice and reconciliation with thoughtful diligence rooted in experience. He, too, has been stopped for “driving while brown.”

Members of his Lamb’s Manhattan Church of the Nazarene climb three flights of stairs in a building that once housed a library to hear the bilingual sermons, a feature introduced by the Salgueros. The diversity goes further: Salguero brought in Pastor Shih Fong Wu, who on the first floor simultaneously leads Sunday services in Mandarin to accommodate the large number of Chinese immigrants in the Lower East Side neighborhood.

Outreach ministries at the church, which catered mostly to the homeless when it was located in Times Square, now counsel a group that contends with legal, cultural and financial hardships and alienation daily.

“When we come to church, we do not ignore those realities,” Salguero said in his sermon. “Justice demands that we recognize that people are oppressed and that the gospel is the liberating message.”

___

When San Marino Congregational Church launched a search for a new pastor, it had only one requirement: The candidate needed to fill the pews. The 60-member California church had struggled to recruit new members and was losing some of its most steadfast congregants to old age.

San Marino Congregational needed a Moses. What it found was the Rev. Art Cribbs — a Baptist-raised pastor from South Central Los Angeles. He soon became the church’s only black member and its spiritual leader.

It was an unorthodox choice for the Christian church, a tiny, all-white congregation tucked into the quiet, opulent Los Angeles suburb of San Marino — a move so risky, the selection committee polled the congregation about Cribbs by secret ballot despite the church’s liberal reputation. The vote was unanimous.

“When we brought it to the congregation, we were definitely very concerned because we didn’t know, we really didn’t know,” said Donald Shenk, a pastoral assistant who chaired the selection process. “Those race questions are often things that when people are given the chance to be anonymous about it, the truth comes out.”

Before the 1960s, it was common for properties in San Marino to have a legal stipulation banning sales to blacks and Jews, and until 1989 the city was national headquarters to the ultraconservative, anti-communist John Birch Society.

Yet among the 145 applicants for the job, Cribbs could not be ignored. His audition tape was so powerful, it made Shenk cry.

“It just blew me out of the water. I was sitting there and I just remember thinking, ‘Who is that?’ I had never heard anybody talk like that,” Shenk said. “He speaks from such a truthful place and such a completely heartfelt place.”

In the year since he’s been pastor, Cribbs has stretched the congregation on topics of social justice and race relations. That’s something choir member Holly Ann Burns hoped for when she voted for Cribbs — and it’s a perspective she feels will help her understand a hurtful story from her own past.

As a child, Burns’ church youth group from the Cincinnati suburbs visited a youth group from an all-black church in the inner-city.

“I was all open and excited and the first thing out of this one girl’s mouth was, ‘Don’t feel like you’re doing us a favor by coming down here and visiting us and acting like you care,’” said Burns. “That put a stop to that conversation.”

Burns, 56, still thinks of the experience.

“You’re getting judged by what you look like,” she said. “It really kicked me in the gut. I was really trying to make an effort to understand.”

Cribbs doesn’t shy from stories like Burns’ and sometimes brings up his childhood spent in a housing development in Watts. San Marino’s Bible study group is now called Soul Food, Cribbs wears an African jacket instead of vestments and the choir dances in the aisles.

And the congregation? It’s grown by nine.

___

Virginia Montague recalls the exchange with a police officer 20 years ago that left her shattered.

Richard, her husband of nearly a decade, didn’t come home after working the night shift as a New York City cab driver. By midday, with no word, fear took hold and his wife went to her police precinct in Harlem. A white lieutenant was at the front desk.

“While I was explaining, his attitude was ... like, ‘So what.’ And he was very dismissive,” she says, a tinge of anger still in her voice as she recalls his cold words: “Maybe he’s with another woman, maybe he left ... there’s nothing we can do about it.”

She couldn’t help but think that his reaction might have been more sympathetic if she and her husband were white.

Richard Montague was murdered. His wife’s insistence that police launch a search in those frantic first days after he disappeared were ignored.

“It’s always been in my mind that if he were white, would there have been more of an effort” to investigate, says Montague, now 66. “I don’t know.”

White victims seem to win more empathy — from the police and the media, she says.

The slaying, which remains unsolved, and her painful questions afterward about how race may have obstructed the urgency of an investigation, led Montague back to the religion she abandoned 20 years earlier.

She found friends and healing at Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The 212-year-old church offered sanctuary to escaped slaves along the Underground Railroad and it was where Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and Paul Robeson found strength from the pulpit. The church has long addressed racial issues openly.

Montague and Versertile ‘Versee’ Simmons, who is also black, participated in a recent voter registration drive at Mother Zion, where Simmons, 71, was baptized and married. Their discussions naturally turned to the presidential campaign. Both are Obama supporters.

Montague doesn’t believe racism will cease to exist in America if a black man were to ascend to the presidency.

Her friend, though, is more optimistic.

“Hopefully, when he becomes president,” Simmons said, “the nation will see us in a different light and that we are as capable as (any white person) to hold any position.”

___

The choir soprano glances up from her sheet music and scans the sanctuary.

The curved oak pews, hand-carved by former slaves. The vaulted ceiling, outlined by sturdy wooden beams and converging in the center to form a cross, a star and a circle. The stained glass panels in the pointed arch windows, illuminated by the glow of a setting sun.

Antioch Missionary Baptist Church is not just Jacqueline Bostic’s church. It’s home.

The history of the 142-year-old Antioch, the oldest black Baptist church in Houston, is intertwined with the history of Bostic’s family. Her great-grandfather, Jack Yates, whose portrait hangs from a balcony, was the first pastor.

And the strength of Antioch’s founders, nine freed blacks who started the church just seven months after slaves were emancipated in Texas, is a strength running deep in this 70-year-old woman. Raised in a segregated Houston, she refused to bow to segregation’s rules.

As a young woman, Bostic balked at sitting in the back of city buses and sat where she pleased. On a trip to Birmingham, Ala., she once defiantly strode up bus steps labeled “white,” much to the dismay of the driver. No words passed between them, but she could read exasperation on his face.

“I felt this should not be, so why is everybody accepting that?” Bostic recalls, with a look that says she would do it all again. “It was not going to be something I accepted for the rest of my life.”

The source of her assurance? Family and faith.

Antioch, she says, is “a very special place to be, to be able to worship God in spirit and truth and shut out other things we were confronted with. It reaffirmed my belief that no matter what your challenges are, God gives you the ability to get through it.”

One of those challenges was breaking racial barriers during a 32-year career in the U.S. Postal Service.

In 1960, when Bostic first joined the postal service, African-Americans and women were not allowed to rise above entry-level positions. Determined to vanquish those rules, Bostic applied for — and got — higher-level jobs, opening the door for others. She retired in 1992 as a postmaster.

Today, Bostic looks at her four children, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, and hopes they will live in a world where they will be judged by their character, not their color.

But, she fears that may never happen. “I’m afraid they will be subject to the same kinds of things I was subjected to. But I always want to have hope that at some point people will accept each other regardless of ethnicity, religious background, or what country they’re from, that we will see that we are all people who are blessed to share the earth.”

Until then, she will worship — in prayer and in song.

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Poll: More Religious Countries Perceived as Less Ethnically Tolerant (Christian Post, 090407)

Countries with more religious citizens are perceived by people living there to be more intolerant of racial minorities, shows a new Gallup Poll report.

“Religious” people, as defined by the analysis, are those who report that religion is important in their daily lives.

Thirty-one percent of the people in the “most” religious countries (those where 94% or more of its citizens say religion is important in their daily lives) believe that the city or area they live in is not good for racial or ethnic minorities to live in.

Meanwhile, 34% in “more” religious countries (87% to 93%) and 32% in countries of “average” religiosity (71% to 86%) say where they live is not a good place for ethnic minorities to live.

Gallup highlighted that the trend is not linear, and that countries with average levels of religiosity report as much intolerance as the world’s most religious countries.

The analysis was based on interviews in 139 countries surveyed between 2006 and 2008.

In addition to comparing ethnic tolerance based on religiosity, the analysis also measured perceived tolerance based on religious groups.

Hindus were least likely to say their communities are not good places for racial and ethnic minorities (14%), while Jews were most likely to say so (52%).

Christians are the third group least likely to say their communities are not tolerant of ethnic minorities (27%), which is notably only slightly higher than secularists (24%).

Muslims were the third most likely to say that their place is not good for racial minorities (34%), and Buddhists were the second most likely (38%) to say so.

The higher levels of racial intolerance reported by Jews and Muslims are likely affected by historical and political factors, Gallup noted. The majority of Jews and nearly half of Muslims living in Israel, for example, say their neighborhoods are not good places for ethnic and racial minorities.

However, outside of Israel, only a minority of Jews (about one in three) and Muslims (about one in five) express the same view about their communities’ intolerance towards ethnic minorities.

Analysis also shows that Christians and Muslims who believe that their religion is the “one true religion in the world,” compared to those in the group that believe their religion is one among several or many true religions, are more likely to perceive their communities as intolerant towards racial and ethnic minorities.

“[T]he present findings suggest that most modern religious traditions seem to have made some progress, at least since the Middle Ages, in promoting ethnic understanding and cooperation,” the Gallup report states. “Although there are some connections between religiosity and ethnic and racial intolerance, these connections were generally small and inconsistent...”

Results are based on telephone and in-person interviews with about 1,000 adults in most countries (and a sample size range of 446 to 2,006).

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Alberta worries about becoming racist haven (National Post, 090522)

As Calgarians worry that this past weekend’s white supremacist rally will reinforce their image as intolerant rednecks, they may want to recall former premier Ralph Klein’s famous quote about “creeps and bums” coming to Alberta and causing trouble.

On Saturday, Calgary police had to call in reinforcements when a white-pride march organized by the Aryan Guard deteriorated into a violent melee as counter-protesters lobbed rocks and tin cans at the group.

The reputed main organizers of the Aryan Guard — Kyle McKee and Bill Noble — are not originally from Alberta.

Mr. McKee, an admitted neo-Nazi, is from Ontario, where he flew a swastika from his rented house in Kitchener before moving to Alberta four years ago.

Before Mr. McKee moved out of the Kitchener house, it was trashed on April 29, 2005, during a party where people smashed windows and hurled a refrigerator and a stove onto the street. During the party, giant swastikas were chalked on the street and a swastika was painted on the fridge.

The damage to the house was so extensive, it had to be condemned.

Mr. Noble, a self-professed white nationalist from B. C. now living in Alberta, is alleged to have set up two white-power Web sites. The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies issued a warning in 2007 that Mr. Noble was focusing his energies on Calgary.

One People’s Project, an organization that monitors and publishes information about alleged racist organizations, has been tracking Mr. McKee and Mr. Noble and the rise of the Aryan Guard for several years.

“While there doesn’t appear to be a single leader, the gang was founded by Kyle McKee primarily,” the group’s Canadian chapter says on its Web site. “There are some well-known Western Canadian neo-Nazis who have joined the group, first and foremost being Bill Noble.”

The group says that after an arrest in Fort St. John, B. C., Mr. Noble moved to Edmonton, where he began to associate with other neo-Nazis, including Nathan Touchette.

Mr. Touchette was a roommate of Mr. McKee’s at the house in Kitchener. The two told the Waterloo Record in April, 2005, that they were members of Blood and Honour, a white-power organization that took its name from the motto of the Hitler Youth, Blut und Ehre. At the time of their notoriety in Kitchener, Mr. Mc-Kee was 19 and Mr. Touchette, 26. Both drywallers, they told the paper they planed on moving to Alberta because there was more work and “a better skinhead scene.”

The presence of white supremacists is nothing new to Alberta. Ku Klux Klan groups have been documented in the province dating back to the 1920s, and there was a KKK cross-burning at Provost, in eastern Alberta, in 1990. But Alberta is far from the only Canadian jurisdiction to deal with the issue.

There was a cross-burning in Moncton, N. B., in 2001, and some of Canada’s most notorious figures in the white-pride movement have been from the east, including Ernst Zundel, Gary Schipper, Wolfgang Droege, Paul Fromm and George Burdi. The white-supremacist Heritage Front was also Ontario-based.

But none of this has deterred people from posting comments about the supposed intolerance of Albertans on the Web sites of various news organizations since the Aryan Guard’s clash with protesters in Calgary on Saturday.

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Firefighters Ruling Expected Monday Could Impact Sotomayor Confirmation (Foxnews, 090628)

(Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor ruled for the city of New Haven, Conn., in a reverse discrimination case brought against it by 20 white and Hispanic firefighters denied promotions despite higher test scores than minorities also seeking advancement.)

The Supreme Court is expected to issue its ruling Monday in a case that could have bearing on the nomination of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

The case is one of “reverse discrimination.” Twenty firefighters — 19 white and one Hispanic — who were denied promotions in New Haven, Conn., claim city officials discriminated against them because they were more concerned about potential complaints of Civil Rights Act violations than their performance on advancement exams.

The white firefighters say discrimination is discrimination no matter what color it takes, and therefore, the city did violate the Civil Rights Act in not promoting the white and one Hispanic firefighters.

How the justices rule could have a big impact on all businesses and governments that make job-related decisions involving race. In 2003, the high court said universities can consider race as one way to ensure student diversity.

But the case is also relevant because Sotomayor was one of the three appeals court judges who ruled for the city in the unanimous decision in the lower court.

A reversal by the Supreme Court that includes very critical remarks about the lower court ruling could be used as ammunition by some senators who don’t want to see Sotomayor confirmed.

Sotomayor’s views on race have been the focal point of criticism as she seeks a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. She has also been scrutinized for her statement outside the court that a “wise, Latina woman” would come to better conclusions more often than a white man.

Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing is currently scheduled to begin on July 13. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told “FOX News Sunday” that her nomination must have a full airing before a vote, and that could mean delaying the hearing scheduled by Democratic senators, a scenario that is unlikely to happen.

“Just a day or so ago, we discovered that there are 300 boxes of additional material that has just been discovered from her time working with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund,” McConnell said. “The committee needs to have access to that material and time to work through it ... so we know all the facts before we vote on a person who’s up for a lifetime job.”

If confirmed, Sotomayor will replace Justice David Souter, whose retirement coincides with the end of the court’s session on Monday. In April’s oral argument of the firefighter case, Souter described it as a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.

As Souter retires to New Hampshire, four justices are heading to Europe for summer teaching jobs, including in Austria, Ireland and Italy. But before they do, they also have to issue two other rulings and several orders on cases to accept for next session, which starts on the first Monday in October.

Among the rulings expected is whether campaign finance law can block movie producers from distributing politically-oriented films or networks from airing ads for those films. The case revolves around a movie distributed by Citizens United that blasted then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

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How About A National Conversation On Race Hoaxes? (Ann Coulter, 090729)

You could not ask for a more perfect illustration of the thesis of my latest book, “Guilty: Liberal Victims and Their Assault on America,” than the black president of the United States attacking a powerless white cop for arresting a black Harvard professor — in a city with a black mayor and a state with a black governor — as the professor vacations in Martha’s Vineyard.

In modern America, the alleged “victim” is always really the aggressor, and the alleged “aggressor” is always the true victim.

President Barack Obama planted the question during a health care press conference, hoping he could satisfy the Chicago Sun-Times, which has been accusing him of not being black enough. He somehow imagined that the rest of the country might not notice the president of the United States gratuitously attacking a cop in a case of alleged “racial profiling.”

Oops.

Suddenly, with the glare of the national spotlight being turned on a small local story, it became clear that there was no “racial profiling” involved — other than by the black Harvard professor, who lorded his credentials and connections over a white working-class cop.

We wouldn’t have known about this case at all if the professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., hadn’t blast e-mailed the universe that he was harassed by racist cops. Gates thought it would be a feather in his cap, not realizing there are huge areas of the country where people don’t think it’s heroic to browbeat cops checking on you after you break into your own house, such as 99% of the country outside of Cambridge.

Contrary to liberals’ ardent desire, Sgt. James Crowley was not on tape saying, “I know it’s his house, but let’s stick it to this uppity negro.” (Curiously, the tape of Gates’ call demanding to talk to the chief of police to “report” Crowley has been withheld. Some watchdog group has got to demand that tape.)

But what if Crowley hadn’t been a model policeman who taught diversity classes and once famously gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a black athlete?

What if the 911 caller had identified the suspected burglars as black, which it turns out she did not?

What if Crowley hadn’t been fully supported by other cops at the scene, one Hispanic and one black? (Liberals will say cops stick together, but I say liberals stick together.)

What if, at some point in his life, Crowley had been accused — falsely or not — of racism?

His life would be ruined.

Desperate to blame the cop, despite the facts, some liberals have begun making up their own facts. Radio talker Opio Sokoni claimed Crowley told Gates to “shut up” and “I’m going to win, you’re going to jail.” Even Gates doesn’t claim the cop said that.

On MSNBC’s “Hardball,” Chris Matthews said that Gates did not say, “I’ll speak with your mama outside,” as stated in the police report.

“He didn’t say this,” Matthews asserted as fact. This invented fact allowed Matthews to accuse the cop of engaging in “projection” and to conjure Crowley’s psychological state, saying, this is “what a white guy thought a black guy would say.”

Eugene Robinson endorsed Matthews’ invented fact, saying: “I cannot imagine in this universe Skip Gates saying, ‘I’ll speak with your mama outside.’” As proof, Robinson explained that Gates “rolls with kings and queens and Nobel Prize winners.” (I’m not “projecting” what I think a black man would say; he really said that.)

And then they both had a laugh about the cop applying racist stereotypes to such an esteemed figure as Professor Gates, who apparently would NEVER use the phrase “your mama.”

First, unlike these aesthetes, I don’t consider “your mama” such an implausible expression for someone to use.

Second, Sgt. Crowley wrote his police report, including the “your mama” line, long before he, or anyone else, could have imagined the arrest was going to become nationwide, front-page news.

Third, there’s a video of Gates using the N-word all over the Internet, and in that short, three-minute video, Gates uses the phrase “your mama.”

The only contrary evidence is that Gates recently denied that he told the cop he’d “speak with your mama outside.” He also desperately wants to drop the subject.

The left’s last-ditch attempt to defend a powerful black man’s attack on a powerless white man is to say the arrest was improper. In Time magazine, Lawrence O’Donnell factually announced, “Yelling does not meet the definition of disorderly conduct in Massachusetts.”

You can argue the facts in court, but there’s no question that the police report described the misdemeanor offense of “disorderly conduct” under Massachusetts law, which includes engaging in “tumultuous behavior” in “any neighborhood,” thereby causing public “inconvenience, annoyance or alarm.”

As everyone who’s read the police report knows, Gates is described as going on an extended tirade against the officer, calling him a racist, saying the officer didn’t know who he was messing with, acting irrationally, following the officer outside to continue haranguing him, and engaging in “tumultuous behavior” in and outside his house, drawing a small crowd of alarmed onlookers and police.

Suppose a cop didn’t arrest a guy who was ranting and raving — in his own home — and, an hour later, the hothead assaults someone. Policeman: I was as surprised as anyone that he shot his girlfriend! Every liberal in the country would demand the cop’s head.

And by the way, try screaming at a judge that he’s a racist and see what happens. Why should police officers deserve less protection than judges? They’re in more danger.

The disorderly conduct charge was not dropped because it wasn’t a good arrest. It was dropped, according to Gates’ own lawyer, because of Gates’ connections.

Before liberals declare that this a case of racial profiling and move on, how about liberals produce one provable example of racial profiling that isn’t a hoax?

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Court Rules for White Firefighters in Discrimination Case (Foxnews, 090629)

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a group of white firefighters in Connecticut were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision endorsed by high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

The 5-4 ruling poses a potential complication to Sotomayor’s nomination, with confirmation hearings set to start in July.

In the high-profile, controversial case, white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., argued they were discriminated against when the city tossed out the results of a promotion exam because too few minorities scored high enough on it.

Justice Anthony Kennedy authored the opinion in favor of Frank Ricci and his fellow firefighters who sued the city of New Haven.

“The city’s action in discarding the tests violated (federal law),” the Supreme Court majority wrote Monday, adding that the city’s “race-based rejection of the test results” could not be justified.

The city argued its action was prompted by concern that disgruntled African American firefighters would sue. But that reasoning didn’t hold sway with the court’s majority.

“Fear of litigation alone cannot justify the city’s reliance of race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions,” the court ruled.

This decision, like many of the close cases before the high court, divided along its familiar ideological lines. Kennedy was joined by the four conservatives on the court in issuing the majority decision.

The court’s more liberal members joined Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent which she read from the bench. “The white firefighters who scored high on New Haven’s promotional exams understandably attract the court’s sympathy,” she said. “But they had no vested right to promotion.”

The firefighters are expected to hold a press conference Monday afternoon in New Haven.

Twenty firefighters — 19 white and one Hispanic — who were denied promotions in New Haven, Conn., claimed city officials discriminated against them because they were more concerned about potential complaints of Civil Rights Act violations than their performance on advancement exams.

The white firefighters argued discrimination is discrimination no matter what color it takes, and therefore, the city did violate the Civil Rights Act in not promoting the white and one Hispanic firefighters.

Sotomayor was one of three appeals court judges who earlier ruled that New Haven officials acted properly.

The reversal could be used as ammunition by some senators who don’t want to see Sotomayor confirmed.

Souter said he’d retire when the court rises for the summer recess. He was named to the court in 1990.

As Souter retires to New Hampshire, four justices are heading to Europe for summer teaching jobs, including in Austria, Ireland and Italy.

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California Students Sent Home for Wearing U.S. Flags on Cinco de Mayo (Foxnews, 100506)

Administrators at a California high school sent five students home on Wednesday after they refused to remove their American flag T-shirts and bandannas — garments the school officials deemed “incendiary” on Cinco de Mayo.

The five teens were sitting at a table outside Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Calif., on Wednesday morning when Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez asked two of them to remove their American flag bandannas, the Morgan Hill Times reported. The boys told the newspaper they complied, but were asked to accompany Rodriguez to the principal’s office.

The five students — Daniel Galli, Austin Carvalho, Matt Dariano, Dominic Maciel and Clayton Howard — were then told they must turn their T-shirts inside-out or be sent home, though it would not be considered a suspension. Rodriguez told the students he did not want any fights to break out between Mexican-American students celebrating their heritage and those wearing American flags.

“They said we were starting a fight,” Dariano told the newspaper. “We were fuel to the fire.”

The boys told Rodriguez and Principal Nick Boden that turning their shirts inside-out was disrespectful, so their parents decided to take them home, the newspaper reports.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” Julie Fagerstrom, Maciel’s mother, told the newspaper. “I’m an open-minded parent, but it’s got to be on both sides. It can’t be five kids singled out.”

Galli told NBC Bay Area, “They said we could wear it on any other day, but today is sensitive to Mexican-Americans because it’s supposed to be their holiday so we were not allowed to wear it.”

In a statement released on Wednesday, the Morgan Hill Unified School District said it did not agree with the school’s actions.

“In an attempt to foster a spirit of cultural awareness and maintain a safe and supportive school environment, the Live Oak High School administration took certain actions earlier today,” the statement read. “The district does not concur with the Live Oak High School administration’s interpretation of either board or district policy related to these actions.”

Attempts to reach school officials early Thursday were not successful. A secretary told the Morgan Hill Times that Boden and Rodriguez were unavailable for comment on Wednesday.

According to its website, Live Oak High School is a 1,300-student institution in the southern part of Santa Clara County, with most students residing in the nearby cities of Morgan Hill and San Jose.

“The student population reflects the rich ethnic and socioeconomic diversity of the community,” the website reads.

More than 100 students were spotted wearing the colors of the Mexican flag — red, white and green — as they left school, including some who had the flag painted on their faces or arms, the Morgan Hill times reported.

While bandannas of any color are banned at the school, its dress code policy does not contain references to American flags.

“However, any clothing or decoration which detracts from the learning environment is prohibited,” the policy reads. “The school has the right to request that any student dressing inappropriately for school will change into other clothes, be sent home to change, and/or be subject to disciplinary action.”

Freshman Laura Ponce, who had a Mexican flag painted on her face and chest, told the Morgan Hill Times that Cinco de Mayo is the “only day” Mexican-American students can show their national pride.

“There was a lot of drama going on today,” Ponce told the newspaper.

Some other Mexican-American students reportedly said their flags were taken away or asked to be put away, but no other students were sent home on Wednesday.

Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the University of California-Los Angeles, said the students are protected under California Education Code 48950, which prohibits schools from enforcing a rule subjecting a high school student to disciplinary sanctions solely on the basis of conduct, that when engaged outside of campus, is protected by the First Amendment.

If the school could point to previous incidents sparked by students who wore garments with American flags, they could argue that the flag is likely to lead to “substantial disruption,” Volokh said.

“If, for example, there had been fights over similar things at past events, if there had been specific threats made,” he said. “But if [school officials] just say, ‘Well, we think it might be offensive to people,’ that’s generally speaking not enough.”

Volokh said the students and their parents likely have a winning case on their hands if they decide to take the matter to court.

“Oh yes, it’s almost open and shut,” he said.

Lis Wiehl, a former federal prosecutor and a Fox News legal analyst, said the incident appears to a “blatant” violation of the students’ First Amendment right to free speech. She noted that inciting violence is an exception to a First Amendment legal defense, but Wiehl said she saw no indications that the students provoked anyone.

“Unless I’m missing something, this seems like a blatant violation of the First Amendment,” said Wiehl, adding that uniforms are not required at the public school. “And they’re wearing, of all horrific things, the American flag.”

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How I Joined a Black Sorority and Helped Fight Racism and Sexism (townhall.com, 101129)

Mike Adams

Many African American Cultural Centers actually impede diversity by turning black students into racists and segregationists. And most of them make black students less tolerant by convincing them that they are somehow more enlightened and have special “perspective” simply because of their race. Recent events have convinced me that such arrogance is on the rise.

Last week, a black female graduate of our university called my office and left a message asking that I call her back regarding an “urgent matter.” I thought she had something important to say. I did not know at the time that I was going to hear a woman half my age lecture me on the importance of tolerance and diversity. But I’m glad she called because she set off a chain of media events that ended quite nicely for those of us who are opposed to racism and segregation.

When the black alumna called she said she had read my recent column “If I Were President.” She wanted to know whether I was really going to abolish the African American Center. At that point, I already knew we were in for an educational conversation. These days, college graduates are not well-versed in satire. As an art form, it is swiftly becoming extinct.

Things went downhill in our conversation when this college graduate told me that she became upset with my remarks about getting rid of the African American Center after she “saw that I was white”. My seventh Great Grandfather fought in the American Revolution in order to preserve our basic God-given rights. But this college graduate seemed to suggest that the expression of basic human rights is contingent upon race. The African American Center she frequented as an undergraduate did not seem to give her the ability to reflect and remedy her own possible racism.

After hearing her tell me that she “got all amped up” in response to my satire I made a big mistake. I explained that I would get rid of all the centers if I really were running for chancellor. The alumna’s response was predictable. She said “If you don’t like diversity you should go find another university.” When I pointed out her hypocrisy she replied that I did not need to be “getting all amped up and taking that tone with (her).”

Sitting in my office getting a lecture on tolerance from someone half my age was bad. When I heard her tell me not to take “that tone” with her I wondered “Could it possibly get any worse?” Well, yes it could. Next, she dropped this bombshell: “I will be in touch with your supervisors.” She even promised to drive in from out of town to set up personal meetings with them.

(Author’s Note: Ironically, both of the administrators she promised to contact are defendants in a First Amendment lawsuit pending before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia. Oral arguments in Adams v. UNCW are scheduled to begin on January 25th).

I got off the phone with the woman who did not like my tone (although at the time I did not think of that rhyme). Shortly after that, the local media decided to get involved. The TV cameras rolled out to UNCW’s African American Center in order to get this footage of a young diversity expert giving his take on the situation. Notice that he confidently asserts that my speech is way outside the mainstream – so much so that it is “inappropriate” to suggest that I represent the university.

The WWAY website (a local TV station) ran a poll, which I am thankful to have won by a ratio of eight-to-one. That is significant because my percentage of support greatly outnumbers the local and national white population. Yet this young diversity expert will probably never acknowledge that his own views are seen by most as “incredible, to say the least” and “inappropriate” at an institution of higher learning.

Note that the WWAY survey was worded in such a way as to steer the results in a certain direction. A better poll would have asked “Does Scott Pickey understand that the First Amendment only protects offensive speech because inoffensive speech does not need protection? Yes or No.” Or “Is Scott Pickey a) an objective journalist? Or, b) a political commentator like Mike Adams?” (Pickey is the reporter who wrote the online version of the story. The reporter handling the video portion of the story was completely objective).

The highlight of the news video is, of course, the portion featuring a black female student who tells us that we still need diversity centers because of the persistence of racism and sexism. But she made the statement while wearing big black sorority letters emblazoned on her blouse. In other words, while lecturing us on the persistence of racism and sexism she was touting her membership in an organization that limits its membership to blacks and women. The hypocrisy of asking the public to fund “solutions” to the “problems” she is exacerbating is simply staggering.

These students did not become so confused overnight. The cultivation of their sanctimonious hypocrisy has taken years of indoctrination in the centers of so-called diversity. Even if those centers are shut down the students will retain the right to express their segregationist views. Such views are protected by the First Amendment regardless of how offensive they may be.

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