Saturday, June 30, 2007

SCOTUS dumps "affirmative action"

The US Supreme Court was accused yesterday of rolling back one of its landmark rulings of the civil rights era by rejecting plans to ensure that America's schools remained racially integrated. The decision will be seen as further evidence that President Bush's appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the court have shifted the balance of power decisively towards social conservatives.

After the court split 5-4 on the issue, dissenting liberal justices denounced the vote as flying in the face of legal precedent and, in particular, the 1954 Brown v Board of Education ruling, which abolished segregation of black and white schoolchildren. Chief Justice Roberts insisted, however, that he had honoured the principle of the court's decision 53 years ago. "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," he said. "Simply because the school districts may seek a worthy goal doesn't mean that they are free to discriminate on the basis of race to achieve it."

Yesterday's ruling on schools policy in Louisville, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington, will place question marks over hundreds of similar systems across America that have been designed to guarantee racial diversity in classrooms. The Bush Administration had sided with parents who took legal action against policies that prevented their children from attending preferred schools.

Crystal Meredith, a white single mother in Louisville, sued after her request to transfer her five-year-old son Joshua to a school closer to home was turned down. This was because of policies introduced during desegregation to ensure broad racial diversity across the US education system. Schools in Louisville spent 25 years under a court order to eliminate the effects of state-sponsored segregation. When it was lifted recently, the school board decided to keep much of the plan in place to prevent education from becoming segregated once more - a decision Mrs Meredith challenged successfully. She said yesterday: "My son is my world and I will never regret fighting for his rights. I only hope this case has brought attention to the school board and this community that each child's education is more important than their plan."

Justice Anthony Kennedy - who effectively holds the casting vote between liberals and conservatives on the bench - offered an opinion that race could still be used in some circumstances to achieve diversity, even though he backed yesterday's ruling.

But Justice Stephen Breyer said that Brown v Board of Education would be undermined by the ruling. "It reverses course and reaches the wrong conclusion," he said. "It distorts precedent, it misapplies the relevant constitutional principles, it announces legal rules that will obstruct efforts by state and local governments to deal effectively with the growing resegregation of public schools."

The ruling was the first on this issue since 2003, when the court upheld consideration of race in college admissions. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who approved of the limited use of race, has since retired and her replacement, Justice Alito, was in the majority that struck down the school system plans in Kentucky and Washington.

Source



Palestinians have lost cred

Why is America trying to pour new money and more weapons into Palestinian Arab hands barely days after the Gaza debacle? It is an ill-considered policy, both premature and useless. The only sure result will be that warring gangs in the West Bank will use every new weapon to continue the mayhem and that the millions paid out won't buy as much as a bottle of milk for Palestinian Arab civilians. Instead, the money will end up in the pockets and bank accounts of the same crooks who lost Gaza.

Indeed, why try to recreate a world that has just crumbled? America and Israel may want to wait for what may turn out to be a changing of the guard: Arab voices, both expert and popular, are rising in vociferous denunciations of the once sacrosanct Palestinian Arabs. ...

"Palestinians today need to be left without a shred of a doubt" as to what other Arabs think of them, a widely read opinion commentator for the Saudi daily Asharq Al Awsat, Mamoun Fandy, thundered on Monday. "We need to tell them the only thing they have proven over 50 years is that they are adolescents who cannot and should not be trusted to run institutions of state or any other important matters."

While it could be argued that the overwhelming public outrage in Saudi Arabia reflects resentment over the collapse of the much-vaunted reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah - which was personally brokered by King Abdullah earlier this year in Mecca - the anger expressed across the Muslim Arab world reflects deep embarrassment at the discredit Hamas has brought, in the name of Islam, through its savagery against Fatah.

For its part, the Egyptian press has become unhinged, spewing vile denunciations of what is universally known as "the cause" - support for the Palestinian Arabs - and describing it as dead. Egypt's government pulled its embassy out of Gaza on Tuesday.

Kuwaitis, who have harbored contempt for Palestinian Arabs ever since they allied themselves with Saddam Hussein's occupation in 1990-91, also dropped all restraint. "Palestinians are neither a modernized nor a civilized people," Ahmad Al Bughdadi wrote Monday in Al Siyassah, an influential Kuwaiti daily. "They are not statesmen. If what happened in Gaza is what they do without a state, what then shall they do when they get one?"

If there could be an editorial coup de grace, it surely was delivered by no less than Abdelbari Atwan, undoubtedly the Palestinian Arabs most influential and respected journalist and a familiar face on both Western and Arab television.

Writing in the London-based Al Quds International, his painfully felt commentary, "Yes, We Have Lost the World's Respect," argued that "the cause" may have lost its legitimacy: "Many, myself among them, find it difficult to speak of Israeli crimes against our people in view of what we have now done," Mr. Atwan wrote. "I never thought the day would come when we would see Palestinians throwing other Palestinians from the tops of buildings to their death, Palestinians attacking other Palestinians to tear their bodies with knives, Palestinians stripping others naked to drag them through the streets."

All of which suggests letting this Arab storm run its course: It may be a purging of the Arab mindset that creates new realities and opportunities.

Source



Reactions to the Rushdie knighthood -- hopeful signs?

The predictable stuff came sharp and fast. Immediately after Rushdie was given his gong for services to literature, Pakistan, our friendly ally in the war on terror, demanded that Britain withdraw the title. The British blasphemer had hurt the feelings of the Muslims’ world, said various Pakistani MPs.

The West is now well versed in this Muslim drama. First act: enter Muslims claiming hurt feelings. Second act: enter Muslims issuing a death-to-Western-heathens diktat. Cue Pakistan’s Religious Affairs Minister Mohammed Ijaz-ul-Haq: “If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British Government apologises and withdraws the sir title.” Meanwhile, Pakistani students burned effigies of the Queen and Rushdie chanting “kill him, kill him”. It’s a routine that travels. Iranian leaders wept tears, claiming it was a clear sign of Islamophobia. Honouring a hated apostate would hurt the feelings of the Islamic community, said the foreign ministry spokesman Mohammed Ali Hosseini. The Headquarters for Honouring the Martyrs of Islam World Movement increased the bounty on Rushdie’s head.

There’s no point in arguing with a country complaining about hurt feelings while it promises to wipe out Israel or with its citizens who want to “bestow kisses on the hands of whomsoever is able to execute this apostate”. But it’s worth checking whether the protagonist in the third act of this horror play will stick to the script. That’s where the West capitulates, apologising for Western values in the name of protecting Muslim sensibilities. Values such as freedom of speech: the right to voice opinions that are offensive. And freedom of religion: the right to disagree without copping a fatwa.

In 2004, after Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered for his movie, Submission, artist Chris Ripke reacted by painting a mural on a wall. It featured a dove (representing peace) with the words “thou shalt not kill” written in Dutch. The head of a nearby mosque complained to Rotterdam police that the mural was offensive and racist. Rotterdam police duly sent in city workers to remove the mural. When a message of peace is regarded as racist, you know Western values are just not what they used to be.

Last year when Muslims were offended by a bunch of silly Danish cartoons featuring the prophet Mohammed, some Muslims reacted by burning the Danish flag to the tune of bomb threats, boycotts and $14 million fatwas on the head of the cartoonists. The intimidation worked. Western leaders fell over themselves in the race to condemn the cartoons. Muslim feelings had to be spared such hurt. Many newspapers refused to publish the cartoons. A French editor was sacked for publishing them. "The Australian" argued publishing them would add nothing to the debate.

With another chapter of Muslim intimidation unfolding over Rushdie’s gong, it is becoming increasingly clear this is a debate we have to have. Not only with Muslim countries. But also with those living in the West who openly reject Western values.

We backed away in 1989. When the ayatollah Khomeini slapped a fatwa on Rushdie’s head, it was a critical test of Western resolve. A test the West failed. Few took the angry Muslims at their word. Instead, they had to be accommodated and placated. Britain, the home of free speech, played host to book-burning and flagrant intimidation by Muslims of the West. Cultural relativism meant British Muslim leaders, such as Sayed Abdul Quddus from the Bradford Council of Mosques, could openly endorse the hanging of Rushdie because he “tortured Islam”.

The West headed down the path of least resistance - appeasement. Many opted to stay quiet rather than wear the racist label slapped on anyone who challenged Muslim sensibilities. Others such as then US president George H.W. Bush delivered up a dose of moral relativism declaring both the fatwa and Rushdie’s book were equally offensive. Others, including British establishment figures, sided with Iran’s death merchants.

In the past two decades, free speech - that most critical of Western values - has been fed through the postmodern sausage-maker called political correctness. The result is a bizarre product where Muslims are deemed too precious to be prodded by the sharper ends of free speech, by words that challenge a set of ideas, their religion. But Muslims are free not just to tell us we are wrong but to demand death to Western infidels.

In that cosy, tolerance-laden environment political Islam thrived. Moral relativism and multiculturalism became Trojan horses for a weird Western death wish. Terrorist organisations banned in other countries set up their headquarters in Britain. Radical clerics exiled by countries such as Saudi Arabia made their home in Britain. British streets hosted demonstrations for those preaching death to Westerners. Local mosques and even universities bred home-grown jihadists. Bombs exploded. Britons died.

The more the West’s confidence waned, tiptoeing around for fear of causing offence, the more audacious became those who despised the West. Summing up the Danish cartoons furore last year, one pundit wondered aloud whether 2007 would be the Year of Shutting Up: a year when the West would retreat even further, undermining its own values so as not to offend those with very different values.

Rushdie’s knighthood has been a neat way of checking the West’s pulse on one of its core values - the right to write freely. As a doctor might say, there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that victimhood is still top of the pops for some Muslims. When Nazir Ahmed, Britain’s first Muslim peer, said it was wrong to honour “the man that has blood on his hands” it echoed a “blame a Westerner” mentality that has hampered progress in much of the Arab world.

Eighteen years on, Muslims were still blaming a bloke who wrote a book, not their own bloody reactions. And some Western leaders, such as British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, are still saying sorry. The good news is fewer people are falling for that baloney. No protests on British streets this time. Not even a book burning. That has to be progress.

Source



The latest racket: An attack on free speech in the name of "privacy"

Comment from Australia

CONFIRMING the theory that nature abhors a vacuum, the NSW Law Reform Commission has declared its support for a new avenue of litigation over breach of privacy. If accepted, the commission's recommendations could deny the right to publish a whole range of information now considered part of ordinary community dialogue.

The commission was set the task of evaluating whether a tort of privacy should exist in response to an adventurous ruling by a County Court judge in Victoria. The result follows the commission's similarly flawed attempt to impose limits on taking photographs in public places that, if adopted, would have rendered photojournalism all but impossible and was rejected out of hand. The latest proposal has been put forward for community discussion.

In doing so, the commission correctly observes that formulation of a comprehensive and meaningful definition of privacy has eluded legislatures and commentators for centuries. Statutory attempts had been either so vague as to be meaningless or so circumscribed as to be arbitrary. The commission also noted that like all rights and freedoms, privacy is not absolute, but must be balanced against other interests, values and human rights in the context of the merits of each case. But it nonetheless advanced for discussion a system based on the Canadian model, which includes a breach of privacy for disclosing embarrassing facts or using a person's name, identity, likeness or voice without authority or consent.

The commission went so far as to suggest that privacy be given over material that was already on the public record and that aggrieved parties should be allowed to share in the profits of offending publications.

The Australian believes there are good reasons why attempts to legally define privacy have proved historically troublesome. We believe consideration of issues such as the introduction of a tort of privacy to be beyond the scope of the Law Reform Commission. At worst it represents an attempt by lawyers to profit at the expense of free speech, putting a nebulous right to privacy ahead of the right to know.

Source

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.


For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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