Thursday, August 13, 2015



The politics of racism are flourishing in Australia (?)

The little Leftist lady who wrote the article below is a Ph.D. student.  One hopes that her supervisors will make her up her game soon. She seems not to have noticed that Muslims are a religion, not a race.  The difference?   Muslims are of many races and you can change your religion but not your race.  Yet she bases her entire claim of racism on Australia on the fact that there are some Australians who are critical of Muslims.  Dim!

And why is criticism of Muslims in any way illegitimate?  Leftists can be searingly critical of Christians!  But "that's different", I guess.  Sheer hypocrisy more like it

She also joins the Leftist mob in claiming that the booing of Adam Goodes was racist but fails to mention that other AFL stars like Wayne Carey, James Hird, Jason Akermanis and Nick Riewoldt were also heavily booed in their day.  Was that racist too?  Or is booing just what AFL fans do?  It's just opinion that the booing of Goodes was racist. If the booing of Goodes shows Australia as  racist, how come he has twice won the Brownlow Medal, given to the “fairest and best” player in the game?  That's pretty strange racism isn't it?  But it's an article of deep faith to Leftists that Australians are racist so any "evidence" for that belief will do and no contrary evidence will be admitted. More on the Goodes affair here.

No doubt there are some racists in Australia but the only real issue is its prevalence.  Are we going to brand a whole nation with the deeds and ideas of a few?  It's a breach of natural justice to blame someone for the deeds of others. And if racism IS prevalent in Australia, how come so many people of all races have risked their lives to get here on rickety boats, with many drowning in the process?  It just seems to be impossible for a Leftist to look at ALL the evidence.  Their preconceptions are sacred.  Sad souls


By Susie Latham

It might be tempting to dismiss claims by new anti-Muslim political party Australian Liberty Alliance that it hopes to eventually poll "in the 20 per cent bracket" at election time as wishful thinking, but this would be a serious mistake.

Racism is flourishing in Australia. AFL legend Adam Goodes has been criticised by many public figures for drawing attention to it and there have already been many rallies against Muslims nationwide this year.

The Abbott government has fostered this atmosphere by declaring that people have the right to be bigots and attempting to repeal part of the Racial Discrimination Act. Banning the burqa in Parliament, declaring that a death cult is coming for us at every conceivable opportunity, Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi's instigation of an inquiry into halal food certification, and Queensland Nationals MP George Christensen addressing a Reclaim Australia rally suggest that an embattled government is belatedly acting on Scott Morrison's advice to exploit community concern about Muslims.

The Opposition's silence, seen by some as a clever way to avoid being wedged on national security, has also contributed.

Although right-wing racist groups have always existed on the fringes of Australian society, the danger posed by a lack of national political leadership on racism and the emergence of the ALA is that it will propel bigotry into the mainstream. Many Muslims feel that sentiment towards them has never been more negative, and having candidates stand for election gives anti-Muslim bigots a public platform and confers legitimacy on their views.

Numbers turning up to rallies against Muslims have been relatively small, but almost 30,000 people "liked" the Reclaim Australia Rally Facebook page. Results of a national study released in 2011 indicated as many as 49 per cent of Australians held negative sentiments towards Muslims. Expressing this on a ballot paper is safe, easy and private.

The ALA may denounce violence and the neo-Nazis associated with some anti-Muslim groups, but you can be sure members of these groups, and others carrying out physical and verbal attacks on Muslims, will be voting for ALA candidates.

In several forums Muslim women have said they are restricting their movements and clothing choices out of fear. Others, including a 90-year-old man, a couple in their 80s and a community activist have had offensive letters posted to their home addresses. Australian Muslims minding their own business have been verbally harangued at their workplaces, on public transport and in the supermarket.

Extremist Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has advised the ALA and will be the guest of honour at its launch in Perth in October, described a poll that claimed more than half the Muslims living in Holland feel less welcome and think more often about leaving as "good news". As the ALA recently reminded its members, anti-Muslim parties may initially struggle, but in "the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Austria, France and Italy – they are supported by millions [and] already poll in the 20 per cent bracket".

The ALA's strong connections to successful anti-Muslim groups in Europe and the US set it apart from groups such as Reclaim Australia and One Nation. It is more sophisticated, well-financed and better organised. Debbie Robinson, a Perth-based director of ALA, is also a member of the group Stop Islamisation of Nations (SION). Other members of SION include US anti-Islam commentators Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller.

At a time when political leadership has been wanting but decent Australians have taken it upon themselves to speak out against the racism directed at AFL player Adam Goodes, the same unity and organisation is needed to stop the ALA from making headway here and leaving Australian Muslims feeling similarly devastated.

SOURCE






Don’t put culture in a ghetto

Policing ‘cultural appropriation’ is just a PC version of segregation.

Fifty-two years on from Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, his vision of a world in which people ‘will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’ remains unrealised. Not because of a revival of old-fashioned racism, but because of the US PC brigade’s abandonment of King’s universalist spirit.

Instead, out of the great echo chambers of the campus Safe Spaces and faux-philosophical Tumblr blogs has come the idea that anyone adopting elements of culture different to his or her own is racist and colonialist. Such people are allegedly guilty of ‘cultural appropriation’, of stealing the culture of other people.

Over the past month alone, there has been a handful of forehead-slapping examples of so-called cultural appropriation. Actor Amandla Stenberg, best known for The Hunger Games, started a Twitterspat with reality-TV personality Kylie Jenner, saying Jenner’s donning of corn rows was ‘appropriation of black features’, before going on to accuse other white artists of adopting hip-hop culture ‘as a way of being edgy and gaining attention’.

Stenberg and the thousands of hashtag activists who share her views contend that white people’s appropriation of hip-hop is wrong because of the culture’s roots in the black American experience. Yet if these ghettoisers of culture want to imagine a future where African-American culture isn’t celebrated by whites, they need only look to the past. They’d surely be satisfied that ragtime pioneer Scott Joplin lived in obscurity throughout his life because of his race. You stick to yours, and I’ll stick to mine – that’s their thinking.

The demonising of so-called cultural appropriation also stifles creativity. Imagine if the young British musicians who drove forward the cultural explosion of the 1960s had felt black American culture wasn’t theirs to love and admire? The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton and The Beatles would never have been.

It’s all very odd. Nobody would be taken seriously if they accused a black woman of cultural theft for having straightened hair, or a Japanese businessman for wearing a jacket and tie. So why is it different for white guys? Because it’s only cultural appropriation when those ‘with power’ in society borrow from the culture of those who, historically, have had less power. This is where the seams of cultural-appropriation theory come apart.

In early July, protesters took against the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for hosting ‘Kimono Wednesdays’, a gimmicky promotion to advertise the display of Monet’s La Japonaise. Visitors were encouraged to don kimonos and imitate the pose of Monet’s wife and muse Camille. But irate white and Asian-American protesters turned out to complain about the ‘exotification’ of Asian people – much to the puzzlement of the Japanese-American organisers of ‘Kimono Wednesdays’.

Artist Roger Peet, in his work, has attacked the pillaging and ‘orientalising’ of Japanese culture by Westerners. In the foreground of his piece ‘Sweet Dreams’, doe-eyed pop starlet Katy Perry smiles, dressed head to toe in traditional Japanese dress. Behind her is a mushroom cloud, and an image of US marines planting the American flag at Iwo Jima. Peet told the Huffington Post that the work explores ‘what whiteness means… the daily violence and brutality of a world system that is bent on turning everything – every sacred grove, every deep note, every singular moment – into an object of value for speculators’.

The fundamental problem with cultural appropriation is that it assumes that each culture has a single, racially uniform origin. Yet to be American, for instance, is to be part of a great cultural melting pot of immigrants, settlers, slaves and natives. So to demand that everyone stick to their own traditions is not only old-fashioned racialism – it is also historically illiterate. MLK’s dream has never been so necessary.

SOURCE






On-the-run murderers win right to privacy: British police refuse to name killers and rapists wanted for more than a decade because of 'data protection rights'

Police were condemned last night for refusing to identify ten fugitives – including four wanted for murder – because naming them would breach their privacy.

The West Midlands force said the identities of the suspects, wanted for more than a decade, should not be made public because their ‘data protection rights’ outweighed the public interest.

The refusal was roundly criticised by one of the force’s former officers and politicians – with one MP accusing the police of ‘protecting criminals’.

The Information Commissioner’s Office said the force’s response appeared to be a ‘data protection duck-out’.

Of the ten suspects, four are wanted for murders dating back to 2002. Another four are wanted for attempted murders between 2001 and 2005, while one is being sought over an alleged immigration offence from 2004.

Another reason given for not naming them was that ‘on-going inquiries’ might be hampered. Khalid Mahmood, Labour MP for Perry Barr in Birmingham, accused the police of ‘protecting criminals’.

He added: ‘The force should be doing all it can, with the help of the public, to track down these people. They have been wanted for some of the most serious crimes and the victims deserve justice. It is absolutely bizarre.’

Tory MP Philip Davies, a campaigner against soft justice, said: ‘It is a shame the police are not more concerned with the rights of decent law-abiding people to go about their business safely.

'Whichever senior police officer doesn’t believe the public have the right to know which dangerous criminals are on the loose should reflect on whether they are in the right profession.’

Ray Egan, 75, who served on the West Midlands force from 1967 to 1993, said: ‘This isn’t the police force that I joined. To look at what is happening, it’s enough to make you jump off the cliffs of Dover.

‘These criminals could still be committing crimes like murder and rape. I don’t know how they think they will catch them if no-one knows who they are.’

The Birmingham Mail submitted a Freedom of Information request to the force asking for the number of suspects classed as ‘wanted’.

A supplementary question requested the names, photographs and details of the ten suspects who had been on the run for the longest time.

West Midlands Police is also the force which has two officers patrolling the streets of Magaluf as part of a two-week trial to help Spanish authorities deal with victims and offenders from the UK.

A sergeant and constable are in Majorca before moving on to Ibiza, but former policeman Mark Williams-Thomas questioned whether they could be effective, given that they have no powers of arrest.

West Midlands Police replied that a total of 1,452 of its suspects were marked as ‘wanted’ on the Police National Computer, although none was identified to the newspaper.

And the force refused to name the ten suspects who had been missing the longest, citing exemption Section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act – a section which covers the release of information relating to personal data.

A spokesman added: ‘It would be unfair to release this information where any person could be identified from the data and in this case the right to privacy outweighs any public interest in release.’

Last night, a spokesman for the Information Commissioner’s Office said the response ‘did not seem to make much sense’, adding: ‘All too often we hear of cases where organisations have simply said no and used data protection as a duck-out. 'This sounds like it might be one of those.

‘Normally there should not be a reason why data protection rules get in the way.’  He added that data protection legislation ‘should not be used as an excuse by those reluctant to take a balanced decision’.

West Midlands Police said it was up to investigating officers to decide whether appeals for information were made public.  The spokesman said: ‘Each case is different. Sometimes it is not in the interest of the inquiry to release details of a wanted person as it may hamper on-going enquiries.’

The force believes that of the four people wanted for murder, two are dead and the other two have fled the country.

One of the ten suspects was named in 2001 when he was 19, as a suspect in the attempted murder of a doctor outside a Coventry hotel.

Two of the remaining suspects are being sought over an attempted murder in 1996, one man is wanted for an attempted murder in 2005 and another is wanted for immigration offences from the same year.

The final suspect, an 81-year-old man, was reported to police in 2010 over a rape allegation dating back to the mid-1980s.

The force last night said the man, who is living in Thailand, was no longer wanted after the Crown Prosecution Service ruled no further action should be taken.

SOURCE






Rep. Cummings: 'Black Lives Also Have to Matter to Black People'

Speaking at a news conference to address the increase in violence in Baltimore last week, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) commented that “a lot of the perpetrators," and many of the "victims," are black people, and he stressed that "black lives also have to matter to black people."

"Another thing that has been bothering me a lot is, I hear, over and over again, Black lives matter. Black lives matter – and they do matter. But black lives also have to matter to black people. And we know, over and over again, a lot of the victims of these crimes are African American. And we know a lot of the perpetrators are African American," Cummings said.

Rep. Cummings urged the residents of Baltimore to cooperate with the police to reduce violence in the city:

"I first of all want to say to Baltimore and to those who may be thinking about committing crimes, you're not going to get away with it. One of the reasons why we have all the expertise here today, these ten agents that will be embedded in our homicide unit, is because we want to make sure that our city is a safe city. And I said it before and I'll say it again, the police need the community, and the community need the police. There's no way that these murders can be solved unless we have the cooperation of the public. And I've stopped by here to beg the public to cooperate with the police because when you stand back and don't do anything, all you do is allow a murderer to go out there and do it again."

Rep. Cummings later continued, "And I would say to those who care, the only people who are doing pretty good now are the morticians. They're the only ones. And I say that we are a city that is better than that. And so, to all of our, all those folks who think that you got to, you get your power, from carrying a gun and shooting somebody and hurting somebody, again, we have joined forces to make sure that we do every single thing in our power to make every single person in our city safe. And it's not just the murders, it's the shootings. And so I'm begging you, put your guns down. Put your guns down and allow people to live."

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D), Baltimore State Attorney Marilyn Mosby, and Interim Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis joined Rep. Cummings at the news conference.

"We all know that the level of violence that we've seen in our city over the past few months is unacceptable. It's unacceptable to everyone who is standing her. It's unacceptable to the communities who are experiencing this violence on a daily basis," Rawlings-Blake said. "If we are not working together, the community and the police, together, none of us will see the safe city that we want to see."

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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