無知な者が政治的活動することは悲劇である。そんな悲劇を良く見かける。だが通常、政治的活動をする人物はその裏に理由があり、ロジックや知識と勇気がある。また世界を住み良くしようとする世界愛に満ちている。グローバルに活躍する、あるいはできるアーテストは世界の「心の灯台」になることを期待されている。それは無名な政治家よりも世界にあたえる影響力があるという現実があるからであろう。政治的になることは売れっ子のアーティストにとってビジネスに大きなマイナスであることは、この記事からもはっきり見てとれる。とくにイスラエルとパレスチニアの紛争は歴史が長く、複雑であり、双方の不信感は絶大なため、まったく解決の糸口さえ見つからない状態。その不信感とはどんなものか。たとえば故PLO議長、アラハト（Yasser Arafat）はその紛争の解決のための柔軟な姿勢や和平協定交渉努力が認められてノーベル平和賞を受賞した。だが、それはたんなる表向きの飾りに過ぎなかったことがのちに暴露されることになる。議会制民主主義のイスラエルとイスラム教のパレスチニアどっちにつくかで意見がはっきり別れる。それは様々な国の様々なレベルの人々に問題が波及することが、この記事の中にある。ただ一つはっきり言えることは、そうしたビジネスにマイナスになっても、敢えてアーテストたちは政治的になる。つまり、どちらかの側を取る。そのアーテストにとってお金を稼ぐよりも、もっと大切なものがあるということを示しているのである。
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Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor (born 7 November 1996), known professionally as Lorde is a New Zealand singer, songwriter, and record producer, I copied and pasted here from Wikipedia.
In December 2017, Lorde cancelled her scheduled June concert in Israel following an online campaign by Palestinian solidarity activists supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. This online campaign included an open letter published on The Spinoff online magazine by both the Jewish New Zealander activist Justine Sachs and the Palestinian New Zealander activist Nadia Abu-Shanab urging Lorde to cancel her Israel tour, citing "Israeli government's policies of oppression, ethnic cleansing, human rights violations, occupation and apartheid." Lorde also issued a statement on Twitter thanking her fans for educating her about Israel-Palestine, and saying "I'm not too proud to admit I didn't make the right call [by booking this tour]."
Lorde's cancellation of her Israeli tour was welcomed by Palestinian activists and supporters including the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and the New Zealand Jewish pro-boycott group Dayenu; of which Sachs was a founding member. By contrast, Lorde's actions were criticised by pro-Israel groups and supporters including Shalom.Kiwi and the actress Roseanne Barr. The Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev and the Israeli Ambassador to New Zealand Itzhak Gerbeg also issued statements urging Lorde to reconsider her cancellation; with the latter inviting Lorde to meet him. American rabbi Shmuley Boteach paid for a full-page advertisement in the Washington Post, with the headline "Lorde and New Zealand ignore Syria to attack Israel", and called her a "bigot", noting that she will be touring Russia despite Putin's support for the Syrian regime.
In response to Boteach's poster, one hundred actors, writers, directors, and musicians including Roger Waters, John Cusack, Angela Davis, Mark Ruffalo, and Viggo Mortensen issued a joint letter on The Guardian defending Lorde's stand. On 31 January 2018, three Israeli teenagers sued the activists that wrote the open letter for "emotional damage" resulting from the concert's cancellation.
Lorde was scheduled to perform in Miami and Tampa Bay in April 2018. Based on anti-BDS legislation in Florida which bars companies that receive state funds from doing business over $1 million with organizations associated with BDS, Floridian law maker Randy Fine called for the cancellation of Lorde's upcoming April 2018 concerts in Florida saying that "When Lorde joined the boycott in December, she and her companies became subject to that statute. The taxpayers of Miami and Tampa should not have to facilitate bigotry and anti-Semitism, and I look forward to the Miami Sports and Exhibition Authority and the Tampa Sports Authority complying with the law and canceling these concerts."
In 1986, at the age of fifty-eight, Romanian-born Jewish-American writer and political activist Elie Wiesel (September 30, 1928–July 2, 2016) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel committee called him a “messenger to mankind.” Wiesel lived up to that moniker with exquisite eloquence on December 10 that year ― exactly ninety years after Alfred Nobel died ― as he took the stage at Norway’s Oslo City Hall and delivered a spectacular speech on justice, oppression, and our individual responsibility in our shared freedom. The address was eventually included in Elie Wiesel: Messenger for Peace (public library).
“I remember: it happened yesterday or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the kingdom of night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.
I remember: he asked his father: “Can this be true?” This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?
And now the boy is turning to me: “Tell me,” he asks. “What have you done with my future? What have you done with your life?”
And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
And then I explained to him how naïve we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must ― at that moment ― become the center of the universe.”
Japan
'It's exhilarating': Japan's female sumo wrestlers take on sexism
Amateur wrestlers hope ban on women in the professional arena will one day be overturned
Justin McCurry in Gifu Mon 18 Jun 2018 20.04 EDT Last modified on Mon 18 Jun 2018 23.51 EDT
Eight of the current nine members of the Asahi University women sumo team pose for a group photo by the Dohyo Photograph: Laura Liverani for the Guardian
It isn’t hard to see why Chisaki Okumura is one of Japan’s best female sumo wrestlers. Combining her considerable height and heft with flashes of speed, her practice bouts end with a succession of opponents thrown to the ground or shoved unceremoniously out of the ring.
On a humid, wet afternoon in central Japan, Okumura draws on her reserves of strength for a final, punishing series of drills with a male opponent. By the end, it is hard to tell who is more exhausted.
For more than two hours every weekday afternoon, the 17 men and nine women of Asahi University’s sumo club stretch, warm up and perform drills together, although for safety reasons they conduct full-on bouts separately.
Training is centered on two dohyo – a dirt-covered 4.55m diameter circle marked out with half-buried rice-straw bales - which are among the few places where female sumo wrestlers are defying the centuries-old sport’s uneasy relationship with gender.
Pic=A female and a male member of the Asahi University sumo team practice against each other during their daily training. Photograph: Laura Liverani for the
As amateurs, the women athletes at Asahi and other universities are not bound by the ancient traditions governing professional sumo - in which only men can compete. But that might not be the case for much longer.
Many hope the ban on women joining the professional sumo ranks will one day be overturned, proving that deep-seated misogyny has no place in a sport striving to be accepted as an Olympic event.
In April, not long after professional sumo was rocked again by allegations of bullying and violence, an incident at an exhibition tournament in Maizuru, near Kyoto, triggered a new campaign to rid Japan’s de facto national sport of its sexist traditions.
The row was triggered by after several women, including at least one nurse, rushed on to the ring to administer first aid to the local mayor, who had collapsed after suffering a stroke. Using the public address system, the referee repeatedly ordered them to leave the ring, but the women refused.
Officials sprinkled “purifying” salt on the wrestling surface after they had left. Sumo officials later denied that this had been done because of the women’s presence in the ring. Salt is customarily scattered on the ring before bouts and after a wrestler has been injured.
The impromptu first responders had fallen foul of an ancient rule banning women from entering, or even touching, the dohyo.
The rule has prevented local female politicians from presenting awards inside the ring.
The Maizuru incident not only embarrassed sumo but was also seen as a metaphor for the treatment of women in Japan, which performs poorly in global tables of gender equality and female political representation.
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Tomoko Nakagawa, the mayor of Takarazuka in western Japan, has unsuccessfully petitioned the Japan sumo association to lift the ban. “I can’t understand why it is only the sumo world that refuses to change or is even going backwards,” she told Agence France-Presse.
The sport’s struggle with sexism is equally baffling to Okumura, who has been wrestling since she was at middle school.
“Sumo shouldn’t be thought of as a sport for men and women, it’s for everyone,” says Okumura, runner-up in last month’s international women’s sumo invitational championships in the 64-80kg category.
“I definitely benefit from being able to train with the men, and I don’t get the impression that they’re looking down on me and the other women. If I were allowed to compete against them in a proper bout I think I could hold my own.”
The Asahi club was formed eight years ago and is now one of about half a dozen women’s sumo clubs at Japanese universities. The female members use the same number of kimarite – or winning moves – as the men, but wear their mawashi belts over shorts and T-shirts.
“There are some people who still struggle to accept the idea of women’s sumo, but I’ve never thought it was at all unusual,” says Shigeto Takahashi, the club’s manager, who has been coaching female wrestlers for 35 years. “The only real difference is that the women have to be a little more careful about injuring their shoulders, but they’re not allowed to wear any padding.”
Kaori Matsui, an associate professor in the university’s department of health and sports sciences, and the club’s deputy manager, said it was natural for women to compete in sumo, having already broken down barriers in other contact sports such as wrestling and judo.
Pic=Two members of the Asahi University women sumo team go through their routine training, practicing Shiko, or foot stomping. Photograph: Laura Liverani
The number of new women taking up amateur sumo is static, however, a problem she blames on the dearth of female coaches to offer guidance to girls and young women.
“Some people I meet are amazed that there is even an international women’s sumo scene,” she says. “There needs to be a more coordinated approach to promoting the brilliance of women’s sumo. When you watch it close up, it’s exhilarating.”
While weary wrestlers gulp down cups of cold tea from a copper kettle, Minayo Nishimoto shows few signs of fatigue - unsurprising, perhaps, for a woman who has been hurling her comparatively slight frame around sumo rings since she was nine years old.
“I understand that the dohyo is regarded as sacred, but whichever way you look at it, the ban on women is sexist,” says Nishimoto, who prides herself on her uwatenage overarm throw. “But that just makes me all the more determined to carry on and be the best female wrestler in Japan.”
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Japanese Medical School Accused of Rigging Admissions to Keep Women Out
Aug. 3, 2018 By Austin Ramzy and Hisako Ueno
A Japanese medical school has been accused of manipulating the test scores of female applicants for years to artificially depress the number of women in the student body, a scandal that has triggered sharp criticism.
The revelations have highlighted institutional barriers that women in Japan still face as they pursue work in fields that have long been dominated by men.
Tokyo Medical University reduced the test scores of women to keep their numbers at about 30 percent of entering classes, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reported on Thursday.
For the 2018 school year, 1,596 men and 1,018 women applied to the school, with 8.8 percent of men and 2.9 percent of women accepted, according to the newspaper.
“This medical school’s practice is very shocking and ridiculous,” said Dr. Takako Tsuda, an anesthesiologist who is chairwoman of the Japan Joint Association of Medical Professional Women. “This practice should be stopped now.”
Yoshimasa Hayashi, Japan’s education minister, ordered an investigation into the school’s admissions procedures over the last six years.
“Discriminating against female students in entrance exams is absolutely unacceptable,” Mr. Hayashi told reporters on Thursday.
The discrimination began after 2010, when the number of successful female applicants increased sharply, the Yomiuri Shimbun said.
The newspaper quoted an unnamed source as saying that school administrators justified the practice out of the belief that women were more likely to drop out of the profession after marriage or childbirth.
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TBS, a television network, cited an unnamed former university admissions official as saying the practice was commonplace among medical schools and that administrators did not see anything wrong with it.
A university spokesman declined to comment.
The revelations triggered an outpouring of criticism online about gender inequality in Japan.
“Those who decided this system never faced problems of balancing housework and child care with a job,” Keiko Ota, a lawyer, said on Twitter. “You got away without doing all that housework and were able to concentrate on just your job thanks to whom? Can you dare say with whom you left your own children?”
Mizuho Fukushima, a lawmaker with the Social Democrat Party, said the school’s practice was clearly a violation of constitutional protections against discrimination. “This is just unacceptable,” she tweeted. “Work-style reform for doctors and child care support should be carried out.”
The reported discrimination at Tokyo Medical University, a prestigious private school, came to light in an internal investigation following the arrest last month of two university officials. The officials are accused of bribery, alleged to have guaranteed admission to a bureaucrat’s son in exchange for state funding, Kyodo News reported.
The allegation that women’s test scores were manipulated has cast a sharp light on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s efforts to advance the economic empowerment of women, a policy known as “womenomics.”
Japan has lagged behind other developed nations on female participation in the workplace. This has been blamed, in part, on traditional hiring practices that emphasize lifelong employment with a single company. Japanese companies typically require long hours, which clashes with cultural expectations that women are responsible for the bulk of housekeeping and child-rearing responsibilities.
By one basic measurement, economic prospects for women in Japan have improved in recent years, as the proportion of women working has surpassed that in the United States. But women are poorly represented in high-paying and prestigious jobs in government, management and science and technology. As a result, the pay gap is still stubbornly wide.
Acceptance rates are higher for women than men in most university subjects in Japan, including engineering, agriculture, dentistry, nursing and pharmaceutical studies. But they trail in medicine, according to an analysis of Education Ministry statistics by Kyoko Tanebe of the Japan Joint Association of Medical Professional Women.
“These stats indicate universities control the student ratio,” Ms. Tanebe wrote last year.
Some people in the field said they had long suspected that women were being actively prevented from pursuing careers in medicine.
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戦後はもう終わったなんて言葉が昔はやったが、右翼軍国主義、天皇主義、全体主義国家から敗戦を経て、民主主義国家を前面に謳った日本国憲法が制定されてもう相当長きに渡る。ところが、民主主義や基本的人権や個人の幸福を追求する権利をまったく理解するには至っていないことがうかがわれる。それが教育者であってもである。わかってもいない日本国憲法がいまや戦前の右翼の懐古主義、天皇主義者をバックにして改憲の危険にさらされているという現実。いやはや、日本の運命はその体制が戦前に戻るのであろうか。
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Japan school boards start to rethink 'black rules' on everything from underwear to protesting
BY TOMOHIRO OSAKI, Japan Times Staff Writer
NOV 8, 2019
More and more municipalities in Japan are scrambling to amend or abolish what are widely criticized as draconian school rules long imposed on students, heralding a rethink of a long-standing teaching culture that has prized conformity and docility.
In the latest example, the board of education in Gifu Prefecture has run a sweeping review of rules upheld by high schools under its jurisdiction. Such rules, known as kōsoku, typically refer to internal codes of conduct that each junior high and high school imposes on pupils under their care, often dictating a strict dress code that extends to the length and color of their hair.
The investigation by the Gifu Prefectural Board of Education found that more than 90 percent of its 61 full-time high schools had maintained rules so stringent that they risked compromising the human rights of the students.
Examples included those that stipulated girls’ underclothes must be white, that students must notify schools in advance of their personal plans for long-distance travel, and that students must seek teachers’ permission to join any assembly outside of school hours, education board official Masayuki Ishigami said. “Assembly” is generally interpreted to include political rallies, although few explicitly state so, Ishigami added.
Although the board has already instructed schools to remove those rules, the changes will officially take effect at the beginning of the new school year in April, Ishigami said.
“At the very least, we felt it necessary to revise those school rules that affect students’ human rights,” Ishigami said. “For example, the mere act of teachers trying to check the color of underclothes worn by girls would raise human rights questions,” he said.
The official said Gifu’s review has been prompted by a recent groundswell of public outrage against the rigorous rules. Although long taken for granted as part of the education system, the tradition of kōsoku ignited debate when an 18-year-old girl sued Osaka Prefecture for damages in 2017 after she was repeatedly forced by her teachers to dye her naturally brown hair black as per a school rule.
Those overly restrictive rules are now commonly dubbed “black kōsoku.” In August, a group of campaigners seeking to eliminate them submitted an online petition signed by more than 60,000 people to the education ministry urging immediate action. Osaka Prefecture, too, took steps to address the issue, ordering all of its high schools to review their rules. As a result, about 40 percent of its 135 full-time high schools made changes, the prefectural government said in a report in April last year.
Japan began keeping a tighter rein on students when the nation went through a drastic increase in juvenile delinquency and violence against teachers in the early 1980s, prompting school authorities to stiffen rules in a bid to curb rowdy behavior, education studies scholar Masaharu Hata wrote in a 1999 book.
But despite recent moves by municipalities to rethink their long-held codes of conduct, progress has moved at a glacial pace because many teachers still prize them as a form of education, said Ryo Uchida, an associate professor of Nagoya University who has written multiple books on school-related issues.
“The biggest objective of Japanese teachers is to keep their classes as orderly as possible and without any incident, and the most common way to achieve that has been to limit students’ freedom,” Uchida said.
Uchida said schools are “almost as though they were granted extraterritoriality,” where even the most absurd rules, such as banning students from wearing scarves and tights even in winter, are justified under the pretext of nipping delinquency in the bud.
“The logic is that if one student started showing off what might be considered a fashion accessory, other students may follow suit, which could encourage overall disorderliness,” Uchida said. “But how could denying students the simplest choices such as wearing something because of cold weather possibly help foster their independence and self-initiative?”
Going forward, the associate professor said the most effective antidote to black kōsoku is for education boards in each municipality to take steps to disclose the details of these internal school rules so they can be checked against the “common sense of the outside world.”
“Only then will the black kōsoku die off,” Uchida said.
Indeed, Setagaya Ward in Tokyo is gearing up to do just that. Its education board is currently in the “final phase” of its plan to make public a list of rules upheld by all of its junior high schools on their respective websites, having conducted a comprehensive update of any inappropriate code.
“Our big objective is to eliminate any unreasonable kōsoku for the sake of children’s human rights,” Setagaya Education Board official Yuji Aoki said. “We also believe that children should be left to make their own decisions about how they should act, not governed by a long list of rules, in order to harness their autonomy in these changing times.”
It is under this belief that all public junior high schools in Setagaya now allow their students to go to school wearing the clothes of their choice once a month — although some locals have argued such an initiative is inappropriate for junior high school students, Aoki said.
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いま注目を集めている、混乱が続く香港。サッチャー政権のイギリスと中国共産党との協定を守らせようとする、香港市民による民主的生活維持運動。その舞台が街頭から香港の各大学へと移っている。中国共産党/警察当局が学生をターゲットにし始めたからに他ならない。前にも書いたが、これらの大学は世界の大学ランキングでも100位以内の高く評価されている大学群だ。東大よりも高いランキングの大学が含まれる。いまやその激しさは、高経大の学生が始めた当初の民主化運動というよりも、過去の全共闘の頂点を示す東大闘争の様相を呈している観がある。もちろん、香港で起こっていることは共産主義国の民主化運動であって、自由主義国の共産主義運動とは違うし、比較にならないほどの修羅場であるが。いずれにせよ、なかなか目が離せない悲しい情勢なのは間違いない。
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The New York Times Report
Hong Kong Colleges Become Besieged Citadels as Police Close In
Police have begun raiding the edges of the biggest campuses to make arrests, leading student activists to engage with them in pitched battles that resemble medieval sieges.
By Edward Wong and Ezra Cheung
Nov. 13, 2019 Updated 8:28 p.m. ET
HONG KONG — Seething with anger, the black-clad students hurled gasoline bombs, threw bricks and even aimed flaming arrows at the riot police, who answered with tear-gas volleys and rubber bullets that hurtled into Hong Kong’s university grounds for the first time.
And with those battles on Monday and Tuesday at the territory’s largest universities, another unspoken rule in the antigovernment protests that have been convulsing Hong Kong for six months was shattered: the sanctity of educational campuses from the police.
The clashes turned what had been sanctuaries for the students at the core of the movement into scenes that evoked medieval citadels under siege.
They opened a new chapter that threatens to further disrupt the Asian financial capital, which has struggled for normalcy despite the increasingly violent protests against the Chinese Communist authorities in Beijing who have the last word over Hong Kong’s future.
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Hong Kong has fallen into recession as tourists have fled and as its busy shopping areas become backdrops for street battles between demonstrators and police officers. The world is asking hard questions about what could befall Hong Kong as Beijing further tightens control over a city that is supposed to operate under its own laws.
The most dramatic student-versus-police clash unfolded late Tuesday night at a barricaded bridge leading to the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. For hours, police officers fired hundreds of rounds of tear gas and rubber bullets and students hurled Molotov cocktails and bricks, and practiced firing bows with flaming arrows. More than 100 injured students were brought to a makeshift first-aid clinic in a gym.
By targeting campuses, the police have breached the last refuge of the protesters, a move that brings the violence to the heart of the universities and invokes the pivotal and fraught role of student activism in the global history of democracy movements.
“One thing that people have realized is that the protests, the movement, the conflict, is unavoidable,” Gabriel Fung, a 19-year-old second-year student at the University of Hong Kong, said. “It’s going to reach you wherever you are at some point.”
It is at these universities where young leaders and other students have been organizing revolts against the Chinese Communist Party and spreading the pro-democracy ideas that undergird the protests. And here, too, that the students discuss the wealth inequality and cultural homogenization that have led to visions of a bleak future among many of their generation.
In Hong Kong, university administrators and professors now find themselves in a difficult position, trying to preach tolerance and walk a tightrope of furious demands from students, the police and government officials. Two schools on Wednesday ended their semesters weeks early.
“Not a single place in Hong Kong is exempt from the rule of law, and that includes universities,” John Lee, the secretary for security, said Wednesday at a news conference. “Universities are not supposed to be the breeding ground of violence.”
The showdown has been brewing for years, going back to the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement of 2014. And the roots of the protests in many ways harken back to social movements elsewhere.
On mainland China, students have led campaigns calling for sweeping political change, notably in 1919 and 1989. In the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, violence broke out on campuses during anti-Vietnam War protests, most horrifically at Kent State University in 1970, when Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on students, killing four and injuring nine.
Student activists in Hong Kong have lived by an exhausting weekly rhythm since the movement began in early June: protest on weekends, show up on Mondays for class, study for exams and apply for internships or jobs in between it all. Many argue with parents who disagree with their politics or tactics. Hundreds have been arrested in recent months and quickly released by the police, as required by law.
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It was the death of a university student this month that set off the current round of protests and violence. Chow Tsz-lok, a student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, sustained a fatal injury after falling from a parking garage near a police action on Nov. 4. Thousands attended candlelit memorial rallies last weekend, and his photograph is on posters and makeshift shrines all over campuses, since he is now a martyr for other students.
Roiled by the latest unrest, universities canceled classes from Monday to Friday. That meant protesters have been able to hit the streets at dawn on weekdays after sleeping a few hours. On campus, activists have sprayed fresh graffiti, including phrases cursing administrators.
The fraught situation led police officers on Wednesday to organize an evacuation of dozens of mainland Chinese students across the border to Shenzhen, where hotels offered them free rooms.
One graduate student at the University of Hong Kong said he and others from the mainland still felt safer on campuses than on the streets. He said many students do not openly express pro-Beijing opinions and sometimes avoid speaking loudly in Mandarin, the dominant language back home. (He spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the tensions.)
Some university departments have delayed recruitment drives of mainland and foreign students to come up with new strategies; a drop-off in enrollment by mainland graduate students, who often pay full tuition, would lead to budget problems.
Hong Kong’s public universities, which have more than 86,000 undergraduate and nearly 11,000 graduate students, each have distinct characters. That means the students have occupied different roles in the movement, and the protests have played out in different ways on each campus.
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with 20,000 students, is considered the most radical campus. Most of its students are Cantonese-speaking locals, some of whom live nearby with their parents in dense apartment blocks. And the campus is high in the hills of Sha Tin, isolated from the city center, which is an hour’s ride away by subway.
On Monday, the police arrested five students on the campus’s edge, administrators said. The next morning, the police, still at the border, confronted front line students, and clashes took place over 20 hours. Rocky S. Tuan, the president, who has been known for trying to engage with students during the movement, showed up during a lull in the evening to urge the students to be calm.
“You all should know that I really want to help you. I will do everything within my capability,” he said. “It is the university’s responsibility to maintain peace on campus, not the police.”
But as Mr. Tuan began walking away, the police fired tear gas. Mr. Tuan himself was enveloped in the gas. Students set fires to keep the police from advancing, and scores formed human chains to pass along bricks, umbrellas and bottled water to the front lines. Students sitting on one patch of road made gasoline bombs as if on an assembly line.
“It was a savage move and a type of police violence when they tried to encroach on the university,” said Timothy Chow, 23, an engineering student who graduated in June. “This is why we have to protect our Chinese University of Hong Kong.”
“When I saw our compatriots and Chinese University staff being hurt by the police, I felt particularly furious and wanted to come back to defend our university,” he added.
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At the University of Hong Kong this week, front-line students also set up barricades and, against the advice of professors, threw paving bricks off balconies, even though it is considered the most established of the territory’s schools.
Founded in 1911, it is the territory’s oldest university. Many of its students are foreigners or Hong Kong residents who attended international schools. English is the main language, and the university aims to open a mainland China campus. Among its alumni are many police commanders and Carrie Lam, the territory’s chief executive who is reviled by protesters.
On Monday, the students were on edge in part because the police had taken a student from a dormitory area early that morning.
Two liberal law professors, Hualing Fu and Johannes Chan, urged a group of front-line protesters in masks not to resort to violence and to understand that the struggle for democracy was a lifetime commitment, according to video footage. But one masked woman shouted they had no choice, and asked: “How many people are we going to sacrifice?”
“We are better, we are different,” Mr. Fu said.
“But we shall not forgive,” a young man shouted, “we shall not forget.”
On Monday and Tuesday mornings, police officers arrived at campus entrances to try to clear the barricades. They fired tear gas, but retreated.
Students have called on the president, Xiang Zhang, to forcefully condemn the police, but he has refrained from doing so, and, unlike Mr. Tuan, rarely holds open forums. On occasion, professors have shown up at the front lines to speak to students, as William Hayward, dean of social sciences, did on Tuesday.
“Obviously, as it goes on and as it gets more polarized, this becomes increasingly a challenge,” Mr. Hayward later said of student engagement. “Some of them do really open up, but at the same time, you know, of course they’re trying to figure out — is he on our side or is he trying to silence us?”
As night fell on Tuesday, students traded shifts at the barricades, walking past a famous eight-meter statue of orange corpses, “The Pillar of Shame,” that memorializes the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy students and workers around Tiananmen Square in Beijing by the Chinese government.
Paul Mozur and Katherine Li contributed reporting.
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正しい知識は強力な武器：半信半疑だが、COVID-19は空気感染しないならしい。
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How Coronavirus Spreads
COVID-19 is a new disease and we are still learning how it spreads, the severity of illness it causes, and to what extent it may spread in the United States.
The President’s Coronavirus Guidelines for America: 15 Days to Slow the Spreadpdf iconexternal icon Spanishpdf icon
*Person-to-person spread
The virus is thought to spread mainly from person-to-person.
Between people who are in close contact with one another (within about 6 feet).
Through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes.
These droplets can land in the mouths or noses of people who are nearby or possibly be inhaled into the lungs.
*Can someone spread the virus without being sick?
People are thought to be most contagious when they are most symptomatic (the sickest).
Some spread might be possible before people show symptoms; there have been reports of this occurring with this new coronavirus, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.
*Spread from contact with contaminated surfaces or objects
It may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.
last reviewed: March 4, 2020
Content source: National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD), Division of Viral Diseases
from CDC, USA Official Page,
空気感染しないというWHOの反論が下。米国のCDCはWHOの見解をそのまま転載しているようだ。空気感染の定義にもよるが、例えば咳により口から飛びだすドロップレットの飛距離は想像以上、１０メートルを超すとか昔に記憶している。その間空気中に浮いているということである。いずれにせよ、慎重に行動することに変わりはない。例えば人との距離を６フィートぐらいに置くというのが推薦基準としてアメリカの記事によく見かける。
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WHO Reviews 'Available' Evidence On Coronavirus Transmission Through Air
March 28, 2020 5:19 PM ET, Writer: Nell Greenfieldboyce
The World Health Organization says the virus that causes COVID-19 doesn't seem to linger in the air or be capable of spreading through the air over distances more than about three feet.
But at least one expert in virus transmission said it's way too soon to know that.
"I think the WHO is being irresponsible in giving out that information. This misinformation is dangerous," says Dr. Donald Milton, an infectious disease aerobiologist at the University of Maryland School of Public Health.
The WHO says that "according to current evidence," the virus is transmitted through "respiratory droplets and contact routes." By that, the agency means the virus is found in the kind of big droplets of mucus or saliva created through coughing and sneezing.
These droplets can only travel short distances through the air and either land on people or land on surfaces that people later touch. Stopping this kind of transmission is why public health officials urge people to wash hands frequently and not touch the face, because that could bring the virus into contact with the nose or mouth.
Other viruses, however, get shed by infected people in a way that lets the germs actually hang suspended in the air for minutes or even hours. Later, these airborne viruses can get breathed in when other people pass by. Measles is a good example of that kind of transmission—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that "Measles virus can remain infectious in the air for up to two hours after an infected person leaves an area."
The WHO said that this kind of airborne transmission of the new coronavirus might be possible "in specific circumstances and settings in which procedures that generate aerosols are performed," such as when a patient is intubated in a hospital or being disconnected from a ventilator.
Based on that, the agency recommends "airborne precautions" when medical workers do those procedures. Otherwise, the WHO says, healthcare workers caring for COVID-19 patients could use less protective "droplet and contact precautions."
That troubles Milton, who says so little is known about this new virus, SARS-CoV-2, that it's inappropriate to draw conclusions about how it is transmitted.
"I don't think they know and I think they are talking out of their hats," Milton says.
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He says people like to think that there's some sharp, black-and-white distinction between "airborne" viruses that can linger and float in the air, and ones that only spread when embedded in larger moist droplets picked up through close contact, but the reality of transmission is far more nuanced.
"The epidemiologists say if it's 'close contact' then it's not airborne. That's baloney," he says.
When epidemiologists are working in the field, trying to understand an outbreak of an unknown pathogen, it's not possible for them to know exactly what's going on as a pathogen is spread from person to person, Milton says. "Epidemiologists cannot tell the difference between droplet transmission and short-range aerosol transmission."
He says these are hard questions to answer, and scientists still argue over how much of the transmission of influenza might be airborne. Some research shows that exhaled gas clouds from people contain a continuum of many droplet sizes and that a "high-momentum cloud" created by a cough or sneeze might carry droplets long distances.
What's more, one study of hospital rooms of patients with COVID-19 found that "swabs taken from the air exhaust outlets tested positive, suggesting that small virus-laden droplets may be displaced by airflows and deposited on equipment such as vents."
Another study in Wuhan hospitals found that most areas had undetectable or low levels of airborne virus.
In the face of this uncertainty, Milton thinks the WHO should follow the example of the CDC and "employ the precautionary principle to recommend airborne precautions."
"The U.S. CDC has it exactly right," he says, noting that it recommends airborne precautions for any situation involving the care of COVID-19 patients.
Of course, the world is struggling with a shortage of the most protective medical masks and gear. For the average person not working in a hospital, Milton says the recommendation to stay 6 feet away from others sounds reasonable.
He says if someone in a house is sick, it makes sense to have them wear a mask and to increase the ventilation in the room, if possible, by cracking open a window. People shouldn't cram into cars with the windows rolled up, he says, and officials need to keep crowding down in mass transit vehicles like trains and buses.
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最後まで無罪を主張し続けて病死した無期懲役囚の故星野文昭さん。努力の甲斐もなく再審請求は受け入れられなかった。政治的であればあるほど検察側に有利に運ぶ日本の裁判。日本の本人自白に頼った検察側の犯人捜査。冤罪事件は生れべくして生まれる。
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Shiga ex-nurse acquitted of 2003 murder after serving 12 years
KYODO
MAR 31, 2020
ARTICLE HISTORYPRINTSHARE
A Japanese court on Tuesday acquitted a former assistant nurse who was convicted of murder and spent 12 years in prison after the 2003 death of a patient, saying at the conclusion of her retrial it is highly likely the man died of natural causes.
Mika Nishiyama, 40, was exonerated by the Otsu District Court, with presiding Judge Naoki Onishi saying there was “no foul play” in the incident and that the 72-year-old patient could have suffered “a fatal irregular heartbeat or a lack of oxygen after not having his sputum sucked out.”
“I’m very happy. My parents shed tears of joy,” Nishiyama said at a news conference in Otsu, the capital of western Japan’s Shiga Prefecture. She celebrated the ruling by taking the hands of her 69-year-old mother Reiko, who was seen sobbing at the courthouse.
Her supporters who had waited outside the court building broke into applause when her defense counsel held up papers showing she was found “not guilty.”
She was convicted in 2005 of killing the male patient by removing his respirator at a Shiga hospital. But in the retrial, prosecutors did not contest new evidence presented by her defense team including a doctor’s opinion that pointed to arrhythmia as a possible cause of death.
Her acquittal will be finalized if the prosecutors do not appeal the ruling within 14 days. Nishiyama’s defense team urged them to waive their right to appeal immediately so her not-guilty verdict will stand.
Nishiyama was indicted after admitting to killing the patient under police questioning in 2004, but she later retracted her confession, saying she had been coerced by investigators.
She pleaded not guilty in subsequent court proceedings, but the Otsu court ruled her confession credible and gave her a 12-year jail term in 2005 — a decision upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007 — which she served out in August 2017.
Tuesday’s ruling said Nishiyama’s confession was unreliable as her statements on a key point of whether the alarm of the respirator continued to ring changed drastically.
It also pointed out that an investigator used the fact Nishiyama, who has a mild intellectual disability, had developed romantic feelings toward him to coerce a confession that matched circumstantial evidence.
The court’s judgment was in line with arguments made earlier by her defense counsel.
“(The investigator) wielded a strong influence over her and controlled her statements,” said the judge. “We cannot rewind the time, but this case has raised a big question over how criminal justice works (in Japan).”
Nishiyama sought a retrial in 2010 and in December 2017 the Osaka High Court ordered the case be reheard, saying the patient may have died from natural causes based on new evidence submitted by the defense team.
The retrial began in February after the Supreme Court endorsed the Osaka High Court decision in March last year.
1991年に起きたロス暴動と類似点が沢山ある。その暴動で何が変わったか？結果的には何も変わらない。いやむしろ地元住民には悪くなった。一度破壊されたら、その地域のビジネスは二度と同じ地に戻って来なかった。つまり働き口や仕事がなくなり、買い物も不便になっただけというわけ。スラム化がすすむのである。暴動はビジネスや住宅・賃貸アパートでもますます、口には決して出さないが差別が正当化される。だから暴動に参加する人間は暴動プロが扇動する。そこにはギャングメンバーや反黒人思想や住民以外の派遣部隊が含まれるとみてもまったくおかしくないのである。
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There are anarchists': Minnesota officials say 'outside agitators' are hijacking peaceful protests
May 30, 2020 2:42pm Update 6:40pm ET Trevor Hughes/USA TODAY
MINNEAPOLIS — Drifting out of the shadows in small groups, dressed in black, carrying shields and wearing knee pads, they head toward the front lines of the protest. Helmets and gas masks protect and obscure their faces, and they carry bottles of milk to counteract tear gas and pepper spray.
Most of them appear to be white. They carry no signs and don't want to speak to reporters. Trailed by designated "medics" with red crosses taped to their clothes, these groups head straight for the front lines of the conflict.
Night after night in this ravaged city, these small groups do battle with police and the National Guard, kicking away tear gas canisters and throwing back foam-rubber projects fired at them. Around them, fires break out. Windows are smashed. Parked cars destroyed. USA TODAY reporters have witnessed the groups on multiple nights, in multiple locations. Sometimes they threaten those journalists who photograph them destroying property.
The mayor and governor say outside agitators are hijacking peaceful protests over the death of George Floyd and literally fanning the flames of destruction. And experts say things will likely get worse in Minneapolis and in other cities seeing similar peaceful protests that turn violent like Los Angeles; Louisville, Kentucky; Des Moines, Iowa; Detroit, Atlanta; and Washington, D.C.
“The real hard-core guys, this is their job: They’re involved in this struggle," said Adam Leggat, a former British Army counterterrorism officer who now works as a security consultant specializing in crowd management for the Densus Group. "They need protests on the street to give them cover to move in.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said protests in the city Tuesday were largely peaceful and organized by local residents, but that the "dynamic has changed over the last several days."
"I want to be very, very clear: The people that are doing this are not Minneapolis residents," Frey said Saturday.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, without providing specifics, said he believes 80% of the people now taking part in the overnight rioting are from outside Minnesota.
"There are detractors. There are white supremacists. There are anarchists," Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan said Saturday afternoon.
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However, a civil arrest list provided by the public information officer of the St. Paul Police Department shows 12 of the 18 people arrested from Thursday through 6 a.m. Saturday were from Minnesota. Five of them are from St. Paul, three are from Woodbury (part of the Twin Cities metropolitan area), two are from Minneapolis, one is from Mankato and one is from St. Louis Park. Four are from out of state and two did not have cities of residence listed.
Leggat, the security consultant, said intelligence reports from his colleagues indicate most of the hard-core protesters in Minneapolis are far-left or anarchists, and that far-right groups have not yet made a significant appearance. He said looting is typically done by locals – usually people with no criminal record who just get caught up in the moment.
But direct conflicts with authorities come from a mix of both locals and outside groups who see these conflicts as a core part of their mission. Many of the anarchists, he said, target banks, chain-type businesses and even luxury cars as symbols of corrupt institutions. He said even a peaceful protest can turn violent if outside agitators decide to participate, hijacking the message.
"The difficulty is that you have no control over who turns up," he said. "If this was to continue to go on, more people will come. And potentially you could have people on the right turning up, which would make things far more complicated. If those guys turn up, they will claim to be there to protect business. But it means the police will have two groups to keep apart. And that uses up a lot of police resources."
Many protesters interviewed by USA TODAY reporters decried the violence, although some said it was a predicable result of generations of anger and suffering. Speaking to a large crowd on Friday afternoon, Minneapolis activist Kon Johnson, 45, said people who have subjugated for so long are finally lashing out. He said the violence has at least gotten the world's attention.
“What is it going to take to get people to listen?" Johnson said. "They say, 'don’t incite violence,' but no one is listening. What does it take to get them to listen? I mean, do we have to take this to the suburbs? To the capital? What’s it going to take to get them to listen? We can’t keep burning stuff down."
Johnson, an activist and performer, said the arrest of Derek Chauvin, the police officer seen kneeling on Floyd's neck for eight minutes, is a good first step. Chauvin was charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter. But he said it's only the first step toward delivering justice to the community.
"I don't want to burn down sh-- either. I don't," Johnson said. "But guess what? It's gonna happen if this fool does not get life in jail."
Pamela Oliver, a sociology expert from the University of Wisconsin-Madison specializing in protests, said politicians sometimes blame outsiders for causing trouble as a way of pretending
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there's no real problem within a community. That's not what's happening here, she said: Political leaders acknowledge Floyd's death focused sharp attention on longstanding problems.
Instead, she said, many Minneapolis residents may see rioting and destruction as a legitimate way to push back on police repression.
"When the police aggressively punish peaceful protest by firing rubber bullets and tear gas, the protesters often escalate their tactics. In contexts in which the police or other authorities have been acting in repressive ways towards communities, there can be a celebratory air when rebellion occurs in what is called a riot," she said. "I have definitely read claims by Minneapolis residents that the police have been so bad that a rebellious response is appropriate."
But many Minneapolis residents appear to be growing weary of the violence and destruction, while still supporting peaceful protests. Clearing rubble from a burned-out Walgreens on Saturday, Daniel Braun, 34, said he was sad to see the damage to his neighborhood.
“There’s civil rights and then there’s burning things down," said Braun, an attorney. “During the day, everything is peaceful. It’s only at night when things happen. Once night falls, please, go home. When it’s dark out and you’re there, you’re not making anything better.”
A protester holding a sign in front of a burned-out building Minneapolis during protests over the death of George Floyd on May 28, 2020.
A protester who has been outside some of the most intense scenes this week – the Minnehaha Mall on the south side on Thursday and Uptown on Friday – said his experiences with riots and protests leads him to believe most violence demonstrators are not from Minneapolis or St. Paul.
Arsonists and people breaking into buildings are "definitely" not from the neighborhoods they are damaging, Augustine Zion Livingstone said.
"Ain't no black person burning down no damn barbershops in their hood," Livingstone, 23, said. "We're not doing that."
Some locals are participating in looting once buildings have been breached, but he said they're in the minority when compared with peaceful protesters.
"We're not destroying buildings, we're not burning buildings," said Livingston, who also was a main speaker during Friday's marches and protests at the Hennepin County Government Center.
勝ち組：１、トランプ政権ーこの冬、トランプの圧倒的な再選が予想される。２、NRA（The National Rifle Association）ービジネスオーナーや個人にとって、身の生命や財産を守るには刀やゴルフクラブや野球バットなんてまったく通用しない。映画のように、暴徒化した犯罪集団を駆逐できない。しかも小さな銃よりも軍隊クラスの大きgunの必要性。相手を威嚇するのが目的。小さな銃では威嚇に限度がある。銃を発砲して殺傷すれば良心の呵責や警察と法律があとあと絡んできて面倒になる。銃を使うのを避けて犯罪を未然に防ぐことが主眼である。３、人種差別の強化ーゲイトコミュニティーの蔓延。人種差別には自業自得要素がかなり存在する。警察官は犯罪を取り締まるのが仕事。警察が嫌いだったら犯罪をするなである。ところがそうになってない。黒人コミュニティーが一辺倒に白人や警察の黒人差別だと抗議しても、問題が少しも解決しない。結果的に犯罪に走る黒人を擁護する形になっている。報道になってないので過去警察官の手によって死傷した黒人たちの犯罪歴を自分で調べる必要がある。KKKが跋扈した古いアメリカを語っていない。あくまでも最近の事件を問題にしている。それらは凶悪なギャングメンバーだったり、犯罪を犯して警察にお世話になっている常習犯と記録している。だから警察がそれほどいやだったら、まず犯罪に手を染めるなとなぜテレビの前で言わないのか言えないのか。ますます金持ちや白人社会は黒人社会から遠ざかる。ビバリーヒルズなどの高級住宅地には警備員配置の門を設けて一般人を通行止めにしている場所はまだ一部である。こういった門を設けて大きなアパート群を数ブロックに渡り管理している場所がLaBreaと3thの近くにある。何度も車で中に入ったことがあるが迷路のようであり、そこから出るのにひと苦労する。入口に門を設けて警備員が交通をチェックする高級住宅群がロスの郊外のそこら中にある。
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George Floyd had ‘violent criminal history’: Minneapolis police union chief
June 2, 2020 | 12:04pm | Updated By Kate Sheehy New York Post
The head of the Minneapolis police union says George Floyd’s “violent criminal history” needs to be remembered and that the protests over his death are the work of a “terrorist movement.”
“What is not being told is the violent criminal history of George Floyd. The media will not air this,” police union president Bob Kroll told his members in a letter posted Monday on Twitter.
Floyd had landed five years behind bars in 2009 for an assault and robbery two years earlier, and before that, had been convicted of charges ranging from theft with a firearm to drugs, the Daily Mail reported.
Floyd died last week after a white cop kneeled on the 46-year-old black man’s neck for nearly 9 minutes, a shocking incident that was caught on video and is sparking widespread violent protests, including in New York City. Floyd had allegedly just tried to pass a phony $20 bill before he died.
“This terrorist movement that is currently occurring was a long time build up which dates back years,” Kroll said in his letter of the protests, adding that some of his city’s issues exist because Minneapolis leaders have been “minimizing the size of our police force and diverting funds to community activists with an anti-police agenda.
“Our chief requested 400 more officers and was flatly denied any. This is what led to this record breaking riot,” he said.
The union chief vowed that his organization would help the cop accused of killing Floyd, now-fired Officer Derek Chauvin, and three other officers who were at the scene and are being investigated.
“I’ve worked with the four defense attorneys that are representing each of our four terminated individuals under criminal investigation, in addition with our labor attorneys to fight for their jobs. They were terminated without due process,” Kroll wrote.
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Despite Los Angeles County's label as the "Gang Capital of the United States, gang population estimates for anywhere in Los Angeles County and gang-related crime statistics have not been forthcoming in recent years. In fact, the last estimates of any sort for Los Angeles County were released in 2007. In 2000, a 2000 U.S. Department of Justice report stated that Los Angeles County had more than 1,300 gangs with more than 150,000 members. Within the City of Los Angeles, a 2007 City of Los Angeles report stated that there were more than 400 separate gangs and an estimated 39,000 members of these gangs. Of these, more than half were Latino. Since the time of these reports, veteran journalist and author Sam Quinnones stated in a 2015 interview with L.A. Taco that declining front-page gang activity in Los Angeles was due to gangs becoming more discreet, disillusionment and falling trust by members in gang leadership and priorities, aggressive gang injunctions and RICO prosecutions and new community policing strategies.
Who is she?ー
Candace Owens is a political commentator and the former Director of Communications for Turning Point USA. She is the founder of the #Blexit movement. She now tours the country delivering speeches to sold out crowds. Originally from Stamford, Connecticut, she now lives in New York City.
About The Bookー
Political activist and social media star Candace Owens explains all the reasons how the Democratic Party policies hurt, rather than help, the African American community, and why she and many others are turning right.
What do you have to lose? This question, posed by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump to potential black voters, was mocked and dismissed by the mainstream media. But for Candace Owens and many others, it was a wake-up call. A staunch Democrat for all of her life, she began to question the left’s policies toward black Americans, and investigate the harm they inflict on the community.
In Blackout, social media star and conservative commentator Owens addresses the many ways that liberal policies and ideals are actually harmful to African Americans and hinder their ability to rise above poverty, live independent and successful lives, and be an active part of the American Dream. Weaving in her personal story that brought her from the projects to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, she demonstrates how she overcame her setbacks and challenges despite the cultural expectation that she should embrace a victim mentality.
Owens argues that government assistance is a double-edged sword, that the left dismisses the faith so important to the black community, that Democratic permissiveness toward abortion disproportionately affects the black babies, that the #MeToo movement hurts black men, and much more. Well-researched and intelligently argued, Blackout lays bare the myth that all black people should vote Democrat—and shows why turning to the right will leave them happier, more successful, and more self-sufficient.
アメリカの公式な統計数値に「黒人がもつ人種の得意性、ユニークさ」がまさに示されていて、凡人の論理をサポートしている。下の記事によれば「According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime」黒人の3人に一人が一度（やそれ以上）その生涯に刑務所の御世話になるという司法統計局の数値。それって考えると凄いと思う。刑務所に行くには重罪か再犯罪者が多い。初犯とか軽犯罪とかでは滅多に刑務所には行かない。つまり余罪まで含めれば、その時点ではキャリア犯罪者であっても驚かない。
Eliminating the racial disparities inherent to our nation’s criminal-justice policies and practices must be at the heart of a renewed, refocused, and reenergized movement for racial justice in America.
Eliminating the racial disparities inherent to our nation’s criminal-justice policies and practices must be at the heart of a renewed, refocused, and reenergized movement for racial justice in America.
This month the United States celebrates the Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965 to commemorate our shared history of the civil rights movement and our nation’s continued progress towards racial equality. Yet decades later a broken criminal-justice system has proven that we still have a long way to go in achieving racial equality.
Today people of color continue to be disproportionately incarcerated, policed, and sentenced to death at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts. Further, racial disparities in the criminal-justice system threaten communities of color—disenfranchising thousands by limiting voting rights and denying equal access to employment, housing, public benefits, and education to millions more. In light of these disparities, it is imperative that criminal-justice reform evolves as the civil rights issue of the 21st century.
Below we outline the top 10 facts pertaining to the criminal-justice system’s impact on communities of color.
1. While people of color make up about 30 percent of the United States’ population, they account for 60 percent of those imprisoned. The prison population grew by 700 percent from 1970 to 2005, a rate that is outpacing crime and population rates. The incarceration rates disproportionately impact men of color: 1 in every 15 African American men and 1 in every 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated in comparison to 1 in every 106 white men.
2. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime. Individuals of color have a disproportionate number of encounters with law enforcement, indicating that racial profiling continues to be a problem. A report by the Department of Justice found that blacks and Hispanics were approximately three times more likely to be searched during a traffic stop than white motorists. African Americans were twice as likely to be arrested and almost four times as likely to experience the use of force during encounters with the police.
3. Students of color face harsher punishments in school than their white peers, leading to a higher number of youth of color incarcerated. Black and Hispanic students represent more than 70 percent of those involved in school-related arrests or referrals to law enforcement. Currently, African Americans make up two-fifths and Hispanics one-fifth of confined youth today.
4. According to recent data by the Department of Education, African American students are arrested far more often than their white classmates. The data showed that 96,000 students were arrested and 242,000 referred to law enforcement by schools during the 2009-10 school year. Of those students, black and Hispanic students made up more than 70 percent of arrested or referred students. Harsh school punishments, from suspensions to arrests, have led to high numbers of youth of color coming into contact with the juvenile-justice system and at an earlier age.
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5. African American youth have higher rates of juvenile incarceration and are more likely to be sentenced to adult prison. According to the Sentencing Project, even though African American juvenile youth are about 16 percent of the youth population, 37 percent of their cases are moved to criminal court and 58 percent of African American youth are sent to adult prisons.
6. As the number of women incarcerated has increased by 800 percent over the last three decades, women of color have been disproportionately represented. While the number of women incarcerated is relatively low, the racial and ethnic disparities are startling. African American women are three times more likely than white women to be incarcerated, while Hispanic women are 69 percent more likely than white women to be incarcerated.
7. The war on drugs has been waged primarily in communities of color where people of color are more likely to receive higher offenses. According to the Human Rights Watch, people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites, but they have higher rate of arrests. African Americans comprise 14 percent of regular drug users but are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses. From 1980 to 2007 about one in three of the 25.4 million adults arrested for drugs was African American.
8. Once convicted, black offenders receive longer sentences compared to white offenders. The U.S. Sentencing Commission stated that in the federal system black offenders receive sentences that are 10 percent longer than white offenders for the same crimes. The Sentencing Project reports that African Americans are 21 percent more likely to receive mandatory-minimum sentences than white defendants and are 20 percent more like to be sentenced to prison.
9. Voter laws that prohibit people with felony convictions to vote disproportionately impact men of color. An estimated 5.3 million Americans are denied the right to vote based on a past felony conviction. Felony disenfranchisement is exaggerated by racial disparities in the criminal-justice system, ultimately denying 13 percent of African American men the right to vote. Felony-disenfranchisement policies have led to 11 states denying the right to vote to more than 10 percent of their African American population.
10. Studies have shown that people of color face disparities in wage trajectory following release from prison. Evidence shows that spending time in prison affects wage trajectories with a disproportionate impact on black men and women. The results show no evidence of racial divergence in wages prior to incarceration; however, following release from prison, wages grow at a 21 percent slower rate for black former inmates compared to white ex-convicts. A number of states have bans on people with certain convictions working in domestic health-service industries such as nursing, child care, and home health care—areas in which many poor women and women of color are disproportionately concentrated.
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Theses racial disparities have deprived people of color of their most basic civil rights, making criminal-justice reform the civil rights issue of our time. Through mass imprisonment and the overrepresentation of individuals of color within the criminal justice and prison system, people of color have experienced an adverse impact on themselves and on their communities from barriers to reintegrating into society to engaging in the democratic process. Eliminating the racial disparities inherent to our nation’s criminal-justice policies and practices must be at the heart of a renewed, refocused, and reenergized movement for racial justice in America.
There have been a number of initiatives on the state and federal level to address the racial disparities in youth incarceration. Last summer Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the Schools Discipline Initiative to bring increased awareness of effective policies and practices to ultimately dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. States like California and Massachusetts are considering legislation to address the disproportionate suspensions among students of color. And in Clayton County, Georgia, collaborative local reforms have resulted in a 47 percent reduction in juvenile-court referrals and a 51 percent decrease in juvenile felony rates. These initiatives could serve as models of success for lessening the disparities in incarceration rates.
Sophia Kerby is the Special Assistant for Progress 2050 at American Progress.
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犯罪の統計をみると白人の黒人へ差別よりも、その逆黒人の白人への差別が浮かび上がってくる。ラリーエルダー氏。だいぶむかしにラッシュリンボーなる保守系のラジオ番組を聞いていた時になじんだ名前だ。その番組にゲストとして彼がよく出ていた。もうだいぶ昔なので忘れていたが、Twitterで彼を発見。記憶が蘇ってきた。彼はその当初から今も、アメリカの人種差別、特に黒人差別や黒人事情に詳しく、統計の数値でマスメディアの嘘やプロパガンダを指摘していた。彼のスタンスは今もまったく変わっていない。事実をもって発言することは、その後何十年たっても同じなので、自分の考えをその後かえることはまったく必要ないということを示している。そんなことは当然なのだが。
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Larry Elder @larryelder
Jun 7
Interracial Violent Victimizations (Excluding Homicide) Between Blacks And Whites (2018)
Total: 593,598
Committed By Blacks Against Whites: 537,204 (approx. 90%)
Committed By Whites Against Blacks: 56,394 (less than 10%)
その様子は通行人の17歳の少女によって撮影されている。フロイド氏は「息ができない！ I can't breathe!」と何度も繰り返し、「あぁー！」と悶絶の叫び声を上げている。警官は顔色ひとつ変えない。通行人たちが警官を止めようと叫ぶが、警官は微動だにしない。やがて到着した救急救命士がフロイド氏をストレッチャーに乗せるが、その時点で既に脈はなかった。
①「ジョギング中に「怪しい」と射殺された黒人青年。」
February 23, 2020、Glynn County, ジョージア州で起きた事件ー当時25歳のAhmaud Arberyがライフル銃で射殺された事件。ジョギング中とはまったくの嘘。黒人青年が自宅からだいぶ離れた白人居住地区に行き、いろいろ周辺を物色している証拠のビデオがある。その時はジョギングなんかしていない。そして急に走り出す。靴はジョギング用ではない。もっとヘビーな靴でジョギングにまったく向かないやつらしい。その地域に盗難があったらしので市民は警戒している。その状況下「怪しい」不審者を発見。彼は犯罪歴ももつ。そのことから物色も考えられる。不審者として、住人が数人でライフルをもった車で追跡、捕まえようとした。走り去る黒人青年に止まるように叫んだが止まらない。彼の前に車を止めて、車から出て制しようとした。そのようすがすべてビデオに取られている。ところが黒人青年は飛びつきライフル銃をつかみ奪おうとして格闘になる。それをみていた別の白人が発砲した。彼が命令に素直に従っていたら、死ななくてよかったケース。それに関与した白人は全員逮捕されている。みな裁判をまっている段階である。
③「公園でオモチャの銃を持っていたために、問答無用で射殺された黒人の中学生」
November 22, 2014、オハイオ州のクリーブランドでの事件。「銃を無差別に通行人に向けている男」がいるという911の通報で車で駆け付けた二人の警察官の一人がその男を射殺。その男とは12歳のTamir Riceであった。警察官は発砲時には相手の年齢は把握していない。本物と思った拳銃は本物と瓜二つのオモチャであることが後で判明。拳銃を向けたら、年齢や人種にまったく関係なく警官は発泡する。その様子がビデオに取られている。これは常識。警官だって射殺される事件は枚挙にいとまがない。彼らの仕事は命がけなのである。警察官が容疑者を射殺するのは毎年千人程度の件数。容疑者も武装しているからだ。容疑者が無防備でも起こりえる。容疑者と格闘になり、警官の腰にある拳銃を奪おうとすることがままある。そういうことを含めて黒人が無防備で射殺される件数は9件。白人の容疑者のケースは件数がもっと多い。それをもってしても黒人差別と叫ぶのは見当違いである。前に言ったが現実は黒人同士での殺し合いが年間7000件という数値とその警察の9件を比べてどう思うか。黒人差別の警察官が黒人をターゲットに殺しまくっているという嘘をマスメディアがプロパガンダしているのは呆れるとしかいいようがない。アメリカ市民もそれに気付いている。トランプ政権が予想外に生れた背景がそこにある。
Dr. Martin Luther King's 1967 speech, "The Other America," given by Dr. King that year at Stanford University as well as at the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Martin Luther King "The Other America" speech excerpt
"…that America has been backlashing on the whole question of basic constitutional and God-given rights for Negroes and other disadvantaged groups for more than 300 years.
"So these conditions, existence of widespread poverty, slums, and of tragic conditions in schools and other areas of life, all of these things have brought about a great deal of despair, and a great deal of desperation. A great deal of disappointment and even bitterness in the Negro communities. And today, all of our cities confront huge problems. All of our cities are potentially powder kegs as a result of the continued existence of these conditions. Many in moments of anger, many in moments of deep bitterness, engage in riots.
"Let me say as I've always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I'm still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve. That in a real sense it is impracticable for the Negro to even think of mounting a violent revolution in the United States. So I will continue to condemn riots, and continue to say to my brothers and sisters that this is not the way. And continue to affirm that there is another way.
"But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense, our nation's summers of riots are caused by our nation's winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention."
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USA Crime Statistics 2015
Blacks Killed by Whitesー2%
Blacks Killed by Policeー 1%
Whites Killed by Policeー 3%
Whites Killed by Whitesー 16%
Whites Killed by Blacksー 81%
Blacks killed by Blacksー 97%
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Trump Retweets Bogus Crime Graphic
By Robert Farley November 23, 2015 | Updated on November 24, 2015 https://www.factcheck.org/2015/11/trump-retweets-bogus-crime-graphic/
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump retweeted a bogus graphic purporting to show the percentage of whites killed by blacks and other homicide data delineated by race. Almost every figure in the graphic is wrong, some of them dramatically so.
Trump’s Twitter account retweeted the graphic on Nov. 22 without any explanation. The image shows a man hidden behind a bandanna pointing a gun under the heading “USA Crime Statistics — 2015” and next to statistics that purport to show homicides by race.
We’re not going to speculate about how originators of the graphic may have twisted data to come up with incorrect figures, or what intent may have been behind those errors — though others have.
We’ll just provide some correct figures according to the latest data available on all homicides from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports data, for 2014. The 2015 data won’t be released publicly until the fall of 2016.
In cases when the race of the perpetrator and victim were known, among the 3,021 white victims of murder in 2014, 2,488 of them were killed by white offenders, and 446 were killed by black offenders. Among the 2,451 black murder victims in 2014, 187 of them were killed by white offenders, and 2,205 were killed by black offenders. Here’s how the percentages work out:
⁂Whites killed by blacks: 14.8 percent.
⁂Whites killed by whites: 82.4 percent.
⁂Blacks killed by whites: 7.6 percent.
⁂Blacks killed by blacks: 90 percent.
⁂ FBI’s Criminal Justice：308 white felons killed by police officers in 2014, and 119 black felons.
⁂FBI homicide averages from 2010 to 2013 to the Washington Post：4 percent of all black homicide victims are killed by police, while 10 percent of all white homicide victims are killed by police.
⁂The Guardian：1,024 people have been killed by police in 2015 through Nov. 23. 509 white, 261 black, 164 Hispanic/Latino, 59 other/unknown, 18 Asian/Pacific Islander, 13 Native American.
⁂KilledByPolice.net：1,066 people in the U.S. were killed by police this year as of Nov. 23. The site counts 280 black people killed by police this year compared with 437 white people.
⁂Washington Post：a tally that stood at 878 this year as of the date of this posting. 417 were white and 224 were black. The site also tracks those who were black and unarmed — 30 so far this year.
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As those figures show, the graphic’s claims about “whites killed by blacks” and “whites killed by whites” aren’t just a little off — they are grossly inaccurate. The data from 2013 is nearly identical, so none of the 2014 figures is a one-year anomaly.
The 2015 data won’t be released publicly until the fall of 2016, a spokesman for the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division told us.
As for the statistics “blacks killed by police — 1%” and “whites killed by police — 3%,” we’re not sure where those figures come from or what they are supposed to represent. According to our analysis of FBI data on justifiable homicide, there were 308 white felons killed by police officers in 2014, and 119 black felons. And again, the FBI does not have 2015 data available, as the graphic retweeted by Trump purports to show. (State and local law enforcement agencies voluntarily provide the FBI with crime data.)
The Guardian has been keeping a running tally in 2015 of people killed by police, through its “The Counted” project. According to the Guardian, 1,024 people have been killed by police in 2015 through Nov. 23. This is the racial breakdown: 509 white, 261 black, 164 Hispanic/Latino, 59 other/unknown, 18 Asian/Pacific Islander, 13 Native American.
Another site, KilledByPolice.net tracks people killed by U.S. law enforcement officers. According to its tally, 1,066 people in the U.S. were killed by police this year as of Nov. 23. The site does not list race for many of those people, but among the ones it does, the site counts 280 black people killed by police this year compared with 437 white people.
And finally, the Washington Post tracks people killed by police officers, a tally that stood at 878 this year as of the date of this posting. Of them, 417 were white and 224 were black. The site also tracks those who were black and unarmed — 30 so far this year.
Peter Moskos, an associate professor in the Department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, applied FBI homicide averages from 2010 to 2013 to the Washington Post data to estimate that 4 percent of all black homicide victims are killed by police, while 10 percent of all white homicide victims are killed by police. It is, he allowed, a rough estimate. Moskos said those figures are shocking, “but not quite right” because of the different ways that agencies report the Hispanic label.
We reached out to the Trump campaign for backup for the figures cited in the graphic. The source listed on the graphic itself is “Crime Statistics Bureau — San Francisco,” a nonexistent agency, as far as we can tell. (Moskos said there is no such thing.) We also asked for the origin of the graphic. If we hear back, we’ll update this piece.
Last month, a Trump retweet caused a bit of a stir after someone with access to his account retweeted a message to explain a dip in the polls that said of Iowans. “Too much Monsanto in the corn creates issues in the brain,” it said. Trump later tweeted that the intern who “accidentally” sent the message “apologizes.” No word yet on whether Trump — who boasts that he does a lot of the tweets personally — is responsible for retweeting the bogus crime graphic.
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アメリカで過去から現在、政治的・社会的に何が起こっているか？今デモや暴動のスローガンBlack Lives Matter(BLM)の意味とは？凡人が今まで書きためていたことをデータを出して補強している。メディアを鵜吞みにしているたくさんの人を見かけるが、アメリカを詳しく正しく知りたい人にお勧め。これを知らないでアメリカ通にはなれない。笑。なおアメリカの政治は実質2党制システム。共和党と民主党。保守派と革新（リベラル）派とに分かれる。でもそれは大雑把で、思想的にはかなり幅が広い。保守派といってもキリスト教色が強い議員もいれば、そうでない者もいる。中立的な保守派もいる。革新派も保守派に近い人もいれば、左翼的な人物もいる。この記事で問題になっているのはFar Left（超革新/左翼的・反アメリカ的議員）たとえば一例だが、黒人民主党議員Maxine Moore Waters（California's 43rd congressional district）はかなり過激。BLMを支持し、黒人差別の名のもとに暴動に同情的な立場だ。2党制は国民投票の大統領選と同様に民主主義を機能させるための妥協的産物で、必要不可欠にみえる。つまり政権の交代が可能になる。日本のように腐敗政治が蔓延しても、自由民主党に政権の長期独占を許すのも、野党が烏合（バカ）の衆でしかなく、英知の欠如からであろう。
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Nolte: Overwhelming Evidence Exposes Democrat Party’s Ongoing Systemic Racism
Dustin Chambers/Getty ImagesDustin Chambers/Getty Images
JOHN NOLTE15 Jun 2020
Facts: America is accused of racism, of holding racial minorities back by way of system-wide white supremacism, and yet Jews, black Nigerians, Indian Americans (from India), and Asians are more successful in America than whites, and their respective imprison rates are lower than whites.
How is it possible in a country that we’re told is riddled with the cancer of white supremacism for those four groups to enjoy a higher standard of living and more success than their all-powerful, white oppressors?
The asking of the question answers the question.
⁂Facts…
*Police shootings of unarmed people (including blacks) have dropped dramatically over the past few years.
*Black and white deaths at the hands of police officers are almost perfectly representative of the country’s racial make-up involving police interactions.
*The black imprisonment rate has been dramatically shrinking since 2006.
*Black and whites are equally satisfied with their local police.
*The black unemployment rate just hit record lows.
*President Trump just signed long overdue criminal justice reform.
*Every single American — white and black — was appalled by what happened to George Floyd and wants to see his family receive justice.
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⁂Facts…
Below are the most controversial deaths of black Americans at the hands of police officers going back a full three years — plus those going back further that became national stories. I’m not here to question whether or not the police acted appropriately in each case. It is enough that they are controversial.
Below is the name of the victim, the city/state where the death occurred, and the political party in charge of the police at the time…
Rayshard Brooks – Atlanta, GA – Democrat
George Floyd – Minneapolis, MN – Democrat
Breonna Taylor – Louisville, KY – Democrat
Manuel Ellis – Tacoma, WA – Democrat
Atatiana Jefferson – Fort Worth, TX – Republican
Javier Ambler – Austin, TX – Democrat
Tony McDade – Tallahassee, FL – Democrat
Dion Johnson – Phoenix, AZ – Democrat
Jemel Roberson – Chicago, IL – Democrat
Botham Jean – Dallas, TX – Democrat
Stephon Clark – Sacramento, CA – Democrat
Jordan Edwards – Dallas, TX – Democrat
Eric Garner – NY, NY – Democrat
Laquan McDonald – Chicago, IL – Democrat
John Crawford, Beavercreek, OH – Republican
Freddie Gray – Baltimore, MD – Democrat
Out of those 16 names, 14 happened in cities or towns where a Democrat is in charge of the police department.
No one is stopping any of those cities from instituting police reforms … other than the Democrats who refuse to institute police reforms.
⁂Facts…
Have you noticed that during this three-week Woke Purge that those in powerful positions who are getting fired or canceled for some sort of discrimination hail from far-left institutions like the corporate media and Hollywood…?
*Meghan Markle’s BFF Jessica Mulroney
*ABC News Exec Barbara Fedida
*Feminist businesswoman Audrey Gelman
*Left-wing editor of Man Repeller Leandra Medine Cohen
*Super-Woke CBC Host Wendy Melsey
*Super-Woke Vanderpump Rules Reality Show Stars Stassi Schroeder, Kristen Doute, Max *Boyens, and Brett Caprioni
*Bon Appetit Editor-in-Chief Adam Rapoport
*Refinery29 Top Editor Christene Barberich
*The Flash co-star Hartley Sawyer
*Editorial Page Editor of The New York Times James Bennet
*Philadelphia Inquirer Executive Editor Stan Wischnowski
*Second City CEO Andrew Alexander
*TV writer for NBC’s Law & Order: Organized Crime Craig Gore
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Every not so funny joke. Every unfair stereotype. Every blatant injustice, no matter how big or small. Every time I remained silent… I take responsibility.
With that in mind, let me share something with you…
I’m a white guy who lives in the rural South. We moved here from Los Angeles in 2011, and over the last nine years, I have heard exactly one off-color racial remark. One. Some guy suggested I name my black dog “Obama.” That’s it. Over nine years as a white guy living in the South, that’s it. I didn’t lecture the guy. I didn’t get in his face. But my immediate reaction, which I didn’t even have time to think about, made it clear I didn’t care for the remark. He responded with a quick “sorry,” and nothing of the kind was ever said again over the two or three times I had to deal with him after that.
So, let me ask you… What the hell is going on in left-wing Hollywood where a pile of white actors are so ravaged by guilt they feel compelled to apologize for all the times they remained silent, every time they tolerated a racist joke or act of discrimination?
I’ll tell you what the hell is going on in left-wing Hollywood…
No, seriously, click on that link. Read it, and then sit back and ponder just how racist Hollywood must be where over 18 years and 14 seasons not one black man or woman was picked to star as ABC/Disney’s bachelor or bachelorette.
Think about how blatantly racist things are in Hollywood, things are at ABC/Disney, where it took nearly two decades in 21st century America for the studio to choose a black bachelor or bachelorette.
⁂Facts…
All these cities where black Americans are gunned down, where blacks claim they live under systemic racism… All of them are run by Democrats — all of them — and in most cases, have been for generations: Chicago, Minneapolis, Baltimore. St. Louis, Oakland, Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Austin, Charlotte, Atlanta, Detroit, New Orleans, Flint, Memphis, Birmingham… and on and on and on…
Democrats, Democrats, Democrats, Democrats…
⁂Facts…
This lunacy about defunding the police embraced by Democrats, left-wing celebrities, and left-wing media elites will ravage black America in a way so disproportionate to the rest of the country, it will make your head spin.
My heart breaks for the urban blight and the death toll that always comes with it.
⁂Facts…
The failing public schools, especially in urban areas, are run exclusively by Democrats, and it is Democrats who fight the hardest to ensure there are no reforms… No school choice, no vouchers, no charter schools, no hope…
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⁂Facts…
The looting and burning, the destruction over the past few weeks that has been encouraged and excused by the left-wing media, left-wing celebrities, and Democrats, is almost exclusively occurring in predominantly back neighborhoods.
White media elites, white celebrities, and white Democrats are openly encouraging marauders of every color to destroy black neighborhoods and are couching this evil as virtue.
⁂Facts…
No one can express the following more eloquently than a black Berkeley professor who must remain anonymous in order to protect his/her job: [emphasis added]
The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.
The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating. No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites. No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites.
If this had been done to Japanese Americans, or Jewish Americans, or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would surely be no different to the roughest parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The History department of UCB is now an integral institutional promulgator of a destructive and denigrating fallacy about the black race.
Democrats, the media, Hollywood, and the organized left have made it their mission to devastate black America… To keep blacks poor, angry, frustrated, and bitter — even as other minority groups somehow flourish under all this “systemic oppression.”
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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UCバークレイ大学・歴史学教授（黒人）のオピニオン。何故反BLM(Black Lives Matter)なのか。彼の意見も凡人とまったく同じ。この記事にあるように、サンフランシスコ市ではアジア（中国）系の住人が黒人犯罪者の餌食、それが頂点に達しているらしい。初耳であるが、そういう犯罪はどこも似たり寄ったり。だから中国人に限らず、白人や日本人やその他の人種だってみな黒人を警戒している。それをだ、黒人差別だ、黒人の命は大切だなんだとほざいてデモやしまいには暴動し、略奪三昧している光景をビデオで見るたびに呆れて物も言えない。余談だがロスだったらヒスパニックのギャングにも注意。ガンポイントでの強盗を数人の被害者から聴いている。
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UC Berkeley History Professor’s Open Letter Against BLM, Police Brutality And Cultural Orthodoxy
BY CLOVERCHRONICLE ON JUNE 11, 2020
The following letter was allegedly written by a UC Berkeley history professor and shared among his or her colleagues anonymously (source / archive link):
Dear profs X, Y, Z
I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.
In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.
In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.
Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or ‘Uncle Toms’. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders. Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.
The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should be vigorously challenged by historians. Instead, it is being treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration of its profound flaws, or its worrying implication of total black impotence. This hypothesis is transforming our institution and our culture, without any space for dissent outside of a tightly policed, narrow discourse.
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A counternarrative exists. If you have time, please consider examining some of the documents I attach at the end of this email.
Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and allies is either primarily anecdotal (as in the case with the bulk of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ undeniably moving article) or it is transparently motivated. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black. Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict. This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries. And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department’s apparent desire to shoulder the ‘white man’s burden’ and to promote a narrative of white guilt.
If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it’s fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews. None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. “Those are racist dogwhistles”. “The model minority myth is white supremacist”. “Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime”, ad nauseam. These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.
Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM’s problematic view of history, and the department is being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position. Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those of us in a precarious position, which is no small number.
I personally don’t dare speak out against the BLM narrative, and with this barrage of alleged unity being mass-produced by the administration, tenured professoriat, the UC administration, corporate America, and the media, the punishment for dissent is a clear danger at a time of widespread economic vulnerability. I am certain that if my name were attached to this email, I would lose my job and all future jobs, even though I believe in and can justify every word I type.
The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.
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No discussion is permitted for nonblack victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of nonblack violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders. Home invaders like George Floyd. For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.
The claim that black intraracial violence is the product of redlining, slavery, and other injustices is a largely historical claim. It is for historians, therefore, to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jewry hasn’t led to equivalent rates of dysfunction and low SES performance among Japanese and Jewish Americans respectively. Arab Americans have been viciously demonized since 9/11, as have Chinese Americans more recently. However, both groups outperform white Americans on nearly all SES indices – as do Nigerian Americans, who incidentally have black skin. It is for historians to point out and discuss these anomalies. However, no real discussion is possible in the current climate at our department. The explanation is provided to us, disagreement with it is racist, and the job of historians is to further explore additional ways in which the explanation is additionally correct. This is a mockery of the historical profession.
Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates. Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades; the ‘systemic racism’ there was built by successive Democrat administrations.
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The patronizing and condescending attitudes of Democrat leaders towards the black community, exemplified by nearly every Biden statement on the black race, all but guarantee a perpetual state of misery, resentment, poverty, and the attendant grievance politics which are simultaneously annihilating American political discourse and black lives. And yet, donating to BLM is bankrolling the election campaigns of men like Mayor Frey, who saw their cities devolve into violence. This is a grotesque capture of a good-faith movement for necessary police reform, and of our department, by a political party. Even worse, there are virtually no avenues for dissent in academic circles. I refuse to serve the Party, and so should you. The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes, carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organisation using literal black slaves in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organisation using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves, many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM. And so, apparently, are we. The absence of counter-narrative enables this obscenity. Fiat lux, indeed.
There also exists a large constituency of what can only be called ‘race hustlers’: hucksters of all colors who benefit from stoking the fires of racial conflict to secure administrative jobs, charity management positions, academic jobs and advancement, or personal political entrepreneurship.
Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth, we can regard ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically segregationist. MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today. We are training leaders who intend, explicitly, to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing?
As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach. He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors.
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And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise. Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species. I’m ashamed of my department. I would say that I’m ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid, as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It’s hard to know what kneeling means, when you have to kneel to keep your job.
It shouldn’t affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.
The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating. No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites. No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites. If this had been done to Japanese Americans, or Jewish Americans, or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would surely be no different to the roughest parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The History department of UCB is now an integral institutional promulgator of a destructive and denigrating fallacy about the black race.
I hope you appreciate the frustration behind this message. I do not support BLM. I do not support the Democrat grievance agenda and the Party’s uncontested capture of our department. I do not support the Party co-opting my race, as Biden recently did in his disturbing interview, claiming that voting Democrat and being black are isomorphic. I condemn the manner of George Floyd’s death and join you in calling for greater police accountability and police reform. However, I will not pretend that George Floyd was anything other than a violent misogynist, a brutal man who met a predictably brutal end.
I also want to protect the practice of history. Cleo is no grovelling handmaiden to politicians and corporations. Like us, she is free.
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******
Make no mistake – BLM is a radical neo-Marxist political movement
ALEXANDRA PHILLIPS 12 June 2020 • 5:35pm The Telegraph
The rapid spread of protests across the West under the Black Lives Matter banner has left a political breathlessness from Baltimore to Berlin. Those in positions of authority are scrambling to show they are addressing endemic racism, and in the commercial sphere, not ending up on the wrong side of the debate and risking Twitter storms and boycotts. In a world where nothing is exempt from moral judgment, being on trend means signing up to radical political movements.
That is what Black Lives Matter is. Don’t take my word for it. Take theirs. The form of words that appears on most online posts connected to the group riffs on ‘the black radical tradition’ which counts among its past contributors the Black Panther Movement and Malcom X. BLM happily self-identifies as a neo-Marxist movement with various far left objectives, including defunding the police (an evolution of the Panther position of public open-carry to control the police), to dismantling capitalism and the patriarchal system, disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure, seeking reparations from slavery to redistribute wealth and via various offshoot appeals, to raise money to bail black prisoners awaiting trial. The notion of seizing control of the apportionment of capital, dismantling the frameworks of society and neutralising and undermining law enforcement are not just Marxist, but anarchic.
Desperate to appease a vociferous clamour, celebrities and companies are queuing up to endorse. Airbnb has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars, an ironic move for a company that enables profiting from real estate through casual lets, driving up rental prices and gentrifying neighbourhoods, impacting on affordable leases in inner cities.
Nike, which has come under fire for using sweatshops to manufacture unaffordable, ‘aspirational’ footwear to pitch to the poorest in society, is now striving for racial equality. Amazon has banned the police from using their facial recognition software in tackling crime, yet are happy to push for greater intrusion in the private sphere.
UK tea manufacturers, whose business was built on the back of slavery and operate under neo-colonial plantation models where tea is grown and picked through agrarian toil in the developing world to be shipped for production, packaging and profits in the West have jumped on the hashtag #Solidaritea. Post-truth absurdity is where we have reached. Yet as companies commercially conflate the tagline Black Lives Matter, with the movement Black Lives Matter, momentum builds for an organisation with little scrutiny or accountability, that is able to mobilise millions and encourage, wilfully or not, outpourings of vandalism, looting and violence across the West.
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With enormous sums of money flooding in - BLM had already received over $100 million from the Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy among others - and many written aims straight from the Communist copybook, there is surely reason for concern. Black Lives Matter is a somewhat amorphous and decentralised movement, allowing international chapters to set up under their banner. Not having a structure, a figurehead or centralised financial control means there is absolutely no accountability. Nobody to call for an end to violence, while providing a moral shield behind which perpetrators of crime can feel emboldened.
But decentralisation does not mean disorganisation. Even with a captive audience under lockdown filled with frustration, sparking a range of parallel protests across the West still demands highly skilled choreography. The sort of operation that requires thousands of avatars to flood social media platforms with calls to action, that can target and penetrate entire demographics simultaneously across a range of countries. That is simply not possible by a group of well meaning activists, however romantic about a cause you may wish to be. It can be achieved using extremely high level, sensitive intelligence equipment of the kind deep state operatives have access to.
Throughout history civil rights movements have been either aided and abetted or exploited by Communist foreign actors, from the American civil rights movement to apartheid in South Africa. By sowing discord in countries, socialist activists have hoped to nurture fertile grounds for socio-political fecundity. It is well within the realms of possibility that state-backed cyber warfare emanating from Russia and China would want to exploit and exacerbate mounting discontent while the West is still reeling from the pandemic.
A once small American movement that witnessed bursts of activity after individual cases of perceived police brutality has become the most prominent protest movement in Europe, and polarises societies wherever it goes. Unlike predecessors that often fell on the swords of their figureheads, this movement remains impervious to the accountability of a leader, because there are many. What we do know of the few founding members is that many are connected to radical Left organisations.
An FBI report released in 2017 found that attacks on police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Dallas, Texas were influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement, with 28 percent of those who used deadly force against police officers motivated by a hatred of police. An unclassified FBI study following the Dallas cop-killing spree of 2016 that left 5 officers shot dead reported departments and individual officers increasingly taking the decision to stop proactive policing amid concerns that anti-police defiance fueled in part by movements like Black Lives Matter had become the “new norm.”
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The sight of missiles being thrown at unarmed British police, with entire ranks forced to retreat from a baying mob should leave anybody who values national and community security with chills. Footage of an attack against a police officer and his colleague in Hackney attempting to apprehend an assault suspect showed members of the public filming the incident while one joined the fracas with a baseball bat. As statues are torn down and lists of demands are drawn up, sleepwalking towards lawlessness must terrify many members of the public.
The difficulty in raising criticism or calling for scrutiny of the movement, despite pulling in unimaginable revenue and endorsement from the biggest corporates, biggest names and most prominent political appeasers, is that it leaves the accuser open to being censored and attacked as a racist. As the movement establishes organised chapters across the West, is emboldened to make explicit commitments to extreme forms of socialism and anarchy, and generates a head of steam against the very structures and protections that have guarded Western society for decades, if all opposition is silenced and checks and balances swept aside, reversing a nascent tidal wave of mob rule will take significant and disturbing levels of force.
I support those who genuinely want to make the world a less prejudiced and more equal place, but there are many reasons to be concerned that Black Lives Matter is not enabling this, and instead is fostering division, chaos and destruction designed to bring the West to its knees - something that will harm the very people the movement purports to protect.
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Eight years after shooting, Nobel-winner Malala graduates
AFP•June 19, 2020
Pic=Malala first rose to prominence aged just 11 with a blog for the BBC's Urdu-language service charting her life in Swat under the Taliban (AFP Photo/Miguel SCHINCARIOL)
Nobel Prize-winning activist Malala Yousafzai, who moved to Britain after being shot for campaigning for girls' education in Pakistan, described her joy Friday at graduating from Oxford University.
Almost eight years after she was attacked by the Taliban on her school bus in the Swat Valley, the 22-year-old posted photos on Twitter of her celebrations with her family.
"Hard to express my joy and gratitude right now as I completed my Philosophy, Politics and Economics degree at Oxford," she said.
"I don't know what's ahead. For now, it will be Netflix, reading and sleep."
The photos show Malala covered in brightly coloured bits of paper and foam -- a student tradition -- and having a cake with her family, decorated with the words "Happy Graduation Malala".
Malala first rose to prominence aged just 11 with a blog for the BBC's Urdu-language service charting her life in Swat under the Taliban.
She was shot in the head by a Taliban hitman in October 2012, and after being flown to Britain for life-saving medical treatment, the family settled in Birmingham, central England.
She was at school there when she heard in 2014 that she had won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Indian activist Kailash Satyarthi "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education."
The youngest ever Nobel laureate, she has continued to speak out for girls' education.
TOMMY ROBINSONVIDEOWORLD NEWS
BLACK LIES MATTER – TOMMY WONT BE IN LONDON!
written by TR News 12th June 2020
Marxists, Anarchists and their affiliates have joined the BLM movement to create a race war. Black Lies Matter – Tommy Won’t Be In London!
The Black Lives Matter movement started in 2013 after Trayvon Martin – a young black lad – was shot dead by a neighbourhood watch officer in Florida. The person who shot Trayvon is George Zimmerman.
When the news broke of a young black lad shot dead in Florida, mainstream media outlets immediately manufactured a racial motive, much like they have done with the tragic death of George Floyd. Mainstream media in the USA reported that a “white man” shot Trayvon Martin – something that Black Lives Matter continues to do to this very day.
Black Lies Matter
The trouble is that the “racial narrative” has spun well and truly out of control. Mainstream media have been race-baiting in the USA for years, Democrat politicians in the USA have been race-baiting for years. Hollywood continues to support fake racial narratives every single day. Now the USA has exported a toxic blend of Black Supremacy, Black identity politics, Black Nationalism and Black victimhood here in the UK when we don’t have the same issues of race in Britain.
Well now we do, and it’s all based on LIES!
All Lives Matter
Nobody is saying there isn’t racism here in the UK; nobody is saying that racism doesn’t exist; nobody is saying that racially motivated attacks don’t happen here either. Black Lives Matter say race issues are common, systemic even, even here in the UK, we challenge any Black Lives Matter leader to name just ONE LAW that persecutes people on the amount of melanin a person has. The BLM movement peddles lies and disinformation creating tensions between Whites and Blacks; this is done with deliberate intent for the sole purpose of pitting people of the white and black communities against each other.
Here is the “white” man George Zimmerman. According to Black Lives Matter, he is a “white supremacist”. They completely ignore his mixed-race background and the fact that he identifies as “Hispanic”. They went with a false flag attack on “whitey” instead. Tell us, does George Zimmerman look “white” to you?
1-2
This is just one of many many lies that Black “Lies” Matter peddle to create tensions and hatred between the white and black community, not only in the USA but also here in the UK and Europe. Anyone watching the Black Lives Matter “peaceful protests” aired on mainstream news outlets will know (if they dig hard enough) there is very little that’s peaceful about them.
Black Lives Matter leadership run the movement like a black chapter of the Ku-Klux-Klan. The leaders are radical black socialists who want to burn everything down to the ground while they chase the phantom of white supremacy. Back in 2015, the Democrats (the equivalent of Labour here in the UK) passed a resolution to support the Black Lives Matter movement.
The DNC said, and we quote:
“[T]he DNC joins with Americans across the country in affirming ‘Black lives matter’ and the ‘say her name’ efforts to make visible the pain of our fellow and sister Americans as they condemn extrajudicial killings of unarmed African American men, women and children,”
Well, the Democrats have a history of racism, it’s not new, it’s still there alive and well, deeply embedded within the Democrat politic. Hillary Clinton (a Democrat and two-time presidential candidate for the Democrat Party) had a “good friend” who recently passed away; his name was Robert Byrd.
Here is Hillary eulogising for her “friend and mentor“.
To all those people who have been suckered into this radical lying left-wing Black Lives Matter movement. To all those black folk who have bought into its Marxist race-baiting divisive narrative – TR.News presents to you….
Robert Byrd – Grand Cyclops In The Ku-Klux-Klan
The black community in the USA and in the UK are being used by left-wing politicians.
AllLivesMatter
We won’t apologise for saying that.
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これが真実だ。Black Lives Matterそんなまやかしには乗らない。その化けの皮が剝がれいる。BLM is a radical neo-Marxist political movement. All Lives Matterが正しいスローガンだろ。黒人だけが特別じゃない。人種差別の極み。それでなくても犯罪の世界では皮肉なことに、すでに黒人至上主義が確立している。
******
OPINION
Finley: America’s hate crime surge is a hoax
Nolan Finley, The Detroit NewsPublished 10:30 p.m. ET April 6, 2019 | Updated 8:52 a.m. ET April 7, 2019
Before actor Jussie Smollett’s whopper unraveled, it was wildly parroted by a media too eager to believe anything that confirms its conviction that America if boiling with hate, Finley says.
Before actor Jussie Smollett’s whopper unraveled, it was wildly parroted by a media too eager to believe anything that confirms its conviction that America if boiling with hate, Finley says. (Photo: Paul Beaty, AP)
It’s been repeated so often it’s taken as fact: Hate crimes have soared over the past two years, and the blame rests with President Donald Trump and supporters inspired by his hateful rhetoric.
It’s a compelling story, supported by statistics that show an increase of 17% in the number of hate crimes reported to the FBI during the Trump presidency.
But it isn’t true. The surge has little to do with Trump and his red hat brigade. This according to Will Reilly, a Kentucky State University associate professor, who extensively researched hate-fueled violence in America for his book Hate Crime Hoax.
“Almost all of that surge is due to the simple fact that in 2017 the number of police departments reporting hate crimes to the FBI increased by 1,000,” says Reilly. “The surge narrative is pretty dishonest.”
And destructive. The perception that hate-filled mobs are roaming the streets attacking minorities, gay and transgender people and other vulnerable citizens in the name of Donald Trump keeps us on edge and makes us distrustful of our neighbors.
It also creates a gullibility that it allows us to believe things we should know aren’t true. Like Jussie Smollett’s ridiculous tale of being attacked by two MAGA-hat-wearing thugs on a frigid Chicago street. Before the actor’s whopper unraveled, it was wildly parroted by a media too eager to believe anything that confirms its conviction that America is boiling with hate.
Smollett’s fake hate crime is not a one-off. Reilly’s research finds that most high-profile hate crimes over the past few years have turned out to be hoaxes.
Reilly studied 409 reported hate crimes over the past five years that received media attention. They include incidents such as the racist graffiti at Eastern Michigan University and the minority woman in Grand Rapids who claimed a group of white men urinated on her.
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“In major cases, almost all of them have been hoaxes,” Reilly says. “The number of hate crime hoaxes actually exceeds the number of convictions. The majority of these high-profile incidents never happened.”
It’s also a false narrative that white cops are targeting African American men, Reilly says.
In 2015, he says, of the 1,200 Americans killed by police, just 258 were black, and only 17 of those were unarmed and shot by white officers. And yet, his research indicates just 10 percent of the media coverage of police violence focused on the non-black victims.
“White guys shot by police under identical circumstances never become national stories,” Reilly says.
The distorted coverage has helped give rise to social movements such as Black Lives Matter that are based more on perception than reality.
“It’s worth noting that that interracial crime is not a huge threat in America,” says Reilly, who is African American. “Eighty-five percent of whites are killed by other whites. Ninety-four percent of blacks are killed by other blacks.”
Americans may be politically divided. But they aren’t taking their disagreements to the streets. Nor have they created a dangerous environment for certain groups of their fellow citizens.
“Portraying America as a hate-filled country is wildly inaccurate,” Reilly says.
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According to the 2018 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)
Done by the Bureau of Justice Statistics(BJS)
Under the U.S. Department of Justice(DOJ)
59778 - Blacks were the victims of white violence
547948 - Whites were the victims of black violence
9x - With those numbers blacks commit 9x more violence against whites than whites do against blacks
But these numbers are misleading because the population for whites and blacks is not the same
197000000 Non-Hispanic Whites make up 61.1% of the population
38000000 African-Americans(Black) make up 12.6% of the population
What this means when adjusted for population size
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犯罪統計を調べれば黒人犯罪数の多さに気付く。アメリカでの殺人事件ではその半数が黒人対黒人の殺人。でも数値を見ただけでは、日本人には犯罪がそもそもすくない社会に慣れているためパッとしないだろう。実感を持たせるために、どんなものかをニュース記事で拾ってみた。場所はイリノイ州の大都市シカゴ市。前大統領のオバマや黒人テレビホストで名をはせたオープラの本拠地。そこにある黒人コミュニティーでつい先週の週末6月19日（金曜夜）ー22日（月曜朝）に起こった殺人事件である。殺人事件だけしか書いてないが、その他の犯罪も当然あることも忘れてはならない。これが毎日のように起きていると思ってよい。余談だが、ニューヨークとかロスとかの大都市も事情は同じとみて正しい。またアフリカの黒人国家を比べると面白い。南アフリカは黒人人口が80％であり、白人がたったの10％しかいない。国をうごかしているのは黒人。南アフリカの驚異的な犯罪数はいったいどう説明するのか。白人の黒人差別という言い訳は通用しない。笑
****
104 shot, 15 fatally, over Father’s Day weekend in Chicago
Five children were among the 15 people killed, including a 3-year-old boy and 13-year-old girl killed in separate shootings in Austin on Saturday.
By Sun-Times Wire Updated Jun 22, 2020, 10:02am CDT
Chicago saw its highest number of gun violence victims in a single weekend this year with 104 people shot across the city from Friday evening to Monday morning, 15 of them fatally. Five of those killed were minors.
The weekend saw more shooting victims but less fatalities than the last weekend of May, when 85 people were shot, 24 of them fatally — Chicago’s most deadly weekend in years.
In a Sunday news conference, Chicago Police Supt. David Brown reflected on the surge in gun violence. “Bullets don’t just tear apart the things they strike,” Brown said. “Bullets also tear apart families. Bullets destroy neighborhoods and they ruin any sense of safety in a community.”
⁂Five children killed
The latest child fatality happened early Monday in Austin on the West Side.
Two boys, 15 and 16, were walking in an alley at 12:18 a.m. in the 4700 block of West Superior Street when someone fired at them, possibly from a gray sedan, according to Chicago police. The 15-year-old was shot in his leg, chest and abdomen. He was taken to Stroger Hospital and pronounced dead. The other boy, 16, was hit in the ankle and also taken to Stroger. He was in fair condition.
Saturday night, a 13-year-old girl was killed and two other teens were wounded in Austin on the West Side.
The girl was inside a home about 8:30 p.m. in the 1000 block of North LeClaire Avenue when the shots were fired, and she was struck in the neck, police said. Amaria J. Jones was taken to Stroger, where she was pronounced dead, authorities said.
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Two boys, 15 and 16, were sitting on a porch when one of them noticed a red laser pointing at him and heard gunfire, police said. The younger boy was struck in the back and the older boy was struck in the leg. They were taken to Mt. Sinai Hospital in good condition.
Two hours earlier, a 3-year-old boy was fatally wounded when someone opened fire at his father while they were driving in Austin.
The toddler, identified as Mekhi James, was struck in the back about 6:25 p.m. when someone in a blue Honda pulled behind the black SUV the boy’s 27-year-old father was driving in the 600 block of North Central Avenue and fired several rounds, authorities said.
A police source said the father was believed to be the intended target of the shooting.
The father drove the boy to West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park, police said, but the boy was pronounced dead shortly after arriving. The father was also treated for a graze wound to the abdomen.
Two teenage boys were killed just over an hour before that in South Chicago.
Jasean Francis, 17, and the 16-year-old were in an alley about 5:10 p.m. in the 7900 block of South Luella Avenue when a male suspect approached them and fired shots, authorities said. Francis was shot in the back, chest and hand while the 16-year-old was shot in the back and side. Both were taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where they were pronounced dead.
⁂Monday morning
The weekend’s latest fatal shooting left a man dead Monday morning in Lawndale.
The 41-year-old was on the street at 4:26 a.m. in the 3800 block of West Harrison Street when someone shot him in the face, according to police. He died about an hour later at Stroger. A person of interest was taken into custody after people near the scene identified him as the possible shooter.
Minutes earlier, another man was killed in East Garfield Park.
The 30-year-old was walking at 4:18 a.m. in the 100 block of South Washtenaw Avenue when someone in the alley fired shots, according to police. He was hit in the neck and taken to Stroger, where he died.
⁂Sunday
Early Sunday, a man was killed and three others were wounded in a shooting in Humboldt Park.
The men were arguing with a group about 12:04 a.m. in the 2600 block of West Potomac Avenue when they were shot, authorities said. Alexis Perez, 41, was shot multiple times and was pronounced dead on the scene. Two other men, 23 and 21, both went to Stroger in good condition. The older man was shot in the knee and hip while the younger man was shot in both legs. A fourth man, 34, was shot in his legs and arms. He was treated and released from Mt. Sinai Hospital.
Sunday evening, a shooting left one man dead and another wounded Sunday evening in Humboldt Park.
They were shot about 7:30 p.m. in the 800 block of North Springfield Avenue, authorities said. Toby Boens, 22, was struck in the chest and pronounced dead at Stroger.
A 34-year-old man was hit in the arm and abdomen and was taken to the same hospital in critical condition, police said.
Ten minutes earlier, a man was shot to death in West Rogers Park on the North Side.
Gary Tinder, 20, was walking about 7:20 p.m. in the 6200 block of North Troy Street when someone approached and shot him in the abdomen, authorities said. He was taken to St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, where he was pronounced dead.
About two hours before that, a man was fatally shot during an argument in Gage Park on the Southwest Side.
Alberto Fayre-Estrada was arguing with someone about 5:15 p.m. in an alley in the 5500 block of South Fairfield Avenue, authorities said.The other person pulled out a gun and shot him in the abdomen. He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital in serious condition and pronounced dead at 11:56 p.m. He lived in Gage Park.
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⁂Saturday
Two men were shot, one of them fatally, in another attack Saturday evening in Austin.
Officers responding to reports of a person shot at 7:46 p.m. in the 200 block of North Central Avenue found the two men on the sidewalk, authorities said. Alonzo X. Robinson, 27, was shot in the torso and taken to West Suburban Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. The other man, 32, was hit in the left foot and taken to the same hospital in good condition.
Less than an hour before that, a man was fatally shot and another was injured in Logan Square on the Northwest Side.
The men, 23 and 24, were outside about 7 p.m. in the 1900 block of North Western Avenue when a group of males approached them yelling gang slogans, according to police. The group asked what gang the men were with, and a fight ensued. During the altercation, one of the males pulled out a gun and fired shots.
The 23-year-old man was struck in the neck and pronounced dead on the scene, police said. The 24-year-old was hit in the arm and was taken to Saints Mary and Elizabeth Medical Center in good condition.
⁂Friday
A 33-year-old man was killed Friday night in Garfield Park on the West Side.
Almos Collum was driving about 10:25 p.m. in the 4100 block of West Congress Parkway when a black SUV approached and someone inside fired into his vehicle, authorities said. He was shot multiple times and taken to Stroger, where he died at 10:49 p.m. He lived in Austin.
The weekend’s earliest homicide happened less than an hour earlier blocks away in Austin.
Three men were outside about 9:52 p.m. in the 4800 block of West Gladys Avenue when someone in a passing vehicle unleashed gunfire, police said.
Johnny Teajue, 33, was shot in the neck and taken to Stroger, where he was pronounced dead, according to police and the medical examiner’s office. He lived in Washington Park.
A 34-year-old man was shot in the foot and is in good condition at West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park, police said. A 43-year-old man who was shot in the lower back took himself to Mt. Sinai Hospital, where he was listed in fair condition.
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⁂Nonfatal attacks
The injured included a 16-year-old girl shot early Monday in an East Garfield Park shooting that left four other people wounded.
The group was at a large gathering on the street at 2:45 a.m. on South Central Park Boulevard when someone fired shots from a passing vehicle, according to police. The girl was hit in the abdomen and taken to Stroger in critical condition. A 24-year-old woman shot in the leg and a 32-year-old man shot in the arm were taken to the same hospital in good condition.
Two other men, 30 and 31, were each shot in the leg and went to Mt. Sinai Hospital on their own in good condition, police said.
On Sunday night, a 12-year-old girl was grazed in a shooting that also wounded a man in Burnside.
She was outside with a group of people about 9:50 p.m. on East 90th Place when someone in a black vehicle fired shots, police said. The girl was grazed on the leg and taken to Trinity Hospital. A 21-year-old man was shot in the hip and taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center. Both were in good condition.
A teenage boy was shot early Sunday in Humboldt Park on the West Side.
The 17-year-old was in a vehicle with three other people at 12:36 a.m. on West Hirsch Street when someone walked up and started shooting, according to police. The vehicle took off and hit several parked cars. The four occupants got out, at which point the suspect shot the teen in the abdomen. He was taken to Stroger in fair condition.
Another teen boy was grazed by a bullet early Saturday in Little Italy.
The 17-year-old was driving about 12:45 a.m. on South Loomis Street when someone in a gold sedan fired shots, police said. He was grazed in the ribcage and taken to Mt. Sinai Hospital in good condition.
A few minutes later, a 64-year-old woman was shot inside her home in Humboldt Park on the West Side.
She was inside at 12:49 a.m. in the 1000 block of North Lawndale Avenue when bullets came through her window, according to police. The woman was hit in the arm and taken to Norwegian American Hospital in fair condition. She did not appear to be the shooter’s intended target.
The weekend’s first shooting wounded a 35-year-old woman Friday evening in South Shore.
She was with a group of people about 6:30 p.m. in the 7400 block of South Phillips Avenue when a light-colored SUV pulled up and someone inside opened fire, police said. She was shot in the arm, and her condition was stabilized at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
At least 66 other people were hurt in shootings throughout Chicago between 5 p.m. Friday and 5 a.m. Monday.
Last weekend’s gun violence killed two people and wounded 31 others across the city.
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*****
Blacks account for nearly half of all NYC arrests 6 years after end of stop-and-frisk: NYPD data
Blacks make up about 24% of the population in New York City.
By Bill Hutchinson June 30, 2020, 2:01 AM ABCNews
In an analysis of arrest data thousands of police departments voluntarily reported to the FBI, in 800 jurisdictions, black people were arrested at a rate five times higher than white people in 2018.
As the novel coronavirus tightened its deadly grip on New York City in the spring, police went on a social distancing crackdown.
Instead of the move sending a message about the importance of preventing the spread of the contagion, it served to inflame racial tensions due to the demographics of the arrestees.
Under pressure from angry politicians and community members, the New York Police Department (NYPD) released data that activists say bolstered accusations of minorities being targeted once again by an uneven-handed law enforcement program.
Of the 125 "COVID-19 related" arrests between March 16 and May 10, 68% were Black, 24% were Latino and just under 7% were white, according to the NYPD Data. NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea disputed the notion that his officers were engaged in racist policing, saying those accusations “could not be anything further from the truth.”
While the sampling of the social distancing arrests is small, critics calling for equality in the way the NYPD goes about enforcing laws say it's indicative of numbers that have refused to budge despite decades of police reforms and talk of more revisions. And activists say it points to an issue that communities across the country are grappling with in the wake of George Floyd's death -- uneven policing that disproportionately impacts people of color.
Not only did New York City become the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic, it became a flashpoint of protest in the aftermath of Floyd's killing even as Mayor Bill de Blasio and other leaders touted New York in recent years as a national model for how a diverse and liberal city can make police reform a top priority.
In the six years since New York City ended its controversial stop-and-frisk program -- a police practice intended to drive down crime but was deemed by a federal judge to be unconstitutional "indirect racial profiling" -- the number of arrests has fallen by nearly half. Yet, Blacks still comprise about 50% of those taken into custody annually, according to records from America's largest municipal police force.
While some critics of stop and frisk hoped its eradication would be the beginning of the end of racial disparities in law enforcement, an ABC News examination of arrests reported to the NYC OpenData website shows that apparently hasn't come to fruition.
Between Jan. 1, 2014, when stop and frisk effectively ended, and Dec. 31, 2019, Blacks have comprised 48% of the nearly 1.8 million arrests made by the NYPD, while Hispanics comprised 34% of the arrests and whites accounted for 12%, according to the data. The statistics in the five-year period show that the most arrests, 281,258, were made for dangerous drugs, while 208,849 were for misdemeanor assault and another 90,097 were for felony assault.
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"There are other just as nefarious, just as racially-biased practices that have filled the void. Unless you're really going to start at the roots of the problem, you’re going to end up in the same place," said Ann Mathews, managing director of the criminal defense practice for The Bronx Defenders, a city public defenders office. "We may be seeing lower arrest numbers, but the way those arrests are happening, who’s being arrested, how they are being arrested, how the police are targeting for arrests, that’s really unchanged. There has not been a sea change in the way the NYPD approaches policing."
At the height of stop-and-frisk in New York City in 2011, police made 412,859 arrests. Blacks accounted for 202,284 of those suspects arrested, or 49%, while 139,363 Hispanics were arrested, or 34%, and the 50,925 white suspects accounted for 12% of the arrests. The most arrests in that year, 103,835, were for dangerous drugs, followed by 36,112 for misdemeanor assault.
Since 2011, the number of arrests in New York City has fallen annually from 396,280 in 2012 to 214,617 in 2019. But the racial breakdown on arrestees remains consistent, the data shows.
In 2019, Blacks, while comprising 24% of the total New York City population of more than 8.3 million, still accounted for 48% of those arrested. Meanwhile, whites, who make up 43% of the population, accounted for 11% of the arrests; Hispanics, who account for 29% of the population, made up 34% of the arrests; and Asians, who account for 14% of the population, comprised 6% of the arrests, according to the data.
Data from 2020, shows that as of March 31 the NYPD had made 44,824 arrests. Of those arrested, 49% were Black, 32% were Hispanic and 11% were white.
Asked by ABC News about the apparent disparities in its arrest data, the NYPD denied that its anti-crime policies are targeting Blacks and Hispanics.
"The NYPD enforces the law fairly and equally and works tirelessly every day to keep every resident and every neighborhood safe," Sgt. Mary Frances O'Donnell, an NYPD spokesperson, said in a statement to ABC News. "The NYPD is committed to ongoing criminal justice reform that balances public safety, investigations and the ability to bring justice for New Yorkers who are victimized."
John DeCarlo, chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of New Haven's Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences, told ABC News that while he does not believe police target people for arrest based on race, he said officers often find themselves enforcing "overreaching laws" passed by legislatures that end up being biased against residents of economically disadvantaged communities.
"In many of the poorer communities, there's a higher minority representation. So what happens is cops come in contact with minority communities that really need not necessarily police services but other kinds of services. They need counselors, they need ways to solve problems that we all have but they don't have the wherewithal to use because of economic restrictions," DeCarlo, the former police chief of Branford, Connecticut, told ABC News.
He noted that Eric Garner "lost his life basically because of an overreaching law." Garner, a 43-year-old Black man, died in July 2014 when an NYPD officer placed him in a banned chokehold after plainclothes police attempted to arrest him for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes.
“I’m not being an apologist for bad policing in any way, but I think that we make laws very often and we ask cops to enforce laws that may be biased toward economic status," DeCarlo said.
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⁂'Seismic shift' in policing
NYPD Commissioner Shea hailed the disbanding of the police department's plainclothes Anti-crime Unit this month as a "seismic shift in the culture of how NYPD polices this great city." While the elite unit was credited with taking numerous guns off the streets, it became a symbol of the aggressive police tactics and officer-involved shootings that protests sweeping New York and the nation keep railing against. The unit also had a disproportionate number of complaints against it registered with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent police watchdog group empowered to investigate grievances filed against NYPD officers and recommend disciplinary action.
"I would consider this in the realm of closing one of the last chapters of 'Stop, Question and Frisk,'" Shea said. "I think it's time to move forward and change how we police in this city. We can do it with brains. We can do it with guile. We can move away from brute force."
On Friday, de Blasio said he supports Shea's decision, explaining that the NYPD can replace the Anti-crime Unit with technology, precision policing and "not have the negative of some of the concerns that have been raised by the community."
He also praised Shea's swift action by suspending without pay an officer caught on video this month using a banned chokehold on Ricky Bellevue, a 35-year-old Black man who had allegedly been heckling him and his colleagues. The officer, David Afanador, allegedly had to be pulled off Bellevue by a colleague.
Afanador has since been charged with felony strangulation and attempted strangulation. He has pleaded not guilty.
"That's the way things need to be: fast, clear disciplinary process, clear accountability. That's what we'll do going forward," said de Blasio, who has made a commitment to cutting the NYPD budget and redistributing those funds to community-based nonprofit youth and social services programs.
Bellevue's sister-in-law, Judith Ceno, said at a news conference on Friday that Bellevue was so traumatized by the incident he's checked himself into a hospital for a mental evaluation.
⁂Socioeconomic effects on the arrest rate
In the aftermath of the May 25 police-involved death of George Floyd, a handcuffed Black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on the back of his neck -- an incident captured on video -- protests and violence have broken out across the country. Fueled by numerous accounts of police disproportionately arresting or using deadly force on Black citizens, demonstrators have demanded police departments reform their use-of-force policies and have pushed to defund law enforcement agencies.
"The movement, in general, is needed to awaken so many minds to the systemic racism that's been happening for years," Lizzy Ashleigh, a member of the Black Lives Matter movement from Brooklyn, New York, told ABC News following the death of Rayshard Brooks, a Black man who was fatally shot in the back by a white Atlanta police officer.
On June 12, Brooks was found allegedly asleep in his car in a Wendy's drive-thru. He was about to be arrested for drunken driving when, during a scuffle, he grabbed an officer's stun gun and ran, deploying the device at an officer chasing him but missing, according to police body-camera and surveillance video released by prosecutors. As the 27-year-old Brooks continued to run, an officer, Garrett Rolfe, opened fire with his handgun, hitting him twice in the back and then allegedly kicking Brooks as he lay dying on the ground, according to prosecutors.
Like Chauvin, Rolfe was fired from the police department and charged with murder.
"In the same respect where so many Black people have been saying for so long, ‘Hey, we’ve told you that we’ve suffered more abuse at the hands of police than our white counterparts,' society is finally realizing that by virtue of seeing these videos," Kirk Burkhalter, a professor at New York Law School and a former NYPD detective, told ABC News.
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Burkhalter said the NYPD arrest data mirrors that of large police departments across the county and "has been another long cry of the Black community that Black Americans are more likely to be arrested generally than white Americans."
An analysis by ABC News of arrest data voluntarily reported to the FBI by thousands of city and county police departments around the country reveals that, in 800 jurisdictions, Blacks were arrested at a rate five times higher than white people in 2018, after accounting for the demographics of the cities and counties those police departments serve.
In 250 jurisdictions, Black people were 10 times more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts.
“The root of the problem is more of a socioeconomic problem than a crime problem," said Burkhalter, who retired from the NYPD in 2004 after a 20-year career.
Burkhalter noted that the bulk of the arrests that have occurred in New York City have been in the poorest communities, where educational, health and social service resources are lacking.
⁂5 million arrests in 13 years
Of the more than 5 million arrests the NYPD made between 2006, the earliest year the NYC OpenData base goes back to, and 2019, the most recent data, most were made in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in New York. Of the 10 New York City police precincts that recorded the most arrests during the 13-year span, seven were in predominantly minority, lower-income neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn.
"Those folks also tend to rely more on 911 because that is their only resource," Burkhalter said. "Say I’m an investment banker and I live on the Upper East Side [of Manhattan] in a really nice neighborhood. If I have an issue with my spouse or an issue with my child, their first inkling is not to call 911. They’ll involve some type of private entity, a social worker, a psychologist, a counselor, whatever the case.
“Folks who don’t have those resources, don’t have the money for those resources and may not even know those resources exist, they’re going to call 911," Burkhalter said. “But once police get there, what are we trained to do? We’re trained to look for a crime. So I’m going to show up and the first question I’m going to ask is, 'Did he or she touch you?' And if they did, that’s harassment or that’s misdemeanor assault and under state law, you have to be arrested."
Burkhalter said that numerous arrests happen on the streets in communities saturated by police officers due to high crime. He said that when he was a patrol officer, he called arrests in such communities "the low-hanging fruit of law enforcement," adding that many of the arrests were for possession and use of narcotics.
"As you look at the statistics of who was arrested for drug possession and those types of crimes … you would think that only Black folks and Hispanic folks use drugs. And that's not true," Burkhalter said.
Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit research and advocacy center working to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system, said that while stop and frisk ended six years ago, that doesn’t necessarily change the allocation of law enforcement officers around the city.
"So it’s quite likely the same low-income minority communities where stop and frisk was basically taking place still might have roughly the same allocation of officers there," Mauer told ABC News. "They’re doing a variety of things, they’re just not doing stop or frisks anymore."
Mauer said that there used to be an unspoken understanding in police departments that crime in poor minority communities was less of a concern unless it spilled over into more affluent neighborhoods.
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“For a very long time, the problem of policing in minority communities was not over-policing but under-policing. People in every Black neighborhood in New York and every other city would call the police and be very frustrated that they got very little response, whether it was domestic violence, or shoplifting, or anything else," Mauer said. "Now there’s often a very heavy presence of police, but that heavy presence has contributed to these enormous racial disparities that we see in the justice system and that goes above and beyond any increase involving crime in those communities."
⁂'Good news, bad news'
Mauer said besides having a detrimental impact on the employment and education opportunities of young minority people who get caught up in the justice system, the disproportionate arrests of Black and Hispanic people breed mistrust of the police.
"Police can’t promote public safety on their own. It only works if they have a strong relationship with the community," Mauer said. "Most crimes aren’t committed with a police officer observing them in action. So if you want to get information that a crime has happened, identification of the alleged perpetrators, you have to have people who have confidence in the police that they will respond, that they will do it in a fair way and that they demonstrate concern for public safety."
He said the NYPD and other large law enforcement agencies across the country have taken steps over the past two decades to rebuild trust in neighborhoods of color by hiring and promoting more minority officers and emphasizing community policing. A big initiative of Mayor de Blasio, community policing is a strategy that focuses on building ties and working closely with members of the communities.
"We see much greater diversity on the force and in leadership as well in police agencies," he said.
Mauer said that overall he views the NYPD arrest data as “a good news-bad news situation."
"The bad news is apparently the Black proportion of arrests has hardly budged at all," he said. "While the good news is that if arrests are down by roughly half in New York, then that means that only half as many African Americans are being arrested as well as for other racial groups, too."
But Ann Mathews of The Bronx Defenders said that while she welcomes police reform efforts, "what is clear is what they haven't brought to date is unbiased policing.”
Mathews said piecemeal changes police have instituted usually when there is a crisis or when political pressure forces revisions are akin to "a Band-Aid approach" that doesn't begin to address the cancer of systemic racism.
“If the whole body is ailing you can stick as many Band-Aids on it as you want and they may do some good," she said, "but they’re not going to cure the whole body."
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黒人差別の幻想を作りだす裏側。「白人による黒人差別」は商売になる。何度も書いているが、下の記事が具体例。商売だから自分のポケットに入れ腹を肥やす悪党もいる。超金持ちの映画俳優、スポーツ、音楽はもとより、経済・商業界から大型寄付金が望める。白人だったら免罪符とし、黒人だったら賛同助成金として。まるで何か正義の味方になったような気分で寄付金をお願いできる。メディアが支えてくれているから、言葉に説得力がもてる。メディアの長い世論操作によって、大衆からからも寄付金が期待できるのである。その逆はどうか。つまり黒人差別がないとなれば、どうやってそんな大型寄付金をもぎ取れるか。そう考えると、こんな甘い汁はないことに気付くだろう。
****
BLM Activists Are Funneling Donations Back to Their Own Companies, Documents Show
Shaun King's PAC gave $460,000 to consulting companies registered to PAC leaders
Joe Schoffstall - JUNE 30, 2020 11:50 AM
The left-wing activist and former Bernie Sanders surrogate Shaun King is among the most visible faces of the Black Lives Matter movement. The former Daily Kos blogger is also one of its prominent fundraisers: In 2017, King founded a political action committee—the Real Justice PAC—with an eye toward driving criminal-justice reform across the country using the same mass mobilization techniques employed by the Sanders campaign.
But over the past 15 months, the Real Justice PAC, staffed by a number of left-wing activists, has funneled a quarter of the money it has brought in back to companies linked to PAC leaders.
Since January of 2019, the PAC has cut dozens of checks totaling more than $460,000 to three political consultancy firms linked to PAC employees. The PAC's data strategist, Jin Ding, and its treasurer, Becky Bond, manage two of them: Social Practice LLC and Bernal Alto LLC. The third—Middle Seat Consulting—was cofounded by one of the PAC's original leaders, Hector Sigala.
"There are legal and ethical ways to have people in leadership positions at an organization also serve as vendors to the same organization," Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, a money-in-politics watchdog, told the Washington Free Beacon. "But these relationships properly raise questions, especially for a group whose leaders include someone like Shaun King, who has repeatedly been accused of enriching himself improperly."
"For 501(c)(3) charities, the IRS actually prohibits what’s called ‘private inurement' or excessive benefit to an individual from the organization’s coffers," Walter said. "Real Justice PAC isn’t a nonprofit overseen by the IRS but a PAC overseen by the Federal Election Commission, which so far as I know doesn’t have such a strict regulation. Still, groups like Real Justice that routinely criticize their opponents for things like ‘dark money' influence—should be prepared to defend practices that let leaders write checks to their own for-profit consultancies."
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Ding, the PAC's technology strategist, is registered as the manager for the California-based Social Practice LLC and Bernal Alto LLC in the firms' state filings. Social Practice received nearly $250,000 from Real Justice PAC this cycle for campaign consulting and digital services. Bernal Alto, which dissolved earlier this year, was paid $20,000 for consulting and organizing services. Bond, a cofounder of the PAC and former senior adviser to Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign, is also listed as a manager for both companies. Progressive digital firm Middle Seat Consulting, which was cofounded by Sigala, received $193,000 from the PAC for advertising services.
While it does not appear that King is personally profiting from Real Justice PAC's payments, the activist has faced accusations of pocketing money he fundraised for Haitian orphans and the families of black individuals killed by police. "Some of that money went to survivors or victims’ families, but much of the largess either went into failed projects, King’s own pockets, or is unaccounted for," the Daily Beast reported in 2019. King called the accusations "bulls—t" and said that "people need to understand that failure is not fraud." King promised to release records of where he spent fundraised money in March of last year, but never did.
Real Justice PAC's profile has grown amid widespread protests against racism and police violence. The group claimed it has seen an influx of new donations—though it did not specify the amount—and is featured on donation-guide lists for Black Lives Matter supporters.
The financial arrangement is in keeping with the PAC's previous practices. During the 2018 election cycle, the PAC sent more than half a million dollars to Bernal Alto and Middle Seat, according to the Daily Caller, and the continued payments could raise questions about how the PAC will use its windfall of new donations.
In previous cycles Real Justice PAC has been pivotal in helping elect far-left district attorneys. In 2017 it provided outside fundraising services for far-left Philadelphia DA candidate Larry Krasner, who went on to win. The group backed a slew of other left-wing candidates including San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin and state's attorney for Cook County, Ill., Kim Foxx.
King, Bond, and several others formed Real Justice PAC in 2017 with the goal of "fighting structural racism." It has since worked alongside George Soros's criminal justice PAC on DA contests across the country. Those efforts have given many far-left candidates major money advantages in their races. Real Justice has pulled in nearly $2 million so far this cycle. Much of that sum came from Cari Tuna, the wife of Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz. Tuna was also the PAC's first donor.
Tuna's foundation, the Open Philanthropy Action Fund, made a $750,000 contribution to the PAC in October. Tuna has directly donated another $50,000. The PAC has also received $100,000 this cycle from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a dark money group that falls under the umbrella of Arabella Advisors, a massive D.C.-based network wealthy Democratic donors use to conceal the sources of hundreds of millions donated to liberal groups and initiatives every year.
The Real Justice PAC did not respond to a request for comment on the payments.
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（The 2020 United States elections will be held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. All 435 seats in the United States House of Representatives, 35 of the 100 seats in the United States Senate, and the office of president of the United States will be contested.）
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As Japan Prepares for the Postponed Olympics, a Conservative Old Guard Is Dragging the Country Down BY GAVAN MCCORMACK 02.24.2021
“A sexist outburst from Japan’s Olympics chief derailed preparations for the rescheduled Tokyo Games and provoked an international furor. Mori Yoshiro’s antiquated attitudes are rooted in a conservative, authoritarian worldview that’s deeply entrenched on the Japanese right.”
“Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games organizing committee president Yoshiro Mori resigned after making sexist remarks. (Franck Robichon / Pool / AFP via Getty)”
Our new issue, “Biden Our Time,” is out now. We discuss the last four chaotic years of US politics, what happened in November, and what to expect from the Biden administration. Get a $20 discounted print subscription today!
On March 25, the Olympic torch relay is due to set out from Fukushima with its “sacred flame” on a grand national circuit of Japan, visiting all forty-seven of the country’s prefectures, and arriving at the Tokyo Games venue in time for the opening ceremony on July 23. But will this eagerly awaited scenario really play out according to plan?
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded Japan the Games in the first place because Prime Minister Abe Shinzo assured them in Buenos Aires in September 2013 that the legacy of the Fukushima nuclear disaster was “under control.” According to Abe, there would be no problem with Japan playing host to the world.
In the Abe design, adopted by his successor, Suga Yoshihide, in November 2021, the “Recovery Games” would signal to the world Japan’s recovery from the 2011 quake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. The grim fact, however, is that Abe’s assurance was unfounded.
1/5
#The Fukushima Legacy
As of 2021, not only has the Fukushima crisis, now in its eleventh year, yet to be resolved — the initial 2011 declaration of a national emergency has not been rescinded — but a second major crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, has followed in its wake. For neither Fukushima nor COVID-19 is there a resolution in sight.
The people of Fukushima — and indeed of Japan as a whole — continue to suffer from the impact of the 2011 meltdown of three reactor cores at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The disaster released a radioactive slurry into the soil, air, and sea, including caesium-137 and strontium-90 — the equivalent, as nuclear physicist Koide Hiroaki reports, of a thousand Hiroshima bombs. Within the reactors, a significant volume, estimated to be more than 1,100 tons, of nuclear fuel, debris, and waste remains.
The caesium slowly degenerates but, according to Koide, even the passage of a hundred years will only diminish it by one-tenth, leaving Japan in a state of nuclear emergency far into the future. Many thousands of Japanese citizens remain displaced by the disaster. In April 2011, 2,700 tons of “less radioactive” water was released into the sea, but much more has accumulated since then, having absorbed some measure of radioactivity from being poured in to cool the melted reactor cores.
The buildup of polluted water continued at a rate, as of early 2020, of several hundred tons each day, with a total volume now in excess of one million tons. Nobody knows what the effect will be of pouring substantial quantities of irradiated fluids into the ocean over the next decade, even if they have been partially “cleaned.” But that is the government’s plan. The water dump, however, is to be held over until after the Tokyo Olympics.
Japan has so far escaped international censure for such high-risk plans. One may readily imagine what the response would be from the international community if some other country — North Korea, for example — were to announce such a step.
With the 2011 nuclear crisis and state of emergency still in effect, a second and very different crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, followed from early 2020. Over one hundred million people around the world have so far contracted it and two million have died. Japan accounts for approximately four hundred thousand and seven thousand of those figures, respectively.
In its current iteration, the COVID-19 emergency declaration covers Tokyo and its surrounding prefectures and extends from January to March 2021. The Abe government postponed the Tokyo Games from 2020 until the following year in response to the pandemic.
2/5
#Mori and the Emperor Cult
As if the two emergencies were not enough, in February 2021 there was an unexpected complication for Japan’s postponed Olympics. The head of the Japanese Olympic Committee, Mori Yoshiro, declared that meetings with many female participants were slow to get anything done, because women talked too much. As sexist comments go, this one was relatively mild, but it stirred a wave of outrage, from women and men alike, both in Japan and internationally.
Mori at first issued a perfunctory apology and retraction, while declaring that he had no intention of resigning. As the wave of sentiment in favor of sacking him spread, ten days after making his remark, Mori stepped down, still protesting that he had been misunderstood. Although he is now gone, the question remains of what his gaffe signified.
Mori is a major political figure, whose career includes a year (2000–1) as prime minister. He stands out in early twenty-first century Japan as a believer in the absolutist Shinto formula upon which the prewar Japanese state was built — a formula that ultimately led to war with much of the world in the 1930s and ’40s. As such, he has been a leading advocate for revision of the Japanese constitution to bring it back into accord with the 1889 imperial document.
As Mori put it in May 2000, addressing a Shinto politics forum: “Everyone should recognize that Japan is the land of the gods, centered on the emperor.” It was precisely this formula of the Japanese state that reached its apogee and then collapsed catastrophically in 1945, giving way to the postwar constitutional order based on popular sovereignty. After that 2000 statement, support for his government steadily drained away, recording an absolute nadir of 6.5 percent in February 2001, at which point Mori resigned as prime minister.
However, his archaic and reactionary worldview proved to be no serious obstacle for continued high-profile roles as a core member of the Shinto Politics League in the Diet, and a national coordinating figure for Japanese sport since 2005, first as president of the Japan Rugby Football Union and then as head of the organizing committee for the Tokyo Olympics. From time to time, Mori continued to provoke controversy by making statements that were calculated to outrage democratic constitutionalist sentiment.
In June 2003, when he was the chair of a committee for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Japan’s falling birth rate, Mori suggested that it was inappropriate for women who declare they will not have children to receive any subsidy from the public purse. In July 2016, in his capacity as Olympic president, he declared that that any athlete who was unwilling to sing the “Kimigayo” imperial anthem at a victory ceremony was not a representative of Japan, implying that their selection would be cancelled.
Mori’s latest contemptuous reference to women can be seen as another expression of the feudal framework of his thinking, with the emperor as the supreme, concentrated expression of unsullied Japanese-ness, while women are considered to be impure, inferior beings, summed up in the expression danson johi (men to be revered, women to be contemned).
3/5
#A Women’s Uprising
Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide and his deputy, Minister of Finance Aso Taro, distanced themselves from Mori’s latest remark, though both men are known to share his attachment to the prewar, emperor-centered polity. While they were mildly critical of Mori, they refrained from issuing any call for his dismissal, focusing on the possible impact of Mori’s comment for the “national interest” (kokueki) rather than on its inherent sexism. It was only when the IOC itself intervened on February 9, declaring Mori’s remarks to be “absolutely inappropriate,” that the ground shifted underneath him. Three days later, he resigned.
Suga and Aso seemed not to realize that the problem with Mori’s statement was its breach of a fundamental principle of modern democracy rather than the damage it might cause to the national interest. It offended simultaneously against the Olympic Charter, which defines the Olympic movement as one transcending national interests, and Article 14 of the Constitution of Japan, which prohibits gender discrimination, not to mention the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1981 Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women.
In the end, it was a kind of uprising by furious women that may have played the decisive role in forcing Mori’s resignation. Mori’s plan for the Games assigned a key role to an army of eighty thousand unpaid volunteers, including many talented bilingual or trilingual women. In light of Japan’s deeply entrenched institutional sexism — the country ranked 121st out of 153 countries on the World Economic Forum’s 2020 “Gender Gap” table — the Mori remarks came as an intolerable insult. Women sent in their resignations by the hundreds, along with quite a few men, in a snowballing phenomenon that was only halted by his resignation.
However, the Mori affair is not going to be solved simply by his resignation, rooted as it was in the deep and ramified structures of Japanese sexism. The whole framework of the Olympic movement in Japan is imbued with his values and staffed by his appointees. Indeed, his controversial remarks signified Mori’s resistance to even modest efforts and pressure to address gender imbalances from within and beyond Japan. His words made this clear:
MEXT [Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology] has been making itself a nuisance by demanding we raise the number of female board members to 40 percent. But the more women there are, the longer board meetings go on. I am embarrassed to have to mention it, but meetings of the Rugby Association take twice as long now that women are included.
On February 12, Hashimoto Seiko, a fifty-six-year-old former Olympic women’s speed skater, took Mori’s place at the helm. Hashimoto is well known to be Mori’s protégé, with the two referring to each other as being “like daughter” and “like dad.” Upon assuming the post, she had no words of criticism for her predecessor, instead offering effusive praise for Mori as her teacher and political exemplar. It is therefore most unlikely that Hashimoto is going to usher in a new era for the Olympic movement in Japan.
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#Full Steam Ahead?
The Japanese government, in consultation with the IOC, must first decide whether to proceed with the Games. Opinion polls consistently report public opposition running at levels of around 80 percent. Even in the corporate sector, a survey in early February found just 7.7 percent of firms in favor of going ahead with the Games as currently scheduled. About 56 percent wanted another postponement or outright cancellation.
There would be a precedent for cancellation, but it’s not one the Japanese authorities would want to be reminded of — the aborted 1940 Tokyo Games. So far, the government seems determined that the Games must go ahead at any cost. It is said to be contemplating a possible arrangement where only athletes would be admitted into the venues and the Olympic torch would be escorted through empty streets.
Can the Japanese people and their business sector be persuaded to see the Games of the XXXII Olympiad as a symbol of recovery from nuclear disaster and pandemic? Even among athletes, there are reports of concern about the potential risks of participation. The governor of one prefecture, Shimane, has served notice that he might withdraw it from the torch relay, warning that the Games were likely to result in another infection spike: “As things stand now, the Olympics should not be held.”
With the Torch due to set off on its grand national tour in a matter of weeks, how will Japan’s Olympic organization and its government reconcile their need for public attention, grand spectacle, and multiple celebrations with the pandemic principles of social distancing? Mori Yoshiro’s antiquated outlook may not be the last hurdle for the Tokyo Games to clear.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gavan McCormack is emeritus professor of Australian National University, editor of the Asia-Pacific journal Japan Focus and author of many works on modern Japan and East Asia, which are commonly translated and published also in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.
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Japan is supposed to use Olympics to boost the positive image of Japan to the world, but instead, As Tokyo Olympics game 2021 getting near to start, the reality of Japan is exposed to the world. The advanced image of Japan being held among the majority of people living outside of Japan is just an illusion.
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Japan Olympics chief who said women talk too much will resign over remarks, reports say
“Yoshiro Mori, head of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games organizing committee, said last week that women talk too much in meetings. (Issei Kato/Reuters)”
By Simon Denyer and Julia Mio Inuma Feb. 11, 2021 at 5:01 a.m. PST
TOKYO — The head of the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee is set to resign, Japanese media reported Thursday, after an uproar over sexist remarks he made about women at a meeting last week.
Yoshiro Mori, an 83-year-old former prime minister with a record of insensitive and sexist pronouncements, had tried to justify the lack of women at a senior level in the Japanese Olympic Committee by saying women talk too much at meetings and make them run on too long. The following day, he apologized but showed no apparent remorse and said he had no intention of resigning.
The comments provoked an unprecedented reaction in Japan, with more than 146,000 people signing an online petition calling on him to step down. Nearly 500 Olympic volunteers withdrew, and one poll found fewer than 7 percent of respondents thought Mori was qualified to continue in his role.
Mori’s intention to resign was reported by public broadcaster NHK and the Kyodo news agency, among other outlets, citing unnamed sources.
The initial reaction to Mori’s outburst among Japan’s elderly, conservative male elite was to brush off the outrage. Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, 72, first told parliament he was “not familiar with the remarks,” to boos from the opposition, before saying they were “unfavorable to the national interest” but claiming it was not up to him whether Mori resigned.
Amid uproar for saying women talk too much at meetings, Tokyo Olympic chief apologizes but refuses to resign
Toshihiro Nikai, the 81-year-old secretary general of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, tried to play down the withdrawal of the volunteers, predicting they would return “when things calm down.” The International Olympic Committee (IOC) also closed ranks, saying last week the issue was “closed” after Mori’s “apology.”
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But the issue was not closed as far as the Japanese public was concerned, and the attempts to brush off the comments provoked more anger.
Female legislators from the opposition parties wore white in parliament to protest Mori’s comments, while the president of Toyota, a leading Olympic sponsor, said he was “disappointed” by the remarks.
Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike said Mori had “disgusted many people” and vowed that she would not take part in a high-level planning meeting for the Games next week.
As the outcry grew, the IOC said Mori’s comments “were absolutely inappropriate” but still declined to press for his resignation on Tuesday.
The World Economic Forum ranks Japan 121st out of 153 countries in terms of gender parity, with the largest gender gap among advanced economies.
Kazuko Fukuda, one of the women who started the petition, said she had wanted a way to get the message across to politicians in their “boys’ club” who had closed ranks around Mori and cling to old attitudes.
Ironically, it is elderly men in senior positions who often have a reputation for talking endlessly during meetings and resenting any challenge to their authority, especially from women, experts say.
“Actually, I think that many people have faced these kinds of attitudes or words in their workplace or school,” Fukuda said. “It’s not like there’s only one person who is sexist and it doesn’t have any effect.”
Japanese Olympic leader remains in job despite IOC reprimand over sexist comments
Yayo Okano, a professor of feminist theory at Doshisha University, said the remarks had come at a time when women were suffering disproportionately from the coronavirus pandemic, with more having lost their jobs than men, with many facing a greater burden as parents or caregivers, with nurses overwhelmed and suicide rates among women surging.
“And yet, these women’s voices are not covered in the media, and society is being run in the majority by men, with large corporations and government focusing only on profit, continuing to ignore the struggles and efforts being made by women,” she said. “And that’s why this has resonated with so many people.”
The scandal has come as polls show Japan’s people are increasingly opposed to holding the Olympics this summer because of the pandemic. While officials argued that Mori’s presence at the helm of the organizing committee was needed to ensure the Games went ahead, it became apparent that his continued presence risked sinking the ship.
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The Kyodo news agency reported that former Japan Football Association president Saburo Kawabuchi was the front-runner to take over from Mori. The 84-year-old Kawabuchi played soccer for Japan in the 1964 Olympics and now heads the athletes’ village for the Games.
But many women took to social media to express their dismay that Japan’s elite had apparently chosen to replace Mori with an even older man, who has a reputation as a right-winger and has courted controversy in the past for supporting corporal punishment.
Fukuda said she was disturbed by the way the decision to replace Mori with Kawabuchi was apparently made behind closed doors, in the typically clubby way that excludes women.
“Repeating this way of decision-making has already shown us that they don’t understand what kind of change needs to be made, to see they are now really supporting gender equality,” she said.
Japanese Olympic leader remains in job despite IOC reprimand over sexist comments
Japan and South Korea see surge of suicides among young women
Amid uproar, Tokyo Olympic chief apologizes but refuses to resign
<Simon Denyer>
Simon Denyer is The Washington Post’s bureau chief in Tokyo, covering Japan and the Koreas. He previously worked as The Post's bureau chief in Beijing and New Delhi; as a Reuters bureau chief in Washington, New Delhi and Islamabad; and a Reuters correspondent in Nairobi, New York and London.
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アメリカの一流紙の一つであるワシントンポストのスポーツコラムニストが、短いコラムで
速やかな東京オリンピックの中止を日本政府に提言。そのなかでオリンピックはIOCにおける主催国への略奪行為に例えている。巨額の開催費用により、開催できる国は中国共産党やロシアのような市民を安く借り出せる独裁国のみになろうとしていると揶揄っている。オリンピック開催により、これ以上の国民への不充分なコロナ対策による犠牲者と経済的略奪されるのがいやならIOCにオリンピック中止を直ちに叩きつけるのが日本のためだと助言している。
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Japan should cut its losses and tell the IOC to take its Olympic pillage somewhere else
By Sally Jenkins Columnist
May 5, 2021 at 2:00 a.m. PDT
Somewhere along the line Baron Von Ripper-off and the other gold-plated pretenders at the International Olympic Committee decided to treat Japan as their footstool. But Japan didn’t surrender its sovereignty when it agreed to host the Olympics. If the Tokyo Summer Games have become a threat to the national interest, Japan’s leaders should tell the IOC to go find another duchy to plunder. A cancellation would be hard — but it would also be a cure.
Von Ripper-off, a.k.a. IOC President Thomas Bach, and his attendants have a bad habit of ruining their hosts, like royals on tour who consume all the wheat sheaves in the province and leave stubble behind. Where, exactly, does the IOC get off imperiously insisting that the Games must go on, when fully 72 percent of the Japanese public is reluctant or unwilling to entertain 15,000 foreign athletes and officials in the midst of a pandemic?
The answer is that the IOC derives its power strictly from the Olympic “host contract.” It’s a highly illuminating document that reveals much about the highhanded organization and how it leaves host nations with crippling debts. Seven pages are devoted to “medical services” the host must provide — free of charge — to anyone with an Olympic credential, including rooms at local hospitals expressly reserved for them and only them. Tokyo organizers have estimated they will need to divert about 10,000 medical workers to service the IOC’s demands.
Eight Olympic workers tested positive for the coronavirus during the torch relay last week — though they were wearing masks. Less than 2 percent of Japan’s population is vaccinated. Small wonder the head of Japan’s medical workers’ union, Susumu Morita, is incensed at the prospect of draining mass medical resources. “I am furious at the insistence on staging the Olympics despite the risk to patients’ and nurses’ health and lives,” he said in a statement.
Olympic officials are determined to have a Tokyo Games despite Japan’s growing doubts
Japan’s leaders should cut their losses and cut them now, with 11 weeks left to get out of the remainders of this deal. The Olympics always cost irrational sums — and they lead to irrational decisions. And it’s an irrational decision to host an international mega-event amid a global pandemic. It’s equally irrational to keep tossing good money after bad.
At this point, money is the chief reason anyone is even considering going forward with a Summer Games. Japan has invested nearly $25 billion in hosting. But how much more will it cost to try to bubble 15,000 visitors, with daily testing and other protocols, and to provide the security and massive logistics and operating costs? And what might a larger disaster cost?
Suppose Japan were to break the contract. What would the IOC do? Sue? If so, in what court of justice? Who would have jurisdiction? What would such a suit do to the IOC’s reputation — forcing the Games in a stressed and distressed nation during a pandemic?
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Japan’s leaders have more leverage than they may realize — at the very least, they are in position to extract maximal concessions from the IOC for hosting some limited or delayed version of the Games, one more protective of the host.
The predicament in Tokyo is symptomatic of a deeper, longer-lasting illness in the Olympics. The Games have become a to-the-very-brink exercise in pain and exhaustion for everyone involved, and fewer countries are willing to accept these terms. Greed and blowout costs have rendered it an event that courts extreme disaster. In September, a report out of Oxford University’s business school found that the IOC has consistently “misled” countries about the risks and costs of hosting. Example: The IOC pretends that a contingency of about 9.1 percent is adequate to cover unforeseen expenses.
The true average cost overrun on a Summer Games? It’s 213 percent.
The IOC understates these risks for a reason: because fewer and fewer countries want to do business with it after seeing all the pillage.
The IOC intentionally encourages excess. It mandates elaborate facilities and events for the sake of revenue, most of which it keeps for itself while dumping the costs entirely on the host, which must guarantee all the financing. The IOC sets the size and design standards, demands the hosts spend bigger and bigger — against all better judgment — while holding close the licensing profits and broadcasts fees. Tokyo’s original budget was $7 billion. It’s now four times that.
China controls the IOC and Olympic sponsors the way it governs its citizens: Through fear
In the Oxford paper, “Regression to the Tail: Why the Olympics Blow Up,” authors Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier and Daniel Lunn observe that the Games dwarf every other national building project on earth in terms of cost blowouts — even mega-dams and tunnel digs. The ever-increasing complexity and expense, and the long window of planning (seven to 11 years) make them a project with high uncertainty that can be affected by everything from inflation to terrorist threat and “the risk of a big, fat black swan flying through it.” The Rio Games, held in 2016 in the midst of brutal economic downturn, were 352 percent over their original budget. And these blowouts are “systematic,” not happenstance.
“Either the IOC is deluded about the real cost-risks when it insists that a 9.1 percent contingency is sufficient, or the Committee deliberately overlooks the uncomfortable facts. In either case, host cities and nations are misled,” they write.
This is why virtually the only government leaders that will have anything to do with the IOC anymore are thugocrats such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, who can coerce labor and spend limitlessly for prestige. Over the past 20 years, other potential hosts have dried up. Among those who have wisely said no to the IOC: Barcelona, Boston, Budapest, Davos, Hamburg, Krakow, Munich, Oslo, Rome, Stockholm and Toronto. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who wrested away key concessions from the IOC for the 2028 Games, has observed that most cities “will never say yes to the Olympics again unless they find the right model.” This is where the barons’ gluttony has led them.
All of this should empower Japan’s leaders to do whatever is best for themselves and their own people. When the Games reasonably could be portrayed as a source of international tourism revenue, perhaps some of the expense could be justified. But now the costs to the Japanese people run much deeper than financial. If ever there was a time and place to remember that the IOC is a fake principality, an oft-corrupt cash receptacle for peddlers with pretensions of grandeur, this is it. The IOC has no real powers, other than those temporarily granted by participant countries, and Japan owes it nothing. A cancellation would be painful — but cleansing.
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一見右翼と左翼は思想的に両極端に位置するが、よくみると右翼の自由民主党と中国共産主義国家の中国共産党は実は双子の兄弟ぐらいに似ている。両方とも政権の一党独裁、日本の憲法はあってないようなもの。それを避けて通る穴がいくらでも存在する。また両国家は歴史の改ざんに忙しい。その改ざんにあっては若干の違いが存在するが、それは日本では自民の政党権力者が改ざんを指揮主導しているが、中国は歴史の改ざんを国政にしている点。まことに面白いではないか。現在の自由民主党が志向する天皇主義思想。天皇主義に洗脳された日本天皇軍が大平洋戦争を起こして、中国大陸で大暴れした。なんとその日本軍が中国共産主義国家誕生の手助けをしたというのだから、なんという歴史の皮肉。そしてその共産党政府の中国の脅威が叫ばれる昨今、大いに選挙戦に利用できた自由民主党が日本国民からゆるぎない投票数を獲得して政権を掌握して遣りたい放題をしている日本がある。
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The CCP Didn’t Fight Imperial Japan; the KMT Did
-While the KMT military defended China against Japan during WWII, the CCP built up strength for the civil war.-
By Zachary Keck September 04, 2014
Credit: Wikimedia Commons https://thediplomat.com/2014/09/the-ccp-didnt-fight-imperial-japan-the-kmt-did/
As Diplomat readers are well aware — and the Pacific Realist is frankly sick of —China has mounted a sustained campaign demanding that Tokyo take a “correct” view of Imperial Japan’s unspeakable crimes during WWII.
There’s always been a good deal of irony to all of this. Although far too many Japanese leaders have tried to shrink or even deny the crimes of Imperial Japan, including its atrocities in China, successive Japanese governments have acknowledged and apologized for many of these.
On the other hand, the Chinese Communist Party has also committed numerous massacres of Chinese since establishing the People’s Republic of China. This began early in its tenure while consolidating its control over the vast country, as Frank Dikötter notes in a terrific recent book. With regards to the “land reform” campaign alone, for instance, Dikötter writes, “The exact number of victims killed in the land reform will never be known, but it is unlikely to have been fewer than 1.5 to 2 million people from 1947 to 1952.” At least another two million were killed in the Great Terror that Mao launched between 1950-1952 to weed out imaginary counter-revolutionaries.
Of course, there was also the widespread famine that killed tens of millions during the Great Leap Forward. To be sure, there’s no reason to believe that Mao and the other CCP leaders intended to starve these people when they launched the Great Leap Forward. That being said, they continued these policies for years after they realized the disastrous outcomes they were having simply because Mao didn’t want to admit his failures. Then, of course, the entire country was plunged into chaos once again during the Cultural Revolution, which was Mao’s attempt to ensure his atrocities weren’t publicly acknowledged by the Party after his death.
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As it turned, he needn’t have worried as the CCP under Deng Xiaoping decided it was not in the Party’s interest to acknowledge it had nearly destroyed the county many times over in its first 25 years in power. Instead, the CCP has devoted considerable resources to systematically rewriting history — or at the very least burying it. Unlike in Japan, where history is distorted by hardline leaders, in China distorting history is the official state policy. Meanwhile, taking the correct view of history is illegal — which is why books like Tombstone are banned.
Reasonable observers might conclude that it is the height of hypocrisy for the CCP to wage a global PR war over Japan’s views of history on the one hand, while on the other hand criminalizing a correct view of its own history. And there was a time not too long ago I might have agreed with these reasonable observers’ conclusion. However, this week Xi Jinping and the CCP took their hypocrisy on history to new heights.
As Shannon reported on Wednesday, earlier this year “China’s legislature passed a resolution creating two new national observances. ‘Victory Day’ on September 3 would commemorate Japan’s surrender in the ‘War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression,’ China’s name for its fight against Imperial Japan before and during World War II. December 13 was also named a National Memorial Day to commemorate the Nanjing Massacre.”
She went on to note that President Xi and the entire Politburo Standing Committee participated in the new Victory Day celebrations, which they used mostly to criticize contemporary Japanese policy, and to try to create the impression that Japan’s shifting defense posture represents a return to the militarism of Imperial Japan.
However, along with criticizing Japan, Xi and the PBSC also used the Victory Day celebrations to praise the CCP itself. As Shannon writes, the Victory Day holiday “also served as a celebration of the Chinese Communist Party’s role in defeating Japan — and more than that, in saving China from its century of humiliation…. Xi credited the CCP with spearheading the movement to unite all of China’s people in opposition to Japan. To Xi Jinping, the deciding factors in the war were the ‘great national spirit’ of the Chinese people — particularly, their patriotism — and the leadership of the CCP.”
None of this is particularly new. The CCP has long claimed credit for having tirelessly defended China from the Imperial Japanese army. This couldn’t be further from the truth, however. As I have noted elsewhere, Japan’s invasion of China saved the CCP from Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT, and ultimately allowed Mao to defeat the KMT in the ensuing civil war. Indeed, by the end of 1934, the CCP was on the verge of extinction after KMT troops delivered another heavy blow to the Red Army in Jiangxi Province, which forced the Party to undertake the now infamous Long March to Xi’an in the northwestern province of Shaanxi. Chiang initially pursued the Communist forces, and would have almost certainly delivered a final blow to the CCP if war with Japan could have been delayed. As it turned out, Chiang was not able to put off the war with Japan any longer, and domestic and international pressure forced him to accept a tacit alliance with the CCP against Japan.
At the onset of the war, then, the CCP was not in any position to defend anyone from the formidable Japanese military. In fact, it wasn’t even in a position to defend itself from the KMT. The initial battles of the second Sino-Japanese War in southern China were the largest ones, and the KMT fought them alone.
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This would be the trend of the entire war. As two scholars note, “From 1937 to 1945, there were 23 battles where both sides employed at least a regiment each. The CCP was not a main force in any of these. The only time it participated, it sent a mere 1,000 to 1,500 men, and then only as a security detachment on one of the flanks.There were 1,117 significant engagements on a scale smaller than a regular battle, but the CCP fought in only one. Of the approximately 40,000 skirmishes, just 200 were fought by the CCP, or 0.5 percent.”
By the CCP’s own accounts during the war, it barely played a role. Specifically, in January 1940 Zhou Enlai sent a secret report to Joseph Stalin which said that over a million Chinese had died fighting the Japanese through the summer of 1939. He further admitted that only 3 percent of those were CCP forces. In the same letter, Zhou pledged to continue to support Chiang and recognize “the key position of the Kuomintang in leading the organs of power and the army throughout the country.” In fact, in direct contradiction to Xi’s claims on Wednesday, Zhou acknowledged that Chiang and the KMT “united all the forces of the nation” in resisting Japan’s aggression.
While the KMT were busy uniting the country and fighting the Japanese military, CCP forces spent much of the early part of the war hiding in the mountains to avoid battle. As the KMT was decimated by the Japanese military, it was forced to retreat further south. At the same time, the Japanese forces largely focused on securing control of Chinese cities and strategic infrastructure, while ignoring China’s massive countryside. Thus, the KMT’s efforts to actually defend China created a power vacuum in rural areas, which the CCP came out of hiding to seize. It used its control over these villages to perfect its propaganda and political efforts, and hid among the population to avoid fighting the Japanese army. According to Soviet military advisers stationed in CCP-controlled areas at the time, the CCP also used this land to grow opium to fund its growing operations.
As far as fighting went, the CCP engaged in guerilla warfare and sabotage missions. This certainly annoyed the Japanese forces, but it did not have a significant impact on Japan’s war operations. In fact, even the Japanese North China Area Army — which had command over the northern areas where the CCP was located and the KMT was relatively weaker than elsewhere —continued to see defeating the KMT as its primary objective. The greater impact of these guerilla operations was in helping the CCP win new recruits. The CCP used their “heroic” operations against the hated Japanese enemy to recruit young men (and women) to their cause, much as militant groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham film their exploits today and post them on YouTube to attract recruits.
This was highly successful. According to the CCP’s own estimates, it began the war with 30,000 troops. By Victory Day, it had 1.2 million regular troops and around 2.6 million to 3 million militia
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under its command. It was also quick to seize the areas that the Japanese army was vacating, and seized the Japanese equipment. In fact, in some instances it even forced the Japanese soldiers to join the Red Army (the KMT did the same). Of course, the war not only allowed the CCP to grow much stronger, but it also greatly depleted the Nationalist’s strength. This allowed the CCP to prevail easily in the civil war.
This was not by accident but by design. The CCP had a choice: it could have prioritized defending the country against Japan during the war, or it could have prioritized seizing control of China from those who did fight the Japanese. It chose the latter. Meanwhile, by choosing to actually try to defend China against Japan during the war, the Nationalists handed the country to the CCP afterwards.
Which is why Xi and the CCP’s decision to create a national observance day to honor its defense of China during the second Sino-Japanese War represents the height of hypocrisy. It’s one thing to try to suppress all information exposing the Party’s failings, which killed millions of Chinese, while demanding Japan take a correct view of history (which Tokyo should do). It’s another thing altogether to falsely claim credit for one of the defining moments of your country’s modern history. And it’s really something unprecedented to create a national holiday to honor your Party for doing something it consciously avoided; namely, putting China’s defense over the CCP itself. Classy.
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