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?
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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。
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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
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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。
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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)”
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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.
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#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.
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#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).
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#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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