Monthly Archives: November 2010

UPDATED: Rationing Mercy For South Africans Refugees

Affirmative Action, Canada, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Propaganda, South-Africa

In my forthcoming book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa, I wrote the following:

To Canada—not to the US—is owed the distinction of granting refugee status to the first white South African victim of hate crimes. Thirty-one-year old Brandon Huntley of Cape Town had survived several run-of-the-mill assaults which saw him savagely stabbed and sworn at by his African assailants for being a “white dog” and a “settler.” The cruel and craven ANC protested Canada’s show of mercy. The idea that Africans would “persecute” Huntley was racist in itself, South Africa’s ruling Solons announced. Huntley has certainly been luckier than thousands of his countrymen, whose numbers continue to dwindle.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that a Canadian Federal Court overturned the Immigration and Refugee Board’s decision to grant refugee status to Huntley:

The Federal Court of Canada overturned the refugee status granted to a white South African who said that he faced persecution, discrimination and possibly death because of his race if he returned home. The decision, which was released on Wednesday, ordered a new hearing by the Immigration and Refugee Board for the South African, Brandon Huntley. His initial success with the board was controversial in Canada, and the South African government filed a formal protest. The court acknowledged that violence and crime were widespread in South Africa, but it found that Mr. Huntley did not demonstrate that previous attacks against him were racially motivated.

Indeed, the Refugee Protection Division of the Immigration and Refugee Board (RPD) found for Huntley. Certainly no citizen of Canada objected to granting this poor man asylum. Yet the Minister Of Citizenship And Immigration chose to exercise his powers to set the RPD’s decision aside. He denies that this decision was made pursuant to political pressure from the ANC, although he does concede the following:

The government of South Africa did not like the RPD Decision and asked the government of Canada to have it appealed to the Federal Court.

One of the listed errors in judgment the Court has leveled at the RPD is the equation of “random acts of violence and criminality with persecution due to the Respondent’s race.” The Court asserts that “the black majority in South Africa is at least equally victimized by criminals.” This is incorrect. Again: Into the Cannibal’s Pot provides the statistical evidence to the contrary.

I refute most of the stock, fatuous “arguments” the Canadian Federal Court advances against this brute fact: the white minority is indeed targeted disproportionately to its numbers in the population.

The same goes for the rest of the Court’s case against granting refugee status to Brandon Huntley. For instance, the idea that BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) doesn’t marginalize whites in the workforce is nonsense on stilts. I excerpt and analyze the statute itself, and quote a wide range of experts, including Americans who love the ANC (and live at the Wall Street Journal).

It is clear to me that Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa might have helped Huntley and his lawyer to make their case. It still could:

THIS COURT HAS ORDERED AND ADJUDGED that “The application for judicial review is allowed. The Decision is set aside and the matter is returned for reconsideration by a differently constituted RPD.”

The Minister denies that he has come under political pressure from the ANC, concerned with its image abroad. Fine. But why bring the power of the Canadian state against one man who has suffered so—even if you think he hasn’t suffered sufficiently?

My father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson, used to say that G-d is full of mercy, which is why there is so little left in the world. Yes, like many Jews, Dad always questioned, and wrestled with, G-d.

I contend that people, being irrational beings, are in the habit of misplacing compassion.

UPDATE: From the Federal Court Decision discussed here, it transpires that the Court, having been petitioned by Canada’s Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, ruled to set aside the Refugee Board’s finding for Huntley. A good section of the Honorable Mr. Justice Russell’s ruling, handed down on November 24, 2010, is devoted to the “alleged chilling and coercive attempts by the South African authorities to assert political and diplomatic pressure to subvert the rule of law in Canada.”

Justice Russell states at once that “the government of South Africa did not like the [Refugee Board’s] Decision and asked the government of Canada to have it appealed to the Federal Court,” and that, around the same time, “the Minister decided to proceed with judicial review.” Oddly enough, Justice Russell, presiding over the Federal Court, found no connection between the ANC’s strong-arming tactics and the Canadian government’s decision to succumb.

Insider Trading Laws = Information Socialism

Business, Criminal Injustice, Economy, Fascism, Law, Political Economy, Regulation, South-Africa, The State

The following is from my new column, “Insider Trading Laws = Information Socialism,” now on WND.COM:

“It’s easy to be thrown off scent when trying to divine the vague, ill-defined, unconstitutional laws under which the Securities and Exchange Commission hunts for corporate prey. Suffice it to say that the SEC operates with the understanding that competition in capital markets must proceed from a level playing field. All investors are entitled to the same information advantage irrespective of effort and abilities.

In a word, information socialism.

In their latest efforts to bring ruin to capital markets, SEC blood hounds have ensnared some of the country’s most powerful hedge-fund firms. Indictments are replete with SEC cloak-and-dagger.

There is a Don, ‘Don Chu,’ which is how the accused, Don Ching Trang Chu, is called. A co-conspirator is ‘CC-1.’ And a cooperating witness: ‘CW-1.’ The companies violated, allegedly, are Atheros Communications, Inc. (‘Atheros’), Broadcom Corporation (‘Broadcom’), and ‘Sierra Wireless’—aka ‘The Tech Company.’

… Then there is the ‘The Firm.’ … The ominous entity at the center of the investigation. ….”

The complete column is “Insider Trading Laws = Information Socialism,” now on WND.COM.

Some of you are waiting for, and have been asking about, the publication of Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa. The wait is worse for South Africans who are in the thick of the events my book documents and analyzes—Into The Cannibal’s Pot is a Burkian polemic, steeped in history, reality, fact, and the classical liberal political philosophy.

When I completed the book some months back, the number of Boers murdered was just over 3000. The death toll now stands at 3,756.

The manuscript is currently under consideration. If all fails, fear not (with your help), someone will see to it that the true story of the New South Africa (“Rambo Nation”), as detailed in Into The Cannibal’s Pot, is told. Not everyone inhabits the solipsistic universe in which most American “writers” (and publishers) are mired. Five magnificent men (as writers, thinkers, and human beings) have returned high Praise For The Cannibal. Thank you; you know who you are.

Have a happy Thanksgiving.

UPDATE V: Killjoy Jolie (Ignoble Savage)

America, Celebrity, Colonialism, Communism, History, Hollywood, Justice, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Private Property, South-Africa

Around the time Paris Hilton made accessorizing with a Chihuahua “hot,” Angelina Jolie made it hip to wear an exotic, adopted, ankle biter on her scrawny hip. Jolie’s couture kids are fully color-coordinated. The actress “has six children, three of whom were from international adoptions.”

Tabloids report that Brangelina’s Benetton Brood is precocious and freaky, as you’d expect. (Tabloids, by the way, did the only hard news reporting during the OJ Simpson travesty of a trial. Ditto in the John Edwards’ love child scandal.)

But there’s one thing the spoilt-rotten Brangelina bunch can’t have. Pop Eater tells us that the ill-bred brood will be brooding on Thanksgiving, because mommy dearest is against the feast.

“Angelina Jolie hates this holiday and wants no part in rewriting history like so many other Americans,” a friend of the actress tells me. “To celebrate what the white settlers did to the native Indians, the domination of one culture over another, just isn’t her style. She definitely doesn’t want to teach her multi-cultural family how to celebrate a story of murder.” … “Angelina gets so grossed out by Thanksgiving that she has made sure her family will not be in America this year on Thursday,” an insider tells me.

Perhaps this deeply silly woman should read John Stossel’s always simple, straightforward columns. In “Happy Starvation Day” this week, Stossel explains “the lost lesson of Thanksgiving”:

The Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share the work and produce equally.
That’s why they nearly all starved.
When people can get the same return with less effort, most people make less effort. Plymouth settlers faked illness rather than working the common property. Some even stole, despite their Puritan convictions. Total production was too meager to support the population, and famine resulted. This went on for two years.
This entertaining and historical story shows that the actual hero of the Thanksgiving was neither white nor Indian: “Squint and the Miracle of Thanksgiving”
“So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue the next year also, if not some way prevented,” wrote Gov. William Bradford in his diary. The colonists, he said, “began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length after much debate of things, (I) (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land.”
In other words, the people of Plymouth moved from socialism to private farming. The results were dramatic.
“This had very good success,” Bradford wrote, “for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many.”
Because of the change, the first Thanksgiving could be held in November 1623. …

UPDATE I (Nov. 25): A joyous Thanksgiving to all (besides the enemies of liberty who are everywhere around us).

UPDATE II: “BAD EAGLE HAS SPOKEN.” Somehow I doubt that joyless Jolie, of the giant wagging finger, would appreciate the words of Bad Eagle on this Thanksgiving day:

“… BadEagle.com thanks all American Indians for their faithfulness, for their strength, and for their patriotism. We are exceedingly proud of the fact that Indians are exemplary in America, and humbly happy that American Indians set this example before the greatest nation on earth. We are still here. Our presence reminds America of what it means to be a nation, to love a nation, and to preserve a nation–precisely what America needs to know now. America’s Stygian state, its mindless drift on the river of Lethe, and its apparent fascination with deception and corruption, all spell disaster soon-coming. BadEagle.com is profoundly thankful to American Indians for providing a ready lesson in the costs of nationhood.”

MORE.

UPDATE III (Nov. 26): BAD EAGLE HAS SPOKEN … WITH A VENGEANCE. Dr. David Yeagley, aka Bad Eagle, is an original and independent thinker. Perhaps this is why you don’t see more of him on Fox News.

“Injustices have abounded against Indians,” I told him in an interesting interview he conducted with me, one in a series of interviews with leading conservative and independent writers. Justifying the decimation of the Indian nations is akin to the convoluted attempts, on this blog as well, to whitewash killing civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In my yet-to-be published book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot, I draw similar distinctions to David’s (hereunder in the Comments Section) with respect to the willful destruction by the British of the Zulu nation. Nothing the much-maligned Boers have ever done remotely resembles the massacres and mass murders committed by the “Anglo-American axis of Evil,” a chapter so titled in Into the Cannibal’s Pot. Ditto the Indians. Nothing the Amerindians have ever done within their self-governing territories—including to wage merciless and murderous internecine warfare on neighboring tribes—has come close to the ethnic annihilation visited upon them by the American, and other colonial, states.

American settlers defended themselves against hostile Indians as was their right (the parallels to the Boers at the Battle of Blood River are obvious). What successive American governments and military did to the Indians—these are crimes against humanity as only the state could commit.

These are the facts, nothing more.

While David is drawing distinctions between myself (a classical liberal) and other conservatives, here’s another shocker. I made friends with two exceptional men at WND’s annual conference: Albert Thompson and Erik Rush. Both were taken aback when I expressed this view on reparations: Where title to land stolen during the era of slavery can be traced, I would support reparations. The logistics, naturally, are difficult. But the principle is not. What was stolen, must be returned. Of course, the nation’s race hucksters have turned a debate about individual property rights into one sanctioning collective guilt and state-directed shakedowns.

Bad Eagle’s blog carries an interesting thread.

UPDATE IV: We discussed the crimes against Japanese civilians on the Barely A Blog post titled “White Light, Black Rain: The Destruction Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki.” Unfortunately, the comments were lost, but my replies to them in the form of updates remain, as do the hyperlinks. Forgive me for not reposting the same comments in favor of the mass murder of innocents. However disdainful, on the anniversary of that crime, I may open up this forum so as to relitigate these crimes.

UPDATE V (Nov. 27): The Rousseauist reverence for the Noble Savage I’ve condemned many times. For example:

“Robert Hughes writes: ‘Historical evidence shows that the people of the Americas had been doing very nicely for centuries and probably millennia when it came to murder, torture, materialism, genocide, enslavement and sexist hegemony.’ In our silly view of native Americans we have, says Hughes, perpetrated a stereotype in which European man has become the demon, and the native has been canonized.”

And this from “Rousseau’s Noble Savage – Not on this Continent”:

In light of archeological findings, the myth of the purity of primitive life juxtaposed to the savagery of Western Culture is even less justified. The Americas are scattered with archeological evidence of routine massacres, cannibalism, dismemberment, slavery, abuse of women and human sacrifice among native tribes. Why, the Northwest Territories Yellowknife tribe eventually disappeared as a direct result of a massacre carried out as late as 1823. By the same shift of logic, should remaining native “nations” perhaps not be made to pay reparations among themselves?

BUT the same essay ends thus:

“In no way do these facts mitigate or excuse the cruel treatment natives have endured. All they do is cut through the ‘rhetoric of moral superiority’ and challenge the cultural script.”

UPDATE V: The Stasi Breast Exam (CONTRA CNN…)

Fascism, Government, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Terrorism, The State

Observe the technique used by the detritus of humanity, the TSA agents, in performing a breast examination. The predatory bitch will circle her victim’s breast, cleaving closely to its contours. The female attack dog will then pass a grubby paw between the woman’s cleavage. Sometimes the neckline above the shameless assailant’s fondling fingers is youthful and firm; other times it’s sagging and old. At all times this specter is pathetic.

We are a country of subjects and sovereigns.

On its website, the Transportation Security Administration ought to provide a technical, detailed, clinical description of the procedure so that a citizen may see in writing the ritual one of these Stasi agents are to perform on his person.

Can you find it here? I cannot.

Don’t fly if you don’t have to.

UPDATED I: SPREADING THE FILTH. WND: “Martha Donahue in a commentary at Resistnet said she’d spent 30 years in the medical industry.

‘For those of you who fly and opt for the ‘pat down,’ you need to demand the TSA thugs change their gloves. I’ve been watching on the news how they operate. People are being searched [with] dirty gloves … gloves that have been in crotches, armpits, touching people who may be ill, people who pick their noses. Do you want those gloves touching you?'”

UPDATE II: SOVEREIGNS ARE EXEMPT. And Boehner Of Orange is no exception. Not a murmur about TSA terrorism have your representatives, new and old guard (other than Ron Paul), uttered. Understandably. TSA sexual assaults are not a pressing matter when you are exempt therefrom. According to the New York Times, “any member of Congress or administration official with a security detail is allowed to bypass security. … The appropriate security procedures for all Congressional leaders, including Speaker Pelosi, Senator Reid [and Boehner] are determined by the Capitol Police working with the Transportation Security Administration.”

UPDATE III (Nov. 24): When all argued for the rights of pilots and flight attendants to go to work without TSA abuse, I warned against interest-group, government-granted rights. How likely are you to get back some of your Fourth Amendment natural rights now that the sectional interests are satisfied with their deal? Strive for chaos. The more the homeland security cauldron bubbles over, the better. You want the thing to implode. Signs that travelers are settling into a status quo ought to trouble you.

The AP: “Cabinet secretaries, top congressional leaders and an exclusive group of senior U.S. officials are exempt from toughened new airport screening procedures when they fly commercially with government-approved federal security details.”

“Aviation security officials would not name those who can skip the controversial screening, but other officials said those VIPs range from top officials like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and FBI Director Robert Mueller to congressional leaders like incoming House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. …”

The heightened new security procedures by the Transportation Security Administration, which involve either a scan by a full-body detector or an intimate personal pat-down, have spurred passenger outrage in the lead-up to the Thanksgiving holiday airport crush.

On Friday, the TSA exempted pilots from the new procedures; flight attendants received the same privilege on Tuesday, TSA spokesman Nicholas Kimball confirmed. Both groups must show photo ID and go through metal detectors. If that sets off an alarm, they may still get a pat-down in some cases, he said. The rules apply to pilots and flight attendants in uniform when they’re traveling.

While passengers have no choice but to submit to either the detector or what some complain is an intrusive pat-down, some senior government officials can opt out if they fly accompanied by government security guards approved by the TSA.

UPDATE IV: CONTRA CNN. Judging from the reports by the females of CNN (those cringe making goody-goodies), and even from FoxNews’ pin-up Megyn Kelly, the planned, Thanksgiving protests against the TSA fizzled; didn’t happen.

Not if you read DRUDGE. Here are some of the headlines, accompanied as they are by an image of at least one heroic passenger, stripped to the waist, sporting a “Screw Big Sis” on his bare back.

OPT-OUT…
POLL: 61% oppose new airport security measures…
Prosthetics Become Source of Shame at Airport Screenings…
Scanner Uproar Shadows Holiday Travel…
AAA Expects Record Traffic on Highways…
30-Mile Backup on Mass Turnpike…
VIDEO: TSA Speedo Protester…
VIDEO: Woman wears bikini to LAX…
Woman: Agents Singled Me Out For My Breasts…
Fliers Claim TSA Has Deactivated Body Scanners…

UPDATE V: In a supercilious op-ed, an ex-CIA agent by the name of Mike Baker, a fixture on FoxNew, demands: “America, Let’s Give the Drama and Hysteria a Rest.” But not before describing with relish how a “TSA dude named Frank got to third base” with him.