Category Archives: Crime

In Memory Of Murdered Men & Women For Whom Kennedy Never Spared A Thought

Africa, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Media, South-Africa, The West

Ted Kennedy (see “Ted’s Dead: Sacred Cow Syndrome Strikes”), the great humanitarian, never piped up about the craven carnage of murder and mayhem in my homeland, South Africa. Why would he? The slaying is done by Africans; the worst fate is often reserved for Afrikaner and English men, women and children, who’re being culled preponderantly and disproportionately to their population numbers.
Kennedy excelled at perpetrating the narrative of the officially excluded and oppressed. His worldview did not expand to accommodate Un-PC realities. As the obscene orgy over the passing of Kennedy, at a ripe age, proceeds shamelessly, mull over a truly tragic waste of lives.

Silent Acquiescence In Daily Terror
Written by PARATUS
Friday, 28 August 2009

South Africa is experiencing extraordinary levels of violent crime. Since the country’s democratic transition in 1994, some 300,000 South Africans have been murdered. Much of this crime is unprecedented in its brutality and is directed at the elderly and the young. Bizarrely, much of the Western media are silent about the calamity which has befallen South Africa. Is this an intentional oversight to avoid accusations of racism or denigrating one of the few African democracies? Or, are the Western media – and, by implication, its consumers – disinterested in accounts of murder and bloodshed far removed on the southern tip of a forgotten continent?

Marinda O’Dell was a compassionate and hardworking occupational therapist at a school for disabled children in Krugersdorp, an hour’s drive north west of Johannesburg. In early August, two young men entered her house just after lunchtime, bludgeoned her 17-year-old daughter unconscious, and cut Marinda’s throat. Marinda became one of the 50 people murdered on an average day in South Africa.

Last month, Cobi Venter, a dedicated anti-apartheid campaigner, and her husband George, an 78-year-old entrepreneur, were brutally murdered in their middle-class suburban home in Port Elizabeth. Six men forced their way into the Venter’s home, which had been barricaded after a previous robbery attempt. George was struck several times with a hammer, tortured and dragged by his feet from room to room, and then killed. After witnessing the terrifying events, Cobi was gang-raped and fatally beaten to death.

According to the Venter’s son: “Blood was on the walls of every single room in the house; it was on the ceilings. It was like evil just exploded there – I mean, all eight of the main windows were smashed as well.” Veteran policemen cried at the scene.

More than ten years ago, Anne Paton, the wife of the celebrated late anti-apartheid author, Alan Paton, fled South Africa in terror. A number of her friends had been murdered, and she was almost killed by two robbers who throttled and assaulted the then 70-year-old as she was enjoying an afternoon nap. Realizing that the government was unwilling to protect its taxpayers and citizens, she finally left South Africa . At the time, she wrote:

I love this country with a passion, but I cannot live here any more. I can no longer live slung about with panic buttons and gear locks. I am tired of driving with my car windows closed and the doors locked, tired of being afraid of stopping at red lights. I am tired of being constantly on the alert, having that sudden frisson of fear at the sight of a shadow by the gate, of a group of youths approaching—although nine times out of 10 they are innocent of harmful intent. Such is the suspicion that dogs us all…

While some people say I have been unlucky, others say: “You are lucky not to have been raped or murdered.” What kind of a society is this where one is considered “lucky” not to have been raped or murdered—yet?”

While difficult to believe, it appears that the level of brutality employed by criminals is on the rise in South Africa. Deputy national police commissioner, Andre Pruis, recently announced an investigation into the excessively violent nature of crime in the country.

Especially at risk are the elderly and the young. According to official South African Police Service (SAPS) figures, in 2007/08 (the latest 12-month period for which data have been released) an average of 30 children were murdered every week. During a typical year, as many children are murdered in South Africa as the number of all people murdered in both the United Kingdom and Germany , notwithstanding the fact that the latter two countries have a combined population of 141 million, compared to 48 million in South Africa.

The risk of being murdered in South Africa today is almost six times as high as in the United States . Compared to the United Kingdom , the risk is 19 times higher, while the risk is an incredible 40 times higher than in Germany.

Sexual crimes are also at intolerably high levels in South Africa. Gang-rape and the rape of toddlers and even infants has become a common occurrence. Only countries at war suffer as much sexual violence as South Africa , Doctors Without Borders said in March in a global report on rape.

According to the SAPS, children are the victims of 41 percent of all rapes and attempted rapes reported in the country; approximately 60 a day. Over 15 percent of all reported rapes are against children under 11, and another 26 percent against children 12-17 years.

Given that a large proportion of all violent crime – but sexual offenses in particular – go unreported, the true figures are likely to be substantially higher. A bizarre belief among some African black men that sex with a virgin can cure HIV/AIDS is further fueling the high levels of child sexual exploitation in South Africa.

According to Max Coleman’s authoritative book, “A crime against humanity: Analyzing repression of the Apartheid State ”, published by the South African Human Rights Committee, 21,000 people died in political violence in South Africa during apartheid. Included in Coleman’s figures are deaths due to SA Defence Force actions in Angola , security force action in South Africa , and intra-black (or “black-on-black”) killings.

Since the end of apartheid in 1994, over 300,000 people have been murdered in South Africa . To put this horrifying number into perspective, it is sobering to recall that the United Kingdom suffered 383,000 military deaths during World War II, after years of intense fighting across France , Germany , and the Mediterranean basin.

An epidemic of criminal violence has afflicted South Africa since its first non-racial franchise in 1994. Yet, as one astute observer points out: “This story has been largely ignored by the mainstream media in the United States and the Western world, in order to perpetuate the Mandela myth of the wonderful New South Africa.”

Why are the Western media largely silent about South Africa ’s crime wave? Is it for fear of being thought ‘racist’, notwithstanding the fact that most victims of violent crime in South Africa are black? Is it for fear of blemishing the miracle of South Africa ’s (relatively) peaceful transition to democracy, having to admit that the value of reconciliation on which the “rainbow nation” was built has given way to mistrust and animosity? Whatever the reason, the Western media is doing its consumers a disservice by ignoring the tidal wave of violent crime which has engulfed South Africa.

“My child has been murdered; he lies in the room at the back and there is blood.” With these words the father of the 29-year-old Gericke Smit, an attorney, had to report his son’s death to an ex-policeman. Gericke was killed in Pietersburg last month by two men who battered him to death, striking him across the head with shovels more than 18 times.

Every day – every hour, even – men, women, and children in South Africa are being murdered in their homes. They share the faces, the names, the broader history of the best in the West. When will this daily terror be reported in the daily news of the West?

[This writer, WND.COM, and a woman named Adriana Stuijt are the only journalists I know who’ve covered the killing fields of South Africa with any consistency. My near-complete book does justice to the topic. Please read our Articles Archive and blog entries under “South Africa.”]

Libyans Are Not The Villains

Britain, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Morality, Terrorism, The West

Not in the saga of the Lockerbie mass murderer released into the loving arms of his countrymen and coreligionists. According to the neoconservatives, Bush’s deft diplomacy had won Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi over to the West, but you know better. By welcoming Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi home as a hero, Libyans and their leaders were showing their true hue to the West. Cry baby victims and their leaders demand sensitivity to their plight; the Arab world gives them a macho display of antagonism. Frankly, I can respect the latter more than the demands from the West that Gaddafi be more like Oprah.

Al-Megrahi was convicted of bringing down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, and killing 270 people—259 people on the plane and another 11 who died on the ground.

The Boeing 747 blew up at 31,000ft, approximately 38 minutes after taking off from London’s Heathrow airport bound for JFK in New York.
Large parts of the aircraft fell on Lockerbie, devastating parts of the Scottish borders town and setting in train the UK’s biggest mass murder inquiry.

The contemptible parties in this fracas are the Scottish authorities, responsible for releasing the man on compassionate grounds citing the certitude of their moral values and Al-Megrahi’s impending death from cancer. A befitting description for the values of Kenny MacAskill, Scotland’s Justice Secretary, are the words deployed by family members: “Perfidious, repulsive and sickening”—that pretty much sums up the quality of Scottish justice.

Update III: Badass In America (Fighting Race Baiters)

Barack Obama, Crime, Education, Intellectualism, libertarianism, Media, Race, Racism

While out on a run one day, our alarm system was triggered. Not the full foghorn, mind you, but a sensor, which went off at the security company’s headquarters. As we were entering the home, two police officers were walking down the driveway and up the stairs. They were extremely polite, but stern. They told us they had received a report of an alarm going off at this address. Were we the owners of the abode, they wanted to know. “Yes,” we replied. They asked to see ID. We complied. Then they left. We were impressed with their professionalism and glad for the vigilance.

A similar thing happened to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. But he was not as pleased with the boys in blue as Sean and I were.

The case of Gates was catapulted to the headlines, first by the “Black In America” cable channel, CNN. Then by the mother ship docked at the White House. “Obama,” reports Fox News, “who is friends with the professor and documentary filmmaker, told reporters at a Wednesday night press conference that … ‘the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.'”

The fact that Gates was in the home is no proof he owned or resided in that home. More material: Obama was anything but impartial. His was the full-throated reaction of the president of Black America. Obama was ready with a bag of tricks that would have done the Sharpton-Jackson race baiters proud.

But back to Gates. He and his cabby had forced the front door, and it appears that Gates refused to produce an ID or any other information, calling Sgt. James Crowley a racist for requesting identification.

“According to the report, Gates then yelled, ‘This is what happens to black men in America.’ When Crowley tried to calm him down, Gates shouted, ‘You don’t know who you’re messing with.'” And, “Ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside.”

Classy.

At this stage, I think the officer ought to have walked away. Just done the gentlemanly thing and bowed out. But when Gates followed Crowley out cussing, pulling rank and threatening him, the officer cuffed the professor for disorderly conduct. At this point, the officer, who so far had done his duty, lost it and gave in to oneupmanship.

Before commenting, do read the Disorderly Conduct Report, written by both Sergeant James Crowley and Officer James Figueroa (courtesy of “The Smoking Gun”).

Update I (July 24): THE AFRICAN ARISTOTLE. Soft sobriquets such as “PC” and “elitist” don’t come close to capturing the essence of Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr.

Let me do the honors. Gates is a man who has risen to the pinnacle of a society he hates. His stature he owes to the creation of bogus fields of specialty by a stupid, self-immolating WASP society. Described as “scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual,” among other effusions, Gates’ scholarship is in … drum roll … the “study of black culture,” a BS pursuit created to appease; to allow the intellectually undeserving to delude themselves and others that they’ve scaled considerable intellectual heights.

I’m appalled that no one has been remotely critical of the treatment this man is receiving as the crème de la crème of American intelligentsia; a man whose Wikipedia entry perfectly seriously lauds his skills at combining of “literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions.” Jacques Derrida at least was an educated deconstructionist. Ditto Michel Foucault.

CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, of the “Black In America” lamentations, had a frothing fit when trying to express her outrage at the treatment of this African Aristotle. O’Brien boasted about taking classes at Harvard with Gates the intellectual giant, and struggled to find the words with which to do justice to his towering achievements, not least of which is his gritty, terribly original role as an “outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon.” What you can’t best, you can at least trash.

Update II (July 25): Steve Sailer on Obama’s ingrained racism. Sailer also brings up a point I’ve hammered again and again on this blog and in my columns: The importance of Ricci, the white firefighter, refusing to go gently into the good night.

Obama’s comments at his news conference on the “stupidity” of the Cambridge Police Department were, despite all his lawyerly stipulations, a textbook example of racial prejudice in action. He had prejudged these specific events based on his deeply held views on the general racial situation in America.

As in Ricci, we see the value of civil servant unions in standing up to racialized politicians. Crowley’s cop union stood shoulder to shoulder with him and helped him face down the Governor and the President. Government employee unions are expensive, but they do have an interest in standing up for civil service rules in fighting the new racial spoils system perpetrated under the guise of “civil rights.”

Another lesson is that as the Establishment has ratcheted up Racism into the worst sin imaginable in the history of the world, it has not correspondingly ratcheted up the seriousness of the consequences of falsely accusing somebody of “racism.” It was clear from even Dr. Gates’s self-serving account that his accusations of racism against Officer Crowley were the product not of evidence but of his understandably tired, overexcited brain intersecting with his business interests as a prestige media race man. Crowley refused to buckle under to extraordinary pressure, going all the way up to the President, thus setting a new standard for how to respond to false charges.

It’s time to pressure Obama to publicly call on his friend Skip Gates to withdraw his charges of racism against Officer Crowley on the grounds that the epidemic of false charges of racism must be halted.

Now, that would be a Teachable Moment!

Update III (July 27): FIGHTING THE RACE BAITERS. On MSNBC, Eugene Robinson, the mediocre, mundane mind that has landed a lucrative post at the Washington Post and a Pulitzer Prize, smirked over the allegation that Gates had cussed. “He’s a superstar, one of the best-known and most highly acclaimed faculty members at the nation’s most prestigious university.” Such people don’t cuss. “C’mon,” Robinson jocularly intimated; Sgt. James Crowley is likely the liar.

Look, I hope you get that this fracas is never about the non-aggression principle: The libertarian law is the easy part; the no-brainer. As the libertarian law goes, Crowley was in the wrong. But there’s more to society than the skeletal non-aggression axiom. The real achievement here is Crowley’s; the Sgt. got the race hucksters to back down, and that includes The President of Black America. Is the WASP fed up to the back teeth? Will he fight for his rights? That’s to be seen.

Updated: Vin Suprynowicz On The Immigration Vexation

Classical Liberalism, Crime, Founding Fathers, IMMIGRATION, Individual Rights, libertarianism, Multiculturalism, Reason

“Californians are living now what will be America’s future—unless mass immigration is stopped,” writes Peter Brimelow of VDARE.COM. I thought I’d beat the daring VDARE folks by mentioning the latest American of note to be picked-off by an immigrant: NFL quarterback Steve McNair. His alleged assailant was a 20-year-old Iranian woman, Sahel Kazemi. But VDARE, being unbeatable on exposing the miseries and contradictions of enforced, centrally planned “third-world immigration and immiseration”—that proved impossible.

I do want you to read “Letting the looters vote on who’s for lunch,” an eminently reasonable column by another intrepid freedom lover, Vin Suprynowicz. Other than Vin, myself and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, I have not come across a libertarian who was willing—and able—to offer a sane, reality-based, countervailing analysis of current libertarian “thinking” on immigration:

“A recent column on the euphemisms used by proponents of illegal-immigrant amnesty brought some irate buzzing from all seven members of the Young Anarchists’ League.

As near as I can figure, I’m “not allowed” to call for the enforcement of current immigration laws — or possibly of any laws, even those few (like the immigration laws) enacted within the powers delegated to Congress under the Constitution — because any such enforcement of the law amounts to some kind of “collectivist police state fascism” against people who have “not initiated force or fraud.”

I’m not sure how you cut through a border fence without “initiating force,” or how you rent an apartment, register a car and go to work every day using someone else’s Social Security number without “initiating fraud.”

I’m further “not allowed” to cite the cost to taxpayers of illegal alien trespassers swarming our public schools and hospitals, lest I be accused of somehow “supporting” tax subsidies for schools and hospitals.

As it so happens, as a libertarian (not an anarchist) I do stand proudly and publicly against tax subsidies for schools and hospitals. People should pay their own way, and seek private charity if unable to do so. This would bring down costs for everyone. But that’s not enough for my young anarchist friends. Instead, I am apparently obliged to pretend these current, swelling tax burdens do not exist.

Perhaps this is an easier position to maintain if Mommy and Daddy still pay all your taxes, while allowing you to live in the basement, pounding your keyboard.

I do remember hearing my friend Jackie Casey, former head of the college Libertarians at the University of Arizona, regaling me with tales of how she would join her mother to visit rental properties the family owned south of Tucson.

Virtually every night, the human waves pouring north through the area would invade these residence units, using the sinks and other available surfaces for bodily activities which most of us reserve for actual toilets. Jackie and her mom would don elbow-length rubber gloves and go to work with their ammonia and bleach, cleaning up the human feces deposited by our noble wave of “harmless guest workers” who I’m “not allowed” to call trespassers because they “never initiative force or fraud” against anyone, merely going “where landlords and employers want them.” …

“Tara Cleveland was a lovely Las Vegas beauty pageant runner-up, an all-A student who wanted to go to law school and who sang at an annual “Spring Fling” employee party here at the Review-Journal 15 years ago. A short time later she was involved in a minor traffic accident in nearby North Las Vegas in which her car was struck by another car driven by two illegal Mexicans.

These two honored Latino guest workers immediately thought, “What would brave freedom fighters like George Washington and Nathan Hale have done, in these circumstances?” So, of course, they ran away.

Tara pursued and confronted the pair. At that point, channeling the spirits of brave patriots like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, these two south-of-the-border freedom fighters shot Tara Cleveland in the face with a double-barrelled shotgun, which had the predictable effect of killing her. They then stole her car and ran away again, eventually reaching Mexico.

It sure puts me in mind of the courage, the principles, the self-sacrifice of the men who risked their lives and their personal fortunes to fight the American Revolution, doesn’t it you?

One of the pair, Joseph Villezcas, was turned over by Mexican authorities in 2006, after they determined he was not actually a Mexican national. He was returned to Nevada and convicted of second-degree murder. But the other, now-33-year-old Fernando Garcia Valenzuela, received sanctuary in Mexico.

Clearly a genius on the order of Ben Franklin, freedom-fighter Valenzuela was not about to stay home, though. He was arrested in California in 1998 and 1999, though authorities there did not link him to the outstanding Las Vegas warrant, possibly because he used fake ID and a fake date of birth — while somehow still not “initiating force or fraud,” you understand.”…

[SNIP]

Read the complete column, “Letting the looters vote on who’s for lunch.”

This writer has argued that on certain “moral (and legal) matters, patriotic, freedom-loving Americans agree instinctively.” The right and righteous rage Suprynowicz expresses comports with the aforementioned observation.
It also reminds me of my sentiments in “José Medellín’s Dead; Cue The Mariachi Band.” To say nothing of my unabashed refusal, in the fractious Comments Section of a BAB debate (scroll down for the referenced exchange), to succumb to Tom Knapp’s egalitarianism-tainted brow-beating and admit that we are all essentially the same, and that—because all immigrants—libertarian scribe ilana mercer and her Ph.D., productive spouse were comparable in their combined contribution to this country to a scum, uneducated, illegal alien, Mexican drug dealer.

In its vim and verve, the Vin piece captures all that stuff. And it’s all good.

Update: Do me the courtesy of at least being vaguely acquainted with my position on immigration (gleaned from going through the Immigration Archive). My policy is not to quote distortions of my positions. I’ve never contended that “illegal immigration” is the country’s demise. Rather, mass immigration, legal and illegal, will indeed be the country’s undoing. I’m an immigration restrictionist for a reason. And those who’re not are rightly termed the “Treason Lobby.”

In response to the tired, so called argument to the effect that, “We have local criminals and welfare bums in the US,” I have countered again and again in articles and on the blog (only the other day) that,
“From the fact that taxpayer-funded welfare for nationals is morally wrong, why does it follow that extending it to millions of unviable non-nationals is economically and morally negligible? Or that it remotely comports with the libertarian goal of curtailing government growth? How is this stock-in-trade, truncated argument different from positing that because a bank has been robbed by one band of bandits (welfare-dependent nationals), repelling or arresting the next (welfare-dependent non-nationals) is unnecessary because the damage has already been done?”

If the leap is not too difficult, please apply this logic to local versus imported criminals, and please do not again inflict on me the vacuity of the non sequitur, “But, but, we have plenty local criminals in the country…”

So bloody what? The premise of that “argument” is: Importing more detritus is negligible to life and property (the robbed bank analogy), because, once some nationals steal property and snuff-out lives, then non-nationals ought to be allowed to have at these expendable resources.