DOWNSIDE LEGACY AT TWO DEGREES OF PRESIDENT CLINTON
SECTION: BREACH OF TRUST
SUBSECTION: RACISM
Revised 8/20/99
RACISM
National Review 6/28/99 John O'Sullivan "...It is, in fact, quite hard to find actual expressions of anti-Chinese or anti-Asian racism in public statements by Republicans or anyone else. The nearest thing to an allegedly bigoted remark came from Alabama's Sen. Richard Shelby, who described the Chinese spies behind the stealing of U.S. technology as "crafty." This was seized upon as an, er, crafty employment of an ethnic stereotype about Asians. But since the spies undoubtedly were crafty -- that comes with being a spy -- the bigotry could well repose in the minds of those who heard the word "crafty" and instantly leapt to the conclusion that Shelby must have intended an ethnic slur. Even before Sen. Shelby had committed his faux pas, however, Amb. Richardson had denounced those who were supposedly questioning "the patriotism of Asian-Pacific Americans and sowing the seeds of a darker xenophobia" because of the spy scandal. But his denunciation, bravely issued to a meeting of Chinese-Americans in New York, contained no hard evidence of anti-Chinese racism. And when the Los Angeles Times sought to fill this gap with anonymous anecdotes of "ethnic profiling" in America's nuclear-weapons laboratories, these turned out to be less than totalitarian. For example, "Snickering and hushed laughter broke out in a roomful of computer users as a person with a Chinese surname was introduced to lead a session on computer security." ....Most accounts blame Americans first. They leave no doubt that the racism of ordinary Americans -- made worse by politicians who incite and aggravate it -- is to blame. Richardson's speech, for instance, defended Asian-Americans against unnamed American racists. A spokesman for Beijing similarly blamed the spy scandal on "typical racial prejudice." Then Maurice Meisner declared in the Los Angeles Times that "opportunistic American politicians now portray Chinese in stereotypical fashion. The increasingly dominant images are of 19th century vintage: Chinese are crafty, deceitful, villainous and half-crazed automatons manipulated by evil rulers. It has become ever more difficult for Americans to see Chinese as fellow humans," etc., etc. There is a neat symmetry here. Meisner's picture of Americans might almost be of "half-crazed automatons manipulated by evil rulers." But the reader will search in vain for any evidence supporting such a picture...."
Jewish World Review 10/1/98 Cal Thomas "Liberal Democrats are today's slave masters. They should let these people go, instead of holding them in indentured political servitude, trading their votes for a few government crumbs. The race panel should have committed itself to putting the black family back together again. But that might solve the problem and unemploy certain black "leaders'' who seem to have made a lucrative career for themselves by ensuring that the misery of others never ends. The impediment to greater black progress is not racial discrimination. It is family breakdown. In every category -- from out-of- wedlock births and fatherless homes, to the percentage of young males in prison and victims or perpetrators of violent crimes --- blacks are disproportionately affected because it is their racial group that suffers most from broken or never-formed two-parent homes.."
Associated Press 6/9/99 Kevin Galvin "...Taking action against racial profiling, President Clinton today is ordering federal law enforcement officials to collect data on the race and gender of the people they stop to question or arrest, an administration official said. The president was announcing the executive order at a roundtable on civil rights law enforcement as a way of encouraging state and local officials to examine their own law enforcement agencies. Clinton also was expected to make what the official said was "a very strong statement'' about racial profiling undermining community confidence in law enforcement and to voice support for a bill before Congress that would provide funds for states to collect similar data. The official spoke on condition of anonymity. Law enforcement officials generally have resisted such data collection....."
New York Times 6/10/99 STEVEN A. HOLMES "...Declaring racial profiling "morally indefensible," President Clinton on Wednesday ordered federal law-enforcement agencies to compile data on the race and ethnicity of people they question, search or arrest to determine whether suspects are stopped because of the color of their skin. "Racial profiling is in fact the opposite of good police work where actions are based on hard facts, not stereotypes," the president said. "It is wrong, it is destructive and it must stop." Clinton said he was issuing a presidential directive requiring all federal law-enforcement agencies, like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the National Park Service, the Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, to gather detailed demographic data on their activities. "The Justice Department will then analyze this data to assess whether and where law enforcement engage in racial profiling, and what concrete steps we need to take at the national level to eliminate it anywhere it exists," he said. Clinton acknowledged that because the vast bulk of police work was carried out by state and local agencies, and not the federal government, his directive would have limited i-pact on the practice of racial profiling. But he challenged state and local police forces to follow his lead in determining the extent of the practice....The president Wednesday also threw his support behind a bill requiring the attorney general to analyze data from a sample of jurisdictions on stops for traffic violations by state and local law-enforcement agencies. The study would look at the race, ethnicity and sex of the driver, what prompted the stop, whether the vehicle was searched, and if so, what contraband was found and whether an arrest was made...."
Washington Times 6/21/99 Jerry Seper "...President Clinton last week criticized racial profiling by police as a "morally indefensible, deeply corrosive practice," but he strongly defended such profiling when he was governor of Arkansas. He approved the profiling of Hispanics by Arkansas State Police as part of a drug interdiction program in 1988. The Arkansas plan gave state troopers the authority to stop and search vehicles based on a drug-courier profile of Hispanics, particularly those driving cars with Texas license plates. A federal judge later ruled the program unconstitutional. A lawsuit and a federal consent decree ended the practice --known as the "criminal apprehension program" -- the next year, and Gov. Clinton criticized the court's decision and, at one point, threatened to reinstate the program despite the court's ruling. Mr. Clinton said then that he considered the searches as he did airport metal detectors and that drugs were a bigger problem than airplane safety. He told the Arkansas Gazette he wished a way could be found to expand the searches again...."The Washington Post 6/21/99 Guy Gugliotta "...Jordan Pearce stood before the Bank United cash machine, stared at a blinking light for perhaps three seconds, waiting quietly while a hidden camera scanned his eyeball. The machine's television screen spasmed once and opened for business. Moments later Pearce pocketed $40 and departed, just like millions of other Americans who stop at their local ATM to get money every day. Except that Pearce, 18, a rising freshman at nearby Rice University, didn't have an ATM card. Instead, he simply allowed the camera mounted in the top of the cash machine to examine his iris -- the colored part of the eye -- and check its characteristics against an earlier scan stored in Bank United's iris database. Once the match was made, Pearce was free to use the machine. He needed neither ATM card nor identification number: "They told me about it when I was making a deposit," Pearce said. "It sounded pretty cool." The cash machines at Bank United, Texas's largest financial institution, have pushed the science of biometrics -- identifying people by their unique physical characteristics -- to a new frontier, transforming what began as a James Bond fantasy into everyday commerce....Whether it's iris scanning, fingerprints, voice prints, hand geometry, face geometry or signature authentication, biometrics are rapidly becoming a cheaper, easier and more secure way to conduct business...."
The Detroit News 7/16/99 Bill Johnson "...None of the 27 new comedies and dramas premiering on the top four networks this fall has minorities in a leading role, and too few in supporting roles..... Although I had failed to notice, there's no disputing the claim. NAACP President Kweisi Mfume's characterization of this fall's lineup as "a virtual whitewash in programming," is both cynical and accurate. ... while this observation received massive media attention, it certainly can't be one of the highest priorities of the media, the NAACP or America. In fact, the issue pales in importance when compared with the self-destructive pathologies gnawing at the core of black communities. Black Americans do, after all, show up in disproportionate numbers on the six and 11 o'clock television news segments and usually in ways that are unflattering. These images, unfortunately, reflect a stark reality a world apart from the cultural stereotypes usually found in the make-believe world of sitcoms. In real life, blacks are plagued by social problems that range from disproportionate HIV and other health problems to poor inner city schools, whose products are more apt to be high school dropouts than achievers.....Making the larger society aware of covert or overt acts of prejudice is within the NAACP's mission as a civil rights watchdog. It must not neglect, however, the problems that are occurring in the back yard of the black community...."
Los Angeles Times 7/20/99 BRIAN LOWRY,ELIZABETH JENSEN and GREG BRAXTON "…In 26 new prime-time shows slated to debut on the four major networks this fall, every lead character and nearly all the cast regulars will be white, even those on shows where the action takes place in urban high schools and New York City night spots…..Industry sources say the answer boils down to a harsh economic equation: there's not enough money in diversity to make it a priority….Olmos, and many other critics, say the problem is primarily institutional and financially motivated, not overt racism. "This was not done with malice," he said. "There was no understanding that this was happening, and that's the real problem." ….Still, some insiders maintain that the real cause of minorities being marginalized has to do simply with audience tastes…"
Philadelphia Inquirer 7/20/99 David Boldt "…The decision last week to put an official end to Boston's busing program for racial integration ought to provoke a moment of national reflection on why the policy was such a failure. At the end of the 1960s, the civil rights establishment, then led by the NAACP, decided that the way to improve the educational opportunities of black children in cities was to increase racial integration by forced busing of students….. One reason they failed was that white parents often withdrew their children faster than they could be bused. In Boston, 20,000 white students, accounting for a quarter of the pupil population, left in the four years after the lawsuit began. In those four years, the Boston public schools went from 60 percent white to 44 percent white. (The white percentage today is 14 percent.) White flight from the cities and their public schools was occurring anyway. The busing program did little more than accelerate the process. But the more important damage wrought by busing was to fracture the civil rights coalition….. Somehow, the leaders of the civil rights movement had become disconnected from the needs of its constituents and lost the high moral ground. Has this changed? Not according to a panel of black and Hispanic leaders I heard last week in Washington. They contended that civil rights organizations and the political left have generally opposed promising strategies like charter schools and school choice - and have no effective alternative….."
World Net Daily 7/21/99 Walter Williams "...One of the outcomes of last week's NAACP 90th Annual Meeting was a call to mau-mau network executives for not having enough blacks in leading roles in next fall's television shows. Another was Kweisi Mfume's call to sue gun manufacturers. The NAACP director said, "The time has come for us to look at the proliferation of handguns." Mfume, like the mayors of Philadelphia, New Orleans and Chicago, sees gun manufacturers as responsible for the murder and mayhem in black neighborhoods. At the turn of the century, Booker T. Washington warned against the agenda of "problem profiteers,"."...."
The Washington Post 7/27/99 Michael A Fletcher "...Hate crimes and law enforcement misconduct targeting Latinos are on the upswing, a trend that has gone largely unnoted because of a dearth of reliable data and policymakers' reluctance to move beyond the "black-white" racial model, according to a report released yesterday by the nation's largest Hispanic advocacy group. The National Council of La Raza report documents dozens of assaults, church burnings and cases of alleged law enforcement abuse against Hispanics. It also says the number of federally reported hate crimes against Hispanics increased nearly 20 percent from 1993 to 1996, which it called a consequence of broad "anti-immigrant" sentiment, the rapidly growing Hispanic population and an increased "tolerance for intolerance.".... The report says Latinos are frequent victims of racial profiling by police. That issue has received wide attention as it relates to African American motorists, but Latinos face similar unfair scrutiny, a situation that the NCLR says receives little attention. Besides noting an increase in crimes against Hispanics, who account for 11 percent of the U.S. population and are expected to be the nation's largest minority group by 2005, the report said there are indications that more Latinos are becoming perpetrators of hate crimes...."
AP 7/28/99 "...ABC, which has been criticized along with other major networks for planning nearly all-white fall series, is adding ethnic characters to at least five shows. ABC executives said they began the effort to make their programs more inclusive in May, before the NAACP and other groups condemned TV's lack of racial diversity. ``Clearly, we have an obligation to reflect society as it exists,'' Stu Bloomberg, ABC Entertainment Television Group co-chairman, told the Television Critics Association on Tuesday. ..."
Accuracy In Media 7/28/99 Reed Irvine Cliff Kincaid "...The media have been preoccupied with some sensational stories of violent white supremacists who have targeted members of minority groups. But the hate goes both ways. A new video on the immigration problem demonstrates that whites in California are being targeted for what might be called "ethnic cleansing." The video, produced by a group called "Voice of Citizens Together," features video clips of pro-Mexican militants openly declaring their aim to take control of California and drive white people out....Perhaps most shocking of all is film footage of a confrontation involving Mexican militants who openly attacked members of VCT. According to media on the scene, the Mexicans were carrying placards with Communist slogans and were "bent on violence." Some of the VCT members protesting illegal immigration left with blood on their faces after being pummeled...."
Reuters 7/30/99 Steve Holland "...- President Clinton said Thursday it was intolerable that the patriotism of U.S. scientists of Asian-Pacific heritage has been questioned in the wake of the Chinese spy probe. ``Asian Pacific American scientists and engineers have long made major contributions to our country, to our national security, and to our unmatched scientific enterprise,'' Clinton said in a written statement.... ``Security matters are of the highest priority in my administration, but history has shown the damage to the lives of our citizens and to our society that results from the destructive grip of prejudice, suspicion and discrimination. Racism and stereotyping have no place in our 'one America' in the 21st century,'' Clinton said. ..."
U.S. News Online 8/9/99 John Leo "... Animal Group Calls Milk Racist," said the headline in the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press. Yes, indeed. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals was at it again, arguing that milk is a racist beverage because "tens of millions" of blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and American Indians are lactose intolerant, while most Caucasians are not. Sunshine, on the other hand, racistly burns more whites than minorities.... "
WorldNet Daily 8/3/99 Joseph Farah "....Impeachment hearing hero David Schippers told Bill O'Reilly on the Fox News Network that former Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary gave marching orders to halt all scheduled promotions of white males in her vast federal bureaucracy. "Now you know something about Hazel O'Leary in your capacity as -- looking over everything, and ... that there was an ongoing ... conspiracy to make certain that no white males got promoted to any offices of responsibility and got -- indeed got no promotions at all," he said. "Really?" questioned O'Reilly. "So Hazel O'Leary, then the chief of the Department of Energy, you're saying that your client told you, was knocking out all white males that -- when they -- when they were up for promotion?" "As I understand it -- this is secondhand. As I understand it, when Hazel O'Leary got into the office, she asked for the promotion list and then asked them to strike the names of all white males," charged Schippers. "That's against the law," observed O'Reilly astutely.
"Well, this information's been furnished to the -- to the Congress. They have it," said Schippers. Is it hard to believe? Not with the bunch in this administration -- not with what I know about the political nature of Hazel O'Leary, who personally targeted me and my organization for extinction as well. She's the former Cabinet official who made phone calls to my news organization's donor base threatening individuals with government retribution if they continued to support the Western Journalism Center, parent company of WorldNetDaily.com...."
Cato Institute 8/5/99 Stephen Moore "...America seems to be suffering from an identity crisis of late. Almost with every passing day, America is splintering into disparate factions divided by ethnicity, race, language and income. There was more than a little irony to Al Gore's famous slip a few years ago when he said that E Pluribus Unum means "Out of one, many," and not "Out of many, one." Has the traditional concept of Americanization been sacrificed to multicultural fervor? As John Miller of National Review points out in his insightful book The Unmaking of Americans, our modern institutions in America and many of our intellectual elites often put more emphasis on "E Pluribus" than on the "Unum." Through such programs as bilingual education, racial and ethnic quotas, and multiculturalism, we seem to mistakenly celebrate our separateness more than the ties that bind us together as a nation. Such policies emphasize group entitlement not individual achievement. As set forth by the Founding Fathers, our common bond as Americans is not our ethnicity but our shared values: our respect for freedom, and the self-evident right of every citizen to pursue life, liberty and happiness. ..."
NewsMax.com 8/8/99 "...If an American President used the "N" word and it was captured on tape, undoubtedly the news media would be all over the story. But what about a presidential brother? A controversial videotape depicts first brother Roger Clinton repeatedly and enthusiastically using that most offensive of all racial epithets while he was under investigation for suspected drug dealing during the 1980's. Here's an excerpt of Roger's clearly audible comments in a June 27, 1984 police surveillance video, as he was using cocaine and discussing a recent encounter his dealer had with a local African American teenager: "Some junior high n - - - - r kicked Steve's ass while he was trying to help his brothers out; junior high or sophmore in high school. Whatever it was, Steve had the n - - - - r down. However it was, it was Steve's fault. He had the n - - - - r down, he let him up. The n - - - - r blindsided him." The clip appears in the blockbuster 1996 documentary, "The Mena Cover-Up: Drugs, Deception and the Making of a President", distributed by Citizens for Honest Government. Another Citizens for Honest Government video, "Obstruction of Justice: The Mena Connection," is currently the subject of a defamation trial in Little Rock, Arkansas....And how come Roger's tape recorded hate speech never found its way into the mainstream press? Is it because a story about slurs hurled by someone very close to the President isn't news? Tell it to Newt Gingrich's mom, who used the "B" word on videotape to describe the First Lady in a 1994 interview with Connie Chung. Her faux pas was recycled for days on end just as Gingrich was about to assume the Speakership. Would the media have given Nixon or Reagan such a break -- had a brother of theirs been caught using the "N" word on tape? Don't bet on it. ..."
Orlando Sentinel 8/12/99 Charley Reese "...The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is urging a boycott of South Carolina until officials there take down the Confederate battle flag that flies on their capitol, underneath the American and state flags. Some years ago, the NAACP passed a resolution calling that dear, old flag " . . . the most odious symbol in the Universe." A bit of hyperbole, I would say. There is no point in arguing the meaning of any symbol. Like beauty, the meaning of a symbol lies in the eyes of the beholder. You can bet that when Japanese and American World War II veterans look at the American flag, it doesn't mean the same thing to both groups.
So I don't deny that some blacks may be offended by the sight of the Confederate battle flag. I just say, "With due respect, I don't care." No one in this free country should get the idea that all he or she has to do is announce, "I am offended by (fill in the blanks)" and then his or her subjective feelings will have the force of law. Let's not get into the business of censoring symbols. Flying a flag is a harmless act....."
AP Wire 8/10/99 "...The nation's largest organization of black lawyers is asking Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist to stop singing ``Dixie.'' Calling the song an offensive ``symbol of slavery and oppression,'' the National Bar Association passed a resolution at its recent convention in Philadelphia urging Rehnquist to ``refrain from such offensive behavior in the future.'' The group represents some 18,000 lawyers. A Supreme Court spokesman said today that Rehnquist would have no comment about the NBA's resolution ..."
New York Post 8/10/99 Michael Meyers "...LAST week some black militants assembled the press to assail the NYPD as some sort of mob and to attack the ads that are aggressively recruiting minorities to join the ranks of this nation's finest big-city force of crime-busters. The radicals - organizers and backers of this Labor Day's second "Million Youth March" in Harlem - screamed that blacks shouldn't sign up for the NYPD. Instead, they favored self-determination and self-policing of the black community. What a crock! The TV pictures of the snarling racial loudmouths were annoying enough, but the sound of their hatred of America and their paranoid stereotyping of the police was deafening. What makes these fools the spokesmen for any neighborhood, much less the entire black communiy? We New Yorkers are lucky - yes, lucky - to have the brave men and women of all colors on our police force who every day get out there to patrol our streets and sidewalks. (No matter their mediocre wages!) Not enough of us thank them - but let just one or two or three cops make a mistake or break under the stress of the dangers all around them, and the haters in our midst emerge to denounce all cops as some sort of "occupation army." Good cops get no demonstration in their favor...."
Boston Herald 8/10/99 Editorial "...Lower crime, abort the unborn children of poor minority women. Offended? You should be, but that's the gist of a sickening new study by researchers from the supposedly prestigious University of Chicago and Stanford University. According to this quack thesis, the nation's crime has dropped during the past 20 years largely because the unwanted offspring of poor, teenage minority women were aborted at a disproportionately high rate in the 1970s, thus draining the pool of potential young criminals. The researchers, Chicago's Steven Levitt and Stanford's John Donohue, even say that legalized abortion may be responsible for as much as half the overall reduction in crime that occurred from 1991 to 1997, and that areas with high abortion rates are safer compared to those where it's less common...."
The Washington Times 8/9/99 Zhengyuan Fu "...President Clinton has renominated Bill Lann Lee as head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and pressured the Senate to confirm his nomination. In 1997, the Senate refused to confirm the appointment of Bill Lann Lee because of his support of racial preference policies. But Mr. Clinton installed Mr. Lee on an acting basis. Since then, Bill Lann Lee has been holding illegally the post for more than 18 months in blatant violation of federal law that limits the tenure of acting officials to 120 days. One of the purposes of Mr. Clinton's nomination of Bill Lann Lee is to portray his opponents as bigoted against racial minorities of Asian descent. Another purpose is to portray himself as a supporter of the Asian-American community. In reality, as the former director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's Western office, Bill Lann Lee is renowned for his support of the racial preference programs that openly discriminate against Asian-Americans and violate the fundamental principle of equal treatment under the Constitution. Under the pressure of Bill Lann Lee's former organization, the NAACP, the San Francisco Unified School District imposed different standards of admission based on race and outright racial quotas, which brazenly discriminated against Asians in general and Chinese in particular...."
8/11/99 AP "...A gunman wounded five people, including a child, at a Jewish community center today. Dozens of police officers searched the complex for the shooter. Five people were hit by gunfire, Fire Department spokesman Jim Wells said...."
Washington Post 8/11/99 David Segal "...The American Bar Association today threw the weight of the nation's lawyers against "racial profiling," the controversial police practice of stopping and questioning minority motorists based on their race. In a unanimous voice vote, the governing body of the ABA, holding its annual convention here, approved a measure calling for state and local municipalities to collect data about police traffic stops to determine whether minorities are regularly pulled over because of their skin color. If authorities are disproportionately targeting minorities, the resolution said, the nation's agencies of justice should "identify the most efficient and effective methods of ending such discriminatory practices as they find exist." Minorities, particularly African Americans, long have complained that they are routinely detained, frisked and even handcuffed by police for no apparent cause. In Maryland, for instance, a court-ordered study found that on one stretch of Interstate 95 minorities accounted for 27 percent of traffic stops, even though they comprised 17 percent of drivers....."
The Des Moines Register 8/11/99 David Yepsen "...Former Reagan administration official Alan Keyes said Tuesday one reason abortion should be outlawed in America is that it has a disproportionate impact on black Americans. Keyes, a Republican and the only black among the major presidential candidates, made the comments Tuesday during an interview on KJMC radio's "In The Public Interest" program. Keyes, who is one of the strongest anti-abortion critics in the GOP field, said fixing the nation's problems starts "with a belief that God is the source of our rights and we human beings have to respect His will. The enforcement of that begins in the womb. " . . . Back in the "70s, when I was coming along, a lot of the black leadership understood that abortion is genocidal. It"s disproportionately affecting black people and now the demographics are such that we will lose our position as the number one minority, the largest minority, in America almost entirely due to abortion and this is not a good thing for us," he said. He said blacks make up only 12 percent of the nation"s population and those numbers will soon decline...."
CNSNews.com 8/12/99 "...When a person is in the midst of violently taking the life of another human being, it is difficult to imagine any emotion other than hate running through their mind - a pure, unadulterated, all-consuming hate. So why must we classify some crimes as hate crimes and others as mere crimes? Tuesday's horrible scene outside a Los Angeles-area Jewish community center has once again focused much attention on hate crimes. The suspect in this case has openly stated his hatred for Jews, and if even a fraction of the information about his white supremacist background is accurate, it would appear that his was a deeply-held hatred. The shooting of those little kids and those watching over them was horrible and scary and wicked. But would it have been any less horrible or scary or wicked had he shot them simply because they were there?.... But what does that say about us and our attitude toward violence? Would the calculated murder of myself be somehow worse than, say, the casual murder of a young black man in Southeast Washington, D.C. just because the perpetrator in my murder espoused a hatred of Norwegians? The premise is ludicrous, but that's the point to which we've come. In America today, we presume to make a crime worse because it is openly rooted in hate rather than quietly rooted in hate....."
Los Angeles Times 8/12/99 William Rempel "...Criminal prosecution of fired nuclear weapon scientist Wen Ho Lee could incite public hysteria over national security fears and "unleash a virulent anti-Chinese frenzy in this country," an organization of 'prominent Chinese Americans' warned Wednesday in a letter to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson..... The New York-based Committee of 100, a nonpartisan public policy group of Chinese American professionals from business and the arts, said in the letter signed by Chairman Henry S. Tang that it is concerned about indications the Taiwan-born Lee was "being pursued vindictively," possibly as a result of personal "or racial animus." The letter also raised questions about whether "the racial prejudice and popular hysteria" that sent 100,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II might lead to "yet another miscarriage of justice" in the Lee case. "Dr. Lee and the nation deserve a case made on the merits of a thorough and professional investigation, not a racist witch hunt," the letter said....."
Jewish World Review 8/13/99 Cal Thomas "...SHAKESPEARE WAS WRONG. To solve our collective problems, we don't first kill all the lawyers. We first kill all of those we think might grow up to be criminals. That is the inescapable conclusion reached in an unpublished study circulating among economists and "experts'' in criminal law. The study suggests that since abortion was made legal in 1973, the crime rate has declined. The implication is that crime is down because abortions are up. So, a good anti-crime package includes first killing all the babies our sociological models determine might grow up to be criminals. That would include Jesse Jackson and a lot of other people who were born in poverty but overcame it. Steven Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, and John Donohue III, a Stanford University law professor, are responsible for the study. Are they doing for modern-day eugenicists what Margaret Sanger did for the Third Reich -- declaring some categories of humans unfit to live and laying down guidelines for the master race?....... "
Washington Post 8/14/99 Vernon Loeb "...Chinese American groups, breaking months of public silence, have expressed concern to federal officials that espionage suspect Wen Ho Lee may have been targeted on the basis of his ethnicity and that his case could trigger what one group called "a virulent anti-Chinese frenzy in this country." "Such a high-profile prosecution, with its attendant media circus atmosphere, could do incalculable harm to the welfare of millions of law-abiding Chinese and to our foreign policy toward China itself," the Committee of 100, a New York-based group of prominent Chinese Americans, said this week in a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. The committee's letter came less than a week after the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee sharply criticized investigators at the FBI and the Department of Energy for failing to pursue other possible suspects, since there is no direct evidence that either Lee or anyone else at Los Alamos National Laboratory gave nuclear secrets to China. ..."
New York Times 8/12/99 Abraham Foxman "...In the late 1980's violence by neo-Nazi skinheads was on the rise across America. At a meeting with Richard Thornburgh, then the Attorney General, we urged the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to place the skinheads on the F.B.I. watch list -- to monitor their activities and vigorously apply the law. The Attorney General did just that, and as a result violence by neo-Nazi skinheads declined significantly. Fast-forward to this past July 4 weekend, when Benjamin Smith, who had been linked to the white supremacist, anti-Semitic World Church of the Creator, went on a shooting rampage, wounding six Jews coming home from Sabbath services and killing an African-American and an Asian before committing suicide. The Anti-Defamation League and other organizations knew about this group -- we monitored its activities and Web site, sought to expose it in the news media. After the July 4 rampage, again we went to the Attorney General, this time Janet Reno, and asked that a full field investigation be initiated in keeping with the Attorney General's "Guidelines on Domestic Security/Terrorism Investigations." We believe we had documented examples of violence and criminal activity perpetrated by members of the World Church. I believe that if Ms. Reno was not restricted by certain legal parameters put in place since the Thornburgh era, she would have acted immediately. Instead, she said she had to "review whether the group itself was tied to individual acts." Mr. Smith's activities on behalf of the World Church of the Creator, while public and abhorrent, were protected by the First Amendment, irrespective of his shooting rampage. Now, in the shootings this week at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles, we have the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the killing of Yankel Rosenbaum in Crown Heights eight years ago, and we have a suspect with clear ties to known hate groups. The suspect, Buford Furrow Jr., who turned himself in yesterday, had spent considerable time at a compound of the Aryan Nations, authorities say, and he may have aspired to the Phineas Priesthood, to which one gains "membership" by committing violence against nonwhites. Once again, the information we're getting about the suspect is coming largely from private groups. This doesn't mean that the F.B.I. has not been tracking these hate groups. But the Justice Department and the bureau are so hamstrung -- by the unpleasant legacy of the Hoover years, by fears of suits from the American Civil Liberties Union, by complaints from conservative lawmakers about avoiding another Randy Weaver fiasco -- that they can't act aggressively....."
New York Post 8/12/99 Steve Dunleavy "...SINCE the big daddies of hate - the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Liberation Army - are drawing Social Security checks, you might think their venom has been transferred to walkers. The truth is since those big daddies of hate have dissipated into the Viagra age, there has spawned a great family - Sons of Hate - and what an attractive brew they are. There are Aryan Nations, The Aryan Brotherhood and The National Alliance, whose leader, William Pierce, wrote the "Turner Diaries." Now, that is a tidy little handbook of hate. And then there is World Church of the Creator. Man, do they hate Christians like me. One of their passionate members went and killed a black and a Korean in Chicago on July 3 and 4. What a hero. Of course there is the Skinhead Movement, The Posse Comitados, who call all non-whites "Mud People." Charming. And don't let's forget our old friends in The American Nazi Party. The misfit who triggered Tuesday's ugliness in Granada Hills, Buford O'Neal Furrow, 37, was reportedly in Aryan Nations and its more active offshoot Order, another highly-resistible group..... So if you were in New York and wanted to join a hate group in Idaho, you would have to read an out-of-town newspaper, write letters, make telephone calls and virtually expose your identity, otherwise how can anyone get back to you without a name and address? But voila. The Internet. "Today, cyberhate can come right into your living room, right into your kids room and you can be anonymous, your neighbor or the local police don't know who you are."...."
Judicial Watch 8/13/99 Larry Klayman "...Yesterday, in what has now become a routine with the corrupt Clinton Justice Department, John Huang, who even Bob Woodward and The Washington Post called a likely Communist Chinese spy, entered into a plea agreement, in which he gets off "scott free," with only a $10,000 fine and 500 hours of community service. Huang was uncovered in the fall of 1996, and when he ran from U.S. Marshals trying to serve him with a subpoena in the Judicial Watch case which sparked the Chinagate scandal, his story rose to national prominence. Later, he would testify to Judicial Watch, untruthfully. When Judicial Watch moved the Court to have Huang testify again, and it so ordered, he invoked the Fifth Amendment over 1000 times, leading the widely respected liberal journalist Christopher Hitchens to remark that Huang had established a "new indoor record." As was true with Huang, thus far the Clinton Justice Department has indicted primarily Chinese, Indonesians, African Americans, and Indians in the Chinagate scandal, to create the appearance of justice. However, they have all been plead out with little to no jail time, with no real commitment to implicate other, high up Clinton-Gore officials. "The Clinton Justice Department is effectively playing the race card, by blaming just a bunch of foreigners and minorities, but not holding them accountable in any event for fear they might implicate the corrupt 'white men in the White House,'" stated Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel Larry Klayman. "Judicial Watch will not allow justice to be compromised, and will now ask the Court to bring Huang back again for testimony, as he can no longer even claim that the Fifth Amendment is applicable," added Klayman and Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. ..."
Front Page 8/13/99 Chris Weinkopf "...Jesse Jackson's Rainbow-PUSH Coalition, which routinely attacks corporations for hiring too few minorities, seems similarly nonplused about the suggestion. A spokesman high-mindedly answered that he wants to "see the study," which has been summarized in the Chicago Tribune but is not yet published, before commenting on its conclusion-that aborting indigent and minority babies makes the world a safer place. Representatives at the Congressional Black Caucus and the American Civil Liberties Union have yet to utter a peep, or return this writer's phone calls. The report, "Legalized Abortion and Crime," by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and Stanford sociologist John Donohue III, notes that nationwide, the number of abortions skyrocketed after the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973. Crime, on the other hand, began to taper off eighteen years later, in 1991, when the first aborted babies would have entered the most crime-prone age group. Where there were many abortions, police reported fewer robberies, rapes, and murders two decades later. From that correlation, the scholars infer causality. They reason that since an inordinate number of abortion-obtaining mothers are unwed, poor, or ethnic minorities, their children, if born, are more likely to become violent criminals. The logic is dubious; the implications are downright frightening....The study's authors, and those who have embraced its findings, insist that they do not endorse the idea of abortion as crime control, but their words speak louder than their denials. Cory Richards, vice president of the Alan Guttmacher Institute, tells the Tribune that the study "is not an argument for abortion per se. [It] is an argument for women not being forced to have children that they don't want to have." But were "choice" all that is at stake, there would be no need to talk about national crime statistics. Implicit in the study is the suggestion that the country is better off for having permitted some 34 million abortions of demographically undesirable people. As Richard Posner, chief judge of the Seventh U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago, claims, "unwanted children are quite likely not to turn out to be the best citizens." Or, as one of the study's authors puts it, "Abortion provides a way for the would-be mothers of those kids who are going to lead really rough lives to avoid bringing them into the world." That sounds a lot like an argument for abortion......There are too many other factors-the rise and fall of the welfare culture, the burgeoning prison population, stricter methods of law enforcement-to determine conclusively why crime went up in the 1970s and down in the 1990s. Abortion probably has removed some sinners from the nation's ranks; it has surely taken some saints, too. That's all a matter of speculation, because 34 million Americans were deemed "unwanted" well before their time. "This idea of culling before birth," a Planned Parenthood spokesperson candidly confessed, "seems a little creepy." It's strange to hear an abortion proponent admit as much, while activists who claim to fight for the civil rights of minorities remain silent. The "unwanted" designation says more about those who apply it than those who are so defined. That America has dealt with 34 million lives so brutally is itself a crime-one that Professors Levitt and Donohue neglected to include in their tally..."
Chuck Baldwin Live 8/18/99 "…Without question, we live in the most hypersensitive generation in history. In this atmosphere of politically correct sensitivity a man was fired job for using the word "niggardly." The word has nothing to do with insulting a particular minority race, of course, but simply means, "miserly, stingy, covetous." No matter. The man was fired posthaste. Just this week Sen. Robert Bennett from Utah was told to apologize for quipping that unless Gov. G.W. Bush did something stupid, like have an affair with a black woman, he was certain to win the Republican nomination for president. He did. Americans are told that they had better not offend black people, Jewish people, homosexuals, Asians, Muslims, Indians, handicap people, short people, fat people, near-sighted people, ugly people or any other people. Any other people except Christian people, that is. Christians are routinely impugned, denigrated and held up to scorn from practically every quarter of society. In movies they are pictured as maniacal murderers, serial rapists and the like. They are favored targets of every late night TV comedian. Christians are routinely told that if they are offended by the content of television programs to "turn the channel". Christian chaplains in our military services are categorically instructed to not mention the name of Jesus. The leaders of public education tell Christian valedictorians the same thing. Christian schoolteachers are told to check their faith at the entrance to the school. Christians must listen to profanity, look at co-worker’s girlie magazines but are threatened with their jobs if they bring a Bible or gospel tract to work….."
NewsEdge Reuters 8/17/99 "…Robert Vrooman also told the Washington Post he does not believe China obtained top-secret information about U.S. nuclear warheads from Los Alamos or any other laboratory belonging to the U.S. Energy Department. Any such stolen data, he said, could have come from documents distributed to ``hundreds of locations throughout the U.S. government'' as well as to private contractors. While ``details of this investigation are still classified,'' he added, ``it can be said at this time that Mr. Lee's ethnicity was a major factor.'' Vrooman is the first high-ranking participant in the investigation to state that Lee's ethnic background played a key role in his emergence as the government's prime suspect….. In a separate statement faxed to the Post, Vrooman said Lee was identified by the Energy Department's Office of Counterintelligence ``as the prime suspect based on, at best, cursory investigation'' of only Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Vrooman said he had personally counted 13 Caucasians at Los Alamos who were ``left out of the investigation'' although like Lee, they had visited China and met officials at a physics institute there…."
The Wall Street Journal 8/19/99 Edward Jay Epstein "…According to Mr. Vrooman, Mr. Lee, who had worked at Los Alamos for 20 years, was only one of many scientists who had access to the design information of the miniature W-88 nuclear warhead--in fact, the data were "distributed to 548 different addresses at the Defense Department, Energy Department, various defense firms, the armed services and even the National Guard." Mr. Lee, it seems, was targeted for investigation because of his Chinese ethnicity. But the full story does not end there. There are, to begin with, reasons to doubt Mr. Vrooman, who was fired because of his putative mishandling of security at Los Alamos and so has an interest in exonerating Mr. Lee. A search of Mr. Lee's computer files found that he had downloaded classified design information on his own backup computer, evidence of a security lapse (for which he was fired), though not of actual espionage. …"