The New York Times
Published: July 29, 2009
Editorial
It was disturbing to learn the other day just how close the last administration came to violating laws barring the military from engaging in law enforcement when President George W. Bush considered sending troops into a Buffalo suburb in 2002 to arrest terrorism suspects. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily a problem of the past. More needs to be done to ensure that the military is not illegally deployed in this country.
The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from law enforcement activities within the United States. If armed officers are going to knock on Americans’ doors, or arrest them in the streets, they should answer to civilian authorities.
Despite this bedrock principle, The Times’s Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston reported last week, top Bush administration officials, including (no surprise) Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that the president had the authority to use the military to round up a suspected terrorist cell known as the Lackawanna Six.
Mr. Cheney and others cited a legal memorandum co-written by John C. Yoo (author of the infamous torture memo), which made the baseless claim that the military can go after accused Al Qaeda terrorists on United States soil because it would be a matter of national security, not law enforcement.
The Lackawanna Six controversy is history, but there are troubling signs the military may be injecting itself today into law enforcement. The American Civil Liberties Union has been sounding the alarm about the proliferation of “fusion centers,” in which federal, state and local law enforcement cooperate on anti-terrorism work. According to the A.C.L.U., the lines have blurred, and the centers have involved military personnel in domestic law enforcement. Congress should investigate.
Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, said Wednesday that fusion centers were not intended to have a military presence, and that she was not aware of ones that did. She promised greater transparency about what role, if any, the active military was playing.
Civil libertarians are also raising questions about a program known as the Chemical, Biological, Radiological/Nuclear and High-Yield Explosives Consequence Management Response Force. The Army says its aim is to have active-duty troops ready to back up local law enforcement in catastrophic situations, like an attack with a nuclear weapon. That could be legal, but the workings of these units are murky. Again, Congress should ensure that the military is not moving into prohibited areas.
Some of the military’s line-crossing seems ad hoc. Earlier this year, when a man in a small town in Alabama went on a shooting spree, Army troops reportedly went out on the streets to participate in the law enforcement effort. It is still unclear precisely what role they played. It is important that the military be thoroughly trained on what the law does and does not permit.
After the lack of respect for posse comitatus at the highest ranks of the previous administration, the Obama White House and Congress must ensure that the lines between military and law enforcement have been restored, clearly, and that they are respected.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Friday, July 24, 2009
Romanian Greek-Catholic Parish Declines Romanian Government Compensatory Offer Of Lands That Belonged To Jewish Holocaust Victims
07/23/2009, Laguna Hills, CA
Romanian-Greek Catholic Association
All press inquires: Jeanette Jogiel 916.441.0800
July 23, 2009 – LOS ANGELES, CA – Calling it a “scandalous and cynical act, reminiscent of the totalitarian era,” a spokesperson for the Romanian Greek-Catholic Association provided to reporters documents released by the Greek-Catholic Parish of Budesti (Romania), which revealed the abuse of the local authorities that offered lands that belonged to the Jewish holocaust victims to compensate the local Greek-Catholic Parish for its legal claims.[more]
In the documents, The Maramures County Commission For Applying the Law of Land Fund, a Romanian governmental institution at the county level that oversees the restitution of the properties seized by the communist regime, ruled that the Greek-Catholic Parish of Budesti should receive 12 acres from the land that belonged to the parish prior of being confiscated by the communists in 1948. Despite this decision, the local officials from Budesti offered to the Greek-Catholic Parish land that formerly was owned by Romanian Jews who were uprooted to Nazi death camps during World War II. The original Greek-Catholic land has been given by the authorities to the Romanian Orthodox Church which didn’t have any properties prior to 1948 in Budesti.
The Greek-Catholic Parish has refused to accept the offer because “it would serve as a grave injustice not only for us, but for the families of the Jews that were exterminated in the Nazi’s concentration camps,” stated Father Calin Hosu, the Greek-Catholic priest from Budesti, in his release.
In 1948, two Greek-Catholic churches and 40 acres of land were taken from Budesti Greek-Catholic Parish by the Communist regime. Now, more than sixty years later, the parish hasn’t yet received any of the properties back. “At the current moment we are still celebrating our religious services in a private house while our churches are kept locked, unavailable for our community to worship in”, says Fr. Hosu.
Father Chris Terhes, President of the Romanian Greek Catholic Association, which brought this subject to the attention of the American media, called the action “scandalous,” and a “reminiscent at the local governmental level of totalitarian behavior”.
“Our Church is simply demanding restitution of our rightful properties that we were deposed of by the communist regime, and we are not interested in barbaric offers from Romanian authorities such this one,” Fr. Terhes said.
According to the Association, about 2,500 Greek-Catholic churches along with parish houses, cemeteries and other type of properties were confiscated by the communist regime in 1948, in an effort to eradicate the Greek-Catholic Church in Romania. In 20 years after the fall of the communism, the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church was able to recuperate only about 200 churches.
“For the faithful of our Church this situation, perpetuated by the Romanian Government, has serious human rights implications, in that they are being deprived of their universal right to worship freely in the manner of their choice. In Budesti, for example, from two churches confiscated from us by the communist regime in 1948 we didn’t get anyone back, therefore our believers have to pray, even today, in a private house like the first Christians that tried to hide their belief because were threaten with the persecution by the Roman Empire,” said Fr. Terhes.
“This case is symptomatic for the situation in Romania, where the Government at the top level tries to present itself as one that honors the international conventions and offers equal access to justice for all its citizens, while at the local level the abuses and injustices are perpetuated by many officials that consider themselves above and untouchable by the law,” he continued.
“Besides the violation of the human rights, this situation has serious implications for Americans or anyone wishing to do business with Romania, in that they could never be assured of honest and equitable enforcement of law or court judgements there,” stated Fr. Terhes.
“We ask the international community to help us putting an end to these abuses and injustices that are still taking place in Romania, and help everyone there to have open access to the universal right of worshiping according to their conscience,” Fr. Terhes concluded.
The documents released by the Greek-Catholic Parish from Budesti can be downloaded from here: 2009-07-22 - Budesti - Greek-Catholic Parish - Press Release.pdf
For more details please visit: www.rogca.org.
Romanian Greek-Catholic Association is a non-profit organization located in South of California which supports the Greek-Catholic Church in Romania, assists the needy in Romania, and provides public awareness about the discrimination and persecution of the Greek-Catholic minority in Romania.
# # #
P.S. Recently, the mayor of a Romanian city and his son marched wearing Nazi uniforms during a fashion show. More details can be found on Google.
Romanian-Greek Catholic Association
All press inquires: Jeanette Jogiel 916.441.0800
July 23, 2009 – LOS ANGELES, CA – Calling it a “scandalous and cynical act, reminiscent of the totalitarian era,” a spokesperson for the Romanian Greek-Catholic Association provided to reporters documents released by the Greek-Catholic Parish of Budesti (Romania), which revealed the abuse of the local authorities that offered lands that belonged to the Jewish holocaust victims to compensate the local Greek-Catholic Parish for its legal claims.[more]
In the documents, The Maramures County Commission For Applying the Law of Land Fund, a Romanian governmental institution at the county level that oversees the restitution of the properties seized by the communist regime, ruled that the Greek-Catholic Parish of Budesti should receive 12 acres from the land that belonged to the parish prior of being confiscated by the communists in 1948. Despite this decision, the local officials from Budesti offered to the Greek-Catholic Parish land that formerly was owned by Romanian Jews who were uprooted to Nazi death camps during World War II. The original Greek-Catholic land has been given by the authorities to the Romanian Orthodox Church which didn’t have any properties prior to 1948 in Budesti.
The Greek-Catholic Parish has refused to accept the offer because “it would serve as a grave injustice not only for us, but for the families of the Jews that were exterminated in the Nazi’s concentration camps,” stated Father Calin Hosu, the Greek-Catholic priest from Budesti, in his release.
In 1948, two Greek-Catholic churches and 40 acres of land were taken from Budesti Greek-Catholic Parish by the Communist regime. Now, more than sixty years later, the parish hasn’t yet received any of the properties back. “At the current moment we are still celebrating our religious services in a private house while our churches are kept locked, unavailable for our community to worship in”, says Fr. Hosu.
Father Chris Terhes, President of the Romanian Greek Catholic Association, which brought this subject to the attention of the American media, called the action “scandalous,” and a “reminiscent at the local governmental level of totalitarian behavior”.
“Our Church is simply demanding restitution of our rightful properties that we were deposed of by the communist regime, and we are not interested in barbaric offers from Romanian authorities such this one,” Fr. Terhes said.
According to the Association, about 2,500 Greek-Catholic churches along with parish houses, cemeteries and other type of properties were confiscated by the communist regime in 1948, in an effort to eradicate the Greek-Catholic Church in Romania. In 20 years after the fall of the communism, the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church was able to recuperate only about 200 churches.
“For the faithful of our Church this situation, perpetuated by the Romanian Government, has serious human rights implications, in that they are being deprived of their universal right to worship freely in the manner of their choice. In Budesti, for example, from two churches confiscated from us by the communist regime in 1948 we didn’t get anyone back, therefore our believers have to pray, even today, in a private house like the first Christians that tried to hide their belief because were threaten with the persecution by the Roman Empire,” said Fr. Terhes.
“This case is symptomatic for the situation in Romania, where the Government at the top level tries to present itself as one that honors the international conventions and offers equal access to justice for all its citizens, while at the local level the abuses and injustices are perpetuated by many officials that consider themselves above and untouchable by the law,” he continued.
“Besides the violation of the human rights, this situation has serious implications for Americans or anyone wishing to do business with Romania, in that they could never be assured of honest and equitable enforcement of law or court judgements there,” stated Fr. Terhes.
“We ask the international community to help us putting an end to these abuses and injustices that are still taking place in Romania, and help everyone there to have open access to the universal right of worshiping according to their conscience,” Fr. Terhes concluded.
The documents released by the Greek-Catholic Parish from Budesti can be downloaded from here: 2009-07-22 - Budesti - Greek-Catholic Parish - Press Release.pdf
For more details please visit: www.rogca.org.
Romanian Greek-Catholic Association is a non-profit organization located in South of California which supports the Greek-Catholic Church in Romania, assists the needy in Romania, and provides public awareness about the discrimination and persecution of the Greek-Catholic minority in Romania.
# # #
P.S. Recently, the mayor of a Romanian city and his son marched wearing Nazi uniforms during a fashion show. More details can be found on Google.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Germany needs time to set Nazi death camp trial
July 21, 2009 - 9:21 AM
Germany needs time to set Nazi death camp trial
BERLIN (Reuters) - A German court may take until the end of August to set a date for the trial of John Demjanjuk, charged with helping to kill nearly 28,000 Jews at a death camp in World War Two, Munich court officials said on Tuesday. The long-awaited case is widely expected to be Germany's last big Nazi war crimes trial.
Demjanjuk, 89, has been held in a jail near Munich since he was deported from the United States in May, and prosecutors charged the suspected death camp guard earlier this month.
He has six weeks to respond, said the Munich court.
"The court will probably not make a decision on the opening of the main trial before the end of August," the court said in a statement. Prosecution and defence lawyers have said the trial could start in the autumn.
Der Spiegel magazine has reported that 22 witnesses are helping the prosecution with their case.
The retired U.S. car factory worker tops the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of most-wanted war criminals. The Centre says Demjanjuk pushed men, women and children into gas chambers at the Sobibor death camp in what is now Poland.
Demjanjuk denies any role in the Holocaust and his family argues he is too frail to stand trial.
Demjanjuk has said he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941, became a German prisoner of war a year later and served at German prison camps until 1944. He emigrated to the United States in 1951 and became a naturalised citizen in 1958.
He was stripped of his U.S. citizenship after he was accused in the 1970s of being "Ivan the Terrible," a notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp.
He was extradited to Israel in 1986, tried and sentenced to death there in 1988, but Israel's Supreme Court overturned his conviction when new evidence showed another man was probably "Ivan."
Demjanjuk regained his citizenship, but the U.S. Justice Department refiled its case against him in 1999, arguing he had worked for the Nazis as a guard at three other death camps. His citizenship was stripped from him again in 2002.
(Reporting by Madeline Chambers, editing by Mark Trevelyan)
Germany needs time to set Nazi death camp trial
BERLIN (Reuters) - A German court may take until the end of August to set a date for the trial of John Demjanjuk, charged with helping to kill nearly 28,000 Jews at a death camp in World War Two, Munich court officials said on Tuesday. The long-awaited case is widely expected to be Germany's last big Nazi war crimes trial.
Demjanjuk, 89, has been held in a jail near Munich since he was deported from the United States in May, and prosecutors charged the suspected death camp guard earlier this month.
He has six weeks to respond, said the Munich court.
"The court will probably not make a decision on the opening of the main trial before the end of August," the court said in a statement. Prosecution and defence lawyers have said the trial could start in the autumn.
Der Spiegel magazine has reported that 22 witnesses are helping the prosecution with their case.
The retired U.S. car factory worker tops the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of most-wanted war criminals. The Centre says Demjanjuk pushed men, women and children into gas chambers at the Sobibor death camp in what is now Poland.
Demjanjuk denies any role in the Holocaust and his family argues he is too frail to stand trial.
Demjanjuk has said he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941, became a German prisoner of war a year later and served at German prison camps until 1944. He emigrated to the United States in 1951 and became a naturalised citizen in 1958.
He was stripped of his U.S. citizenship after he was accused in the 1970s of being "Ivan the Terrible," a notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp.
He was extradited to Israel in 1986, tried and sentenced to death there in 1988, but Israel's Supreme Court overturned his conviction when new evidence showed another man was probably "Ivan."
Demjanjuk regained his citizenship, but the U.S. Justice Department refiled its case against him in 1999, arguing he had worked for the Nazis as a guard at three other death camps. His citizenship was stripped from him again in 2002.
(Reporting by Madeline Chambers, editing by Mark Trevelyan)
Monday, July 20, 2009
Countering Riots, China Rounds Up Hundreds
Nurmen Met held photographs of his sons, 19 and 21, who he said had been taken by riot officers as they entered the public bathhouse his family owns.
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: July 19, 2009
The New York Times
URUMQI, China — The two boys were seized while kneading dough at a sidewalk bakery.
The livery driver went out to get a drink of water and did not come home.
Tuer Shunjal, a vegetable vendor, was bundled off with four of his neighbors when he made the mistake of peering out from a hallway bathroom during a police sweep of his building. “They threw a shirt over his head and led him away without saying a word,” said his wife, Resuangul.
In the two weeks since ethnic riots tore through Urumqi, the regional capital of Xinjiang, killing more than 190 people and injuring more than 1,700, security forces have been combing the city and detaining hundreds of people, many of them Uighur men whom the authorities blame for much of the slaughter.
The Chinese government has promised harsh punishment for those who had a hand in the violence, which erupted July 5 after a rally by ethnic Uighurs angry over the murder of two factory workers in a distant province. First came the packs of young Uighurs, then the Han Chinese mobs seeking revenge.
“To those who have committed crimes with cruel means, we will execute them,” Li Zhi, the top Communist Party official in Urumqi, said July 8.
The vow, broadcast repeatedly, has struck fear into Xiangyang Po, a grimy quarter of the city dominated by Uighurs, Turkic-speaking Muslims who have often had an uneasy relationship with China’s Han majority. Uighurs are the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, but in Urumqi, Han make up more than 70 percent of the 2.3 million residents.
It was here on the streets of Xiangyang Po, amid the densely packed tenements and stalls selling thick noodles and lamb kebabs, that many Han were killed. As young Uighur men marauded through the streets, residents huddled inside their homes or shops, they said; others claim they gave refuge to Han neighbors.
“It was horrible for everyone,” said Leitipa Yusufajan, 40, who spent the night cowering at the back of her grocery store with her 10-year-old daughter. “The rioters were not from here. Our people would not behave so brutally.”
But to security officials, the neighborhood has long been a haven for those bent on violently cleaving Xinjiang, a northwest region, from China. Last year, during a raid on an apartment, the authorities fatally shot two men they said were part of a terrorist group making homemade explosives. Last Monday, police officers killed two men and wounded a third, the authorities said, after the men tried to attack officers on patrol.
“This is not a safe place,” said Mao Daqing, the local police chief.
Local residents disagree, saying the neighborhood is made up of poor but law-abiding people, most of them farmers who came to Urumqi seeking a slice of the city’s prosperity. Interviews with two dozen people showed vehement condemnation of the rioters. “Those people are nothing but human trash,” one man said, spitting on the ground.
Still, the police response has been indiscriminate, they said. Nurmen Met, 54, said his two sons, 19 and 21, were nabbed as riot officers entered the public bathhouse his family owns. “They weren’t even outside on the day of the troubles,” he said, holding up photos of his sons. “They are good, honest boys.”
Many people said they feared that their family members might be swallowed up by a penal system that is vast and notoriously opaque. Last year, in the months leading to the Beijing Olympics, the authorities arrested and tried more than 1,100 people in Xinjiang during a campaign against what they called “religious extremists and separatists.”
Shortly after the arrests, Wang Lequan, the region’s Communist Party secretary, described the crackdown as a “life and death” struggle.
Uighur exile groups and human rights advocates say the government sometimes uses such charges to silence those who press for greater religious and political freedoms. Trials, they say, are often cursory. “Justice is pretty rough in Xinjiang,” said James Seymour, a senior research fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
In a sign of the sensitivities surrounding the unrest, the Bureau for Legal Affairs in Beijing has warned lawyers to stay away from cases in Xinjiang, suggesting that those who assist anyone accused of rioting pose a threat to national unity. Officials on Friday shut down the Open Constitution Initiative, a consortium of volunteer lawyers who have taken on cases that challenge the government and other powerful interests. Separately, the bureau canceled the licenses of 53 lawyers, some of whom had offered to help Tibetans accused of rioting last year in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.
Rights advocates say that if the trials in Xinjiang resemble those that took place in Tibet, many defendants will receive long sentences. “There is a lot of concern that those who have been detained in Xinjiang will not get a fair trial,” said Wang Songlian, a research coordinator at Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group.
Residents of Xiangyang Po say police officers made two morning sweeps through the neighborhood after the rioting began, randomly grabbing boys as young as 16. That spurred a crowd of anguished women to march to the center of Urumqi to demand the men’s release.
But none of the detainees has come home, the residents say, and the authorities have refused to provide information about their whereabouts.
“I go to the police station every day, but they just tell me to be patient and wait,” said Patiguli Palachi, whose husband, an electronics repairman, was taken in his pajamas with four other occupants of their courtyard house. Ms. Palachi said they might have been detained because a Han man was killed outside their building, but she insisted that her husband was not involved. “We were hiding inside at the time, terrified like everyone else,” she said.
Although it was impossible to verify the accounts of the residents, as Ms. Palachi spoke, more than 10 people gathered to share similar accounts.
Emboldened by the presence of foreign journalists, the group decided to walk to the local police station to confront the police again. “Maybe if you are with us, they will give an answer,” said Memet Banjia, a vegetable seller looking for his son. “Probably they will say nothing and the next day we will disappear, too.”
But the meeting with the police was not to be. As the residents approached the station house, a squad car roared up and the crowd melted away. The foreigners were ordered into the car and driven to the station house. After an hour’s wait, a pair of high-ranking security officials arrived with a lecture and a warning.
“You can’t be here; it’s too unsafe,” one of them said as he drove the foreigners back to the heavily patrolled center of the city. “It’s for your own good.”
Zhang Jing contributed research.
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: July 19, 2009
The New York Times
URUMQI, China — The two boys were seized while kneading dough at a sidewalk bakery.
The livery driver went out to get a drink of water and did not come home.
Tuer Shunjal, a vegetable vendor, was bundled off with four of his neighbors when he made the mistake of peering out from a hallway bathroom during a police sweep of his building. “They threw a shirt over his head and led him away without saying a word,” said his wife, Resuangul.
In the two weeks since ethnic riots tore through Urumqi, the regional capital of Xinjiang, killing more than 190 people and injuring more than 1,700, security forces have been combing the city and detaining hundreds of people, many of them Uighur men whom the authorities blame for much of the slaughter.
The Chinese government has promised harsh punishment for those who had a hand in the violence, which erupted July 5 after a rally by ethnic Uighurs angry over the murder of two factory workers in a distant province. First came the packs of young Uighurs, then the Han Chinese mobs seeking revenge.
“To those who have committed crimes with cruel means, we will execute them,” Li Zhi, the top Communist Party official in Urumqi, said July 8.
The vow, broadcast repeatedly, has struck fear into Xiangyang Po, a grimy quarter of the city dominated by Uighurs, Turkic-speaking Muslims who have often had an uneasy relationship with China’s Han majority. Uighurs are the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, but in Urumqi, Han make up more than 70 percent of the 2.3 million residents.
It was here on the streets of Xiangyang Po, amid the densely packed tenements and stalls selling thick noodles and lamb kebabs, that many Han were killed. As young Uighur men marauded through the streets, residents huddled inside their homes or shops, they said; others claim they gave refuge to Han neighbors.
“It was horrible for everyone,” said Leitipa Yusufajan, 40, who spent the night cowering at the back of her grocery store with her 10-year-old daughter. “The rioters were not from here. Our people would not behave so brutally.”
But to security officials, the neighborhood has long been a haven for those bent on violently cleaving Xinjiang, a northwest region, from China. Last year, during a raid on an apartment, the authorities fatally shot two men they said were part of a terrorist group making homemade explosives. Last Monday, police officers killed two men and wounded a third, the authorities said, after the men tried to attack officers on patrol.
“This is not a safe place,” said Mao Daqing, the local police chief.
Local residents disagree, saying the neighborhood is made up of poor but law-abiding people, most of them farmers who came to Urumqi seeking a slice of the city’s prosperity. Interviews with two dozen people showed vehement condemnation of the rioters. “Those people are nothing but human trash,” one man said, spitting on the ground.
Still, the police response has been indiscriminate, they said. Nurmen Met, 54, said his two sons, 19 and 21, were nabbed as riot officers entered the public bathhouse his family owns. “They weren’t even outside on the day of the troubles,” he said, holding up photos of his sons. “They are good, honest boys.”
Many people said they feared that their family members might be swallowed up by a penal system that is vast and notoriously opaque. Last year, in the months leading to the Beijing Olympics, the authorities arrested and tried more than 1,100 people in Xinjiang during a campaign against what they called “religious extremists and separatists.”
Shortly after the arrests, Wang Lequan, the region’s Communist Party secretary, described the crackdown as a “life and death” struggle.
Uighur exile groups and human rights advocates say the government sometimes uses such charges to silence those who press for greater religious and political freedoms. Trials, they say, are often cursory. “Justice is pretty rough in Xinjiang,” said James Seymour, a senior research fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
In a sign of the sensitivities surrounding the unrest, the Bureau for Legal Affairs in Beijing has warned lawyers to stay away from cases in Xinjiang, suggesting that those who assist anyone accused of rioting pose a threat to national unity. Officials on Friday shut down the Open Constitution Initiative, a consortium of volunteer lawyers who have taken on cases that challenge the government and other powerful interests. Separately, the bureau canceled the licenses of 53 lawyers, some of whom had offered to help Tibetans accused of rioting last year in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.
Rights advocates say that if the trials in Xinjiang resemble those that took place in Tibet, many defendants will receive long sentences. “There is a lot of concern that those who have been detained in Xinjiang will not get a fair trial,” said Wang Songlian, a research coordinator at Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group.
Residents of Xiangyang Po say police officers made two morning sweeps through the neighborhood after the rioting began, randomly grabbing boys as young as 16. That spurred a crowd of anguished women to march to the center of Urumqi to demand the men’s release.
But none of the detainees has come home, the residents say, and the authorities have refused to provide information about their whereabouts.
“I go to the police station every day, but they just tell me to be patient and wait,” said Patiguli Palachi, whose husband, an electronics repairman, was taken in his pajamas with four other occupants of their courtyard house. Ms. Palachi said they might have been detained because a Han man was killed outside their building, but she insisted that her husband was not involved. “We were hiding inside at the time, terrified like everyone else,” she said.
Although it was impossible to verify the accounts of the residents, as Ms. Palachi spoke, more than 10 people gathered to share similar accounts.
Emboldened by the presence of foreign journalists, the group decided to walk to the local police station to confront the police again. “Maybe if you are with us, they will give an answer,” said Memet Banjia, a vegetable seller looking for his son. “Probably they will say nothing and the next day we will disappear, too.”
But the meeting with the police was not to be. As the residents approached the station house, a squad car roared up and the crowd melted away. The foreigners were ordered into the car and driven to the station house. After an hour’s wait, a pair of high-ranking security officials arrived with a lecture and a warning.
“You can’t be here; it’s too unsafe,” one of them said as he drove the foreigners back to the heavily patrolled center of the city. “It’s for your own good.”
Zhang Jing contributed research.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Alcee Hastings Paves the Way for Concentration Camps
This right-wing anti-Obama column does not necessariy reflect the views of our station, but we thought we'd include it as it mentions some interesting sidelights on Obama's recent acts of legislation and some of his Homeland Security administration picks.
July 6, 2009
Nancy Pelosi was unable to install disgraced former judge Alcee Hastings — who was impeached for bribery and perjury, and then hit a further low by cochairing Shrillary's presidential campaign — as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. But that doesn't mean this felonious Congresscritter (D-FL) hasn't been busily participating in the destruction of our country.
An amendment to a bill swiftly moving through the US Congress will allow the Obama Administration's Attorney General to classify Americans as domestic terrorists if they are pro-life, pro-gun and anti-big government.
Impeached Florida judge — now a Democrat Party member of the House of Representatives — Rep. Alcee Hastings introduced what some claim is a disturbing piece of legislation. Hasting's amendment calls for the Attorney General to have discretion over who is called a terrorist and what groups will be treated as terrorist groups.
Imagine the irony of patriots being denounced as terrorists by the scuttling cockroach Holder, the best friend of any real terrorist.
"This is arguably one of the worst pieces of legislation to come down the pike in a long, long time. In essence Attorney General Eric Holder — a Bill Clinton retread — will have the discretion to label Americans terrorists. Hastings is a dangerous man and should be forced to resign from congress. He's also proposed the creation of "emergency camps" that are nothing more than prisons," warns political strategist Mike Baker.
"This amendment is part and parcel of the trend in this country to suppress dissent by patriots by calling them domestic terrorists," he added.
The trend was given a major boost by Comrade Obama's preposterous choice for head of Homeland Security:
In an unclassified report entitled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," Secretary for Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and her agency included the following description of "extremists:"
"Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration."
If "terrorists" are defined as those who believe in states rights, border defense, the Second Amendment, and/or the sanctity of human life, the government will need new facilities to house them all. Hastings is on top of it:
Rep. Alcee Hastings also introduced what many say is another disturbing piece of legislation. That new bill calls for the Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to build at least six facilities that can be designated as "emergency centers." Hastings' rationale for such facilities is to gather and "house" civilians on what are basically detention centers guarded by armed soldiers or paramilitary troops.
The House bill (HR 645) — National Emergency Centers Establishment Act — is not even on the radar of members of the elite media. According to critics of the plan, if passed the government will create camps or centers that by their nature restrict the activities of US citizens herded into them.
In the near future, voicing opposition to the radical left agenda being rammed down our country's throat could land you in a concentration camp. Now's a good time to start resisting what liberals are doing to this country, because it won't be getting any easier.
July 6, 2009
Nancy Pelosi was unable to install disgraced former judge Alcee Hastings — who was impeached for bribery and perjury, and then hit a further low by cochairing Shrillary's presidential campaign — as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. But that doesn't mean this felonious Congresscritter (D-FL) hasn't been busily participating in the destruction of our country.
An amendment to a bill swiftly moving through the US Congress will allow the Obama Administration's Attorney General to classify Americans as domestic terrorists if they are pro-life, pro-gun and anti-big government.
Impeached Florida judge — now a Democrat Party member of the House of Representatives — Rep. Alcee Hastings introduced what some claim is a disturbing piece of legislation. Hasting's amendment calls for the Attorney General to have discretion over who is called a terrorist and what groups will be treated as terrorist groups.
Imagine the irony of patriots being denounced as terrorists by the scuttling cockroach Holder, the best friend of any real terrorist.
"This is arguably one of the worst pieces of legislation to come down the pike in a long, long time. In essence Attorney General Eric Holder — a Bill Clinton retread — will have the discretion to label Americans terrorists. Hastings is a dangerous man and should be forced to resign from congress. He's also proposed the creation of "emergency camps" that are nothing more than prisons," warns political strategist Mike Baker.
"This amendment is part and parcel of the trend in this country to suppress dissent by patriots by calling them domestic terrorists," he added.
The trend was given a major boost by Comrade Obama's preposterous choice for head of Homeland Security:
In an unclassified report entitled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," Secretary for Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and her agency included the following description of "extremists:"
"Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration."
If "terrorists" are defined as those who believe in states rights, border defense, the Second Amendment, and/or the sanctity of human life, the government will need new facilities to house them all. Hastings is on top of it:
Rep. Alcee Hastings also introduced what many say is another disturbing piece of legislation. That new bill calls for the Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to build at least six facilities that can be designated as "emergency centers." Hastings' rationale for such facilities is to gather and "house" civilians on what are basically detention centers guarded by armed soldiers or paramilitary troops.
The House bill (HR 645) — National Emergency Centers Establishment Act — is not even on the radar of members of the elite media. According to critics of the plan, if passed the government will create camps or centers that by their nature restrict the activities of US citizens herded into them.
In the near future, voicing opposition to the radical left agenda being rammed down our country's throat could land you in a concentration camp. Now's a good time to start resisting what liberals are doing to this country, because it won't be getting any easier.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
China Locks Down Restive Region After Deadly Clashes
Urumqi residents on Monday walked past burned cars. The government sent police officers into the city after deadly fighting.
BY EDWARD WONG
Published: July 6, 2009
URUMQI, China — The Chinese government locked down this regional capital of 2.3 million people and other cities across its western desert region on Monday and early Tuesday, imposing curfews, cutting off cellphone and Internet services and sending armed police officers into neighborhoods after clashes erupted here on Sunday evening between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese. The fighting left at least 156 people dead and more than 1,000 injured, according to the state news agency.
But hundreds of Uighur protesters defied the police again on Tuesday morning, crashing a state-run tour of the riot scene for foreign and Chinese journalists. A wailing crowd of women, joined later by scores of Uighur men, marched down a wide avenue with raised fists and tearfully demanded that the police release Uighur men who they said had been seized from their homes after the violence. Some women waved the identification cards of men who had been detained.
As journalists watched, the demonstrators smashed the windshield of a police car and several police officers drew their pistols before the entire crowd was encircled by officers and paramilitary troops in riot gear...(read the rest of this article by clicking on the link in the title above.)
BY EDWARD WONG
Published: July 6, 2009
URUMQI, China — The Chinese government locked down this regional capital of 2.3 million people and other cities across its western desert region on Monday and early Tuesday, imposing curfews, cutting off cellphone and Internet services and sending armed police officers into neighborhoods after clashes erupted here on Sunday evening between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese. The fighting left at least 156 people dead and more than 1,000 injured, according to the state news agency.
But hundreds of Uighur protesters defied the police again on Tuesday morning, crashing a state-run tour of the riot scene for foreign and Chinese journalists. A wailing crowd of women, joined later by scores of Uighur men, marched down a wide avenue with raised fists and tearfully demanded that the police release Uighur men who they said had been seized from their homes after the violence. Some women waved the identification cards of men who had been detained.
As journalists watched, the demonstrators smashed the windshield of a police car and several police officers drew their pistols before the entire crowd was encircled by officers and paramilitary troops in riot gear...(read the rest of this article by clicking on the link in the title above.)
Monday, July 6, 2009
Michelle Malkin’s In Defense of Internment
Michelle Malkin’s In Defense of Internment
Breaking News: Japan, Not America, Guilty of War Crimes 60 Years Ago
By Steve Sailer
For decades, the public considered the central event in America's 20th Century history to be the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Countless movies included a scene where swing music emanating from a wood-sided radio is replaced by a breathless announcer saying, "We interrupt this broadcast …"
In recent years, however, merely drawing attention to Japan's aggression has come to be seen as a little racially insensitive, something that nice white people just don't do. Thus the Holocaust, a much safer topic, is increasingly portrayed as the most important occurrence in last century's American history.
With the crimes of the Japanese militarists fading into the blur of Things We're Not Supposed to Think About, the bushido mindset, which inflicted so many atrocities on the world, is now considered cool. Recent Hollywood movies, such as Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" and Tom Cruise's " The Last Samurai," are full of Shinto.
However, some non-Japanese Asian-American writers are still inclined to raise unfashionable historical issues due to their relatives' victimization by Imperial Japan, and are well positioned to survive charges of racism. For example, Iris Chang's aptly-titled 1998 book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II was a surprise bestseller. (If you read even a few of its 449 reviews on Amazon, you'll see that Japanese hypernationalism is far from dead.)
For those in the educational and cultural establishments who believe that only whites can be racist, the reality that America, and much of Asia and the Pacific, was brutalized by fanatically racist nonwhites is profoundly inconvenient.
Fortunately for their peace of mind, the crimes of Imperial Japan can be nicely balanced off against an alleged American crime: the internment of Japanese Americans after the outbreak of Pearl Harbor.
Michelle Malkin, whose parents were born in the Philippines, bravely takes on the internment industry in her new book In Defense of Internment: The Case for "Racial Profiling" in World War II and the War on Terror. It's a daring and powerfully argued, if perhaps not wholly convincing, effort. Most importantly, it restores some three-dimensional perspective to a complex event.
I must say I have no idea how Michelle can write a serious work of polemical history, while keeping up her popular column, and having a new baby, but she's done it. [VDARE.COM NOTE: And even found time occasionally to go fishing.]
In Defense of Internment is timely because the taxpayer-funded effort to demonize the memory of all the public servants responsible for the evacuation of the West Coast Japanese has left our airport security system a sick joke.
Nobody, including Michelle, is arguing for interning all Arab Muslims in the U.S. But the "Slippery Slope to the Manzanar Concentration Camp" argument is repeatedly trotted out these days to render unthinkable even the most narrowly-tailored racial profiling.
Underperformin' Norman—Mineta, the Secretary of Transportation—has repeatedly declaimed that, because he was interned with his family during WWII, the Transportation Security Administration must continue its dysfunctional system of randomly searching, say, Navajo grandmothers, rather than (for shame!) focusing on Arab Muslims.
Still, Michelle could have noted that Mineta, the only Democrat in the Cabinet, didn't initiate his anti-profiling policy. Instead, George W. Bush denounced profiling of Arabs back during his second debate with Al Gore in 2000—as part of a plan hatched by Grover Norquist and Karl Rove to win the Muslim vote.
Michelle's book raises a series of difficult questions to which I'll give my answers.
Was the internment the result of wartime hysteria and racism?
No doubt overexcitement played a role. My grandfather, for example, became convinced that a Japanese farmer who owned a sloping field above Pismo Beach had planted his crops in a coded pattern conveying secret information to submarines lurking offshore. That seems like the lowest bandwidth communication medium imaginable. But, I am told, there was no arguing with the old boy.
And there were also many threats of mob violence against the Japanese, with Filipinos being especially angry.
Still, the Japanese weren't the only ones to be evacuated or suffer other restrictions on their freedoms. In 1941, America's most popular athlete, Joe DiMaggio, famously hit in 56 games straight. Yet, the next year, his father, a San Francisco crab fisherman, was grounded for the duration to prevent him from, I guess, rendezvousing in the fog beyond the Golden Gate Bridge with Mussolini's invasion fleet.
Italy, of course, had no navy to speak of, and Il Duce's subjects showed negligible enthusiasm for the war. Indeed, when Patton's army landed in Sicily in 1943, the Italian soldiers put down their guns, ran down on the beach, and helped the Americans unload.
In Germany, warlust was running much higher, but Hitler never finished building any aircraft carriers so he was never a credible threat to strike land targets in America. Moreover, the loyalty of German-Americans had been fully tested in World War I, when expressions of pride in German culture in the U.S. had been crushed during the anti-German kulturkampf.
Our current fetish with Nazi Germany disguises the fact Japan was much more objectively worrisome to West Coasters in early 1942. In Japan, fanaticism was strongest of all.
And the Japanese surface fleet was world-beating. It boasted eleven battleships, compared to the zero we had left afloat after their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, and ten aircraft carriers (six full-sized), while the U.S. could seldom put more than three flattops to sea in the Pacific. These aircraft carriers had revolutionized warfare, raiding Hawaii, Australia, and Ceylon, spanning 65 degrees of longitude, between December and April.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson argued that hit-and-run raids on the West Coast were "not only possible, but probable in the first months of the war, and it was quite impossible to be sure that the raiders would not receive important help from individuals of Japanese origin."
Was this worry strategically plausible or a figment generated by fear?
Worries about Japanese attacks were not simply a rationalization to drive out the Japanese Americans. Serious decisions were based on these concerns. For instance, the huge Kaiser steel mill, where the Liberty boats were to be built, was situated well inland in Fontana, California, precisely to be out of range of Japanese battleships.
Arguably, incursions on California made no long-term strategic sense for the Japanese and were thus unlikely. The problem with trying to judge how rationally Americans responded, however, is that the Tokyo high command, while tactically brilliant, was strategically nuts, with a pronounced tendency toward what Paul Johnson in Modern Times called "rational hysteria." For years, fierce young Japanese Army officers had been assassinating moderate statesmen skeptical of their demands for war. For Japanese, openly discussing the risks inherent in attacking the much bigger country of America could be a death sentence.
Having started a war it didn't know how to end, attacks on West Coast ports to disable the U.S. Navy made about as much strategic sense as anything else the Japanese did.
With hindsight, we know that the Japanese chose instead to drive south and east, conquering Guam, Wake Island, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, and Burma. By May of 1942, the Japanese had conquered one-eighth of the Earth's surface.
Finally, in June, Japan's mighty First Air Fleet turned back east, toward Midway Island, as the initial step toward Admiral Yamamoto's goal of conquering Hawaii and holding the population hostage until America agreed to end the war.
This was yet another strategic misjudgment. If Admiral Yamamoto had succeeded in capturing Oahu, and the Japanese had treated Americans the way they treated the Filipinos, the U.S. would never have negotiated. It would probably have taken until about 1946 or 1947 for the U.S. to fight its way back within bombing range of the Japanese mainland. But then, instead of atom-bombing just two Japanese cities, we probably would have annihilated a couple of dozen.
Fortunately, the Japanese were spared the full wrath of which America was capable by the U.S. Navy's extraordinary victory at Midway on June 4th, 1942. After that, the threat of raids on the mainland diminished sharply.
But by then, the evacuation from the West Coast of about 112,000 ethnic Japanese, about one-third of the adults being citizens, had been underway for months. (Japanese American citizens outside of the Coastal region were left alone.)
Were fears of disloyalty wholly hallucinatory?
Japanese immigrants in Southeast Asia had aided the invaders. But that doesn't prove than many in America would have helped temporary raiders. For one thing, any such traitors would have been left behind to face the wrath of the American survivors.
But the precision of the Pearl Harbor attacks did show that the Japanese had a spy ring operating on Oahu. It included one American-born citizen, Richard Kotoshirodo.
And top Roosevelt administration officials were hungrily reading decodings of Japanese diplomatic cryptograms, some of which recounted spy surveillance of mainland ports. The Japanese government would have preferred to use whites and blacks as its spies, but racist regimes have a much harder time recruiting Benedict Arnolds from other ethnic groups than do communist dictatorships. There's no evidence that the Japanese state progressed beyond organizing espionage to arranging sabotage, although suicide bombings would have been a logical step for the government that invented the kamikaze.
Unfortunately, the first two Japanese American citizens to have their loyalty spontaneously tested by a Japanese incursion … flunked. A Japanese pilot returning from shooting up Pearl Harbor crash-landed on Niihau, the privately-owned ranching island that serves as a cultural preserve for Native Hawaiians. The two American-born citizens of Japanese descent on Niihau collaborated with the pilot and briefly took over the island, until a wounded Hawaiian killed the aviator with his bare hands. One of the quislings then shot himself.
How severe was the risk?
On Hawaii, the Japanese ethnic group made up such a large fraction of the workforce that mass evacuation was impractical. Instead, the territory came under martial law. Few problems were observed. But then, the Japanese Navy never made it back.
Let it be noted that sabotage was more of a left-of-center fear at that time. Stalin had denounced "wreckers" at his show trials, and the international left had become obsessed by fascist "fifth columnists" during the Spanish Civil War. So evacuation of the Japanese from the West Coast was supported somewhat more by liberals than by conservatives. The most notable public spokesman against mass evacuations was Republican Senator Robert Taft—and the leading dissenter within the Roosevelt Administration was FBI supremo J. Edgar Hoover.
It should also be noted that the 1924 shutdown of immigration did much to cut down on the threat of disloyalty. All the Japanese-born noncitizens had been in the U.S. for at least 18 years. Even if they hadn't grown fond of America, they had at least gotten old enough that militancy wouldn't be as fun-sounding as it once might have seemed. The American citizens had all been born in this country and, typically, educated in assimilationist public schools.
But thousands of American-born citizens, such as Kotoshirodo, had been sent to Japan for their education, where they'd caught the militarist virus.
Everyone has heard, repeatedly, of the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which was formed in the camps and went on to set records for medals won while fighting in Italy.
We don’t hear, however, of the fact that over a quarter (28%) of the young male citizens in the camps refused to swear allegiance to the U.S. Presumably, many had been alienated by their experiences, but it shows that stories about complete loyalty among the internees are myths. Ultimately, 5,589 individuals even renounced their citizenship.
How bad was the treatment of internees?
By WWII standards, not all that bad, at least after the initial chaos. The worst injustices were that many evacuees had to sell their property at fire sale prices. In particular, many farmers in Los Angeles County would have made a fortune if they had been able to hold on to their land until the housing boom after the war. Some compensation for property losses was voted by Congress in 1948, but it wasn't enough.
Luckily, Japanese Americans are a hard working and enterprising people, so most got back on their feet relatively quickly after the war. In the 1970s, Senator S. I. Hayakawa argued that by breaking the authority of the older generation, internment enabled the younger people to adapt to the American economy better and make more money after the war than they would have otherwise.
Physical conditions in the camps were spartan, but not much worse than those experienced by draftees who remained stateside. And, of course, lots of draftees ended up in much worse places, such as Guadalcanal or, worst of all, a Japanese prisoner of war camp.
Workers in the relocation camps were paid, although the maximum wage was limited to that of an Army private's. Eventually, tens of thousands were allowed out to take jobs or attend colleges away from the West Coast.
Still, there was a significant psychological difference between being drafted and being interned. This must have been especially painful to the status-sensitive Japanese. Also, this complete disruption of life would be easier for a young draftee to endure than an elderly evacuee.
In summary, I would agree with Michelle that based on what policy makers knew in the desperate month of February 1942, mass evacuation of the Coast was certainly defensible.
I would add, though, that it seems less than optimal. Hoover's proposal for rounding up suspicious characters and removing Japanese ethnics from around just the most militarily crucial locations in Seattle and San Diego sounds far better both from the standpoints of protecting personal liberty and justice and of maintaining wartime production.
Unlike Michelle Malkin, I approve of the 1988 payment of $20,000 to each internee. The U.S. is a rich country and can afford to pay off at leisure for decisions that need to be made in haste.
That's a much better practice than our current tendency to immediately get bogged down interminably by half-remembered half-truths.
[Steve Sailer [email him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]
Breaking News: Japan, Not America, Guilty of War Crimes 60 Years Ago
By Steve Sailer
For decades, the public considered the central event in America's 20th Century history to be the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Countless movies included a scene where swing music emanating from a wood-sided radio is replaced by a breathless announcer saying, "We interrupt this broadcast …"
In recent years, however, merely drawing attention to Japan's aggression has come to be seen as a little racially insensitive, something that nice white people just don't do. Thus the Holocaust, a much safer topic, is increasingly portrayed as the most important occurrence in last century's American history.
With the crimes of the Japanese militarists fading into the blur of Things We're Not Supposed to Think About, the bushido mindset, which inflicted so many atrocities on the world, is now considered cool. Recent Hollywood movies, such as Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" and Tom Cruise's " The Last Samurai," are full of Shinto.
However, some non-Japanese Asian-American writers are still inclined to raise unfashionable historical issues due to their relatives' victimization by Imperial Japan, and are well positioned to survive charges of racism. For example, Iris Chang's aptly-titled 1998 book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II was a surprise bestseller. (If you read even a few of its 449 reviews on Amazon, you'll see that Japanese hypernationalism is far from dead.)
For those in the educational and cultural establishments who believe that only whites can be racist, the reality that America, and much of Asia and the Pacific, was brutalized by fanatically racist nonwhites is profoundly inconvenient.
Fortunately for their peace of mind, the crimes of Imperial Japan can be nicely balanced off against an alleged American crime: the internment of Japanese Americans after the outbreak of Pearl Harbor.
Michelle Malkin, whose parents were born in the Philippines, bravely takes on the internment industry in her new book In Defense of Internment: The Case for "Racial Profiling" in World War II and the War on Terror. It's a daring and powerfully argued, if perhaps not wholly convincing, effort. Most importantly, it restores some three-dimensional perspective to a complex event.
I must say I have no idea how Michelle can write a serious work of polemical history, while keeping up her popular column, and having a new baby, but she's done it. [VDARE.COM NOTE: And even found time occasionally to go fishing.]
In Defense of Internment is timely because the taxpayer-funded effort to demonize the memory of all the public servants responsible for the evacuation of the West Coast Japanese has left our airport security system a sick joke.
Nobody, including Michelle, is arguing for interning all Arab Muslims in the U.S. But the "Slippery Slope to the Manzanar Concentration Camp" argument is repeatedly trotted out these days to render unthinkable even the most narrowly-tailored racial profiling.
Underperformin' Norman—Mineta, the Secretary of Transportation—has repeatedly declaimed that, because he was interned with his family during WWII, the Transportation Security Administration must continue its dysfunctional system of randomly searching, say, Navajo grandmothers, rather than (for shame!) focusing on Arab Muslims.
Still, Michelle could have noted that Mineta, the only Democrat in the Cabinet, didn't initiate his anti-profiling policy. Instead, George W. Bush denounced profiling of Arabs back during his second debate with Al Gore in 2000—as part of a plan hatched by Grover Norquist and Karl Rove to win the Muslim vote.
Michelle's book raises a series of difficult questions to which I'll give my answers.
Was the internment the result of wartime hysteria and racism?
No doubt overexcitement played a role. My grandfather, for example, became convinced that a Japanese farmer who owned a sloping field above Pismo Beach had planted his crops in a coded pattern conveying secret information to submarines lurking offshore. That seems like the lowest bandwidth communication medium imaginable. But, I am told, there was no arguing with the old boy.
And there were also many threats of mob violence against the Japanese, with Filipinos being especially angry.
Still, the Japanese weren't the only ones to be evacuated or suffer other restrictions on their freedoms. In 1941, America's most popular athlete, Joe DiMaggio, famously hit in 56 games straight. Yet, the next year, his father, a San Francisco crab fisherman, was grounded for the duration to prevent him from, I guess, rendezvousing in the fog beyond the Golden Gate Bridge with Mussolini's invasion fleet.
Italy, of course, had no navy to speak of, and Il Duce's subjects showed negligible enthusiasm for the war. Indeed, when Patton's army landed in Sicily in 1943, the Italian soldiers put down their guns, ran down on the beach, and helped the Americans unload.
In Germany, warlust was running much higher, but Hitler never finished building any aircraft carriers so he was never a credible threat to strike land targets in America. Moreover, the loyalty of German-Americans had been fully tested in World War I, when expressions of pride in German culture in the U.S. had been crushed during the anti-German kulturkampf.
Our current fetish with Nazi Germany disguises the fact Japan was much more objectively worrisome to West Coasters in early 1942. In Japan, fanaticism was strongest of all.
And the Japanese surface fleet was world-beating. It boasted eleven battleships, compared to the zero we had left afloat after their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, and ten aircraft carriers (six full-sized), while the U.S. could seldom put more than three flattops to sea in the Pacific. These aircraft carriers had revolutionized warfare, raiding Hawaii, Australia, and Ceylon, spanning 65 degrees of longitude, between December and April.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson argued that hit-and-run raids on the West Coast were "not only possible, but probable in the first months of the war, and it was quite impossible to be sure that the raiders would not receive important help from individuals of Japanese origin."
Was this worry strategically plausible or a figment generated by fear?
Worries about Japanese attacks were not simply a rationalization to drive out the Japanese Americans. Serious decisions were based on these concerns. For instance, the huge Kaiser steel mill, where the Liberty boats were to be built, was situated well inland in Fontana, California, precisely to be out of range of Japanese battleships.
Arguably, incursions on California made no long-term strategic sense for the Japanese and were thus unlikely. The problem with trying to judge how rationally Americans responded, however, is that the Tokyo high command, while tactically brilliant, was strategically nuts, with a pronounced tendency toward what Paul Johnson in Modern Times called "rational hysteria." For years, fierce young Japanese Army officers had been assassinating moderate statesmen skeptical of their demands for war. For Japanese, openly discussing the risks inherent in attacking the much bigger country of America could be a death sentence.
Having started a war it didn't know how to end, attacks on West Coast ports to disable the U.S. Navy made about as much strategic sense as anything else the Japanese did.
With hindsight, we know that the Japanese chose instead to drive south and east, conquering Guam, Wake Island, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, and Burma. By May of 1942, the Japanese had conquered one-eighth of the Earth's surface.
Finally, in June, Japan's mighty First Air Fleet turned back east, toward Midway Island, as the initial step toward Admiral Yamamoto's goal of conquering Hawaii and holding the population hostage until America agreed to end the war.
This was yet another strategic misjudgment. If Admiral Yamamoto had succeeded in capturing Oahu, and the Japanese had treated Americans the way they treated the Filipinos, the U.S. would never have negotiated. It would probably have taken until about 1946 or 1947 for the U.S. to fight its way back within bombing range of the Japanese mainland. But then, instead of atom-bombing just two Japanese cities, we probably would have annihilated a couple of dozen.
Fortunately, the Japanese were spared the full wrath of which America was capable by the U.S. Navy's extraordinary victory at Midway on June 4th, 1942. After that, the threat of raids on the mainland diminished sharply.
But by then, the evacuation from the West Coast of about 112,000 ethnic Japanese, about one-third of the adults being citizens, had been underway for months. (Japanese American citizens outside of the Coastal region were left alone.)
Were fears of disloyalty wholly hallucinatory?
Japanese immigrants in Southeast Asia had aided the invaders. But that doesn't prove than many in America would have helped temporary raiders. For one thing, any such traitors would have been left behind to face the wrath of the American survivors.
But the precision of the Pearl Harbor attacks did show that the Japanese had a spy ring operating on Oahu. It included one American-born citizen, Richard Kotoshirodo.
And top Roosevelt administration officials were hungrily reading decodings of Japanese diplomatic cryptograms, some of which recounted spy surveillance of mainland ports. The Japanese government would have preferred to use whites and blacks as its spies, but racist regimes have a much harder time recruiting Benedict Arnolds from other ethnic groups than do communist dictatorships. There's no evidence that the Japanese state progressed beyond organizing espionage to arranging sabotage, although suicide bombings would have been a logical step for the government that invented the kamikaze.
Unfortunately, the first two Japanese American citizens to have their loyalty spontaneously tested by a Japanese incursion … flunked. A Japanese pilot returning from shooting up Pearl Harbor crash-landed on Niihau, the privately-owned ranching island that serves as a cultural preserve for Native Hawaiians. The two American-born citizens of Japanese descent on Niihau collaborated with the pilot and briefly took over the island, until a wounded Hawaiian killed the aviator with his bare hands. One of the quislings then shot himself.
How severe was the risk?
On Hawaii, the Japanese ethnic group made up such a large fraction of the workforce that mass evacuation was impractical. Instead, the territory came under martial law. Few problems were observed. But then, the Japanese Navy never made it back.
Let it be noted that sabotage was more of a left-of-center fear at that time. Stalin had denounced "wreckers" at his show trials, and the international left had become obsessed by fascist "fifth columnists" during the Spanish Civil War. So evacuation of the Japanese from the West Coast was supported somewhat more by liberals than by conservatives. The most notable public spokesman against mass evacuations was Republican Senator Robert Taft—and the leading dissenter within the Roosevelt Administration was FBI supremo J. Edgar Hoover.
It should also be noted that the 1924 shutdown of immigration did much to cut down on the threat of disloyalty. All the Japanese-born noncitizens had been in the U.S. for at least 18 years. Even if they hadn't grown fond of America, they had at least gotten old enough that militancy wouldn't be as fun-sounding as it once might have seemed. The American citizens had all been born in this country and, typically, educated in assimilationist public schools.
But thousands of American-born citizens, such as Kotoshirodo, had been sent to Japan for their education, where they'd caught the militarist virus.
Everyone has heard, repeatedly, of the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which was formed in the camps and went on to set records for medals won while fighting in Italy.
We don’t hear, however, of the fact that over a quarter (28%) of the young male citizens in the camps refused to swear allegiance to the U.S. Presumably, many had been alienated by their experiences, but it shows that stories about complete loyalty among the internees are myths. Ultimately, 5,589 individuals even renounced their citizenship.
How bad was the treatment of internees?
By WWII standards, not all that bad, at least after the initial chaos. The worst injustices were that many evacuees had to sell their property at fire sale prices. In particular, many farmers in Los Angeles County would have made a fortune if they had been able to hold on to their land until the housing boom after the war. Some compensation for property losses was voted by Congress in 1948, but it wasn't enough.
Luckily, Japanese Americans are a hard working and enterprising people, so most got back on their feet relatively quickly after the war. In the 1970s, Senator S. I. Hayakawa argued that by breaking the authority of the older generation, internment enabled the younger people to adapt to the American economy better and make more money after the war than they would have otherwise.
Physical conditions in the camps were spartan, but not much worse than those experienced by draftees who remained stateside. And, of course, lots of draftees ended up in much worse places, such as Guadalcanal or, worst of all, a Japanese prisoner of war camp.
Workers in the relocation camps were paid, although the maximum wage was limited to that of an Army private's. Eventually, tens of thousands were allowed out to take jobs or attend colleges away from the West Coast.
Still, there was a significant psychological difference between being drafted and being interned. This must have been especially painful to the status-sensitive Japanese. Also, this complete disruption of life would be easier for a young draftee to endure than an elderly evacuee.
In summary, I would agree with Michelle that based on what policy makers knew in the desperate month of February 1942, mass evacuation of the Coast was certainly defensible.
I would add, though, that it seems less than optimal. Hoover's proposal for rounding up suspicious characters and removing Japanese ethnics from around just the most militarily crucial locations in Seattle and San Diego sounds far better both from the standpoints of protecting personal liberty and justice and of maintaining wartime production.
Unlike Michelle Malkin, I approve of the 1988 payment of $20,000 to each internee. The U.S. is a rich country and can afford to pay off at leisure for decisions that need to be made in haste.
That's a much better practice than our current tendency to immediately get bogged down interminably by half-remembered half-truths.
[Steve Sailer [email him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]
Are there FEMA concentration camps?
Well, I don' t know. And we don't know. I would think it is an attempt to help disaster victims, and that is what President Obama signed into existence. But yes, they are outfitted for Martial Law, maybe thanks to the lovely "troublemakers." But during the last crisis of Hurrican Katrina, nothing seemed to much happen along the lines of rioting and killing people.
So I am hoping the FEMA camps will work out somehow, but their main problem seems to be lack of adequate funding or the capacity to build people superior housing they can escape to during a major disaster. What shall be done given the current economic crises does not look "pretty" to a journalist like me from here.
We can only hope for the sake of disaster victims that there will be no more such New World Order, Rex 84 or whatever such plans to "assist" disaster victims by housing them in concentration camps as before has been done - so many hideous and perverted times. We can only hope and vote, as Osama Bin Laden once put it himself, strangely enough, that our votes will somehow matter.
I wish I could offer you, Dear Readers, a way out of this crisis. We voted for President Obama, and I am dearly hoping that all will work out eventually in the end. Meanwhile, yes, don't let them come and take you away somewhere for no good reason at all. It would be for the best to not do so, although I deeply suspect the first such victims will be people that the authorities take away for some legal reason matter or another, such as illegal alien status, under President Schwarzenegger. I would suggest never voting for such a man as President.
The link in the title above leads to an Arnold Schwarzenegger page I can no longer work on, probably due to a computer malfunction that I will eventually fix, if it comes to pass that I am able to fix it. However, it is tempting to think that some sort of conspiracy is involved. I doubt it seriously, but anyway I am currently unable to add news about California Governor Arnold Schwarznegger. Chances are, it is indeed a computer malfunction that is "in the way."
His father was SS personnel during the Holocaust. At least "our Arnie" admits the Holocaust happened. At least, there is hope if he is elected that he will not make Hitler's mistakes, and somehow all will work out. But I think we are better off with a two term President Obama who is trying to help disaster victims. Potential President Schwarzenegger is someone I cannot reliably trust yet, unless he mends his racist ways completely and does not send Mexican-Americans to concentration camps. Also, Obama could use the time to figure it all out, and 8 years at least gives him something in the way of time to help him do so.
We are not Mexican-Americans, but I have friends in that community, and I would be very sad to see them come after me right after they came after them, as one thing could simply lead straightways to the other. Even the Nazis admitted they did not know really for sure at all times what was going on. They only did what they did due to War, Deprivation, and Poverty - and maybe even overpopulation. I have read their stuff, and they were human either, but you know.
Anyway, I hope we do not end up in concentration camps.......
.....again.
So I am hoping the FEMA camps will work out somehow, but their main problem seems to be lack of adequate funding or the capacity to build people superior housing they can escape to during a major disaster. What shall be done given the current economic crises does not look "pretty" to a journalist like me from here.
We can only hope for the sake of disaster victims that there will be no more such New World Order, Rex 84 or whatever such plans to "assist" disaster victims by housing them in concentration camps as before has been done - so many hideous and perverted times. We can only hope and vote, as Osama Bin Laden once put it himself, strangely enough, that our votes will somehow matter.
I wish I could offer you, Dear Readers, a way out of this crisis. We voted for President Obama, and I am dearly hoping that all will work out eventually in the end. Meanwhile, yes, don't let them come and take you away somewhere for no good reason at all. It would be for the best to not do so, although I deeply suspect the first such victims will be people that the authorities take away for some legal reason matter or another, such as illegal alien status, under President Schwarzenegger. I would suggest never voting for such a man as President.
The link in the title above leads to an Arnold Schwarzenegger page I can no longer work on, probably due to a computer malfunction that I will eventually fix, if it comes to pass that I am able to fix it. However, it is tempting to think that some sort of conspiracy is involved. I doubt it seriously, but anyway I am currently unable to add news about California Governor Arnold Schwarznegger. Chances are, it is indeed a computer malfunction that is "in the way."
His father was SS personnel during the Holocaust. At least "our Arnie" admits the Holocaust happened. At least, there is hope if he is elected that he will not make Hitler's mistakes, and somehow all will work out. But I think we are better off with a two term President Obama who is trying to help disaster victims. Potential President Schwarzenegger is someone I cannot reliably trust yet, unless he mends his racist ways completely and does not send Mexican-Americans to concentration camps. Also, Obama could use the time to figure it all out, and 8 years at least gives him something in the way of time to help him do so.
We are not Mexican-Americans, but I have friends in that community, and I would be very sad to see them come after me right after they came after them, as one thing could simply lead straightways to the other. Even the Nazis admitted they did not know really for sure at all times what was going on. They only did what they did due to War, Deprivation, and Poverty - and maybe even overpopulation. I have read their stuff, and they were human either, but you know.
Anyway, I hope we do not end up in concentration camps.......
.....again.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
AMERICAN HOLOCAUST and The Coming NEW WORLD ORDER
Monday, June 22, 2009
The FEMA Deathcamp of the MOJAVE DESERT in CALIFORNIA
Several years ago, I interviewed former Rothschild Illuminati member Doc Marquis about what he knew about he NWO agenda for America. He used to work hard for this Illuminati agenda in the past, including working at FORT LEWIS to recruit into the Illuminati NWO agenda. Then he became a Christian and began exposing the NWO agenda through "Christians Exposing The Occult." (At least, we HOPE he has fully come out! I give him the benefit of the doubt...otherwise with HIS Rothschild Illuminati background, I would not want to meet him in a dark alley.)
Doc knew that the modern GUILLOTINES were present then at Fort Lewis, as my later reporting has confirmed. Yes, Doc HAS handled the modern guillotines! He even participated in Rothschild Illuminati rituals in which they were used...testing the waters ahead of time so to speak. I asked him, "well, how did they work?" He replied, "oh, they worked just fine!" That's what I was afraid of.....(Thank you Jacob Rothschild and Illuminati family and Lubavitch Chabad's NOAHIDE LAWS for the GUILLOTINE AGENDA...pardon my sarcasm. I am sure your people love to read my reports! Lot's of free publicity, eh?)
THE FEMA DEATH CAMP OF THE MOJAVE is a full gassing/cremating DEATH CAMP, dedicated to the TERMINATION OF ALL ON FEMA’S "RED/BLUE LIST" (plus MANY other lists) UNDER MARTIAL LAW.
I have previously documented this horrific death camp, and documented the eyewitness accounts of several former NWO supporters who were flown out there. My friends, DOC MARQUIS (Illuminati) and ELAINE KNOST (CIA/Luciferian), formerly high level Illuminati Luciferians but now Christians for many years, were both flown separately to this facility in the Mojave Desert of California.
It boasts a landing strip. According to even another contact, a DEA agent I met in California at the GRENADA FORUM,who personally investigated this FEMA facility, it was recently DOUBLED IN SIZE TO INCREASE KILLING CAPACITY.
People have asked me, "WHY don't you go out there to that place and get photographs for documentation...???" How foolish to even think about it! The level security around such facilities is incredible!
Such detention camp facilities are meant to be isolated and out of sight from general public viewing. Also they are remote to make escape or entrance to rescue victims an impossibility. Professional military grade motion detection devices, remote cameras, ground sensors, all play a role in keeping away intruders or investigators.
Once the plane lands, Doc explained, you travel by jeep about 14 miles to an area enclosed in desert mountains.
It is fully staffed. All staff members WEAR BLACK SWAT TEAM UNIFORMS. When I asked Doc Marquis what his sentiments were, back when he was a member of the Illuminati and given a tour of this killing facility, his reply was, “SHEER JOY! I REJOICED at the thought of CHRISTIANS BEING TERMINATED IN THIS PLACE!” A chilling response, but typical of this nation’s Satanists/Illuminists and NWO supporters! (And sadly, as one Messianic Jewish friend admitted, typical of some in the Jewish communities in America who believe that "...it is the CHRISTIANS' turn to go to the camps now." How sad...)
This FEMA death camp was shown off as something the NWO and FEMA was literally PROUD OF!!! And there are MANY more FEMA/Homeland Security detention camps whose ultimate purpose under MARTIAL LAW is NOT TO SAVE LIFE, but to TERMINATE HUMAN LIVES DEEMED UNWORTHY OF ENTERING INTO THE DAWNING OF LUCIFER’S NEW WORLD ORDER. KNOW THE COLD HARD FACTS ABOUT FEMA!
So please, think TWICE before surrendering and going meekly to such camps under a STATE OF MARTIAL LAW in YOUR region.
-Pamela Schuffert
The FEMA Deathcamp of the MOJAVE DESERT in CALIFORNIA
Several years ago, I interviewed former Rothschild Illuminati member Doc Marquis about what he knew about he NWO agenda for America. He used to work hard for this Illuminati agenda in the past, including working at FORT LEWIS to recruit into the Illuminati NWO agenda. Then he became a Christian and began exposing the NWO agenda through "Christians Exposing The Occult." (At least, we HOPE he has fully come out! I give him the benefit of the doubt...otherwise with HIS Rothschild Illuminati background, I would not want to meet him in a dark alley.)
Doc knew that the modern GUILLOTINES were present then at Fort Lewis, as my later reporting has confirmed. Yes, Doc HAS handled the modern guillotines! He even participated in Rothschild Illuminati rituals in which they were used...testing the waters ahead of time so to speak. I asked him, "well, how did they work?" He replied, "oh, they worked just fine!" That's what I was afraid of.....(Thank you Jacob Rothschild and Illuminati family and Lubavitch Chabad's NOAHIDE LAWS for the GUILLOTINE AGENDA...pardon my sarcasm. I am sure your people love to read my reports! Lot's of free publicity, eh?)
THE FEMA DEATH CAMP OF THE MOJAVE is a full gassing/cremating DEATH CAMP, dedicated to the TERMINATION OF ALL ON FEMA’S "RED/BLUE LIST" (plus MANY other lists) UNDER MARTIAL LAW.
I have previously documented this horrific death camp, and documented the eyewitness accounts of several former NWO supporters who were flown out there. My friends, DOC MARQUIS (Illuminati) and ELAINE KNOST (CIA/Luciferian), formerly high level Illuminati Luciferians but now Christians for many years, were both flown separately to this facility in the Mojave Desert of California.
It boasts a landing strip. According to even another contact, a DEA agent I met in California at the GRENADA FORUM,who personally investigated this FEMA facility, it was recently DOUBLED IN SIZE TO INCREASE KILLING CAPACITY.
People have asked me, "WHY don't you go out there to that place and get photographs for documentation...???" How foolish to even think about it! The level security around such facilities is incredible!
Such detention camp facilities are meant to be isolated and out of sight from general public viewing. Also they are remote to make escape or entrance to rescue victims an impossibility. Professional military grade motion detection devices, remote cameras, ground sensors, all play a role in keeping away intruders or investigators.
Once the plane lands, Doc explained, you travel by jeep about 14 miles to an area enclosed in desert mountains.
It is fully staffed. All staff members WEAR BLACK SWAT TEAM UNIFORMS. When I asked Doc Marquis what his sentiments were, back when he was a member of the Illuminati and given a tour of this killing facility, his reply was, “SHEER JOY! I REJOICED at the thought of CHRISTIANS BEING TERMINATED IN THIS PLACE!” A chilling response, but typical of this nation’s Satanists/Illuminists and NWO supporters! (And sadly, as one Messianic Jewish friend admitted, typical of some in the Jewish communities in America who believe that "...it is the CHRISTIANS' turn to go to the camps now." How sad...)
This FEMA death camp was shown off as something the NWO and FEMA was literally PROUD OF!!! And there are MANY more FEMA/Homeland Security detention camps whose ultimate purpose under MARTIAL LAW is NOT TO SAVE LIFE, but to TERMINATE HUMAN LIVES DEEMED UNWORTHY OF ENTERING INTO THE DAWNING OF LUCIFER’S NEW WORLD ORDER. KNOW THE COLD HARD FACTS ABOUT FEMA!
So please, think TWICE before surrendering and going meekly to such camps under a STATE OF MARTIAL LAW in YOUR region.
-Pamela Schuffert
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