Friday, November 09, 2007

Britain's multicultural agony continues

Sikh girl, 14, suspended for wearing religious bangle

A Sikh teenager has been suspended from school for refusing to remove a religious bangle. The parents of Sarika Singh, 14, are now considering a legal challenge against the school, a girls' comprehensive school in Aberdare, South Wales, that taught the girl "in isolation" for nine weeks before excluding her.

Jane Rosser, the headmistress of Aberdare Girls' School, said that the code of conduct permitted only two items of jewellery, a watch and a pair of plain metal stud earrings. The school bans all visible religious symbols, including Christian crosses and Muslim headscarves.

Miss Singh has won the backing of the Valleys Race Equality Council and her parents are now considering a challenge in the High Court. The metal bangle, called a kara, is one of five items all Sikhs are expected to wear. It is supposed to be a visual reminder to do only good work with the hands. Miss Singh, who has been suspended for five days, began wearing it two years ago after a family visit to India, but the school took action only in September. Her mother, Sanita Singh, said: "Sarika told us, `I don't go to school any more, I go to prison'."

Ian Blake, chairman of the school's governing body, said: "We made our decision only after prolonged research into the previous stated cases across the UK, interrogation of the law, including human rights and race relations legislation." The governors have rejected an appeal.

Source



McCarthyism: The Rosetta Stone of Liberal Lies

by Ann Coulter

When I wrote a ferocious defense of Sen. Joe McCarthy in "Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism", liberals chose not to argue with me. Instead they posted a scrolling series of reasons not to read my book, such as that I wear short skirts, date boys, and that Treason was not a scholarly tome. After printing rabidly venomous accounts of McCarthy for half a century based on zero research, liberals would only accept research presenting an alternative view of McCarthy that included, as the Los Angeles Times put it, at least the "pretense of scholarly throat-clearing and objectivity."

This week, they got it. The great M. Stanton Evans has finally released "Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies". Based on a lifetime's work, including nearly a decade of thoroughgoing research, stores of original research and never-before-seen government files, this 672-page book ends the argument on Joe McCarthy. Look for it hidden behind stacks of Bill Clinton's latest self-serving book at a bookstore near you. Evans' book is such a tour de force that liberals are already preparing a "yesterday's news" defense -- as if they had long ago admitted the truth about McCarthy. Yes, and they fought shoulder to shoulder with Ronald Reagan to bring down the Evil Empire. Thus, Publishers Weekly preposterously claims that "the history Evans relates is already largely known, if not fully accepted." Somebody better tell George Clooney.

The McCarthy period is the Rosetta stone of all liberal lies. It is the textbook on how they rewrite history -- the sound chamber of liberal denunciations, their phony victimhood as they demean and oppress their enemies, their false imputation of dishonesty to their opponents, their legalization of every policy dispute, their ability to engage in lock-step shouting campaigns, and the black motives concealed by their endless cacophony.

The true story of Joe McCarthy, told in meticulous, irrefutable detail in Blacklisted by History, is that from 1938 to 1946, the Democratic Party acquiesced in a monstrous conspiracy being run through the State Department, the military establishment, and even the White House to advance the Soviet cause within the U.S. government. In the face of the Democrats' absolute refusal to admit to their fecklessness, fatuity and recklessness in allowing known Soviet spies to penetrate the deepest levels of government, McCarthy demanded an accounting. Even if one concedes to on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand whiners like Ronald Radosh that Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson didn't like communism, his record is what it was. And that record was to treat Soviet spies like members of the Hasty Pudding Club.

Rather than own up to their moral blindness to Soviet espionage, Democrats fired up the liberal slander machine, which would be deployed again and again over the next half century to the present day. In hiding their own perfidy, liberals were guilty of every sin they lyingly imputed to McCarthy. There were no "McCarthyites" until liberals came along. "Blacklisted by History" proves that every conventional belief about McCarthy is wrong, including:

-- That he lied about his war service: He was a tailgunner in World War II;

-- That he was a drunk: He would generally nurse a single drink all night;

-- That he made the whole thing up: He produced loads of Soviet spies in government jobs;

-- That he just did it for political gain: He understood perfectly the godless evil of communism.

Ironically, for all of their love of conspiracy theories -- the rigging of the 2000 election, vote suppression in Ohio in 2004, 9/11 being an inside job, oil companies covering up miracle technology that would allow cars to run on dirt, Britney Spears' career, etc., etc. -- when presented with an actual conspiracy of Soviet spies infiltrating the U.S. government, they laughed it off like world-weary skeptics and dedicated themselves to slandering Joe McCarthy.

Then as now, liberals protect themselves from detection with wild calumnies against anybody who opposes them. They have no interest in -- or aptitude for -- persuasion. Their goal is to anathematize their enemies. "Blacklisted by History" removes the curse from one of the greatest patriots in American history.

Source



HAWAII: By The Color of Their Skin, or The Content of Their Character?

The House of Representatives recently approved a bill that would establish disturbing racial classifications under American law. The Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2007-also known as the "Akaka Bill" after its primary Senate sponsor, Daniel Akaka (D-HI)-purports to grant "native Hawaiians" federal recognition akin to that now enjoyed by Indian tribes. It uses the one-drop rule to create a race-based government that will collect political and economic preferences and exempt sufficiently ethnic Hawaiians from whatever aspects of federal and state authority it deems undesirable.

By carving out a Hawaiian exception to the Constitution's guarantees of equal protection and due process, the Akaka Bill tries to circumvent a 2000 Supreme Court decision that struck down a racial restriction on voting for trustees of Hawaii's Office of Hawaiian Affairs.

Sponsored by Neil Abercrombie (D-HI) in the House and supported by Hawaii's Republican governor, Linda Lingle, the bill is both unconstitutional and bad policy. Congress simply cannot create new sovereigns outside the constitutional framework, and analogies to American Indians misconstrue both the history and legal status of peoples who predate the United States.

The Constitution's Indian law exception is controversial enough, but it was created by the document itself, arising as a unique historical compromise with pre-constitutional realities, and Congress still retains a great amount of oversight. Once the Constitution was ratified, no government organized under it could create another government that can exempt itself from the Bill of Rights as it sees fit.

But if the Akaka Bill is not a constitutional end-run, as its backers vehemently protest, then it is facially disallowed by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments' explicit proscription against any state action that treats people differently based on their race or ethnicity. The Supreme Court found Native Hawaiians to be an ethnic group, after all, so Congress cannot pass a law giving them rights denied other Americans.

Hawaiians are not American Indians in the constitutional sense. The term "Indian tribes" has a fixed meaning, limited to preexisting North American tribes that were "dependent nations" at the time of the Founding. Such tribes, to benefit from the protections of Indian law, must have an independent existence and "community" apart from the rest of American society, and their separate government structure must have a continuous history for at least the past century. By these standards, Hawaiians do not qualify.

Even if Congress could create from whole cloth the equivalent of an Indian tribe, there is no good reason to label racial or ethnic groups as distinct self-governing nations...

As one federal court recently explained, "the history of indigenous Hawaiians... is fundamentally different from that of indigenous groups and federally recognized Indian Tribes in the continental United States." The United States seized tribal lands and persecuted their inhabitants, while Hawaiians peaceably ended their monarchy and later overwhelmingly voted to become a state.

Moreover, aboriginal Hawaiians are not geographically segregated, but live together with people of all races. Hawaii is the most integrated and blended society in America: Only 10 percent of native Hawaiians have at least 50 percent Hawaiian blood and only two of the nine trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs have Hawaiian surnames. What is more, some 40 percent of those qualifying as Native Hawaiian under the Akaka Bill's one-drop "ancestry" rule don't live in Hawaii.

Even if Congress could create from whole cloth the equivalent of an Indian tribe, there is no good reason to label racial or ethnic groups as distinct self-governing nations solely because they have unique cultural traits or were once victims of oppression or discrimination. Otherwise, what is to stop African or Jewish or Catholic or Chinese Americans from demanding not only reparations for the wrongs historically committed against them but also their own separatist governments?

Not deterred by law or principle, Sen. Akaka has proposed various forms of his bill since 2000, when the House also passed it. Last year the Senate fell just four votes shy of ending a Republican filibuster, in the absence of three senators who would have voted for it. This year, with Democrats controlling Congress-and with Republican co-sponsorship from Alaska's delegation, Rep. Tom Cole (OK) and Sens. Norm Coleman (MN) and Gordon Smith (OR)-the Akaka Bill will almost certainly land on the president's desk.

The Bush administration, which in 2005 merely suggested a few amendments, has now promised a veto, citing the U.S. Civil Rights Commission's conclusion that the bill "would discriminate on the basis of race or national origin and further subdivide the American people into discrete subgroups accorded varying degrees of privilege." And that is beyond the special federal recognition that Hawaiians-as well as indigenous Alaskans-already receive, not least in the form of racial check-off boxes for purposes of affirmative action.

President Bush's belated discovery of his veto pen is an encouraging sign-on this as on so many other issues-but the next occupant of the White House may not be as opposed to judging people on the basis of their skin color or national origin.

Source



Quebec Cardinal Speaks Out Against Imposing Relativism on All Students

Quebec City Cardinal Marc Ouellet has spoken out against a Quebec initiative which would impose a relativistic religion course on all Quebec students whether in public school, private school or even receiving home education. The Cardinal made his remarks before a commission which is seeking public reaction to the program on "Ethics and Religious Culture" which includes positive presentation of homosexual families and requires children to question their own religious upbringing. (see coverage: http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/oct/07100409.html )

The Cardinal's presentation before the Bouchard-Taylor commission is being seen as a watershed defense of the place of the Catholic faith in Quebec society and indeed in Canada as a whole. Cardinal Ouellet said that the mandated course "subjects religions to the control and the interests of the State and puts an end to religious freedoms in school which were acquired many generations ago."

With a firmness and fire rarely seen from the Canadian Catholic hierarchy, the Cardinal said, "No European nation has ever adopted such a radical position which disrupts the religious convictions and takes away religious freedoms. There is an uneasiness felt by many families as well as a sense of helplessness in front of the almighty State."

The Cardinal also used the opportunity to address the underlying problem of the clash between secular humanists and the Catholic culture in Quebec and the rest of Canada. "The real problem in Quebec is the spiritual emptiness created by a rupture of religion and culture and a substantial loss of memory brought about by a crisis of the family and education," he said. "It has caused dismay among young people, the fall of the marriages, the minimal birth rate, and the terrifying number of abortions and suicides to name only a few consequences that are also reflected in the precarious state of elderly people and in the public health system." "A spiritual renewal is possible," he said, "if the dialog between the State, Society and the Church is resumed in a manner that is constructive and respectful of our collective identity which is now pluralistic."

As an example of intolerance he cited the desire to remove the crucifix from the National Assembly (legislature). "To remove it would signify a cultural rupture, a denial of who we are and who we are called to be as a collective historically founded on Christian values"

Source

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.


For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

***************************

No comments: