Friday, May 15, 2015



Charming multicultural egotist in Britain



A schoolgirl stabbed a fellow pupil in the face with a pencil leaving her drenched in blood after a classroom row, a court heard today.

Lakima William-Thames, 20, allegedly screamed ‘I warned you not to mess with me’, as she attacked two other Lambeth College students.

She grabbed Omawima Benjamin by the hair and stabbed her in the face with a pencil in front of horrified passers-by in Clapham Common, the Old Bailey heard.

When the victim’s pal Abena Boateng tried to intervene, William-Thames grabbed her by the hair and kicked her stomach.

The fight was only broken up when the defendant’s own mother separated the girls.

Miss Benjamin told jurors William-Thames ran up to her in the street after college, grabbed her hair from behind and began battering her face.

‘We were walking towards the station and then I saw her running towards us,’ she added.  ‘She grabbed my hair and everything was a bit of a blur at that time.  ‘She said something like “I told you not to mess with me”.  ‘She grabbed my hair from the back, it was pretty hard and there was a lot of punching and scratching.

‘I was trying to push her away from me.  ‘I was so shocked, I didn’t know what was happening I just wanted to get away.’

The 20-year-old added: ‘I had a really bad headache and didn’t know what was happening, then I saw blood on my hands and on my shirt.’

Miss Boateng, 21, said they tried to cross the road to escape from the defendant but there was too much traffic.

‘As she was stabbing she said “I warned you, I warned you”,’ she added.  ‘She was punching Omawima’s face with a pencil in her hand.  ‘She was holding her head straight so she could stab her face.’

She said when she tried to protect her friend the defendant punched her in the face and kicked her in the stomach.

Prosecutor Richard Hutchings said the attack took place at around lunchtime on April 25 last year, near the Southside college campus in Clapham.  The girls had been sent home after a row in class that morning, the court heard.

‘The prosecution allege that the defendant assaulted two of her college classmates after they had all left college for the day,’ Mr Hutchings said.  ‘There had been a little bit of a row at the college that morning.  ‘After they had left college in Clapham she attacked them in the street.

‘In the course of all this Miss Boateng, who was also there, got caught up in it and was also assaulted.

‘When Miss Boateng tried to intervene to protect her friend, who had just been stabbed in the face with a pencil, the defendant turned on her.  ‘She grabbed Miss Boateng’s hair and lashed out by kicking her.

‘The defendant’s mother intervened and broke the defendant apart from Miss Boateng.’

William-Thames claims the other two girls started the fight and she was acting in self defence, the court was told.

The defendant wore black Adidas leggings, a black and white stripy top and a white hoody in the dock.

William-Thames, of Streatham, south west London, denies assault occasioning actual bodily harm and assault by beating.

SOURCE







Shut Pam Geller Up, or We Will All Die

Last week, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly announced that Pamela Geller, the woman who sponsored a draw Muhammad event in Texas, threatened America’s national security. Geller, said O'Reilly, “spurred a violent attack.” He continued, “Insulting the entire Muslim world is stupid. … It does not advance the cause of liberty or get us any closer to defeating the savage jihad.” On the same network, Juan Williams stated that Geller “engaged in gratuitous offensive behavior that led to the deaths of two people.” The New York Times editorialized that Geller “achieved her provocative goal” with her “exercise in bigotry and hatred posing as a blow for freedom.”

Geller, the narrative goes, should never have encouraged people to draw Muhammad because it was “provocative.” To which the answer should be: So what? Women attending school in Afghanistan “provokes” radical Muslims into throwing acid on their faces, but that does not mean that women should not go to school in Afghanistan or be condemned for doing so.

Geller, the narrative goes, made Americans less safe by provoking radical Muslims, as though Muslims have no responsibility to act like decent human beings — as though, faced with the prospect of a cartoon of their prophet, Muslims have no choice but to grab guns and go a-huntin'. But that’s nonsense. What truly spurs radical Muslims into violence is the well-evidenced belief that if they kill enough Muhammad cartoonists, soon people will stop drawing cartoons of Muhammad.

Geller, the narrative goes, was “Islamophobic” in her call for drawings of Muhammad; unlike Charlie Hebdo, Geller was not an equal opportunity offender of all religions, and therefore showed particular animus toward Islam. But failure to equally attack all religions does not make satire of one religion illegitimate — were that the case, The New York Times would have to answer why drawing Muhammad presents deep problems, but running simultaneous ads for the slanderous “Book of Mormon” musical is hunky-dory.

So, why the assault on Geller? The answer is simple: Too many Westerns have bought into the notion that personal responsibility can be jettisoned in favor of judgments about identity. Geller is the problem, in this view, because she is an upper-class Jewish woman from New York City; her rivals are poor Muslims from Phoenix. They are, by the nature of their identities, members of the victim class. She is, by contrast, a member of the victimizing class. Nothing either party can do can change their status in this equation. Therefore, according to Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, even the Muslims who shot up Charlie Hebdo in France were justified: “Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny — it’s just mean. … By attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech.”

How do proponents of this victim/victimizer identity dichotomy determine who falls into which category? They simply look at the socioeconomic status of those involved and make a determination of who is worse off. Thus, black Baltimore rioters were not people acting without any sense of values, but rather victims provoked by injustice from a non-existent white power structure in Baltimore. Before a conflict has even begun, we know who deserves our sympathy.

That calculus leads to more death, more destruction, more chaos. That death, destruction and chaos cannot be laid at the feet of Pamela Geller, but those who continue to perpetuate a narrative in which people who commit evil acts are victims, and those who are their victims are their provocateurs.

SOURCE






The Return of Obama's Hoax-Spreading Bitter Half

By Michelle Malkin

She's baaaaaaaack. And she's maaaaaad.

First lady Michelle Obama delivered the commencement address at Tuskegee University last weekend. She'll do it again at Ohio's Oberlin College — the UC Berkeley of the Midwest, Ground Zero for racial grievance-mongering and fake hate crimes — next week.

Commencement FLOTUS is not the same first lady who shows up on "Ellen" or "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" wearing her pastel cardigan, Chuck Taylors and a megawatt grin. No, this frowny-faced Michelle Obama talks and squawks like Al Sharpton in Jimmy Choo kitten heels. At Tuskegee, FLOTUS traded her affable TV persona for the divisive social justice complainer we all came to know and loathe during her husband's first presidential campaign.

Obama's resurrected bitter half inspired the graduates by complaining about people complaining about her. She complained about the "sting" of "daily slights" throughout her life and her poor, beleaguered husband's. And then she complained. And complained. And complained some more.

She clucked at the "folks" (read: white folks) who allegedly "crossed the street in fear of their safety" at the sight of the Obamas.

She called out unnamed "clerks who kept a close eye on us in all those department stores."

She decried the racist "people at formal events who assumed we were the 'help.'" (Funny, the only time I recall this happening in the Obama White House was when Valerie Jarrett mistook four-star Army Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who is white, for her waiter. But I digress.)

Reaching into her deep well of indignation, Mrs. Obama then assailed "those who have questioned our intelligence, our honesty, even our love of this country."

Let me take out my teeny-weeny bow and play the world's smallest violin at the thought of Mrs. Obama being subjected to the "sting" of impolite questions about her honesty. Using my best slow vibrato: Waw-waw-waw-wawwww.

It's hard to take Mrs. Obama seriously, because she has been caught so brazenly lying about the racial discrimination she supposedly still faces today even as first lady of the United States. When she told the Tuskegee students about being watched "in all those department stores," she neglected to mention that just five months ago, one of her most famous anecdotes of retail racism went up in smoke.

What? You forgot already? Using almost the exact same language in a People magazine interview that she used in her Tuskegee commencement speech, the first lady deplored the "sting" of "racist experiences" that she and her husband allegedly still suffer.

Get her some Calamine lotion STAT!

"Even as the first lady," she bemoaned, "not highly disguised, the only person who came up to me" at a Target store "was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf." Remember: ABC News reported that Mrs. Obama claimed such "incidents are 'the regular course of life' for African Americans and a 'challenge' for the country to overcome."

The anecdote turned out to be a tall tale — with the emphasis on "tall." The reason the 5-foot-11 first lady was asked to get detergent off the Target shelf was that her vertically challenged fellow shopper couldn't reach it. How do we know this? Because Mrs. Obama said so herself in a radically different version of the Target story she told David Letterman three years ago.

"I reached up, 'cause she was short, and I reached up, pulled it down," the first lady described with that megawatt grin, and the shopper said, "Well, you didn't have to make it look so easy." Far from psychologically debilitated by any racial "sting," Mrs. Obama told Letterman, "I felt so good" helping out the short woman.

I don't care what color you are: This arrogant exercise of first lady privilege — invoking false stories to stoke racial hostility and score political points — is patently offensive. There's enough demagoguery in the public square. The Aspen ski-vacationing, haute couture-wearing, Hollywood elite-chumming first lady's delusional discrimination fables are fuel on a raging fire her husband has failed to alleviate with billions of dollars of government "investments," programs, summits and photo-ops.

It is especially irresponsible of Mrs. Obama to be spreading her cultural gasoline on college campuses, where the excesses of identity politics and multiculturalism continue to poison young minds.

Don't like suffering the "daily slights" of questions about your honesty? Stop lying.

SOURCE






A worthy Prince

For years, The Guardian newspaper has been trying to get its hands on ten letters written by Prince Charles to Labour ministers in 2004 and 2005. They have practically achieved the status of holy writ.

The anti-monarchist newspaper was apparently convinced that the Prince had behaved unconstitutionally and possibly disgracefully in bending the ears of elected politicians and putting undue pressure on them.

Judges ruled in favour of publication under the Freedom of Information Act, but were overruled in 2012 by the then Attorney General, Dominic Grieve.

Providing endless employment to myriad lawyers — the Government’s costs alone amounted to £400,000 — the matter wound its way through the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, which ruled that the letters must be published. And yesterday they finally saw the light of day.

Shock horror? Far from it. These so-called ‘black spider memos’ are generally about as controversial as back copies of The Beano. There is nothing in them of which the Prince of Wales need feel ashamed, though a handful of republicans will inevitably try to make hay.

The man that emerges is one already familiar to us — someone who cares deeply about a wide range of subjects, many of which might slip below the radar of ministers, and is impressively knowledgeable about all of them.

For the most part, he is concerned with bread-and-butter issues. To the then Prime Minister Tony Blair he writes on two occasions about agricultural matters and the plight of farmers. In a second letter, he is strongly in favour of a badger cull, believing that the animals pass on bovine tuberculosis to cattle.

Though some may find such views hard to swallow, they are widespread in the countryside, and in any event the Blair government ignored his advice.

Less provocatively, perhaps, Environment Minister Elliot Morley is taxed in another letter with the Prince’s worry that over-fishing of the Patagonian Toothfish is putting the albatross (which feeds on it) at risk.

Charles Clarke, then Education Secretary, is treated to a lecture about the importance of nutritious school food, while his successor, Ruth Kelly, is asked in another letter by the Prince whether she might attend a summer school organised by one of his charities. (She couldn’t.)

Missives to other ministers incorporate anxieties about the need to preserve a superannuated gaol in North Ireland, and a similar request in respect of two Antarctic huts built by the explorers Scott and Shackleton. He is fond of bringing the activities of his charities to the notice of ministers.

There is one bombshell — though one that is wholly to the Prince’s credit. In a letter to Mr Blair, dated September 8, 2004, he mentions the shortcomings of the Lynx helicopter in Iraq in ‘high temperatures’, which had been brought to his notice.

He adds that the replacement to the Lynx had been subject to delays, and expresses his fear — also shared by this newspaper at the time — that ‘this is just one more example of where our Armed Forces are being asked to do an extremely challenging job (particularly in Iraq) without the necessary resources’.

Mr Blair freely concedes the ‘limitations’ of the helicopter in his reply to the Prince — something he did not do at the time in public, despite concerns raised in Parliament and parts of the media. Isn’t this pretty shameful of the Labour PM?

Without doubt, the Prince was acting in the public interest by drawing the matter to Mr Blair’s attention. Whether he achieved anything may be questioned, but he showed himself more in tune with the needs of the armed services than the Labour government appeared to be.

All in all, I don’t believe that a single letter might reasonably be thought to exert undue pressure on an elected representative. They are always polite, sometimes extravagantly so, and the Prince never tries to pull rank.

I must confess that, slightly to my surprise, I found myself feeling grateful that we have an heir to the throne who is prepared to bring worthy and virtuous causes to the notice of those in power. Even his critics could not argue that he ever makes a request which might be thought self-interested or personally grasping.

So, I’m afraid that if The Guardian hoped to discredit him, it has signally failed. On the basis of these letters, he is a public-spirited Prince who takes a commendable and detailed interest in the lives of ordinary people, who are his future subjects.

The question is why the Government and Prince Charles himself fought so hard to prevent the publication of letters which generally reflect well on him. Especially baffling was the response of Dominic Grieve in 2012.

The Attorney General (he has since been sacked) stated that the ten letters could not be published because they might ‘seriously damage’ Charles’s future role as king, being ‘in many cases particularly frank’. Publication would have ‘potentially undermined [the Prince’s] position of political neutrality’.

Such a view can’t be plausibly maintained in the light of what the ‘black spider memos’ actually say. What could Mr Grieve have meant? Unless he was referring to other correspondence of which he is aware and the public isn’t, his political judgment appears bizarre.

Prince Charles’s own spirited opposition to the publication of these missives is easier to understand. He maintains that it would be more difficult to write candid letters, and receive equally candid replies, if recipients knew they would end up in the public domain.

In this judgment he was wrong. Two years ago, I argued in these pages that these letters should be published, and having read them I am more certain than ever that I was right, not least because they show the Prince in a generally favourable light.

But the strongest reason in favour of publication is that if he seeks to offer advice to ministers, albeit on subjects that usually rank pretty low in terms of people’s priorities, he should be in favour of transparency.

What the letters reveal is that while he has a bee in his bonnet on all manner of subjects, there is little or no evidence of ministers having caved in under pressure. But there is proof of a concerned, inquiring and active mind trying to operate in the public interest.

It emerged yesterday that the Prince has been writing letters to ministers since the age of 16, if not before, and it will take a lot to stop him now. He is still to be found in his study late at night as he scratches away in black ink.

As a result of a law passed in the dying days of the last Labour government in 2010, correspondence involving the monarch or heir to the throne cannot be made public for 20 years, or five years after the writer’s death, whichever is longer.

So we won’t be seeing any more of his countless memos, and we must make up our minds on the basis of these ten as to whether they are a good thing or not. I would unhesitatingly say that they are.

But this habit of bombarding ministers with ideas must surely stop when the Prince of Wales becomes king — if not before. As the Queen has shown, the monarch should stand above public debate for fear of dividing her subjects on any issue. We may guess, but we do not know, what she thinks about anything.

One day, the heir to the throne will have to set aside his typewriter and scratchy old pen. But, on the whole, we should be glad that we have a caring — if occasionally slightly eccentric — and committed Prince.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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



No comments: