Black on black shooting causes a riot for once

Because the shooter was a cop doing his job.  Note that there usually is testimony from black bystanders denying that the deceased was behaving offensively.  Such testimony has often been shown to be false

Police have insisted the man who was shot dead by a Charlotte cop was carrying a gun and refused repeated orders to drop it.

Father-of-seven Keith Lamont Scott, 43, was gunned down by Officer Brentley Vinson while standing next to his car in the North Carolina city on Tuesday night, prompting violent protests that left 16 officers injured.

His family have insisted he was disabled and was only reading a book when he was killed, but Charlotte Police Chief Kerr Putney says officers found a weapon in his vehicle.

Hours after the shooting, demonstrators arrived at the scene and began destroying marked police vehicles, setting trucks alight and throwing rocks at officers.

In a press conference on Wednesday, Putney said one person had been arrested and slammed the 'agitators' for turning a peaceful demonstration violent. 

He added that the story of Scott's shooting is 'very different' to how it has been portrayed in social media, and made it clear that they did not find a book at the scene.

Charlotte's Mayor Jennifer Roberts has called for 'peace, calm and dialogue' as the city braced for further protests planned for Wednesday evening.

Students started the second round of demonstrations by staging a lie-in at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. 

Video shows one protester jumping on top of a police car and officers firing tear gas to break up the crowd. Several hundred people gathered with some setting fires to block a major road, while others set trucks ablaze.

Some stole boxes from trucks before police used flash grenades in an attempt to disperse the angry crowd, an ABC affiliate in Charlotte reported.

A group of protesters then tried to break into a Walmart store before police arrived and began guarding its front entryway.

Some protesters were heard yelling 'Black Lives Matter,' and 'Hands up, don't shoot!' . They held up a sign saying 'Stop Killing Us' and 'it was a book', making reference to the object Scott was reportedly holding when he was shot dead.

Charlotte police went to the complex around 4pm looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they saw Scott - not the suspect they were looking for - inside a car, department spokesman Keith Trietley said in a statement.

Officers saw Scott get out of the car with a gun and then get back in, Trietley said. When officers approached, Scott exited the car with the gun again. At that point, officers deemed the man a threat and at least one fired a weapon, he said.

However, Scott's brother told reporters: 'He was waiting in the car for his son to get from school.

Detectives recovered a firearm at the scene and were interviewing witnesses, Trietley said.

Officer Brentley Vinson - a former college football player - was identified as the officer who shot Scott, WCCB reports. Officer Vinson, who has worked at the department since July 2014 and is also black, has been placed on paid on administrative leave, as is standard procedure in such cases.

Meanwhile, Scott's daughter Lyric Scott live streamed the aftermath of the shooting on Facebook.

In the video, she says that her father was parked and reading a book in his car while waiting for a school bus to drop off his son.

'My daddy didn't do nothing,' she is heard saying in the video. 'They just pulled up undercover.' She added that Scott was disabled and claimed that officers had Tasered him and then shot him four times. 

Adam Rhew said that the crowd began to disperse after police deployed tear gas. He said on Twitter that he estimates the CMPD used six to eight cans of tear gas.

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Free speech destructive to Left’s stifling orthodoxies

Comment from Australia

Perhaps it was the delirium of pneumonia that allowed Hillary Clinton to speak so freely, putting half of Donald Trump’s supporters in what she called the “basket of deplorables”. Like the in vino veritas that sets in after a few drinks, Clinton’s honesty was refreshing.

They are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it”, said Clinton of the Deplorables. In one fell swoop the unplugged Democratic presidential candidate lifted the lid on the neo-fascist Left.

Clinton’s moment of ill-discipline reduced the fraud of so-called progressive politics to a simple illiberal equation: if you disagree with me on race matters, you are a racist. If you disagree with me over lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex politics, you are a homophobe. Disagree with my position on Islam, you are an ­Islamophobe. If you disagree with me on immigration, you are a xenophobe. Rather than engaging in debate, too many on the Left would rather portray disagreement on totemic issues as grounds for a mental disorder with the sole aim of shutting down any challenge to leftist orthodoxy.

The same politics of deriding deplorables is endemic in Australia, especially in the same-sex marriage debate. The Greens and LGBTI activists claim that allowing Australians to decide whether marriage should be redefined would fuel harmful hate speech from same-sex marriage opponents. Worse, the leaders of Australia’s alternative government succumbed to the lowest of low-rent politics. A plebiscite would lead to suicides, Bill Shorten said. Deputy leader Tanya Plibersek used a young boy named Eddie, the son of a same-sex couple, for political purposes. The aim is clear: shut down debate about same-sex marriage. Agree or shut up is the staple of neo-fascists. Never mind that we are debating an institution, not the sexuality of individuals.

Malcolm Turnbull exposed Labor’s thought police during question time last Wednesday. “Was Julia Gillard a homophobe when she opposed same-sex marriage? Was Penny Wong a homophobe when she opposed same-sex marriage? Of course not. The reality is, if people who opposed same-sex marriage then are not homophobes, then they are not homophobes now. The Labor Party has to stop preaching this hatred,” the Prime Minister said.

Alas, same-sex marriage activists chose hatred last Friday when they learnt that Christian groups planned to meet at the Mercure Sydney Airport hotel to prepare for the no campaign. The threats of violence, feral social media posts, including “are your children safe at Mercure” and nasty phone calls to staff showed the disdain for debate among same-sex marriage activists. Hotel management cancelled the event to protect staff. Did left-wingers in favour of same-sex marriage condemn the hate-filled campaign from their own side? No.

Whatever you may say about rigid Christian doctrinal teaching, the churches understand they operate in a liberal democracy where the marketplace of ideas will necessarily challenge their beliefs. Not so the gay-marriage zealots whose fanaticism seeks to suppress open debate and reason.

The critical question is why have so many on the Left taken this illiberal path? Whereas radical leftists in the 1960s were at the vanguard of libertarianism, challenging oppressive customs and canons, too many are now enforcers of their own stifling orthodoxies. The end of liberalism for many on the Left started more than 40 years ago when, by embracing identity politics, they untethered human rights from classical notions of freedom. Sex, sexuality, race and other forms of personal identification trumped Enlightenment freedoms and the very notion of universal, libertarian rights.

Soon enough, identity politics fuelled victimhood claims in a confected marketplace of outrage with feelings now the measurement of human rights. The right not to be offended, not to have one’s feelings hurt, marked the downward spiral of the liberal Left. Instead, a paternalistic Left set ­itself up as the arbiter of rights and freedoms based on repressive ­adherence to its feelings-based moral code rather than the universal rights of mankind.

There are few more defining moments in the Left’s long, illiberal demise than its response when Muslim fundamentalists slapped a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, demanding his death, burning his novel and marching in London to suppress words.

By choosing silence at this pivotal moment, left-wing elites sided with Muslim fundamentalists who understood that free speech threatened their grip on power.

Now it’s the same with the Western Left. They understand that free speech is the enemy of their illiberal, stifling orthodoxies. It explains why so many on the Left refuse to countenance any change to section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, even while three students from the Queensland University of Technology are dragged through a three-year legal rigmarole of racial discrimination claims for posting innocuous comments on Facebook. The silence from most on the Left attests to the neo-fascist transformation of their politics. To speak up would expose the illiberal project that the Left has undertaken for four decades.

Those who call out the Left’s dangerous regression deserve kudos. British writer Nick Cohen marched against Margaret Thatcher and denounced New Labour’s embrace of corporate capitalism. Cohen tendered his resignation from the Left a year ago: “Slowly, too slowly, I am ashamed to say, I began to notice that left-wing politics had turned rancid.”

In Australia, Guy Rundle recently lamented the Left’s enthusiasm for the ever-encroaching state and how the aim of anti-discrimination laws “is to make the censor ‘go inside’, so that you ultimately second-guess your own impulse to challenge, to express, to be outrageous or genuinely on the edge”.

At the weekend, former minister in the Hawke and Keating governments Peter Baldwin traced the sad demise of the Left from a rational movement committed to equality of people, regardless of race, gender and class, to one of moral depravity where so-called progressive intellectuals denounce Ayaan Hirsi Ali as an “Enlightenment fundamentalist”. Hirsi Ali was born a Muslim, was subjected to female genital mutilation and escaped an arranged marriage. Shouldn’t we pay tribute to a woman who choses Western freedoms over Islamic restraints?

We need more people like Baldwin who are honest about the Left’s conversion into loathers of freedom. Half-hearted analyses don’t cut it. When former NSW Labor premier Bob Carr scolded members of the Left for intolerance in the free speech debate, he refused to acknowledge that section 18C cements intolerance in our polity. It’s like saying you support democratic nations but not the sole beacon of democracy in the Middle East, Israel. It makes no sense.

Equally absurd, the Greens can walk out on Pauline Hanson but to denounce a duly elected senator as having no place in a democracy is more offensive than anything Hanson says. It is the antithesis of democracy. We’ve tiptoed around calling out the neo-fascist mindset of many on the Left for too long. What is more deplorably neo-fascist: the clumsy words of the often ill-informed Hanson who believes in free speech or the slippery sorts on the illiberal Left who cannot stomach open debate?

SOURCE





Saudi Arabia condemned?

Saudi Arabia won't take ANY refugees, even though they could easily afford it, so I suppose U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein (below) was condemning them.  If not, why not?  And if the Saudis won't take in their fellow religionists, why should anybody else?

The United Nations' human rights chief on Monday doubled down on his criticism of political leaders who are leery of admitting refugees due to security concerns, labeling them “racists and xenophobes” and saying they would face the judgment of humanity.

Addressing a U.N. summit on refugees and migrants in New York – one day before President Obama hosts another one – U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein took direct aim at what have become regular targets of his over recent months.

“The bigots and deceivers, in opposing greater responsibility-sharing [relating to admitting refugees from conflicts like the one in Syria], promote rupture,” Zeid said.

“Some of them may well be in this hall this morning. If you are here, we say to you: We will continue to name you publicly. You may soon walk away from this hall. But not from the broader judgement of ‘we the people’ – all the world's people. Not from us.”

Zeid did not name those he was referring to, but has done so in previous speeches. They include Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and a handful of right-wing European politicians – including some in power, such as the president of the Czech Republic and the prime ministers of Hungary and Slovakia.

Zeid said the U.N. member states present on Monday could change the suffering faced by refugees from conflicts, by promoting “respect, safety and dignity for all.”

“But not when the defenders of what is good and right are being outflanked in too many countries by race-baiting bigots, who seek to gain – or retain – power by wielding prejudice and deceit, at the expense of those most vulnerable,” he said.

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Critics on Civil Rights Report: It's 'Dangerous' -- Important to ‘Push Back Against This Nonsense’

Faith leaders and religious liberty advocates are weighing in on the recently released U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report that concluded terms such as “religious liberty” and “religious freedom” were code words for discrimination and even “Christian supremacy.”

Their response is clear: The commission is out of step with the founding principles of the United States of America and its findings threaten the free practice of religion in this country.

“The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance,” Martin Castro, chairman of the commission, said in a statement included in the 296-page report.

“The report was misleading in its account of the law, and dangerous in its recommendations,” Roger Severino, director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation, told CNSNews.com.

“It is preposterous for the chair to say that laws that protect the right of Muslim prisoners to grow beards, Native Americans to use sacred eagle feathers, and Sikhs to wear turbans in government jobs, are somehow an insidious attempt to impose ‘Christian supremacy’ on the nation,” said Severino.

“Perhaps most troubling is the attempt to discredit sincere religious believers as being motivated by hate instead of faith and the implied recommendation that religious groups should change their beliefs on sexual morality to conform with liberal norms for the good of the country,” said Severino, who also worked with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

“I would expect to see such a slanted and anti-religious report come out of China or France perhaps, but am disappointed to see it come from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights,” he said.

“The report of the Civil Rights Commission, alleging that First Amendment claims of religious liberty are a mere cloak for discrimination, is pure hate speech,” Bishop E. W. Jackson, founder and president of Staying True to America’s National Destiny, or STAND, told CNSNews.com.

“This Commission has become a tool of the totalitarian left to stigmatize faith in God and belief in the Bible and its moral principles,” said Jackson.

He continued, “This report turns the concept of civil rights into a tool of religious persecution. It should be denounced by the American people as a dangerous departure from the spirit, letter, and plain meaning of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.”

Speaking to Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on his Washington Watch radio show, Ken Blackwell, the senior fellow for Family Empowerment at the FRC, said it is important to “fight back” against the report and its findings.

“There is a fundamental struggle in this country between those who believe in individual liberty and those who believe in our ability to practice our faith in the public square, and those who would cleanse the public square of faith and God,” Blackwell said.

“Essentially, what these folks are trying to do is to change the meaning of our language; to change the meaning of the very foundation of words and concepts of our Constitution,” Blackwell said. “And so in the marketplace of ideas and our public dialogue, agencies and agents like this can cause confusion and lead us down a rabbit hole.”

“It very important that we push back against this nonsense,” Blackwell said.

Jesus’ Teachings

On Tuesday, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCC) weighed in, refuting Castro’s claims and stating that people of faith care for those who are discriminated against.

“[Castro] makes the shocking suggestion that Catholic, evangelical, orthodox Jewish, Mormon, and Muslim communities are comparable to fringe segregationists from the civil rights era,” Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, chairman of the USCCB's Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty, said in the statement.

“These statements painting those who support religious freedom with the broad brush of bigotry are reckless and reveal a profound disregard for the religious foundations of his own work,” said Lori.

“People of faith have often been the ones to carry the full promise of America to the most forgotten peripheries when other segments of society judged it too costly,” he said. “Men and women of faith were many in number during the most powerful marches of the civil rights era.”

“Can we imagine the civil rights movement without Rev. Martin Luther King, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel?” Lori said. “In places like St. Louis, Catholic schools were integrated seven years before the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.”

“Jesus taught us to serve and not to count the cost,” Lori said.

“We wish we were there in even greater numbers, but we are there to humbly offer the full promise of America to all,” said the bishop. “Rest assured, if people of faith continue to be marginalized, it is the poor and vulnerable, not the Chairman and his friends, who will suffer.”

Government Mandates

Even two members of the eight-member commission, which is chosen by the president and Congress, disagreed with the conclusion of the report, including Gail Heriot, professor at the University of San Diego School of Law.

“Back when the federal government didn’t heavily subsidize both public and private higher education, when it didn’t heavily regulate employment relationships, when it didn’t have the leading role in financing and delivering healthcare, we didn’t need to worry nearly so much about the ways in which conflicts with religious conscience and the law arise,” Heriot said in her rebuttal in the report.

“Nobody thought about whether the Sisters of Charity should be given a religious exemption from the Obamacare contraceptive mandate, because there was no Obamacare contraceptive mandate,” she said.

U.S. Catholic bishops at their annual meeting in Baltimroe, Md. 

“The Roman Catholic Church didn’t need the so-called Ministerial Exception to Title VII in order to limit ordinations to men (and to Roman Catholics), because there was no Title VII,” Heriot said.

“If there is any hypocrisy and intolerance, it is emanating from Mr. Castro who unfairly smears Christians, like the Little Sisters of the Poor, who are sincerely following their consciences out of love of God and neighbor, and who only want to be free to continue to serve the needy without government discrimination,” Severino said.

Kelly Shackelford, president and CEO of First Liberty Institute, said he questioned Castro’s role as chairman of the commission.

"No one denigrating religious freedom should be serving on a civil rights commission, much less being its chairman,” Shackelford said. “Calling religious freedom and liberty ‘code words’ for racism, homophobia, and sexism is reprehensible. America was founded on religious freedom.”

SOURCE

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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. 

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