New Orleans Starts Tearing Down Confederate Monuments, Sparking Protest

New Orleans officials removed the first of four prominent Confederate monuments early Monday, the latest Southern institution to sever itself from symbols viewed by many as a representation racism and white supremacy.

The first memorial to come down was the Liberty Monument, an 1891 obelisk honoring the Crescent City White League.

Workers arrived to begin removing the statue, which commemorates whites who tried to topple a biracial post-Civil War government in New Orleans, around 1:25 a.m. in an attempt to avoid disruption from supporters who want the monuments to stay, some of whom city officials said have made death threats.

The workers inspecting the statue ahead of its removal could be seen wearing flak jackets and helmets. Police officers watched the area from atop the parking garage of a nearby hotel. Meanwhile, a handful of people opposed to the move held a vigil at the statue of Jefferson Davis, who was the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu has called the Liberty Monument "the most offensive of the four" to be taken down, adding it was erected to "revere white supremacy."

"If there was ever a statue that needed to be taken down, it's that one," he said in an interview Sunday with The Associated Press.

The Crescent City White League attempted to overthrow a biracial Reconstruction government in New Orleans after the Civil War. That attempt failed, but white supremacist Democrats later took control of the state.

An inscription added in 1932 said the Yankees withdrew federal troops and "recognized white supremacy in the South" after the group challenged Louisiana's biracial government after the Civil War. In 1993, these words were covered by a granite slab with a new inscription, saying the obelisk honors "Americans on both sides" who died and that the conflict "should teach us lessons for the future."

Three other statues to Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard and Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis will be removed in later days now that legal challenges have been overcome.

The removals are "about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile — and most importantly — choose a better future," Landrieu said in a statement released by his office. "We can remember these divisive chapters in our history in a museum or other facility where they can be put in context — and that's where these statues belong."

Nationally, the debate over Confederate symbols has become heated since nine parishioners were killed at a black church in South Carolina in June 2015. South Carolina removed the Confederate flag from its statehouse grounds in the weeks after, and several Southern cities have since considered removing monuments. The University of Mississippi took down its state flag because it includes the Confederate emblem.

New Orleans is a majority African-American city although the number of black residents has fallen since 2005's Hurricane Katrina drove many people from the city.

The majority black City Council in 2015 voted 6-1 to approve plans to take the statues down, but legal battles over their fate have prevented the removal until now, said Landrieu, who proposed the monuments' removal and rode to victory twice with overwhelming support from the city's black residents.

People who want the Confederate memorials removed say they are offensive artifacts honoring the region's slave-owning past. But others call the monuments part of the city's history and say they should be protected historic structures.

Robert Bonner, 63, who said he is a Civil War re-enactor, was there to protest the statue's removal.

"I think it's a terrible thing," he said. "When you start removing the history of the city, you start losing money. You start losing where you came from and where you've been."

Since officials announced the removals, contractors hired by the city have faced death threats and intimidation in this deep South city where passions about the Civil War still run deep.

Landrieu refused to say who the city would be using to remove the statues because of the intimidation attempts. And the removal will begin at night to ensure police can secure the sites to protect workers, and to ease the burden on traffic for people who live and work in the city, Landrieu said.

"All of what we will do in the next days will be designed to make sure that we protect everybody, that the workers are safe, the folks around the monuments are safe and that nobody gets hurt," Landrieu said.

Landrieu said the memorials don't represent his city as it approaches its 300th anniversary next year. The mayor said the city would remove the monuments, store them and preserve them until an "appropriate" place to display them is determined.

"The monuments are an aberration," he said. "They're actually a denial of our history and they were done in a time when people who still controlled the Confederacy were in charge of this city and it only represents a four-year period in our 1,000-year march to where we are today."

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Preying Silently: The Crisis of Christian Persecution
   
It was 5:30 a.m. when Friar Najeeb Michaeel looked out his window and saw what every Iraqi Christian feared: trucks filled with ISIS soldiers. Dozens of families were fleeing when the terrorists cut in front of them and stopped. “I gave everybody the last rites,” the Friar said. “I thought it was finished for us.” Instead, people abandoned their cars and started running. Miraculously, they survived. But, like most Christians in the Middle East, they don’t know for how long.

Hunted down, beaten, enslaved, and tortured for their faith, Christians have been crying out for the world’s attention since they were first driven from their ancient homelands. Thursday, a group of American scholars did their best to give them that attention at a special event at the National Press Club. Called Under Caesar’s Sword, a partnership of Notre Dame, the Religious Freedom Institute and Georgetown University sounded the alarm for the millions of believers living in terror from the cradle of Christianity to the North Korean underground. “Life has not gotten better” for men and women of faith, said a somber Cardinal Donald Wuerl. In a world where at least one Christian is killed every hour for practicing their faith, the situation is dire.

The group’s report, “In Response to Persecution,” reads like a horror story, explaining that about 200 million Christians around the world are “at risk of physical violence, arrest, torture, even death simply because they live and practice a faith that is not acceptable to the rulers in that part of the world.” Just last year, 9,000 Christians were slaughtered for religious reasons — a 20 percent jump from the year before. To survive, more families are on the run, going underground, or even showing support for the regimes oppressing them. In Iran and Saudi Arabia, where the punishments are most severe, Christians are desperately trying to “[avoid] the attention of the authorities.”

The Hudson Institute’s Nina Shea pointed out that Christians still can’t go to the UN’s refugee camps for safety reasons — and, worse, are not receiving any government aid. That’s unacceptable, considering that the U.S. funds over a quarter of the UN’s budget. While the Trump administration has its work cut out for it climbing out of the hole Obama dug on the crisis, this is an obvious pressure point the White House can use to bring more relief to the suffering. Even now, we aren’t sure that the UN Security Council’s genocide investigation even includes Christians! The Trump team should lean on them to ensure it does.

As a lot of experts have pointed out, there’s also a role for the business community to play. And that starts with putting these basic human rights ahead of their economic interests or good relations. Dollars can speak louder than words, and corporate outrage would go a long way to bringing about change in these war-torn areas. Unfortunately for the White House, the eight years of religious hostility at home has led to a serious culture of indifference abroad. Cleaning up the mess left behind by the Obama administration won’t be easy, but it’s time for President Trump to pick up the torch and lead the way.

For now, American Christians face nothing like their brothers and sisters overseas, but the report makes it clear that this “subtle persecution” is growing – “particularly with respect to their convictions about sexuality, marriage and the sanctity of life.” When secularists turn up the heat on our churches, we can learn a lot from the courageous men and women abroad about how to live as Christians under pressure. After all, if Middle East Christians can face death without denying Christ, we can face name-calling and “hate” lists.

And if our nation wants to revive its reputation as the defender of the defenseless, the church will have to lead the way. We need to call on our pastors to be prepared for the coming persecution in the U.S. and help their flocks stand firm. As the Pope pointed out, the opposition to Christians here and abroad is rooted in the same opposition — it’s just different in degree. If that degree ever ratchets up to the terror we see on beaches in Libya or churches in Egypt, we have to be ready. Until then, we should all make a commitment now to lift up the persecuted, who are suffering for nothing more than confessing Jesus Christ as Lord.

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Hidden in Plano Sight

If Plano leaders want to legislate in secret, then voters will sue them in the open! Texans Greg and Laura Hatch are just two of the locals frustrated by the city’s underhanded passage of an LGBT ordinance in 2014. Instead of debating the issue in public, members met behind closed doors and agreed to force a radical anti-faith, anti-gender measure down voters' throats. Now, three years later, the Hatches are taking them to court.

“Texas requires local governments to operate with transparency,” said the couple’s attorney Cleve Doty. He was referring to the Texas Open Meetings Act (TOMA), which bars any municipality from hiding their business from the people. “This is even more concerning than what is in the ordinance itself because the city refused to play by the rules,” Doty told Breitbart. “Plano’s politicians wanted to hide from the citizens what they were doing and, based on their actions, didn’t want citizen input.”

Of course, there’s a good reason for that. They had to do in secret what they know they’d never get away with in public! This is how the Left operates when it’s on the wrong side of public opinion (which is often!). As upset as Plano residents were by the ordinance, Breitbart points out, they were far more upset they never knew about it. “We are disappointed in our city officials. We know as a kind neighborhood city and we believe Plano can do better,” the Hatches said in a statement. They believe every Plano citizen, “regardless of faith or belief, deserve the right to observe or participate in his or her government.”

That would be a lot more difficult if the Plano measure is allowed to stand. The ordinance was one of the more extreme examples of LGBT activism, even going so far as to criminally fine people or businesses with natural views on marriage and sexuality. “It put many businesses under the thumb of City Hall about things as personal and private as bathrooms, among other things,” Doty explained. “This is a disservice to citizens no matter which side of the issue they’re on: people from both sides of the political debate were excluded from the conversation, and the City created an ordinance that will be void. Nobody wins when the city breaks the law.”

And thanks to this couple, Plano isn’t about to get away with it! Our (cowboy) hats go off to concerned citizens like these two who are fighting for everyone’s right to be heard.

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Shtetls, Ghettos to the Jewish State. Nothing has changed

Nothing has changed in attitudes against the Jews in the last century.

From the programs of a hundred years ago to the strain inflicted on Israel today there is an eerie similarity.

Jews confined to their Russian shtetls suffered the murders and horrors of Jew haters.  Polish Jews were herded into ghettoes, ghettoes where their presence was harshly tolerated as a temporary measure by their Nazi masters.

History shows us that these shtetls and ghettoes were gradually reduced in size and denuded of their Jewish population by the ethnic cleansing of their haters.  There Jewish exclusivity did nothing to make them feel safe. On the contrary, a sense of vulnerability and foreboding hovered in the streets and in the homes of the enclosed and entrapped population.

In a real sense, we see this being played out in the Middle East today. Muslim countries expelled their Jews, and Israel was the beneficiary. The Jewish State did not feel like a ghetto then. It welcomed its brethren with open arms. It was a positive development.  But the Arab nations that banished their Jews did not see it that way. They detested the growing Jewish presence in their region and took violent steps to do away with it. In this, they were in kinship with the Russian and German anti-Semites.

On a promise of a reduced homeland the Jews were deprived of the vast majority of the land for the benefit of the complaining Arabs. This territory became known as Transjordan.

Then, after Arab armies failed to destroy the nascent Jewish State, Israel was persuaded to relinquish further land for peace in the name of a non-existent harmonious and peace-loving Palestinian nationhood.

Having lost five wars to eliminate the Jewish presence in the Middle East, the Arabs encouraged and promoted a Palestinian anti-Israel narrative and action campaign. The aim was shudderingly familiar - to pressure the world to force Jews to relinquish territory and property.

Despite an incessant terrorist campaign that left thousands of Israelis dead and more injured, the Arabs, now called Palestinians, were projected as victims.

In the delusional spirit of goodwill, Israel signed accords with a determined enemy, withdrew from developed land in Gaza with beautiful homes, rich agricultural infrastructure, and the beginnings of a tourist industry, traumatically removing its population, only to discover they had been tricked and trapped by international forums determined to reduce the Jewish ghetto in the Middle East further into areas of indefensible lines.

Israeli objections are met with diplomatic threats, boycotts, and the threat of violence.

As with the shtetl and the ghetto, nobody can assure the Jews of Israel that any withdrawal into vulnerable and over-crowded areas will put an end to the persistent threat of a Final Solution to the Jewish Problem in the Middle East. To any Israeli Jew with grave concerns comes a glib dismissal that Jews now have a strong army, so cope with the repercussions.

The international collusion with the Arabs is little different to the collusion of British officials exactly one hundred years ago in Jerusalem, Cairo and Whitehall who, instead of carrying out both British policy and the terms of the League of Nations Mandate to establish the Jewish national homeland, deserted their responsibilities by turning their backs on the Jews they were instructed to assist and, instead, duplicitously encouraged the Arabs to protest the Jewish presence.   What is going on with the false charges of "illegal occupation" and "illegal settlements" if not this?

Today, the effort is to reduce and diminish the Land of Israel further in favor of advancing a Greater Palestine that has failed to contribute any scientific, agricultural or social advancement within its society. Instead, they continue to nurture the age-old anti-Jewish attitude and the perpetuation of anti-Jewish hatred and violence.  A Greater Palestine is divided within itself and united only in their determination to inflict further ethnic cleansing on the Jews of Israel.

From the shtetl to the ghetto to the Jewish State, little has changed in attitudes against the Jews in the last century.

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

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