Archive for May 2007

In 1954 a rabbi at the Forest Hills Jewish Center in Queens told his congregation on the Rosh Hashanah holiday that “the refusal to be comforted has been the secret passion of our people’s history. . . . We created special institutions to keep us maladjusted, to remind us of our troubles, to perpetuate our grief.” He added that “Judaism does not only teach us to accept, but also to resist. When Abraham was told by God that He is about to destroy Sodom, he did not bow his head in humble submission. He protested. He challenged God to justify His actions.”

Writing of his years as a student at St. Philip Neri Elementary School in the 1950s, the novelist Michael Pearson recalled learning the same biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. A poor liar, Pearson had failed to convince Mother Concepta, his first-grade teacher, that he was not the chief culprit in a pencil fight that had erupted while she was out of the room. Making an example of Pearson, Mother Concepta reminded the class that “Lot’s wife turned around. She looked back. She disobeyed, boys and girls. And God turned her into a pillar of salt. Remember Lot’s wife, children. Remember her.”

In postwar New York, Catholics and Jews often encountered the same biblical passages but extracted opposite lessons from them. That is one of the central findings of my new book, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics

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May 24, 2007 — Police searched students for weapons amid reports of increased racial tension and the threat of weapons being brought to Spring Grove Area High School this morning.

The search was a result of three racially charged incidents at the high school this week, including two derogatory racial comments written at the school Monday and Tuesday and a “black on white” fight Wednesday, said Northern York County Regional Police Chief Carl Segatti.

In the interracial fight, one of the juveniles was slightly injured, and a 16-year-old was charged with disorderly conduct, Segatti said. He declined to release who was injured and who was charged by race.

“Today, we had officers at the school to do our best to assure that the educational process will go on,” Segatti said.

The search was in response to weapons being brought to school and as a precaution to assure student safety, Segatti said.

In a letter sent home with students, Supt. David Stricker reminded parents that “the district and local authorities are doing everything possible to ensure a safe school day each and every day for our students.”

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One out of four young U.S. Muslims believe suicide bombings against innocent civilians are OK to defend Islam, a disturbing new poll revealed yesterday.

The nationwide survey - one of the most exhaustive ever conducted of American Muslim attitudes - also found widespread doubt that Islamic terrorists carried out the 9/11 attacks.

But at the same time, three out of four U.S. Muslims are worried about the rise of Islamic extremism around the world - and more than 60 percent are “very concerned” it will grow in America.

The survey - revealing possible radicalization of homegrown American Muslim youth - included more than 1,000 of the nation’s estimated 2.35 million Muslims and was conducted in English and several foreign languages.

The most shocking responses came when those surveyed were asked whether suicide bombings and other violence against civilians can be justified “in order to defend Islam from its enemies.”

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NEW YORK (CNN) — There are times when reason carries the mind no further, when the mind is carried from the rational across the penumbra of the absurd. That is where the leadership of the U.S. Senate now resides.

What many once regarded as the world’s great deliberative body looks more like a clamorous bazaar in which senators feverishly hawk duplicity and deceit as bright jewels of public policy. Comprehensive immigration reform is just such a bauble, and buyer beware.

Most beguiling among those merchants of mendacity is none other than Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who has been peddling his wares at the Senate bazaar for more than four decades. Kennedy’s counterfeit immigration views reach all the way back to his championship of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

In signing that legislation into law, President Lyndon Johnson promised it would not be revolutionary or affect the lives of millions, even as it overturned 60 years of U.S. immigration policy of national origin quotas and led to the creation of explosive chain migration.

Twenty-one years later, President Ronald Reagan signed into law amnesty for more than three million illegal aliens who had entered the country. President Reagan then promised the new employer sanctions would “remove the incentive for illegal immigration by eliminating the job opportunities,” and that the law’s amnesty provision would allow millions who were hiding in the shadows to “step into the sunlight.”

And now, another 21 years later, we hear the same language as the pro-amnesty and open borders advocates demand that American citizens ignore history, reason and the national interest.

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New Immigration Minister Brice Hortefeux said a family with two children would be paid 6,000 euros (£4,068) to return to their country.

In 2005-2006, a similar scheme was taken up by some 3,000 families.

France is home to about two million immigrants from north and sub-Saharan Africa, according to a 2004 census.

“We must increase this measure to help voluntarily return. I am very clearly committed to doing that,” Mr Hortefeux told France’s RFI radio.

Mr Hortefeux last week was named immigration minister by newly-elected President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Mr Sarkozy has warned that France “is exasperated by uncontrolled immigration”.

France was hit by a series of riots in the immigrant-heavy suburbs in 2005.

One of the most pernicious means by which restrictions on free speech have grown tighter in recent years has been through the use of incitement laws, both incitement to hatred and incitement to violence and murder. In some cases, as in the outlawing of incitement to religious hatred through the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, the law is being used to censor genuine debate. In other cases, incitement law is being used to shut down protest, as in the recent convictions of Muslim protestors Mizanur Rahman and Umran Javed for inciting racial hatred and ‘soliciting murder’ during a rally in London against the publications of the Danish cartoons.

Over the past decade, the government has used the law both to expand the notion of ‘hatred’ and to loosen the meaning of ‘incitement’. Much of what is deemed ‘hatred’ today is in fact the giving of offence. And the giving of offence should be viewed as a normal and acceptable part of plural society.

But what of cases where someone has clearly crossed the boundary between causing offence and fomenting hatred? Such speech should not be banned either.

Free speech for everyone but bigots is no free speech at all. The right to transgress against liberal orthodoxy is as important as the right to blaspheme against religious dogma or the right to challenge reactionary traditions. In any case you cannot challenge bigotry by banning it. You simply let the sentiments fester underground.

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CHARLESTON, S.C. — In a new twist in American race relations, a federal court has ruled that a white teacher in a predominantly African-American school was subjected to a racially hostile workplace.

The case concerned Elizabeth Kandrac, who was routinely verbally abused by black students at Brentwood Middle School in North Charleston. Their slurs make shock jock Don Imus look like a church deacon.

Nevertheless, despite frequent complaints, school officials did nothing to intervene on Kandrac’s behalf, arguing that the racially charged profanity was simply part of the students’ culture. If Kandrac couldn’t handle cursing, school officials told her, she was in the wrong school.

Kandrac finally filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and subsequently brought a lawsuit against the Charleston County School District, the school’s principal and an associate superintendent. Last fall, jurors found that the school was a racially hostile environment to teach in and that the school district retaliated against Kandrac for complaining about it. The defendants sought a new trial, but U.S. District Judge David C. Norton recently affirmed the verdict. However, he did not support the jury’s findings of $307,500 in damages for lost income and emotional distress.

Although Kandrac clearly suffered — she was suspended from her job shortly after a story about her EEOC complaint appeared in the local newspaper, and her contract was not renewed — her case didn’t meet evidentiary requirements for damages. The judge said a new trial would have to determine damages, but the school district and Kandrac settled for $200,000.

The more compelling issue for students, parents and society is the idea that a particular group of people can be allowed to behave in a grossly uncivil and threatening way by virtue of their racial “culture.” The key legal question was whether a school could be held responsible.

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DAYTON — — When Claud Bell Sr. started looking for his first house in Dayton in the mid-1950s, he knew that, as a black man, there were places set aside for his family.

“The ads for property said ‘Colored’ right in the newspaper back then,” Bell said. “You couldn’t just go over to East Dayton and buy a house if you were black.”

More than 50 years later. Bell, like most Daytonians, still lives in a neighborhood where most of his neighbors are of the same race he is.

In the 2000 census, Dayton’s non-Hispanic population was about 53 percent white and 43 percent black. There was a scattering of Hispanics, Asian and other races.

An analysis of the city’s census tracts at the time showed that most sections of the city’s neighborhoods had obvious racial identities. Areas in East Dayton were up to 99 percent white in 2000, while West Dayton had tracts that were up to 98 percent black. A few tracts, mostly in neighborhoods close to North Main Street, had diverse populations ranging from about 36 to 66 percent white.

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Last week, Slate magazine carried an interesting series of columns written by Paul Shirley, an American pro basketball player currently plying his trade in Spain (he has played parts of three seasons in the NBA).
Shirley’s most interesting observations were about race. He noted that, at present, 6 percent of NBA players are white Americans (75 percent are African-Americans and 19 percent are foreigners), and that “when the average white American male” watches an NBA game, “he would very much like to see another average white American male” on the court.

When he sees such a player, Shirley claims, the average white American fan is going to root for the average white American player, because “we like to see people who look like us succeed.” I have no idea if this is true, but I know it’s not true in my case, at least when it comes to “white” American basketball players.

I root for the players who play for the Detroit Pistons, and for those who went to the University of Michigan. These are tribal allegiances from my youth. But I don’t root for players who look like me, if for no other reason that there are no NBA players who look like me, at least on any scale of likeness I find meaningful.

Shirley sees things differently, in large part no doubt because he is a white American, in a sport in which the white American is becoming an endangered species. For him, the category “white” understandably has a great deal of meaning.

Shirley relates how racial prejudice has dogged his basketball career every step of the way. Because he’s white, many players and coaches have always assumed he wasn’t very good, even though as someone who has reached the NBA, and now makes an excellent living in the world’s second-best professional league, he’s obviously better at basketball than 99.99 percent of the people who made this assumption.

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France’s minister of immigration and national identity, a new ministry created by President Nicolas Sarkozy, has ruled out legalizing undocumented immigrants en masse.

The new ministry said today that government policy would be dictated by firmness and pragmatism

“We have to put aside massive legalization. It doesn’t work and it penalizes, even immigrants,” Brice Hortefeux said on Europe 1 radio.

Policy, he said, would be guided by “firmness and humanism” with “lots of pragmatism.”

He also said he planned to adhere to the policy of deporting illegal immigrants from France. The number of deportees was expected to reach some 25,000 this year, and Hortefeux said he would ensure that figure is reached.

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