fufor's unregelmässige news

How best to understand racism
October 31, 2009
By Tim Soutphommasane

Do you have to be black, or a member of a minority ethnic group, to understand racism?

WHAT US Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart famously said about obscenity may well be said of racism: "I know it when I see it." At one level, there is nothing hard at all to understand about racism. If we are to be judged, let it be done according to the content of our character and the quality of our deeds; leave our ethnic origin or skin colour out of it.

But, as with so many things, there can be a gap between theory and practice. For all that any reasonable person will endorse a value of non-discrimination, not everyone is arguably capable of appreciating the humiliation involved in racism.

According to some theorists of identity, there can be limits to one's social understanding. Where someone has not experienced the nastiness of racism first-hand, it can be easy to dismiss complaints about bigotry as claims for special treatment. To understand racism may require seeing things through a different pair of eyes or walking in someone else's shoes.

This is because we do not live our lives unencumbered by particular identities. For example, there are practical consequences of being born to, say, English rather than Egyptian parents. Although it can never determine our fate, our historical identity can have profound implications on how we experience the world.

There can be occasions, though, where there is a "misrecognition" of identity. Philosopher Charles Taylor explains it the following way.

Where society mirrors back to someone "a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves", that person can end up adopting this as the true reflection of their worth. This is the crux of racism: it can diminish a person's dignity and self-respect.

Such reasoning is perhaps behind some of the recent eye-catching experiments that have been conducted on race and identity. In his newly released film Schwarz auf Weiss (Black on White), German journalist Gunter Wallraff covers himself in dark brown make-up and dons an afro wig to "find out what it's like to be black in Germany".

In a more comical vein, John Safran recently did some "blackfacing", taking to Chicago's streets pretending to be black on ABC television's John Safran's Race Relations.

However, it seems vacuous to conclude that comprehending racism as a white person is possible only through such extreme efforts of impersonation. As some of the violence directed against Indian students in Australia reveals, racism is not confined to attempts by dominant majorities to impose their social power over minorities; it can often be a case of minority on minority.

Equally, there can be cases where majorities themselves are subjected to forms of prejudice by minorities. No group can claim a monopoly over being a victim.

The real test of whether one gets racism is not, then, whether one belongs to a minority group. Rather, it concerns whether one understands that not being treated with equal respect and decency can have effects other than mere trivial offence. Whether we are white, black, brown or yellow, we should all be able to recognise the harm of racism.
http://tinyurl.com/yzsby63

Waco Siege “Enforcer” To Rule Over Global Police Force
October 29, 2009
Blue Sky Sunshine's Blog

UN and Interpol officials will meet today to discuss the formation of a “global police force” that would enjoy access to a worldwide database of DNA, biometric and fingerprint records. The effort will be spearheaded by a man known as “The Enforcer” who helped federal authorities both conduct and cover up the murderous Waco siege which killed 76 people in 1993.

“Interpol and the United Nations are poised to become partners in fighting crime by jointly grooming a global police force that would be deployed as peacekeepers among rogue nations riven by war and organized crime, officials from both organizations say,” reports the New York Times.

The emergence of a global police force is of course something that people like Alex Jones have been warning about for well over a decade. The global police force, just like the world army, is a key centerpiece of the march towards a dictatorial global government.

Those who were once called paranoid conspiracy theorists for claiming that the plan all along has been to centralize law enforcement into a global body run by the world government under the auspices of the UN and Interpol have been proven right once again.

For a taste of what Americans who aren’t so favorable to taking orders from foreigners on home soil can expect, consider the fact that the secretary general of Interpol, and one of the men at the forefront of setting up the global police force, is none other than Ronald K. Noble.
Noble, who is known as “The Enforcer,” has been instrumental in working with Chinese authorities to provide policing in the Communist country for major national events. However, his most notorious role was in ordering and then, in his position as Undersecretary for Enforcement of the United States Department of the Treasury, whitewashing the actions of the BATF following the federal government’s murderous siege on the Branch Davidian compound at Waco which killed 76 people including more than 20 children and two pregnant women in April 1993.

As Carol Moore writes, “Noble had approved the decision to go ahead with the raid,” and therefore, “had little interest in issuing a report that either would challenge significantly the BATF’s investigation or modus operandi or would admit these led to crimes against the Davidians.”

Noble ignored in his report more than a dozen eyewitness reports, along with photographic and video evidence, of a BATF helicopter firebombing the Waco church during the siege. He also ignored David Koresh’s July 1992 invitation to the BATF to inspect the Waco compound, which if it had gone ahead could have prevented the siege and the murder of 76 innocent people altogether.

“During the hearing, Friend-of-Bill Webster Hubbell denied repeatedly that he and Clinton had discussed the Waco situation informally, and improperly. However, an Associated Press article claimed Hubbell had revealed he was giving Clinton updates on Waco. And House staffers discovered a memorandum in which then-Treasury official Ron Noble asserted Hubbell would take the matter up with Clinton if the Treasury Department’s review did not downplay BATF errors. Clearly, Noble condones covering up government crimes against citizens,” writes Moore.
Noble was picked directly for the position of secretary general at Interpol by fellow Waco siege accomplice, former Attorney General Janet Reno.
Read the rest of the article Here:
http://tinyurl.com/yelddnf
It's very informative.
http://tinyurl.com/yzrzglv

The 'Third "Templars"
Oct. 26, 2009
THE JERUSALEM POST

It's a dilemma for mainstream Israelis: How to resist capitulating to Arab violence on the Temple Mount - driven by irrational fears of Zionist plots against it - while not encouraging marginal Jewish groups who feverishly yearn to make the Arabs' worst nightmares come true?

Israel's "Third Templars" don't seem to care about the consequences of stoking an apocalyptic religious war with Islamic civilization - 56 countries, 1.57 billion faithful, most of them currently on the sidelines of the Arab-Israel conflict.

Jewish tradition holds that the Mount, site of Solomon's Temple (and the Ark of the Covenant) and later the Temple built by the returnees from the Babylonian exile, retains an intrinsic holiness. Disagreements among Torah authorities over which, if any, sections of the Temple plateau may be traversed without treading on the sacred ground of the Holy of Holies date back centuries.

To this day, most ultra-Orthodox Jews avoid the area. And yet for those who consider themselves part of the Jewish collective regardless of denominational or political persuasion, the Mount embodies the civilizational core of our shared past.

In 638, Arab invaders defeated the Christian Byzantines (inheritors of the Roman Empire) for control of this land. Within 50 years they had constructed the Dome of the Rock to enshrine the holy stone Muslims believe to be the place where Abraham prepared to sacrifice… Ishmael. Subsequently, the Aksa Mosque was constructed on the southern end of the plateau.

AFTER ISRAEL captured the area from Jordan in 1967, Moshe Dayan decided to be magnanimous in victory and continue the authority of the Muslim religious trust, or Wakf, to administer the site. Jews, previously barred by Muslims from reaching the holy places, were allowed to ascend the Mount during visiting hours. In keeping with Jewish tradition and in cognizance of Muslim sensibilities, they were, however, prohibited from conducting religious services.

This seemed the perfect compromise, enabling Muslims to worship at the shrines, as was their custom, and Jews (as well as tourists of all faiths) to visit the site for silent meditation and inspiration. The Orthodox establishment of the day, running the gamut from haredi to Zionist, opposed going up to the Mount.

Now a diverse group of mostly post-Zionist settler rabbis, messianic followers of the late Lubavitcher rebbe and practicing "Third Templars" - abetted by a smattering of ultra-right-wing Knesset members - have banded together to force the "hand of God." Ostensibly, they are calling upon the Jewish masses to ascend the Mount and assert a Jewish presence there; we suspect that what many of them really want is to "disappear" the Muslim shrines, put up a Jewish temple and recommence animal sacrifices.

Therein our dilemma: Step back from the Temple Mount, and Arab intimidation wins. Assert Jewish rights, and risk heartening a band of Jewish extremists high on a toxic potion of piety and politics. That even a "moderate" Palestinian leader like Mahmoud Abbas does not accept the Temple Mount as sacred to Jews further complicates the predicament.

ONE POSSIBLE approach is for the government to explicitly remind the Wakf that its administrative role on the Mount derives from the authority vested in it by the Jewish state. Successive governments have abdicated their fiduciary responsibilities by failing to monitor Wakf treatment of Jewish visitors and, most troublingly, looking the other way as the Muslim trust carried out unauthorized excavations.

In parallel, we want to clearly hear Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu denounce as folly the actions of those agitating for a Third Temple built on the ashes of the Muslim shrines. He should disabuse anyone who imagines that the antics of these "Third Templars" have support on the sane Right.

Given the Palestinians' endemic intransigence and quick resort to violence - including, it should be stressed, via malevolent inflation of tensions on the Mount - it is easy to be dismissive of all their grievances over Jerusalem. But sometimes, more sensitivity could be applied. The Palestinians are not always wrong to complain that municipal authorities are placing unreasonable demands on them in seeking building permits while facilitating scatter-site Jewish housing (with no security value) in densely populated Arab neighborhoods.

In the final analysis, Israeli sovereignty is best manifested by providing the same level of municipal services to all taxpaying Jerusalemites - and by insisting on the same adherence to the law from all.
http://tinyurl.com/yz9g5qp