I am a taxi driver. I mean this in the sense in Spanish Yo soy taxista. I am born to do the work I am now doing.
My life is working out to be so fine I can hardly stand it. Why do I say this? Well, first of all my wife Marbella is a wonderful patient woman who supports me in many ways, from making sure I have clean clothes to cooking for me. She resisted our marriage at first out of fear that I would believe that she wanted me in order to get legal status in the United States. I never thought that was the case but yes, I wanted to marry her and be her legal husband to help her get this status, and to get her children off of welfare because I love her and care a lot for her two daughters and I wanted for her daughters to know for sure that I love their mother and would committ to her and to them in order to prove it.
Knowing that life might end up being harder in some ways she supported me any way in my confrontation with Administration for Children's Services. Also, she lets me sleep into the afternoon and awakens me with a cup of coffee to help me start my day.
I am now possibly the most fortunate man in New York city.Here is why I say so:
1- I enjoy doing the work I now do.
2- MY wife is wonderful to me.
3- It is a pure joy working to bring the money for the food and clothing for these three people I love.
4- I have the most freedom of any man in New York City! I have done and I am doing what others can only dream of, I am telling my boss off, exposing the terrible inner workings of my employer, the Government of New York City, before the whole world. How many of you would want to be able to tell the world about your employer? I do it.
Last night I drove taxi for the first time on a Friday night (first time in ten years or so, that is.) I was feeling strong and energetic and alive.I have to make a choice soon, which is to request a weekly lease with my garage. Their deal is for a driver to rent for seven shifts while actually paying for six, and the driver can take two days off after each seven day stint. What´s good about this is of course the lower lease and also the fact that the weekly drivers have priority for the cars so I would also actually start working a bit earlier each shift than I generally do now. The benefit of my present situation is that I can come and go more or less as I please. I am confident that as long as I work Sunday and Monday nights consistently they will always let me work the more lucrative nights as I wish.
I'm going to ask them for the weekly deal next week. Perhaps they won´t give it to me. We shall see.
What Israel Has Done to Palestinian Children With U.S. Taxpayers' Dollars
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Hard Line New York Cabbie
I'm getting more acclimated to this night taxi driving and enjoying it more and more too. A couple of days ago I had to wait to get my taxi because the day driver was late. The dispatcher actually made the guy pay me a fine (not what I would hve earned but more than the lease for forty-five minutes.) This guy had told me "it's okay" and I told him, "no, forty-five minutes is not okay." He got vulgar and I gave it back to him with my face close up to his when the dispatcher told him to give me fifteen dollars.
This past week I have been getting really decent cars to drive- they have great pick-up and no problems to concern the passengers, such as door ajar light not going off, etc. that are the hallmark of the worst cars the fleet has. I think I've passed my probation. This means I make a bit more money because although I am not an aggressive or reckless driver it is better to make a trip in a minute less and it is better to be able to compete somewhat for business of the typical potential New York passenger who will blithely enter the car of a maniac who has just streaked across three lanes and a red light to get his business. They'll even put their children and grandmothers with such drivers.
Tuesday night I finally got my first non paying passenger. Not to give the gory details, this happens from time to time and is part of the game, but later on someone left his cell phone in the back seat, it was stuck inside the cushion. when I cleaned out the car at the end of the shift, there it was. The guy called and came up to Harlem yesterday to get the phone and he gave me the customay twenty dollar reward too, so this cancelled out my fare beater.
Why does it work this way for me?
Anyhow the fun of being out there after almost everyone else has given up and coralling that last twenty dollar fare is back, and I love it.
This past week I have been getting really decent cars to drive- they have great pick-up and no problems to concern the passengers, such as door ajar light not going off, etc. that are the hallmark of the worst cars the fleet has. I think I've passed my probation. This means I make a bit more money because although I am not an aggressive or reckless driver it is better to make a trip in a minute less and it is better to be able to compete somewhat for business of the typical potential New York passenger who will blithely enter the car of a maniac who has just streaked across three lanes and a red light to get his business. They'll even put their children and grandmothers with such drivers.
Tuesday night I finally got my first non paying passenger. Not to give the gory details, this happens from time to time and is part of the game, but later on someone left his cell phone in the back seat, it was stuck inside the cushion. when I cleaned out the car at the end of the shift, there it was. The guy called and came up to Harlem yesterday to get the phone and he gave me the customay twenty dollar reward too, so this cancelled out my fare beater.
Why does it work this way for me?
Anyhow the fun of being out there after almost everyone else has given up and coralling that last twenty dollar fare is back, and I love it.
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Friends True and False
This essay ends with a warning to Jews--"Fear The Wrath of God." This warning applies also in my opinion to the American people.
Israel ShamirFriends, True and False
Israel ShamirFriends, True and False
Sunday, July 23, 2006
I have a question for "New AIDS Review" plus more about "too many people" crapola.
http://www.newaidsreview.org/posts/1113961790.shtml
Science bamboozles the left
One of the oddest things about the whole HIV-AIDS affair is the fact that the instinctively free thinking, anti-authoritarian types who question the paradigm find themselves in bed with the right wing. This is the fate of anyone who takes a skeptical view of science these days, or so it seems. From AIDS to global warming to the effects of DDT, all the questioning and second thoughts, all the skeptical realism, seems to come from the dark side, politically speaking. Skepticism about science does not come from the angels of leftist rhetoric, not even from Noam Chomsky, who we otherwise salute for the graceful decency which imbues his rhetoric. We often listen to Chomsky not so much for his predictable, blame-the--USA angle on world events, as simply a soothing balm for the soul. While Chomsky speaks, conscience lives.But it's not from the likes of Chomsky that we hear anything about the issue of whether all is well in politically relevant fields of science. This by itself is surprising, given his work as a theorist of language and brain structure. Perhaps Chomsky has commented on the politics of science, but not in our hearing. (Edit: After this was written, we were told that in the mid nineties Chomsky in an interview did make a mild comment in support of an investigation into AIDS if, as he was told, some prominent scientists disagreed with the ruling theory).)Instead, we hear from novelist Michael Crichton, science fiction writer James Hogan, 20/20 host John Stossel of ABC, or other skeptical writers and reporters in the pages of the American Spectator, Policy Review (of the Heritage Foundation), the Wall Street Journal or the New York Sun. Rightists all, making fun of the lame brained left for stampeding in panic whenever a scientific doomsayer comes along.Pity the rare liberal or leftist who likes to double check the facts when it comes to scientific and medical alarms. He has to climb in with the folks at the opposite end of the political spectrum. So what's going on? What is it about the left that crumples up and dies at the touch of a scientific fact?Take AIDS, for example, and the dispute over whether HIV is really the cause of the fatal immune dysfunction. Many readers of the New York Times say they have no idea that this dispute existed. Not surprising, since the Times has mentioned it in barely seven pieces in fifteen years. The readers of the American Spectator are familiar with it, however, from Tom Bethel's penetrating coverage over the years. Meanwhile the liberal and left wing media have been bamboozled into treating any such enquiry as an affront to decency and common sense.In fact, there have been only a handful of professional journalists in the last fifteen years who have looked into this question from both sides, and reported accordingly. Given the powerful political forces at work devoted to protecting the ruling view, this is not so surprising. But what is remarkable is the fact that typically only the right leaning and conservative press have had the guts to second guess the science establishment on this and other issues. Perhaps the petty cynics are right in AIDS and the right wing found the anti-HIV idea useful as a club to beat gays over the head with, while the liberals toed the gay party line. And in environmental issues, possibly Republicans are too growth minded for the world's good. But now all these problems are fully globalized one would have expected such trivial and provincial attitudes to be set aside. Instead, the concerned left make a living out of irresponsibly dire predictions while the conservatives are inclined at least to double check them.Perhaps it is no coincidence that the most accomplished reporter of this neglected issue is politically beyond such labels. The independent minded Celia Farber, whose columns bashing the current belief about HIV AIDS in Spin magazine are legendary, has complex sociopolitical views, rooted in her experience growing up partly in Sweden as well as the US. But one thing is sure, she is no right winger. Yet having written for fifteen years for SPIN and lately the New York Press on the questions surrounding HIV, she deplores the wilful blind eye that liberals and the left have otherwise turned towards the many anomalies in the science of AIDS. Even with a multitude of lives at stake, including hapless infants, not to mention billions in health spending that could be put to better use if HIV AIDS science is the scam that so many say it is, the left prefers to wallow in righteous identification with the victims rather than grasp the nettle of the case against HIV, which has survived hostile peer review in respectable journals for over 15 years. In fact, liberals flock to join in the suppression of the heresy, as if the leading scientists were priests in some church. The critics, they bleat presumptuously, "endanger lives."Perhaps the truth about people and their ideological alignment these days is too complex for simple labels, and the umbrella terms of left and right are now outmoded, like the once proud banner of liberalism, which conservatives have reduced to a liability. But crude or not, it appears to us that the conservative and right wing of the US press are consistently tougher minded in dealing with science than the left. However intellectually brilliant, the left typically run in fear from science. They simply can't handle it.In fact, the graduates of arts and literature at the helm of political and general interest magazines in the US are as quickly reduced to terrified jelly by science as the arts crowd in England were back in the fifties, when C.P. Snow wrote his famous thesis on the topic of the great separation between the arts and science. Mention to the editor of Poz that the science of AIDS is possibly wrong, as I did recently, and he will gape at you as if you had just dropped down from Mars, or were claiming you had.This applies even to those who write entire books about the AIDS "crisis". Take the youthful Greg Behrman, scion of a Wall Street family of South African origin who after Princeton and a Rhodes scholarship turned his Oxford thesis into a book, last year, "The Invisible People: How the US Has Slept Through the Global AIDS Pandemic, the Greatest Humanitarian Catastrophe of Our Time". Asked about the scientific basis for the statistics in his doomsday critique, Behrman, now an AIDS policy coordinator at the Council of Foreign Relations, says he relied on the conventional science and had no inclination to question it. For someone who conducted 200 interviews for a 352 page book and who has lived in South Africa, the only country whose government has resisted accepting the science before the dispute is resolved, this indicates a naive lack of curiosity, to say the least. More important leaders of opinion such as Richard Holbrooke, Bill Clinton, and Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia, all of whom add the weight of their full support to AIDS aid without any interest in the truth of the matter have more to explain, especially when responsible critics say that the very medications they want to help send to Africa and Asia are lethal.In my own case I recall fifteen years ago that a prominent and respectable magazine in the US, of long and admirable heritage and wide current renown. agreed to assign me a review of the situation in AIDS, after I told the haute WASP editor that I had detected very serious shenanigans going on in this arena of science and medicine, which indicated that people might be suffering and dying needlessly. Having spent more than two years researching the situation, including attending two AIDS Conferences in Montreal and San Francisco where the behavior of the scientists who were leading the field resembled the antics of the Nazis in Nuremburg, as well as an exclusive, insiders meeting of scientists in Washington run by the inimitable Robert Gallo, I reported a lengthy piece suggesting that venality rather than truth seeking ruled the day, and that all indications were that the sociology as well as the science demanded review.At first the editor and his junior editor assigned to the piece were thrilled, the great man at the helm opining no less than this piece was the kind of story that "we should be running". After an interval where the draft was circulated for comment around the office for group reassurance, however, I was taken aback one day to receive a less than-forthcoming call from the junior editor. They were not going to run the piece after all, he said apologetically.It took all my skill at flattering this careerist to tease out what had happened. Seems that he (the junior editor) had passed a newstand that morning, where the views of the renowned, highly credentialed scientist who had first questioned the HIV--AIDS paradigm had found their way onto the front page of a think tank journal of especially right wing flavor, the above mentioned Policy Review, in fact. This had immediately put a spanner into the works, and there was no way of extricating it, it seemed. The liberal, patrician editor of the said journal was probably not of a mind to find himself at Manhattan cocktail parties of his fellow literati, being hailed with irony as a political bedmate of their most prominent enemy. So that was that.I was reminded of all this today (April 14) when I read in the New York Sun the op-ed piece by John Stossel titled "The Alarmists Never Stop". In it Stossel, famous for his asking befuddled bureaucrats with nasal irony to "Give Me A Break", the title of his recent book, replies to an inevitable storm of email roused by his support of Michael Crichton's view that we need not worry as much about global warming as the hand wringing Cassandras would have us do. Typically charming excerpts read: "Boy when you sell out, you really sell out don't you? " and "All of the cow flatulence in the world can't equal the effect of the odiferous steam rising from the pile of bull? that you lay down." Most were copied from a Web page quoting the UN and the National Academy of Science, the Pew Center and the Union of Concerned Scientists on the "consensus" that "global warming is a scientific reality". The writers seemed unaware that Crichton, Stossel and everybody else accept warming as fact; the issue is how much of it is human in origin, and whether huge sacrifices to curb the human portion are needed.Stossel detects decidedly left wing interests in the concerns of the Concerned Scientists, which rather misleadingly demands no particular degree or experience to join, he points out. He replies to the chief concern of the critics, that scientists and other skeptics on global warming are paid by the energy industry which uses fossil fuels?true in some cases?by saying it is "nowhere near as 'generous' as the millions the scaremongers collect.... Suggesting corruption is just another smear." He goes on to point out that the Web page involved is "Media Matters for America" run by the David Brock who oddly enough in a previous, right- leaning life wrote "The Real Anita Hill." About that time Newsweek was writing a piece titled "The Cooling World" and predicting a drop in food output by 1985 as temperatures dropped. "Just 30 years ago, scaremongers were telling us about global cooling. The alarmists never stop."If Stossel is correct, then, in scientific matters the left is driven by fear and smear, and the right by facts. This is not a happy situation, given the world as it is, growing more complex and changing by the week. Policy makers need to have the best information on what prospects we face, for there are huge economic choices to be made. What do we really have to sacrifice to save the world in respect to the environment, or to AIDS? Maybe it is less than we think. Certainly, liberal leaders should be as concerned as the right to have their scientific "facts" (claims) doublechecked. In the case of AIDS, if the HIV critics are correct and the paradigm is nonsense, every million sent to sub Saharan Africa will help kill rather than cure Africans of what ails them. It is time for the left to engage science. If liberals continue to make fools of themselves by leaving science to the scientists, and relinquish realistic thinking to the right, what kind of world do they expect to end up with?
Posted by truthseeker on Thursday April 14, 2005 at 9:49pm
(link)Darin Brown (mail) (www):
Well, I'm an unapologetic leftist and liberal, and I know exactly what you're talking about. All I can say is, I make up my own mind about things and refuse to let myself get bullied by the guilt trips and harangues of the left on certain issues. The fact is, the left can be just as closed-minded and witless as the right at times. But once you've stood up to them once and you realise that you can stay true to your political *and* scientific values without compromising either, then it's easier the next time.
2.9.2006 7:26pm
(link)Eugene Weixel (mail) (www):
I count myself firmly on the left but I heartily agree that "our side" is more prone to being bamboolzed and flim flammed by "official science" as opposed to being interested in science. "Official science" is often corrupt and resistant to change and growth. Also there is a strong nihilist anti-development and anti-growth trend that is accepted as being on the left that truly is not leftist, and not progressive. I am one of those heretics who think that the world is not overcrowded with "too many people" and that the earth is not "supposed to be" a museum of pre-human existence. Perhaps HIV causes AIDS, but it doesn't seem to have been proven.
6.22.2006 10:01am
(link)Truthseeker (mail):
"Perhaps HIV causes AIDS, but it doesn't seem to have been proven." Eugene, thanks for your support, re the vulnerability of the left to be snowed by scientists, though we are not sure that we can follow you on the rest of your stepping stones. Are human beings are by definition creatures who deserve to replace others on this planet, even though as human beings we tend by nature to think so? Apart from being conscious and intelligent, we don't seem to be superior in nature to animals or insects on any moral parameters, as far as we tell. Is a more acute self-concious intelligence enough to justify overcrowding the planet with our species? Even if we feel as we do that every human life is precious, because we tend to identify with others, isn't this also an argument for restraining the number of precious human lives the planet has to support? As far as we are concerned, the current level of six billion concurrent lives is a mind boggling sea of indistinguishable life, most of it undistinguished in consciousness or intelligence precisely because of the lack of time and resources to cultivate body and mind of most of these individuals. Now we have Negroponte's $100 computer and the WWW, so that probably may be solved as far as education goes. But still, the sheer number of people even in New York City seems incomprehensibly large, if you think of them as unique individuals, each of whom deserves a decent life. Nature seems to agree - she is quite capable of ending lives when they have barely begun. So maybe even on the moral plane there are diminishing returns at the margin, as it were - each new human life is not as uniquely valuable after all. Maybe we should restrain ourselves from our natural instinct to propagate to the max and rescue every last deformed embryo, and keep alive every unconscious human vegetable. Maybe we should move the bar a little. Maybe it is time to be a little more tough minded in facing up to reality without sentiment. Meanwhile, on the question of HIV and AIDS you seem to be a little confused. There is no valid scientific reason to believe that HIV causes AIDS, or anything else, other than a conventional response of the human system. Or have you discovered one we have overlooked? A prize of one copy of Harvey Bialy's "Oncogene, Aneuploidy and AIDS: The Life and Scientific Times of Peter H. Duesberg" awaits anyone who can offer such a breakthrough notion, and sustain it. Or to put it more simply, if we told you that we were abducted by aliens last Friday night, could you disprove it? But would you believe it?
6.22.2006 12:04pm
(link)Eugene Weixel (mail) (www):
Well friend, I just don't believe that we humans ought to be replaced by viruses or insects. Clearly for better or for worse humans are as much in charge of things here on earth as the climate and geology allow. It's best to make the best of it. I'm just not qualified to have the final say on what AIDS is or what causes it. Imagine a taxi driver making such a pronouncement. I have pointed favorably to the so-called AIDS denialists on my weblog, and I have posted much of what they have to say or linked to it. I hope anyone who is told that he has AIDS or HIV does not consult a taxi driver (that's me), but medical experts on both sides of the argument if possible. I always invite folks who believe that there are too many people (other people, of course) on earth to just step off. It wouldn't be so hard to do. Your characterization of the mass of toilers really as "indistinguishable life, most of it undistinguished in consciousness or intelligence precisely because of the lack of time and resources to cultivate body and mind of most of these individuals" is most hateful and I despise it. So, please step off if it's so crowded.
7.20.2006 12:11am
(link)Manny Kimmel:
Truthseeker, Watch out that you do not get into Mr. Weixel's cab and begin your genocidal ramblings to pass the time. You might not wind up where you intend.
7.20.2006 11:27am
(link)Truthseeker (mail):
I hope anyone who is told that he has AIDS or HIV does not consult a taxi driver (that's me), but medical experts on both sides of the argument if possible. It is not impossible that a taxi-driver might have the perspective, analytical talent and independence of mind to be immune to the AIDS meme and see more clearly than a pride of "experts" on the topic. In fact in the case of this study, the only hope of correction of the paradigm is that a host of taxi drivers and other lay souls - including wealthy patrons in particular - rise up and smite the Philistines as directed by the few generales in this revolutionary campaign. Your characterization of the mass of toilers really as "indistinguishable life, most of it undistinguished in consciousness or intelligence precisely because of the lack of time and resources to cultivate body and mind of most of these individuals" is most hateful and I despise it. So, please step off if it's so crowded. Possibly you mistake the thrust of this remark, which was directed against the injustice of the distribution of resources in the modern world. We believe that in a just society, every single child should be given the maximum resources and opportunity to realize his or her talents, analytical and creative, and not one shortchanged because of the accident of low birth. Is there a single child you know that you don't feel this way about?
7.20.2006 1:15pm
(link)Eugene Weixel (mail) (www):
Well I am struggling singlehandedly as of now to expose the New York City Government's cover up of the Incarnation House abomination. I am a Child Protective worker who blew the whistle once too often, so now I'm driving taxi. I have a personal opinion about HIV/AIDS that is informed by people like Liam Scheff and Dr. Duesberg. Frankly though I hold some doubts only because the officialdom of science and medicine is so adamant. They can (in my humble opinion) be corrupt, slipshod, they may fail to meet the standards set for true scientific work and still perhaps be right about something. I guess it comes down to the question of whether or not the AIDS drugs do more good than harm or more harm than good. I don't know how either has been demonstrated. BBC claims that AIDS deaths in Europe have plumetted 80% since a new "drug cocktail" has been introduced. Of course they say that the HIV virus is developing immunity to this drug combination also.What can I make of this? How can I dispute it? Surely I am angry that an unknown number of foster children,almost all of them "minorities" probably mostly orphans as young as a month old were literally pumped with chemicals that were certainly known to cause harm and not certainly known to do any good, and that it is probable that a large percentage of these poor children were not even "HIV positive" but their mothers were. I find it hard to understand why it falls to me after others did so well in getting the matter exposed to begin with to raise hell as they steamroll a non investigating investigation, even having admitted that they didn't even know how many foster children had been given over to the experiments with no parental consent, no consent by the children old enough to decide and to know they are nauseous and dizzy when they take the drug and feel fine when they don't, no legal appointed guardian to ask the questions and demand the answers as to how the experiment would help his or her specific child. Whether or not AZT ever went on to help anyone what was done was an outrage. I am an anti Malthusian. I love people, children especially and I do not think there are or soon can be "too many." My back gets up about this, maybe because I've spent so much time among people who would probably be quickly labled as "excess," my aging taxi driving self included no doubt. If there is a human life not worth living why then do the even most miserable try to hold on tight to life and fear death? I'm sure that just about all people given the right conditions can do amazing things and most don't get the chance to come close to their potentials. Those relative few born irreversably not able to do this or do that at least can bring joy and affection to others and teach them how fortunate they are.
7.21.2006 2:51am
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Science bamboozles the left
One of the oddest things about the whole HIV-AIDS affair is the fact that the instinctively free thinking, anti-authoritarian types who question the paradigm find themselves in bed with the right wing. This is the fate of anyone who takes a skeptical view of science these days, or so it seems. From AIDS to global warming to the effects of DDT, all the questioning and second thoughts, all the skeptical realism, seems to come from the dark side, politically speaking. Skepticism about science does not come from the angels of leftist rhetoric, not even from Noam Chomsky, who we otherwise salute for the graceful decency which imbues his rhetoric. We often listen to Chomsky not so much for his predictable, blame-the--USA angle on world events, as simply a soothing balm for the soul. While Chomsky speaks, conscience lives.But it's not from the likes of Chomsky that we hear anything about the issue of whether all is well in politically relevant fields of science. This by itself is surprising, given his work as a theorist of language and brain structure. Perhaps Chomsky has commented on the politics of science, but not in our hearing. (Edit: After this was written, we were told that in the mid nineties Chomsky in an interview did make a mild comment in support of an investigation into AIDS if, as he was told, some prominent scientists disagreed with the ruling theory).)Instead, we hear from novelist Michael Crichton, science fiction writer James Hogan, 20/20 host John Stossel of ABC, or other skeptical writers and reporters in the pages of the American Spectator, Policy Review (of the Heritage Foundation), the Wall Street Journal or the New York Sun. Rightists all, making fun of the lame brained left for stampeding in panic whenever a scientific doomsayer comes along.Pity the rare liberal or leftist who likes to double check the facts when it comes to scientific and medical alarms. He has to climb in with the folks at the opposite end of the political spectrum. So what's going on? What is it about the left that crumples up and dies at the touch of a scientific fact?Take AIDS, for example, and the dispute over whether HIV is really the cause of the fatal immune dysfunction. Many readers of the New York Times say they have no idea that this dispute existed. Not surprising, since the Times has mentioned it in barely seven pieces in fifteen years. The readers of the American Spectator are familiar with it, however, from Tom Bethel's penetrating coverage over the years. Meanwhile the liberal and left wing media have been bamboozled into treating any such enquiry as an affront to decency and common sense.In fact, there have been only a handful of professional journalists in the last fifteen years who have looked into this question from both sides, and reported accordingly. Given the powerful political forces at work devoted to protecting the ruling view, this is not so surprising. But what is remarkable is the fact that typically only the right leaning and conservative press have had the guts to second guess the science establishment on this and other issues. Perhaps the petty cynics are right in AIDS and the right wing found the anti-HIV idea useful as a club to beat gays over the head with, while the liberals toed the gay party line. And in environmental issues, possibly Republicans are too growth minded for the world's good. But now all these problems are fully globalized one would have expected such trivial and provincial attitudes to be set aside. Instead, the concerned left make a living out of irresponsibly dire predictions while the conservatives are inclined at least to double check them.Perhaps it is no coincidence that the most accomplished reporter of this neglected issue is politically beyond such labels. The independent minded Celia Farber, whose columns bashing the current belief about HIV AIDS in Spin magazine are legendary, has complex sociopolitical views, rooted in her experience growing up partly in Sweden as well as the US. But one thing is sure, she is no right winger. Yet having written for fifteen years for SPIN and lately the New York Press on the questions surrounding HIV, she deplores the wilful blind eye that liberals and the left have otherwise turned towards the many anomalies in the science of AIDS. Even with a multitude of lives at stake, including hapless infants, not to mention billions in health spending that could be put to better use if HIV AIDS science is the scam that so many say it is, the left prefers to wallow in righteous identification with the victims rather than grasp the nettle of the case against HIV, which has survived hostile peer review in respectable journals for over 15 years. In fact, liberals flock to join in the suppression of the heresy, as if the leading scientists were priests in some church. The critics, they bleat presumptuously, "endanger lives."Perhaps the truth about people and their ideological alignment these days is too complex for simple labels, and the umbrella terms of left and right are now outmoded, like the once proud banner of liberalism, which conservatives have reduced to a liability. But crude or not, it appears to us that the conservative and right wing of the US press are consistently tougher minded in dealing with science than the left. However intellectually brilliant, the left typically run in fear from science. They simply can't handle it.In fact, the graduates of arts and literature at the helm of political and general interest magazines in the US are as quickly reduced to terrified jelly by science as the arts crowd in England were back in the fifties, when C.P. Snow wrote his famous thesis on the topic of the great separation between the arts and science. Mention to the editor of Poz that the science of AIDS is possibly wrong, as I did recently, and he will gape at you as if you had just dropped down from Mars, or were claiming you had.This applies even to those who write entire books about the AIDS "crisis". Take the youthful Greg Behrman, scion of a Wall Street family of South African origin who after Princeton and a Rhodes scholarship turned his Oxford thesis into a book, last year, "The Invisible People: How the US Has Slept Through the Global AIDS Pandemic, the Greatest Humanitarian Catastrophe of Our Time". Asked about the scientific basis for the statistics in his doomsday critique, Behrman, now an AIDS policy coordinator at the Council of Foreign Relations, says he relied on the conventional science and had no inclination to question it. For someone who conducted 200 interviews for a 352 page book and who has lived in South Africa, the only country whose government has resisted accepting the science before the dispute is resolved, this indicates a naive lack of curiosity, to say the least. More important leaders of opinion such as Richard Holbrooke, Bill Clinton, and Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia, all of whom add the weight of their full support to AIDS aid without any interest in the truth of the matter have more to explain, especially when responsible critics say that the very medications they want to help send to Africa and Asia are lethal.In my own case I recall fifteen years ago that a prominent and respectable magazine in the US, of long and admirable heritage and wide current renown. agreed to assign me a review of the situation in AIDS, after I told the haute WASP editor that I had detected very serious shenanigans going on in this arena of science and medicine, which indicated that people might be suffering and dying needlessly. Having spent more than two years researching the situation, including attending two AIDS Conferences in Montreal and San Francisco where the behavior of the scientists who were leading the field resembled the antics of the Nazis in Nuremburg, as well as an exclusive, insiders meeting of scientists in Washington run by the inimitable Robert Gallo, I reported a lengthy piece suggesting that venality rather than truth seeking ruled the day, and that all indications were that the sociology as well as the science demanded review.At first the editor and his junior editor assigned to the piece were thrilled, the great man at the helm opining no less than this piece was the kind of story that "we should be running". After an interval where the draft was circulated for comment around the office for group reassurance, however, I was taken aback one day to receive a less than-forthcoming call from the junior editor. They were not going to run the piece after all, he said apologetically.It took all my skill at flattering this careerist to tease out what had happened. Seems that he (the junior editor) had passed a newstand that morning, where the views of the renowned, highly credentialed scientist who had first questioned the HIV--AIDS paradigm had found their way onto the front page of a think tank journal of especially right wing flavor, the above mentioned Policy Review, in fact. This had immediately put a spanner into the works, and there was no way of extricating it, it seemed. The liberal, patrician editor of the said journal was probably not of a mind to find himself at Manhattan cocktail parties of his fellow literati, being hailed with irony as a political bedmate of their most prominent enemy. So that was that.I was reminded of all this today (April 14) when I read in the New York Sun the op-ed piece by John Stossel titled "The Alarmists Never Stop". In it Stossel, famous for his asking befuddled bureaucrats with nasal irony to "Give Me A Break", the title of his recent book, replies to an inevitable storm of email roused by his support of Michael Crichton's view that we need not worry as much about global warming as the hand wringing Cassandras would have us do. Typically charming excerpts read: "Boy when you sell out, you really sell out don't you? " and "All of the cow flatulence in the world can't equal the effect of the odiferous steam rising from the pile of bull? that you lay down." Most were copied from a Web page quoting the UN and the National Academy of Science, the Pew Center and the Union of Concerned Scientists on the "consensus" that "global warming is a scientific reality". The writers seemed unaware that Crichton, Stossel and everybody else accept warming as fact; the issue is how much of it is human in origin, and whether huge sacrifices to curb the human portion are needed.Stossel detects decidedly left wing interests in the concerns of the Concerned Scientists, which rather misleadingly demands no particular degree or experience to join, he points out. He replies to the chief concern of the critics, that scientists and other skeptics on global warming are paid by the energy industry which uses fossil fuels?true in some cases?by saying it is "nowhere near as 'generous' as the millions the scaremongers collect.... Suggesting corruption is just another smear." He goes on to point out that the Web page involved is "Media Matters for America" run by the David Brock who oddly enough in a previous, right- leaning life wrote "The Real Anita Hill." About that time Newsweek was writing a piece titled "The Cooling World" and predicting a drop in food output by 1985 as temperatures dropped. "Just 30 years ago, scaremongers were telling us about global cooling. The alarmists never stop."If Stossel is correct, then, in scientific matters the left is driven by fear and smear, and the right by facts. This is not a happy situation, given the world as it is, growing more complex and changing by the week. Policy makers need to have the best information on what prospects we face, for there are huge economic choices to be made. What do we really have to sacrifice to save the world in respect to the environment, or to AIDS? Maybe it is less than we think. Certainly, liberal leaders should be as concerned as the right to have their scientific "facts" (claims) doublechecked. In the case of AIDS, if the HIV critics are correct and the paradigm is nonsense, every million sent to sub Saharan Africa will help kill rather than cure Africans of what ails them. It is time for the left to engage science. If liberals continue to make fools of themselves by leaving science to the scientists, and relinquish realistic thinking to the right, what kind of world do they expect to end up with?
Posted by truthseeker on Thursday April 14, 2005 at 9:49pm
(link)Darin Brown (mail) (www):
Well, I'm an unapologetic leftist and liberal, and I know exactly what you're talking about. All I can say is, I make up my own mind about things and refuse to let myself get bullied by the guilt trips and harangues of the left on certain issues. The fact is, the left can be just as closed-minded and witless as the right at times. But once you've stood up to them once and you realise that you can stay true to your political *and* scientific values without compromising either, then it's easier the next time.
2.9.2006 7:26pm
(link)Eugene Weixel (mail) (www):
I count myself firmly on the left but I heartily agree that "our side" is more prone to being bamboolzed and flim flammed by "official science" as opposed to being interested in science. "Official science" is often corrupt and resistant to change and growth. Also there is a strong nihilist anti-development and anti-growth trend that is accepted as being on the left that truly is not leftist, and not progressive. I am one of those heretics who think that the world is not overcrowded with "too many people" and that the earth is not "supposed to be" a museum of pre-human existence. Perhaps HIV causes AIDS, but it doesn't seem to have been proven.
6.22.2006 10:01am
(link)Truthseeker (mail):
"Perhaps HIV causes AIDS, but it doesn't seem to have been proven." Eugene, thanks for your support, re the vulnerability of the left to be snowed by scientists, though we are not sure that we can follow you on the rest of your stepping stones. Are human beings are by definition creatures who deserve to replace others on this planet, even though as human beings we tend by nature to think so? Apart from being conscious and intelligent, we don't seem to be superior in nature to animals or insects on any moral parameters, as far as we tell. Is a more acute self-concious intelligence enough to justify overcrowding the planet with our species? Even if we feel as we do that every human life is precious, because we tend to identify with others, isn't this also an argument for restraining the number of precious human lives the planet has to support? As far as we are concerned, the current level of six billion concurrent lives is a mind boggling sea of indistinguishable life, most of it undistinguished in consciousness or intelligence precisely because of the lack of time and resources to cultivate body and mind of most of these individuals. Now we have Negroponte's $100 computer and the WWW, so that probably may be solved as far as education goes. But still, the sheer number of people even in New York City seems incomprehensibly large, if you think of them as unique individuals, each of whom deserves a decent life. Nature seems to agree - she is quite capable of ending lives when they have barely begun. So maybe even on the moral plane there are diminishing returns at the margin, as it were - each new human life is not as uniquely valuable after all. Maybe we should restrain ourselves from our natural instinct to propagate to the max and rescue every last deformed embryo, and keep alive every unconscious human vegetable. Maybe we should move the bar a little. Maybe it is time to be a little more tough minded in facing up to reality without sentiment. Meanwhile, on the question of HIV and AIDS you seem to be a little confused. There is no valid scientific reason to believe that HIV causes AIDS, or anything else, other than a conventional response of the human system. Or have you discovered one we have overlooked? A prize of one copy of Harvey Bialy's "Oncogene, Aneuploidy and AIDS: The Life and Scientific Times of Peter H. Duesberg" awaits anyone who can offer such a breakthrough notion, and sustain it. Or to put it more simply, if we told you that we were abducted by aliens last Friday night, could you disprove it? But would you believe it?
6.22.2006 12:04pm
(link)Eugene Weixel (mail) (www):
Well friend, I just don't believe that we humans ought to be replaced by viruses or insects. Clearly for better or for worse humans are as much in charge of things here on earth as the climate and geology allow. It's best to make the best of it. I'm just not qualified to have the final say on what AIDS is or what causes it. Imagine a taxi driver making such a pronouncement. I have pointed favorably to the so-called AIDS denialists on my weblog, and I have posted much of what they have to say or linked to it. I hope anyone who is told that he has AIDS or HIV does not consult a taxi driver (that's me), but medical experts on both sides of the argument if possible. I always invite folks who believe that there are too many people (other people, of course) on earth to just step off. It wouldn't be so hard to do. Your characterization of the mass of toilers really as "indistinguishable life, most of it undistinguished in consciousness or intelligence precisely because of the lack of time and resources to cultivate body and mind of most of these individuals" is most hateful and I despise it. So, please step off if it's so crowded.
7.20.2006 12:11am
(link)Manny Kimmel:
Truthseeker, Watch out that you do not get into Mr. Weixel's cab and begin your genocidal ramblings to pass the time. You might not wind up where you intend.
7.20.2006 11:27am
(link)Truthseeker (mail):
I hope anyone who is told that he has AIDS or HIV does not consult a taxi driver (that's me), but medical experts on both sides of the argument if possible. It is not impossible that a taxi-driver might have the perspective, analytical talent and independence of mind to be immune to the AIDS meme and see more clearly than a pride of "experts" on the topic. In fact in the case of this study, the only hope of correction of the paradigm is that a host of taxi drivers and other lay souls - including wealthy patrons in particular - rise up and smite the Philistines as directed by the few generales in this revolutionary campaign. Your characterization of the mass of toilers really as "indistinguishable life, most of it undistinguished in consciousness or intelligence precisely because of the lack of time and resources to cultivate body and mind of most of these individuals" is most hateful and I despise it. So, please step off if it's so crowded. Possibly you mistake the thrust of this remark, which was directed against the injustice of the distribution of resources in the modern world. We believe that in a just society, every single child should be given the maximum resources and opportunity to realize his or her talents, analytical and creative, and not one shortchanged because of the accident of low birth. Is there a single child you know that you don't feel this way about?
7.20.2006 1:15pm
(link)Eugene Weixel (mail) (www):
Well I am struggling singlehandedly as of now to expose the New York City Government's cover up of the Incarnation House abomination. I am a Child Protective worker who blew the whistle once too often, so now I'm driving taxi. I have a personal opinion about HIV/AIDS that is informed by people like Liam Scheff and Dr. Duesberg. Frankly though I hold some doubts only because the officialdom of science and medicine is so adamant. They can (in my humble opinion) be corrupt, slipshod, they may fail to meet the standards set for true scientific work and still perhaps be right about something. I guess it comes down to the question of whether or not the AIDS drugs do more good than harm or more harm than good. I don't know how either has been demonstrated. BBC claims that AIDS deaths in Europe have plumetted 80% since a new "drug cocktail" has been introduced. Of course they say that the HIV virus is developing immunity to this drug combination also.What can I make of this? How can I dispute it? Surely I am angry that an unknown number of foster children,almost all of them "minorities" probably mostly orphans as young as a month old were literally pumped with chemicals that were certainly known to cause harm and not certainly known to do any good, and that it is probable that a large percentage of these poor children were not even "HIV positive" but their mothers were. I find it hard to understand why it falls to me after others did so well in getting the matter exposed to begin with to raise hell as they steamroll a non investigating investigation, even having admitted that they didn't even know how many foster children had been given over to the experiments with no parental consent, no consent by the children old enough to decide and to know they are nauseous and dizzy when they take the drug and feel fine when they don't, no legal appointed guardian to ask the questions and demand the answers as to how the experiment would help his or her specific child. Whether or not AZT ever went on to help anyone what was done was an outrage. I am an anti Malthusian. I love people, children especially and I do not think there are or soon can be "too many." My back gets up about this, maybe because I've spent so much time among people who would probably be quickly labled as "excess," my aging taxi driving self included no doubt. If there is a human life not worth living why then do the even most miserable try to hold on tight to life and fear death? I'm sure that just about all people given the right conditions can do amazing things and most don't get the chance to come close to their potentials. Those relative few born irreversably not able to do this or do that at least can bring joy and affection to others and teach them how fortunate they are.
7.21.2006 2:51am
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Comments about "Israeli Jewish Peace Advocate Says there are no bomb shelters, sirens in Israeli Arab towns."
Janice said...
I'm not surprised at this. The Zionazis are one step away from building gas chambers.
11:06 AM
Anonymous said...
They were off because the Arabs there disconected them so they would not have to hear Israeli siren marking national holidays. Nazareth receives all the same funding and benefits every other similarly sized municipality in Israel receives. Stop grasping at straws and stop ignoring the salient facts. Even when Israelis are not culpable for the violence, you hold them liable, even failing to hold Arabs to task for their own actions- such as removing sirens. Furthermore, it's not often Air raid sirens actually have to be used in Israel and they are used for memorials and in some religious towns to mark the begining of the Sabath- and so I can see why the Arabs in Nazareth wouldn't mind disconecting theirs. You're sick- and stop deleting my posts. some aren't showing up.
12:58 PM
Eugene Weixel said...
You know, I give plenty of space, generous to a fault, really, to anonymous zionists and others whose points of view get lots and lots of hearing. I don't know who you are and so I do not know what posts you are referring to. I get a few commercial type posts urging me and my readers to get rich on the internet. I don't publish them. Are those the ones you speak of? I'm too kind, really to you rabid mouth frothing haters, but that's the social worker in me. Take some rest. Sounds like you need it.
I will always believe a person who has a name over an anonymous foulmouth.
2:36 PM
About "More Light Unto The Nations"
Anonymous said...
Norman Finkelstein is a dillusional self hating Jew. Sound familiar Eugene?
12:59 PM
Eugene Weixel said...
Nu? And now you're a psychiatrist? Norman Finkelstein (and me also for that matter) has more integrity and courage than you can conceive of. I don't agree with some of what Norman says but the man's heart is plainly in the right place and his courage and tenacity have my total admiration.
As the song said >"Who the F@ck are you?"
2:40 PM
About
Anonymous said...
Jonathan Cook is a liar, it's as simple as that, and more power to you for circulating this crap. A day after the rocket fell in Nazareth, Israeli journalists decided to check whether no shelters were build in the town. Surprise - there were, only converted for other uses by local government, which believed that, since Israeli Arabs aren't required to serve in the army, they'll never be targeted by their fellow arabs from the other side of the border. Incidentally, that's what the Israeli authorities were thinking. Anyway, Nasralla hit Nazareth by accident - he was aiming for Natzrat Ilit, a Jewish town nearby. Now for some other points. You can see Cook's bravery through his intrepis reporting about the privations that he has to suffer from Israeli censorship. What a load of garbage. The only thing that journalists - both foreign and local - aren't allow to report is a time and a place where Hizballa's rocket hits, so as not to aid the terrorists' targeting capabilities. One of El-Jezzeera crews was arrested when it repeatedly defied this restriction by showing on life TV where the missile stroke Haifa. Needless to say, other crews of the same station continued to work as usual and didn't even lost its credentials for the ministry of foreign affairs. When your kook Cook praises the speed with which El Jezzeera delivers the news vis-a-vis Israeli media, he can mean only two things - the places where rockets had landed and the death of Israeli soldiers. On both occasions Israeli journalists are deliberately stalling, in the last case in order to allow the army to notify the family first. Were Israel to engage in stifling foreign media, it would certainly start with one kook Cook, who is nothing but a lying, self-aggrandizing hate-spewer.Regards,Arik Elmanaelman@hotmail.comJerusalem
12:57 PM
Eugene Weixel said...
I would like to see evidence that the Arab towns wee provided with bomb shelters and turned them over to other uses. According to Yaariv Oppenheimer, of Israel's small Zionist "peace movement" called "Peace Now" not only are there no shelters in the Arab towns and villages but also there are no sirens! (Well why bother with a siren if there is no shelter any way?)When you say Nasralla was aiming for Zatzrat Ilit you seem to be calling upon some special insider knowledge. I will continue to say that you Zionists not only place military hardware among your oppressed Arab "fellow citizens" but you deny them even air raid sirens and shelters.After all you are the ones who refuse to give back land and houses to many of these your fellow citizens who fled warfare long ago from one part of your Israhell to another. Would the same rule apply to those Jews who have scurried from the North to relative safety in the south of your Israhell??
About
thecutter said...
Thanks a lot for putting this up, Eugene. Wishing you the best in these hot and terrible days.
3:44 PM
Eugene Weixel said...
Well Atzmon is on the money once again and since he can say it better than I can I yield the floor.I'm thinking more and more that the answer for most Israeli Jews is http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=SUNA,SUNA:2005-45,SUNA:en&q=free+land+in+kansas. They had better see the writing on the wall. Palestine and Lebanon will not be defeated.
5:27 PM
A regular commenter sent me a redundant post listing unsubstantiated assertions against Venezuela. Being that I had allowed this kind of thing once and had responded I saw ne need to repeat the exercise. I'm not going to turn this blog over to people who advocate attacking Venezuela, or who froth at the mouth with ad hominem attacks with no substantiation of their facts.
Janice said...
I'm not surprised at this. The Zionazis are one step away from building gas chambers.
11:06 AM
Anonymous said...
They were off because the Arabs there disconected them so they would not have to hear Israeli siren marking national holidays. Nazareth receives all the same funding and benefits every other similarly sized municipality in Israel receives. Stop grasping at straws and stop ignoring the salient facts. Even when Israelis are not culpable for the violence, you hold them liable, even failing to hold Arabs to task for their own actions- such as removing sirens. Furthermore, it's not often Air raid sirens actually have to be used in Israel and they are used for memorials and in some religious towns to mark the begining of the Sabath- and so I can see why the Arabs in Nazareth wouldn't mind disconecting theirs. You're sick- and stop deleting my posts. some aren't showing up.
12:58 PM
Eugene Weixel said...
You know, I give plenty of space, generous to a fault, really, to anonymous zionists and others whose points of view get lots and lots of hearing. I don't know who you are and so I do not know what posts you are referring to. I get a few commercial type posts urging me and my readers to get rich on the internet. I don't publish them. Are those the ones you speak of? I'm too kind, really to you rabid mouth frothing haters, but that's the social worker in me. Take some rest. Sounds like you need it.
I will always believe a person who has a name over an anonymous foulmouth.
2:36 PM
About "More Light Unto The Nations"
Anonymous said...
Norman Finkelstein is a dillusional self hating Jew. Sound familiar Eugene?
12:59 PM
Eugene Weixel said...
Nu? And now you're a psychiatrist? Norman Finkelstein (and me also for that matter) has more integrity and courage than you can conceive of. I don't agree with some of what Norman says but the man's heart is plainly in the right place and his courage and tenacity have my total admiration.
As the song said >"Who the F@ck are you?"
2:40 PM
About
Anonymous said...
Jonathan Cook is a liar, it's as simple as that, and more power to you for circulating this crap. A day after the rocket fell in Nazareth, Israeli journalists decided to check whether no shelters were build in the town. Surprise - there were, only converted for other uses by local government, which believed that, since Israeli Arabs aren't required to serve in the army, they'll never be targeted by their fellow arabs from the other side of the border. Incidentally, that's what the Israeli authorities were thinking. Anyway, Nasralla hit Nazareth by accident - he was aiming for Natzrat Ilit, a Jewish town nearby. Now for some other points. You can see Cook's bravery through his intrepis reporting about the privations that he has to suffer from Israeli censorship. What a load of garbage. The only thing that journalists - both foreign and local - aren't allow to report is a time and a place where Hizballa's rocket hits, so as not to aid the terrorists' targeting capabilities. One of El-Jezzeera crews was arrested when it repeatedly defied this restriction by showing on life TV where the missile stroke Haifa. Needless to say, other crews of the same station continued to work as usual and didn't even lost its credentials for the ministry of foreign affairs. When your kook Cook praises the speed with which El Jezzeera delivers the news vis-a-vis Israeli media, he can mean only two things - the places where rockets had landed and the death of Israeli soldiers. On both occasions Israeli journalists are deliberately stalling, in the last case in order to allow the army to notify the family first. Were Israel to engage in stifling foreign media, it would certainly start with one kook Cook, who is nothing but a lying, self-aggrandizing hate-spewer.Regards,Arik Elmanaelman@hotmail.comJerusalem
12:57 PM
Eugene Weixel said...
I would like to see evidence that the Arab towns wee provided with bomb shelters and turned them over to other uses. According to Yaariv Oppenheimer, of Israel's small Zionist "peace movement" called "Peace Now" not only are there no shelters in the Arab towns and villages but also there are no sirens! (Well why bother with a siren if there is no shelter any way?)When you say Nasralla was aiming for Zatzrat Ilit you seem to be calling upon some special insider knowledge. I will continue to say that you Zionists not only place military hardware among your oppressed Arab "fellow citizens" but you deny them even air raid sirens and shelters.After all you are the ones who refuse to give back land and houses to many of these your fellow citizens who fled warfare long ago from one part of your Israhell to another. Would the same rule apply to those Jews who have scurried from the North to relative safety in the south of your Israhell??
About
thecutter said...
Thanks a lot for putting this up, Eugene. Wishing you the best in these hot and terrible days.
3:44 PM
Eugene Weixel said...
Well Atzmon is on the money once again and since he can say it better than I can I yield the floor.I'm thinking more and more that the answer for most Israeli Jews is http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=SUNA,SUNA:2005-45,SUNA:en&q=free+land+in+kansas. They had better see the writing on the wall. Palestine and Lebanon will not be defeated.
5:27 PM
A regular commenter sent me a redundant post listing unsubstantiated assertions against Venezuela. Being that I had allowed this kind of thing once and had responded I saw ne need to repeat the exercise. I'm not going to turn this blog over to people who advocate attacking Venezuela, or who froth at the mouth with ad hominem attacks with no substantiation of their facts.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
Thursday, July 20, 2006
The Human Shields of Nazareth by Jonathan Cook
July 19, 2006
The Human Shields of Nazareth
by Jonathan Cook
Nazareth hit the international headlines for the first time in this vicious war being waged by Israel mostly on Lebanese civilians. Reporter Matthew Price, corseted in a blue flak jacket in Haifa, told BBC viewers that for the first time Hezbollah had targeted Nazareth late on Sunday. "Nazareth is a mostly Christian town," he added, managing to cram into a single sentence of a few words two factual mistakes and a disturbing hint of incitement.
Whatever the precision of its rockets (and Nazareth's residents are certainly worried enough about that), Hezbollah struck not at Nazareth but at a site some distance from Nazareth – a site of strategic significance to Israel, though I cannot say more than that as we are now officially under martial law in the country's north.
Matthew Price was also wrong about Nazareth being a "mostly Christian town." During the 1948 war in which Israel's army ethnically cleansed much of the surrounding area of Palestinians, Muslim villagers fled to Nazareth in search of sanctuary. Today, two-thirds of the city's 75,000 inhabitants are Muslim – or at least they are by the religious classification system imposed on all citizens by the Israeli authorities.
Which brings us to the nasty element of incitement from our BBC reporter.
Several Israeli armaments factories and storage depots have been built close by Arab communities in the north of Israel, possibly in the hope that by locating them there Arab regimes will be deterred from attacking Israel's enormous armory. In other words, the inhabitants of several of Israel's Arab towns and villages have been turned into collective human shields – protection for Israel's war machine.
Before the strike close to Nazareth late on Sunday night, several Arab villages in the north had been hit by Hezbollah rockets trying to reach these factories. No one at the BBC saw the need to mention these attacks nor the fact that "mostly Muslim" villages had been hit. So why did the strike against Nazareth – and its mistaken Christian status – became part of the story for the BBC?
Because Israel wants to portray Hezbollah, and its leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, as a crazed Islamic militia, as fanatical Muslims who hate Jews and Christians with equal vehemence. This is all part of Israel's claim that it is fighting George Bush's "war on terror." Predictably, the BBC obliged by regurgitating this piece of racist nonsense.
If anybody still doubts that Israel is shaping the news agenda of broadcasters like the BBC, here was as good as the proof.
According to the jingoistic Jerusalem Post, the Israeli Prime Minister's Office and the army are delirious at their success in dictating the headlines and tone of foreign news broadcasts.
Ehud Olmert's media adviser, Assif Shariv, told the Post that the international media were interviewing Israeli spokespeople four times as much as spokespeople for the Palestinians and Lebanese. Another government adviser, Gideon Meir, boasted: "We have never had it so good. The hasbara [propaganda] effort is a well-oiled machine."
Which may explain why we know so little about what is happening in Lebanon and Gaza – and why we know so little about what is happening inside Israel too.
To remind you, I, like other residents of northern Israel, am under martial law. As are the foreign journalists – and in addition they are required to submit their copy to the military censor. So all I can tell you, without breaking the law, is that you are not getting the entire picture of what has been happening here in the Galilee.
Certainly, a piece of news that I doubt you will hear from the foreign media, although bravely the liberal Hebrew media has been drawing attention to the matter, is that the "only democracy in the Middle East" has all but silenced al-Jazeera from reporting inside Israel.
The reason is clear: until recently al-Jazeera had been running rings around the local and foreign press.
Al-Jazeera is the Arab world's most serious and popular news gatherer, and essential viewing for anyone who wants to get a realistic idea of the news from both sides of the border. When I heard the missile strike close by Nazareth on Sunday night, al-Jazeera told me what had happened a full half hour before the Israeli media, and a day before my colleague Matthew Price.
How do they do it? Because most of their staff in Israel are Israeli citizens, as well as being Palestinian Arabs. Their journalists belong to the forgotten fifth of the Israeli population whose citizenship is Israeli but whose nationality is Palestinian.
So not only do al-Jazeera's reporters know the northern patch of Israel like home ground (because it is home ground) but they are also not cravenly waiting for the Israeli Prime Minister's Office and army's spokesman to tell them what is going on.
Watching al-Jazeera has been a revelation: it has dedicated a substantial portion of its coverage to events inside Israel as well as in Lebanon, in stark contrast to Israeli broadcasters who rarely use any of the footage from Lebanon.
Similarly, al-Jazeera faithfully translated Ehud Olmert's speech word for word into Arabic, and then included a lengthy analysis from a local correspondent for its viewers. Israeli broadcasters, on the other hand, repeatedly mistranslated the televised words of Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah into Hebrew and English, removing context and his calls for negotiation.
Similar misrepresentations of Nasrallah's position in the foreign media presumably reflected their over-reliance on the Israeli broadcasters.
But al-Jazeera's coverage inside Israel – the Arab world's best chance of being exposed to the Israeli point of view – is being effectively shut down. In the past two days, its editor has been arrested on two occasions and another senior journalist was taken in for questioning. According to its reporters, they cannot move from their office without being followed by the Israeli security services.
Why are they receiving this treatment? Because, according to Israel's only serious newspaper, Ha'aretz, the country's Hebrew media have been inciting against them. In particular Reshet Bet radio station, one of several wings of the Israeli media loyal to the government, has been telling lies that al-Jazeera is revealing classified information, namely the location of rocket strikes.
Is the claim true? According to Ha'aretz again: "Other TV networks, including Israeli news services, made similar reports without suffering from police intervention."
Freedom of the press rarely means much when governments go to war. The local media usually consider it their patriotic duty not only to strip of vital context the information they offer their viewers, but they often falsify the record too. Much of Israel's media are clearly doing both jobs with some accomplishment.
But the fact that some in the Israeli media see it as part of their job to silence journalists not as craven as themselves is the real eye-opener. Maybe they realize al-Jazeera just makes them look like propagandists.
Nabila Espanioly, the director of a charitable organization in Nazareth promoting women and children's interests, makes a point worth remembering as the foreign and Israeli media huddle in the shelters of Haifa and Nahariya interviewing terrified "Israelis."
In fact, they are talking not to Israelis but to Israeli Jews. The fifth of the Israeli population who are not Jewish but Arab are rarely to be found hiding in public shelters because the authorities neglected to build any in their towns and villages.
In other words, although the Israeli army has sited several important weapons factories and military intelligence posts close to Arab communities in the north, the Israeli government has not offered the Arab residents any protection should there be fallout – quite literally in the case of the Katyusha rockets – as a result.
This is another tiny facet of the discrimination endured for decades by the country's Arab population that so rarely surfaces in media coverage of Israel.
Similarly oblivious to the ironies, the Israeli and foreign media have been running heartwarming stories about how "Israelis" are opening their homes and hearths to their compatriots fleeing the north. Again for "Israelis" substitute "Israeli Jews."
No one I know here in Nazareth believes they would find much of a welcome in Tel Aviv or Beersheva should they go looking for one. Which leaves them with nowhere to run should they need to.
The only Arab communities out of the line of Hezbollah fire are those in the southern Negev belonging to the Bedouin. But that is not much comfort. Most of the Negev's 150,000 Bedouin have been forced to live in squalid tents and metal shacks by an Israeli government that bulldozes anything more permanent. The authorities also deprive many of the Bedouin communities of water and all public services. So sweating it out with the Katyushas may be the better option.
A final footnote – one to ponder in the quieter moments after the worst of the suffering is over. Those Israeli Jews fleeing for their lives as they head south to the quiet – so far at least – of Tel Aviv and beyond offer a small echo of events nearly six decades ago when 750,000 Palestinians were forced to leave their homes by the Israeli army.
Israeli Jews have always taken the view – and happily tell any outsiders as much – that the "Arabs" lost the right to their homes in the war of 1948 because they "fled" (in fact many were forcibly expelled, but let that drop for the moment).
The Israeli government has adopted much the same view, even refusing to allow the 250,000 of its own Arab citizens who are classified as internal refugees – their ancestors fled the fighting in 1948 but have citizenship because they stayed inside what is today Israel – to return to their original homes and land.
So how exactly should we regard those Israeli Jews now fleeing from Nahariya and Haifa? Should they lose their homes, their land, and their bank accounts just as the Palestinians did in 1948?
The Human Shields of Nazareth
by Jonathan Cook
Nazareth hit the international headlines for the first time in this vicious war being waged by Israel mostly on Lebanese civilians. Reporter Matthew Price, corseted in a blue flak jacket in Haifa, told BBC viewers that for the first time Hezbollah had targeted Nazareth late on Sunday. "Nazareth is a mostly Christian town," he added, managing to cram into a single sentence of a few words two factual mistakes and a disturbing hint of incitement.
Whatever the precision of its rockets (and Nazareth's residents are certainly worried enough about that), Hezbollah struck not at Nazareth but at a site some distance from Nazareth – a site of strategic significance to Israel, though I cannot say more than that as we are now officially under martial law in the country's north.
Matthew Price was also wrong about Nazareth being a "mostly Christian town." During the 1948 war in which Israel's army ethnically cleansed much of the surrounding area of Palestinians, Muslim villagers fled to Nazareth in search of sanctuary. Today, two-thirds of the city's 75,000 inhabitants are Muslim – or at least they are by the religious classification system imposed on all citizens by the Israeli authorities.
Which brings us to the nasty element of incitement from our BBC reporter.
Several Israeli armaments factories and storage depots have been built close by Arab communities in the north of Israel, possibly in the hope that by locating them there Arab regimes will be deterred from attacking Israel's enormous armory. In other words, the inhabitants of several of Israel's Arab towns and villages have been turned into collective human shields – protection for Israel's war machine.
Before the strike close to Nazareth late on Sunday night, several Arab villages in the north had been hit by Hezbollah rockets trying to reach these factories. No one at the BBC saw the need to mention these attacks nor the fact that "mostly Muslim" villages had been hit. So why did the strike against Nazareth – and its mistaken Christian status – became part of the story for the BBC?
Because Israel wants to portray Hezbollah, and its leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, as a crazed Islamic militia, as fanatical Muslims who hate Jews and Christians with equal vehemence. This is all part of Israel's claim that it is fighting George Bush's "war on terror." Predictably, the BBC obliged by regurgitating this piece of racist nonsense.
If anybody still doubts that Israel is shaping the news agenda of broadcasters like the BBC, here was as good as the proof.
According to the jingoistic Jerusalem Post, the Israeli Prime Minister's Office and the army are delirious at their success in dictating the headlines and tone of foreign news broadcasts.
Ehud Olmert's media adviser, Assif Shariv, told the Post that the international media were interviewing Israeli spokespeople four times as much as spokespeople for the Palestinians and Lebanese. Another government adviser, Gideon Meir, boasted: "We have never had it so good. The hasbara [propaganda] effort is a well-oiled machine."
Which may explain why we know so little about what is happening in Lebanon and Gaza – and why we know so little about what is happening inside Israel too.
To remind you, I, like other residents of northern Israel, am under martial law. As are the foreign journalists – and in addition they are required to submit their copy to the military censor. So all I can tell you, without breaking the law, is that you are not getting the entire picture of what has been happening here in the Galilee.
Certainly, a piece of news that I doubt you will hear from the foreign media, although bravely the liberal Hebrew media has been drawing attention to the matter, is that the "only democracy in the Middle East" has all but silenced al-Jazeera from reporting inside Israel.
The reason is clear: until recently al-Jazeera had been running rings around the local and foreign press.
Al-Jazeera is the Arab world's most serious and popular news gatherer, and essential viewing for anyone who wants to get a realistic idea of the news from both sides of the border. When I heard the missile strike close by Nazareth on Sunday night, al-Jazeera told me what had happened a full half hour before the Israeli media, and a day before my colleague Matthew Price.
How do they do it? Because most of their staff in Israel are Israeli citizens, as well as being Palestinian Arabs. Their journalists belong to the forgotten fifth of the Israeli population whose citizenship is Israeli but whose nationality is Palestinian.
So not only do al-Jazeera's reporters know the northern patch of Israel like home ground (because it is home ground) but they are also not cravenly waiting for the Israeli Prime Minister's Office and army's spokesman to tell them what is going on.
Watching al-Jazeera has been a revelation: it has dedicated a substantial portion of its coverage to events inside Israel as well as in Lebanon, in stark contrast to Israeli broadcasters who rarely use any of the footage from Lebanon.
Similarly, al-Jazeera faithfully translated Ehud Olmert's speech word for word into Arabic, and then included a lengthy analysis from a local correspondent for its viewers. Israeli broadcasters, on the other hand, repeatedly mistranslated the televised words of Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah into Hebrew and English, removing context and his calls for negotiation.
Similar misrepresentations of Nasrallah's position in the foreign media presumably reflected their over-reliance on the Israeli broadcasters.
But al-Jazeera's coverage inside Israel – the Arab world's best chance of being exposed to the Israeli point of view – is being effectively shut down. In the past two days, its editor has been arrested on two occasions and another senior journalist was taken in for questioning. According to its reporters, they cannot move from their office without being followed by the Israeli security services.
Why are they receiving this treatment? Because, according to Israel's only serious newspaper, Ha'aretz, the country's Hebrew media have been inciting against them. In particular Reshet Bet radio station, one of several wings of the Israeli media loyal to the government, has been telling lies that al-Jazeera is revealing classified information, namely the location of rocket strikes.
Is the claim true? According to Ha'aretz again: "Other TV networks, including Israeli news services, made similar reports without suffering from police intervention."
Freedom of the press rarely means much when governments go to war. The local media usually consider it their patriotic duty not only to strip of vital context the information they offer their viewers, but they often falsify the record too. Much of Israel's media are clearly doing both jobs with some accomplishment.
But the fact that some in the Israeli media see it as part of their job to silence journalists not as craven as themselves is the real eye-opener. Maybe they realize al-Jazeera just makes them look like propagandists.
Nabila Espanioly, the director of a charitable organization in Nazareth promoting women and children's interests, makes a point worth remembering as the foreign and Israeli media huddle in the shelters of Haifa and Nahariya interviewing terrified "Israelis."
In fact, they are talking not to Israelis but to Israeli Jews. The fifth of the Israeli population who are not Jewish but Arab are rarely to be found hiding in public shelters because the authorities neglected to build any in their towns and villages.
In other words, although the Israeli army has sited several important weapons factories and military intelligence posts close to Arab communities in the north, the Israeli government has not offered the Arab residents any protection should there be fallout – quite literally in the case of the Katyusha rockets – as a result.
This is another tiny facet of the discrimination endured for decades by the country's Arab population that so rarely surfaces in media coverage of Israel.
Similarly oblivious to the ironies, the Israeli and foreign media have been running heartwarming stories about how "Israelis" are opening their homes and hearths to their compatriots fleeing the north. Again for "Israelis" substitute "Israeli Jews."
No one I know here in Nazareth believes they would find much of a welcome in Tel Aviv or Beersheva should they go looking for one. Which leaves them with nowhere to run should they need to.
The only Arab communities out of the line of Hezbollah fire are those in the southern Negev belonging to the Bedouin. But that is not much comfort. Most of the Negev's 150,000 Bedouin have been forced to live in squalid tents and metal shacks by an Israeli government that bulldozes anything more permanent. The authorities also deprive many of the Bedouin communities of water and all public services. So sweating it out with the Katyushas may be the better option.
A final footnote – one to ponder in the quieter moments after the worst of the suffering is over. Those Israeli Jews fleeing for their lives as they head south to the quiet – so far at least – of Tel Aviv and beyond offer a small echo of events nearly six decades ago when 750,000 Palestinians were forced to leave their homes by the Israeli army.
Israeli Jews have always taken the view – and happily tell any outsiders as much – that the "Arabs" lost the right to their homes in the war of 1948 because they "fled" (in fact many were forcibly expelled, but let that drop for the moment).
The Israeli government has adopted much the same view, even refusing to allow the 250,000 of its own Arab citizens who are classified as internal refugees – their ancestors fled the fighting in 1948 but have citizenship because they stayed inside what is today Israel – to return to their original homes and land.
So how exactly should we regard those Israeli Jews now fleeing from Nahariya and Haifa? Should they lose their homes, their land, and their bank accounts just as the Palestinians did in 1948?
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
From the blog Peacepalestine- "Never Again" by Gilad Atzmon
...The photo at the left is not a pornographic image of a Rabbi giving oral pleasure to a newly born Jewish baby. It is actually Mohel Rabbi Yosef David Weisburg sucking blood from a baby’s penis while performing a circumcision.(The Jerusalem Post Magazine, Nov. 5, 1976, p. 14)[1]......The modern Israeli Jew is no doubt a modern man, he doesn’t follow the bible, he doesn’t practice Judaism, he dumped God long time ago but bizarrely enough, he still chops his male baby’s foreskin when this infant is just eight days old. The modern Israeli is circumcising his son, he mutilates his son’s young body following a primitive tribal blood ritual, he lets a rabbi (a Mohel) injure his new born baby and then he watches the very same rabbi to suck the blood from his newly born son’s penis. Evidently, the modern secular Jew may have managed to assimilate but failed in merging into humanity. He is still an active participant in an ancient tribal bloodsucking ritual.I am not an anthropologist, I cannot determine whether it is exactly the bloodsucking culture that turned Buber, Haber, Sharon, Peretz, Wolfowitz and Kissinger into mass bloodsuckers. But I do know that in my road in London, there are no participants in any ancient blood rituals.
Somehow, it feels very safe. I think to myself that it is rather possible that once we enforce or at least convince Israelis and modern Jews to stop celebrating their bizarre rituals they may learn to love their neighbours almost as much as they love themselves. By the time this happens the cultural clash between Jewishness and humanity may be resolved. It is crucial to take into consideration that our collective image of Hamas and Hezbollah as mass murderers and bloodthirsty fanatics is just a projection made by those who happen to be active participants in blood rituals. ..
Read On
Nice Jewish Girls
These are nice Jewish girls- maybe they were born in your hometown? They are "Israelis" now and they are writing hate messages to the people of Lebanon on the bombs their fathers are hurling at cities towns and villages in that country.
These Lebanese children have received the gifts of their nice Jewish neighbors.
And don't you be too smug either. If you're a European, your country is sitting on its hands watching this, giving George Bush and this Stalin wannabe named Amir Peretz time to work it out.(Peretz is a "comrade" of all Second International members, by the way, does that include you?)
If you're an American, you''re paying for this with your tax dollars. Now come on, what makes you think there can't be a day of reckoning?
If you are a citizen of almost any Arab country, your government is doing exactly what it's doing. Nothing. Are you proud of the help the Lebanese and Palestinians are receiving?
Israhell In Lebanon
Let us remember:
attacks by the Israeli Offensive Forces on the Lebanese border did not begin this Wednesday with the apprehending of two Israeli soldiers.
For more than the past month, the Israeli army has been conducting live ammunition training on the border. Lebanese shepherds have been killed. The response from the "international community"? Silence.
Let us remember:
Israel continues to imprison Lebanese in their jails, and the call from Hezbollah has been clear for years: Hezbollah will work for their release. Lebanese are not the only ones held in Israeli jails; there are thousands of Arab prisoners. And in From contrast to the incorrect reporting by The Guardian (UK), Hassan Narsallah, Secretary General of Hezbollah, stated quite clearly that Hezbollah will use these 2 Israeli soldiers for negotiation and he did not specify the conditions; he did NOT say that he will release these soldiers only upon the release of all Arab prisoners in Israel.
Let us also remember:
Israel has refused to submit a map of the 400,000 land mines that it deliberately left in South Lebanon, and these mines regularly kill Lebanese children. http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=10589§ionID=107 __._,_.___
From Richard Wilcox
attacks by the Israeli Offensive Forces on the Lebanese border did not begin this Wednesday with the apprehending of two Israeli soldiers.
For more than the past month, the Israeli army has been conducting live ammunition training on the border. Lebanese shepherds have been killed. The response from the "international community"? Silence.
Let us remember:
Israel continues to imprison Lebanese in their jails, and the call from Hezbollah has been clear for years: Hezbollah will work for their release. Lebanese are not the only ones held in Israeli jails; there are thousands of Arab prisoners. And in From contrast to the incorrect reporting by The Guardian (UK), Hassan Narsallah, Secretary General of Hezbollah, stated quite clearly that Hezbollah will use these 2 Israeli soldiers for negotiation and he did not specify the conditions; he did NOT say that he will release these soldiers only upon the release of all Arab prisoners in Israel.
Let us also remember:
Israel has refused to submit a map of the 400,000 land mines that it deliberately left in South Lebanon, and these mines regularly kill Lebanese children. http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=10589§ionID=107 __._,_.___
From Richard Wilcox
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Still more recent comments
DesertPeace said...
Your blog is great... this thread was absolutely brilliant.
2:04 PM
http://fatoldjewishguywholivesintheprojects.blogspot.com/2006/07/jewish-stuff.html
Thanks. Of course most of what was said was said by Mark Rudd, a man who was willing to put his life on the line against the Vietnam War and in solidarity with Black Americans. Hats off to Mark. To me he represents the finest of Jewish tradition, and I know at the time he felt he was fleeing just that (that's part of it) and represents what nazis and supremacists of the white and Jewish stripes hate the most.
stevierae said...
Eugene--Ummm, let me state the obvious here--- you said you want your job back at ACS. Don't you think that inflaming the higher-ups within that agency (and their higher ups) is sort of giving them more and more ammo to use NOT to hire you back? I mean, by all means, you need to stand up for what's right; advocate for those who cannot advocate for themselves--but you know that being a whistleblower at this stage of the game, in such a public venue, is simply going to ensure you will return to an even more hostile work environment if, indeed, they are forced to hire you back (either via the grievance process or via a wrongful termination lawsuit decided in your favor.)
3:20 AM
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=19337604&postID=115291517259560322
At 3:04 PM, ecsredeye said…
Whistle blowers blow whistles. I got into trouble originally for telling the truth. NOw that I am considered not to be an ACS employee by ACS they have no complaint.They went after me for telling the truth and for pointing out illegal and unsafe actions, both on this blog (though it was never spoken of officially in writing) and on the job. Sure I want my job back. I also want the self respect of a person who tells the truth.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Jewish stuff
Mark Rudd under arrest in Chicago, Days Of Rage, 1969
http://www.generationaldynamics.com
Jewish rebels and rebel Jews
As a person of Jewish descent raised in the United States I have
thought of myself as a secular, non believing progressive. As I have
investigated Jewish history and the true Jewish religion of today I
must say that for most of the years I fancied myself as such I have
been a follower and believer in the true Jewish religion of now -
The Holocaust Narrative, which includes The Crusades (against Jews,
of course), the Spanish Iquisition (not a national liberation struggle,
not aimed mainly at Islam, but against Jews, in our mythology), the
"Chemilniecki massacres" (not an uprising of oppressed Ukrainian peasants
but a blind, irrational, hate and alcohol fueled senseless assault on innocent Jews).
to me I've had the opportunity to be challenged in this religion of mine.
Truth shall make us free.
Rebel Jews:Lenni Brenner - Zionism in the Age of Dictators: An excellent book available
free on line.
de/middleast/brenner/
The Weight of Three Thousand Yearsby ProfessorIsrael Shahak -
Another great online book available for free!
http:
//www.biblebelievers
.org.au/jewhis1.htm
Still another great free online book,this by Israel Shamir.
http://www.vho.
org/aaargh/fran/livres2/PardesEng.pdf
A great essay touchng
on the"Blood Libel" issue by Israel Shamir:
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=
1020
Jewish Rebels:
http://www.upstatefilms.org/weather/sandiego.html
The Weather underground:
http://www.markrudd.com/
Mark Rudd grew up differently than I did but his essay on why there
were somany Jews in SDS (US student anti Vietnam war movement of
the 60's and 70's)
is a good read and yes I recognize myself even though as I said
he and
I grew up differently.He in Maplewood, New Jersey in a middle class family and I in the housing projects of New York City to a demi communist demi zionist not well off family.
For links to auto biographical stuff about
me go here-- http://search.blogger.com/?as_q=queensbridge&ie=UTF-8&ui=blg&bl_url=fatoldjewishguywholivesintheprojects.blogspot.com& and here http://search.blogger.com/?as_q=dover%2C+ignatowski&ie=UTF-8&ui=blg&bl_url=fatoldjewishguywholivesintheprojects.blogspot .com&x=
39&y=9
Friday, July 14, 2006
Israhell gets a dose of its own medicine.
Not satisfied with blowing up the only elecrtric power plant the Palestinians have in Gaza and not satisfied with bombing and strafing the people of Gaza supposedly in search of one Israeli soldier who was taken captive in a military action by anti-occupation resistance fighters the racist Jews Only State (aka Israhell) unleashed a furious murderous bombardment against the lovely but long suffering city of Beirut, in the neighboring country of Lebanon, supposedly because the resistance forces there had captured two Israeli soldiers in a military action. The action apparently was meant to take pressure off the suffering civilian population of Gaza and to let them know that they are not alone.
Israeli sailors must have felt pretty confident that they could bomb and murder with impunity just like the Americans aboard the USS New Jersey had done before to the same country, Lebanon. I can only imagine the surprise that hit these arrogant baby killers when a rocket with an explosive tip smashed into their ship courtesy of Hezbollah.
It aches my heart to know that Jews are acting like the Nazis are said to have acted, inflicting group punishment on civilian populations both in Gaza and in Lebanon for the legitimate wartime doings of resistance forces. Yet and still I smiled a little bit when I read about the Israhelli naval ship taking a hit.
We Jews are said to be so intelligent! I know I am not the only one who knows that inevitably the tide is going to turn, just like it did in South Africa. The intelligent thing to do would be to release the Palestinian and Lebanese hostage prisoners Israhell is holding just like the US is holding prisoner hostages in Guantanamo. The intelligent thing to do would be to accept the Hamas offer of a long term truce and start to negotiate a one person one vote solution for all of the land once called Palestine, as the whites in South Africa did, wising up to their inevitable violent downfall were they to continue trying to use their technology against the vast numbers of black Africans.
What the whites found out, and what the Jews are also likely to find out, is that oppressed people are capable of the greatest most profound forgiveness and also have the pragmatic sense to want to avoid all out warfare and destruction of the country, and to utilize the education and skills of the settlers for the good of the country if the settlers are willing to share the country and desist from trying to rule or ruin it.
Failing good sense the Jews in Israhell inevitably face a payback that will really be harsh. That would be a shame but it would be something they are still and continuously bringing upon their own heads.
Israhell: Stop the bombing. Release the prisoners. Sit down with the elected representatives of the Palestinian people. Time is running out for you.
Israeli sailors must have felt pretty confident that they could bomb and murder with impunity just like the Americans aboard the USS New Jersey had done before to the same country, Lebanon. I can only imagine the surprise that hit these arrogant baby killers when a rocket with an explosive tip smashed into their ship courtesy of Hezbollah.
It aches my heart to know that Jews are acting like the Nazis are said to have acted, inflicting group punishment on civilian populations both in Gaza and in Lebanon for the legitimate wartime doings of resistance forces. Yet and still I smiled a little bit when I read about the Israhelli naval ship taking a hit.
We Jews are said to be so intelligent! I know I am not the only one who knows that inevitably the tide is going to turn, just like it did in South Africa. The intelligent thing to do would be to release the Palestinian and Lebanese hostage prisoners Israhell is holding just like the US is holding prisoner hostages in Guantanamo. The intelligent thing to do would be to accept the Hamas offer of a long term truce and start to negotiate a one person one vote solution for all of the land once called Palestine, as the whites in South Africa did, wising up to their inevitable violent downfall were they to continue trying to use their technology against the vast numbers of black Africans.
What the whites found out, and what the Jews are also likely to find out, is that oppressed people are capable of the greatest most profound forgiveness and also have the pragmatic sense to want to avoid all out warfare and destruction of the country, and to utilize the education and skills of the settlers for the good of the country if the settlers are willing to share the country and desist from trying to rule or ruin it.
Failing good sense the Jews in Israhell inevitably face a payback that will really be harsh. That would be a shame but it would be something they are still and continuously bringing upon their own heads.
Israhell: Stop the bombing. Release the prisoners. Sit down with the elected representatives of the Palestinian people. Time is running out for you.
Campaign begins
I'm hitting the streets starting tonight with flyers publicizing these articles. It's my hope that New Yorkers will be reading them seriously and will ask the ACS commissioner, John Mattingly what's going on with the aids drug scandal and why are they going nuts snatching kids again when he said himself that that compromises child safety. john.mattingly@dfa.state
A Letter to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now About The Unethical AIDS ...
I ask The New York Times How AIDS drug torture investigation is coming along...
To John Mattingly, The Vera Institute and Mayor Michael Bloomberg ...
New Yorkers Are Going To Know About The Racist AIDS Drug Experiments...
AIDS Drug Experiment Scandal Update AIDS foster child Drug Tests. A scandal - Pro and Con. Excerpts from Liam Scheff's "The House That Aids Built" How Many NYC Foster Kids were force fed these chemicals? Truth is they don't know....
ACS Stats show that Giuliani time did return to Children's Services, and that's not good ...
Memo to New York's Administration for Children's Services: The ...
ACS is getting away with some really bad things
These are the figures of the US Department of Health and Human Services... Put into question the common assertion that it's the AIDS drugs that account for the drop in the number of children diagnosed with AIDS. These figures show fewer and fewer "at risk" women giving birth. Sex Offenders and Foster Children Do Mix... They do in New York City. ACS/Vera Institute begin third year of AIDS foster children scandal coverup ...
Recent comments
9 comments
Regarding my renouncing my so-called "right to return."
Anonymous said...
"What do they teach you there at Yeshiva University?"One thing- not to be so humiliated of our Jewishness as to denounce it completely. You go way beyond Israel bashing in this one friend. Did I catch some Holocaust justification in there? Correct me if I'm wrong.
8:41 PM
Eugene Weixel said...
Yelling "anti semitism", like "waving the flag" is the refuge of a scoundrel.I do not and never would "justify" killing or forcibly deporting whole populations to conditions that cannot support life as humans concieve of it, be that the slave labor camps run by the nazis, where many people died of hunger, typhus and other diseases and where an unkown number of people of various ethnicities were flat out murdered,or the maxi concentration camps which Jews have turned Gaza and the towns of the West Bank into.What I will say about "The Holocaust" is I am quite sure it did not occur in the way I was taught that it occured. I've written some about it and I am not going to repost all of that here.You can look it up.
3:56 PM
Anonymous said...
Well you're not in such great company boychik. Have you been to Auschwitz? I have. I picked bones out of a lake with a basin of ashes. That doesn't prove anything, but if you want to deny the systematic murder of Jews during WW2, then that's your problem. You'll die an angry man, what can I say. Secondly, please do notify me when the first Palestinian dies of Typhus or starvation all the more so being gassed or executed unjustifiably (key word). They might be hungry in Gaza, but it's a far cry -a far cry- from the brutality of the holocaust. I can't possibly sway you. There is no point. You are depraved beyond reach, seriously. I can't come to your site anymore. I don't know why I ever did. You know, I am considered left wing and you make me look like Kahana, who I condemn. You hate Jews- that's clear. I just can't jive with that. You're beyond the pale.
6:29 PM
Eugene Weixel said...
Dear Bob and stevierae-All this reminds me of an interesting anecdote about Meir Kahane. His political party was in the process of being banned from the Israeli parliament on the grounds that it is racist, which nominally and supposedly a political party may not be in the Jewish only state of Israhell. (Chuckle, it's true, it's the law there).Kahane retorted that he is no racist but that those who believe that the Arab people will ever accept Isitreal are racists, because that expectation showed a total lack of respect for the Arabs. He went on to say that were he an Arab he would be a rejectionist. He would not accept the notion of a Jewish State in the midst of the Arab world. He said that he respected the Arabs as human beings and as worthy opponents.He said that the Zionist "peaceniks" do not respect the Arabs and are the racists in fact.
8:04 PM
Eugene Weixel said...
Mr. Anonymous-Clearly when you cut off employment, trade, travel,deprive the government of the tools to enforce the rule of law, even bar receipt of charity from abroad, you are intent upon either killing or driving away the population. To me that's nazi.That happens to be what you are doing to the Palestinians.
8:17 PM
Muslims and Me.
MHoward said... Can't help but notice, you describeyourself of "Jewish origin". Yetin your blog, you identifiy yourself as a Jew? Why? The way I see it, you don't mind, describeing yourself as a "Jew", if it gives you some notority in your blog. Yet in actuality, your not really Jewish. To you beingof Jewish origin is an accident. ONly to be used if it gives you somekind of political advantage in your writeing. The only question is, why do you keep describeing yourself as Jewish? I already know the answer to the question. Which is basicly that it is selfserveing to you. It's just that i'd find it amusing to hear your justification.
3:46 PM
Eugene Weixel said...
When I say I am of Jewish origin I am saying that I do not follow the Jewish religion though my ancestors did.When I say that I am a Jew I am saying that I will not run from that fact- a person born of Jewish ancestry will always be a Jew in the eyes of many others, for the good or the bad, with or without converting to another religion. To tell a David Duke, for example, that I am not Jewish would be to have folded, to have cut and run in my way of thinking.When I had these discussions with the Muslim students in my classroom I used both words and explained why I did. Thank you for giving me this opportunity for clarifying this.
7:56 PM
"Black Anti Semitism" and Anti Semitism in general.
At 5:50 PM,
BobGriffin said…
I myself have run across some Anti-Semitism in a part of the black community in south Florida, and would not be overly surprised to see it elsewhere. I am a goyische Christian, and for a little while was attending a black church near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I quit attending after hearing one man in the Sunday School class expounding on how the Jews had been rebelling against God for several hundred years before the time of Jesus, and not hearing anyone correct him. (I had earlier left a white Presbyterian Church because of an expression of anti-Arab prejudice)So, why would there be Anti-Semitism in the black community? I can come up with several reasons which make sense, and which fit similar racial prejudice in the white community.1) When European Jews started arriving in the US in the late 19th century, they were competing with other communities for economic opportunities. This is not unusual; every immigrant community MUST do this.2) Most Anti-Semitic whites are also Anti-Black, but blacks in America are and have been faced with more prejudice and fewer opportunities than Jews, even Yiddish-speaking Jews.I compare both the Irish Anti-Negro riots of the 1860s, the Anti-Korean prejudice in the Los Angeles black community, and the anti-Latino prejudice in so many working-class white communities.Moreover,Any identifiable racial or ethnic community which dominates its neighborhood(s) thereby generates prejudice against itself from other inhabitants who are not part of that community. The attitudes and actions of members of that community can either ameliorate or exacerbate that prejudice. In my own family, I have witnessed this in regards to a local ethno-centric Armenian community. In another case, the ethno-centric attitudes of members of the southern California Chaldean community led to an anti-Chaldean prejudice on the part of a young Southern Californian.We need to act as neighbors to each other, despite racial, religious, or ethnic differences. When we don't do so, nourishing either envy or disdain, we create fertile ground for racism.-----------I want to thank you for being there, for posting what you do, and for linking with other pro-Jewish anti-Zionist Jews. I have a left-wing Syrian-American friend, a member of the Syrian Orthodox Church, who in his anger over the treatment of the Palestinians and over the pro-Israel domination of American foreign policy, risks being drawn in by right-wing anti-Semites. Your posts and links have given me something to hand back to him, as you and he generally have similar political and ethical viewpoints. I detest left-wing anti-Semitism just as much as I detest right-wing anti-Semitism, but I have little common ground to use when combatting right-wing anti-Semitism. Your blog and links help a great deal in combatting left-wing anti-Semitism.Again, thanks for your care and your work.Be Well,Bob Griffin
At 8:46 PM,
Eugene Weixel said…
I think The Bible, including the Old Testament indicates that the Jews have been rebelling against God. Making Ba'alim, whoring after Canaanite gods, etc. etc. David rebelled. Isn't it felt that God dispersed and exiled the Jews as punishment for not upholding the Covenant? Weren't prophets constantly rebuking the Hebrews for the sinful ways?Christians have the right as do any other religionists to believe that their religion represents The Truth. Those Jews who did not reject Jesus or his message, as far as I can understand it, became Chrisitans, who later were conquered by the Muslims and mainly converted to Islam. I remember reading something that claimed (around twenty years ago) that if all the Jews who had converted to other religions had not done so there would now be around 50 million Jews. I guess most Jews over time have left the flock. Generally throughout most of their histories Islam and Christianity have both tolerated or in some times and places, even elevated and favored Judaism, yet Jews wanted to cease being Jews and they did. Now pseudo scientific racialism makes that problematical. In my way of thinking Jews actually have a specialness - special responsibilities to in a sense "be a light" that is to uphold justice and equality and brotherhood. Mainly Jews have been rebelling against this role and it's a shame.
Regarding my renouncing my so-called "right to return."
Anonymous said...
"What do they teach you there at Yeshiva University?"One thing- not to be so humiliated of our Jewishness as to denounce it completely. You go way beyond Israel bashing in this one friend. Did I catch some Holocaust justification in there? Correct me if I'm wrong.
8:41 PM
Eugene Weixel said...
Yelling "anti semitism", like "waving the flag" is the refuge of a scoundrel.I do not and never would "justify" killing or forcibly deporting whole populations to conditions that cannot support life as humans concieve of it, be that the slave labor camps run by the nazis, where many people died of hunger, typhus and other diseases and where an unkown number of people of various ethnicities were flat out murdered,or the maxi concentration camps which Jews have turned Gaza and the towns of the West Bank into.What I will say about "The Holocaust" is I am quite sure it did not occur in the way I was taught that it occured. I've written some about it and I am not going to repost all of that here.You can look it up.
3:56 PM
Anonymous said...
Well you're not in such great company boychik. Have you been to Auschwitz? I have. I picked bones out of a lake with a basin of ashes. That doesn't prove anything, but if you want to deny the systematic murder of Jews during WW2, then that's your problem. You'll die an angry man, what can I say. Secondly, please do notify me when the first Palestinian dies of Typhus or starvation all the more so being gassed or executed unjustifiably (key word). They might be hungry in Gaza, but it's a far cry -a far cry- from the brutality of the holocaust. I can't possibly sway you. There is no point. You are depraved beyond reach, seriously. I can't come to your site anymore. I don't know why I ever did. You know, I am considered left wing and you make me look like Kahana, who I condemn. You hate Jews- that's clear. I just can't jive with that. You're beyond the pale.
6:29 PM
Eugene Weixel said...
Dear Bob and stevierae-All this reminds me of an interesting anecdote about Meir Kahane. His political party was in the process of being banned from the Israeli parliament on the grounds that it is racist, which nominally and supposedly a political party may not be in the Jewish only state of Israhell. (Chuckle, it's true, it's the law there).Kahane retorted that he is no racist but that those who believe that the Arab people will ever accept Isitreal are racists, because that expectation showed a total lack of respect for the Arabs. He went on to say that were he an Arab he would be a rejectionist. He would not accept the notion of a Jewish State in the midst of the Arab world. He said that he respected the Arabs as human beings and as worthy opponents.He said that the Zionist "peaceniks" do not respect the Arabs and are the racists in fact.
8:04 PM
Eugene Weixel said...
Mr. Anonymous-Clearly when you cut off employment, trade, travel,deprive the government of the tools to enforce the rule of law, even bar receipt of charity from abroad, you are intent upon either killing or driving away the population. To me that's nazi.That happens to be what you are doing to the Palestinians.
8:17 PM
Muslims and Me.
MHoward said... Can't help but notice, you describeyourself of "Jewish origin". Yetin your blog, you identifiy yourself as a Jew? Why? The way I see it, you don't mind, describeing yourself as a "Jew", if it gives you some notority in your blog. Yet in actuality, your not really Jewish. To you beingof Jewish origin is an accident. ONly to be used if it gives you somekind of political advantage in your writeing. The only question is, why do you keep describeing yourself as Jewish? I already know the answer to the question. Which is basicly that it is selfserveing to you. It's just that i'd find it amusing to hear your justification.
3:46 PM
Eugene Weixel said...
When I say I am of Jewish origin I am saying that I do not follow the Jewish religion though my ancestors did.When I say that I am a Jew I am saying that I will not run from that fact- a person born of Jewish ancestry will always be a Jew in the eyes of many others, for the good or the bad, with or without converting to another religion. To tell a David Duke, for example, that I am not Jewish would be to have folded, to have cut and run in my way of thinking.When I had these discussions with the Muslim students in my classroom I used both words and explained why I did. Thank you for giving me this opportunity for clarifying this.
7:56 PM
"Black Anti Semitism" and Anti Semitism in general.
At 5:50 PM,
BobGriffin said…
I myself have run across some Anti-Semitism in a part of the black community in south Florida, and would not be overly surprised to see it elsewhere. I am a goyische Christian, and for a little while was attending a black church near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I quit attending after hearing one man in the Sunday School class expounding on how the Jews had been rebelling against God for several hundred years before the time of Jesus, and not hearing anyone correct him. (I had earlier left a white Presbyterian Church because of an expression of anti-Arab prejudice)So, why would there be Anti-Semitism in the black community? I can come up with several reasons which make sense, and which fit similar racial prejudice in the white community.1) When European Jews started arriving in the US in the late 19th century, they were competing with other communities for economic opportunities. This is not unusual; every immigrant community MUST do this.2) Most Anti-Semitic whites are also Anti-Black, but blacks in America are and have been faced with more prejudice and fewer opportunities than Jews, even Yiddish-speaking Jews.I compare both the Irish Anti-Negro riots of the 1860s, the Anti-Korean prejudice in the Los Angeles black community, and the anti-Latino prejudice in so many working-class white communities.Moreover,Any identifiable racial or ethnic community which dominates its neighborhood(s) thereby generates prejudice against itself from other inhabitants who are not part of that community. The attitudes and actions of members of that community can either ameliorate or exacerbate that prejudice. In my own family, I have witnessed this in regards to a local ethno-centric Armenian community. In another case, the ethno-centric attitudes of members of the southern California Chaldean community led to an anti-Chaldean prejudice on the part of a young Southern Californian.We need to act as neighbors to each other, despite racial, religious, or ethnic differences. When we don't do so, nourishing either envy or disdain, we create fertile ground for racism.-----------I want to thank you for being there, for posting what you do, and for linking with other pro-Jewish anti-Zionist Jews. I have a left-wing Syrian-American friend, a member of the Syrian Orthodox Church, who in his anger over the treatment of the Palestinians and over the pro-Israel domination of American foreign policy, risks being drawn in by right-wing anti-Semites. Your posts and links have given me something to hand back to him, as you and he generally have similar political and ethical viewpoints. I detest left-wing anti-Semitism just as much as I detest right-wing anti-Semitism, but I have little common ground to use when combatting right-wing anti-Semitism. Your blog and links help a great deal in combatting left-wing anti-Semitism.Again, thanks for your care and your work.Be Well,Bob Griffin
At 8:46 PM,
Eugene Weixel said…
I think The Bible, including the Old Testament indicates that the Jews have been rebelling against God. Making Ba'alim, whoring after Canaanite gods, etc. etc. David rebelled. Isn't it felt that God dispersed and exiled the Jews as punishment for not upholding the Covenant? Weren't prophets constantly rebuking the Hebrews for the sinful ways?Christians have the right as do any other religionists to believe that their religion represents The Truth. Those Jews who did not reject Jesus or his message, as far as I can understand it, became Chrisitans, who later were conquered by the Muslims and mainly converted to Islam. I remember reading something that claimed (around twenty years ago) that if all the Jews who had converted to other religions had not done so there would now be around 50 million Jews. I guess most Jews over time have left the flock. Generally throughout most of their histories Islam and Christianity have both tolerated or in some times and places, even elevated and favored Judaism, yet Jews wanted to cease being Jews and they did. Now pseudo scientific racialism makes that problematical. In my way of thinking Jews actually have a specialness - special responsibilities to in a sense "be a light" that is to uphold justice and equality and brotherhood. Mainly Jews have been rebelling against this role and it's a shame.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
More about my "right to return" point and counterpoint.
ABOUT MY RIGHT TO RETURN - Why I have no "Right to return" to The Jewish State, and do not want it.
The above link is to an article I wrote in December 2005. I place it up top of the blog from time to time because I'm very proud to have openly and publicly renounced any so called "right to return" to "Israel" and because it helps people who visit this blog understand just who I am and what this blog and I stand for. I just got a pretty angry response to it and I don't want that to be buried in the interior of this blog where no one will see it, so I am going to put it here and reply to it as well. The commenter's words will be in black, mine will be in dark red.
Anonymous said...
You suck. You should be ashamed, but you're not, so I'll glide past that.
This guy makes the claim that he's an attorney. How eloquent! I always wondered just who or what is being put down by the term "you suck." Who in this world does not suck? Who has never sucked? There are things I've done in my lifetime that I am not proud of and even am ashamed of. Renouncing my "right of return" to "Israel" is not one of those things.
I hope all the Palestinian sympathisers and pushers of the Paletinian conspiracy against the Jews are pleased to find a Jew so removed from and ignorant of his own heritage and religion that he wouldn't mind trampling and spitting upon his own history and suffering of his people that they find it fit to call him a 'mensch.'
Actually I was surprised by the number of replies to the original post and their intensity. I was getting sometimes a thousand hits a day back then, now I get around 150 or so. Would that there were a powerful Palestinian conspiracy against the Jews. They'd be back in possession of their land if there were. Now talk about conspiracy - what there is is a very strong one, a Jewish one in fact, against the Palestinians.
Finally! A jew with his head screwed on right! Right? Wrong! Firstly- if it doesn't matter that Jews once lived there at some point in history, why should it matter any more that Arabs lived there MORE recently in history? Your argument is not consistent.
I'm going to spot you the ridiculous notion that you and I are more purely the direct unblemished ancestors of the people of "The Holy Land" of the times of those alleged womanizing cads about town, David and Solomon, who if they lived at all and in the lifestyle they are said to have lived, are the ancestors of damned nearly all of us, probably in duplicate , and I include Congolese and Swedes here. Of course it matters that Arabs were living in Palestine and were deliberately displaced and shoved aside by people whose connection to the place I will grant you only for argument sake, a connection of people who had not been present on that land for 2,000 years, no longer spoke Aramaic (as ethnic minorities who are Christian in Syria and Iraq still do) and who had been land owners, prime ministers, advisors to kings and popes, bankers to nations, publishers of books and periodicals, soldiers, citizens of other places. This 2000 year old connection would not bring with it any right to destroy, disperse, shove aside or murder whoever was there 2000 years later even if again for sake of argument they did not constitute a nation but were "merely" dispersed and isolated tribes. The right of persecuted people to seek asylum does not bring with it the right to displace other people and usurp their land.
Well, that might be obvious to me as a Jewish lawyer critiquing the works of a Jewish cab driver. Bravo.
After I demolish you in this debate, if you feel you need a para legal to research the lawsuit you are going to bring against the school that gave you your degree just drop another comment here and for the right price we'll make it happen.
Furthermore, you ignore the Jews who DID speak Arabic (Aramaic)
Well, you don't claim a degree in history or linguistics do you? Aramaic is not Arabic, Arabic is not Aramaic. What do they teach you there at Yeshiva University?
and were scattered through Pan-Arabia- Babylon, Perssia, Egypt. We've certainly had our share of oustings from the holy land. Moreover, those very Jews who were kicked out of Israel by the romans,
That's bulloney. By the time of the Romans and Jesus, the vast majority of practitioners of the Mosaic faith were not residents of Palestine. They and their ancestors had voluntarily emigrated. But here we are again, your degree is in law and not history. "The Jewish Background - The New Testament dates the birth of Jesus from the reign of Herod (Matthew ... About seven hundred thousand Jews lived in Palestine, one million in Egypt, ...http://www.paulonpaul.org/booth/jewish_background.htm "
were then kicked BACK in by the Syrians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Perssians, et al. All the while, those countries refused to re-absorb the Arabs who had migrated into the holy land and were living as isolated tribes throughout.
The Mizrahi Jews were not kicked out of Iraq certainly , and certainly they were not kicked into "Israel." Most Mizrahi Jews will tell that their communities were zionist, and that they had aspired to go to Israel and were not refugees.
"Any analogy between Palestinian refugees and Jewish immigrants from Arab lands is folly in historical and political terms" says professor Yehouda Shenhav of Tel Aviv University. He goes on to say "
An intensive campaign to secure official political and legal recognition of Jews from Arab lands as refugees has been going on for the past three years. This campaign has tried to create an analogy between Palestinian refugees and Mizrahi Jews, whose origins are in Middle Eastern countries - depicting both groups as victims of the 1948 War of Independence. The campaign's proponents hope their efforts will prevent conferral of what is called a "right of return" on Palestinians, and reduce the size of the compensation Israel is liable to be asked to pay in exchange for Palestinian property appropriated by the state guardian of "lost" assets.
The idea of drawing this analogy constitutes a mistaken reading of history, imprudent politics, and moral injustice."
Iraqi Jews, which perhaps you didn't mention on purpose were stampeded out of Iraq by a true and real Zionist conspiracy (you see in politics and war folks often do work in tandem. When they do so that's a conspiracy.) Iraq even tried to bar Jews from leaving the country.The Jews of Iraq
THE FORGOTTEN REFUGEES: the causes of the post-1948 Jewish Exodus ...
LASTLY- who decides who has the right of return?
You say you are a lawyer, although you have no courage to reveal your identity, (something I'm proud to say I do here and everywhere) for God's sake! International law decides!
Amnesty International's position on forcible exile and the right to return
"Among the key human rights principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the right to return. Article 13 of the UDHR states: ''Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.''4. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the treaty which gives legal force to many of the rights proclaimed in the UDHR, codifies the right to return, stating in Article 12.4: ''No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.''
For instance, who decides who can enter the US? That would be the US government.
Actually the United States Government is under certain treaty obligations with Mexico which it honors in the manner it habitually honors treaties with American Indian tribes, by not honoring them at all. Treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo ARTICLE VIII
Mexicans now established in territories previously belonging to Mexico, and which remain for the future within the limits of the United States, as defined by the present treaty, shall be free to continue where they now reside, or to remove at any time to the Mexican Republic, retaining the property which they possess in the said territories, or disposing thereof, and removing the proceeds wherever they please, without their being subjected, on this account, to any contribution, tax, or charge whatever.
Those who shall prefer to remain in the said territories may either retain the title and rights of Mexican citizens, or acquire those of citizens of the United States. But they shall be under the obligation to make their election within one year from the date of the exchange of ratifications of this treaty; and those who shall remain in the said territories after the expiration of that year, without having declared their intention to retain the character of Mexicans, shall be considered to have elected to become citizens of the United States.
In the said territories, property of every kind, now belonging to Mexicans not established there, shall be inviolably respected. The present owners, the heirs of these, and all Mexicans who may hereafter acquire said property by contract, shall enjoy with respect to it guarantees equally ample as if the same belonged to citizens of the United States.
You see Yeshiva Bucha, it's the law, stupid.
After 1948- ie after the Arabs committed one of their chief and many historical blunders in rejecting the partition plan- Israel had every right to determine its own immigration laws, after being frustrated for so long by the british costing the Jewish nation more lives than the number of "Palestinians" could ever count among its ranks. Israel decide who can come and go into its borders. For instance, the PA has said that Jews would not enjoy any right of return into the West bank and Gaza after their achieve statehood. "Return" to what, the land you've stolen? Actually you are a liar or an ignorant fool. Here is what the Palestinian charter says about it:
Adopted by the Palestine National Council, July 1-17, 1968:
"Article 6: The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians"
I already dealt with your shameful unlawful rejection of the right of return under international law. There is much juicier stuff you've given me and I want to get to it.
Not just that, no Jew could ever live there at all. Nice.
You need to read something before you come to me with your gibberish. See Above.
Not that any sane Jew would choose to live in an Arab 3rd world country over his own gorgeous Israel. And that is what this about: money. The Jews made the desert bloom and all of a sudden,neighboring Arabs want a piece of it. Norman Finkelstein demolished this bunkum long ago. That people like you still quote Joan Peters and her discredited fraud of a book From Time Immemorial without attribution says something I think about you, her and the argument. Did you really think you could slip that one by me?
And they got it , for a while. But then in 2000, Jews starting tightening its borders and hiring guest workers from the Philippines to do manual labor.
So now it's not the Palestinians any more and their labor but it's the Filipinos who "make the desert bloom" which you'd be interested in knowing was so much hokum. You're stealing Palestinian water and you haven't the strength OR COURAGE to cultivate your own land or get your hands dirty and hard. You are NOT REDEEMERS OF ANY LAND.
Now we have the (waning) second intifada, which is slowly becoming the third, which will morph into the fourth, until the end of time. It aint going to stop. Arabs always hated Jews- they butchered us at the turn of the last century, they murdered us in riots in 1939 and they have killed us, New Yorkers on vacation too, while we eat Pizza in "Big Apple Pizza" on Ben Yehudah Street in Jerusalem.
They won't get me on Ben Yehuda Street buddy because I'm not going anywhere near there. I'm more concerned with my own government infuriating millions of people against my country, its people and against Jews too and concerned that as the neo cons said, they may feel that the last "Pearl Harbor" we got in downtown Manhattan did not turn the trick of making Americans sufficiently gung ho for war. In fact over half of New Yorkers think it's likely the government itself attacked the World Trade Center. Not exactly the outcome the neocons would have dreamed of. (No one official has ever explained 7 World Trade Center very well either)
You would like that shop- it's covered with NY License plates. That's the theme. And if you eat Pizza there, Arabs might kill you for your sins. Or if you dance at a hall in Tel Aviv (a city with exclusively Jewish origins) you will be killed as an occupier.
You're never going to catch me there until any Palestinian can return to his home or his father's home or his grandfather's home.
An occupier of your own city- that you bargained for, in a land your brothers agreed to share, a place we fled to and were forced to flee from, a place where we have learned to fight rather than die, a place where Jews can be free from oppression.
Israhell is probably the least safe place on earth to be a Jew in. Isn't that ironic? And Jews are supposed to be so smart...
Even your NY schools had Jewish quotas until recently so don't get so comfy there in Jew York, hymie town,
It's not all that comfortable in New York for working people. It's being eaten alive and poor and working people are being pushed out by real estate speculators, not the least of whom are not only Jews but Israeli emigres.
where Jews can be killed in Crown Heights and their murderers walk free (although it's better now).
I took care of the Crown Heights malarkey in this article. If you have the guts read it.
WISE UP FAT GUY- you're priming youself as victim of the next holocaust. You don't think German Jews thought they were really "Germans"?
In Mein Kampf Hitler almost never mentions Jews without also mentioning Communism. He even wrote about a so called "mass extermination" of non Jews at the hands of Jewish Communists. Now you may actually be in accord with Adolf on this one. I'm not. Fact is it is unfortunate that the largely Jewish led revolutionary uprisings in post WWI Germany and Hungary failed. When they did the momentum went the other way, way the other way. That truly was a tragedy. But Hitler tried to work with the Zionists and in fact for some time they were the only legal political movement in Germany outside the Aryan Nazi Party. (to my way of thinking they were the Jewish nazi party, dude.) Of course it was in exploration of that affinity that Eichmann went to Jerusalem.
Oh they did. And they found ou the hard way that they were not. Just like you will find out you're not really American. A Jew is a Jew no matter what hat he wears. For your own sake, wise up brother.
While I'm no flag waiver and not jingo bozo I do know for example that Israel committed a crime against the USS Liberty, whichwas a ship in international waters. Jews don't help them(our) selves by defending that horrible massacre of American service members. Where do you stand on that one? I'm with the Americans who were attacked by Israel on the high seas and I don't care if the politicians here are too scared of the zionist political money/media juggernaut/steamroller to tell the truth even up to today. They aren't worth a rat's patootie anyhow.
Bernard Marx And the Holocaust Agnostic Revisited
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Muslims and me.
Over the past several years my life has intersected with various segments of the Muslim community here in New York City.
Around eleven years ago, I took a job in one of New York City's training schools for aspiring taxi drivers. As people may be aware most of them were and still are from Muslim countries. I think I did very well, I think I helped my students not only take the test but also I tried very hard to get them ready for the realities of the work itself, and the snares that were waiting for them. On the face of it I was well liked, and I was told that several of my students had been advised by friends who had gone before to insist that I be their intructor.
At different times the fact that I am Jewish, (or of Jewish descent) would come up and this would generate lively discussion. Of course, I was the intructor and they were students who might have thought that my good will was a prerequisite for their getting along in their new setting. That confusion was partially cleared up for me the few times I met up with some of my then former students as they were working in the business later. They were uniformly friendly towards me and some of them thanked me for the hard work I had done to get them ready.
Later on at Emergency Children's Services I made a friendship with a co worker, an African American of the Muslim faith. We got along famously well and looked forward to being paired up to go to the field together. This was a clearly equal relationship and so it could be assessed as an honest to goodness friendship.
Now that I am back driving a taxi I have found employement at a nearby to my home taxi garage whose managers (I don't know who the owners are) are Muslims who are from South Asia. We don't chat much, when I'm at the garage they are busy. Most of my fellow drivers out of the gargage are French speaking Africans of the Muslim faith and there is a small prayer room or masjid on the premises.
I'm new there, and so I do not expect the royal treatment. They are not going to give me any new car to drive until they feel confident after my not having destroyed any of their old ones. That's the business and that's how it works. I must say though that they have been helpful to me, even helping me to figure out how to turn on the "off duty light" and print out my meter totals. The boss always smiles and says "hello" to me and they've sent me out to work every day I've showed up seeking it.
I know that Muslims have reason to be quite angry at Jews. What I can say is that in my experience it hasn't been made personal.
NYC Administration For Children's Services Must Be Stopped.
That's the name of my new web log. It is devoted exclusively to issues of Child Protective Services (ACS) in New York City. If you are interested in helping to do something to correct the illegalities and indecencies of Administration For Children's Services I've posted about in this web log, please visit this new site. I will be postering and publicizing this new site locally on the streets of New York.
Check out this new web site here.
Check out this new web site here.
Friday, July 07, 2006
Am I bitter?
I like to look over the blogs that link to this one and I just about always set up a link in return as a courtesy, regardless what I think of that blog. So, imagine my surprise when I saw myself being described as "an embittered former Communist" who puts out an excellent "no bullsh!t" blog. Well, It is a compliment and it comes from someone who is an interesting writer named An Seanchai, out of Dublin, Ireland.
Anyhow, if I come across embittered I'm disappointed. Angry? Yes. Embittered? No. Angry at Communism? No. I do think that the activists in this country who still work in the name of communism more or less are clueless and I do think that by and large the organizations they function in are compromised in lots of ways, not the least being the infiltration of government and other hostile forces and the naivete of most of the members of these groups, which comes from the fact that Americans have been deprived of the ability to think critically, and also comes from the fact that middle class and well to do revolutionaries, no matter how well meaning they are, and they are well meaning, (and for that I love them all,) do not grasp the reality of the lives of those they hope to mobilize. Case in point: I think if you read their publications you will see more about "Gay marriage" than about "the need to campaign for more places to live that are affordable" or "the need for a higher minimum wage."
And not to sound too tired and repetitive or self promoting but I know that in the United States, and in New York City in particular Child Protective Services is a large and ever looming lawless and scary presence that wreaks havoc and even gets away with murder. Now, a capitalist government entity that does this ought to be of at least passing interest to communists, progressives, revolutionaries and socialists, unless I am living on another planet. It enters the homes of poor and working people at will, demands they take drug tests, awakens and terrifies their children at all sorts of ungodly hours for all sorts of reasons and non reasons, and in the ultimate - something that is happening around a thousand times a month here in New York City, they take children, mainly non white children and immigrant children, out of the homes and arms of their mothers and fathers, not infrequently placing them in real and serious risk that they did not face previously.
So if I seem bitter it's because I am a lonely "voice in the wilderness" about this matter. I hope to change all that.
????????????????????????????
Here is an excerpt from a very interesting article by Simon Jones entitled "Triumph of The Will: Jewish Cultural Hegemony">
For the past century, Zionism has been instrumental in shaping world politics - from tipping the balance in WWI, through ensuring the success of the Bolshevik revolution, the Western alliance with the Soviet Union in WWII, the growing alienation and humiliation of the Islamic world, the hotting up of the Cold War and gradual undermining the SU, right up to the still mysterious collapse of the WTC, and the subsequent devastation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Such zeal, such fanaticism demands one's awe, if not respect.
How can such a small group gain such immense power? It's almost enough to make one believe that the Jews must indeed be the chosen people. The rest of the world - Christians, Muslims, Hindus, etc - outnumber them by almost a factor of 1000, yet seem to be dancing to their tune.
The roots of this astounding state of affairs lies in the Jewish cultural hegemony which triumphed in the 20th century both in the West and in the Soviet Union as a result of the broad acceptance of the ideals of secular Jewish culture. (1) This cultural hegemony is an essential element in the present US-Zionist project. A recent survey showed that 85% of American Jews support Israel in the ongoing conflict (only 1% percent support the Palestinians), allowing the Zionists to rely on them even if they don't like what the Zionists are up to... click here to read on
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
This Blog is about many things, but what I can tell you about that is unique and that New Yorkers Need to Know About is ACS
ABOUT MY RIGHT TO RETURN - Why I have no "Right to return" to The Jewish State, and do not want it.
WHERE IS THE REAL ANTI WAR MOVEMENT? Good Question. Considering that the majority is against the war in Iraq why can't we stop it?
DEBATE ABOUT WHAT THE HOLOCAUST IS OR WAS This actually didn't get people as mad as I had expected it would...
HUGO CHAVEZ, JEWISH KIDS AND LOCKING UP GOOD PARENTS IN NEW YORK I don't imagine the NYPD cops and ACS would really deal with Jewish families the way they do Black and Hispanic ones...
STARASIA'S NIGHTMARE A reality piece about a kid who meets her "protectors."
ENOUGH WITH THE BROKEN WINDOWS ALREADY Parents in NYC get locked up for stupid reasons that would not wash in the suburbs.
ON BEING A COP FOR THE SHELTER SYSTEM This is real, folks, and real stupid too.I say investigate schools of social work!
A COLD NIGHT IN HELL I spent a few nights like this working at Emergency Children's Services....
ACS is getting away with some really bad things
Coming soon: More about the problems that Mssrs Adegbola and Mattingly and ACS employment law attorney Michele Weinstat as well have with reading comprehension, and why I say that Child Protective Manager Ramon Vargas of Emergency Children's Services is a menace.
New York's Administration For Children's Services is once again being "reformed." If you want to believe that please let me show you this bridge I have for sale...
Memo to New York's Administration for Children's Services: The ...
Administration for Children's Services has a beef with me. They wanted me to violate constitutional law and common decency. As I've told honcho John Mattingly, and as he does not want to know, ACS conducts activities beyond the law and rule of law (investigation without report, investigation of reporters) and common decency . "Our office is called “Emergency Children’s Services” I think for a reason. We are conceived as an arm of Child Protection that intervenes in emergencies. It is a matter of decency if not of law that people are not to be disturbed in their abodes by the government at unreasonable times or for reasons that lack reason."
One cold February morning around four years ago I removed four little children from their homes at around four in the morning without court order and for no reason a normal person would accept, other than the old cliché “I was only following orders.” I wrote a memo to my director who thanked me for bringing the matter to his attention. A few months after this the manager retired, some say under duress. This action was ordered and insisted upon after my co worker and I told the supervisor from the home itself that there was no safety emergency in this home – and I promised myself that I would never again be the instrument of such thoughtless brutality.
I'm almost 60 years old and it is too late for me to change much. I have these hang ups about decency, respect for others and lawfulness of government actions that help make me into a misfit where I work, but it is too late for me to find another job. Maybe it is not too late for the place where I work to change.
Thank you,
Eugene Weixel "
Well, in fact it is not too late for me to find another job. I'm taxi driving at night, I like it and I'm taking care of my family. I never have to suffer another person's stupidity for long and it's never about anything important anyway. Some things are more important than money.
Administration For Children's Services is ugly. - They are getting away with horrible racist drug experiments that they perpetrated against helpless minority group foster children.
Sex Offenders and Foster Children Do Mix... ACS located foster children too damned close to a building filled with male sex offenders. I explain the problem with this. This was a Rudolph Giuliani production, by the way....
A thuggish subculture> Administration for Children's Services Once you understand the low cultural level at high ranks you can understand a lot of things they do...
Administration for Children's Services has a beef with me. Mainly the ACS Commissioner John Mattingly wants to do is strike a "three monkeys" ("Me? I know nothing") pose and a big mouth whistle blower becomes a problem in that case.
A Letter to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now About The Unethical AIDS drug experiments ... I would have hoped for more from Amy, but New York foster children have no constituency and can't force their issue even onto her.
ex Commissioner William Bell and the bunchofmillion$ paperwork messup. It seems that New York's ACS accidentally tossed some many many millions of Federal dollars into the garbage can.
AIDS foster child Drug Tests. A scandal - Pro and Con. ("Con" as in "con job")
Betsy Gotbaum Is a Pretty High Ranking Person In New York City but all she does for the foster chioldren is call her friends at the Daily News. Big Deal. I could do that too.
ACS/Vera Institute begin third year of AIDS foster childrendrug experiment cover up ... You'd expect something different from The Vera Institute.
To John Mattingly, The Vera Institute and Mayor Michael Bloomberg ...
Me, the Inspector General, the Whitick case, Ramon Vargas and ... More proof I guess, as if I needed it, that no one who's anyone gives a flying hoot really about the children of New York's poor, working class and minority families.
I ask The New York Times How AIDS drug torture investigation is going... Not that it matters, a few hundred foster kids more or less...
Purges and Gag Orders--Administration for Children's Services shuts up its staff...
Not so terrible for workers to surf net says judge (unless the worker is Eugene Weixel?)
Special Victims, Nixzmary, Instant Responses, Emergency Children's ... Remeber that whole big deal about Nixzmary Brown? I do.
Links regarding child fatalities in NYC over the years.
How Nicholas Scopetta and Giuliani reformed Administration for Services... First they announced new higher standards for promoting supervisors, then they purged the old ones and put in new ones who don't meet the new high standards.
Would You Believe It? No Reply! Why I do not trust the Inspector General... They're really not interested when a rank and file whistle blower tries to tell them something...
Dear Fellow ACS workers who are members of local 371: This got me in a mess of trouble.
Cops, kids and ragamuffins wise and foolish Many cops don't know their pants seats from their sleeves when it comes to dealing with child abuse cases.
AHRP Testimony: Protections for Foster Children Enrolled in drug trials ... AHRP got the Feds to say that ACS violated the regulations, which counts for something I suppose, but nothing was actually done about it.
Coming soon: More about the problems that Mssrs Adegbola and Mattingly and ACS employment law attorney Michele Weinstat as well have with reading comprehension, and why I say that Child Protective Manager Ramon Vargas of Emergency Children's Services is a menace.
New York's Administration for Children's Services is getting away with some really bad things
June 20, 2006- This Post will for the foreseeable future always be on top of this web log, no matter what else I might post and no matter what else might happen. The Administration for Children's Services is trying to get away with having forced orphans and foster children to take experimental medicines that were known to be highly toxic. It was exposed over a year ago and ACS finessed with the promise of an investigation and the press went to work confusing the public over the issue of the unethical drug tests versus "what is HIV/AIDS" which are two separate and distinct matter that might appear to be linked but in reality are not. This post carries items I've put on this weblog since last December regarding this scandal and some other outrageous practices at Administration for Children's Services.I am starting an effort to publicize this issue and this web log in New York city, which is central to the scandal and central to forcing a true accounting and reckoning for what was done to hundreds of helpless orphans and foster children, how many, still not know.Year Old News That Seems To Have Faded Away - The Ugliness that is ACS
The scandal is about one of the most egregious crimes committed against minority people in this country and the SOB's are so far getting away with covering it up, blurring it over and getting away possibly with murder.
New York City's Administration for Children's Services and its predecessor agencies subjected foster children, almost entirely minority orphans as young as two months old, to Phase I and Phase II drug experiments. An intrepid journalist named Liam Scheff broke the story open and it became big news. Among other things the cover uppers have managed to conflate the heart of the scandal with what is called "AIDS denialism," or the denial by many including doctors and scientists of several of the givens most people believe about AIDS, including ideas that>
1- There is no disease called AIDS, that it's a new name for old illnesses.
2- There is a disease called AIDS but it is not caused by HIV viruses.
3- There are no HIV viruses.
4- HIV virus has never been isolated. (A belief held by the inventor of the test used to "find" HIV).
5- There is no AIDS epidemic in Africa, it's a new name for old problems mainly of poverty and underdevelopment.
6- AIDS drugs are more deadly than any disease they puportedly treat.
These are all controversial opinions. They also conflict to some extent. Personally I am not in a position nor qualified to make judgements about these things. It is known though that many AIDS treatments are very toxic, and it is also known that AIDS or HIV among infants cannot be determined by any measure acceptable to anyone, before a child is eighteen months old. This drug trial is not the only one conducted mainly on African and Arrican descended people to be under a cloud.
The problem with these AIDS drug tests is that
1- They were done on involuntary child and infant subjects who had no parental or guardian oversight to protect their individual interests. Children old enough to know they were suffering and who refused to take the experimental drugs were force fed though surgically inserted feeding tubes.
2- They were done on many children under eighteen months of age. They were highly experimental at the least and not demonstrably done in the health interests of the subject children.
3- It was reported that at least two children died directly through the toxic effects of the experimental medicines. These reports were never satisfactorily investigated.
4- New York City's government has no certainty as of this day as to how many children or what children were subjected to the experiments. It is difficult then to imagine how the outcomes of the experiments could be known, accepted and deemed beneficial to the subject children.
5- New York City has assigned The Vera Institute for Justice to "investigate" the matter. This assignment was announced over a year ago. Vera is a major contractor to Administration for Children's Services, that is it receives money from the agency whose work it is purportedly investigating, not just expenses of the investigation but other money through other contracts as well.
6- Even if Vera Instutute were not so compromised, it is not an agency that conducts investigations of crimes or investigations that call for the use of forensic sciemce and forensic medicine. New York City has a Department of Investigations. The drug trials are admittedly flawed and were found to compromise acceptable standards of ethics. With records of subject children "popping up" in basements and uncounted all these months, it is certainly the purview of a more qualified investigatory body with powers to recommend punishments where appropriate and powers to subpeaona witnesses and force testimony from past and present City employees.
7- The "investigation" is dragging on with no "conclusion" in sight, and in fact with noises that there is not going to be a conclusion at all.
Now, whether or not the AIDS denialists are right or wrong about HIV and AIDS, several of them had come forward to make the scandal known. For that they deserve thanks. Guinea Pig Kids
A Letter to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now About The Unethical AIDS ...
I ask The New York Times How AIDS drug torture investigation is coming along...
To John Mattingly, The Vera Institute and Mayor Michael Bloomberg ...
New Yorkers Are Going To Know About The Racist AIDS Drug Experiments...
AIDS Drug Experiment Scandal Update
AIDS foster child Drug Tests. A scandal - Pro and Con.
Excerpts from Liam Scheff's "The House That Aids Built"
How Many NYC Foster Kids were force fed these chemicals? Truth is they don't know....
These are the figures of the US Department of Health and Human Services...
Put into question the common assertion that it's the AIDS drugs that account for the drop in the number of children diagnosed with AIDS. These figures show fewer and fewer "at risk" women giving birth.
Sex Offenders and Foster Children Do Mix...
They do in New York City.
ACS/Vera Institute begin third year of AIDS foster children scandal coverup ...
Dear Fellow ACS workers whoare members of local 371: I gave this out in front of ACS HQ. It got me into a jam.
Baby Snatching Fools- Giuliani time returns.
Me to Bloomberg and the media:Where were you for all the other Nixzmary Browns?
Special Victims, Nixzmary, Instant Responses, Emergency Children's Services- The New York Post is Lying When They Say Giuliani Fixed CPS in New York
ACS worker to The Commissioner - My Boss Says Some Things to The New York Daily News - And I React. John Mattingly talks off the top of his head to the press. Not smart.
The Nixzmary Brown Case - Daily News gets its hands on the case record, more.... I hope the workers who got blamed for Nixzmary sue everyone in sight. "Leaked" my Aunt Fannie!
Nixzmary Brown, 7 Is Dead, Known to Child Welfare Authorities
FACT SHEET ON ACS ABUSE OF BLACK & LATINO CHILDREN AS GUINEA PIGS FOR TESTING OF AIDS DRUGS
January 2004: Investigative Reporter Liam Scheff publishes The House that AIDS Built. The article documents ACSTs (NYC Administration for Childrens Services) use of Black and Latino children in foster care asguinea pigs for trials of toxic AIDS drugs. Drugs were given to children as young as 1 month old. The article cites deaths of at least four of thechildren at the Incarnation Childrenâ?Ts Center (ICC), the main site of the testing, which is run by the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. The trials went on from the mid-1980s through the beginning of this century.
March 2004: Vera Sharav of the Alliance for Human Research Protection contacts several Federal agencies to get them to investigate and put a halt to ACSs violations of Federal regulations for the protection of children as research subjects. March-June, 2004: ACS, in a series of private correspondences in response to inquiries from City Councilmen deBlasio and Perkins, assures them that ACS had done nothing wrong. No further inquiry was made or public hearingdemanded by the Councilmen.
December 2004: The December 12th Movement (D12) and Millions for Reparations (MFR) became aware of the issue through a newly-released BBC documentary, Guinea Pig Kids, which documented the abuses of ICC. The twoorganizations viewed health care in the Black and Latino communities in general and the human rights violations suffered by the children at ICC, in particular, as an important part of the demand for Reparations. They immediately launched a multi-faceted campaign to inform the community ofthis issue. It included: weekly demonstrations in front of ICC; presentationof a letter to the Commissioner of ACS requesting answers to specific questions on what had occurred at ICC; a letter writing campaign to local,state and federal elected officials demanding that they hold public hearingson these drug trials.
January 27, 2005: A representative of D12 met with Councilman deBlasio,Chair of the General Welfare Committee, in an unsuccessful attempt to have him hold a public hearing on the ICC. February 8, 2005: In response to D12's December 30th letter to ACS Commissioner Mattingly, ACS called for a meeting. It was held between representatives of D12, MFR, the Center for Law and Social Justice, Young, Gifted and Black and a high level delegation of ACS and the NYC Law Department.
The community representatives left dissatisfied. Many of their questions went unanswered, including: i) what were the causes of death of children in the clinical trials; and ii) what were the long-term side effects of the drugs used. ACS told them that 76 children had been involved in clinical trials and promised to get back to them after they had compiled the information which had been originally requested in December, 2004.April 22, 2005: ACS, which had still not gotten back to D12 and MFR,announced that it had hired an outside research facility to investigate them. It also announced that 465 children, not the 76 they told us in February, had been "guinea pigs." The actual number may grow.
April 24, 2005: D12 and MFR hold press conference on steps of City Hall,with Councilmen Barron and Perkins, as well as Vera Sharav. Councilman deBlasio, through Councilman Barron, announces that he has finally decided to hold a hearing. MFR, D12 and Parents in Action call for a city-wide demonstration at ICC on April 30th to Shut It Down May 5, 2005 - NYC Council holds Public Hearing on Administration for Children's Services and the testing of experimental AIDS drugs on allegedly HIV positive children in foster care.
MILLIONS FOR REPARATIONS: 456 Nostrand Avenue; Brooklyn, NY 11216; (718) 398-1766 (tel); (718) 623-1855 (fax);
See also: -
http://groups.msn.com/GlaxoWellcomeKleineexposed
TOPICS: Health/MedicineKEYWORDS: AIDS; AIDSHIV; AIDSMEDS; CHILDABUSE; CHILDREN; DRUGSCOMPANIES; GLAXCO; GLAXCOKLEINE; GLAXCOWELCOM; HIV; HIVAIDS; WELLCOM; ACS; Giuliani; John Mattingly;Nicholas Scopetta; Michael Bloomberg; Racism; Government Press; Prostitute Press; Zionist Press., Vera Institute For Justice.
This news is more than a year old. I have some questions. Do You? What has happened since May 5, 2005 when the City Council had its public hearing. Is anyone in jail for this attrocity? Mattingly told the community activists a year ago that the VERA Institute would be investigating this matter. Now, VERA has a wholesome sounding name and is known as good guys who help underdog ex cons get on their feet. Nice PR job Mattingly>http://aolsearch.aol.com/aol/search?invocationType=topsearchbox.search&query=Vera+ACS+contractweb results
enhanced by page 1 of 250
Vera Institute of Justice Support for Government Officials MOBI...
Soon thereafter, ACS signed a three-year $1.2 million contract with the Vera Institute to provide research, technical assistance, and evaluation services in ...http://www.vera.org/support/support_95.asp
Exploring the Intersections Between Child Welfare and Juvenile ...
Vera Institute of Justice. 15. ACS and the Juvenile Justice System. Lizzie, Jean, and Diana, all 15, were living in an ACS contract diagnostic center. ...http://www.vera.org/publication_pdf/pathways.pdf
MMRTFA
In the six months between July and December 2002, ACS contract preventive service ... by the Vera Institute and ACS to resolve issues in juvenile justice, ...
http://aolsearch.aol.com/aol/search?invocationType=topsearchbox.search&query=ACS+Vera+%22children%27s+center%22
Vera has operations right inside ACS offices.
So I have a few questions. Is VERA an objective outside agency or the ACS House Detective? Just where are we in this investigation?
HERE IS WHAT I PUBLISHED ON THIS WEBLOG REGARDING THIS SITUATION IN THE EARLY DAYS OF IT'S EXISTENCE>
Saturday, December 24, 2005
AHRP Testimony: Protections for Foster Children Enrolled in Clinical Trials
READ THE WHOLE REPORT ON THIS TESTIMONY!
Unethical Experimentation on Foster ChildrenTimeline and Links - Unethical Experimentation on Foster ChildrenLetters Challenge NY Times Report re: AIDS drug/ vaccine experiments on foster childrenOHRP preliminary findings fault Columbia University Medical CenterCongressional Hearings - Testimony by Roberta Harris, Deputy Secretary, Wisconsin Dept. of Health / Family ServicesCongressional Hearings - AHRP statement and recommendations for the recorA National Scandal: AIDS Drug Experiments on Foster Care Children - AHRP Letter of Complaint:
Keywords: Giuliani, Nicholas Scopetta, William Bell, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, ACS Commissioner John Mattingly, Child Abuse, AIDS, HIV, Tyranny, Government amuck, corporative media, government stenographers, zionist press,Administration for Children's Services,New York Times, BBC, Vera Institute for Justice, sham investigation, You can't fight city hall.
Unauthorized use of a computer?
I get a chuckle sometimes when I look through the logs and see visitors from my old employer The City of New York.
Domain Name
nyc.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address
167.153.10.226 ? (The City of New York)
ISP
The City of New York
Domain Name
nyc.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address
167.153.10.226 ? (The City of New York)
ISP
The City of New York
Location
Continent
:
North America
Country
:
United States (Facts)
State
:
New York
City
:
Brooklyn
Lat/Long
:
40.6944, -73.9906 (Map)
Distance
:
5 miles (local visitor)
Language
English (United States)en-us
Operating System
Microsoft Win2000
Browser
Internet Explorer 6.0Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Javascript
version 1.3
Monitor
Resolution
:
1024 x 768
Color Depth
:
32 bits
Time of Visit
Jul 5 2006 2:31:47 pm
Last Page View
Jul 5 2006 2:31:47 pm
Sometimes I run their IP address to see where else they've been.
The above visitor came by my site in looking up the name "Michele Weinstat." (Sorry Micehle for the typo of "Michelle").
Just to let you know when you come back, that I know where else you've been. Have a nice day.
Domain Name
nyc.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address
167.153.10.226 ? (The City of New York)
ISP
The City of New York
Domain Name
nyc.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address
167.153.10.226 ? (The City of New York)
ISP
The City of New York
Location
Continent
:
North America
Country
:
United States (Facts)
State
:
New York
City
:
Brooklyn
Lat/Long
:
40.6944, -73.9906 (Map)
Distance
:
5 miles (local visitor)
Language
English (United States)en-us
Operating System
Microsoft Win2000
Browser
Internet Explorer 6.0Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Javascript
version 1.3
Monitor
Resolution
:
1024 x 768
Color Depth
:
32 bits
Time of Visit
Jul 5 2006 2:31:47 pm
Last Page View
Jul 5 2006 2:31:47 pm
Sometimes I run their IP address to see where else they've been.
The above visitor came by my site in looking up the name "Michele Weinstat." (Sorry Micehle for the typo of "Michelle").
Just to let you know when you come back, that I know where else you've been. Have a nice day.
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Memo to New York's Administration for Children's Services: The Constitution is the law of this land, and that includes the 4th Amendment.
The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the land,
even in New York City and it even applies to the Administration for
Children's Services.The Fourth Amendment then, is the supreme law of
the land. It even applies to Child Protective supervisors like Maradesa
"Sunday" Adegbola, caseworkers like me and ACS attorneys like Michelle
Weinstat, even if she has trouble understanding its meaning.
I was written up and put under disciplinary investigation and action by
Maradesa "Sunday" Adegbola, a supervisor who supposedly holds a Masters
Degree from a respectable university in this country, and the charges
were signed off on by John Mattingly, the commissioner of ACS and signed
by Michelle Weinstat, a person who it is said has passed the Bar Exam,
holds an advanced degree in the law and is trusted to understand the
same, for refusing to violate the 4th amendment rights of a black family
in New York City.
This young couple had a one year old child and had just had a newborn
baby. The baby was born with congenital birth defects. The couple took
the newborn infant Christmas shopping with them, leaving the one year old with neighbors, and with the mother carrying the infant in a store bought
baby carrier on her back, and when they got home the infant was apparently
dead. The doctor who signed the infant's death certificate did not report
any child abuse or neglect.
The Special Victims Squad detectives did not take the case, it was given to
ordinary precinct detectives who spent several hours with the parents without
calling a report to the State Central Register (SCR). In my interview with the
detective he said he had no grounds for criminal charges nor any allegation
of child abuse. I was told by a police sergeant that her effort to report
the child's death to the State Central Register was rebuffed. Still, because
the police called ECS (this is not the procedure for reporting child abuse,
a call to the State Central Register is the procedure. The SCR had just
rejected a report.) I was sent with a supervisor, Hani Malek, to go to these parent's home at 2:20 in the morning (remember the police and doctors had
spent hours with this couple), interview the mother and father and wake up the neighboring family who had been tending to the one year old, (and to their
own young children) and awaken the one year old to "check to see that
he is okay." The report that the SCR did finally concoct was one of suspected neglect, that the infant was carried and transported in an inappropriate carrier, which is something no police officer or doctror had said to anyone.(By the way, because this report was concocted and "accepted" this family, in mourning, was subjected to a sixty day long investigation of a known fake and phony "allegation."
We got to the apartment building and rang to doorbell. The father came
downstairs to the lobby and told us that he did not want us to come into
his apartment and that he would not help us to awaken his neighbors, but
that he would be happy to cooperate with the investigation if we were to
return at eight in the morning. Malek and I left the building and called
Adegbola from the car. Adegbola was furious and demanded that I summon
police to force entry. I am charged with refusal of Adegobla's orders,
while Malek has since been promoted. Adegbola sent another team to the
apartment house, they rang every doorbell in the lobby at around three
in the morning to gain entry and banged repeatedly on the family's apartment
door, getting no response. They called Adegbola for his instructions but he
did not direct them to get police this time, but directed them instead to
leave the apartment building.
I pointed out to Commissioner Mattingly in an email that the SCR had initially
refused to accept a report and that they only took the report at the same time that
I was leaving the ECS building, after falsifying the words of the
reporting police officer, something which happens more than a few times
according to my experience with with the New York State Central Register. I questioned and still question the legality of ACS conducting an investigation without a valid report from the SCR.
Anyway, here is the Fourth Amendment to the United States constitution,
a law that theoretically applies to black people in Harlem as much as
it might apply to Jewish people in any Hasidic enclave in Brooklyn.
Administration for Children's Services has a beef with me.
I wish to point out that a Federal Court has ruled that caseworkers like
myself are not personally shielded from respecting laws that are apparent
and clear or that should be clear to a college graduate and that in such case
an "I was following orders" or "it was agency procedure" defense would not
be of avail. Some laws are presumably known to holders of advanced college
and university degrees from american schools, laws like the first ten
amendments to the United States Constitution, which I studied in the sixth
grade, the seventh grade, the eighth grade and through High School as
did Michelle Weinstat and John Mattingly.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure
in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches
and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon
probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly
describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I believe that ECS violates this Constitutional law so habitually,
and with such abandon that a caseworker can be subjected to disciplinary
action for (allegedly) not violating it, as indeed I was.
Here is commentary on the amendment based upon a lawsuit that New
York City lost over ten years previous:
Social Services Investigations: The Removal of Children From The Home
Copyright 2001 by The
Rutherford Institute, P. O. Box 7482, Charlottesville,
VA 22906-7482
Reference No.: E-09Updated: 2/ 23/ 01
Parents in the United States are subject to increasing government
involvement in their lives as they seek to properly raise their
children. Administrative agencies of the government, which are created
by statute to carry out broad directives such as maintaining the health
and welfare of minor children, are given more and more discretion in
performing those duties.
Each state, and the federal government, has a social service agency.
These agencies have various titles such as Department of Social Services,
or Department of Health and Human Services. Regardless of title, each
has a division concerned with the protection and welfare of minor children.
These are the agencies given the charge of investigating reports of
child abuse.
All fifty states have laws which require an individual or organization
to report actual or suspected abuse.1 Those who
may be compelled to make such reports include schools, churches, day care facilities, and civic clubs
such as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.2 With these
reporting requirements in force, the child protective services division
of a state's social service agency is continually investigating citizens
who have been reported under these laws.
1. When may a social worker or law enforcement officer enter a private home
to investigate child abuse 'Social service agencies often receive anonymous
reports of actual or suspected child abuse. These reports are based on another citizen's observations,
suspicions, and possibly the desire to avoid liability
for failing to report abuse. Social service agencies then investigate such
reports.
The Fourth Amendment guarantees citizens the right to be secure in their
persons, houses, papers, and effect from unreasonable searches and seizures,
and states that this right shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall
issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and
particularly describing the place to be searched, the persons or things to be seized. 3
The courts are divided as to whether probable cause or a warrant are
required before a social worker is justified in demanding entry into a
residence. It is well established that physical entry into the home is
the chief evil against which the . Fourth Amendment is directed.
4 At the very
core [of the Fourth Amendment and the personal rights it secures]
stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be
free from unreasonable governmental intrusion. 5 The
Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches establishes
the cardinal principle that searches conducted outside the judicial
process, without prior approval by judge or magistrate, are per se
unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment--subject only to a few
specifically established and well-delineated exceptions. 6
Case law has established that the state satisfies the reasonableness
component for a full-scale search through a showing of probable cause.
Probable cause exists when sufficient information warrants the belief
that a crime has been committed, and evidence of that crime will be found in the place to be searched. 7 Upon
a showing of probable cause, a neutral magistrate may issue a warrant. Warrantless searches are only permissible under the well defined exceptions of
consent to the search,8 exigent circumstances, 9 and administrative searches. 10 As one case notes,
these principles should generally be applied to child abuse cases, as well
as all other forms of warrantless invasions of a home:
It is true that the [prior] caselaw applying these principles specifically
in the context of a warrantless invasion of a home based on an alleged need
to prevent child abuse is relatively sparse. In this context, [defendants]
suggest that they were entitled to assume until told otherwise by the courts
that child abuse cases would not be controlled by the well established legal principles developed in the context of residential intrusions motivated
by less pressing concerns. We reject this suggestion. As we have noted . . .
a prior case on all fours is not necessary; a
public official may not manufacture immunity by inventing exceptions to
well settled doctrines for which the case law provides no support. It
evidences no lack of concern for the victims of child abuse or lack of
respect for the problems associated with its prevention to observe that
child abuse is not sui generis in this context. The Fourth Amendment
caselaw has been developed in a myriad of situations involving very
serious threats to individuals and society, and we find no suggestion
there that the governing principles should vary depending on the
court's assessment of the gravity of the societal risk involved. 11
Consent to Search
Obviously, if a parent or other legal guardian gives consent to search
the residence or child, no probable cause or warrant is necessary.
Consent must be judged by the totality of circumstances and lack of
knowledge of the right to refuse a search cannot, standing alone, invalidate consent. 12 Consent must be
freely given, and is ineffective if it is extracted under threat of
force or under claim of government authority. 13 In these contexts,
it is not unusual for a parent to engage in a 'submission to a claim of
lawful authority.' 14
This occurs when a parent demands a warrant and is informed
that the state officials need no warrant and demand entry, despite the
parent's repeated protests and demands for a warrant. Under these cases,
no reasonable law enforcement officer could believe that the parent had
given legally effective consent to the entry or following search. 15 Without legally
effective consent the search is unlawful unless it falls within some other exception, such as exigent circumstances.
Exigent Circumstances
Courts use the term "exigent circumstances" as a shorthand for a group of
related exceptions to the probable cause and search warrant requirements.
These exceptions are established in a line of cases wherein emergency
intrusions are undertaken in order to protect or preserve life or to
avoid serious bodily injury. "The right of the police to enter and
investigate in an emergency . . . is inherent in the very nature of
their duties as peace officers, and derives from the common law. "16 However,
in order to qualify for the "exigent circumstances" exception to
probable cause there must be a showing of true necessity-- that is,
an imminent and substantial threat to life, health, or property. "17 To put it
another way, state actors making the search must have reason to believe
that life or limb is in immediate jeopardy and that the intrusion is
reasonably necessary to alleviate the threat. 18
Administrative Searches
When a case involves some type of official intrusion into one's home,
the Fourth Amendment's protections are called into play. An individual
need not be suspected of criminal behavior to invoke the protection of
the Fourth Amendment. 19 Prior to 1967,
the Supreme Court held that administrative searches were not covered by the protections of the Fourth Amendment. 20 In 1967, the
Supreme Court decided Camara v. Municipal Court, 21 wherein Camara
refused to permit San Francisco Public Health inspectors to make a routine
annual inspection of his home for possible violations of the city housing
code. Criminal charges were made against Camara for refusing to allow an
inspection. The Supreme Court, noting that the only way a resident could
challenge the inspection was by refusing entry and risking criminal
conviction, determined that the practical effect of this system was to
leave the occupants subject to the unbridled discretion of the inspector.
22 This unbridled
discretion was found unconstitutional, and thus, the Court held that a warrant should be sought in such a context. 23
The Supreme Court later sanctioned a warrantless caseworker's visit to the
home of a recipient of Aid to Families with Dependent Child, even though it characterized the visit as a "search" 24 The Court found
that the search was nevertheless reasonable and did not violate the Fourth
Amendment since:
1) the family received written notice specifying the date of the
visit was received several days in advance;2) the means of
conducting the visit emphasized privacy and minimized any burden upon a
homeowner's right against unreasonable intrusion;3) the visit was not
shown to have as its purpose the obtaining of information as to criminal
activity and was not equitable with a criminal investigation, and was not
in aid of any criminal proceeding; 4) sources of information other than a
home visit would not always assure verification of a dependent child's
actual residence or of actual physical presence in the home or of impending
medical needs; 5) the use of search warrant procedures would have seriously objectionable features in the welfare context; and 6) the recipient's
refusal to permit the visit was not a criminal act, the only consequence
of such refusal being that the payment of benefits would cease. 25
Anyway supposedly the entire
ACS staff including Adegbola, Weinstat and even Mattingly received
training on Agency time and premises in just this matter. Law rolls
off some people like water off a duck's back.
Post Script-- click here.In light of the comment I received I am linking to a store that sells the type of baby carrier that this mother used to carry her child who died. You will see these are appropriate baby carriers. And so I ask what the reason would be to interview this mother at 2:30 AM
even in New York City and it even applies to the Administration for
Children's Services.The Fourth Amendment then, is the supreme law of
the land. It even applies to Child Protective supervisors like Maradesa
"Sunday" Adegbola, caseworkers like me and ACS attorneys like Michelle
Weinstat, even if she has trouble understanding its meaning.
I was written up and put under disciplinary investigation and action by
Maradesa "Sunday" Adegbola, a supervisor who supposedly holds a Masters
Degree from a respectable university in this country, and the charges
were signed off on by John Mattingly, the commissioner of ACS and signed
by Michelle Weinstat, a person who it is said has passed the Bar Exam,
holds an advanced degree in the law and is trusted to understand the
same, for refusing to violate the 4th amendment rights of a black family
in New York City.
This young couple had a one year old child and had just had a newborn
baby. The baby was born with congenital birth defects. The couple took
the newborn infant Christmas shopping with them, leaving the one year old with neighbors, and with the mother carrying the infant in a store bought
baby carrier on her back, and when they got home the infant was apparently
dead. The doctor who signed the infant's death certificate did not report
any child abuse or neglect.
The Special Victims Squad detectives did not take the case, it was given to
ordinary precinct detectives who spent several hours with the parents without
calling a report to the State Central Register (SCR). In my interview with the
detective he said he had no grounds for criminal charges nor any allegation
of child abuse. I was told by a police sergeant that her effort to report
the child's death to the State Central Register was rebuffed. Still, because
the police called ECS (this is not the procedure for reporting child abuse,
a call to the State Central Register is the procedure. The SCR had just
rejected a report.) I was sent with a supervisor, Hani Malek, to go to these parent's home at 2:20 in the morning (remember the police and doctors had
spent hours with this couple), interview the mother and father and wake up the neighboring family who had been tending to the one year old, (and to their
own young children) and awaken the one year old to "check to see that
he is okay." The report that the SCR did finally concoct was one of suspected neglect, that the infant was carried and transported in an inappropriate carrier, which is something no police officer or doctror had said to anyone.(By the way, because this report was concocted and "accepted" this family, in mourning, was subjected to a sixty day long investigation of a known fake and phony "allegation."
We got to the apartment building and rang to doorbell. The father came
downstairs to the lobby and told us that he did not want us to come into
his apartment and that he would not help us to awaken his neighbors, but
that he would be happy to cooperate with the investigation if we were to
return at eight in the morning. Malek and I left the building and called
Adegbola from the car. Adegbola was furious and demanded that I summon
police to force entry. I am charged with refusal of Adegobla's orders,
while Malek has since been promoted. Adegbola sent another team to the
apartment house, they rang every doorbell in the lobby at around three
in the morning to gain entry and banged repeatedly on the family's apartment
door, getting no response. They called Adegbola for his instructions but he
did not direct them to get police this time, but directed them instead to
leave the apartment building.
I pointed out to Commissioner Mattingly in an email that the SCR had initially
refused to accept a report and that they only took the report at the same time that
I was leaving the ECS building, after falsifying the words of the
reporting police officer, something which happens more than a few times
according to my experience with with the New York State Central Register. I questioned and still question the legality of ACS conducting an investigation without a valid report from the SCR.
Anyway, here is the Fourth Amendment to the United States constitution,
a law that theoretically applies to black people in Harlem as much as
it might apply to Jewish people in any Hasidic enclave in Brooklyn.
Administration for Children's Services has a beef with me.
I wish to point out that a Federal Court has ruled that caseworkers like
myself are not personally shielded from respecting laws that are apparent
and clear or that should be clear to a college graduate and that in such case
an "I was following orders" or "it was agency procedure" defense would not
be of avail. Some laws are presumably known to holders of advanced college
and university degrees from american schools, laws like the first ten
amendments to the United States Constitution, which I studied in the sixth
grade, the seventh grade, the eighth grade and through High School as
did Michelle Weinstat and John Mattingly.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure
in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches
and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon
probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly
describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I believe that ECS violates this Constitutional law so habitually,
and with such abandon that a caseworker can be subjected to disciplinary
action for (allegedly) not violating it, as indeed I was.
Here is commentary on the amendment based upon a lawsuit that New
York City lost over ten years previous:
Social Services Investigations: The Removal of Children From The Home
Copyright 2001 by The
Rutherford Institute, P. O. Box 7482, Charlottesville,
VA 22906-7482
Reference No.: E-09Updated: 2/ 23/ 01
Parents in the United States are subject to increasing government
involvement in their lives as they seek to properly raise their
children. Administrative agencies of the government, which are created
by statute to carry out broad directives such as maintaining the health
and welfare of minor children, are given more and more discretion in
performing those duties.
Each state, and the federal government, has a social service agency.
These agencies have various titles such as Department of Social Services,
or Department of Health and Human Services. Regardless of title, each
has a division concerned with the protection and welfare of minor children.
These are the agencies given the charge of investigating reports of
child abuse.
All fifty states have laws which require an individual or organization
to report actual or suspected abuse.1 Those who
may be compelled to make such reports include schools, churches, day care facilities, and civic clubs
such as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.2 With these
reporting requirements in force, the child protective services division
of a state's social service agency is continually investigating citizens
who have been reported under these laws.
1. When may a social worker or law enforcement officer enter a private home
to investigate child abuse 'Social service agencies often receive anonymous
reports of actual or suspected child abuse. These reports are based on another citizen's observations,
suspicions, and possibly the desire to avoid liability
for failing to report abuse. Social service agencies then investigate such
reports.
The Fourth Amendment guarantees citizens the right to be secure in their
persons, houses, papers, and effect from unreasonable searches and seizures,
and states that this right shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall
issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and
particularly describing the place to be searched, the persons or things to be seized. 3
The courts are divided as to whether probable cause or a warrant are
required before a social worker is justified in demanding entry into a
residence. It is well established that physical entry into the home is
the chief evil against which the . Fourth Amendment is directed.
4 At the very
core [of the Fourth Amendment and the personal rights it secures]
stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be
free from unreasonable governmental intrusion. 5 The
Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches establishes
the cardinal principle that searches conducted outside the judicial
process, without prior approval by judge or magistrate, are per se
unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment--subject only to a few
specifically established and well-delineated exceptions. 6
Case law has established that the state satisfies the reasonableness
component for a full-scale search through a showing of probable cause.
Probable cause exists when sufficient information warrants the belief
that a crime has been committed, and evidence of that crime will be found in the place to be searched. 7 Upon
a showing of probable cause, a neutral magistrate may issue a warrant. Warrantless searches are only permissible under the well defined exceptions of
consent to the search,
these principles should generally be applied to child abuse cases, as well
as all other forms of warrantless invasions of a home:
It is true that the [prior] caselaw applying these principles specifically
in the context of a warrantless invasion of a home based on an alleged need
to prevent child abuse is relatively sparse. In this context, [defendants]
suggest that they were entitled to assume until told otherwise by the courts
that child abuse cases would not be controlled by the well established legal principles developed in the context of residential intrusions motivated
by less pressing concerns. We reject this suggestion. As we have noted . . .
a prior case on all fours is not necessary; a
public official may not manufacture immunity by inventing exceptions to
well settled doctrines for which the case law provides no support. It
evidences no lack of concern for the victims of child abuse or lack of
respect for the problems associated with its prevention to observe that
child abuse is not sui generis in this context. The Fourth Amendment
caselaw has been developed in a myriad of situations involving very
serious threats to individuals and society, and we find no suggestion
there that the governing principles should vary depending on the
court's assessment of the gravity of the societal risk involved. 11
Consent to Search
Obviously, if a parent or other legal guardian gives consent to search
the residence or child, no probable cause or warrant is necessary.
Consent must be judged by the totality of circumstances and lack of
knowledge of the right to refuse a search cannot, standing alone, invalidate consent. 12 Consent must be
freely given, and is ineffective if it is extracted under threat of
force or under claim of government authority. 13 In these contexts,
it is not unusual for a parent to engage in a 'submission to a claim of
lawful authority.' 14
This occurs when a parent demands a warrant and is informed
that the state officials need no warrant and demand entry, despite the
parent's repeated protests and demands for a warrant. Under these cases,
no reasonable law enforcement officer could believe that the parent had
given legally effective consent to the entry or following search. 15 Without legally
effective consent the search is unlawful unless it falls within some other exception, such as exigent circumstances.
Exigent Circumstances
Courts use the term "exigent circumstances" as a shorthand for a group of
related exceptions to the probable cause and search warrant requirements.
These exceptions are established in a line of cases wherein emergency
intrusions are undertaken in order to protect or preserve life or to
avoid serious bodily injury. "The right of the police to enter and
investigate in an emergency . . . is inherent in the very nature of
their duties as peace officers, and derives from the common law. "16 However,
in order to qualify for the "exigent circumstances" exception to
probable cause there must be a showing of true necessity-- that is,
an imminent and substantial threat to life, health, or property. "17 To put it
another way, state actors making the search must have reason to believe
that life or limb is in immediate jeopardy and that the intrusion is
reasonably necessary to alleviate the threat. 18
Administrative Searches
When a case involves some type of official intrusion into one's home,
the Fourth Amendment's protections are called into play. An individual
need not be suspected of criminal behavior to invoke the protection of
the Fourth Amendment. 19 Prior to 1967,
the Supreme Court held that administrative searches were not covered by the protections of the Fourth Amendment. 20 In 1967, the
Supreme Court decided Camara v. Municipal Court, 21 wherein Camara
refused to permit San Francisco Public Health inspectors to make a routine
annual inspection of his home for possible violations of the city housing
code. Criminal charges were made against Camara for refusing to allow an
inspection. The Supreme Court, noting that the only way a resident could
challenge the inspection was by refusing entry and risking criminal
conviction, determined that the practical effect of this system was to
leave the occupants subject to the unbridled discretion of the inspector.
22 This unbridled
discretion was found unconstitutional, and thus, the Court held that a warrant should be sought in such a context. 23
The Supreme Court later sanctioned a warrantless caseworker's visit to the
home of a recipient of Aid to Families with Dependent Child, even though it characterized the visit as a "search" 24 The Court found
that the search was nevertheless reasonable and did not violate the Fourth
Amendment since:
1) the family received written notice specifying the date of the
visit was received several days in advance;2) the means of
conducting the visit emphasized privacy and minimized any burden upon a
homeowner's right against unreasonable intrusion;3) the visit was not
shown to have as its purpose the obtaining of information as to criminal
activity and was not equitable with a criminal investigation, and was not
in aid of any criminal proceeding; 4) sources of information other than a
home visit would not always assure verification of a dependent child's
actual residence or of actual physical presence in the home or of impending
medical needs; 5) the use of search warrant procedures would have seriously objectionable features in the welfare context; and 6) the recipient's
refusal to permit the visit was not a criminal act, the only consequence
of such refusal being that the payment of benefits would cease. 25
Anyway supposedly the entire
ACS staff including Adegbola, Weinstat and even Mattingly received
training on Agency time and premises in just this matter. Law rolls
off some people like water off a duck's back.
Post Script-- click here.In light of the comment I received I am linking to a store that sells the type of baby carrier that this mother used to carry her child who died. You will see these are appropriate baby carriers. And so I ask what the reason would be to interview this mother at 2:30 AM
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