Leadership

Here is Jan Brewer, governor of Arizona and the country's leading anti-immigration politician, giving a public address on television as to why people should reelect her:




Yup.

I guess her groomers/coaches tell her to never stop smiling, no matter what.

The only people who have justification to act like this are the senile and the very high.

Murder - the logical end of anti-immigrant xenophobia

Some kids not too far from here beat a forty-seven-year-old man to death, preserving it for their children via cell phone video, strictly and solely because Abelino Mazaniego, father of four, was not born in the United States. There was no provocation. There was no conflict other than the one the kids made. There was no history of bad blood. He was a stranger to them. They saw him sitting on a bench after he got off work and decided to have fun, because they learned that American lesson that immigrants from south of the border are not people - they are problems, they are criminals, they are welfare-sappers, parasites and at best, landscapers. Racist demagogue politicians and talk radio garbage love to ride that crap to power. See the "Tea Party Movement," Sheriff Joe Arpaio, or the most recent Arizona Hispanic/Latina/o racial profiling legislation for current reference points.

He's fucking dead. Some kids beat him for kicks. Now he's gone, and his family is left with no father, no husband, and no source of income. He was their sole provider.

The kids who killed him weren't even interested in robbery, as a nurse at the hospital did that:

But it apparently wasn't an attempt to get the $640 in cash that Mazaniego was carrying.

Police found the victim after the beating and took him to the hospital, where, officials say, nurse Stephan Randolph, 39, of Flemington, took the money out of the unconscious victim's wallet.

Family members noticed the missing money and told authorities, who charged Randolph with third-degree theft Monday, six days after Mazaniego died.

Pure fun, they wanted. And they got it.

The racial aspects of this are pretty interesting. At least two of the teenagers who killed him are African-American. It took prosecutors about a week to upgrade the charges against them from manslaughter to murder. If they were white, I think it would still be manslaughter, at the most. If Abelino were white, they would all be up on the highest murder charge possible. The fact that prosecutors didn't put them up on murder right away reinforces the idea that Abelino and people like him are not people. Their office had to get pressured to act.

Fuck this place.

Zionists hijacking a plane is somehow not terrorism

In yesterday's New York Times, the newspaper published an Op-Ed piece, entitled "Hijacking Their Way Out of Tyranny," heaping praise upon a group of Soviet citizens, mostly Jews, who attempted to hijack a plane and make their way to sweet Israel, where they could then join in the tyranny.

I could get into a lot of details, but I will keep it fairly short. My main point is this: if you replace "Jew" with "black" and "Soviet Union" with "United States of America" in the article, there is no way that the Times or any other mainstream paper would ever touch such a writing. Instead, we see the lionization of these beacons of freedom.

The article leaves out the part where they planned to take the plane by deadly force and had a bunch of weapons on them, as I found in December 18th, 1970's Times:

Subdue the pilot, nice. The author, and the editors at the Times, portray the attempted hijacking as not only harmless but absolutely morally right. There are no questions here; these people were deeply oppressed and had no choice but to hijack a plane at gunpoint. Beyond these barely implied exaltations of the hijacking, the Op-Ed makes no analysis of the event, focusing instead on the road to liberty and freedom the failed hijackers paved for Soviet Jews and other disgruntled anonymous citizens. I bet Palestinians wish they would at least put a couple of toll plazas on that road.

Finally, the author seems to glibly proffer the idea that the would-be hijackers were only going to take a twelve-seat plane, so what's the big deal? It seems that this isn't entirely accurate, as according to an interview with two of the then-recently freed hijackers in April 30th, 1979's Times, there were sixteen of them, not twelve:

It's not so much the devout Zionism that gets me here; it's much more the hypocrisy and inconsistency of what is terrorism and what is not. Generally, Zionists cannot be terrorists, according to the mainstream Western, and particularly American, media. They do whatever they want, with very minimal constraints. They can take over and kill a bunch of people on a ship in international waters that was to be delivering humanitarian aid to oppressed people, they can blithely kill countless innocent people (including those hot-button women and children) and they can run an apartheid-style occupation for decades. Do they get sanctions? No, they get rewarded like no other, calling anyone who acts to oppose any of this a terrorist. And here we see them still glorified for it all in the country's most revered and supposedly "liberal" newspaper.