Howard Epstein – POLITICALLY INCORRECT
POLITICALLY INCORRECT – OBAMA’S POT CALLS THE ISRAELI KETTLE BLACK
According to the Times of Israel for April 14, 2016, the Obama administration’s State Department, in its annual report on human rights, has criticised Israel over:-
- “excessive use of force” in the Palestinian territories, and “arbitrary arrest and associated torture and abuse, often with impunity,” by the IDF, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.
- numerous reports of the ISF (Israel security forces) killing Palestinians during riots, demonstrations, at checkpoints, and during routine operations; in some cases they did not pose a threat to life.
Driven to checking out the report for myself I found something so striking that I felt I had to share it with you. Remarkable for its absence from the State Department’s global Review of Human Rights Abuses is any reference to the USA. It is like the States do not exist for the State Department. The whole world is generously given the oxygen of publicity to assist them in connection with their human rights record, but not the Good Ole US of A.
Diffident about my own web-surfing ability, I checked the website[1] again. Searching under “U” and then, out of desperation, under “A”, I found:-
| Uganda Ukraine United Arab EmiratesUnited KingdomUruguay Uzbekistan |
Afghanistan Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Antigua and Barbuda |
Argentina Armenia Aruba Australia Austria Azerbaijan |
Having drawn an incontrovertible Yank blank, I looked under “Regions” and saw: Western Hemisphere, which contains everything you would expect: Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada – other than and apart from America. And for confirmation that it was not a glitch, the map of that region on the webpage has a big, grey, empty where the USA was to be seen last time I checked. (Alaska is greyed out, too.) For the purposes of this report, which somewhat arrogantly tells the whole world how to behave, of self-examination, there is nothing. Nothing, nada, zero, effes! Can you believe it? This is tantamount to: “I can criticise you but I am certainly not going to indulge in any self-criticism.” Would you not wander off in disgust. Would I not lose my locus standi on human rights, my right to speak on these matters, if I put myself above criticism? Is the USA different from everyone else on earth? Perhaps the Americans think that they have no human rights abuse record. Perhaps the Americans have something to hide.
I’LL SAY THEY HAVE!
If only because I just shouted the loudest, it falls to me to provide some balance, particularly because the Obama administration seems increasingly unbalanced. (Possibly, the increasing threats from North Korean and Iranian rockets that make the USA’s deals with them look so amateurish (not to say possibly suicidal), they have lost all sense of … well, sense. So, thrashing around to project pretensions of American greatness, they castigate the world, but put themselves beyond comparative study.) Whatever the reason for this egregious and self-serving American omission, I am pleased to do something about it.
HOWARD EPSTEIN’S (FIRST) ANNUAL REPORT ON HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES CARRIED OUT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AKA THE LAND OF THE FREE
It is still[2] open season on the blacks, so far as the police departments of the USA are concerned. Consider:-
- Ferguson, Missouri (Source: New York Times)
- On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed, by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in Ferguson, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. The shooting prompted protests that roiled the area for weeks.
- On November 24, 2014, the St. Louis County prosecutor announced that a grand jury decided not to indict Mr. Wilson. The announcement set off another wave of protests.
- In March, 2015, the Justice Department called on Ferguson to overhaul its criminal justice system, declaring that the city had engaged in constitutional violations.
- Ferguson, Missouri (Source: New York Times)
On August 9, 2015, demonstrations commemorating the killing of Michael Brown one year before ended Sunday night when an 18-year-old was shot and critically wounded by the police.
- North Charleston, South Carolina
- April 4, 2015 Walter Scottwas shot, following a daytime traffic stop for a non-functioning brake light.
- Scott, a black man, was fatally shot by Michael Slager, a white North Charleston police officer.
- Slager was charged with murder after a video surfaced contradicting his police report.
- The video showed him shooting the unarmed Scott eight times from behind while Scott was fleeing.
- Chicago, Illinois (Source: CNN)
- On April 12, 2016, hundreds of Chicago residents took to the streets on the night of one day after authorities identified the person shot and killed by police as 16-year-old Pierre Loury.
- In a blistering report, a mayoral task force said police “have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color” and have alienated blacks and Hispanics with the use of force and a longstanding code of silence.
You appreciate, of course, that the above represent but a tiny and merely-recent sample of the grotesque treatment of blacks by police in America the Beautiful. I shall spare you further detail, as (with many reports of blacks being shot in the back) it is too painful to contemplate. Here is a sweeper:-
- The USA, 2015 (Source: The Guardian)
- Young black men were nine times [that is 9 times] more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers in 2015, according to the findings of a Guardian study that recorded a final tally of 1,134 deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers this year.
- There were 1,134 deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers in 2015. [Worthy of repetition, was it not?]
- Despite making up only 2% of the total US population, African American males between the ages of 15 and 34 comprised more than 15% of all deaths logged this year by an on-going investigation into the use of deadly force by police.
- The rate of police-involved deaths of African Americans aged 15 to 34 was five times (that is 5 times) higher than for white men of the same age.
- Paired with official government mortality data, this new finding indicates that about one in every 65 deaths of a young African American man in the US is a killing by police. [That’s right, by the police. You know, the “Protect and Serve” boys.]
Now, he of the fair bouffant, whose tonsorial splendour may be his greatest achievement, the unmistakeable head – sorry, Head of the State Department, Secretary of State, John Kerry, likes to tell us, when he criticises Israel, that he does so as a friend because that is what friends should do. I approach him and his State Department – and his President – with no less warmth and amity:-
Listen up guys. Your human rights record is about the worst in the world. Your police shoot to kill, as if that is the only way of preserving their own lives. (Israeli police do not do that, except in extremis.) Your police even claim self-defence when they shoot young men (disproportionately high numbers of black men) in the back. It won’t wash, John. We don’t buy it. YOU have a problem. Fix it before you tell us how to fix ours.
It is sad to reflect on how little The Great Black Hopes, Nelson Mandela and Barak Obama, achieved for their fellow persons of color. The former, almost a god in the RSA, spent three years in office before he said a word about AIDS. And when he first spoke on the subject, he was not even in the RSA. When he took office, the incidence of AIDS in the RSA was 1 per cent. Not least because he was not attuned to the problems of the ordinary black South African in the street of a shanty town, it rose to 20%.
Compare and contrast British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who made AIDS and sex education in the time of AIDS an absolute priority. I sat in a cinema with my 13 year old daughter whilst, in a screened public service film, a condom was extracted from its wrapper, inflated and extolled for its virtuous role in the battle against AIDS. I paid a very small price of a little embarrassment, whilst the UK government trenchantly took sexual mores by the collar and shook it vigorously, until everyone in the country understood the issues around AIDS. Not so in the RSA, even fifteen years later. Someone observed that Mandela spent more time with the Spice Girls than he did on AIDS.[3]
So that is how Mandela did his very own constituency, the ordinary black man, a fatal disservice.
Obama’s legacy is equally flawed. If there was one step he could have taken on becoming president to assist his constituency, it was to find a way to alter the rules of engagement for America’s law enforcement officers, such as:-
- no more shoot to kill: try everything else first; and
- that means no more bodies that have been shot in the back turning up for autopsy.
I confess, I have no idea what legal processes Obama would have needed to satisfy in order to achieve such a goal, but the world would have been consumed with mirth at whatever State, County, City or other law enforcement authority in the Land of the Free tried, given the publicity that would surely have followed, to justify shoot to kill and shoot in the back as a matter of formal policy. Perhaps, all he had to do was urge each of them to alter their rules of engagement accordingly and change. Ah “Change”. Whatever happened to that? Come to that, whatever happened to “Yes we can”?
There is no evidence that Obama even thought of it; thus he did not think of the fundamental welfare of his very own constituency. And his administration presumes to sermonise as to how we should run our affairs in this island of democracy in the ocean of autocracies (and in many cases mayhem) that stretches from Greece to Japan! Hang your heads in shame, Kerry and your State Department, and keep your thoughts to yourselves. And certainly do not (as in the first reported criticism at the head of this article) lump together: the IDF, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. We are as different from them as the sand extracted from the tunnels that snake out of Gaza are from chopped liver. That sort of co-mingling of competing groups with utterly different standards is not so much Tea Party as Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.
You worry about your social problems, John, and how to deal with them, and allow us to deal with ours. In any event, yours are so much more deeply ingrained than ours that you do not have the luxury of the time required for criticising us. Get back to the drawing board over your gun control problems – as they affect your police, for goodness sake – and Good Shabbos.
© April 2016 – Howard Epstein
[1] http://www.state.gov/misc/list/index.htm
[2] ie since there were first blacks in America to abuse, as I observe in my forthcoming book on modern America.
[3] See: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/nelson-mandelas-mixed-legacy-on-hivaids/
