Daily Mail: Deonne Dickerson and Michelle Gregg have been heavily criticized
Harambe was fatally shot after their four-year-old boy crawled past a railing and fell 15ft into the gorilla exhibit moat
Harambe was shot dead after dragging the boy violently around
Many have blamed the boy’s parents for 17-year-old Harambe’s death
They released a statement on Sunday saying their boy is doing ‘just fine’
Zoo director said Harambe was ‘disoriented’ and tranquilizer would have taken too long with the possibility of agitating the animal even more
Director said: ‘Looking back we would make the same decision’
He insisted barriers were secure, asking: ‘Do you know any four-year-olds? They can climb over anything’
These are the parents of the four-year-old boy whose 15-feet fall into the gorilla exhibit moat in Cincinnati Zoo resulted in the death of 17-year-old silverback gorilla, Harambe.
Seen here for the first time is mother Michelle Gregg, 32, who has four children by father Deonne Dickerson, 36, a man who, Daily Mail Online can disclose, has a lengthy criminal history.
Criminal filings against Dickerson stretch over a decade and include burglary, firearms offences, drug trafficking, criminal trespass, disorderly conduct and kidnap.
In 2006 he was sentenced to one year behind bars for a drug trafficking conviction.
But in numerous pictures posted on Dickerson’s Facebook site in recent years he appears to have turned his life around to become the proud father of four.
Indeed, the majority of his postings to the social media site are updates of his children and his working life.
In others pictures he has uploaded his friends congratulate him and Michelle on the birth of their fourth child last January.
Posted inBlacks|Comments Off on Parents-of-four whose son fell into zoo enclosure sparking killing of Harambe the gorilla as it emerges father has a lengthy criminal history – including kidnap and drug trafficking
Steve Sailer writes: Donald Trump has come to be seen by both his enemies and his supporters as the living embodiment of a potential revival of the American tradition of free speech after the Obama ice age of political correctness. Trump’s backers tend to believe they have more to gain from frank, outspoken debate (whether in pragmatic advantages or simply in entertainment value), while his opponents assume that they, personally, have more to lose from a return to a freer market for ideas.
This is one of those rare cases in politics where both sides may be right.
For example, back in March, Senator Marco Rubio warned, shortly before losing the Florida primary and dropping out of the race, that this new craze for honesty had America careening toward chaos and anarchy (not to mention poorer career prospects for establishment Republicans):
“This is what a culture and a society looks like when everybody says whatever the heck they want, when everyone just goes around saying ‘I’m just going to speak my mind,’” Rubio said at a morning press conference in Largo, Fla. “Well, there are other people that are angry, too. And if they speak out and say whatever they want, it all breaks down. It’s called chaos. It’s called anarchy. And that’s what we’re careening towards.”
Rubio had prospered under the old rules of the game that had limited the topics for Republican rhetoric to questions of who liked the corporate income tax least and loved Israel most. But in the unexpected new Trump Era when Republican voters were suddenly allowed to offer their opinions on more fundamental topics such as who should be allowed into America, Rubio withered.
Of course, Rubio didn’t stumble quite as humiliatingly as onetime front-runner Jeb Bush, whose central theme—that he loved Mexicans more than he liked Americans—had been considered electoral genius by the GOP brain trust in 2012–15. Before Trump reminded voters that your candidate really ought to at least claim to be on your side, it was thought clever for Republican candidates to offer American voters an attitude of disdain and a platform of dispossession.
“The fact that Trump is offering a less filtered version of how a typical New York City voter views the universe is probably a good thing.”
One odd thing about all this is that Trump, who prides himself on his salesmanship, had never seemed during his long celebrity career to be a likely candidate for the role of leader of the awkward squad of tellers of inconvenient truths. Even more than most salesmen, Trump has been famous over the last three decades for using generous helpings of what he calls “truthful hyperbole” to promote his offerings as the greatest things ever. (On the other hand, in contrast to the rather abstract business life of Mitt Romney, Trump’s career of building giant buildings that rappers and pro athletes want to live in is the kind of tangible accomplishment that citizens can identify with.)
Trump’s evident love of making money meant that he wasn’t seen as a threat to the established order, because our system is practiced at controlling dissent through economic squeezing.
The key month in the emergence of the Legend of Trump, however, came immediately following his June 16, 2015, announcement of his candidacy, when business behemoths like NBC, Macy’s, Univision, Carlos Slim, and the golf tours of America and Britain all threatened to break their corporate relationships with Trump for pointing out that Mexican elites are dumping their unwanted population on America.
Normally Americans meekly back down with apologies when confronted with that kind of corporate firepower. But Trump responded that he had 10 billion dollars so he could afford to tell the truth. Granted, Trump probably doesn’t have close to 10 billion dollars, but that only made his political audacity seem even more heroic. Read on.
* People like Anglin and other men with extravagant haircuts (what?) don’t really believe Trum is a fascist.
They have learned from 100 years of liberalism. They realized that the only thing required a of a political movement in the age of mass media is to be known. As long as you manage to grab attention with an air of having fun and I-don’t-give-a-fuck, you’ll do well. Being serious and thoughtful is for later. Remind you of anything?
They also photoshopped Hitler quotes onto Taylor Swift pictures until the terse letters from her lawyers.
* I’ve finally gotten around to watching The Sopranos, and Trump strikes me as likeable for many of the same reasons the TV audience finds the Tony Soprano character likable.
Gets things done.
A natural leader–assumes dominance.
Says what he thinks without fear or favor.
Treats his opponents harshly, as they (usually) deserve.
Deals with the world as it is rather than with wishful thinking.
Has an intuitive understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of others.
Anti-intellectual, cuts through intellectual bullshit and gets at the essential truth.
* Hillary? Jokes? She can only be found on the pointy end of that spear.
Let’s pull one of her previous exertions at humor out of the memory hole — the barking incident.
The thing that got me about Hillary’s canine performance is that it just couldn’t have been spontaneous — it was obviously designed as part of a joke. Her communication team must have thought it was a fine idea to have her do this thing.
Can you imagine the brainstorming that must have gone into this?
Communication Guru 1: The problem we keep running into in the focus groups is that your delivery seems too canned, Hillary.
Hillary: Canned? Canned? They just don’t know me! Everybody who knows me knows how warm and spontaneous I am! They love me to pieces for my warmth and spontaneity! Sometimes they get so overwhelmed with it they have to leave the room!
Comm Guru 2: We just have to figure out a way to let the public see what all your friends already know.
Hillary: Everybody loves my dog imitation! They can’t believe it when I do my dog imitation! You’ve all seen my dog imitation, haven’t you?
Comm Guru 1: Oh Yes of course.
Comm Guru 2: Many times. Can’t count how many. Not enough fingers and toes.
Hillary: So let’s figure out how to work it in.
Comms Gurus 1 and 2, in unison: Great idea, Hillary!
Comm Guru 1: How about making fun of the Republicans? They’re like silly demented dogs, right?
Hillary: That’s fabulous!
Comm Guru 2: Yes, Hillary, what you could do to set it up is to talk about how everytime a Republican lies, a dog barks. And then you do your silly demented dog bark.
Hillary: And that is fabulous! Perfect! This thing is on!
Comm Guru 1: It’s so inspirational to be working with you, Hillary!
Comm Guru 2:Yeah, I think I speak for both of us when I say it almost feels wrong to charge for our services!
Hillary: Almost, but not totally, am I right?
Comm Gurus 1 and 2: Oh, you’re right again, Hillary!
All: Ha,ha,ha!
Hillary: People aren’t going to stop talking about this one, I can feel it!
Comm Guru 1: It’ll never go away, I guarantee it.
Comm Guru 2: Youtube is forever.
Hillary: What I wouldn’t give to see the look on Trump’s face when he first hears it! [Hillary starts barking, doesn’t stop].
* And my belief that Trump is going to steamroll Hillary is due not to specific attacks. It is due to the Sailer strategy being valid, and Trump being far better at winning, executing and strategizing than Hillary has proven to be. Hillary is plenty smart, but so is Trump and likely more so. And what Trump has is killer instinct, competitiveness, and ability in that area. This is something common to all elite businessmen – their idea of the perfect business situation is one where they have no competition, and if that is not the lay of the land, they do their best to make it that way.
Someone like Trump is very well practiced at sizing up strengths and weaknesses of opponents, he will know his own, and he will have analyzed it before even entering the race. He will pit his strengths against her weaknesses, and do his best to make her play his game. His feeling for what people will buy, what they believe, what they think – it’s far more valuable than her knowledge of arbitrary laws and how to get your way in a courtroom. Her Secretary of Statesmanship was her opportunity to show what a diplomatic deep state genius she was. And… nothing. She’s no Bill, she doesn’t have the feel, the instinct; her hamfisted campaign attempts have been exactly that. Nothing grabs. She’s struggling to beat a geriatric communist.
One thing I’ve been pretty good at, is kind of the opposite to Steve. Things I like become popular. I early adopt some things years before they go mainstream. In the case of HBD, more than anything else I’ve been a fan of, however the full weight of the media, education system and a lot of the government has been against us. We’re going mainstream, and Trump is our avatar. The riot in the ballot booth is about to begin, and not before time.
* The Times article is well worth reading in entirety. Steve focuses on immigration, but there’s more to the “psychological reactance” (a theory that apparently has been around since 1966) driving Trump’s appeal:
Jonathan Haidt, a professor at N.Y.U., suggested to me that one way to better understand the intensity of Trump’s appeal is by looking at something called “psychological reactance.” Haidt describes reactance as
“the feeling you get when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you. So you redouble your efforts and do it even more, just to show that you don’t accept their domination. Men in particular are concerned to show that they do not accept domination.”
Haidt applies this to the 2016 election:
“Translated to the Trump phenomenon, I would say that decades of political correctness, with its focus on “straight white men” as the villains and oppressors — now extended to “straight white cis-gendered men” — has caused some degree of reactance in many and perhaps most white men.”
In both the workplace and academia, Haidt argues,
“the accusatory and vindictive approach of many social justice activists and diversity trainers may actually have increased the desire and willingness of some white men to say and do un-PC things.”
There you go. That’s it, in a nutshell. The parts in bold – my emphasis – sum up what I hear from a lot of men I know who are surprise Trump supporters. As Paddy Chayefsky put it, they’re mad as hell, and they’re not going to take this anymore. It’s not just immigration, not just BLM or silly arguments over transgender bathroom rights. It’s the demonization of them, of us, which recently has become openly celebrated in mainstream media. Just as important, it’s the sense that one can’t fight back or even argue gently, mildly and reasonably against any of the PC dogma without risking ostracization and professional and sometimes personal ruin.
The level of fury with this hatred for whites, males and heterosexuals and this enforced orthodoxy of thought has been steadily building for years. It has found a voice in Trump, for all his many faults.
That’s why he’s Teflon Trump – it almost literally doesn’t matter what he says. He’s fighting back. And it just feels so damn good to have someone on the public stage sticking a thumb in the eye of the forces of PC that he gets tremendous support regardless of what he actually stands for.
The fact that things have come to this, that so many white men feel almost compelled to support this otherwise awful man for President, is another reason to be furious. We’ve not only been demonized and silenced, now we’re pushed to support someone for President who is poorly suited to the office but who at least speaks up for us.
* They’ve spent decades trying to make Crooked Hillary look human/warm/empathetic, only to have it fall flat and fake each time. Any comedian will tell you it’s the delivery, not the material, that sells the joke. It’s also why Chris Rock’s material wouldn’t work for Jerry Seinfeld and vice-versa; their deliveries work for their stuff, not for anyone else’s (it’s also why comedians will sometimes tell stories about “giving” a joke to another comedian because it doesn’t “work” for them).
That isn’t to say that material isn’t important – it is- but if you can’t deliver a joke the material doesn’t matter.
Hillary always tries the fake humorous routine or the fake warmth routine, and it falls flatter and flatter each time. She should really just play up her dour, humorless, but serious nature – similar to Margaret Thatcher (whom Hillary is too proud and ignorant to emulate). That way, a dry riposte from Hillary would carry far more humor, because you wouldn’t see it coming. But she’s dumb, so she’ll do the fake-cackling nonsense and the fake-loving-grandma routine and no one will buy it.
That said, the comedians have been out in force attacking Trump since last summer, and it just makes him stronger. Why? Simple: every joke in the world that could be made to denigrate Trump has already been made. They aren’t fresh. So anything Hillary delivers will seem stale from the get go. That’s dangerous.
Trump also took full-frontal comedy blows already at a professional roast by Comedy Central. Way back in 2011: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1865333/. Nothing Hillary can throw at him will in anyway be as cutting or memorable as when he sat there and let professional comedy writers and comedians have a field day on him on cable TV.* Hillary will come off as a summer repeat with her jokes.
Trump, meanwhile, has the gift of freshness and great delivery. “Crooked” Hillary was fresh – as Scott Adams called it, a linguistic killshot – but Trump has the gift of great comedic delivery. That’s killer. If Ted Cruz or Rubio had called her “Crooked Hilary” or Goofy Elizabeth or Crazy Bernie, it would have sounded stilted, forced, and fake. Trump comes off humorous, and the jokes fit his delivery. He has a great stage presence.
If I were Hillary, I would avoid making jokes about Trump, because it plays into Trump’s strengths and not hers. It’d be Dukakis in the tank all over again, or Kerry on the windboard – don’t play up an image that isn’t you. That said, she seems a bad enough campaigner to fall for some Hollywood consultant’s argument that they just need to make fun of Trump more this summer, and she can use the same comedy writers that Jimmy Kimmel have – after all, he’s funny, so it must be all his material, right? **
*again, the fact that Trump did this roast in 2011 me he was thinking about seriously running for a long time and planned it out. He opened himself up for the roast specifically to gauge where the likely attacks would come from and what they would say, and to get it all out of the way. Remember: he registered “Make America Great Again” as a trademark way back in 2012. He’s playing 4th-level chess while everyone else thinks he’s too dumb to know how to open the box.
**p.s. Jimmy Kimmel isn’t funny, just putting this in context.
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on Steve Sailer: ‘The core of the Trump Phenomenon is the question of freedom of expression.’
I guess tribalism is peachy for Jews and other non-whites but it is a bad thing for goyim. Got it.
Ben Shapiro writes: “So, what about those of us who despise both the KKK and the Black Lives Matter movement? What about those of us who think that white nationalism is despicable, and that the censorious brutality of the “diversity” clique is gross? We’ve got a long road ahead of us. We’ll have to teach a new generation, from scratch, that freedom and liberty still matter, regardless of race. We’ll have to attempt to restore the notion of a social fabric, rather than the tribalism that now dominates the conversation. We’ll have to stand tall against authoritarianism from both sides.”
Fox News tweets: @benshapiro: “For Trump there’s some sort of bizarre connection between the ethnicity of the person & the ideology the person must hold.”
Posted inBen Shapiro|Comments Off on Orthodox Jew Ben Shapiro Condemns Tribalism
Know any white guys who want to restrict freedom of speech? I don’t.
The Torah has no such category as hate speech or racism or bigotry or anti-Semitism. These are all gentile terms contrary to Torah. Torah Jews don’t spend time “fighting anti-Semitism” or “fighting racism” or “fighting homophobia.”
Jewish groups welcome FB, Twitter pledge to crack down on hate speech
YouTube, Microsoft also sign code of conduct with European Commission, requiring removal of reported content within 24 hours
Jewish groups welcomed a pledge by four internet giants to crack down on online hate speech, though some questioned the firms’ commitment to act.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft on Tuesday signed a code of conduct with the European Commission that requires them to delete the majority of reported illegal hate speech within 24 hours, The Telegraph reported.
The European Jewish Congress offered an “enthusiastic welcome” to the code of conduct in a statement Tuesday, but the World Jewish Congress reacted more coolly in a statement the same day, voicing “skepticism about the commitment of these firms to effectively police their respective platforms.”
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and others “already have clear guidelines in place aimed at preventing the spread of offensive content, yet they have so far utterly failed to properly implement their own rules,” the CEO of the World Jewish Congress, Robert Singer, said in the statement.
“Tens of thousands of despicable video clips continue to be made available although their existence has been reported to YouTube and despite the fact that they are in clear violation of the platform’s own guidelines prohibiting racist hate speech. … Nonetheless, YouTube gives the impression that it has been cracking down on such content. Alas, the reality is that so far it hasn’t.”
Last week, France’s Union of Jewish Students, or UEJF, and the anti-racist organization SOS Racisme sued Twitter, YouTube and Facebook for failing to remove anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic content, Le Parisien reported.
The two groups, together with SOS Homophobie, said that on March 31 and May 10, they found 586 examples of such content. Only 4 percent of the content was deleted by Twitter, 7 percent by YouTube and 34 percent by Facebook, the groups said.
In 2013, the Paris Court of Appeals issued a landmark ruling forcing Twitter to block the hashtag #UnBonJuif — French for “a good Jew” — and to remove the thousands of associated anti-Semitic tweets that violated France’s law against hate speech.
The ruling was a turning point in the fight against online hate speech in France and beyond because it caused Twitter to abandon its policy of applying as little censorship as is permissible in the United States, where Twitter’s head office is based and where there are fewer limitations on free speech than in many countries in Europe.
YouTube has since permanently banned videos posted by Dieudonne, a French comedian with 10 convictions for inciting racial hatred against Jews.
In 2014, Facebook removed the page of the Holocaust denier Soral for “repeatedly posting things that don’t comply with the Facebook terms,” according to the company. Soral’s page had drawn many complaints in previous years.
Despite complaints of partial compliance on hate speech removal by the internet giants, European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor celebrated the accord Tuesday as “a historic agreement that could not arrive at a better time.” It is “very important” that governments and online companies “work in tandem to make the internet a safer space for all,” he said.
The president of the Conference of European Rabbis, Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, was also optimistic, saying in a statement that “internet hate leads to a culture of fear. We hope that today’s announcement will be the first step in combating that culture.”
REPORT: “The recent terror attacks have reminded us of the urgent need to address illegal online hate speech. Social media is unfortunately one of the tools that terrorist groups use to radicalize young people,” said Vera Jourova, European Commissioner in charge of Justice,Consumers and Gender Equality, at a daily press briefing of the Commission.”The Internet is a place for free speech, not hate speech. The Code of Conduct against illegal online hate speech, agreed with IT companies today, will ensure that public incitement to violence to hatred has no place online,’’ she added.
The definition of illegal online content is based on the Framework Decision on Combatting Racism and Xenophobia which criminalises the public incitement to violence or hatred directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin.
Jewish groups welcome the agreement. Daniel Schwammenthal, Director of the AJC Transatlantic Institute, declared : “For too long, social media companies claimed their ‘community standards’ are sufficient to deal with the haters on their platforms. For too long, users flagging posts such as ‘Kill all Jews’ were frequently told though such calls to murder didn’t violate these same ‘community standards.’ We hope this agreement will help ensure social media platforms are no longer abused by those who threaten people’s lives and the very values our free societies are built on.’’“We trust the European Commission and EU Member States will monitor closely whether this agreement is properly implemented and take the appropriate measures should the code of conduct prove to be ineffective,” he added.“This is a historic agreement that could not arrive at a better time,” said European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor. “We have seen a massive growth of online hate speech and incitement in recent years and it is very important that governments, law enforcement agencies and online companies work in tandem to make the internet a safer space for all.”“It has been demonstrated that many of those who have shed blood on the streets of Europe in recent years have been indoctrinated online, so hopefully this agreement can cut off a means of recruitment into extremist organizations.”
Posted inCensorship|Comments Off on Jewish Groups Welcome Censorship
VIENNA (Reuters) – Far-right parties in some European countries are winning over Jewish voters by exploiting fears about militant Islamists and mainstream parties must do much more to address Europeans’ security concerns, a Jewish leader said on Tuesday.
Boosted by Europe’s migrant crisis, Norbert Hofer of Austria’s anti-immigration Freedom Party only narrowly lost the country’s presidential election on May 22. He would have been the first far-right head of state in the European Union.
“I understand that, most probably, a not insignificant part of the (Jewish) community here voted for Hofer for the presidency,” the head of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER), Pinchas Goldschmidt, told Reuters in an interview.
Goldschmidt, who is also the chief rabbi of Moscow, said he had received reports of a similar shift among French Jews towards supporting the anti-immigration National Front ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections next year in France.
“When God gave out intelligence, not everybody stood in line. And so when those parties come with a populist message to the Jews and say ‘We’re going to save you from the Muslims’ … propaganda is effective,” he added.
Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem in April – a gesture rich in symbolism, given the Nazis’ role in Austrian history and the flight or murder of most Austrian Jews following the country’s annexation by Adolf Hitler in 1938.
“Not only from the Freedom Party in Austria but also from the side of, for example, the National Front in France … and also (Geert) Wilders in Holland, they all seem to want us Jews to say they are acceptable,” Goldschmidt said.
Today Austria is home to an estimated 15,000 Jews and more than 500,000 Muslims.
“DANGEROUS” POPULISM
The security threat posed by Islamist militants has become much clearer after last year’s Paris attacks and must be tackled, Goldschmidt said, adding that Europe’s Schengen area of passport-free travel made that more difficult.
“I think that since the populist right-wing parties raised real concerns of people, unless the mainstream parties of Europe are going to address those issues, they’re going to lose.”
Goldschmidt, who was in Vienna for a gathering of the CER, suggested measures including the creation of a European anti-terrorism task force, improvements in border security and more effective integration of refugees.
He also condemned what he said was the tendency of far-right parties to conflate ordinary Muslims with Islamist militants.
“(The) moderate Muslim is our natural ally. They are as much the victims of radical Islamism as we Jews. It is the populism, the generalization, which is dangerous and destructive.”
Posted inAlt Right, Europe, Jews|Comments Off on Far-right parties winning over some Jewish voters, top rabbi warns
ADL: Only 3,000 Klan Members in Small Groups With No Central Leadership
New York, NY, May 11, 2016 … Despite efforts by Ku Klux Klan groups to gain publicity by exploiting the presidential election and distributing hate literature, the Klan today is a collection of mostly small, disjointed groups with no predominant leadership or stability, according to a new report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “Tattered Robes: The State of the Ku Klux Klan.”
“What remains of the Klan is a collection of mostly small and disjointed groups that have difficulty in recruiting members and even maintaining any semblance of long-term stability,” said Oren Segal, Director of ADL’s Center on Extremism. “Klan groups form and dissolve just as quickly, and few longstanding groups still exist. Even those aren’t very healthy.”
ADL’s report identifies current trends among Klan groups and provides examples of recent Klan activity. While many are adept at exploiting the media by staging political endorsements, leafleting, and occasional rallies, most organized Klan groups suffer from a lack of cohesion and paucity of members, key factors in its long-term trend of decline. Other factors in its decline include a perception that Klan groups are old or outdated, as well as the presence of other types of white supremacist groups that compete for membership with Klan groups.
Some quick facts about Klan group membership and recent activity:
There are currently about 30 active Klan groups in the U.S, most of them very small. There are approximately 3,000 Klan group members nationwide, as well as an additional but unknown number of supporters and associates.
Distributing racist fliers has evolved into a key Klan tactic, as it requires few members to accomplish. In 2015, ADL counted 86 separate incidents in which Klan fliers were left on doorsteps or driveways in neighborhoods around the country, an increase from 73 similar incidents in 2014.
There were only three public Klan rallies across the United States in 2015. Klan organized rallies were held in Montgomery, Alabama; Columbia, South Carolina; and the University of Mississippi. Some Klan group members did take part in extremist events staged by other groups.
More than half of the currently active Klan groups were formed only in the last five years, showing how short-lived and unstable today’s KKK groups tend to be.
The report says that some regional Klan groups, such as the North Carolina-based Loyal White Knights, which is the most active Klan group in the U.S. today, have a broad, though shallow, geographical reach. In 2015, the Loyal White Knights, which has between 150 and 200 members, were able to draw attention to themselves in 15 different states in the south and east, primarily through leafleting.
Most Klan groups, however, are significantly smaller. The Kentucky-based Elders Blood-N-Blood Out Knights, for example, consists of just a handful of members.
IDEOLOGY OF KLAN GROUPS: HATRED OF NON-WHITES INFUSED WITH NEO-NAZISM
Many Klan groups today promote a traditional Klan ideology infused with varying degrees of neo-Nazi beliefs or affiliations. For some Klan groups, embracing neo-Nazi tenets has resulted in symbiotic relationships with neo-Nazi groups. Some Klan groups have formed alliances with factions of Aryan Nations and the National Socialist Movement.
“Making explicit or de facto alliances allows more joint events, which can help mask the small numbers that individual white supremacist groups are able to generate,” said Dr. Mark Pitcavage, ADL Senior Research Fellow and one of the authors of the report.
Klan groups have rallied recently around issues such as immigration and alleged “white genocide” and have attended anti-Muslim protests. Klan members and supporters in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and West Virginia have distributed anti-Muslim fliers urging readers to join the Klan and “help fight the spread of Islam.” Other groups use attention-getting antics to attract publicity. One group, the International Keystone Knights, made news for appealing an “Adopt-a-Highway” court ruling in Georgia, a common white supremacist publicity stunt, while the Arkansas-based Knights Party drew attention after sponsoring a racist billboard in their home state.
CRIMINAL ACTIVITY AND VIOLENCE
ADL’s report also details how individuals with present or past connections to Klan groups have recently been convicted of a wide range of violent crimes from murder sprees to assault. Some have attempted and conspired to commit murder, while others have been arrested for illegal possession of a variety of weapons, from brass knuckles to firearms and explosives. However, the declining Klan membership has in the long-term meant reductions in criminal activity as well, a trend that will hopefully continue.
ADL’s Center on Extremism fights extremism, terrorism and all forms of hate in the real world and cyberspace with unmatched capabilities in research, analysis, investigation, and online monitoring. Recognized as the foremost authority on extremism, the Center provides resources, expertise and training which enables law enforcement, public officials, community leaders and internet and technology companies to identify and counter emerging threats.
Posted inADL, Anti-Semitism, KKK|Comments Off on ADL Report: KKK Declining in Stature and Significance
ADL: White supremacists and anti-Semites have been bombarding Jewish journalists with anti-Semitic tweets, particularly if the journalists have been critical of presidential candidate Donald Trump or his family. Anonymous tweeters whose background is unknown have also joined in the attack.
Journalists such as Julia Ioffe, Bethany Mandel, Jonathan Weisman and Ben Shapiro have all been targets of this campaign. Many of the tweets feature Holocaust imagery. Yellow Jewish stars with the word “Jude” are superimposed on the pictures of these journalists. There are also disturbing images of concentration camps and ovens directed at the journalists, as well as cartoons depicting anti-Semitic stereotypes.
While the actual identity of many of the people sending the offensive tweets can’t be determined, at least two well-known neo-Nazis have blatantly attacked Jewish journalists online. In a recent blog post, neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin went after Weisman, a New York Times reporter, who received an avalanche of anti-Semitic tweets after mentioning the anti-Semitic campaign against Ioffe. In an earlier blog post, Anglin had also encouraged his followers to troll Ioffe on Twitter after she wrote a profile of Melania Trump for GQ magazine.
Anglin derided Weisman for publicizing the hateful tweets directed at him. Anglin alleged that Jewish journalists like Weisman and Ioffe had provoked the wrath of white supremacists. But Anglin went further, practically declaring that there is a war on with Jewish journalists. He wrote, “You’ve all provoked us. You’ve been doing it for decades—and centuries even—and we’ve finally had enough. Challenge has been accepted.”
Another neo-Nazi, Andrew Auernheimer–also known as “Weev”–tweeted at Weisman, “Get used to it you f—ing kike. You people will be made to pay for the violence and fraud you’ve committed against us.”
Anglin and Auernheimer are both adept at propaganda. Anglin uses his website, The Daily Stormer, to attack Jewish journalists and other Jews and encourages his followers to troll them online. Anglin himself was banned from Twitter after he ran a propaganda campaign with fake tweets about the Klan coming to the University of Missouri following some racial incidents at the school. Auernheimer is a well-known hacker who this year sent flyers advertising The Daily Stormer to dozens of printers located at universities across the country.
Both Anglin and Auernheimer are known figures who have used social media to attack Jews, but there are legions of anonymous Twitter users who are exploiting the Internet to carry out these anti-Semitic campaigns against Jewish journalists. While white supremacists used to promote their anti-Jewish propaganda on extremist forums and random websites, they are now able to mainstream their hate on sites used by millions of people and easily recruit others to join in their efforts.
Posted inADL|Comments Off on ADL: Anti-Semites Spearhead Attack Campaign Against Jewish Journalists
BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union reached an agreement Tuesday with some of the world’s biggest social media firms, including Facebook and Twitter, on ways to combat the spread of hate speech online.
Under the terms of a code of conduct, the firms, which also include YouTube and Microsoft, have committed to “quickly and efficiently” tackle illegal hate speech directed against anyone over issues of race, color, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin. The sites have often been used by terrorist organizations to relay messages and entice hatred against certain individuals or groups.
Among the measures agreed with the EU’s executive arm, the firms have said they will establish internal procedures and staff training to guarantee that a majority of illegal content is assessed and, where necessary, removed within 24 hours. They have also agreed to strengthen their partnerships with civil society organizations who often flag content that promotes incitement to violence and hateful conduct. The European Commission and the firms have also agreed to support civil society organizations to deliver “anti-hate campaigns.”
“The internet is a place for free speech, not hate speech,” said Vera Jourova, the EU commissioner responsible for justice, consumers and gender equality. She added that the code of conduct, which will be regularly reviewed in terms of its scope and its impact, will ensure that public incitement to violence to hatred has “no place online.”
The firms themselves say there’s no conflict between their mission statements to promote the freedom of expression and clamping down on hate speech.
Twitter, which has been at the center of much of the hate speech that’s spread online over the past few years, says it will continue to tackle the issue “head-on” along with partners in industry and civil society.
“We remain committed to letting the Tweets flow,” said Twitter’s European head of public policy Karen White. “However, there is a clear distinction between freedom of expression and conduct that incites violence and hate.”
And Facebook’s head of global policy management Monika Bickert urged the company’s 1.6 million users to use the site’s in-built reporting tools in the event they find content they consider unacceptable.
“Our teams around the world review these reports around the clock and take swift action,” she said.
Great to see that the tech giants are following the directives of the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Hate is hate: much more still needs to be done to combat online hate in US, not only Europe
The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Digital Terrorism and Hate Project commends today’s announcement that social media giants, including Facebook, Twitter, Google/YouTube, and Microsoft have committed to the European Union to remove “illegal” hate postings from their services within the next 24 hours.
“We applaud today’s important announcement as a significant step in the long struggle to degrade the leveraging of social media platforms by terrorists, their supporters, neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and other extremists in Europe,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center who has founded and heads the Human Rights NGO’s Digital Terrorism and Hate Project for the last two decades.
“However, much more needs to be done by these companies to deal with the unfettered access of extremists to their powerful platforms in the US,” he added. “This includes Twitter shutting down vicious hate hashtags. Twitter allows hate hash-tags that use the “n-word” and threaten Jews, Muslims and other minorities,” Cooper also said, adding, “It is vital that these companies take all necessary steps to strengthen their own Terms Of Use, make them transparent and create the mechanism to deal with the burgeoning problem of online hate in our country.”
Rabbi Cooper also expressed concern that the companies were, in effect deploying on double on dealing with hate, “It appears from today’s announcement that hate postings, for example about the “Big Lie” of the blood libel (that Jews use the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes) would be removed in Germany, but remain untouched if posted through a US server.” He added, “Hate is hate and if a Social media company would remove such postings from its online pages in Germany, it should do the same globally.”
For the last two decades, the Wiesenthal Center’s Digital Terrorism and Hate Project has been a trailblazer in exposing, monitoring and combating the abuse of online technologies by extremists of all kinds, in the US and overseas. The Center’s annual interactive report has been reviewed by the US Congress and helps train law enforcement, intelligence, and community activists globally. In 2012 the Center introduced a password-sensitive app for law enforcement that enables instant access to our expert researchers. While cyber hate is on the rise, only close to half of this country’s law enforcement agencies have a social media policy, according to a recent police survey. The Simon Wiesenthal Center regularly meets with the leading social media companies and releases an annual report card reflecting the commitment (or lack thereof) of companies to curb online terror and hate.
Hispanics in black face:
John Rivers: Why do billionaires like Carlos Slim, Mark Zuckerberg & Jeff Bezos use their Media Platforms to destroy their enemies? Because they can.
From my Twitter home page:
* Trump holds 2 pressers in 2 business days.
Sanders takes no Qs at event billed as presser.
Clinton hasn’t held a formal presser in 6 months.
* Clinton keeps asking us to imagine her losing. Ask yourself if Trump would make that mistake.
* Dishonest press viciously targets voters for fueling Trump’s rise, calls for recriminations.
Nobody thinks of Donald Trump as a good man. He might be a hard man capable of doing hard things.
Was Napoleon a “dictatorial blood-thirsty monster desiring French hegemony over Europe or was he the standard bearer for the more enlightened values to come out of the French Revolution (including deghettoizing the Jews)”?
R. H. S. Stolfi’s premise, that Adolf Hitler did not think of himself as an evil man doing evil deeds, is diametrically opposed to other biographers’ theories of Hitler, the man. Stolfi professes that Hitler was underestimated by his enemies as well as historians and his biographers. Stolfi quotes Ian Kershaw, a recent biographer of Hitler, as saying that “someone with so few intellectual gifts and social attributes ….was no more than an empty vessel outside of his political life….” In Stolfi’s opinion, Hitler was a talented architect, a good artist (not a mediocre one as is often described), and a music aficionado as well as a heroic front-line soldier of World War I. The common bias of Hitler’s previous biographers, according to Stolfi, is that a fear of interpretation leading to comprehension of the man, might also be considered an apology for his actions. All of Hitler’s previous biographers began their studies from a viewpoint of contempt for the man, rather than an openness to learn about him. Stolfi sees Adolf Hitler as a self-proclaimed messiah; a savior of the German people from the degradation resulting from the Treaty of Versailles and the Marxist Jews who were intent on destroying Germany.
I personally found it difficult to read Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, because I, like the other biographers, have a hard time overlooking the evil deeds of Hitler and concentrating instead upon his supposed genius. Stolfi characterizes Hitler as a rare world historical figure, compared with the likes of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Julius Caesar. He clearly presents an alternate view from all the other major biographers of Adolf Hitler, but not a view that I can share.
In the guise of a scholarly screed, former Marine Corps Reserve Stolfi (German Panzers on the Offensive Russian Front, 2003, etc.) makes an incredible—and entirely failed—attempt to rehabilitate the most reviled figure of modern history.
The author strongly objects to the universal “denigration” of Adolf Hitler. Across nearly 500 pages, he decries the “antipathy” against his hero, mistaking amoral charisma for integrity. Hitler, writes the author, was a man of towering achievement, a messiah for the German people, an intense, idealistic mastermind. To Stolfi, the young Wagnerian hero of World War I who boasted a firm handshake and direct eye contact was a sensitive Bohemian artist and opera lover. Against all evidence, the author also proclaims him a wonderful painter and superb architect. Hitler pronounced himself the savior of Europe from the threat of Marxism, and the murder of millions of Jews was simply political necessity. Readers should understand that Stolfi’s book is not a biography but a preposterous hagiography employing selective fact supported by quotes from a few Nazis and a lot from the Führer’s own Mein Kampf. It is also a jealous, sarcastic discourse against the “conventional wisdom” of the “great-biographers” (unlike Stolfi, these include reliable authors such as Toland, Fest, Kershaw, etc.). The book ends before the end of the Third Reich. Ultimately, despite the author’s effort to spin the malign corruption—especially offensive while it is still in living memory—there remains nothing beyond the evil and tyranny that his subtitle promises.
Because Adolf Hitler has come to epitomize evil, it takes an “act of stupendous historical imagination” to perceive him as a man, as A.N. Wilson asserts in his provocative biography. From today’s perspective, Hitler’s words and deeds, as far back as “Mein Kampf” (1925-26), seem to lead inevitably to the concentration camps and the murder of millions. We see him, to use Mr. Wilson’s phrase, as a kind of “Demon King” of history.
Instead, Mr. Wilson would like to suggest, Hitler’s racism and fanaticism were of a piece with the culture of his time. Hitler was “an embodiment, albeit an exaggerated embodiment, of the beliefs of the average modern person.” Mr. Wilson in fact goes further than that, suggesting that the rise to power of someone like Hitler was a predictable consequence of a secularizing world. “Hitler was the Enlightenment’s cloven hoof,” Mr. Wilson writes; he exemplified “more than anything else the futility of the ‘modern’ or ‘scientific’ outlook on life.”
Hitler was an early champion of many ideas typical of our own degraded modern age—vegetarianism, the opposition to hunting, the endorsement of abortion and euthanasia, and the rejection of the past, including old-time religion. Are the Nuremberg rallies really so different, Mr. Wilson asks, from “our love of spectacularly large football stadia, pop festivals, and open-air religious celebrations”? The Olympic torch, he reminds us, is a Nazi invention.
But the larger point is that Mr. Wilson’s effort to write a “Hitler, Our Contemporary” polemic puts him at odds with a legion of Hitler biographers and historians whose work he has both absorbed and depreciated….
…Works like Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” (1996) have argued that Hitler’s ascent resulted from a strain of racism in German culture that shaped him and made him the culmination of a nationalistic and ethnocentric malignancy. Mr. Wilson, by contrast, seems to recognize little unique about the German situation. Hitler, “in his racial discrimination, was simply being normal,” the author suggests. “The United States and the British Empire were both racist through and through.” This is a stupendously undergraduate generalization—even if it contains some measure of truth.
The Bullock-Fest-Kershaw triumvirate seems to favor a Hitler who wanted something less than the whole world. Yet in order for the rest of the world to retain something of its own identity, it would have to concede the superiority of all things German. So it is not surprising that Mr. Wilson, for one, finds it difficult to see how Hitler could have stopped at the Volga.
In the end, the most convincing parts of Mr. Wilson’s unorthodox account may be his provocative insights into an artistic sensibility. Noting how much Hitler depended on his speeches (even “Mein Kampf” was dictated), Mr. Wilson calls him the “most hypnotic artist of post-literacy.” Like today’s radio talk-show “entertainers,” Hitler knew there was something about the spoken word that could galvanize millions. Rather than focus on Hitler’s ideology, the biographer brilliantly singles out his subject’s style of attack: “Henceforth, the German people were seen as an orchestra whom he could conduct, as a great chorus who could sing his compositions.”
Frederic Spotts, in “Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics” (2003), accomplished something similar, placing Hitler’s plans for world conquest in the context of his private ambitions to rename Berlin “Germania” and to re-create a Greco-Roman empire with colossal buildings that would outclass the classical age. This emphasis of Hitler as artist signals, perhaps, yet another shift in the five-decade effort to come to terms with who Hitler was.
Steve Donoghue lists Prof. Stolfi’s biography as one of the worst books of the year. “7. Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny by R. H. S. Stolfi – The author of this nauseating book is quick to point out that his efforts to get at the man behind the long-standing characterization of Hitler as a monster of pure evil are not to be construed in any way as some kind of neo-Nazi support of Hitler … merely a contention that such characterizations do little to help us understand the man. Which is like saying you’re against guns but a big fan of bullets. Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent, as Stolfi knows perfectly well – and as shouldn’t be attempted in those rare cases where the man is a monster. Years ago I said we were only a decade away from a biography of Hitler by a respected writer who made him out to be a somewhat wayward and badly misunderstood European statesman, and while this book isn’t that biography, it lays the groundwork as thoroughly as that groundwork can be laid (right down to the studio-photograph on the cover, perhaps the most nauseating thing about the whole production). Take it from somebody who’s read everything ever written about the man: in Hitler’s case, much to the world’s misfortune, there was nothing beyond evil and tyranny.”
* Prof. Stolfi has written a much needed corrective interpretive
history of Adolf Hitler – a history free of the socially mandated operating
assumption and pre-conceived conclusion of Hitler as fundamentally evil;
that ‘evil’ is the appropriate and only filter with which to interpret all of Hitler’s
actions, values and aspirations. This typical approach inevitable leads to
authorial moralizing complete with an endless string of
condemning adjectives re: Hitler, i.e. psycho, barbaric, evil, crazy, insane,
egomaniacal. This is not only tiresome, but un-enlightening,
un-academic, and useless in reaching meaningful conclusions about Hitler
and his motivations. Hitler winds up as a buffoonish cartoon rather than a complex human
being with sincere motives.
Prof. Stolfi courageously uses a more realistic approach to his subject,
applying a new filter to interpret Hitler and reaching conclusions that immediately
strike the reader as realistic and more accurate than the pre-packaged
condemnations of previous authors. The end result is a broader portrait of a
three-dimensional human, rather than a cartoonish figure.
Prof. Stolfi and Prometheus publishers are owed a great debt of gratitude
for this book: serious social sanctions are typically applied to Hitler biographers
who use any interpretive filter other than ‘Hitler as evil’: sanctions including
boycott, ad hominum attack, accusations of prejudice, pressure to terminate employment,
etc. In taking the risk, they’ve provided the public with the rarist commodity – real
history rather than dogmatic ideology masquerading as history.
* In the normal course of things, it usually doesn’t take that long after the death of a person of significance for passions to cool and objectivity rein when historians begin to sit in judgement. Even in the case of wartime enemies, ordinary Americans have been remarkably quick to jettison the baggage of official propaganda once we’ve achieved victory, and in some cases even embrace the leading figures of our erstwhile enemies. Did Americans ever really_hate_George III? Did we feel_anything_about the Kaiser after WWI? We came to idolize Robert E. Lee after the Civil War and romanticized Emperor Hirohito once we showed him who was boss.
In the case of Hitler however, historians are still- almost 70 years after his death, hobbled by a set of rules, unofficial but as iron-clad as divine writ, about how he should be presented to the masses: to wit- as an ignorant, cowardly, sexually deviant, one-testicled, no-talent artist who gained power by mesmerizing the German people solely on the force of his oratory which, contradictorily enough, was of comical crudity and amounted to nothing more than screaming anti-Jewish slogans. He achieved economic success for Germany by military spending, he took over countries unjustly, he “started” World War II and initiated “The Holocaust.” When the historical facts won’t stand even twisting, then historians must resort to outright fabrication.
Such strictures of thought control are unprecedented in our history. It is, of course, because Hitler chose to confront two international, overlapping groups- Judaism and Communism- who neither forgive nor forget. When those 2 groups emerged from WWII victorious over both Hitler and Western civilization, they were determined that their captive populations should hate their masters’ greatest enemy and his principles as much as they did, and thus instituted a regimen of 24/7/365 propaganda that replaced the Cross with the gas chamber, that replaced original sin with our White skin, that replaced Christianity with the Holocaust and that replaced the devil with Hitler. Dissidents from the official line are personally and professionally destroyed, by the powerful forces that regulate thought in this country.
The author of this incredible book, who is either brave or reckless or, perhaps, judging himself immune from retribution because of his advanced age and retired status, has written the first objective evaluation of Hitler and first professional critique of the historiography of Hitler’s biographers. The biographers he exposes as court historians, who tell demonstrable lies as they dismiss Hitler as insignificant in 900 page tomes. Stolfi correctly regarded such simultaneous diminution and obsession as contradictory and so undertook this objective examination of Hitler. What he reveals is that, regardless of how one “feels” about Hitler, he was a personally exceptional man whose political accomplishments would objectively rank him as a World-Historical figure as great as, if not greater, than men such as Caesar or Napoleon.
Stolfi is no Nazi apologist. He acknowledges Hitler’s actions against the Jews and offers some perspicacious criticism of Hitler’s war conduct. But he honestly weighs him in the historical scales and quite correctly judges him as the very opposite of the insignificant figure his biographers claim him to be. If you want propaganda, look elsewhere. Read this book if you want to know the truth about Hitler.
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"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
