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Columnists -- with bite! We feature conservative-friendly writers from Canada and the U.S. who help clarify the difference between liberals and conservatives. All have personally agreed to be a part of our team here at PTBC.

A. Oluwatoyin

A. Oluwatoyin

New Leadership Grades: From Pass/Fail to Black/White

Posted on Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Bio/Email | Anthony Oluwatoyin Archives | Printer-Friendly Version

Finally, Michael Brown got one right. The much-maligned, former Director of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has just handed out grades to all the main parties involved in the Katrina/Rita hurricane fiasco.

He gave President Bush an “A-”. U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco shared “Gentleman’s Cs” (C- and C+ respectively).

The only clear-cut failing grade went to the black Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin. A disgraceful “D.” Actually, that was generous of Michael Brown. As a former professor, “I gotta tell ya” (to summon my best Liberano-Canadianese), Nagin’s real grade is “F - -,” F minus minus, a grade I used to reserve for student work that was not even fit to be graded.

Remember, the kindest cut that Brown himself suffered was being called “clueless,” in handling the hurricane aftermath. So he has every reason not to want to seem to be vindictive. But fair is fair. Brown took it like a man. As did the others. The Vancouver Sun had a recent headline that said it all: “Katrina poised to claim another victim” (Feb. 14). It was about Secretary Chertoff, whose resignation the Sun and its ilk are “poised” to trigger.

Bush, of course, has been called “racist” — and everything over and above pure evil. Governor Blanco, a Democrat, and a woman at that, has, thereby, enjoyed some cover. But she too has taken her licks.

Only Nagin, the lead man right at Ground Zero of the whole disaster, still has his smirk virtually intact. The man who failed to order school buses and city buses to evacuate poor black residents to safety, the simplest and most serious task of all, has now rebounded even from his racist “chocolate city” repopulation project. (“I gotta tell ya,” even I didn’t think he could pull that one off.)

Such is the power of the “politics of pigment.” “It’s the colour, Stupid,” as I said in my earlier piece on the topic (“Katrina and Rita no match for race card,” September 2005). Indeed, the race card is “poised” to replace the report card.

Liberal correctness has watered down “elitist” and “insensitive” As and Bs, so we ended up with a simple Pass or Fail. Now, just check “black” or “white.” You’ve been judged.

How else do you explain the celebratory send-off that has started in his last year in office for that most failed leader of the most failed institution in the history of the species. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Never mind all those Oil-for-food billions that built a few extra palaces for Saddam Hussein, money that was supposed to make economic sanctions against the former Iraqi dictator less harsh for his victims.

Annan was the U.N. point man directly in charge (Assistant Secretary-General, then Undersecretary-General) of Peacekeeping Operations (three years before he became Secretary-General) when almost a million Rwandans were slaughtered in three months of terror in 1994. Force Commander under Annan at the time, former Canadian General (now Senator) Romà ©o Dallaire, in his blistering memoir, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, has given his former boss a grade lower than Mayor Nagin’s “D.”

The glib Euro-lib, on the other hand, rewarded Annan (along with his organization) with their Nobel Peace Prize in 2001.

How do you stack that up against one of Annan’s predecessors, Dag Hammarskjold, who made trip after trip into the same African region so neglected by Annan, in attempts to mediate ethnic conflicts, eventually yielding his very life to the unforgiving jungle?

The President of Niger floats conspiracy theories about his own man-made hunger crisis in his country. The President of South Africa floats conspiracy theories about what causes AIDS. The President of the Sudan floats conspiracy theories about ethnic cleansing in Darfur. Exactly how has native black African (Ghanaian) Annan thereby been advantaged in responding?

The man is what my very African granduncles used to call a “buttocks level two-percenter.” Yet this bottom-percenter continues to be the little darling of global liberalism. Most recently, Annan has called for the closing of Guantà ¡namo Bay, the holding facility for militant combatant terrorists at the U.S. naval base in Cuba, based on his organization’s one-sided “report” of torture there. Not only did the U.N. not go down to view the facility, it actually refused to do so, allegedly because the authorities would not allow the U.N. a tà ªte-à  -tà ªte with the prisoners.

Never mind that no prison anywhere would allow any such unmonitored contact, separate from legal representation. Why hasn’t Annan called for the immediate closure of detainment camps throughout Africa and around the rest of the Third World, based solely on one-sided accounts of torture from escapees, exiles and experts?

What we have here is a failure of expectation. White liberalism, which expects nothing short of miracles from George Bush, fails to see the diabolical racism of excuse-making for every failure of every black leader. There can be only one antidote. Wherever a black leader is involved, no matter who else shares authority, we shall expect more from the black leader than from all others combined. We shall always expect more of a black leader, just by virtue of being black. Call it an “Affirmative Action of Great Expectations” to promote leadership in black communities the world over.

Here’s the rub. A white man who accidentally shot his lifelong friend on a quail hunt is hunted down in international abuse. A white hockey player, in addition to criminal sanction, will now probably pay millions for an altercation that took place during a game. Then you have black leaders failing black people, at every turn, in the worst ways imaginable, and still not losing their white liberal preferred status.  Still getting passing grades.

It is a crime against humanity.

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Nice line, eh

Anthony Oluwatoyin, a columnist for The Afro News, writes on community issues and religion. Originally from Nigeria in West Africa, he attended and taught at Universities in Canada and the US. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)


Posted on 02/21/06 at 08:33 AM

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A. Oluwatoyin

A. Oluwatoyin

Show me the cartoons!

Posted on Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Bio/Email | Anthony Oluwatoyin Archives | Printer-Friendly Version

In my first piece on the topic of the Moslem cartoons, I framed a simple question that is surely at the heart of the mystery in the ongoing saga. Exactly what, I asked, is so ambiguous to Western liberals about unambiguous Moslem violence, violence as a means to settle any and all disagreements?

And now, Part 2. The second central question that must be asked. Exactly why is the liberal media cabal so hesitant to show the cartoons?

I have been getting e-mail responses to my first cartoon piece, from here to Egypt to Nigeria — people can’t find the cartoons. Apparently, much of the Internet is as self-censored as our CBC and The New York Times. My goodness. I mean, where’s that notorious kosher cow, a.k.a. “the public’s right to know”? The responses you have heard need to be exposed for what they are. Some of them are one heck of a hoot and howl. But make no mistake. There are some deeply disturbing implications here.

One news station after the other; this newspaper, that newspaper…they’re tripping all over one another… running for cover, pathetically trying to hang on to the loin-cloth of tattered liberal explanations for naked Moslem hate and homicide.

For if there is one lesson that liberals can no longer hide from the Western mainstream, it is this: these apologists have the same primal fear as the rest of us, of a Moslem world utterly dominated by a handful of terrormongers.

It’s not just Bush, Blair, Bush, Bush, Bush anymore.

For years, the only thing wrong with the Middle East, as liberals saw it, was the West. Western support for Israel. Western failure to handle the Palestinian question with “even-handedness.” Western invasion of Moslem countries. Western values or lack thereof.

Blame the West. It was the only game in town. Now a bunch of cartoons, for heaven’s sake, have unleashed a savage truth. It matters not a damn what the issue is, Moslem response is universal and unequivocal. Murder. Mayhem. Rage. Plunder.

Liberals cannot admit this. For then they would have to consider, at least the possibility that war, invasion; extreme measures to root out extremists, to begin to nourish organic democracy — well, liberals just might have to give in to this new alphabet of foreign affairs. In other words, Bush/Blair were right.

What! You mean it’s finally time to start talking about the “liberation” of Iraq? To stop that universal preoccupation with “occupation”? Now that is not a concession possible to the organic idiocy of the liberal worldview.

So liberals have been chased into hiding by anorexic cartoons, abandoning their post at the check-point of their most cherished of values, freedom of the press, like girly-men Canadian border guards raised on one mad-cow of a liberal diet which views all things involving weapons with fetish distaste.

This is the spectre haunting the hitherto unexplored corners of a global divide in the business of civilization, the so-called “Clash of Civilizations.” That is why the Western liberal press continues to have such a tough time explaining something that should be so simple: to show or not to show the cartoons.
     
They don’t have any such problem when it comes to Osama videos or kidnappings, torture, beheadings of Westerners. In that regard, the BBC and CNN have all but become unpaid affiliate broadcast service units of Al Jazeera, that foul al-Qaeda terrorist mouthpiece, based in Qatar, masquerading as a legitimate news agency.
       
Four members of staff quit at the ubiquitous AP (Associated Press), that calls itself the “backbone of the world’s information system,” when one of their producers refused to show the cartoons. She said the AP was interested in the story about the cartoons, not the cartoons themselves. How’s that for blowing smoke right up your very own waste-pipe?

There’s the story. Then there’s the story of the story. Then, I suppose, the story of the story of the story…. What a farce. In any case, how would you know just what is going on if the storyteller says he is going to talk about the fact that everyone is talking about something but he won’t tell you just what that something is.

Why don’t the AP, CNN and Co. tell us about the story of Moslem kidnappings, beheadings and Osama without showing the videos and photos, over and over, such that it seems like the news media is really trying to explain to the point of almost justifying what could be driving Moslems to such extremes?

How they pick and choose. Smack in the middle of the cartoon controversy, we have now a “new” video of abuse, dating back to 2004 supposedly, this time involving British soldiers whacking Iraqis. Everyone knows how this certainly will play into the hands of the extremists. Will that give the liberal media pause? Hell no. You see, it’s o.k. to “inflame”, as long as the bad guys are Westerners, heck, as long as it is Westerners who look like the bad guys.

Violent criminals who cloak themselves in Islam are, apparently, the only people we must not offend. How offensive is that! Who’s kidding whom here?

Here’s the deal. Show the damn cartoons or fess up that you’re scared like a schoolgirl, and therefore, we all need to stop talking as if these Moslem murderers have any legitimacy whatsoever.

No, I don’t think one that one should go around baiting criminals or calling their bluff, when clearly innocent bystanders may be the ones who will pay the price. But then, stop acting as if we are dealing with anything but plain criminals. Stop talking about insurgents and insurrectionists as if you’re talking about opposition to oppression, as if you’re talking about a rebellion of freedom-seekers. Admit that what I call the Bush/Blair GDI (Global Democracy Initiative) is the new GDI (Global Defense Initiative).

I would go so far as to stop calling them terrorists. Even that description now has gained a perverse coinage of “anti-hero.” It connotes “tough,” “resilient,” “won’t be pushed around,” as if these creatures have some legitimate beefs. Talk only of cold-blooded criminals who are nothing but cold-blooded cowards. Brand them with the mark of Cain.

Liberals need to liberate their own language if they want to share any truth with the rest of us.

Stop talking about motives and beliefs of barbaric swine. Stop conflating savages with average, desperate Iraqis and other Muslims who are too damned scared to say what they really think of the savages who have hijacked their religion and their lives.

The best analogy for fleshing this out comes from the black community, here at home and worldwide. For two, three generations now, black violence has been discussed, described, explained in terms of that liarful litany of “racial alienation,” “the legacy of slavery,” “colonial consequences,” and the like. The incontrovertible consequence has been to bathe the black community in a bloodbath of blamelessness.

The only beneficiaries of excuse-making for black violence have been the perpetrators themselves. From the brutal gangs of Los Angeles to Toronto to the Butcher of Bangui, the self-proclaimed 1970s Emperor of the Central African Republic whose specialty was mowing down schoolchildren on strike against wearing a particular school uniform.

Criticizing indefensible violence while “acknowledging” the “integrity” of the complaints of those involved, does not strike a balance. It simply gives the devil an inch. It gives the wrong signal to the wrong elements at the wrong time. Moslem violence must be condemned without qualification.

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Nice line, eh

Anthony Oluwatoyin, a columnist for The Afro News, writes on community issues and religion. Originally from Nigeria in West Africa, he attended and taught at Universities in Canada and the US. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)


Posted on 02/15/06 at 09:41 AM

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A. Oluwatoyin

A. Oluwatoyin

Moslem cartoons and other Christian cheeks

Posted on Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Bio/Email | Anthony Oluwatoyin Archives | Printer-Friendly Version

You know there’s a failure to communicate when notorious Vancouver Sheik Younus Kathrada, who reportedly called Jews “brothers of the monkeys and the swine,” becomes a central figure in left-lib media reports calling for calm in the ongoing Moslem cartoon controversy.

The cartoons, first printed in Danish newspapers, feature most controversially, Moslem founding Prophet Mohammed complete with time bomb in turban, warning suicide bombers that he is fresh out of virgins.

Kathrada’s makeover from hatemonger to emissary of peace exposes rather than hides the ugly distance between Western traditions and the savage stranglehold of terror in the Moslem world. When Kathrada says there should be no violence in response to what Moslems consider a capital crime against their prophet, one could choke on one’s own giggle behind the hand.

Beheadings on tape have been justified (oh, I mean “explained”) in terms of attacks on Moslem terrorists, invasion of Moslem nations, mounting beauty pageants, and everything less than the cartoon slur of Mohammed, the very mention of whose name Moslems accompany with the benediction, “Peace be upon Him.”

Yet we are to believe that there is now a call to embrace. The Trojans and their horse couldn’t have perpetrated a finer fraud.

The streets as always have been less inclined to craft such correctness. From Damascus to Beirut, all across Europe, protest has respected only the exact limits of powers that faced it face-to-face. Embassies have been torched with the same ease with which boycotts were urged.

A defense of the actual cartoons would be about as modest a proposal as eating eight-day old babies every other day of the week. CNN would not even show the cartoons—except in pixilated form.

It matters not what excuses (oh, silly me again, I mean “explanations”) liberal apologists proffer, the natives are restless and refuse to be contained. Perhaps the Danish, in a vandal-making bout of self-deluded Scandinavian neutrality, truly believed that Moslems can be liberalized into being able to take a joke!

The excessive Euro-unionist mentality cannot abide those who cannot be stretched or squashed to fit uncontested truth. They would themselves bend over backward to make the accommodation. The Palestinian news agency reported that Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller called Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to apologize for the insult to Moslems.

There have been more apologies for naive cartoons than ever there were for Nazi complicity. We are given updated talking points with better regularity than Wall Street quarterly reports. Last July, the CBC expressed angst even about calling suicide bombers terrorists with reference to the London bombings.

We must not call Muslims Moslem, which latter word smacks of the Arabic for “oppressor.” Now there’s a non-misnomer! (As you can tell, I got my memo like Cher got her Oscar ceremony instructions on how to dress like a serious actress.)

Of course, cartoons of Christians, especially of Roman Catholic Mariolatry (excessive devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God) are not in the same league. And they come as much from infidel-bashing followers of Mohammed as they do from Protestants and other fellow Christians.

Yet from the barbaric murders of such critics of Islam as Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh and fellow Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn in the heartland of Euro-tolerance to the corpse-ridden protest in Moslem-dominated Northern Nigeria of the 2002 Miss World beauty pageant, Moslems acclaim again and again that violence is their answer to any and all disagreement.

Just what is it about so unambiguous a view of dialogue that Westerners find so ambiguous? No Christian ever turned the other cheek like latter-day liberals. The irony is that Moslems perhaps consider that the worst cheek of all.

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Anthony Oluwatoyin, a columnist for The Afro News, writes on community issues and religion. Originally from Nigeria in West Africa, he attended and taught at Universities in Canada and the US. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)


Posted on 02/07/06 at 04:19 AM

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A. Oluwatoyin

Liberals lose 19 million to one

Posted on Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Bio/Email | Anthony Oluwatoyin Archives | Printer-Friendly Version

No, that, unfortunately, wasn’t the losing margin of the federal Liberals in our recent election.

It is much more cosmic. It is the gap by which Global Liberalism is losing its war on truth and justice. Battle for battle. One case after the other.

One spectacular case in particular. More about that later. First, an update. The latest move in left-loon attempts to undermine capital punishment.

When the U.S. Supreme Court overruled itself in reinstating capital punishment 30 years ago, it rejected the idea that capital punishment is by definition cruel and unusual. That discredited view has just received a fresh transfusion of twisted reasoning.

The idea seems to be that there is in fact no way to kill that would not be cruel and unusual. Lethal injections, we hear, must go the way of the “frying chair” (electrocution), the firing squad, the “choke-a-rope” (hanging).

It is most ironic to watch Conservatives squirm in defending the most innocent life against the final solution of abortion, while liberals, in spite of broad-based U.S. support for capital punishment, pull the most brazenly deceptive stunt in defense of murderers.

Ken Starr, of all people, the superb Conservative scholar, former Judge, the Whitewater/Monica Lewinsky special prosecutor of disgraced ex-President Bill Clinton, filed a clemency petition with California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, on behalf of Michael Morales, scheduled to be executed Feb. 21 for the 1981 murder of 17-year-old Terri Winchell.

Starr, now Dean of Malibu-moneyed Pepperdine University Law School, also plans to argue that Morales’ trial was tainted by an unreliable jailhouse informant.

And, of course, just in case—Morales has filed a last-ditch appeal in federal court in San Jose, arguing that California’s method of using lethal injection amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

That followed hot on the heels of a literal, last minute Supreme Court stay by Anthony Kennedy of the execution of Florida cop-killer Clarence Hill who claimed that the anaesthetic used in lethal injections merely masks the pain of the procedure.

There hasn’t been this much New Age “gallows humour” since George Ryan, the scandal-ridden ex-Governor of Illinois, on trial as we speak, opted for an image-enhancing blanket amnesty that commuted all his state’s 167 death-row sentences, on his way out three years ago.

The moral equivalence of a murderer’s discomfort with his termination of his victims falls outside the widest latitudes of language. Such a successful, albeit temporary, manipulation of the Courts, is equally ineffable. 

And oh, just in case, Hill is claiming that he is brain damaged, mentally retarded (whatever description suits you), so according to a 2002 Supreme Court ruling, he is not death eligible anyway.

Which brings us to that dramatic case that started it all just weeks ago. The case of Roger Keith Coleman. On May 20, 1992, when the Virginia coal miner was executed for killing his 19 year-old sister-in-law, Wanda McCoy, Universal Liberaldom proclaimed in the words of the killer himself: “An innocent man is going to be murdered tonight.” 

Time magazine, two days before the execution, featured Coleman on its front cover, with “Innocent” in large blood-red print, and the obligatory disclaimer (“might be”) in much smaller, white letters.

In the years since, Coleman remained the poster boy for blurring the distinction between innocence proclaimed and innocence proven. When Virginia prosecutors objected to DNA retesting in the case, nothing further was needed to seal the syllogism.

After all, what was the state of Virginia trying to hide? The outcry crashed in a whimper two weeks ago when Virginia’s outgoing Governor, Mark Warner, announced that the retested evidence conclusively proved Coleman’s guilt.

Our Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto estimated the probability that someone unrelated to Coleman was responsible for the crime scene DNA to be 1 in 19 million.

Plans for massive media rallies demanding the immediate cessation of all capital punishment, not to mention the capital trials of advocates like “Texecutioner” George Bush, were quietly scrapped. Governor Warner had to settle for a few minutes on a Sunday talk show to explain why his 2008 Presidential candidacy as the nominee of the Democratic party had to be taken off life support.

Only the press release from James McCloskey of New Jersey based Centurion Ministries that so aggressively advocated for Coleman’s innocence had the painful ring of truth:

“With Governor Warner’s announcement, it has been established once and for all, with absolute scientific certainty through unimpeachable DNA testing, that the semen found in Wanda McCoy belongs to Roger Coleman.

This means that Roger Coleman is the killer of Wanda McCoy. We now know that Roger’s proclamations of innocence, even as he sat strapped in the electric chair moments before his death, were false.”

Contrast the statement of Dr. William F. Schulz, Executive Director, Amnesty International USA:

“Governor Mark Warner demonstrated tremendous courage by recognizing that states, courts, and juries can make mistakes. .... The death penalty, which is not synonymous with justice, is riddled with potentially fatal flaws.

Despite the outcome of these tests, the antiquated practice of state-sanctioned executions should be abolished based on its appalling record of human error, prosecutorial misconduct, racial bias….”

What would Schulz have said if the DNA had come back negative? Only one word would need to be changed. From “Despite” (the outcome of these tests) to “With” ….

The entire episode was one of professionalized liarfulness. Wanda McCoy was raped, stabbed and nearly beheaded. Even if Coleman had not donated the semen found in her, he could still have been integral to the eventual murder. His own defense originally maintained that two men were implicated.

Of course, that was when they had other hopes for the DNA. A reported confession (to another one of those “unreliable jailhouse snitches,” wouldn’t you know), a crime scene fingerprint, hair evidence, Coleman’s record as a convicted sex offender, his polygraph results (he failed, of course) .... Nothing was ever going to be enough to convince Coleman’s supporters.

Until January 12 this year and that explosive DNA result. How quickly liberals recover from the sham of their shameless discredit.

Now our freshly minted Justice Alito will have to do to the Kennedy on the Supreme Court what he did to the drunken Kennedy in the Senate, during his nomination hearings.

 

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Nice line, eh

Anthony Oluwatoyin, a columnist for The Afro News, writes on community issues and religion. Originally from Nigeria in West Africa, he attended and taught at Universities in Canada and the US. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)


Posted on 01/31/06 at 10:38 AM

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A. Oluwatoyin

Lady Hillary Marmalade and her Mocha Choco Latta Mayor

Posted on Saturday, January 21, 2006
Bio/Email | Anthony Oluwatoyin Archives | Printer-Friendly Version

(Being with deep apologies to songmeister Crewe and diverse others as legal requirements may in fact warrant anywhere.)

This is the story of how Lady Marmalade, a.k.a. Hillary Clinton, met her Mocha Choco Latta Mayor down in “old New Orleans.”

On Martin Luther King Day 2006, Hillary escaped from the plantation of the Non Compos Mentis. She subsumed and suffused herself into the radioactive personality of the “Creole Lady Marmalade.” As she told the crowd at her trial for stealing two bottles of Whitewater, “Y’all know what I’m talking about,” which actually said more about her excuses for her criminality than her particular condition back on the plantation. 

But as she had lucked out so many times in her life, she lucked out again. The media and masters were consumed with someone else.

Ray Nagin was known to and celebrated by his white liberal masters as Ragin’ Nagin for his fiery attacks on their political foes. No courthouse jester anywhere ever enjoyed such salutations and protection. They made him Mayuh—down in “old New Orleans.” “Gitchie, Goochie, ya, ya, YEE-AH!”
 
On Martin Luther King Day 2006 Ragin’ Nagin emancipated himself from what good sense he had left from a lifetime of self-abusive stupidity. Raging like a hurricane, he claimed that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were a sign of God’s anger toward the United States of America. And from that he drew the conclusion that God wants New Orleans to be all black again, to be painted “chocolate.”

Well, that was that. His liberal masters pulled the plug on Nagin. He was no longer their “maverick” ally. Now he had come “unglued,” they said. Again, this took all the heat off Hillary Marmalade. No one wanted to waste time discussing her case. Never mind two bottles of Whitewater, she could now get away with murder.

So Hillary came to make herself into the Creole Lady who came to thank the man she came to call her Mocha Choco Latta. She came struttin’ her stuff, extending one nasty “voulez-vous coucher avec moi” to her Mocha man. As the song relates, she anointed his black satin skin with her unholy oils of bootleg Whitewater which together they turned into magnolia wine. She broke loose the beast inside as he roared: “Creole Lady…more! More!! MORE!!!”

These are the ungodly times that try men’s souls, when a self-Creolized white woman rushes into a black Church seeking sanctuary from her privileged life in the halls of power which she declares equivalent to the diabolical compact of slavery. If that were a white Christian conservative male, he would be lynched then and there in the tabernacle.

The only thing more revolting than Hillary Marmalade’s remark is the fact that there continues to be exactly no pressure on her to apologize. So quite naturally, Hillary boastfully dismissed the very idea of an apology.

And in spite of the long overdue criticism of Ragin’ Nagin, the simple truth is that he has not been arm-wrestled into a resignation. Not that he would be missed. In fact, it is his ineffectiveness in leading reconstruction efforts that led him to resort to such colourful language in reassuring blacks that they were not being silently edged out of resettlement.

More to the point, the liberal media has reassured us all that it is not as if we are dealing with a white Mayor who declared himself in pursuit of a vanilla city.

It fell to Creole Hillary to complete the articulation of this abominable double standard. Her new political playmate, Former Republican Speaker, Newt Gingrich, we were told, also had the “p” word in his past. He had spoken of engineering his party’s 1994 historic takeover of the House of Representatives in terms of leading a “slave rebellion” against the liberal Democrat masters of the plantation.

So any mention of the “p” word is either as unproblematic or as encumbered as any other. They stand or fall together.

But do they? A black man has the duty, not merely the right, to break loose the chains of an odious left-lib ideology that wiped out his Divinely constituted household role, aggressively recruiting his woman and seed for the welfare plantation of Uncle Sam.

White Christian conservatives have become a gift beyond price in this brave endeavour of my people. They go out of their way to shed every last linkage to historic perversions of their ideals embodied in the KKK and the like. They have indeed, as Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America entailed, become fellow insurrectionists on the liberal plantation.

It is white liberals who feel no similar compunction to defer to black resistance. Pseudo-Creole Hillary cannot begin to understand which part of her mother of all paternalisms could possibly be considered objectionable.

That, of course, is exactly the mentality of a slave master.

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Nice line, eh

Anthony Oluwatoyin, a columnist for The Afro News, writes on community issues and religion. Originally from Nigeria in West Africa, he attended and taught at Universities in Canada and the US. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)


Posted on 01/21/06 at 12:01 AM

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A. Oluwatoyin

The new political humour

Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006
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Since I’m not a masochist, I’m not a fan of the new political humour. It was my grandmother who taught me that you know a joke is not a joke when the joke is on you. Anyone on the political right instinctively shares this sensibility.

In any case, sometimes, the jokes are not so much offensive as just plain off.

After the first (French) debate, in our current federal election campaign, for instance, Barbara Yaffe of the Vancouver Sun, summed up the candidates in obligatory ethnic jabs. “All four men had the look of “old white guys,” she wrote. Now, Martin, 68; Duceppe, 58; Layton, 55; O.K. But quintessential baby-boomer, baby-face Stephen Harper, at 46? “Old”? Nonsense.

It gets better. Or, worse, depending on your perspective. And again, it is Harper (surprise) who just can’t get a break. More from Yaffe. Some real whoppers here:

“Harper, whose party won less than nine per cent of the vote in Quebec in 2004, was careful to present a pleasing image….

Some of his answers, however, sounded a bit heartless. For example, when asked how Ottawa would help the homeless, he talked about the need to get them jobs.

When asked how he’d react to one of his children being gay, he replied: “Obviously, parents have a duty to always love their children.”

Work is a heartless offer? Loving your gay child is heartless? Isn’t that the real joke here? Imagine if U.S. Conservative Pastor Pat Robertson had said that. The night show monologues would be ablaze with the kind of love these Christian freaks give their straight kids——as opposed to cold, heartless love for a gay child.

That, of course, is the whole problem. The new humour is as much about humour as the liberal media is about objectivity. Jon Stewart, 43, the fake newsman on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show is the aging punk at the heart of the humourless movement.

Stewart’s especial facility is for pretending to make fun of the left-lib while in fact storing up real whacks at everything right of centre. He is now legendary for “taking down” the CNN program, Crossfire, and its Conservative co-host, Tucker Carlson. Appearing on Crossfire, and in commentary off the show, Stewart would sound as if he were simply having fun with both the left and right perspectives in terms of the well-known no holds barred debate format of the show.

In fact, Stewart would subtly subject everything from Tucker Carlson’s ubiquitous bow-tie to deeply committed pro-life and traditional marriage positions to ridicule while he laughed along with but not seriously at the left point of view.

When Crossfire was cancelled, barely three months after the much-discussed Stewart appearance, and Tucker “moved on”, then incoming CNN CEO, Jonathan Klein, went out of his way to announce that he “wholeheartedly” agreed with Stewart’s “overall premise,” as if he were referring and deferring to some uber-Sage from the Mount of Broadcast Standards. 

This double standard of unfunniness is “settled law.” Contrast the ridicule of Stephen Harper’s formality (“pasted unending smile,” was the verdict from the second set of debates) with the chummy way the left-lib press in Canada no less than in the U.S. profiled Al Gore’s “cerebral” demeanour throughout the 2000 U. S. Presidential campaign. This is all the more baffling, since Harper is an authentic intellect as opposed to that pathetic self-aggrandizing buffoon who, you recall, “invented the internet.”

When January 23 swipes the arrogant smirks clean off their unfunny faces, the Liberals will realize that God too has a sense of humour.

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Nice line, eh

Anthony Oluwatoyin, a columnist for The Afro News, writes on community issues and religion. Originally from Nigeria in West Africa, he attended and taught at Universities in Canada and the US. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)


Posted on 01/13/06 at 06:42 PM

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From Tookie to Toronto: lessons in black on black crime

Posted on Wednesday, December 07, 2005
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Canadians were shocked when Toronto’s ever-expanding gang warfare culminated in the recent brazen, daylight murder of one black youth mourner at the very funeral of another black youth victim.

White liberalism was never more impotent to explain such a dramatic turn in the particular field of its vaunted expertise. But as always in these matters there is much to learn from that great laboratory of ethnic experimentation. Black America.

Take the case of Stanley Tookie Williams. The 51 year-old African American is the cold-blooded coward on death row in California whose death, set for Dec. 13, has global white liberalism itself in the death throes of diabolical apologetics.

In spite of a quarter century of legal access and reviews certifying Tookie’s guilt, in the most liberal jurisdiction on the face of the earth, Governor Arnold (“Terminator”) Schwarzenegger has been arm-wrestled into scheduling a clemency hearing for Tookie this Thursday, Dec. 8.

Williams will die for four murders. In separate robberies in 1979, then 26-year old Tookie, whose actual middle name has taken on the obligatory love-fest of bleeding heart diminutives, killed store clerk, 26-year old Albert Lewis Owens, and Taiwanese immigrants, 76-year old Yen-I Yang, Yang’s wife, 63-year old Tsai-Shai Yang and the couple’s 43-year old daughter, Yee Chen Lin.

And that was just the crowning criminal achievement of what prosecutors at the time rightly called the “Bengal Tiger” outside its “natural habitat.”

Tiger Tookie was born to kill. In his teens he co-founded the still most violent Los Angeles gang, the Crips, so named for reported descriptions of crippled victims of young thugs in Tookie’s notorious South Central neighbourhood.

True to form, the beast regaled his colleagues with accounts of victim Albert Owens: “You should have heard the way he sounded when I shot him.” Tookie then made gurgling, growling noises and laughed about Owens’ death.

But to hear Hollywood tell it, the murder of Owens, who was white, was a black on white fatality from the era of race riots and white police brutality. Just the kind of revisionist feed that fuels opposition to capital punishment.

All the more reason to focus on the role of the Crips in the black community, in black on black crime. No grand socio-reformatory statement there. Just plain jungle savagery. But then I speak as a black African man who was born into, was raised, schooled and has worked in black communities the world over, including the black/Korean south central Los Angeles area. I was certainly never embedded in white racial guilt.

To save Tookie is to sacrifice the blood-right of a people to weed itself of a poison ivy to its very existence. When every black predator is treated to the equal ethnic empathy of any black man, white liberalism becomes the root of all evil. For then no black community can separate Hitler from his daily grind of victims.

To draw the line at capital punishment does not soften the blow. Or save such a perverted failure at justice. Remember Lionel Tate? Just under five years ago, at age 13, a massive 160-pound Tate was given the alarmist distinction of “the youngest person to be sentenced to life,” in the brutal beating death of his 6 year-old neighbour, Tiffany Eunick. Tate, on probation after his conviction was overturned, went on a spree of crime, from gun possession to armed robbery, racking up nothing more than additional probation. Just now, no longer a minor, he is back in the system and may, finally, get that original life sentence.

In any case, life or death, all punishment is secondary. What saves lives on a day to day basis is the view normal people have of the infliction of suffering. A black predator equals himself to his black victim in the pigment of pain. He is doing no worse to his victim than is done to him simply by virtue of being who he is.

With equal opportunity annihilators like Tookie, this attitude will cross racial lines. But basically, pigment needs sameness to confirm, again and again, that it is just what it is and cannot help but be. Thus, from Tookie to Toronto to Timbuktu, the victims of black crime are overwhelmingly disproportionately also black.

Small wonder, black men in the barbershop of Tookie’s old neighbourhood, in spite of obvious dangers that could come from Tookie’s Crips, openly on national TV, condemn Tookie, all these years later, saying he must die.

While Hollywood stars apologize for Tookie, the beast itself apologizes for not one of his murder convictions. He simply denies all four.

So what is there to forgive? Schwarzenegger’s granting of a clemency hearing is an abomination. The governor has no jurisdiction to retry the case. And logically, you cannot forgive a man for something he did not do.

So Tookie’s case reduces back to simple due process. Fact-finding in a fair trial. But again, Tookie has had a lifetime of examination and re-examination, all at great cost to taxpayers who include, of course, relatives of victims of his monstrous deeds.

Just last month, the governor suffered quite a political loss. All four reform propositions that he backed went down in flames. Will Schwarzenegger, himself up for re-election next year, now sacrifice four murders for four propositions?

Uber-liberal California is nevertheless staunchly (66 - 70%) for the death penalty. Instead of a clemency hearing, Schwarzenegger would do well to conduct a Multicultural Presentation Ceremony of the lives of Tookie’s victims and their surviving relatives.

It’s time to redress a gross imbalance. Tookie’s tony set have had him nominated for Nobel prize after Nobel prize. It’s time to nominate the victims of this ape for justice.

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Nice line, eh

Anthony Oluwatoyin, a columnist for The Afro News, writes on community issues and religion. Originally from Nigeria in West Africa, he attended and taught at Universities in Canada and the US. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)


Posted on 12/07/05 at 09:14 AM

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Libby lessons for white conservatives

Posted on Saturday, November 05, 2005
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Under normal circumstances, one would have advised that the best way to handle the recent indictment of “Scooter” Libby, now former White House Adviser and Chief of Staff to Vice President Cheney, is simply to let Joe Wilson keep right on talking.

Former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson is the man whose wife, former, supposedly covert, CIA operative, Valerie Plame, was allegedly outed by Libby to reporters. That triggered the investigation, such an outing being criminal, culminating in the indictment.

The more Joe Wilson opens his mouth, the more he removes all doubt. You can’t but wonder: what the heck was all the fuss with this guy in the first place? The man is exactly what Spencer Tracy, in one of his most memorable roles, called a “nin-com-POOP,” that is, second “P” not at all silent.

Still, Republicans cannot simply rely on the implosions of the aging surfer-boy who coasted on a Gentleman’s “C” in college.

These are not normal circumstances.

The media will certainly not hold Wilson to account. Following the indictment, Fox News Sunday seemed to be the only program that even mentioned the Senate Intelligence Committee report from last summer challenging Wilson’s assertions about the Niger trip that led back to his wife.

The Senate report questioned everything from his wife’s involvement in his selection for the mission to his knowledge of what he claimed were forged documents, with wrong dates and names - documents, however, that he had apparently never seen!

In sharp contrast, one commentator after another had trouble smothering giggles with regard to the view that Libby may have lied because he was sure that he would not be betrayed by reporters to whom he spoke.

What is it about the liberal press that Conservative operatives and strategists continue to fail to understand? What is the mystery? The failure to expect the absolute worst from the media must be the real mystery.

Almost two years after the investigation began, with the names of all the main players very much in the news, there was no reasonable doubt left that anyone who had ever spoken to Libby was going to sing like a canary.

Including “Judith of Holofernes” Miller. Jailed for refusing to identify her source, she emerged barely three months later, wielding Libby’s head. The media question had switched. It was no longer: why is her right to protect a source under attack? It was: why is she protecting the Bush Administration?

Never mind Loose Lips Libby. Did anyone outside the Communist Party of America, expect anything different?

In honour of my hero, that Great Plainsman, war hero, former Republican Senator and Presidential candidate Bob (“Prairie-speak”) Dole, I must speak plainly: too many white conservatives just don’t get it. You will forgive. I must tell it like it is. White conservatives are just too eager to be liked by the mainstream media, even while recognizing the illegitimate domination of the extreme left.

Most disturbingly, white conservatives simply feel they cannot just ignore liberals. They’re just not up to what I call the Ann Coulter litmus test: An authentic conservative is at least one who does not feel that he must speak to liberals, especially when in fact he does not need to do so.

As the Libby debacle shows, sometimes white conservatives harbour such closet respect for liberals, they all but become obsessed with responding to them, no matter what logic the left does not have on its side.

One of the main reasons for this is what I call “peer-grooming.” That is the unique kind of peer-pressure that comes from attending those notoriously loony-left Ivy-league schools.

It goes back to the Vietnam era, when the draft-dodging cowardly rats promoted themselves as “the best and brightest” in contradistinction to poor blacks and some poor whites who readily took up the mantle of duty in the military.

The post-modernist myth of the anti-establishment intellectual hero was born. Every Nixon-bashing smart-mouth kid was suddenly “Berkeley Boy Brilliant” (after the 1960s student protests at the famed University of California campus). All others were schmucks who needed the opportunities of the military to get some chance in life.

The result is double-barrelled: liberals condescend to blacks, alienating black conservatives, but being balanced out by white conservatives who secretly defer to liberals. It is a sick, symbiotic connection.

Ronald Reagan broke from the fatal mould. He had the guts to call liberals what they are and to disdain them accordingly. He famously stormed out of a Civil Rights meeting, not afraid to be called “racially insensitive”. The buzz words had no fizz for our Ronnie.

Today, Conservatives all but apologize for their stunning victories at the polls both in Canada (the emergence of the Reform party) and the U.S. (George Bush’s historic mid-term Congressional wins and his own subsequent re-election).

This is the backdrop against which we must view an aggrandized Joe Wilson. A man who had never been accused of analytic rigour gains sudden op-ed edge that no one dares ignore. Bone-crushingly derivative, the media defer to him as the marrow of discontent.

I said I must speak plainly. If Wilson were not white, the White House would have seen him for just another mouthpiece of the protest cabal. The instinct of too many Yaley conservatives like Libby is to respond without delay to liberal buzz.

“Libby returns calls.” For the former Bush Adviser, that reputation in the liberal press was a badge of honour.

It won’t save him now. 

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Nice line, eh

Anthony Oluwatoyin, a columnist for The Afro News, writes on community issues and religion. Originally from Nigeria in West Africa, he attended and taught at Universities in Canada and the US. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)


Posted on 11/05/05 at 09:05 AM

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The racial roots of Christian stereotypes and the new hate

Posted on Wednesday, October 26, 2005
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Bill Moyers’ Journal sat across the 1970s on PBS, the state-funded channel in the U.S. The left-lib press accorded Moyers the status of CBS pioneer, Edward R. Morrow, that bombastic bigot who considered opposition to communism just short of a character defect.

Morrow has been taken up in a new film by Hollywood loud-mouth George Clooney. Recent statements by Moyers ensure that his own film cannot be far behind.

A self-actualized anti-Conservative, Moyers has finally abandoned the slick pretence at professionalized objectivity of his early years, blasting what he calls, “the institutions that conservatives revere — corporate America, the military, organized religion.”

Moyers suffered a massive Howard Dean moment at the start of the academic year, just this Fall, at the Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Southern born and bred, Moyers, an ordained Baptist Minister, called conservative Christians “homegrown Ayatollahs,” equating them to Islamist terrorists. He accused the Republican party of trying to groom America for theocracy. “Democracy is in peril,” he concluded.

Last year, in the heat of the U.S. presidential election, Moyers stated, “I think that if Kerry were to win this in a tight race, I think that there would be an effort to mount a coup, quite frankly. I mean that the right-wing is not going to accept it.”

Within a month, Kerry’s loss crushed Moyers into retirement. On the way out he unleashed: “I’m going out telling the story that I think is the biggest story of our time: how the right-wing media has become a partisan propaganda arm of the Republican National Committee.”

Truth be told, the venom was there all along. I started documenting it back in the 1979 run-up to the presidential race between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, the following year.

Moyers did a piece on what he called “the essential Reagan” and “the essential Carter.” Reagan was a man who believed in the basic creative and marketing genius of Americans. Moyers cited the instance of a man, mentioned by Reagan, who, as I recall, was going to make or sell something of a can holder that would keep your beer cold as you sipped and talked.

The details have blurred but Moyers’ instant, dismissive, derisive snap has remained with me all these years: Not everyone is going to be able to invent something new and profitable. Indeed, I’m almost sure those were the exact words. I certainly knew exactly what he meant. I had been following his program for a while. He never tired of the most patronizing references to the plight of black Americans.

You see, for hard-core liberals, Black people are the prototype of helplessness. Or, at least, those of whom it would be downright cruel to have Great Expectations. Moyers all but viewed Reagan’s self-help motto as racist.

I would watch and listen to Moyers studiously, waiting even for the slightest hint of a belief in the equal capacity of black people for invention, direction, originality. It never came.

I came to the conclusion that liberals are people who believe that if it were not for government, society would not get out of bed in the morning. And the black man-child, of course, is the poster child for what I now call this “existential disbelief.” To believe it, you might as well not believe that man exists.

The loony left has replaced and displaced the oldest operational wisdom of the species. Man is the measure, the ancients held. Man was the standard.  And traditional Christianity came to represent the most faithful and the finest articulation of this view.  Until now.

The fashionable “post-modernist,” “pseudo-Christology,” of Bill Moyers’ lib-left (the glib-left) is a reductionism that takes man lower than the lowest crawler in the Garden of Eden.

Poor whites are sometimes treated to this disbelief. As are other ethnic minorities and members of the “wretched of the earth.” But again, black underachievement is the favoured weapon of liberals. It is the most reliable and consistent, yielding no harvest of counter-cases whether here or in the African Motherland.

Liberalism calls on government to supplement this existential subsistence. To correct “God’s error.” Thus liberals must demonize Christians who insist that God’s work is complete in all men. For such Christians must be either blind or bigoted.

This — is the “essential Moyers.” This is the cornmeal of the new hate. This is what Conservatives need to expose and excise.

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Nice line, eh

Anthony Oluwatoyin, a columnist for The Afro News, writes on community issues and religion. Originally from Nigeria in West Africa, he attended and taught at Universities in Canada and the US. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)


Posted on 10/26/05 at 11:01 PM

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Stuff that in your pipe!

Posted on Thursday, October 13, 2005
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You probably have it committed to memory by now, and without any effort on your part. I speak of the best piece of gross, crossover propaganda since that porn film classic with that actress who used to be on the Ivory Snow box ads.

Here it is: “Tobacco is the only product, available legally, which, if you use it exactly as the manufacturer intended, will kill you.”

The claim has the status now of a New Age Universal Truth. Our Supreme Court has joined the fray, handing down, September 29, a condemning 9 - 0 decision that might pump billions of tobacco dollars into the B.C. treasury. The Court ruled that B.C. may sue cigarette companies for the cost of treating smoking-related illnesses.

The left-lib media that so boastfully bashes America at every turn, gloated at B.C.‘s copy-cat initiative, modelled on lawsuits launched by various states in the U.S. against tobacco manufacturers. In the 1990s, tobacco companies agreed to pay a group of states almost $250 billion (US) over 25 years to defray smoking-related health costs. 

The B.C. case is expected to be replicated across provinces. Again, the lefty media that was so cynical about national implications for public healthcare posed by a different Supreme Court ruling, earlier this summer, in favour of private insurance in Quebec, was all but urging other provinces to pile on against Big Tobacco in the B.C. ruling.

The tobacco industry that pays $9 billion in annual taxes may now have to cough up $4 billion in estimated smoking-related health costs across Canada. Not to mention 45,000 alleged tobacco deaths that will no doubt generate a whole separate class of legal action.

We got a preview, literally, within minutes of the ruling in the B.C. case. One class-action suit after another was filed in Quebec, seeking $17 billion here, $5 billion there, for “nicotine dependency”, for “failure to inform” of tobacco danger….

But really, what good would the Supreme Court decision be if all smokers were magically to quit now? Where would tobacco taxes come from? And if fewer and fewer died from less and less smoking, the linkage with disease would be more and more difficult to make.

So let’s match one schizophrenic slogan with another. How’s this definition? Tobacco industry: the only, barely, but still legal industry, which, if it functions exactly as the government must now expect, will kill perhaps as many as 100,000 annually; incur some $90 billion in treatment costs, while also, of course, pumping trillions into government coffers.

The government must be just as death-invested as it alleges of the tobacco companies. So who will take up our class action against the government? 

What’s more, the tobacco ruling allows cost-recovery going back 50 years, in spite of tobacco “warnings” across that time, notices on cigarette packs about the “dangers” of smoking, smoking during pregnancy, dangers of second-hand smoke, and on and on.

B.C. Health Minister George Abbott hailed the unanimous verdict as a “landmark ruling in our attempt to hold the tobacco industry responsible for its detrimental products.”

By-no-means a lefty, B.C. Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell proclaimed the tobacco ruling “an enormous victory.” No kidding.

The threshold of proof is so low as to allow “aggregate action” in recovering costs. That would mean B.C. would not have to prove specific harm to each individual.

And with that dismissal of the last scrap of individual responsibility, our top court imposed the most belligerently one-sided decision short of denying the other side access to court in the first place. 

So again, with the diabolical slogans and venal definitions. Government: an instrument of mass suicide by death-inducing means like tobacco, provided for that very intent.

Why stop there? Never mind the bewildering hypocrisy that shields alcohol, gambling and other vices from the fate that has befallen tobacco. Let’s go deeper in the bio-social dynamic. Here’s the biggest catch of them all. Definition. Women: the only natural force in the universe, which, if men respond to them exactly as God (their manufacturer) intended, will drive men to rape, plunder, even murder.

Why don’t the loony-left stick that in their post-modernist pipes, and blow!

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Nice line, eh

Anthony Oluwatoyin, a columnist for The Afro News, writes on community issues and religion. Originally from Nigeria in West Africa, he attended and taught at Universities in Canada and the US. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)


Posted on 10/13/05 at 11:01 PM

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Uncle Wally, Aunt Sally, Huck Finn, Puppies and a BC pervert

Posted on Friday, September 30, 2005
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Nina Grewal’s Bill C-313, went down in flames, 169 to 100. The Conservative MP’s private member’s bill would have raised the age of sexual consent from 14 to 16. But she knew, even when her bill started life as private member’s motion M-221 back in the Spring, it had all of a snowball’s chance in hell.

Les Liberanos, our federal Liberals, those masters of perverse pleasures, were as gleeful in reminding critics that it was Mulroney’s Conservatives, in 1987, who lowered the age to 14, as Chrà ©tien used to be in pointing to the same source for the GST.

Leading the charge against the age raise, Justice Minister Cotler said he did not want to criminalize teenage “puppy love.” But normal Canadians worry about much older predators taking advantage of youth. Cotler’s move is plain deception, so much so as to make people wonder if the liberal understanding of puppy love involves actual puppies.

Don’t blame these Twisted non-Sisters for knowing how to reap from recklessness. The Liberal agenda in maintaining the lowest age of consent in most of the civilized world is a testament to the bankruptcy of diversity.

Just go back to the submission five years ago to the federal Justice Dept. on the matter of age of consent by EGALE (Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere).

Beginning with the observation that gay and lesbian youth are “likely to encounter people who are more than two years older than them,” in youth and support groups, EGALE goes on to the outrageous and, of course, illogical, conclusion that age of consent limits would mean “cutting off access to this vital resource,” causing “substantial harm.”

Is EGALE actually saying that so-called “youth” groups for gays and lesbians are nothing but a front for sex? Otherwise, why would age be such a central concern? As long as it’s a “youth” group, its focus would be on opportunities for discussion, group activities, support programs.

So a few years age difference, here and there, older or younger, would be nothing to the purpose. It is EGALE that is reducing gay-lesbian youth connections to mere sex in exactly the manner it would otherwise refer to as a right-wing homophobic stereotype.

What is worse, EGALE wants to make it easier for older participants to have this “access.” What a switch!

When conservatives accuse gay-lesbian groups of being co-opted by out and out pedophiles like the satanic NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association), liberals cry foul. But not a beep out of them when so-called support groups seem to be fronting for plain sexual exploitation.

And there is no wiggle room here. EGALE points directly at the “close-in-age” exception in Canadian law. That would be the infamous section 150, Part V of our Criminal Code: “in respect of a complainant who is twelve years of age or more but under the age of fourteen years, it is not a defence that the complainant consented… unless the accused (a) is twelve years of age or more but under the age of sixteen years; (b) is less than two years older than the complainant….”

EGALE says it flat out:“Whatever the age of consent is, the Government may wish to consider increasing the window for the “close-in-age” exception.” In other words, worry less and less about that darn age gap. And we ain’t talking Demi Moore/Ashton Kutcher here. Get offa that!

So-called right-wing bias is a buffer, it turns out, between kids and EGALE’s liberal Namblarism. If any kid needs to be protected from older associates, by age gap limits, surely it would be the kid who would be the most ashamed or afraid to complain to the police in the first place.

Just two weeks or so ago, Joel Johannesen posted one of his best biting blogs on all this (see September 16; partially repeated on Wednesday, 28 Sept.). With reference to US magazine editor, Tim McDarrah, busted for trying to pick up a 13 year-old girl on the Internet for sex, Joel reminded us of Canada’s “progressive” tolerance of sexual contact with those younger than 14.

As he said: “[A]t the rate of “progress” we’re making in Canada under the liberal-left, the age of consent might well keep getting lower and lower.” Indeed, we would be providing the world with a model defense to consent in the growing industry of pedophile-tourism.

What with the internet: You don’t even have to worry about leaving home without it. Take the case, right here in British Columbia, of ex-teacher, George Kraus involving possession of child porn. The 60 year-old pervert who taught elementary school in Surrey/White Rock was caught last Spring with over 25,000 images, including ones of child rape and bondage. He is to be sentenced in late November.

Believe it or not, that is not the ugliest aspect of this unspeakable story. Here’s what Kraus said of the images, to a reporter no less, on being caught back in March: it’s not hurting anybody…they’re all overseas.”

So, quite naturally, at Kraus’ recent Court hearing, Crown prosecutor Winston Sayson did not recommend jail time for the predator.

That’s the prosecutor, mind you. Not the odious creature’s defense attorney. Rather, the attorney for the Crown, which Crown, of course, represents the people. The peoples’ attorney. Doubling for the defense, apparently.

New B.C. Attorney General, Wally Oppal, in a letter to the editor in The Province (September 23), defended prosecutor Sayson, claiming that the Crown in fact did seek jail time for Kraus but settled for a conditional sentence based on case law (previous rulings in such matters).

Oppal, who is also our “Minister responsible for multiculturalism,” said not one word about the “overseas” comment. We still don’t know where “overseas.” We do know that Haitian children have featured in recent molestation allegations involving BC pervs.

Oppal, who was musing a few weeks ago about tougher sentences for property crime in BC, is apparently not so worried about pedophiles making property of kids. We let our pervs get off easy with the overseas kids then we allow the overseas pervs to sample our tolerant “access” to kids here.

It’s quite a New Age ethnic exchange, if you think about it.

For now, the law allows for a maximum five year sentence in the Kraus case. Case law does not prevent the Crown from seeking tougher sentences reflecting growing community disgust and righteous anger regarding such unconscionable violations of innocence.

It’s called precedent and it is the bloodline of the law. Following precedent does not stand in the way of setting new precedent. It cuts both ways. Otherwise, how did old precedent get to be precedent in the first place? Indeed, why have judges? Simply program computers with past rulings and they will spit out new ones quicker than those one in a trillion DNA calculations.

But never mind all that. Back to: it’s not hurting anybody…they’re all overseas.

I am driven to recall Aunt Sally in Huckleberry Finn on being told of a steamboat explosion. Asking if anybody was hurt, and on being told, “No Ma’am. Killed a Nigger,” Aunt Sally replied, “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”

Liberals who can’t wait to exploit black civil rights experiences to push for gay marriage and every other “alternative lifestyle,” don’t want anyone to see the real analogy in terms of saving our kids. Ain’t it somethin’.

As Joel says (in that more recent Sept. 28 blog), come election time, Conservatives will be able to say, beyond lefty clichà ©, it really is for the kids.

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Anthony Oluwatoyin, a columnist for The Afro News, writes on community issues and religion. Originally from Nigeria in West Africa, he attended and taught at Universities in Canada and the US. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)


Posted on 09/30/05 at 04:28 AM

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Katrina and Rita no match for race card.

Posted on Friday, September 23, 2005
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A pack of cards is exactly the kind of thing that does not survive a storm.

Except in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina slammed into the city on August 29, at a category 4 (down from 5). One card in particular was not down for the count.

The race card. Through all the rage and blame; looting; the contest between job and jurisdiction; the unconscionable abandonment of post and duty; one thing stood resolute in the Big gone Uneasy.

The race card. It would not be moved. President Bush took the biggest licks of his entire political life. Even white people who firmly rejected the idea that the government moved slowly because Katrina’s victims were disproportionately black and poor, just as squarely expressed disappointment in the President’s performance.

Mike Brown, the President’s man at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had to step down. On the way out, the liberal media used him to show that the universal practise of resume padding is, after all, a capital crime.

Parish presidents in Louisiana were blamed for not evacuating nursing home residents, 34 of whom were found dead at one location alone. Governor Blanco blinked.

But not the black New Orleans mayor, Ray Nagin. He took to the phone lines of his comfortable hotel, cussin’ and carrying on, as his city collapsed all around him. The liberal media stood guard outside. Raging Nagin was untouchable.

The black mayor was not blamed for failing to use school buses to evacuate residents who did not have their own transportation. When the waters came, city buses broke down in the middle of the streets, all over town. The Governor started to point her finger at the mayor. Then she read the liberal hand. She pointed away, all the way to Washington. To George Bush, of course.

The black mayor was not blamed when he simply did not, or, flat out refused to issue a mandatory evacuation for hours upon hours after the President’s disaster declaration. Instead, the Governor again pointed to Bush then pointed at Bush.

The black mayor was not blamed when police officers not only abandoned their city, but now, we read, themselves joined in the brazen looting and lawlessness. Yet it is understood on all hands that a leader is to be judged on the calibre and calculus of his discipleship.

Foul-mouthed Nagin was not to be held to account for failing to inspire loyalty and dedication. The liberal media readily gave him credit for anything that went right.

The elderly scrambled. Women grabbed bundles of illegitimate children. There were no men in sight.

Until the looting started. Then black men were everywhere to be seen. The black mayor was not blamed for failing to inspire black men in the worst of times.

In fact, it was then that Ragin’ Nagin came completely unhinged. The coconut went non comp (non compos mentis, not competent mentally). Against every last piece of counsel, smack in the face of post-Katrina tropical storm Rita, he insisted on inviting residents back. He was not blamed for a rush to reopen.

Instead, the liberal media wanted to know if perhaps George Bush had not been sufficiently clear in his counsel to the mayor. After all, the President is famously inarticulate. Yes, the old jokes were justified as relief in a time of national trauma. No one dared joke that the black mayor had to be a retard if he needed such a clear issue clarified for him.

So, of course, the President had to get his Chief of Staff, Andy Card, to beg the mayor, behind the scenes, to reconsider. Either that, or storm Rita barrelling into a category 4 hurricane, then 5, finally prevailed on the mayor. He disinvited returnees.

At last report, failed US Democratic party presidential candidate, John Kerry, and his merry gang of fellow loser-liberals have ordered an armoured limo to go down to Louisiana to escort the race card back to Washington where it will be enshrined in the Smithsonian Institution, unto perpetuity.

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Anthony Oluwatoyin, a columnist for The Afro News, writes on community issues and religion. Originally from Nigeria in West Africa, he attended and taught at Universities in Canada and the US. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)


Posted on 09/23/05 at 05:09 AM

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And now: Here come the students, to complete the tale of the debt.

Posted on Friday, September 16, 2005
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It’s been the summer of the debt. Cancel African debt. Never mind the continent-crushing corruption that fuels the debt. Then. Cancel the debt of the entire Third World. Let it ride.

And now. Just when you thought reason would cool off fried-brain liberalism, here come the students. The bastion of nationalized unreason. The last gasp of good faith socialism. Cancel student loan debt: the last rallying cry of remorseless ignorance.

It hasn’t gone well. In April this year, former federal NDP leader but still MP, Alexa McDonough, failed to rally her colleagues to support her private member’s bill to allow students to file for bankruptcy a mere two years after finishing studies rather than having to wait for 10 years. She flunked out 169 to 105.

This despite the fact that almost two years ago now, the liberal-stacked Senate released a Report of the Senate Committee on Banking, trade and Commerce, recommending that student debt be eligible to be erased in a bankruptcy 5 years after completion or termination of studies.

In cases of hardship, the recommendation was that the debt could be discharged in a “shorter” period.

In early June, just after McDonough’s disgrace, the government introduced a Bankruptcy Reform bill calling for a discharge of debt after 7 or more years; 5 years in cases of extreme hardship.

But by the end of June, more bad news. Justice Sedgwick of Ontario Superior Court, ruled against students, upholding the 10 year wait for debt discharge.

The Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) was apoplectic. The organization, a so-called “cooperative alliance” of over 70 student unions, covering almost a half-million students, coast to coast, views student debt as all but a fetish. You would think that the debt just happens upon students like post-modernist, uber-deconstructivist voodoo.

CFS offers not one word about individual responsibility and accountability. It’s all about how tuition drives up debt; credit cards are to blame; and, of course, always, always, the government is supposed to fix it all.

Statistics Canada tells us that as of last year almost half our university graduates leave school with an average of almost $20,000 in student loan debt.

If CFS had its way, B.A. would stand for “Bankruptcy Allowed”. When you get your B.A. degree covering your major, you would automatically also get a minor B.A. (Bankruptcy Allowed), erasing your debts.

Except, of course, if you got a job at graduation and would gladly repay what you owe.

The default rate of student loans in Canada is a whopping 25% plus. In the big, bad US of A, it was as low as 8 to 9% in 2002. For all our moral oneupmanship, we must be the kinder, gentler leeches, eh?

CFS is fond of anecdotal evidence. Of students who graduate with as much as a $100,000 debt.

Well, I too have anecdotes. I remember (let’s call her Lady Georgina) who majored in (let’s say) “Advanced People Studies.” I remember her tone when she relayed how the government had “saddled” her with so much student loan debt. The hate she expressed was so palpable I thought of calling the RCMP to get them to warn her bank of what she might do if she had to default.

What a difference a generation makes. There really was a time when Canadians and Americans both expressed profound gratitude for “relief” (welfare), the US G.I. Bill that allowed WWII vets to go to college, and endless other programs.

Now it’s all resentment. Like Lady Georgina’s twisted uppitysm. Predictably, CFS has now whipped out the class and race cards. Tuition is now what determines who goes to medical school.

Forget debt forgiveness. Mark my words, CFS is preparing a test case to show that the very concept of tuition is (“inherently”) a violation of our Charter Rights. Coming soon to a court near you.

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Anthony Oluwatoyin, a columnist for The Afro News, writes on community issues and religion. Originally from Nigeria in West Africa, he attended and taught at Universities in Canada and the US. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)


Posted on 09/16/05 at 11:01 PM

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The missing mandatory in meeting the meth menace is mandatory treatment.

Posted on Thursday, August 25, 2005
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When federal Health Minister, Ujjal Dosanjh, joined cabinet colleagues Irwin Cotler (Justice) and Anne McLellan (Public Safety) at the August 11 announcement of tougher sentencing for meth offenses, Dosanjh was all wet and back of the pack.

Sentencing, certainly raising the maximum sentence from 10 years to life as the feds did, is fine from the viewpoint of justice and public safety. So Cotler and McLellan are covered. But health has to do with treatment, rehab, getting well, overcoming the killer power of addiction. Addiction is a sentence in itself. In that regard, Dosanjh fell flat.

What’s really bizarre here is that Dosanjh seemed to realize what was at stake. “There are significant health, social and economic harms caused by methamphetamine, not only for users, but for communities as well,” the Minister said.

But again, it was his colleagues who put flesh on the facts. “The law must therefore not only reflect the seriousness of the offense but its impact on families and communities,” said Minister Cotler.

Our National Drug Strategy from 1987 has been renewed, every four years or so (last in May 2003) at, oh, just a few hundred million dollars overall. But treatment remains just one of the “pillars” of the strategy (as with the program of former Vancouver Mayor, Larry Campbell).

Health Canada coughs up $25 million annually for provincial and community drug use projects and rehab services. The ministry funds $70 million worth of Native and Youth national substance abuse programs.

Yet Natives, Native youth, women and others continue to suffer debilitating effects of drug abuse. Surely, we can get better value for our money.

In BC, in the late 1970s, the Alcohol and Drug Commission flirted with compulsory treatment for heroin users. A 3-year minimum mandatory rehab was proposed. But barely a half decade later, the Commission was scrapped. Ultra-lefty NDP MLA, the late Rosemary Brown, was relentless in a critique that transcended political divides.

Here she is at her savage best, referring to the role of “that drug-pushing government of yours.” “What I’m looking at is the hypocritical attitude of the government toward alcohol. It sells, pushes, advertises and taxes alcohol, and then it wipes out [the] Drug and Alcohol Commission,” Brown said.

“[T]his government was spending: $7 million on alcohol and drug programs. It takes in $365 million, it was spending $2.7 million on the Alcohol and Drug Commission, [which it wiped out],” she added.

The figures need to be adjusted for time and institutional changes. What has not changed is the need for a health program that can match the potency of addiction.

Canada lacks the American stomach for “mandatories”. Cotler rejected it even of sentencing. “Research shows mandatory minimums don’t serve as a deterrent and actually have the opposite effect,” he said.

The police beg to differ. “They have to go with mandatory minimum sentencing if they really want to resolve the problem,” says Tony Cannavino, President of the Canadian Professional Police Association. “We all know that judges will never give those high sentences,” he said.

Constable Todd Sweet, New Westminster trustee of the BC Federation of Police Officers, echoes the sentiment: “When was the last time anyone came close to getting that [previous] maximum sentence [of 10 years]? The answer is never.”

In any case, treatment does not have at its disposal the range of alternatives that anchor the imposition of sentencing. So long as treatment is voluntary, society can do next to nothing when the addict fails to follow through. Cotler, on the contrary, does not have to worry that any sentence (mandatory minimum or not) will be at the mercy of offender caprice.

It is time to cross-pollinate treatment with sentencing through the uniquely effective strategy of “imposition”. It’s time to revisit the old Alcohol and Drug Commission idea of mandatory minimum treatment.

Civil liberties alarmists have lost all their original fire. One of the twisted benefits of terrorism has been to expose them for the unthinking, one-sided extremists that they are.

If Dosanjh and Cotler are honest about the impact on families, communities and our whole nation, then leaving treatment up to the individual is an anachronistic aberration. Society must now be viewed as nothing less than a victim impact statement in the determination of exactly how to handle addicts.

It does not follow that we will simply whack people about the head. In fact, our desperation demands an approach as compassionate as it is dispassionate. Otherwise, we risk turning the offender as victim into the offender as violator.

A good place to start is with the federal inmate. Twenty-odd years ago, I taught in the Prison Education Program (PEP) out of SFU. Program after program failed, simply because enrollment as such exacted about as much from prisoners as it did from frat boys. If the feds thought that such a soft approach gave one a sense of respect for boundaries even with regard to prisoners, they misfired. It simply made one question bureaucratic commitment.

You’ve got your classic captive audience here. Carpe diem. You cannot force a man to read or think. Or change his attitude with regard to substance abuse. What you can do is intervene, and intervene in an aggressive, bellicose, activist way.

The late great actor, Carroll O’Connor, of Archie Bunker fame, whose real life son committed suicide after a lifetime of struggling with addiction, did a public service ad in which he would say, “Get between your kids and drugs any way you can.” 

Conservatives need to realize that for the loony-left, the matter of governments coming between individual addicts and their drugs has become just another twisted substitute for the old alliance between Church and State. The civil liberties even of vandalizing, thieving, mugging crackheads are the new sacraments of secular selfhood.

Certainly, if prisons are indeed to serve as correctional facilities, rigorous rehab becomes a necessity. This would mean more than a few pills. It would allow for intrusive and invasive impositions ranging from experimental drugs to skills acquisition, including thinking skills. Participation is no predictor of performance. But non-participation is certainly a guarantee of non-achievement. So the option of enrollment must be off the table.

You cannot treat all addicts like inmates. But the social impact of addiction that so concerns Dosanjh and his colleagues is very much a matter of crime. That is as useful a benchmark as any, then, for the kind of intervention that mandatory treatment aspires to be.

Nothing could better ensure that imposed treatment does not itself become abusive. I suspect that alarmist critics are the ones Rosemary Brown would consider the real hypocrites today.

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Anthony Oluwatoyin, a columnist for The Afro News, writes on community issues and religion. Originally from Nigeria in West Africa, he attended and taught at Universities in Canada and the US. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)


Posted on 08/25/05 at 07:18 AM

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I have a dream: choosing judges should look to our future not punish our past.

Posted on Thursday, August 18, 2005
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In Vancouver for its annual conference, the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) passed a resolution on Saturday, August 13, to “encourage” the appointment of aboriginal judges.

Spelling this out, the CBA asked for “appointments of aboriginal people who have an understanding of indigenous legal systems to all levels of courts.”

It was a long time coming. The aboriginal section of the CBA had been pushing hard for more native judges. Last year, the association “urged” Ottawa to recognize “all three founding peoples of Canada” when appointing judges.

The resolution just passed in Vancouver said “Indigenous law is a third system of law that applies throughout Canada.” The first two systems, we’re told, are the “English Common law and French Civil law.”

The problem, of course, is that this sounds too much like a “three-tier” legal system. (In a country that can’t grasp the idea of “two-tier” healthcare.)

Are we still all “equal under the law”? What’s really scary about the three “systems” is that they are based on our racial and ethnic heritage. That’s not even something you can buy your way out of (like unsatisfactory medicare).

Surely, the law isn’t supposed to sound like a life sentence, if you’ve done no wrong. In fact, this may be why some critics of the CBA have gone so far as to get into a racial debate about the systems.

In a blistering editorial, the National Post, August 15, said, “There are not “three founding partners” in Canadian law…because there is no single native legal tradition. Most of what today is called native legal heritage is a modern-day warm-and-fuzzy fantasy devised by activists and academics eager to encourage the conceit that European and aboriginal civilizations were equal in accomplishment.”

Do we really need to go there? To get into a “war of civilizations” when we’re just trying to obey the law and live? Do we really need to turn the law into a race war? The CBA is unleashing a whole new race-baiting that takes us back to our “Feuding Fathers.”

Average Canadians today just want to move forward with equal opportunity for all and may the best man win. Or best woman.

The CBA is a voluntary organization that represents about 38,000 lawyers, judges, and other law professionals across the country. About 65% of Canadian lawyers are members. These are big numbers. This is not an organization that can be dismissed for not being representative. This is no fringe group.

All the more reason to get it right. Focus more and more on what a judge has to offer. Not on which group offered up the judge.

We need judges who will bring their background of understanding and compassion to the law. We don’t need natives who will turn background into bias against the law.

The CBA says it is trying to fill in the gap between longstanding recognition of aboriginal traditions by the courts and the benefits of having judges with “first-hand knowledge of Indigenous legal systems.”

But why do the judges themselves have to be native? There are many routes to “first-hand” knowledge. And being a native is no guarantee of insight into native customs. Presumably, many of the customs achieved respect under the law because non-native judges came to a deep understanding of the underlying native values in the first place.

Expertise is expertise. Otherwise, wombless entities (namely, males) could never judge issues of maternity and childcare with fairness. Just emphasize awareness and specific skills. If it turns out that only natives qualify, so be it.

There is a strange irony here. A judge looks to a man’s past to punish him for what he has done wrong. Otherwise, the law is very forward-looking indeed. We look to reform. Rehabilitation. Corrections. Whatever pushes your politically correct buttons.

The law is dynamic; an instrument of progress. So why would we choose judges to do such forward-looking work on a basis that’s so rooted in their racial past? Why don’t we just start punishing people for not being native?

Of course, extremist lefty feminists (Rush Limbaugh’s beloved “FemmeNazis) who “demand” spots for women on the Supreme Court, don’t help matters. That’s just what gives edge to these crazy ideas of appointment without merit.

In our eagerness to make up for past prejudice, let’s not prescribe more of the same poison. The great US civil rights leader, Martin Luther King had a dream. He looked forward to a society in which blacks, like whites, would “not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”

That’s a model for the CBA. We need to try to move away from groupthink of this group versus that group. From English versus French. Not add more to the melee.

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Anthony Oluwatoyin, a columnist for The Afro News, writes on community issues and religion. Originally from Nigeria in West Africa, he attended and taught at Universities in Canada and the US. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)


Posted on 08/18/05 at 07:09 AM

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