9/8 Protest At UCB Against Michelle Malkin and Racial Profiling

Michelle Malkin decided to make *hit up and say that John Kerry shot himself to get a medal in Vietnam, because he knew with his psychic powers that he'd be running for president 35+ years later. Michelle must have forgotten that she wasn't on Fox or some Heritage foundation shindig because Chris Matthews smacked it down so hard you could actually feel it comin' through your tv screen.

Click here to view video
http://www.oliverwillis.com/node/view/329

Yeah - I was at the Dan Flynn 'lecture' a few years ago (as were several other frequent commenters here like Dean) where they had all these extremely baiting flyers about how 'mumia should fry', so I went to grade papers in the back and watch the bloodbath. He so obviously wanted to stage a big fight there and play the victim. At the beginning, a student was trying to pass out information about another upcoming event, and Flynn insulted him, and then his friends yelled some stuff back, and several of us started to plead that he should just start his talk because he clearly was trying to keep the fight going, and even when there were long pauses between remarks, he would keep coming back with more insults to spark his opponents. He clearly didn't want to deliver his talk and probably didn't even have one prepared. Then he went back to write lots of articles for David Horowitz's Frontpagemag about what a victim he had been at Berkeley.

I went to David Horowitz's event (too long to describe) where he was completely spoiling for a fight. Most sensible leftists boycotted this ridiculous mess because they could see they were being baited with the newspaper ad saying that black people owe white people a debt of gratitude for saving them from Africa, and Horowitz completely controlled the stage. The reason I went was to flyer about the fact that I had gotten Tim Wise to agree to debate him, but when I contacted Horowitz, he refused. Then the chump Young Republican league on campus had flyers saying "oh, we wanted to have a debate but the liberals refused!" and this was such an outright lie, I had to flyer about it. Then a Young Republican who the rest of the Young Republicans reject for being too extreme and racist and socially awkward actually put a graduate student Jose Palafox under arbitrary citizen's arrest when he walked by outside and hooted at them. The rest of the people who actually made it in were repeatedly threatened by the 2 dozen police and 30 young republicans lining the aisles threatening to arrest anyone who used their voice.

I liked that people showed up for what's his name (I was there too) the nasty anti-arab guy. But you can see how his speech was totally staged too. It took about 90 minutes to get everyone in the simple lecture hall because the students insisted on searching everyone's bags twice, and several hundred older adult nonstudents who favor his position showed up, which *never* happens for ordinary nonpolitical lectures in arts/culture/science, and they were spoiling for the fight and for hissing at the Students for Justice in Palestine (who seem to be significantly jewish). But what was the result - a journalist at the Eastbay Express took pictures of the 3 most wingnutty protesters and tried to argue that this is what defines the average educational experience at UC Berkeley now.

So, ask yourself why they had this article in the Chronicle today.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/09/07/BAGRA8KN0U1.DTL

There is tons of news that doesn't make the Chronicle at all. Clearly, the Young Republicans sent out a press release and will be there with cameras. It's not like it would be totally great if no one cared at all, but I don't have the energy to show up to that. I hope people could at least plan a clever response where you don't let them frame the debate again, because probably a Chronicle reporter and Frontpage mag are all going to show up there. Maybe don't do the typical 4 chants from protest rallies.
There were a lot of Germans and Italians who were also in the internment camps, except it wasn't 'race' based, but an intersection of ethnicity and local politics. Most were very recent immigrants (and people who fled germany in the late 1930s usually had a great reason to) plus the nazi regime was actually quite popular among some crowds in the US during the 1930s. Except, europeans who had become 'white' like Charles Lindberg and Henry Ford were not susceptible for being thrown in a camp, but they found a couple examples of actual germans who supported Hitler, and then suspicions caused them to toss several thousand others in. I think it's important to mention that so that white americans recognize that it won't always be other racial groups who are targeted. They even put some jewish german americans in internment camps and traded them back for prisoners of war towards the end.

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A political scorcher is forecast for UC Berkeley Wednesday night.

Syndicated columnist and Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin, author of a provocative new book defending racial profiling and the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, will bring her conservative crusade to what she views as the citadel of political correctness and sniveling, anti- American leftists.

She wants to go "mano-a-mano" against critics of conservative speakers, she told talk-show host Rush Limbaugh on Aug. 20. "It will be quite revealing to see how these acolytes in liberal education and liberal arts colleges treat me."

Malkin seeks to undermine the prevailing view and collective guilt about the internment because she believes it has shackled today's fight against terrorism.

"She has courage, folks," Limbaugh said. He recalled a UC Berkeley speech in 1983 by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, President Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations, who was shouted down by protesters opposed to U.S. policy in El Salvador.

Malkin's 7 p.m. appearance in 145 Dwinelle Hall is sponsored by the California Patriot, a conservative student magazine on campus. One of her past columns referred to UC Berkeley as "Sodom & Gomorrah U," while another was titled "Berkeley vs. America," and another referred to "the Manhattan-Berkeley- Hollywood Axis of Snivel."

Her newly released book, "In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror," was listed on the New York Times best-seller list last week and has provoked blasts of criticism.

The ad hoc Historians' Committee for Fairness, which includes professors and researchers from Stanford, UCLA, Harvard and more than two dozen other universities and colleges, issued a statement last week saying the book "is contradicted by several decades of scholarly research, including works by the official historian of the United States Army and an official U.S. government commission."

The Japanese American Citizens League called the book "a desperate attempt to impugn the loyalty of Japanese Americans during World War II to justify harsher governmental policies today in the treatment of Arab and Muslim Americans."

Malkin says historical records, particularly the so-called MAGIC Japanese cable messages, provide ample evidence of potential enemy collaboration within Japanese and Japanese American communities on the West Coast. She says President Roosevelt was justified in ordering the mass evacuation that sent about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry to relocation camps.

In 1988, President Reagan issued a formal apology for the evacuation and signed legislation providing reparations for survivors of the internment.

Malkin said Reagan, a hero to conservative America, relied on the "biased conclusion" of the national Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. That panel, which blamed racial discrimination, was stacked with pro-reparations commissioners and conducted "kangaroo hearings" where internment-defenders were berated and ridiculed, Malkin said.

"The ill-founded conclusion that there was absolutely no military rationale for the West Coast evacuation/relocation is indeed affecting War on Terror policies today," she said in an e-mail response to The Chronicle. "My book gives example after example of current opponents of threat profiling invoking the 'internment card' as an excuse to do nothing to fight Islamic extremists in our midst."

"I am not advocating rounding up all Arabs or Muslims and tossing them into camps," her book says, "but when we are under attack, 'racial profiling' -- or more precisely, threat profiling -- is justified. It is unfortunate that well-intentioned Arabs and Muslims might be burdened because of terrorists who share their race, nationality or religion. But any inconvenience, no matter how bothersome or offensive, is preferable to being incinerated at your office desk by a flaming hijacked plane."

Among the book's targets is U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, a former U.S. congressman from San Jose who was interned at the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming as a boy. Malkin complains that Mineta cited the relocations when he banned racial profiling in post-Sept. 11 airport screening.

John Tateishi, executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League and a key leader of the 1980s reparations campaign, called Malkin's book "a fabrication of historical fact. I don't think any credible historian will take her seriously."

Tateishi said Malkin, the daughter of immigrants from the Philippines, "has become the darling of the right because she fits a certain kind of image that they want to promote of an ethnic minority female who goes against ethnic community organizations that hold different points of view."

The California Patriot invited Malkin "because she's a great speaker and has lots of interesting things to say," said the magazine's managing editor, Amaury Gallais, a junior.

He said the group invited her last semester before they knew about her book but she declined because she was too busy. Later, her husband contacted the magazine to say she was doing a book tour this semester and would be happy to appear, Gallais said.

Asked whether the relocation of Japanese Americans was justified, he said, "This event has clearly been misrepresented. It might have helped us win the war in many respects -- it's hard to say."

E-mail Charles Burress at cburress [at] sfchronicle.com.

I think this is all a David Horowitz plot (again).
It would be great if Malkin spoke and no one protested
and every would sit their, quietly, and let Malkin
talk on and on and on, sounding even more ridiculous
as the minutes go by, but I'm sure there will be plenty
of shouting and screaming, that give the BCR guys
more crap to put in their fundraising letters. Why do
the extreme right always have better PR guys?

I am surprised that this ignorance is coming out of a university. It sounds more like a pre-school. None of you would make a pimple on this young lady's ass. Speaking of sounding ridiculous I refer you to the posted article.

Take a look at this kid's article. Do you see how he keeps talking about logic so much, then proceeding forth with completely illogical ideas, and the primary defense he uses is that it is brave to be 'politically incorrect' therefore he is right.

I can't type in mathematical symbols for the logic - but he keeps saying that because a small number of terrorists belonged to a certain group (nationality), yet still represented about .0000001% of that group, that the group (their saudi nationality and men from a long list of other muslim nations) should all be inspected to see if they belong to the set (terrorists). Yet the terrorists also partly intersect with many other groups - such as flight students, wealthy people, males, unmarried people, and a whole list of other sets. Race/nationality is the only character singled out for a search that has a very low likelihood of identifying the subgroup (terrorists).
Meanwhile, there are many terrorists from many nationalities including many white male americans.

My housemate is an indian statistics grad student who asked me the other day whether the democrats or republicans are the conservative party because he doesn't know american politics, and he has pictures of kittens and winny the pooh on his wall, - he's been fingerprinted by immigration, and I was showing him this and telling him about the David Horowitz thing, and he was like "why didn't anyone beat him up? " and I was trying to explain how they keep staging these things to try to make a show of how intolerant the liberals are and they don't respect free speech, and he was like "well, they're going to call them that anyway, so why not beat him up, given that they're going to say that anyway?"
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http://www.dailycal.org/article.php?id=15979
Racial Profiling Not Racism
Profiling Can Be Intelligent Way to Prevent Future Terrorism

By ETHAN LUTSKE
Tuesday, September 7, 2004
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Political conversations are supposed to be dispassionate. Ideally, we should be able to bandy about ideas freely, in a place where all notions and suggestions are given due consideration, deconstructed through logic, unencumbered by the weighing anchor of fragile emotion. But it rarely happens. A controversial idea will be inevitably blindsided by the accusation of intolerance toward some group. Racist. Sexist. Homophobe. Bigot.

Coming to campus tomorrow is a very controversial speaker, one who no doubt will be tagged with an aforementioned stain. Michelle Malkin is someone who advocates for racial profiling. A columnist and author, she is giving a lecture in favor of taking someone’s race, religion, and national origin into account when deciding how we should treat them for national security purposes. To these ends, she claims, we were right to be wary of the Japanese in World War II, and we are right to be wary of Islamic Arabs now. Sounds a bit racist, no? Well, I agree with her.

Although it sounds like a cliché, this country is facing a renewed crisis. We’ve faced them before, and we will face them again. Right now, we have a specific enemy, one we can control, one we can defeat. But we can’t do it by blindly ignoring who our enemy is in the name of political correctness.

Terrorists are not random people. They do not come equally from Nova Scotia, Finland, and Saudi Arabia. As much as it is difficult to confront it, our enemies today are mainly Arab, and mainly Islamic. Yes, there is the occasional Timothy McVeigh, but they do not represent the norm, if such a word can be used here.

And so I join with Ms. Malkin in advocating judicious use of racial and religious criteria in some security procedures. It’s not because I bear any ill will toward any groups which might be included.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I support this idea because it is the best way to ensure the safety and the liberties of all Americans. To take notice that 16 of the 19 hijackers were Arab Muslims from Saudi Arabia is not being racist. As Dennis Miller says, it’s being minimally observant.

Racism is a blot to be sparingly used. There are true racists in this world, those who call for the extermination and degradation of Jews, Muslim, Blacks, whoever. But an honest person shouldn’t have to tip-toe around the issue, trying to avoid the smudge of racism. We should all be able to read, think, and talk critically, kneading ideas without having a visceral reaction of recoil and dismissal.

I’ve been called a racist before, and I’m sure I’ll be called a racist again. But this isn’t a reason to change ones views. When I look at the facts, when I look at how our world is currently constituted, I see what I see. This is a time when the overriding motives and characteristics of those who wish to kill us are inextricably sewn up with race and religion. Am we supposed to ignore this?

We have just seen yet another example of Islamic fanatic terrorism in Russia. But the world seems to be ignoring the fact that these perpetrators were Islamic extremists. Are we to ignore reality in favor of a more comforting mirage?

We attend one of the great academic institutions in the world. We should be able to listen to ideas. Tomorrow night a woman is coming here with an idea that seems offensive to some: that we should put a little extra scrutiny on someone simply because of the color of their skin. Dr. King would be dismayed. But he didn’t have to face this threat.

No serious person advocates rounding up all Muslims, but to take their religion and national origin into account, to add those qualities to a list of other possible criteria, seems reasonable, and in fact, necessary. You think it’s offensive and racist? That does me no good. But, you have a logical and rational reason why it’s useless? Then come speak to me. I’d love to be proven wrong. I’m sure Ms. Malkin would also.

To advocate scrutiny based on race is an unpleasant necessity. But it’s what my logical mind tells me. So, think about it. Civilly debate it. Listen to the arguments. Then, please, tell me why I’m wrong.

Ethan Lutske is a third-year UC Berkeley political science student. Respond at opinion [at] dailycal.org.

Ms Malkin has the right to free speech, as does the looney left. If you don't like what she has to say, then stay home and ignore her, and don't buy her books. It always amazes me that the left assumes only THEY have the right to free speech. Ms Malkin has sole millions of book, and if people in Berkeley want to hear her, you have no right whatsoever to stop it. Until you understand this basic, fundamental aspect of free speech, you have no business even commenting on what she has to say. Free speech is not just for what you want to hear - it is, more importantly, for what you do NOT want to hear. Read and learn. And please grow up.

you are one of the least articulate chumps around here. and that's really saying something, buddy... who let you out anyways....

bit of logic yourself there. Hope you didn't strain yourself to bad.

...except that i spelled my words correctly.

um, this isn't that difficult to understand, or it shouldn't be so complex for you. the first amendment describes the relationship between the government and people, restricting the government from infringing on speech, religion, assembly and press activities of the citizens.

It does not describe the relationship between citizens. If members of the Lyndon LaRouche group or hare krishnas decided to set up on the sidewalk outside your house with signs, shouting slogans, you would be entitled to open your window and tell them to shut up. However the government would not be able to arrest them or drive them off. You would not be entitled to throw water balloons at them or threaten them, because that would not be your own form of speech, but would be violence.
Likewise, the UC spartacist league was not restricting the free speech of Michelle Malkin with their signs. You, but trying to stop them from talking, would be restricting their own speech. What we were discussing above, but that you failed to understand, was whether it was politically prudent for the spartacist leagu+ miscellaneous other students to do this because everyone knows that Malkin will use pictures of them to say that they were trying to restrict her free speech, employing this misunderstanding of the first amendment that you have.

Free speech isn't about you defending your right to say something, or about defending the rights of someone to say something you agree with.

Free speech IS about defending the rights of someone to say something you find offensive.

Ms. Malkin is attempting to engage in rational discourse regarding an event in history - an event that was carried out by the Father of the New Deal, of all people.

The Kingdom of Berkeley is no more a home to Free Speech than any dictatorship.