NNA Breaking News Update 11/25/1998..
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NNA Breaking News Update 11/25/98
1. AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOES CHEER GAINS
2. Black Panther Makes Chicago Mayor Bid
3. Denny's Not Liable In Bias Case
4. Nappy Hair' book causes school furor; teacher removed from
classroom
5. Eddie Bauer Settles Bias Lawsuit against black shoplifters
6. 14 Charged With Cemetery Vandalism
7. Jews are biggest target of crimes of religious bias
8. EPA To Keep Disaster Data off Net
World News
9. Governor plans stops in Israel, Egypt next week
10. Volkswagen's Wartime Travesty
---------------------------------------------------------------
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOES CHEER GAINS
Chicago Tribune Staff Writer
SEATTLE -- To hear John Carlson tell it, Washington state is the
catalyst that will usher in America's next civil rights movement.
With the passage of an anti-affirmative action initiative he helped
sponsor, Carlson believes Washington voters will jump-start a stalled
movement by spurring other states and Congress to dismantle gender
and racial preference programs he asserts are discriminatory.
Then America, he proclaims, finally would be able to achieve Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of a colorblind society.
"When people (in the future) look back, they will see this as a new
era in civil rights," said Carlson, who is host of an Internet talk
program in Seattle. "After decades of magnifying race through
preference programs, this new era maximizes race and focuses
affirmative action on people's circumstances rather than their
skin color."
Supporters of Washington's Initiative 200, which bans race and
gender preferences in government hiring, contracting and school
admissions, say their Nov. 3 triumph with 58 percent of the vote
demonstrates that the campaign resonated with mainstream voters
and shows that the measure's model, California's Proposition 209,
was not an anomaly.
California, though important to the movement as the most populous
state, could be dismissed for its proclivity for passing offbeat
initiatives.
But the Washington victory is significant, according to observers,
because the state better represents middle-American sensibilities.
Washington has a strong liberal base as demonstrated by the
re-election of key Democrats to Congress and voters' approval Nov. 3
of measures that legalized medical marijuana and raised the minimum
wage.
"I am struck by the fact that (Initiative 200) opponents outspent
advocates 2-1, all the newspapers opposed it, and Microsoft and
Boeing opposed it, yet it passed," said Carl Cohen, a philosophy
professor at the University of Michigan, whose protests of the
school's racial-preference policies sparked an anti-affirmative
action lawsuit against the university.
"The population around the country is unhappy with deliberate racial
preferences," he added. "If the people of Michigan had the opportunity
to vote, I think they would say no too."
Meanwhile, architects of the anti-preferences campaign are preparing
a blueprint to propel the movement forward, focusing their attention
and financial resources next on the states of Michigan and Nebraska
and the city of Houston.
Not content with relying on a piecemeal approach, the network of
activists, scholars and lawyers involved in the movement intend to
renew efforts to abolish preferences on a national scale through
Congress and the courts.
The movement's leaders also are studying a bold yet potentially
divisive new tactic that they say will transform America into a
race-neutral society.
Ward Connerly, a California businessman and University of California
regent who led the Proposition 209 campaign, is considering sponsoring
another initiative in California in 2000 that would prohibit
governments from collecting racial data on employees, students
and contractors.
"If you eliminate preferences, the next logical thing is to take
(racial and ethnic information) out of people's hands," Connerly
said. "This would make race irrelevant faster than eliminating
preferences.
"Multiracial groups and the Libertarian Party would get behind it.
Liberals clinging to the ideal of a colorblind society would support
it too. It would pass by a greater margin than Proposition 209,"
which received 54 percent of the vote in 1996.
Exempted from the law, he said, would be research institutions that
study such diseases as sickle cell anemia, which primarily affects
African-Americans, and law-enforcement agencies that need racial
descriptions to apprehend suspects.
While Connerly considers offering a new initiative, moves are under
way to take the campaign against preferences to the nation's
heartland.
Michigan and Nebraska are among about 15 states where anti-preference
campaigns fizzled out in the legislature or in the signature-gathering
phase. But Connerly, whose American Civil Rights Coalition provided
organizational expertise and marshaled financial resources to bolster
Washington state's campaign, has targeted the states as part of his
strategy to spread the movement.
"There are a number of (anti-preference) lawsuits at the University
of Michigan," Connerly said, which he maintained could make the state
ripe for change.
"Nebraska would be an easy victory," he added. "The state is
conservative with deep-rooted principles. Once we talk about
fundamental fairness, nobody would be able to argue against it."
A community group in Houston may reintroduce Proposition A. The
measure passed a year ago, but a judge invalidated the election,
ruling that city leaders went too far when they changed the text
of the initiative to denote it as an affirmative action ban.
"Looking at the Washington results, we conclude that the vast majority
of Americans want to see the current system of racial and gender
preferences end," said Edward Blum, co-organizer of the Houston
Civil Rights Initiative.
The backlash against affirmative action began two decades ago with a
landmark 1978 case in which a white man, Allen Bakke, sued the
University of California-Davis medical school for denying him
admission while accepting less qualified blacks. The U.S. Supreme
Court ruled that the school discriminated against Bakke but was
justified in using race-conscious policies to foster diversity as
long as they were not the only admissions criteria.
In recent years, white students have filed discrimination lawsuits
targeting admissions policies at University of Texas, University of
Michigan and University of Washington.
After the Nov. 3 voting, exit polls showed that Initiative 200's
supporters represented all racial and economic groups in Washington.
The initiative establishes a state law, rather than a constitutional
amendment as Proposition 209 did, and so the Washington attorney
general's office is reviewing how the measure would square with
affirmative action laws. Meanwhile, a commission appointed by Gov.
Gary Locke and committees at the state universities are studying
how best to implement it.
"We are setting up our own committee to monitor how well (the state
and universities) are complying with Initiative 200," Carlson said.
"The breadth and depth of this victory make good-faith compliance
all the more important."
Affirmative action supporters are downplaying the significance of
Initiative 200, saying other election trends indicate a backlash
against such typically conservative causes.
The election of Democrats to the governor's office and U.S. Senate
in California, affirmative action supporters say, demonstrates a
growing dissatisfaction with Republican leaders there who had
endorsed Proposition 209 as well as other initiatives that banned
bilingual education and barred illegal immigrants from receiving
publicly funded services.
Civil rights organizations, including the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and
the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, are intensifying their campaigns
against anti-affirmative action forces. Their strategy involves
building broad coalitions, highlighting why affirmative action is
needed and confronting those who want to end preferences on their
"misuse" of civil rights themes.
"The opponents of affirmative action never marched with Martin Luther
King, never fought against discrimination in the South and never read
all of his words in context," said Butch Wing, the Rainbow/PUSH
Coalition's California state coordinator.
"They are extracting one or two sentences of Dr. King's words to
attack his deeds. Dr. King was a proponent of affirmative action."
In his 1964 book "Why We Can't Wait," King advocated "compensatory
or preferential treatment" for blacks to rectify past injustices.
Theodore Shaw, associate director and counsel for the NAACP Legal
Defense Fund, said the key to defeating measures such as Initiative
200 in the future is to clearly explain to voters that they would
dismantle affirmative action. Initiative 200, like Proposition 209,
was carefully worded as a "civil rights" issue that would ban
discrimination.
"People in Washington were very confused on what they were voting
for," Shaw said.
--
[Another sign of the times]
Black Panther Makes Chicago Mayor Bid
CHICAGO (AP) - U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther leader
and one of Chicago's most outspoken political activists, vowed Monday
to end a culture of ``exclusion and cronyism'' by defeating Mayor
Richard M. Daley.
``I will manage an administration that values inclusion, empowerment
and cooperation,'' Rush said in announcing his bid for mayor. ``The
Daley administration values exclusion and cronyism, and it suffers
from a lack of vision.''
Rush, 52, gained fame in the 1960s as a leader of the radical
Black Panther Party. He later got involved in Democratic politics,
winning a congressional seat in 1992.
Rush accused Daley of putting all the city's resources into
rebuilding the downtown while ignoring Chicago's deteriorating
South and West Sides - home to many black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
An adviser to Daley, who has served eight years and has yet to
announce whether he will seek another term, said the Democratic
mayor has encouraged development throughout Chicago.
``Mayor Daley ... has compiled a record of accomplishment in every
area of the city that he should be proud of,'' adviser Avis LaVelle
said.
Political observers in this heavily Democratic city said Rush hopes
to follow the path paved by the city's first black mayor, the late
Harold Washington, whose 1983 victory stunned the mostly white
political machine that kept Daley's father, Richard J. Daley, in
office from 1955 to 1976.
But Washington ran at a time when many Democrats were dissatisfied
with machine politics, said Don Rose, a Chicago political consultant.
Daley has done well to neutralize Democratic factions who were
against him early in his career, he said.
``It's hard to see how Bobby picks up a coalition of dissenters,''
Rose said. ``The odds are Daley wins in the first round.''
The election will be the first to be held under a new system in
which all candidates run in a nonpartisan primary in February. If
no candidate receives a majority in the primary, the top two
vote-getters compete in an April runoff.
--
Denny's Not Liable In Bias Case
(TAMPA) -- A Tampa federal judge has ruled that the Denny's
restaurant chain is not responsible for the acts of a franchise
holder who has already been punished for discriminating against
black customers. U-S District Judge Steven Merryday excused Denny's
Incorporated from a case involving a Plant City restaurant. Three
years ago, 36 black choir members say they waited in vain for
service while white diners were seated, ate and left. They sued,
and the franchise owner was ordered to pay each of the singers one-
thousand dollars. Denny's Incorporated paid 54-Million dollars in
1994 to settle a class action discrimination case filed after
incidents in California and Maryland.
--
Nappy Hair' book causes school furor; teacher removed from classroom
NEW YORK (AP) - A white Brooklyn teacher who gave an acclaimed
children's book called ``Nappy Hair'' to her mostly black and
Hispanic third-graders was removed from her classroom after
parents complained and threatened her.
Ruth Sherman, 27, was transferred out on Tuesday after a tense
school meeting Monday night.
``The term `nappy' is generally derogatory and not every parent
felt that using a book like `Nappy Hair' in a classroom setting,
although the author was black, was a wise way to go,'' said Board
of Education spokesman J.D. LaRock. LaRock said that despite some
``provocative passages,'' the book has a positive message.
Told in a gospel-like, call-and-response style, the book is about a
little girl with the ``nappiest, fuzziest, the most screwed up,
squeezed up, knotted up'' hair. It received rave reviews, including
one from The New York Times.
``The idea that it is a racist book is ridiculous,'' said the author,
Carolivia Herron, who believes the book should be used to teach
racial diversity. ``This book is a wonderful celebration of nappy,
African-American hair.''
The district superintendent told Ms. Sherman to report to district
headquarters instead of her classroom, pending further investigation,
according to Ron Davis, a spokesman for the teachers union.
Ms. Sherman, who began teaching full-time this fall, could face
transfer or disciplinary action. She did not return calls Tuesday.
Davis said several parents at the meeting stood up and threatened
Ms. Sherman, shouting things like, ``Watch out!'' and ``We're
going to get you!''
He said he believed the parents had not read the entire book,
but had seen only a few pages or heard the title. Davis said
the book ``was meant to encourage appreciation of our cultural
diversity and ethnic uniqueness.''
Ms. Herron, 52, a professor of English at the University of
California at Chico, said the book is based on a story her
80-something uncle tells about her at family gatherings. A
recording of her uncle's tale was played at a Smithsonian
program in Washington.
Ms. Sherman ``could have taught `Mary Had a Little Lamb' or some
other books that had nothing to do with the African-American
culture,'' Ms. Herron said. ``Instead, she tried to relate to
the culture of the children she was teaching.''
--
[If you're Black and want to steal, visit Eddie Bauer clothing stores
and receive $1 Million.]
Eddie Bauer Settles Bias Lawsuit against black shoplifters
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Clothing retailer Eddie Bauer has settled a racial
discrimination lawsuit with three black teen-agers held by a guard
who thought they were shoplifting, a spokeswoman said.
The Redmond, Wash.-based company was in the process of appealing a
jury decision siding with the teen-agers when the settlement was
reached last week, according to spokeswoman Lurma Rackley.
Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
A security guard at the company's Fort Washington, Md., warehouse
store falsely accused Alonzo Jackson, Rasheed Plummer and Marco
Cunningham of shoplifting and held them against their will Oct. 25,
1995.
Jackson, then 16, was forced to remove a shirt he had bought a day
earlier. The shirt was returned to Jackson after he went home and
brought back a receipt.
The teen-agers sued for $85 million. A federal jury awarded them
$1 million last year after acquitting the company of discrimination,
but convicting the company of defaming the teens and negligently
supervising its guards.
The settlement was ``amicable'' and ``reached without rancor,''
Rackley said.
``Our company does not discriminate. We strive to maintain an
atmosphere that conveys our company's core values, legacy of
quality service and respect for everyone,'' said Eddie Bauer
CEO and President Rick Fersch.
The teens' attorney, Donald Temple, was unavailable for comment.
--
14 Charged With Cemetery Vandalism
(NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ) -- Eleven teenagers and three adults have been
charged with vandalizing a Jewish cemetery in central New Jersey.
Authorities say that the defendants may have ties to hate groups
who use the Internet to spread anti- Semitic propaganda. Tombstones
in the Mount Lebanon Cemetery in Woodbridge were spraypainted with
swastikas and ethnic and racial slurs. The vandalism took place
during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
--
[Jews? Hated? Have they ever asked themselves why? The Jewish
Telegraphic Agency might want to look in the mirror for the
answer.]
Jews are biggest target of crimes of religious bias
NEW YORK, Nov. 24 (JTA) -- Jews and Jewish property are the prime
targets of hate crimes motivated by religious prejudice, the Federal
Bureau of Investigation has concluded.
The FBI's annual report on hate crimes, released this week, tallied
1,087 crimes directed against Jews and Jewish institutions in 1997,
almost 80 percent of all such acts perpetrated on the basis of
religion.
Responding to the findings, the Anti-Defamation League issued a
statement saying, ``This high level of violence and vandalism
directed against Jews is another reminder that violent anti-Semitism
remains a significant problem in America."
All told, 8,049 hate crimes were reported by the FBI for last year,
representing a decrease of about 700 from the previous year.
The statistics were collected by 11,211 law enforcement agencies
across the United States, 144 fewer than the year before, marking
the first time since the Hate Crimes Statistics Act was enacted in
1990 that the number of participating agencies declined from one year
to the next.
Calling the report ``a disturbing measure of hate in America," ADL
urged expanded bipartisan efforts at state and federal levels to
combat ``bias- motivated violence."
It is not clear whether the slight decrease in the number of reported
hate crimes is attributable to better anti-hate programming and
enforcement or to what the ADL called the ``unwelcome'' decline in
the number of participating agencies.
The FBI report came as ADL released the findings of a survey showing
that Americans' attitudes toward Jews are improving overall, but
that African Americans are nearly four times more likely than whites
to hold anti-Jewish beliefs.
The survey found that the number of American adults with strongly
anti-Jewish views has dropped from 20 percent to 12 percent since
1992, when ADL last conducted a study of such attitudes.
--
[What is the FBI afraid of? I thought everyone loved what America has
become?]
EPA To Keep Disaster Data off Net
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Environmental Protection Agency is abandoning
its idea of posting potential disaster casualty figures for chemical
plants on the Internet. The FBI and others had been alarmed that the
data might aid terrorists in planning attacks.
``The EPA and FBI recognize that chemical facilities may be a target
for terrorism even without the sensitive data on the Internet,'' the
EPA wrote in a letter this month to House Commerce Chairman Thomas
Bliley, R-Va.
The Associated Press reported Oct. 30 that the FBI, the CIA, the
National Fire Chiefs' Association and lawmakers, including Bliley,
had been raising concerns for nearly a year about the Internet plan
for distributing the ``worst case scenario'' data. The EPA, however,
appeared reluctant to drop the concept.
The intelligence community was concerned that putting the data on the
Internet might give terrorists a road map for targeting facilities
for the most catastrophic attacks. Environmental groups strongly
advocated disclosure of the information, saying it was important for
people who live near plants to know potential dangers.
At the time of the AP story, agency officials said they were working
to find a way to allay the concerns.
The EPA informed Congress a week later it had adopted an alternate
idea suggested by the FBI that would make the worst case data, which
includes casualty estimates in case of a chemical release for each
plant, available to state and local agencies and libraries via a
secure computer system.
The public still will get access to other information about chemical
plants on the Internet, including accident histories for each plant
and prevention plans.
``Both agencies will continue to support a community's right to
know about chemical risks as it is an important aspect of accident
prevention,'' the EPA wrote Bliley.
Bliley plans to monitor the EPA's efforts as it explores other
ways to make the worst-case-scenario data available to the public,
such as on a computerized compact disc or through the Freedom of
Information Act, to make sure it does not stray into the same
concerns. The FBI says it remains ``greatly opposed'' to the
CD-ROM distribution.
It was Congress that first mandated that the information be made
public. The Clean Air Act required the EPA to disclose information
it has collected from some 66,000 chemical manufacturing sites
across the nation under its Risk Management Plan.
The law didn't specify how the information should be disclosed. The
EPA initially picked the Internet for the widest possible
dissemination. The agency now says it will work with the FBI
to develop safer technologies in the future for disseminating
sensitive data on the Internet.
--
World News
[The following two articles could be aptly named, "Republican
Presidential hopefuls announce their Judeophilia"]
Governor plans stops in Israel, Egypt next week
Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau
AUSTIN -- Gov. George W. Bush, who plans a trip to Israel next week,
will first visit Egypt with his father, former President George Bush,
the governor's office said Monday.
Karen Hughes, the governor's spokeswoman, said his trip to Cairo this
week will be part of an overseas family vacation that began Sunday.
Hughes said the governor was invited to Cairo by his father, who is
scheduled to speak to Egyptian businessmen there at a dinner later
this week.
The spokeswoman said she did not know who else, if anyone, the
governor would meet with while in Egypt.
Bush and his wife, Laura, will visit Israel with two other Republican
governors -- Paul Cellucci of Massachusetts and Michael Leavitt of
Utah -- Nov. 29 to Dec. 2 on their return home from vacation.
The Israeli visit will be sponsored by the National Jewish Coalition
and the Republican Governors Association.
Bush's office would not confirm a published report that Bush will meet
with Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon and Israeli President Ezer
Weizmann.
Bush is widely considered the front-runner for the Republican
presidential nomination in 2000, although he says he has not
made up his mind about a White House race.
Because he has had little foreign policy exposure, his Middle Eastern
stops will likely increase speculation that he will run for president.
"I don't think it's political at all," Bush told The Associated Press
last week when discussing his trip to Israel. "I'm sure some will try
to read politics into it. This is a trip I've wanted to take with my
wife."
--
[The extortion continues. What would a Nazi story be without mass
graves, killing babies, forcing women to work while pregnant,
spoiled milk, murders, torture and of course evil Nazis. While
the media provides the hysteria, Jews sue the pants off of
everyone they can.]
Volkswagen's Wartime Travesty
Volkswagen says: 'We cannot forget the past, but we must learn
from it in order that it is never repeated in the future.'
Volkswagen's Kinderheim
(CBS) A three-month investigation by CBS This Morning Investigative
Correspondent Roberta Baskin reveals an untold story of World War II.
The second and third parts of her story will be broadcast on This
Morning on Tuesday, Nov. 24, and Wednesday, Nov. 25. The text of
some of the newly-discovered documents from the National Archives
can be accessed below.
Following is the first of Roberta Baskin's reports:
While European Jews were herded into concentration camps and murdered
during the second World War, many Russian and Polish Christians were
abducted from their homes and taken to Germany to grease the Nazi
war machine. They, too, were treated as less than human.
This summer, as we searched through previously classified war crimes
documents at the National Archives in Washington, we discovered a
"Kinderheim." It means "children's home." And it's a tragic chapter
in an already horrific history.
In the midst of war, no one rescued the babies. With a madman in
charge, their cries were ignored. They were not Jewish babies.
They were not in concentration camps. These babies were the children
of Russian and Polish laborers forced to work at gunpoint in German
factories. Their story largely went unreported until now.
Danish historian Therkel Straede is one of the few who knows the
story: "They were considered worthless," he says of the infants.
Therkel Straede
The factory that used the highest percentage of forced laborers?
Volkswagen, with headquarters in central Germany in a city now
known as Wolfsburg. "Volkswagen was a leader in terms of getting
slave labor," Straede says, and adds:< "Hitler was sort of the
patron of Volkswagen, you could say."
Hitler and company admire a Volkswagen model
Hitler delighted in the famous Beetle design introduced in the late
'30s. He became one of the first to take one for a ride.
But when the war began, German workers went off to fight. Volkswagen
asked the Nazis to replace them with thousands of foreign laborers.
But there was a problem with many of these workers. As Straede puts
it, "More than half of the Polish and Russian employees, forced
laborers at Volkswagen, were women." Some of those women were
pregnant. Others became pregnant. The Nazis ordered that children's
homes be set up to keep the foreigners' babies separate from German
babies.
Life for them was grim, says Straede: "They didn't conceive of them
as human beings... They were considered sub-human... These children
were not of any value."
At first, the babies were placed in a children's home near the
mothers' barracks at the factory. Later, Volkswagen took the
children away. The reason, says Straede, was "to prevent the mothers
from spending too much time with the children and basically keep
them working."
In June of 1944, Volkswagen moved its children's home eight miles
down the road, away from the factory. For the mothers, it meant they
could no longer breast feed or even see their babies more than once
or twice a month.
For the infants, it meant they were in the care of Nazi nurses. And
that became a death sentence.
Sara Frenkel
Polish-born Sara Frenkel was sent to work at the children's home:
"They saw children dying, and they didn't do anything about it."
Hundreds of babies were sent to the Volkswagen children's home - a
home infested with bugs, raging with infections, and managed with
indifference.
Frenkel recalls: "The children weren't cleaned up. They laid in
their wet diapers. The children became sore. There were bacteria...
bed bugs and lice... It smelled badly there."
The mothers worked 12-hour shifts and needed a police permit to
see their own babies. So the babies were left to fend for themselves.
"Some would develop...these infections." says Straede, adding:
"From...the bites and the bugs. This was constantly going on for
months and months. Every day, somebody would die."
"Children can't be raised between lice and bugs." Frenkel comments,
"That's impossible."
As the wartime documents show, Volkswagen management knew that
every month, more babies were dying. November 1944: 20 babies
received, 21 died. February 1945: 30 babies received, 26 died.
March 1945: 27 babies received, 28 died.
[More Mass Graves. Wait for the Baby Gas Chambers]
Mass Grave of Babies
Straede asserts: "The management, top management, knew what was
going on."
They knew the babies weren't taking the little milk they were
given. "I picked up the bottle to check if the milk wasn't too
hot." says Frenkel. "I tried some milk and realized that it was
sour."
During 1945, the last year of the war, it got worse. Frenkel
says she still thinks about it every day. Nearly every infant
placed in the Volkswagen home died.
Dead children whose lives could have been saved, according to
Frenkel:"If people took care of the children, all of them could
have survived."
In all, 365 defenseless babies perished.
--
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