THE WORST WORSENS
 By Thomas Sowell
In his book “The Great Crash 1929,” John Kenneth Galbraith said: “The worst continued to worsen.” The same can be said of the Duke University “rape” case and District Attorney Michael Nifong.
After all this time, it finally came out in court last week that the DNA samples collected from the underwear and private parts of the alleged victim contained DNA from other men -- but none from the Duke lacrosse players who were accused of raping her.
The head of the DNA testing laboratory testified in court under oath that both he and Nifong knew this and kept it secret.
You think that is incredible? How about a statement made afterwards by District Attorney Nifong that he didn’t say anything about this publicly because he was “trying to avoid dragging any names through the mud”?
He certainly did not avoid dragging the names of the Duke lacrosse players through the mud. He not only denounced them, they were paraded in handcuffs in front of the national media. Their pictures were on every television news program across the country.
If these young men get completely exonerated, this episode will still follow them the rest of their lives. Yet they have not been convicted of anything and have not even gone to trial -- which is scheduled for next spring, if it ever takes place.
Indeed, they have not even been interviewed by the police or by the District Attorney who issued denunciations of these white lacrosse players when he was running for office and making a play for the black vote.
Nor has the District Attorney interviewed the woman who claimed to have been raped. In a “he said, she said” situation, anyone interested in the credibility of the two sides would at least have tried to find out what specifically they claimed.
But that is only if you care about the truth, rather than the politics of the situation. Politically, the District Attorney had a black woman who claimed that white men had raped her. That’s all he needed to get elected.
Nifong has shown from day one what he was interested in. Showing the “rape” victim only photographs of white Duke lacrosse players was a violation of the basic principles of a lineup.
People who are known to be innocent are included in lineups just to test the credibility of whoever is identifying those picked out as guilty.
If you pick out somebody who was known to be overseas at the time, there goes your credibility. But District Attorney Nifong was not about to risk having the accuser’s credibility tested, and certainly not before his election.
All the evidence that has come out has pointed the other way. One of the alleged rapists has a paper trail that shows he wasn’t even there when he was supposed to be raping the “exotic dancer.”
A black cab driver says he was with him, going to a bank’s ATM to get some money -- and bank records show him there at the time when he was supposed to be committing rape.
When confronted with the fact that DNA tests failed to show that any of the Duke lacrosse players’ DNA was present on the “exotic dancer,” Nifong said that they could have used condoms.
Every part of your body has DNA that is left wherever you have had bodily contact. When you shake someone’s hand, you leave your DNA. Each Duke student would have to have had a giant condom covering his whole body to avoid leaving DNA on someone he raped.
Far more is involved in this case than the misdeeds of one District Attorney. There is a segment of the black community -- a small segment, we can hope -- that figures it is payback time for all the black men who have been railroaded to jail on trumped-up charges involving the rape of white women.
The local branch of the NAACP, an organization which fought against such injustices in times past, has thrown its weight behind those who are trying to railroad three white students, who were not even born when these other injustices occurred.
Winston Churchill once said, “If the past sits in judgment on the present, the future will be lost.” Nowhere is that more true than when dealing with the explosive mixture of race and politics.
Nifong deserves to be removed from office and disbarred. If he gets away with all this, it will be a blank check for every prosecutor in the country to abuse the powers of the office.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com. |
2006: THE YEAR OF
PERPETUAL OUTRAGE
 By Michelle Malkin
It began with the Danish cartoons. It ended with the flying imams. Two thousand six was a banner year for the Religion of Perpetual Outrage. Twelve turbulent months of fist-waving, embassy-burning, fatwa-issuing mayhem, intimidation, and murder resounded with the ululations of the aggrieved. All this in the name of defending Islam from “insult.” Let’s review.
In late January, masked Palestinian gunmen took over a European Union office in Gaza City to protest the publication of a dozen cartoons about Islam, Mohammed, and self-censorship in the Danish newspaper the Jyllands-Posten. They stormed the building, burned Danish flags, and spearheaded an international boycott of Denmark’s products across the Muslim world.
The rage was manufactured pretext. The cartoons had been published four months earlier with little fanfare. It wasn’t until a delegation of instigating Danish imams toured Egypt with the cartoons -- plus a few inflammatory fake ones, including an old image of a French hog-calling contest participant deceptively portrayed as “anti-Muslim” -- that the fire started burning. Think the mainstream media will remember that? Not likely. They fell for the ruse and were slow to acknowledge it after American bloggers and Danish television exposed the scheme.
What was really behind Cartoon Rage? Muslim bullies were attempting to pressure Denmark over the International Atomic Energy Agency’s decision to report Iran to the U.N. Security Council for continuing with its nuclear research program. The chairmanship of the council was passing to Denmark at the time.
Alas, Western journalists, analysts, and apologists were too clouded by their cowardice and conciliation to see through the smoke. More than 800 were injured in the ensuing riots, and 130 people paid with their lives. The innocents included Italian Catholic priest Andrea Santoro, who was shot to death in Turkey on Feb. 5, by a teenage boy enraged by the illustrations. The Muslim gunman shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” as he murdered Father Santoro while the priest knelt praying in his church. Several brave moderate Muslim editors who stood up to the madness were jailed, fined, and convicted of crimes related to insulting Islam. The Danish cartoonists remain in hiding.
The world soon tired of Cartoon Rage, but the “peaceful” Muslim ragers were just warming up. They found excuses large and small to riot and threaten Western infidels. In India, they protested the magazine publication of a picture of a playing card showing an image of Mecca and also burned Valentine’s Day cards. An insult to Islam, they screamed. In Spain, they protested a Madrid store for selling a postcard with a mosque on it with the words “We slept here.” An insult to Islam, they protested. In Pakistan, they burned down a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, a Pizza Hut, and toppled Ronald McDonald. In Jakarta, they smashed the offices of Playboy magazine. You know why.
In June, the trial against lioness journalist Oriana Fallaci for insulting Islam commenced in Bergamo, Italy. She had been charged by professional Muslim rager Adel Smith of the Muslim Union of Italy of “vilipendio” -- vilifying Islam -- in her post-9/11 books slamming jihad. A judge had refused to throw out the case. She faced a pile of death threats and accusations of “Islamophobia” for speaking truth to Islamo-power.
Fallaci’s death from cancer during the fifth anniversary week of the September 11 terrorist attacks preempted the trial in Italy, but her passing did nothing to preempt the eternal rage of the perpetually outraged. The day she died, the grievance-mongers were shaking their fists and calling for the head of Pope Benedict XVI for his speech that made reference to a 14th-Century conversation touching on holy war and jihad. For engaging in open, honest intellectual and spiritual debate, he was condemned, lit afire in effigy, and targeted anew. The ragers bombed Christian churches in Gaza City and Nablus. They murdered Italian Sister Leonella Sgorbati, an elderly Catholic nun shot in the back by a Somalian jihadist stoked by Pope Rage. “Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim,” a Somalian cleric had declared. The Vatican made nice with Muslim leaders.
New outrages are always in bloom. In late September, it was a Berlin production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” that featured the decapitated head of Mohammed. A week later, it was a banyan tree attacked by Indonesian Muslims who wanted to disprove its mystical powers. A few days after that, it was former British foreign secretary Jack Straw, who had the audacity to make the very obvious observation that full Muslim veils impede communications between women and Westerners. Offensive! Disturbing! An insult to Islam!
Not to be outdone, a delegation of extortionist imams boarded a U.S. Airways flight in Minneapolis in November and tried to manufacture an international human-rights incident. They clamored for a boycott and threatened to sue.
The good news: The fire did not catch here this time. The bad news: As Oriana Fallaci warned before her death: “The hate for the West swells like a fire fed by the wind. The clash between us and them is not a military one. It is a cultural one, a religious one, and the worst is still to come.”
Michelle Malkin is author of the new book “Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild.” Her e-mail address is malkin@comcast.net. |
Cannot remain silent
Last Monday and Tuesday, December 11 and 12, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hosted a Holocaust Deniers conference in Tehran. The purpose was to bring together revisionist “historians” who believe that the Holocaust, in which 6 milllion Jews and millions of other “undesirables” were systematically murdered by the Nazis, never took place.
The conference was praised by attendees, stating that the gathering “gives them a chance to air theories that are banned in parts of Europe.” Ahmadinejad initiated the gathering in an attempt to bolster his image as a leader in the Arab world who stands up to Israel, Europe and the United States. He has denied the existence of the Holocaust repeatedly in State speeches and knows it creates an image that will whip up anti-Israel support at home and abroad.
As the son of Holocaust survivors I condemn this sort of gathering in the most strident terms. In a perfect world we would have learned from the lessons of history. Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq and any number of other insane wars and massacres would not have occurred. The people who express these hateful ideas do so to further their personal agendas. If there was a way to get Deniers to accept the truth of the past, they might see the ignorance of their positions. But logic certainly won’t do it.
Reels of photographs taken at the Death Camps won’t do it. If I went to the conference with pictures of my grandparents, who I never met, and told them stories of my father’s family who was completely wiped out, or took my mother there to tell her story, they wouldn’t listen. They have their agenda mapped out and THE TRUTH ISN’T ON IT.
I do not advocate restricting anybody’s right to express their ideas in any type of forum. I am a firm believer in free speech, so he, and his cohorts in the conference, have a right to believe whatever despicable swill they wish. With this belief, however, comes the responsibility to speak out against such ideas when they are so patently offensive and wrong. I could not remain silent on this issue and hope the outcry is at least as loud as the publicity they have garnered through their ridiculous pronouncements.
Respectfully,
Ranaga Farbiarz |
