'Girl taught to hate'

Looks like someone skipped out on Parenting 101:

A seven-year-old girl apprehended by Child and Family Services said she believed only white people deserve to live and talked casually of how to kill black people, a court heard yesterday.

"She said 'You would whip black people with a ball and chain and they would die,' " testified a social worker who interviewed the girl after she showed up at school last year with a swastika and racist writings drawn on her body.

Child and Family Services is seeking permanent guardianship of the now eight-year-old girl and her three-year-old stepbrother, while the boy's father is fighting to regain custody of the children. A two-week trial began yesterday.

The mother and the boy's father, who are now separated, cannot be identified under terms of a publication ban.

The children's mother was not present in court yesterday. A lawyer retained on her behalf just last week asked that the case be adjourned. Justice Marianne Rivoalen rejected the request.

The social worker testified the girl told her she and her parents routinely watched "white pride" videos which discussed killing black people. She said the girl said "everyone who is not white should die."

The girl also said her parents featured her and her brother in a poster with the words "Missing: a future for white children" and then plastered it across town.

In an assessment forwarded to CFS, the social worker said the girl was taught to hate everyone who is not white, was "very knowledgeable about (Adolf) Hitler," and considered such racist beliefs as normal.

The social worker said the children's mother called her several days after they were apprehended "yelling about freedom of speech" and protesting that she and her husband were being persecuted for their religious beliefs.

'PROUD TO BE WHITE'

The social worker said the girl's mother told her she didn't wash off the racist writings and symbols "because she wanted to piss off the school" and that she was "proud to be white."

The father's lawyer asked the social worker if the children would have been candidates for apprehension if one of them showed up at school with a "sign of the cross or a Star of David" drawn on their arm.

The social worker said "it had nothing to do with what was drawn on her arm, it was what was disclosed in the interview (with the girl)."

Outside court, the girl's biological father defended her mother as a good person easily manipulated by others.

"If (she) met a priest on Wednesday she'd be a nun by Thursday," the man said. "I know there is good in her ... But she is a lost kid."

The trial continues.

Thoughts?

Ice-Cream ads using Obama spark racism complaints

Obama ice cream, anyone? Chocolate-vanilla ice cream is one of several Russian products being marketed using America's first black president, even as critics call the ads racist.

Other ads featuring US President Barack Obama have promoted tanning salons and tooth-whitening services.

But the creator of one Obama-themed ad -- for ice cream bars which have a chocolate-flavoured centre embedded in a layer of vanilla -- insisted Friday that it was not racist and should be seen as a joke.

The ad for Duet ice cream bars features a smiling, cartoonish black man flashing a V-for-Victory sign in front of the US Capitol, along with the Russian slogan: "Everyone's talking about it: dark, inside white!"

Some blasted the ad as insensitive after it surfaced on English-language websites this week. "This is just racist," said one visitor to the Ads of the World website, while another asked: "Is the ice cream as tasteless as the ad?"

Andrei Gubaidullin, who created the ad, told AFP that it was not racist and that Russia simply had a different attitude to race than Western countries.

"For Russia, this is not racist. It is fun and that's it," said Gubaidullin, creative director at Voskhod advertising agency, based in the Urals Mountains city of Yekaterinburg.

"We don't consider teasing ethnic groups racist. It is just seen as a joke," he said by telephone, adding that he personally liked Obama.

In another ad to play on Obama's race, a leaflet recently seen in Moscow used a photograph of the US president to promote a tanning salon.

A leaflet circulated in Moscow last fall showed a smiling Obama with the slogan "Full Dental Democracy!" to promote the MeraDent chain of dental clinics.

People of African descent are relatively few in Russia and those who do live in the country often complain of racism.

Racism row over chimp cartoon sparks heated debate

Racist, unfunny, offensive, unpatriotic, hilarious, confusing, lame.



Reactions are as mixed as they are strong to Tuesday's New York Post cartoon that depicted the police shooting of a chimpanzee. Two police officers, one with a smoking gun, are near the chimp's bullet-pierced body. "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill," one officer says.

The Post's Sean Delonas used a typical editorial cartoon "trope" of linking two current news stories: the shooting of a chimp after it mauled a Connecticut woman and President Obama's signing of the stimulus bill.

But soon after the issue hit newsstands, the Rev. Al Sharpton -- and other black opinion makers across the country blasted the cartoon as an attack on Obama's skin color and African-Americans in general.

"Being that the stimulus bill has been the first legislative victory of President Barack Obama and has become synonymous with him, it is not a reach to wonder: Are they inferring that a monkey wrote the last bill?" Sharpton said.

Jelani Cobb, a Spelman College history professor and the author of a forthcoming book about Obama, says the cartoon offended on many levels.

He winced at the cartoon's gun violence as a stoker to the nervousness some feel about the safety of a black president in a historically racist country.

"When I looked at it, there was no getting around the implications of it," Cobb said. "Clearly anyone with an iota of sense knows the close association of black people and the primate imagery."

Dozens of cartoonists weighed in on dailycartoonist.com. Some said it was a simpleton move to use the tired metaphor of a monkey to make fun of something -- no matter what it was. One poster wrote, "Wha...?" pointing out that Obama didn't write the stimulus package; lawmakers did.

On the cartoon "danger scale" of 1 to 10, the chimp cartoon scored a 9, Dilbert creator Scott Adams says.

Adams liked the cartoon, but judging its overall worthiness is difficult -- a gauge best measured by an audience, not the cartoonist, he said.

"Any cartoon has to be a little bit dangerous, and he's definitely achieved that," he said. "You have to perceive that the cartoonist is in personal danger or there's something dangerous about it, that at the cartoonist's next cocktail party, half of the people there are going to want to poison his drink."

Just like George Carlin's seven dirty words, there are also no-no's for cartoons, Adams said. "He's got everything you shouldn't have," he said. "Gunfire, that's the one thing you cannot get away with. And then he's got violence against animals, also a pretty big no."

New York Post editor Col Allan referred calls to a public relations representative who sent out this statement: "The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington's efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist."

Delonas is not giving interviews, the PR rep said.

If there is any apology due, it shouldn't come from the cartoonist, insisted Ted Rall, the president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, whose cartoons run in 100 publications across the United States.

An editor should object if there is a strong possibility that a cartoon will not resonate the way the cartoonist wanted, he said. Cartoonists have to be free to be creative, to not edit themselves during the drawing process.

"He was trying trying to jam two stories together, and unfortunately this is what a lot of lame editors like," Rall said. "The comparison he had in mind: The guy who wrote the package wasn't Obama; it was a bunch of white economic advisers, and he [Delonas] wasn't thinking about Obama."

The Post cartoonist, he added, has the misfortune of working in a business that, over the past decade, has become a graveyard of gag jokes. A former editor once told Rall that satire in cartooning died after September 11.

"I have to wonder about the competence of his editors," Rall continued. "It goes with the 'make it shorter and dumber' mentality that's happening in print."

Cartoonist John Auchter, of the Grand Rapids Business Journal in Michigan, said Delonas had to expect people to be offended.

"The racial connotation of what he drew, it's really silly that either he or his editors couldn't anticipate that [reaction]," Auchter said. "When I think about all the things that are thrown around here with the accusations of being racist ... that is one of the things as a cartoonist you have to be aware of -- what you're doing and that you know things are going to be taken that way. You are the first-line editor."

Syndicated political cartoonist Chip Bok didn't find the Post cartoon racist, but he said it probably was in bad taste.

"A woman was terribly mauled and almost killed," he said. "That's really the only grounds by which [my editors] would throw out a cartoon. When it involves somebody's life like that, I would tend to stay away from it."

Bok knows a little about what it feels like to create a polarizing cartoon. In 2006, around the time of the Danish Mohammed cartoon controversy, the Akron Beacon Journal published a cartoon he drew showing a blurred picture of the Prophet Mohammed on CNN.

The cartoonist had been watching the network cover the story about Muslim anger over the Danish cartoons, which showed the prophet with a bomb crafted out of his turban. Bok was upset that CNN had chosen to blur the cartoon in its coverage.

The cartoonist immediately drew his cartoon, which showed a couple watching TV and saying, "Well, no wonder Muslims are upset. Muhammad looks like he's on acid."

"I was inundated with e-mail, the paper was picketed," he said. "There was quite a reaction."

Surrey B.C. man alleges assault and racial abuse by 3 off-duty police officers

Phil Khan says he is 'very traumatized'

The man who was allegedly assaulted by three off-duty Metro Vancouver police officers says he was beaten, robbed and racially abused.

Phil Khan spoke publicly Friday for the first time since the incident early Wednesday morning in downtown Vancouver.

Khan, who met the media outside his Surrey home, alleged that he was beaten for seven to eight minutes in an unprovoked assault and that the three assailants all smelled of alcohol.

Khan said he was working at the time, delivering newspapers, and was about to make a delivery to the Hyatt Regency Vancouver hotel on Burrard Street.

A man approached him and asked for directions to Broadway and Cambie Street in Vancouver, he said.

Khan, who met the media outside his Surrey home, alleged that he was beaten for seven to eight minutes in an unprovoked assault and that the three assailants all smelled of alcohol.

Khan said he was working at the time, delivering newspapers, and was about to make a delivery to the Hyatt Regency Vancouver hotel on Burrard Street.

A man approached him and asked for directions to Broadway and Cambie Street in Vancouver, he said.

"He says, 'Come here, you idiot,' and then I said, 'Take it easy,'" Khan said.

"I said, 'Let me finish this delivery first, and I will tell you how to go.' Then he kept on saying, 'You come here now.'"

According to Khan, the man then pulled Khan's jacket and started kicking him.

Two other men arrived in a taxi from a pub on nearby Granville Street and jumped into the fight, according to the cab driver who took them to the location outside the Hyatt hotel.

The driver of the cab, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Yash, said he called police at around 2:30 a.m.

Khan said the three men also racially abused him.

"They are telling me, 'We don't like brown people' and kept saying it and beating me."

He said he was crying out for help but was surprised by what the three men told him.

"They told me, 'We are the police. You don't need help. If you don't behave … we have a Taser,'" Khan said.

Khan said the men finally stopped beating him after some city workers and a cab driver came to help.

He said he was robbed of $200 and that after being beaten, he told his assailants, 'I'm half dead anyways after you guys beat me up so badly. You might as well use the Taser and then kill me.' That's the end of the story."

Khan's wife, Zabida, said her husband suffered both physical and psychological injuries and remains "on heavy medication."

"He has injuries in his stomach, back, knees [and] hands. He can't sleep," she said, adding he has had two doctor's visits since.

The couple has three young daughters, aged between four months and 4½.

"We are a very quiet family. We live in a very quiet neighbourhood," she said.

Khan said he always has great respect for police, who are protectors of the innocent, but he is utterly "very traumatized" by the ordeal.

"I feel very afraid now … I have always liked my job … now I feel very different, very afraid," he said.

Officers suspended or reassigned

The three off-duty officers were arrested by Vancouver police as a result of the altercation. The officers belong with the West Vancouver, New Westminster and Delta police departments.

The officers' names have not yet been released, and no charges have been laid. Vancouver police continue to investigate the incident.

The three police services of which the officers are members will each conduct an internal review of the case. All four investigations will be conducted by police and overseen by the B.C. police complaint commissioner.

A 38-year-old officer with New Westminster Police Service has been suspended (with pay) for at least 30 days. He joined the force four years ago.

A junior officer with West Vancouver Police Department, and a patrol constable who has three years' experience with Delta police, have both been reassigned to desk duties.

In a statement issued Friday Vancouver police Chief Jim Chu said the public should have confidence in the police investigation of three officers.

"This investigation is being pursued aggressively and fully. We are in the process of interviewing witnesses and examining evidence, including any video that may have been recorded," Chu said.

I'll hold off on passing judgement or pointing fingers until further information is released on the incident, but does anyone else have any thoughts?

White supremacists watched in lead up to Obama administration

Hate crimes experts and law enforcement officials are closely watching white supremacists across the country as Barack Obama prepares to be sworn in as the first black president of the United States.
So far, there is no known organized effort to express opposition to Obama's rise to the presidency other than a call by the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan for its members to wear black armbands as well as fly the U.S. flag upside down on Inauguration Day and Obama's first full day in office.

As Tuesday approaches, when Obama stands outside the Capitol to take the oath of office, experts expect anger about the new president to spike. But they don't expect it to go away.

"The level of vitriol, I expect, will go up a bit more around inauguration time," said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino.

"There "is concern" about white supremacist groups during the inauguration," said Joe Persichini, the assistant FBI director who is helping to oversee security during the inauguration.

The inauguration of the nation's first minority president increases any potential threat, "particularly stemming from individuals on the extremist fringe of the white supremacist movement," said a recent intelligence assessment by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

But law enforcement has the appropriate resources to respond if needed, Persichini said.

"We have seen a lot of chatter," Persichini said. "We have seen a lot of discussions. We have seen some information via the Internet. But those are discussions. We look at the vulnerabilities and whether or not the groups are taking action."

"You have freedom of speech," he added. "Anyone in this nation can have a discussion about their beliefs, but we are concerned about whether or not they take that freedom of speech and exercise some act that is against the law."

Anger, violence and interest in racist ideology did increase in the hours and days after Obama was elected president in November, hate groups experts said.

Three New York men were indicted on charges of conspiracy to interfere with voting rights -- accused of targeting and attacking African-Americans in a brutal crime spree soon after Obama was declared the winner on November 4.

Interest in racist ideology was so high right after the election that computer servers for two White supremacist Web sites crashed, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups.

But the violence and interest soon subsided. Leaders within the white supremacist movement are now seeking to capitalize on Obama's presidency by using his election to help grow their organizations.

"President-elect Obama is going to be the spark that arouses the 'white movement,' " reads a posting on the National Socialist Movement Web site. "Obama's win is our win. We should all be happy of this event."

In an interview posted on his Web site on election night, former Louisiana state Rep. David Duke said Obama's election "is good in one sense -- that it is making white people clear of the fact that government in Washington, D.C., is not our government."

"We are beginning to learn and realize our positioning," Duke, a prominent white supremacist, later said in the election night recording. "And our position is that we have got to stand up and fight now."

Mark Potok, director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project, said the leaders of these groups are frustrated by Obama's win.

"I think the hate groups are desperately looking for a silver lining in a very dark cloud for them," Potok said.

While experts said it is difficult to determine how many people belong to hate groups, they do agree with an SPLC estimate that claims there are about 900 operating now, a 40 percent increase from 2000. The vast majority of these groups promote white supremacist beliefs, and range from skinheads living in urban areas to the KKK ,which is based largely in rural settings.

It is difficult to pinpoint how many people subscribe to white supremacist views, because the Internet allows people to follow the movement under the cloak of anonymity. Leaders of the white supremacist movement are able to use their Web sites to reach a new subset of potential followers and push their racist rhetoric to the limit without outright calling for violence.

Levin said one challenge in protecting Obama is that the identity of a potential attacker would likely be unknown -- a person who believes in white supremacist ideology, but decides to act as a lone wolf.

Threats of violence are more likely to be found on Web sites that allow posters to remain anonymous.

Most white supremacist leaders have been careful in what is posted on their Web sites, "hyper-aware that they are being watched," Potok said.

But not all white supremacist leaders are mindful of their actions or care to be. Two months before the election, American National Socialist Workers Party head Bill White posted a magazine cover on his Web site featuring a picture of Obama in the cross hairs of a rifle scope with a headline "Kill This N-----?"

White is now in jail on unrelated charges that he "threatened use of force against" a juror who had helped convict another white supremacist as well as several other charges of making threats to unrelated victims.

"Racism in the U.S. "remains a real problem" even though Obama won the White House, Potok said, and he predicted that hate groups will continue to grow during Obama's presidency.

"I think we are in a very worrisome moment historically," Potok said. "I say that because there are several things converging that could foster the continued growth of these groups: continuing high levels of nonwhite immigration, the prediction by the Census Bureau that whites will lose their majority in 2042, the tanking economy, and what is seen as the final insult, the election of a black man to the White House."

Levin noted that it is common knowledge the U.S. Secret Service is taking great measures to protect Obama (who began receiving coverage in May 2007, the earliest point ever for a candidate in a presidential campaign), and emphasized it is a great challenge.

"President-elect Obama is so used to a public presence, and being among people poses some real difficulties for his protection," Levin said.

Are you racist?

Reactions to racism not as strong as we think, study finds
While most people believe they would not tolerate a racist act, a new study from Canadian and U.S. researchers found test subjects in an experiment reacted with indifference when exposed to one.

Researchers in Toronto recruited 120 non-black York University students for what they said was a psychology study.

Half of the students were each put in a room with two actors - one white and one black - posing as other participants of the study.

The black actor then left the room to retrieve a cellphone, lightly bumping the other actor on the way out.
The white actor then responded in one of three ways:

- saying nothing
- saying the phrase "I hate when black people do that" or
- uttering an offensive racial slur.

When the black actor returned, study participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire rating their emotional mood and then were asked to choose a partner for what they thought was the actual test.

The researchers found that in cases where the white actor made a racist comment, participants did not speak out, did not report any emotional distress and actually chose the white actor as a partner more often than they did the black actor.

These results stood in stark contrast to a second group of respondents who were asked who they would choose as a partner after having the situation described to them.

These respondents overwhelmingly chose not to work with the white actor when a racist statement was uttered.

Lead researcher Kerry Kawakami, a psychology professor at York University, said the study raises awareness that even people who consciously condemn racism might harbour implicit biases. (CBC radio's Quirks and Quarks will have an interview with the study's lead author today, Jan. 10th)

"People should be aware that maybe they have this duality inside themselves," Kawakami told CBC News. "They think they're egalitarian, they think they're fair, they think they'll react in negative ways towards racism, but that might not actually be the case."

In an accompanying analysis in Science, psychologists Eliot R. Smith from Indiana University and Diane Mackie from the University of California, Santa Barbara, suggest another reason the participants may have reacted to the incident with indifference.

Since they were knowingly participating in a test, they behaved in manner previous research has suggested experiment participants often do: that is, constraining normal impulses in an effort to be helpful and focused on what they believe to be the task.

Smith said the study illustrates that in certain social contexts, it may be easy for people to dismiss a racist remark as an oddity. Those social contexts extend beyond the role of experiment participant.

I'd like to get the thoughts of my readers on this study...what are your opinions on the findings?

"The failure of people to confront or do anything about racist comments is pretty widespread in the real world," said Smith. "People may feel uncomfortable if someone makes a remark like this, but it's rare they will actually confront them."

Researchers from the University of British Columbia and Yale University also co-authored the study.