Another Associated Press Scandal: Wire Service Covers Up Black-Male-on-White-Male Rape Spree

By Nicholas Stix
Published 2:32 a.m., December 29, 2006.
Last updated 4:53 a.m., December 29, 2006.


What Did the AP Know, and When Did It Know It?

Imagine you were a member of a group being targeted by a serial rapist, but the media refused to provide you with this urgent information, which in the age of AIDS and resistant forms of venereal disease, could protect you from having your life destroyed or even ended, because it didn't like the way the truth looked? Or imagine you wanted to learn about the prevalence of rape but you couldn't, because the media refused to provide the public with the real story? Or you're simply a citizen who wants to be informed, as an end-in-itself?

There is nothing theoretical about the above questions. In and around Baytown, TX, since April an armed serial rapist – "a clean-shaven black man, 18-21 years old... [5'10"-6' tall] and with a shaved head" and carrying a backpack -- has been targeting small, frail, white men, 18-21 years of age, who live in their parents' houses. The last reported rape was committed on November 30. And yet, the Associated Press doesn't want potential victims, students of rape, or inquisitive citizens to know the truth.


Racial Profiling, in the Real World

In an 18 December story, Houston-based Associated Press reporter Joe Stinebaker refused to identify the race of the Baytown rapist's victims, even though they were almost surely chosen based on their race, and knowing that the black rapist attacks only smallish, frail, young white men is an essential piece of information for potential victims to protect themselves, and for residents to look out for, in preventing further rapes, and possibly helping to catch the assailant.

The rapist -- who also robs his victims -- has so far victimized at least five young white men in and around Baytown, at 30-60 day intervals; the Baytown police are sure he's raped more men than that, but surmise that other victims have so far been too ashamed to come forward. The rapist's m.o. is to pick out a victim, stalk him for a time, ensure that he is alone, and then confront him either just outside of his house, or break into the house and confront him inside, first robbing and then raping him. The rapist favors a gun, but has also used a knife; he is always armed.

(If Baytown police can be certain that the local rapist has violated more white men, is it not equally likely that there are more black rapists loose, racially profiling and violating white men?)

Baytown is an oil refinery (ExxonMobil, Chevron Phillips, and Amoco) and chemical plant-dominated (Exxon Chemical and Bayer) city of 66,430 souls (2000 census) on Texas' Coastal Plains, in Harris County, where Houston is the county seat. The city's information page puts it "on the northern shore of Galveston Bay" between Houston on its eastern flank, with Beaumont to the west, and Galveston to the north, and provides a photograph of a peninsula jutting into the bay.

News accounts of rape often hide behind euphemisms such as "sexual assault," but "homosexual rape" means just that. A man violates the anus of another man, forcing his sexual member into a place not designed to accommodate it, tearing the flesh, and ejaculating into the delicate, bloodied tissues. If the rapist is HIV+, he will almost certainly infect his victim, thus ending the latter's chance at ever having a normal sex life, and possibly, any life at all.

Unprotected homosexual intercourse is far and away the most high-risk form of sex for the transmission of HIV; no other sex act even comes close.

Since the rapist is targeting exclusively young white men, we are also talking about racist hate crimes and civil rights violations.

Since 1999, the American public has continuously been inundated, via Big Media, by phony claims of innocent black males being "racially profiled" and even murdered by the authorities. But when a real case of racial profiling arises, Big Media fall silent. Imagine the outcry, coast to coast, if a white man were targeting and raping young black men. (While I am convinced that the notion of hate crimes is unconstitutional, as long as white men are going to be charged with them, blacks who target victims based on the latter's race must also be so charged.)

AP reporter Joe Stinebaker buried victims' description of the rapist in the penultimate paragraph of his 252-word December 18 story. That was because many readers quit reading a news story early on.

Stinebaker's last paragraph read, "The victims have all been men in their late teens."

Just "men."

One police press rep (surprise, surprise!) Stinebaker quoted also was anything but helpful.

"'I wish we had a link between the victims, because we might have a better chance of catching him,' said Lt. Richard Whitaker of the police department in Baytown, where took of the attacks took place. 'We don't have any affirmative links at all.'"

Try that they were all "white, smallish, frail men, between the ages of 18 and 21, and all lived in their parents' house," Lieutenant.

That’s what police call, "fitting the profile." If Stinebaker quoted Lt. Whitaker exactly and in context, the Lieutenant was saying that there is no profile.

Lt. Whitaker did not return my telephone messages requesting comment for this story.

The socialist MSM's smearing of police as racist thugs notwithstanding, the truth is that thousands of police departments all over America are almost as politically correct as your average university sociology department.


What's the Story?

The reader may well be wondering how I know that the AP is suppressing information. What are my sources?

In a Houston Chronicle story that was posted to the newspaper's Website on Dec. 16, 2006 at 2:51 P.M. (i.e., exactly fifty hours before Joe Stinebaker's AP story was posted around the country), Cindy Horswell reported,

But what makes this case so unusual is that women are not the target. So far the five victims have all been young, white males in their late teens or early 20s, mostly students still living at their parents' homes.

The attacker is described as a light-skinned black male, clean-cut and nicely dressed, in his late 20s. He stands 5-foot-6 to 6 feet tall and weighs about 200 pounds.

Far from burying the most essential information at the end of her article, or even suppressing it altogether, Horswell put it all in the second and third paragraphs of her 728-word story, where they belong.

"Who?" "What?" "When?" "Where?" "How?" are still the essential questions that every news story – even more so every crime story – must answer. Answering them does not mean burying the information at the end of the story, much less not publishing it at all.

Kudos to Cindy Horswell.


The AP Stonewall

I first contacted AP on December 20 to ask Joe Stinebaker why his story lacked such essential information. That contact was a mere formality; unlike every single other American press organization I know of, AP refuses to provide telephone numbers or even eddresses, where readers, journalists, and researchers may contact its writers. And if that weren't bad enough, the AP demands that anyone seeking to contact one of its staffers, write to its media relations department at info@ap.org. I provided my telephone number, in addition to my eddress, in a request to Jack Stokes, AP's director of media relations. Stokes never responded.

"Media relations" at the AP is a euphemism for institutionalized stonewalling.

This is not the first time that I sought a response for a story from the AP's corporate lords. In early September 2004, when I wrote a story on the "Boosgate" hoax that AP reporter Tom Hays had engineered, I repeatedly emailed and called AP's offices, requesting comment before going to press, but never got a response.

In my experience, AP is much worse than non-media corporations, in its refusal to respond to journalists. When I call a Fortune 500 company for a comment on a story, I often get a call-back within the hour.


Get the Story!

Having no time to waste on stonewalling operations, on 21 December I bypassed the "suits" and sought out Joe Stinebaker on my own, but was informed that he was on vacation until 2 January, using up accumulated time, as was his editor, Wendy Benjaminson. However, an AP source assured me that AP reporter John Porretto had done a follow-up to Stinebaker's story, in which Porretto had spent a full day in Baytown during the middle of last week, and had written a story on the case that would include the victims' race that would appear on news Web sites last Friday (22 December) night, for the Saturday edition.

I searched the Web for Porretto's story last Friday night, and ever since. Finally, the 762-word story was posted at, among other places, the Houston Chronicle's Web site Tuesday at 2:05 p.m. But after being held back for four days, Porretto's story still failed to mention the race of the victims. (Wouldn't you love to have been a fly on the wall at the editorial meetings during that period, when Porretto's article was discussed?)


A Half-Truth is a Whole Lie

Meanwhile, Democratic Party strategist, law professor, and rape victim Susan Estrich wrote a syndicated column based on the Baytown rapist story that went out on Christmas Eve. In "Male rapes occur, and it's time to address them," Estrich used the Baytown case to press the point that male-on-male rape is a real problem that has been swept under the rug. Estrich's column was a perfect case of "a half-truth is a whole lie," in which she swept the problem of black-on-white male rape under the rug.

Again, since the vast majority of prison rapes are perpetrated by black men, this "real problem" Estrich speaks of, has a distinctly racial dimension about which she maintains silence.


More Rapes are Committed Against Men than Against Women

As I have -- or rather, as Human Rights Watch has shown, male-on-male prison rape is a huge problem, particularly black-male-on-white-male prison rape. Indeed, in her 2001 report for Human Rights Watch, No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons lawyer-investigator Joanne Mariner revealed,

Past studies have documented the prevalence of black on white sexual aggression in prison. These findings are further confirmed by Human Rights Watch's own research. Overall, our correspondence and interviews with white, black, and Hispanic inmates convince us that white inmates are disproportionately targeted for abuse. Although many whites reported being raped by white inmates, black on white abuse appears to be more common. To a much lesser extent, non-Hispanic whites also reported being victimized by Hispanic inmates.

Based on her reading of studies by prison rape scholars, Joanne Mariner estimated that more men than women are raped each year in the U.S.

I would not be at all surprised to find that the Baytown rapist is an ex-con who developed a taste for raping white men while in prison. The victims he has targeted match almost all of the characteristics of prisoners targeted for rape that Joanne Mariner cited in her study. (Mariner cited one more characteristic -- that of seeming delicate or vulnerable or slightly feminine, which I don't see any American newspaper citing in this day and age, though Los Angeles Times reporter Lianne Hart’s quote -- see two paragraphs below -- of a Baytown police captain’s roundabout description of the relative sizes of perpetrator and victims, is close enough.)

As America’s prisons are practically laboratories for the production of HIV by violent convicts who often deliberately infect other prisoners, let us hope the Baytown rapist is not also HIV+.

Public health researchers Hammett, Harmon, and Rhodes estimated that in 1997, 7.5-10 percent (150,000-200,000) of America’s prison population was HIV+.


Honest Reporters

Another non-AP reporter who did her job on the Baytown rapist story is the Los Angeles Times' Liane Hall. In a Christmas Eve story, Hall revealed the victims' race, as well as suggesting that they were small and frail – "… 'fairly identical in stature,' [Baytown Police Capt. Roger] Clifford said. 'He's bigger and can dominate them.'"

(Hall's story also appeared on Christmas Day in the
Dallas-Forth Worth Star-Telegram, which keeps its Web stories up longer than the L.A. Times.)

Kudos to Liane Hall.

As one might expect, local news operations had been way out in front of the national organizations.

An 18 December story posted at the Web site of Houston's KHOU-TV Channel 11 looked odd. It was credited to the "Associated Press," yet included the victims’ race in its description, in the final paragraph.

Note, however, that when a news organization buys an AP article, it is not obliged to run it as is. It may cut an article for space or content considerations, or supplement it with material it has uncovered through its own staffers, and/or through other media organizations.

The KHOU staffer I spoke to, who requested anonymity, "We actually did the story before that. I guess, let's see, the police department gave us that information," as to the victims' description. "We actually did that story on December 4."

The KHOU source insisted that it was AP that had used KHOU material, not the other way around.

Kudos to KHOU.

And kudos to Houston TV's Channel 2 News, which already on 16 December ran a 256-word story, whose fourth paragraph read,

The five known victims have been white men in their late teens or early 20s, many who are students still living in their parents' homes.

I saved the Channel 2 story for last, because it too ran under an "Associated Press" byline, but it was obviously supplemented by Channel Two News staffers, who added the victims' race and an indirect quote from Sgt. Bryan Pair of the Harris County Sheriff's Office, neither of which were in any other AP version of the story.


Associated Propaganda

The AP cover-up is significant for two reasons. First, AP is, with the New York Times, one of the two most influential news organizations in America. Through its over 1,000 print, radio, and TV outlets in America and abroad, AP reaches as many as one billion people per year; Joe Stinebaker's censored male rape story was published as far away as India. The New York Times also publishes many AP stories. And across the country, newspapers large and small buy much of their non-local news from AP.

Indeed, newspapers even buy local news from AP. Thus, we were treated to the spectacle of the Houston Chronicle running Joe Stinebaker's racially censored AP story on the Baytown rapist on 18 December, two days after the newspaper had run Chronicle reporter Cindy Horswell's more informative story on the same topic. And on 26 December, the Chronicle ran John Porretto's racially censored story.

Although for years, the conventional wisdom has held that the news business is dominated by TV, and more recently, the orthodox "unconventional" wisdom has held that the Internet has made newspapers obsolete, the New York Times and AP are more powerful than ever. While local TV news focuses on fires, car accidents, bad weather and murders, national TV news organizations set up their news day according to what they read the night before in the New York Times and/or from AP.

And so, for most of the public, the revised version of the philosophical chestnut becomes, If the AP or the New York Times didn’t report an event, did it happen?

Presently, the top of AP's home page has a link to a statement of support for Pulitzer Prize-winning Iraqi AP photographer Bilal Hussein, who is in U.S. military custody. (Yet another tainted Pulitzer.) What the AP statement leaves out, is that Hussein is a terrorist suspect whom U.S. military authorities found with traces of explosives on his person. Perhaps AP's corporate chieftains deemed the reasons for Hussein's detention irrelevant. Meanwhile, AP VP for Corporate Communications Ellen Hale issued a statement in which she misrepresented the Geneva Conventions and U.S. military law, in saying that "AP is insisting that the U.S. military follow accepted due process under the law and the Geneva Conventions..."

Those charged with being unlawful combatants, of colluding with them, or of being spies or saboteurs, are specifically excluded from the protections of the Geneva Conventions, and U.S. Military law is no more generous.

Second, not content to censor and suppress the news, AP engineers hoaxes in which it publishes fake news. I already cited its "Boosgate" hoax. It has also published staged photographs shot by Bilal Hussein.

More recently, AP reporters have been exposed for piping quotes, which they attributed to a non-existent Iraqi Police spokesman named "Jamil Hussein."

A number of years before the War in Iraq, Saddam Hussein was able to plant a spy within the AP.

(The AP is also guilty of pedestrian socialist media bias, as in the cases of its reporters Tim Martin and Jennifer Loven, and a passel of AP stories analyzed by the Republican Media Research Center's Newsbusters Web site.)

AP is especially egregious in matters of interracial rape. It has suppressed reporting on black-male-on-white-female gang rapes, such as the January 21, 2006 case from Henrico County near Richmond, VA, in which four black students (some of whom had been athletes) at black Virginia Union University were charged with gang-raping a white coed from the University of Richmond's Westhampton College for women. John Patrick Cates, 21, and Brian Anthony Ridgeway, 24, were eventually convicted of rape in early November for the attack, but may serve token terms of less than five years in prison. A third attacker, Julian Dewayne Williams, 21, pleaded guilty to assault and battery, and will not spend more than four months in prison, even though he participated in a vicious gang rape, and charges against a fourth man, Sherrod Donte Jeffrey Jr., 21, were dismissed altogether.

Although the AP ran a brief local story on the arrests, its national team shunned it, and I had to find out the disposition of the case through The Collegian, a student newspaper at the University of Richmond.

Kudos to The Collegian's Sloan DeVilbiss.

And kudos, too, to the local Richmond Times-Dispatch, which ran a more detailed story on the convictions of Cates and Ridgeway, but oddly, left out the reporter's byline.

By contrast, when Duke rape-hoaxer Crystal Gail Mangum first made her false charges against Duke lacrosse team members, AP declined to report that not only is white-male-on-black-female rape a crime so rare as to be statistically non-existent (accounting for 0.0 percent of all rapes in a given year), but that white-male-on-black-female gang rape has actually been non-existent nationally in recent years. AP also declined to report that in Duke's Durham, NC home, as my Autonomist editor, Rocco DiPippo reported, black men have for years made a sport of raping white women. Meanwhile, three innocent young white men stood to spend the rest of their lives in jail for crimes that had never been committed.

AP's "reporters" and "editors" declined to inform their readers that between 2001 and 2003, blacks committed, on average, 15,400 black-male-on-white-female rapes per year, while whites committed, on average, only 900 white-male-on-black-female rapes per year. Since there are five-and-one-half as many white as black males in this country, that means that black males rape white females over ninety times as frequently as white males rape black females.

The [Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey] tells us that interracial multiple-offender offenses are even more lopsidedly black than interracial crime as a whole. In fact, whereas blacks [males] committed 10,000 gang-rapes against whites [females] between 2001 and 2003, the NCVS samples did not pick up a single "white" [including Hispanic]-on-black [female] gang rape.

The material in the previous two paragraphs (and the quoted text in the latter paragraph), while all deriving from the federal Department of Justice, was published in the 2005 state-of-the-art report, The Color of Crime, which was published by the New Century Foundation, which also publishes American Renaissance magazine.

But suppressing the news wasn't enough for the folks at AP. In late April, they ran a hoax article by one of their national propagandists, New York-based Erin Texeira, in which she quoted young black women who complained of routinely suffering boorish and sexually abusive behavior from white men.

The young black women can almost finish each other's stories. They go to a party, a concert, a nightclub. Twenty-somethings of all colors are flirting and dancing. And then it happens.

Inevitably, a woman says, a white man asks her to dance erotically while he watches. Or he grabs her rear end. Or asks for sex, in graphic detail, without bothering to ask her name.

Many of Texeira's quotes, if they were quotes, were recycled lines that black racists had used to complain about Halle Berry’s Oscar win in 2002. The complaints were that in Berry’s movies she was always sleeping with white men (John Travolta in Swordfish, and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster’s Ball), and/or doing strip teases for them (Warren Beatty in Bulworth), which the blacks considered racial outrages. And Texeira made it clear that she was aware of the complaints, since she referred to them later in the story.

Anyone with any experience in such racially mixed situations in today's America knows that were a white man to mistreat a young black female in such a fashion, that the female would slap or punch him and scream, at which point, every black (and likely, Hispanic, too) male in the vicinity would immediately pummel the white. Young black women do, however, endure such lewd, crude behavior all the time -- from black boys and men.

White men are notoriously timid around black women, and with good reason. In New York, in a practice going even beyond Jim Crow, it has for many years been a pastime for black females of all social strata to casually assault white men in public. The black females know that if the white man defends himself, he will be beaten to a pulp by every nearby black and Hispanic male, while whites will either stand around and do nothing, or support the racist thugs, and the white victim may even be arrested for a racial attack. And if the white man does nothing to defend himself, the black female will at minimum enjoy having racially humiliated him.

Such is the racial power that every black female in America today possesses. I call the world that grants them such power, Jim Snow.

A reporter is guilty of journalistic fraud, whether she "pipes" fictitious quotes or uncritically quotes transparent lies. Erin Texeira was engaged in a form of journalistic jury tampering; she was seeking to predispose the jury in the Duke "rape" case to be biased against the white defendants and in favor of the hoaxer-plaintiff, and thereby to railroad three innocent young white men.
(Texeira's Duke story is but one performance from a veritable walking race hoax machine.)

In another exercise in fiction, on 1 July, Texeira "reported" that educated black men train themselves to act in a passive fashion, to try and put at ease frightened whites.

According to an influential leftist/black myth, crime is merely a "function" of poverty; blacks have a high poverty rate, and thus a high crime rate. And since poverty is due to white racism, and since the arrests, prosecutions, and convictions of black males are due to racial profiling, blacks are not at all to blame for their high crime rate.

Lies, lies, lies.

As has been proven ad nauseum, "racial profiling" is a hoax. As The Color of Crime showed, there is no correlation between poverty and crime. (And correlation isn’t causation, anyway.) And as I have previously pointed out, the 32.1 percent figure of black men aged 20-29 years old currently under criminal justice supervision (in jail or prison, or on probation or parole), is 33.2 percent higher than the black poverty rate of 24.1 percent.

The problem, as anyone living in an urban area knows, is that over the past twenty years or so, an increasing proportion of middle-class black men have adopted the thug life mentality. Although middle-class black men rage to collusive reporters, and write letters to newspapers about whites' unforgivable sin of seeing them as scary, the truth is that a substantial and ever-growing proportion of youngish, urban, black middle-class men is obsessed with intimidating whites, and becomes enraged when whites refuse to be intimidated.

So, there you have the AP's alternate universe of interracial rape, which for the wire service is in turn a microcosm of race relations, a world in which seemingly upstanding white men routinely assault and rape black women with impunity, and in which gentle, innocent black men must cope with racist white stereotypes and profiling.

(In the foregoing story, I used some material from reporter Ken Fountain of the Baytown Sun newspaper (free registration required); Fountain has been covering the Baytown Rapist story since at least 21 September. A tip o' the hat to VDARE columnist James Fulford, who blogged on this case back on 18 December.)

Please Support VDARE

By Nicholas Stix
Last updated at 2:50 a.m., 25 December 2006.

It’s that time of year again. You are bound to be inundated with telephone calls from the “National Police Officers’ Association,” or some such scam, which will claim to helping out the widows and children of police officers slain in the line of duty, organizations which virtually never contribute one dime to the welfare of police officers or their families. But one organization, which does not engage in cold calling, in order to fleece the unwary good-hearted, and which, in fact, is indispensable, is VDARE.

Not only is VDARE (those mysterious typos, notwithstanding) the best-written Web site that I know of, it is the indispensable Web site, which has had more of a positive effect than any 200 GOP talking points sites (some of which are edited by would-be political consultants) combined.

VDARE is devoted to the National Question. As in, shall the United States of America endure, and what is necessary to do, in order to ensure that it does? Since presently, the greatest threat to the continued existence of these United States is mass immigration, legal and illegal, immigration is VDARE’s preoccupation.

How important is VDARE? Pat Buchanan’s just released work, State of Emergency, is easily the most important immigration book written since Michelle Malkin’s Invasion, four years ago. (It may be the most important book since VDARE founder Peter Brimelow’s 1995 work, Alien Nation.) The impeccable statistical research Buchanan cites in State of Emergency was provided by statistician Edwin Rubinstein, a regular VDARE columnist. And when the standard-setting report on race in America, The State of White America, appears later this month, it too will have statistical foundations provided by Ed Rubinstein.

But that’s not all, folks.

Steve Sailer, another regular VDARE columnist, may well be the most brilliant intellectual-journalist working in the English language today.

But there’s more. VDARE also showcases work written exclusively for it by columnists Bryanna Bevens, Allan Wall, James Fulford, Joe Guzzardi, Juan Mann, Donald A. Collins, Brenda Walker and Athena Kerry.

A listing of just a few of its exposés (including two from yours truly) follows:

S. 2611 Amnesty/Open Borders/Immigration Acceleration Bill – VDARE helped galvanize opposition that shelved the bill for now, and exposed the Pence Plan by Cong. Mike Pence (R-Indiana), that sought to backdoor amnesty, while claiming to be a “rational middle ground.”

Misrepresenting the Hispanic Vote: Steve Sailer has for several years continually exposed the myths whereby not only the socialist MSM, but their Republican counterparts, not to mention politicians from both major parties have proceeded as if Hispanics’ votes somehow counted for more than whites’ votes.

Naming Open Border Lobby names: VDARE writers have shown how low the OBL will sink, in order to defend the indefensible, such as in Patrick Cleburne’s exposé of Colorado horse farm owner Helen Krieble’s agitations for amnesty, whereby Krieble seeks to depress the wages she has to pay her workers.

VDAWDI: With his VDARE American Worker Displacement Index, Edwin S. Rubenstein has kept a monthly tab on the rise of “immigrant” employment, and concurrent decline in the employment of Americans.

EOIR: In what he should have turned into a book by now, immigration attorney and VDARE columnist Juan Mann has shown how the Executive Office of Immigration Review has undermined the enforcement of immigration law.

America’s Worst Immigration Journalist: VDARE columnist Joe Guzzardi presides over one of the fiercest journalism competitions in existence: determining who, of all the shamelessly dishonest open borders shills, is the worst.

God & Girl at a Catholic University: Athena Kerry’s series showed the decline into multicultural nihilism of one once proudly Catholic institution.

Diversity is Strength! It’s Also … Police Corruption: In 1995, the New York City Police Department hired illegal alien Martin Peters. When Peters came under suspicion in the murder of the mother of his child, and the NYPD showed reticence about promoting him to sergeant, Peters who played the race card, and got his promotion. Sgt. Peters is now under indictment for Murder in the Second Degree, Assault in the First Degree, Intimidating a Witness in the Third Degree, Menacing in the Second Degree, three counts of Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the Second Degree, defrauding HUD out of $38,724 in rent subsidies, bankruptcy fraud and last, but not least, immigration fraud.

“Disappearing” Urban Crime: shows the methods of statistical fraud the NYPD employs to make New York “America’s Safest Big City.”

The VDARE Blog: VDARE has one of the best blogs on the Web, with steady contributions from its regular columnists, plus bloggers Patrick Cleburne and Randall Burns.

If you doubt me, try for yourself!

Syndicated columnists: VDARE also runs and archives the columns of Pat Buchanan and Michelle Malkin. So, what’s the big deal about running columns you can read anywhere? The big deal is that nowhere else can you read these columns with the encyclopedic links that VDARE’s editors weave into the text.

Sam Francis: Over the past twenty or so years, Sam Francis was one of America's most important political thinkers, and one of her few honest writers on race. Francis died on February 15, 2005 of complications following heart surgery, at the age of 57. But during his brief stay in this vale of tears, Francis was as prolific as he was insightful. And all of the approximately 400 columns he wrote for VDARE are still available at his VDARE archive, which also contains links to obituaries honoring him, to his work for Chronicles magazine and townhall.com, and to the newly published collection of some of his work. This archive is a treasure trove.

Donate: Please give to VDARE. If you do so by December 31, you can write your contribution off your 2006 taxes. And tax write-offs aside, giving to VDARE is, in the words of one of my favorite ex-convicts, A good thing.

James Robertson: Yet Another Federal Judge Gone Wild

By Nicholas Stix
Published at 5:06 p.m., Tuesday November 28, 2006.
Last revised at 11 p.m., Tuesday November 28, 2006.

When I got the FNC Alert below in my e-mail box at 4:44 p.m. today, I thought it had to be a joke. But sure enough, at Fox News, at 5 p.m., it was the headline at the top of the page, not yet linked to any stories. I checked the calendar; it isn’t April Fool’s Day.

“Breaking News >> Federal Judge Rules American Paper Money is Unfair to Blind People”

By 5:12, the headline had a story:

U.S. District Judge James Robertson said the Treasury Department has violated the law, and he ordered the government to come up with ways for the blind to tell bills apart.

Now the first thing that occurred to me was that this will make it easier to counterfeit money. And sure enough, Treasury made the same argument.

Government attorneys argued that forcing the Treasury Department to change the size of the bills or add texture would make it harder to prevent counterfeiting. Robertson was not swayed.

The good judge gave Treasury ten days to begin fixing the problem. How kind of him. I think Treasury would spend the time better, putting in its appeal.

"Of the more than 180 countries that issue paper currency, only the United States prints bills that are identical in size and color in all their denominations," Robertson wrote. "More than 100 of the other issuers vary their bills in size according to denomination, and every other issuer includes at least some features that help the visually impaired."

So, America is unique. I like that. As for Judge Robertson’s implied claim that every nation on earth has deliberately changed its currency, in order to aid the blind, if you believe that, I have a great deal for you on a slightly used bridge. His claim sounds like a sophistic hook the plaintiffs and the American Council of the Blind came up with, for friendly judges like Robertson to hang their hats on.

Sweden, Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, I can see changing their bills to accommodate the blind, not to mention in order to appease Moslems who see images of Mohammed everywhere, and currency cultists. But over 80 percent of the world's 200 or so nations would laugh at activists who demanded they change their currency for the blind … and then shoot them, and laugh some more. We’re talking about impoverished countries that are run by dictators, and where life is nasty, solitary, brutish, and short … but we're supposed to believe that the butcher-in-charge hops to, in order to change the currency for the sake of activists and their clients. (We’re also talking about countries whose currency is safe from counterfeiters, because it is worthless!)

What I think is going on here, is that the plaintiffs and their judge took the odd-sized foreign bills, and assumed that they had been changed to accommodate handicap activists.

"The fact that each of these features is currently used in other currencies suggests that, at least on the face of things, such accommodations are reasonable," he wrote.

He said the government was violating the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in government programs. The opinion came after a four-year legal fight.

"It's a landmark decision. I believe it will benefit millions of people," said Jeffrey A. Lovitky, attorney for plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, The Dominican Republic, Djibouti, Dominica, East Timor, Haiti, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, The Central African Republic, Congo I, Congo II, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Etiopía, Fiji, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, India, The Ivory Coast, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Liberia, Libya, Lithuania, The Maldives, Moldovo, Morocco, North Korea, Kosovo, Lesotho, Laos, Lebanon, Nigeria, Niger, Namibia, Mali, Chad, San Marino, Somalia, Somaliland, The Sudan, Swaziland, Suriname, Togo, Tanzania, Syria, Tajikistan, Russia, Latvia, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Rwanda, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Red China, Palau (Palau?), Mauritania, Mauritius, Turkmenistan, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and last but not least, good old Zimbabwe.

(I’m pretty geographically literate, as these things go, and yet a few dozen of this week’s new national names are Greek to me.)

How many of the 101 above-named nations – roughly half of those in the world today – do you see going broke, changing their currency to accommodate the blind?

This is the world we live in, not the world of Judge Robertson’s humanitarian fantasies.

The good judge’s claim that the federal government is in violation of the Rehabilitation Act is nonsense on stilts. Money is not a “government program.” If James Robertson gets away with redefining money as a government program, oh, the mischief that will ensue – on top of his own mischief, that is.

And for every person the turning upside down of American currency will benefit, it will wreak havoc for the hundred others who will have to foot the bill for the cost of printing up billions of new bills, and then foot the bill for billions of dollars in costs due to counterfeiting. Not to mention the millions of vending machines whose owners will then be sued by activists and attacked by the media as being guilty of “discrimination.” (Will Judge Robertson be around to claim ‘More than 100 of the other nations mandate that all vending machines take bills varied in size, according to denomination, and every other nation mandates that machines include at least some features that help the visually impaired”? I wouldn’t put it past him.) And the owners will get expensive new machines, whose costs will have to be borne by the 99 percent that will not benefit from them.

The Treasury has spent years and a fortune developing bills that are more difficult to counterfeit, something that Judge James Robertson evidently could care less about.

I can just hear someone say, “But what about justice?!” Yeah, what about it? This isn’t about justice, unless we redefine “justice” so that it means that certain selected groups can turn the world upside for everyone else, at everyone else’s expense, while everyone else is disenfranchised.

One other such group for whom the judge has a particular solicitude, is terrorists.

Mooks like James Robertson talk “justice,” but have contempt for the law, and for any notion of justice worthy of the name. What they have is loyalty to certain groups, enmity towards the rest of us, and a hubristic self-righteousness. Robertson and his ilk in the judiciary, the bar, and among activists and politicians are in a competition to see who can incur greater costs to the American taxpayer, and cause more damage to American society.

The Death of a President

By Nicholas Stix


Forty-three years ago yesterday, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States of America, was felled in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist, dishonorably discharged, ex-marine. For most of my life, November 22 was always commemorated as one of the darkest days in American history. In recent years, such commemoration seems to have been fading.

President Kennedy was riding that day in a motorcade with his wife, Jackie, Texas Gov. John Connally and the latter’s wife, Idanell (1919-2006), and Texan Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Kennedy had come to Texas to shore up a rift among Texas Democrats.

As soon as she saw her husband had been hit with gunfire, Mrs. Kennedy showed herself willing to sacrifice her own life, to save her husband’s. She threw herself across her husband, to shield his body from further gunfire with her own, as if she were a secret service agent, rather than America’s First Lady. Alas, it was too late.

Gov. Connally also was wounded, and his wife, Idanell Brill "Nellie" Connally (1919-2006), helped save his life by “pull[ing] the Governor onto her lap, and the resulting posture helped close his front chest wound (which was causing air to be sucked directly into his chest around his collapsed right lung).”

Later that day, aboard Air Force One, Vice President Johnson was sworn in as America’s 36th President.

On April 11, Oswald had attempted to assassinate rightwing Army Gen. Edwin Walker; one hour after assassinating the President, he murdered Dallas Patrolman J.W. Tippit, before being arrested in a Dallas movie theater. Two days later, Oswald was himself murdered by Jack Ruby, as lawmen sought to transfer Oswald from police headquarters to the Dallas City Jail.

Jack Kennedy has become, like his ersthwile fling, Marilyn Monroe, a Rohrschach Test, onto which people (particularly leftists) project their preoccupations. Thus do conspiracy obsessives project the notion that the President’s assassination had issued out of a conspiracy so immense, including at least two assassins, with the identity of the specific participants – the Cosa Nostra, the CIA, Fidel Castro – depending on the imaginings of the obsessive in question.

Likewise has Kennedy’s presidency been fetishized by leftwing obsessives and family retainers, who have turned him into a socialist demigod, who supported massive economic redistribution and radical “civil rights.”

The best way of summing up the real JFK versus the fantasy version propagated by the Left and Kennedy courtiers since his death, is by comparison and contrast to President Richard M. Nixon, Kennedy’s opponent in the 1960 election.

Kennedy has been portrayed as a leftwing saint and Renaissance man, who gave us or supported (or would have, had he lived) the War on Poverty, civil rights for blacks, and utopia. Nixon, by contrast, was a rightwing Mephistopheles (“Tricky Dick”), and a crude, racist, fascist warmonger.

Politically, Kennedy and Nixon actually had much in common. Both were unapologetic anti-communists in matters domestic and foreign. Nixon successfully prosecuted for perjury the traitor and Soviet spy, Alger Hiss (which inspired the Left to work tirelessly thereafter for Nixon’s destruction), while Kennedy (“Ich bin ein Berliner.”) was an unequivocal supporter of West Berlin against Soviet imperialism, and risked nuclear war, when he faced down the Soviets during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. (Due to the statute of limitations, Nixon could not prosecute Hiss for treason or espionage.) On the negative side of the ledger, Kennedy betrayed the Cuban insurgents who carried out the Bay of Pigs invasion, by withholding promised air support, thus turning the invasion into a fiasco.

Domestically, at least in fiscal matters, Kennedy was considerably to the right of Nixon. Early in Kennedy’s administration, he signed off on what was then the biggest tax cut ever, and which set the economy on fire. In light of Kennedy’s fiscal conservatism and belief in self-reliance (“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”), it is highly unlikely that he would have signed off on a program for massive government welfare programs. The War on Poverty was the idea of Lyndon Johnson, who exploited the nation’s mourning for JFK to ram his programs through Congress.

By contrast, Nixon introduced price and wage controls, a move that was far to the left economically of the Democratic Party, even after Kennedy. And it was Nixon, the hated “racist,” not Kennedy or even Johnson, who institutionalized affirmative action. Note that over 30 percent of blacks voted for Nixon for president, over three times as high a proportion than ever would vote for George W. Bush for president.

For over thirty years, leftist Democrats have sought to tar and feather Nixon as a “racist” for his “Southern Strategy” of appealing to Southern whites with promises of “law and order.” The presuppositions of the leftist critics are: 1. If one is not a leftist, one may not campaign for the votes of groups that may potentially vote for one, but rather must hopelessly chase after the votes of people who will never vote for him, thereby guaranteeing his defeat; and 2. Because the explosion in crime was primarily the fault of blacks, no politician may ever campaign on behalf of “law and order” (in other words, see #1).

Since leftists have long controlled the media and academia, no successful counter-movement has ever been waged against the Democrat Northern Strategy that continues to this day inflaming and relying on racist blacks for their votes and their violence.

If anything, Nixon was a stronger supporter of “civil rights” than Kennedy. When Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested during the 1960 presidential campaign, Nixon wanted to call King’s parents in support, but let his advisers talk him out of it. Conversely, Kennedy let his adviser, future senator Harris Wofford, talk him into calling “Daddy” King, which resulted in Kennedy winning the black vote.

In August 1963, the Poor People’s March, in which Martin Luther King Jr. would give his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, was almost shut down by the Kennedy Administration without King even getting to speak.

The march had been organized by A. Philip Randolph, the legendary socialist founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nation’s first successful black labor union. Randolph was planning on giving a radical leftwing speech written by Stanley Levison, a communist advisor to both Randolph and King, but as historian David Garrow tells in his biography, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the President’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, acting in his brother’s name, threatened literally to pull the plug on the demonstration, were Randolph to deliver the planned speech. Randolph relented, and gave a considerably toned-down speech.

There is no record, to my knowledge, of Nixon ever censoring a political speech, much less one by a civil rights leader.

As for Southeast Asia, Kennedy got us involved in the War in Vietnam; Nixon got us out.

Kennedy repeatedly jeopardized national security, both as a naval intelligence officer during World War II, and while President, due to his obsessive womanizing. By contrast, even Nixon’s sworn enemies have failed to find any evidence of his cheating on his beloved wife, Pat.

And as for the two men’s intellectual status, Nixon was clearly superior. The notion that Kennedy was an intellectual the planned product of a PR campaign engineered and financed by the future president’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.. The elder Kennedy got his son’s undistinguished, pro-appeasement (echoing the elder Kennedy, who was a Nazi sympathizer) Harvard senior thesis, Why England Slept, published as a book, after having it rewritten by erstwhile family retainer, New York Times columnist Arthur Krock (whom JFK would later stab in the back, using future Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee as his tool of choice); later, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage, was ghostwritten for JFK by another family retainer, Theodore Sorensen, in order to give the young senator the “gravitas” necessary for a run at the White House. Working on behalf of JFK and Joe Kennedy, Arthur Krock campaigned relentlessly on behalf of the fraudulent work, and succeeded in gaining it the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography, yet another fraudulent Pulitzer that has never been rescinded.

Nixon, on the other hand, really did write a series of important books on politics. But although Nixon was a true Renaissance man, he was a Republican, and so while the Kennedy hagiography of the press, Hollywood, and academia would slavishly promote the myth of Kennedy as Renaissance man, in the same parties’ corresponding demonography of Nixon, the last thing they were going to do was to give Nixon due credit for his very real intellectual accomplishments.

So, where does that leave us? Must we choose between the fictional but pervasive image of JFK as Renaissance man, socialist, and compassionate civil rights supporter, or Garry Wills’ revised version, in which Kennedy appears as a ruthless, pathologically lying sociopath?

If we jettison our illusions about the political leaders we support being compassionate, kindly, fatherly (or insert your romanticized cliché of choice) types, and admit that the ruthless, pathologically lying sociopath has been a frequent Oval Office type, that still does not free us from the obligation of weighing the virtues of this sociopath against that one.

While it is ludicrous to speak of a man who inhabited the office for only two years and ten months as a “great president,” John F. Kennedy had his moments. He gave us a tax cut of historic dimensions, stood up to the Soviets, founded the Peace Corps, and started the race to the moon that culminated in 1969, with Neil Armstrong’s world historical walk.

GOP’s 50-Year Reich Collapses!

By Nicholas Stix


Immediately after the 2004 election, many Republicans smugly predicted that the GOP would rule – as in, both houses of Congress and the White House – for fifty years. Well, this must be the year 2054, because it’s over. Republicans were crushed in House races, losing at least 23 seats, and even in the Senate, where although the dust has not yet settled, it looks as though the Democrats have also won the Senate.

Everything worked for the Democrats – gay-baiting, in the case of Cong. Mark Foley (R-FL), and race-baiting, in the case of Sen. George Allen (R-VA), the Jewish junior senator from Virginia. (Don’t accuse me of Jew-baiting – he’s one of my people!)

The wrong conclusions are almost guaranteed to be drawn from this election. We’re not hearing about the President’s base, which stayed home. I’ve been saying for at least a year that George W. Bush holds his Christian Evangelical base in contempt. One month before the election, the Evangelical advisor who was one of the people who had initially run the White House’s faith-based initiative, came out with a book in which he told of White House aides rolling their eyes and speaking derisively of prominent Evangelical leaders as “nuts.”

The media and other politicians are going to see this election purely as a referendum on the war, while ignoring the President’s Open Borders policy.

As Fox News’ Shepherd Smith observed, “There has never been a civilization in history that has survived that hasn’t controlled its own borders.”

Smith also quipped, regarding the close Virginia senate race, in which conservative Democrat former Navy Secretary James Webb currently (2 a.m., Wednesday morning) leads neoconservative Republican Sen. George Allen by 5,700 votes, “Virginia is for Lawyers.” “There will be a recount, and then there will be lawyers.”

As far as the war is concerned, will any of our best and brightest rethink their approach to warfare? Don’t hold your breath. If our leaders continue to construe of “war” in such a vague, open-ended, utopian fashion (“nation-building,” “exporting democracy,” etc.), then no matter how many victories our side achieves, they will keep expanding the mission until we are defeated. And if we fight “multicultural” wars, in which the rules of engagement are perverted, and our troops require the permission of lawyers (female, natch), before they may fire on a terrorist leader; and our soldiers and Marines must stand by and watch while the streets erupt in chaos and looting, so that the media will not show white American men killing Arabs; if the enemy is permitted to turn mosques into ammo dumps, mustering centers, and embattlements, while our boys are handcuffed from fighting accordingly; and if we are not so much as permitted to name the enemy, or to even name our operations as we see fit, because it might offend the enemy, then we might as well all bend over for the Religion of Terror right now, because America will never win another war under those terms.

Yet another mistake was in claiming that all people, everywhere, want the same things we do (peace and democracy). Arabs will die before they’ll accept peace, and they will vote, if necessary, to end democracy.

There was a realpolitik case to be made for war, and I made it, in early 2003. But I never supported a multicultural war.

Many conservative and Republican voters stayed home over immigration. While I can’t say how many did, it was enough to tip Congress over to the Democrats. The two geniuses, George W. Bush and Karl Rove, can take credit for that, though I doubt they will.

Our Enemy is in the Sand

By Nicholas Stix
Originally published on March 18, 2003


Whom to Fight?

The problem with fighting our Moslem enemies, as many observers have noted, is that the terrorists never identify themselves with any particular nation. Thus, each Moslem nation – excepting the Saudis – enjoys plausible deniability regarding its role in 911. What no one, to my knowledge, has noted, however, is that deniability cuts both ways. Just as Islam could not openly declare war on America, America cannot openly declare war on Islam. But we can fight Islamic nations, while denying that we are fighting Islam.

Were America to declare war on Islam, we would instantly have one billion unified enemies, in addition to our non-Moslem enemies, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Swedes, et al. Were world Islam to declare war on America, we would immediately cut off foreign aid to all Islamic nations, and pick off one Islamic nation at a time (which we may have to do, in any event). The others would then surely find the relevant passage in the Koran telling them that they are not obliged to bring about Armageddon, and sue for peace.

In the best-possible scenario, following the war on Iraq, any Islamic nation – even Saudi Arabia – we asked to cooperate with us in rooting out the terrorists in their midst, would do all it could to help. As I said, that's the best-possible scenario.

Deniability regarding 911 is least plausible in the case of Saudi Arabia. It was their men, and their money, that took down the World Trade Center towers, a section of the Pentagon, and four airliners carrying Americans. Days after 911, a friend who was teaching in Saudi Arabia wrote that a local imam had argued in the newspaper, that suicide attacks were perfectly justified within Islam, as long as the suicide part was only a means to a greater end, and not an end in itself.

But Saudi Arabia is also home to Mecca, the capital of world Islam. Attacking the Saudis, while perfectly justifiable morally, would have nightmarish consequences. And yet, if all else fails, we may someday have to invade Saudi.

Many paleoconservatives suggest we do nothing, aside from eliminating all aid to Israel. (I haven't seen their calls to eliminate the billions we give to Arab states, like Egypt. I must have missed those articles.) They insist that there is no evidence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda; between Hussein and the anthrax attacks; no evidence that Hussein has weapons of mass destruction (WMDs); and no evidence that Hussein is a greater threat to us than say, North Korea.

There is evidence of al Qaeda activity out of Baghdad, in the person of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. And we know darned well, that Saddam Hussein has WMDs; even the UN inspectors have reported that he has not accounted for WMDs he had prior to kicking out the inspectors in 1998, including 2,641 gallons of anthrax and an indeterminate amount of vx and Sarin nerve gases. Now it seems that Hussein even has a drone aircraft for the dispersal of chemical and biological weapons.

Some of the President's critics have insisted that North Korea is a bigger danger than Iraq. The New York Times' columnist Paul Krugman, for instance, insists that the president is insane, comparing him to the deranged, fictional skipper in Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, Captain Queeg. Insisting that Iraq poses no danger to us, Krugman demands that Bush simply jerk over 200,000 U.S. troops out of the Persian Gulf. What Bush should do with those troops, Krugman does not say.

For a genius like Krugman, military brinkmanship is as easy as picking up a misdirected restaurant order from one table, and setting it down in front of a different customer. "Need I point out that North Korea, not Iraq, is the clear and present danger?," lectures Krugman, at once blending an air of superiority with the unintended self-caricature of a superficial, tenured academic with no realistic sense of the difference between armchair pronouncements and the movements of an armada, just this side of a conflagration.

The Los Angeles Times' Robert Scheer, is a lifelong apologist for communist imperialism who is well to the left of Krugman. As David Horowitz observes, regarding a rigged "debate" co-sponsored by the University of California School of Journalism and the L.A. Times, to which no conservatives or Republicans were invited,

"According to Scheer there is no reason now for the United States not to 'wait four months' to give the inspections time to work, while implying that he would then support a U.S. military action (something he has not done in his entire life) if they failed. No one on the platform discussed the difficulties of keeping 250,000 troops in the desert, during the summer heat, and spending a billion dollars a week to do it, while Democrats are complaining about the budget, and bivouacking them in an area where they would be a prime target of terrorist attacks."

As Horowitz notes, Scheer and his comrades have called on the U.S. to "contain" Hussein, arguing that containment worked against the Soviet Union, without disclosing that they had fought tooth and nail against containment, and surely would once again.

If Krugman, Scheer, and the other Americans playing the North Korea card, left and right, were serious, they would be making concrete proposals for action. Like our "sophisticated, worldly," French enemies, whom the critics adore, they just want to divert us from attacking Saddam, who in two to five years will have nuclear bombs, at which point the issue will be moot. Then they'll blame George W. Bush, for having missed his historic opportunity.

The real issue for many of the President's domestic critics – including many at the New York Times – has been keeping us out of war, so that George W. Bush can lose the 2004 election. On the left, ice-cold political calculations are at work. These people are not against military adventurism, let alone a rationally defensible war. They supported Bill Clinton's military adventures, which he undertook without Congressional authorization, and now deny that George W. Bush HAS Congressional authorization to make war.

When Bill Clinton was elected, I recall how socialist Times columnist Anthony Lewis, who was opposed to all military actions by GOP presidents, immediately began chafing at the bit, for Clinton to start dropping bombs.

Note that Saddam Hussein has violated the terms of the 1991 ceasefire in every way imaginable, from kicking out weapons inspectors in 1998, to hiding WMDs, to firing hundreds of times on allied planes, and even shooting down an unmanned drone, in the no-fly zones.

Tuesday, The New York Times repeated the standard line of those who may seem to be appeasers, but who are actually using Saddam Hussein, in order to hurt America.

"This page has never wavered in the belief that Mr. Hussein must be disarmed. Our problem is with the wrongheaded way this administration has gone about it."

Similarly, when Leslie Gelb, now the president of the Council of Foreign Relations, said on the Charlie Rose show Monday night, after the President's speech, that he supports a war on Iraq, just not the way the President is doing it, what the retired Timesman was really saying, was that he wouldn't support a Republican, no matter how right he was.

A law of ethics and politics, maintained by such different thinkers as Kant and Rousseau, states that if you desire certain ends, you desire the means to attain them. A consequence of that law, is that if you think you desire a certain end, for which there is only one means, and you shun it, you really don't desire the end. There is only one means for disarming Iraq – removing Saddam Hussein from power.


The Pakistan Option

Perhaps, instead of the Iraqis or the North Koreans, we should attack Pakistan. After all, Pakistani troops have fired on our troops across the border in Afghanistan, which constituted acts of war, the Pakistanis harbor al Qaeda terrorists, and the Pakistani people are in a fierce competition with the Saudis as to who loves the late Osama bin Laden more, and hates America the most.

But the Pakistanis are our "allies." What that means is that, although in a nation of 147 million people, perhaps only one person supports the U.S., that person happens to be dictator-general Parvez Musharraf. Musharraf has given us invaluable assistance, in hunting down al Qaeda leaders. Musharraf will probably meet the same fate as another pro-U.S., Islamic dictator-general, Egypt's Anwar Sadat, but at present he is useful, and usefulness is the most America can hope for from any Islamic nation.

Note, too, that the Pakistanis also have The Bomb, which complicates matters further, a complication we seek to prevent from arising in Iraq.
HomebodiesPaleoconservatives have also argued variously that America suffers from multiple domestic crises that are not being addressed, and that a war against Iraq would merely be for Israel's sake.

The notion that we must choose between addressing our domestic sovereignty issues and going to war was made by the often brilliant Paul Craig Roberts on a bad day.

The need to resolve one issue does not preclude pursuing the other. More recently, in an otherwise excellent column on the problem of U.S. corporations that engage in the pseudo-trade of "outsourcing" (Sending materials to countries where cheap labor makes products which are then "imported" to be sold to American consumers.), out of left field, Roberts suddenly expressed opposition to a war on Iraq:

"A country devoid of high productivity jobs is a poor country. Is the United States on the outsourced path to becoming a Third World country?


"The Bush administration should think about this question before it gratuitously attacks Iraq. The consequences of war in the Middle East are unknown."

Roberts sounds a little like "Osama bin Laden" on the gag videos David Letterman periodically plays on his show: "Dave, I just wanted to wish you a happy Valentine's Day." The tape seems to be over, but Osama catches himself, and adds, as an afterthought, "Oh, and death to America."

I guess we all have a lot on our minds these days.


Was 911 Our Fault?

The most enduring paleoconservative (and libertarian) argument against war, echoes the argument made by many on the Left:

'911 was a rational response to America's meddling in every corner of the world, and expressed Islamic anger at our support of Israel. We have made the world hate us. The proper thing to do is to come home from the four corners of the Earth, and not go off to war everywhere.'

The claim that America brought 911 on itself, makes perfect sense ... if you're a Moslem.

Over the past twenty-odd years, Moslem nations have accepted billions of dollars in aid from us, and let our military fight its battles in Kosovo and Kuwait.

The Moslem world may dream of the destruction of America, and cheer on attacks on America, but it also desperately desires congress with the Great Satan. It wants our oil money, our military protection (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Kosovo), our foreign aid money, our cigarettes and alcohol (albeit on the sly), and it even lusts after our women. Moslem hypocrisy is a bottomless pit; defenses of Moslem hatred of America reflect poorly on their advocates.


The Politics of Humiliation

Nine-eleven didn't happen because of America's aggression; it happened because of years of passive-aggressive behavior on America's part, and because Moslems have decided to take over the world. (I know, not all Moslems, but the rest will follow.) It followed a series of murderous attacks and humiliations of America by Moslem terrorists, most of which the U.S. simply "took," or which it permitted our Moslem "allies" (usually the Saudis) to cover up, and add insult to injury: Beirut (241 Marines killed, in 1983), Saudi Arabia (5 U.S. military advisers killed in Riyadh in 1995); Saudi again (19 serviceman killed and 500 wounded at the Khobar towers, in 1996); Kenya and Tanzania (260 dead, 5,500 wounded) and Yemen (17 sailors killed, and 39 wounded on the U.S.S. Cole, in 2000). And those are just some of the more notorious cases. Note too that almost half of the dead cited above, and the majority of the wounded were not Americans, but were nonetheless attacked, because our enemies considered it so important to murder Americans, that they considered any number of non-Americans who got in their way, collateral damage.

My historically-minded colleague, Allan Stover, dates the beginning of the Moslem war on the West to September 6, 1970. That was when "Islamic terrorists hijacked Swissair, TWA, and Pan Am airliners and blew them up. The next day, they attacked a British airliner and destroyed it." Stover continues, "That date, September 6, 1970, marked an Islamist declaration of war against Western nations. Sadly, we´ve been either too oblivious or too much in denial to realize that we´ve been in a state of war since then. The major attacks against America alone should have made that clear."

Our inability or unwillingness to properly retaliate has not only harmed us, but continually humiliated us, as well. And in addition to all the attacks on American personnel, there is the continuing humiliation of American servicewomen by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Note that while progressive, enlightened American elites may look down on old-fashioned notions of honor (except where the honor of protected affirmative action classes is concerned), much of the world still considers causing a person, group, or nation to lose face, a grievous offense.
Granted, we have no business dressing up women who are useless in combat as senior officers, and giving them authority over men who are real troops, sailors, and airmen. But with that said, if we are going to give these women officer's rank, we have to act as though they really are officers.
For all that Arabs complain, particularly regarding Israel, of being "humiliated," the practice of humiliating non-Moslems ("dhimmis") and even lower-caste Moslems, is considered sacrosanct in the Moslem, and particularly, the Arab Moslem world. The Saudis consider us their servants. Saudis have also repeatedly been guilty of kidnapping or abusing American children, and fleeing, with the help of Saudi and U.S. State Department officials, to the corrupt, Islamic monarchy.

The issues that Paul Craig Roberts considers domestic matters have doubtless contributed to our Islam/terrorism problem. People from countries that shoot down like dogs those who breach their borders laugh at a country whose officials do not respect and enforce their own borders and sovereignty. However, foreigners also learn to hold in contempt a nation that permits its citizens to be harmed with impunity. Folks like Roberts and Pat Buchanan, above all, should appreciate this point. We need to deal with our sovereignty problems domestically AND on the world stage.

But why Iraq? Is attacking Iraq a purely arbitrary call, as in, "You're Moslem, you'll do"?

As some hawks – and even socialist dove, Michael Walzer – have pointed out, we are already at war with Iraq, and have been since 1991. Hussein violated the ceasefire agreement from the start, and so we have been involved in a "little war," limited to bombing runs, ever since "Gulf War I" ended. (More recently, Allan Stover has written a column in which he draws a tight historical analogy between Germany's violation of the 1919 Versailles strictures against re-arming after World War I, and Saddam Hussein's violations of the 1991 Gulf War sanctions against re-arming.)

However, whereas Walzer tries to make a virtue of the "little war," I believe that Hussein and the Arab world will not admit defeat, until he is crushed. The lack of a crushing, humiliating victory over Iraq has made us look weak in the eyes of the world, hence the "heroic" opposition to us in the U.N. Security Council, and in so much "world opinion." As some observers have noted, Saddam sees his mere survival since 1991 as a victory. We must show him that he has lost, in the only way he will understand. This is not about hatred, but rather about winning, and limiting the loss of life.

The "world" – i.e., socialist elites – criticizes America for its "unilateralism," but it was our playing along with the U.N. in Gulf War I that caused us to stop at the Iraqi border, rather than march on to Baghdad. The sins of multilateralism have come back to haunt us.

The New York Times' Thomas Friedman supports the war, in spite of himself, yet complains that President Bush is going about it all wrong, because he has "unilaterally" set a course for war. Aside from the fact that we do have allies, Friedman has made a fetish of multilateralism, which he and many others have converted from a means to an end, into an end in itself. At its best, multilateralism means more soldiers, firepower, and money for the war, and for the peace thereafter, and less cost in blood and treasure for any one power. At its worst, multilateralism means being subject to the treachery, manipulation, and demands for war booty of dubious "allies." Friedman, et al., mistrust American sovereignty, while naively trusting international sovereignty. That way lies ... the U.N.

The State of Nature
The notion that passivity towards the Moslem world will result in peace for America is delusional. Politics hates a vacuum, and passivity by a supposed world power would open a vacuum that another player would look to fill. Just as Saddam Hussein cannot afford to be seen as weak by an Iraqi citizenry which would respond by quickly dispatching him, so too can America ill afford to be seen as weak by the nations of the world. It was such a perception that led to 911, and that if not soon dispelled, will lead to worse. Like it or not, an analogy holds between Iraq and world politics. In both cases, the state of nature holds, where as Thomas Hobbes observed in Leviathan in 1651, life is "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

The philosophical basis for the paleoconservative and libertarian call for not waging war, comes from President George Washington's call, in his farewell address, for avoiding foreign entanglements. That's certainly sound advice, but I don't think the Father of Our Country meant that we should betray our allies, or let our enemies attack us without our hitting back. By all means, we should scale back our foreign commitments (say, by exiting NATO and the UN). But developing a more sober foreign policy is a long-term plan that does not contradict meeting our enemies in the short term. Washington, whose advice was based on prudence and 18th century circumstances, would not have considered ignoring the war being waged against us prudent.

And so, we must fight back, or die the death of a thousand cuts. Or maybe just a few cuts. If we batter and humiliate enough of the Moslem world, we will succeed in putting the fear of Allah back into most Moslems, who will then give up their dreams of destroying America. And the few who cling to hopes of Armageddon will be manageable.

The war against Iraq will not be a distraction from the so-called War on Terror, it will be a continuation of the War on Islam, er, Terror.

The State of White America: A Major New Study on American Race and Ethnic Relations

By Nicholas Stix


Every day one reads about some new racist abomination – the lynching (aka fatal, “botched robbery”) of a white, the black race hoax du jour, the creeping Hispanic reconquest, the arrest (see also here and here) or threatened arrest, and violation of the constitutional rights of someone who has broken no laws, but who has violated multiculturalism’s racial and ethnic dogmas – but long for some sweeping, scientific and philosophic overview of what is destroying America, one town, one classroom, one workplace at a time. Your wait is over.

Any day now will see the publication of the report, The State of White America, by the National Policy Institute. Yours truly had the honor and the privilege of serving as the study’s editor, and with Edwin S. Rubenstein and Robert J. Stove, as one of its authors.

Indianapolis-based statistician Edwin S. Rubenstein is one of the top quantitative social researchers working in the U.S. today. It was his research which provided the empirical basis for Pat Buchanan’s new bestseller, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. Rubenstein, a columnist at VDARE, the premier source for information, analysis, and commentary on America’s ongoing immigration disaster, heads up ESR Research Economic Consultants.

Melbourne-based historian Robert J. Stove is the author of elegant essays and erudite historical studies alike. His first book was the acclaimed biography of sixteenth-century composer Palestrina, Prince of Music. Stove’s most recent work is the alternately chilling and entertaining, The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims. Stove is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and a frequent contributor to, among other periodicals, Chronicles, The New Criterion, and National Observer.

“SOWA” will honestly answer the following questions and more, cutting through the MSM’s lies, spin, and newspeak:

What is the single most important indice in predicting the quality of a school district?

What is the daily reality of urban public schools like?

How has the American workplace changed over the past 50 years?

What is the reality behind charges of “racial profiling”?

What really happened in New Orleans, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina?

How goes it with those “family values” that President Bush insists “don’t stop at the Rio Grande”?

How many Hispanic immigrants really are assimilating into American society, and how many are insisting that American society assimilate to their subculture?

What are the names of the terrorist organizations that arguably have wreaked more havoc on American society than Al Qaeda, and which the MSM refuses to honestly report on?

SOWA unflinchingly answers these questions and many more!

Mandingo: Boglerizing History and Logic

By Nicholas Stix

Any non-black who attempts to engage in dialogue with American blacks today, soon discovers that black race hoaxes are not merely the stuff of Big Lies, a la the Tawana Brawley Hoax, the 2000 Florida Disenfranchisement Hoax, etc., but central to the most mundane exchanges. Witness the following entry in an IMDB.com discussion of the tawdry 1975 exploitation movie Mandingo, set on an antebellum plantation, and which emphasized white racist savagery and interracial relationships, not only between the brutal old slaver’s son and a slave girl, but between the son's wife, played by blonde, professional sexpot Susan George, and the heavyweight boxing champion (and non-actor), Ken Norton Sr.

chesterrodney: “Susan George couldn't get another major role in Hollywood after ‘Mandingo’. She was reduced to ‘B’ type movies and made for TV movies after that. Hollywood didn't want to see her in any major films or major acting roles after her love scene with Ken Norton in ‘Mandingo’. Hollywood to this day is scared of showing black love. And they don't want to see a big muscular black man with a white woman!”

That is a racist black fantasy. Susan George had specialized in playing sluts before Mandingo, she played one in Mandingo, and she continued playing such roles thereafter. Since Mandingo was itself a trashy B-movie, the notion that her career went downhill thereafter, is ludicrous. Besides, you provide no evidence that she was blacklisted (or is it, whitelisted?). All you have are your racist fantasies.

Sidney Poitier had already crossed the particular color line "chesterrodney" speaks of in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in 1967, an A-movie if ever there was one, which was nominated for ten Oscars, and won two.

Jim Brown had his famous shower scene with Raquel Welch in 100 Rifles in 1969. And Raquel Welch is white, was considered white at the time (Hispanic whites are more obsessed with their whiteness than are non-Hispanic whites), and only very recently, for opportunistic reasons, decided to publicly become a “proud Latina.”

And important independent movies, such as One Potato, Two Potato in 1964, had already explored interracial love affairs between black men and white women. Chesterrodney has invented a non-existent issue, in order to vindicate his racist fantasies. If anything, Hollywood, like the mainstream media in general, has an allergy against showing black women in the arms of white men.

chesterrodney (later): “As for Susan George, I never said she was blacklisted from ‘A’ list status in Hollywood. I said she was blacklisted from getting roles in major Hollywood movies.”

Although he never used the word “blacklisted” in his first statement, Chesterrodney obviously meant just that. But he not only uses the term in his second statement, but goes beyond simply contradicting an earlier statement, to contradicting himself from one sentence to the next! Way to go, man! You not only boglerized movie history, you boglerized logic, as well!

To boglerize – my coinage – refers to the practice of film “historian” Donald Bogle of misrepresenting movie history by recounting pictures in which blacks played minor roles, as if the blacks were the stars and the actual white stars were invisible, of ignoring dominant performances by whites in movies in which they co-starred with black performers (e.g., Rod Steiger (or “Stieger,” as Bogle calls him) and Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night), while dishonestly celebrating the black performer, and most pathetically, of routinely misspelling the names of white actors, while never doing so with the names of black performers.

Bruno Kirby Sighting!

By Nicholas Stix

On October 6, watching Between the Lions, an entertaining kids’ show that is one of the few (the only one?) that actually helps kids learn how to read with my son, I saw a familiar face under a lot of makeup and with a big mustache and a hammy, generic Eastern/Southern European accent. I’m sure it was a middle-aged, paunchy, Bruno Kirby, may he rest in peace.

The story was about a simpleton farmer and the Lucy-type (from Charles Schulz’ Peanuts comic strip) woman in the countryside who takes all of his money giving him obvious advice. The farmer’s house is overrun with livestock. The woman tells him to remove first this animal, then that, and ultimately all of the animals from the house, each time taking more of his money. In the end, the woman leaves for the big city in a luxurious, chauffeur-driven car, laughing at the (Charlie Brown-based?), farmer. His life is also immeasurably better without a house full of animals, though the (feminist?) writer seems to want us to look up to the scam artist and down upon the honest if dull farmer.

Unfortunately, the story was on the dumb side, certainly below Between the Lions’ usual standards, as was Kirby’s work, but all the same, it was nice to see him working during the long, dark night that Billy Crystal rang down on him, following City Slickers. (Speaking of Crystal, City Slickers II was on TV yesterday, with Jon Lovitz “replacing” Kirby. The pic was so bad that we changed the channel after about two minutes. No wonder critics panned it and audiences avoided it the plague.)

The usually reliable IMDB.com’s page for Between the Lions is worthless, and Kirby’s own IMDB.com page makes no mention of his guest gig, but I was able to find confirmation that Kirby had indeed been a guest star on the show, though without any particulars (episode name, initial broadcast date) at the show’s PBS Web page.

Domestic Terrorism: The Nation of Islam and the Zebra Murders

By Nicholas Stix

The three men went out hunting that night. But their prey was human. White humans, to be exact. Only they didn’t consider whites human, but rather “grafted snakes,” “white devils,” and “blue-eyed devils.”

They grabbed three children, and tried to get them into their van, but the resourceful kids ran away.

The children were Michele Denise Carrasco, 11, Marie Stewart, 12, and Marie’s 15-year-old brother, Frank.

The angry, frustrated hunters went back to their van, and sought after new quarry. They found it in the form of a happy married couple, out for an after-dinner walk near their home on Telegraph Hill. The wife ran away, but when one of the hunters put a gun to her husband’s chest and said he’d kill him, she stopped and returned. Her devotion cost her her life.

In the van, the hunters brutally assaulted the husband and wife, and two of the hunters (Cooks and Green) robbed the husband and wife, and two (Cooks and Harris) sexually molested the wife. Parking near some deserted railroad tracks in the Potrero District, the hunters had at husband and wife alike, taking turns hacking their faces with a machete, and nearly decapitating the wife, before leaving them for dead.

The couple was named Quita and Richard Hague. The date was October 20, 1973.

Quita Hague was dead, but a hideously mutilated Richard Hague miraculously survived.

The hunters that night were Jesse Lee Cooks, Larry Green, and Anthony Cornelius Harris. Cooks, Green, and Harris were members of the Black Muslims (now known as the Nation of Islam), who had been recruited, along with dozens of other Black Muslims, to randomly murder whites.

That was the official beginning of the “Zebra” Killings, which would be carried out on the streets of San Francisco, and would hold the city by the bay – one of the most beautiful in the world – in a state of terrified siege for the next six months. Or rather, would hold white San Franciscans in a state of terror. As black residents told reporters, they felt just fine, thank you.

The Zebra Killings were so called because the San Francisco Police Department reserved radio frequency “Z” (“Zebra” in military and police parlance) for all dispatches that might be related to the serial killings.

It would be months before the SFPD would connect the Quita Hague killing to the Zebra case. That is because although the Hague case had in common with the San Francisco killings and attempted murders to come, that it was a random black-on-white murder by youngish black men who stood out for being conservatively dressed and groomed, the cases that formed the profile that stood out to the detectives in the SFPD Homicide Detail were all carried out with a .32 pistol, and did not involve robbery or sexual molestation. (Youngish black men who were conservatively dressed and groomed were and are hallmarks of the Nation of Islam (NOI).)


Killers and Suspects

Between October 20, 1973 and April 16, 1974, Jesse Lee Cooks, Larry Green, and Anthony Cornelius Harris, as well as J.C. (aka J.C.X.) Simon and Manuel Moore, murdered at least 15 whites and grievously wounded at least another nine whites in failed murder attempts. In at least one case (“John Doe #169”), the devils kidnapped a homeless white man, took him to Black Self-Help Moving and Storage, the NOI-owned business where all of the above-named killers but Cooks worked, bound and gagged their victim, and began chopping off his body parts while he was still alive. (Cooks worked at the NOI-owned Shabazz Bakery; according to Anthony Harris, the NOI assassins had butchered at least one other white victim at Black Self-Help.)

One of the detectives who worked the Zebra detail told me that one of the cases in which the dismembered white murder victim could not be identified was known as “the turkey case,” since the victim, who was found on Ocean Beach minus his feet and hands (and head?), was trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey.

Jesse Lee Cooks also raped twice and sodomized (at least) one white woman, whom he had planned on murdering, as well, but who succeeded in maneuvering him, much to his consternation, into letting her live.

Black Self-Help was managed by Tom Manney, an NOI member who, according to a different detectives from the case was a former St. Ignatius High School and City College football star. According to Clark Howard, the author of the definitive work on the Zebra killings, Zebra: The true account of the 179 days of terror in San Francisco (1979), Manney lent his black Cadillac to the murderers, who used it in several of the killings. According to Howard, an illegal .32 pistol that Manney owned was the murder weapon in several of the killings. Manney was arrested for the Zebra Killings, but released for – in the DA’s opinion – lack of evidence.

One of the detectives who worked the case told me that more recently, Manney was charged with insurance fraud. The detective recalled that in addition to serial murder, Black Self-Help was a burglary operation. So much for the NOI’s self-image as a clean-cut, racial supremacist religion preaching racial annihilation while refraining from common crimes such as robbery, burglary, and rape.

In addition to Manney, Clarence Jamerson, Dwight Stallings and a fourth man whose identity I could not determine, were also arrested in the Zebra Killings, but released for lack of evidence. The fourth man was inexplicably given the pseudonym “Jasper Childs” by Zebra author Clark Howard.

Stallings was arrested by Inspector Rotea Gilford, who was the first black promoted to the SFPD Homicide Bureau. Gilford, who had grown up with Stallings, was certain that the latter had blood on his hands, but was unable to prove it. Later, while working as a longshoreman, Stallings died in a work accident.

After Gilford retired from the SFPD, he became a close political advisor to his old friend, former California State Assembly speaker and then-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Gilford has since unfortunately died from diabetes. Last year, Gus Coreris remembered Gilford as “a good policeman,” the highest praise one cop will give another.


Nation of Cut-Throats

As one of the inspectors from the SFPD Homicide Detail team that ran the case told me on Thursday, investigators at the California Department of Justice’s Bureau of CII and the FBI had been quietly compiling material on similar murders up and down the state of California and the East Coast, respectively, since 1970. (A detective from the Zebra case called CII “Criminal Intelligence and Investigation,” Clark Howard called it “Criminal Investigation and Identification,” and a timeline of the California Department of Justice identifies CII as “Criminal Identification and Information.”)

One such East Coast murder was the April 14, 1972 ambush murder of Patrolman Philip W. Cardillo in Harlem’s NOI Mosque #6, by mosque members, following a false “officer in need of assistance” call one member had made.

That was Min. Louis Farrakhan’s mosque at the time, and if historian Vincent J. Cannato’s recounting of the murder in The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and the Struggle to Save New York (2001) holds up, Farrakhan was at least guilty of obstruction of justice, if not conspiracy to murder a police officer.

Retired NYPD Lt. Randy Jurgenson, who responded to the mosque ambush 34 years ago, has just finished a book on the case, Circle of Six. Two weeks ago, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who also responded to the mosque ambush that fateful day, announced that he is reopening the case. At the time, suspect Lewis 17X Dupree, was acquitted of murder charges.

Getting back to the West Coast, the retired SFPD inspector told me that the San Francisco operation was run through the NOI’s local Mosque #26.

The killers all sought membership in an elite NOI group called the “Death Angels,” which had recruiting meetings and pep rallies in the attic at Black Self-Help. In order to become a Death Angel, one had to murder four white children, five white women, or nine white men. In the NOI, cowardice is a virtue.

According to Clark Howard, the NOI had gangs of assassins up and down the state of California:

At that time, there were fifteen accredited Death Angels in California. To achieve their collective membership, they had already quietly killed throughout the state 135 white men, 75 white women, 60 white children – or enough of a combination thereof to give each of them his required four, five, or nine credits. This was October of 1973. The California attorney general’s office had already secretly compiled a list of forty-five of those killings which had taken place in the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Long Beach, Signal Hill, Santa Barbara, Palo Alto, Pacifica, San Diego, and Los Angeles; and in the counties of San Mateo, Santa Clara, Los Angeles, Contra Costa, Ventura, and Alameda. All of the victims were white. All the known suspects in the killings had been associated with the Black Muslim movement. The killings were even then continuing throughout the state.

The operation came down from the highest reaches of the NOI, making the NOI the bloodiest domestic terrorist group in American history.

During the same period, murdering whites had become quite a sport for black San Francisco criminals, a sport that did not bother black San Francisco civilians at all, who were of little help to police in solving the Zebra killings. On the bloodiest night of the killings, January 28, 1974, the NOI murderers shot five whites within two hours, leaving four dead and one crippled. In one case that night, the killers shot to death a white woman, Jane Holly, in front of eight black women in a well-lighted laundromat. Yet none of the black women would give police a useful description of the killer.

Had blacks helped police, the NOI killers could have been caught months earlier, and several of their victims spared.

As retired SFPD assistant chief and historian Kevin J. Mullen, who at the time was a veteran of over 20 years on the force, recently wrote,

By the late 1970s, San Francisco’s homicide rate was 18.5 per 100,000 population, up from 5.9 in an equivalent period in the early 1960s. Much of the increase was driven by a rise in black on white killings. It was in this climate that the Zebra killings occurred.

Note that at 13.4 percent, blacks then comprised barely more than one-eighth of the city’s population.

We still do not know how many whites the Nation of Islam murdered during the period of 1970-75, let alone how many it has since murdered, not to mention how many copycat black-on-white murders it may have inspired.

CII’s Richard Walley, who until his unfortunate death from cancer in 1974, ran the California Department of Justice’s Intelligence Analysis Unit (IAU), was convinced that during the 1970-early 1974 period alone, the NOI was responsible for 71 black-on-white racial murders in California. In Zebra, however, author Clark Howard estimated that the NOI was guilty of “just under 270” black-on-white murders in California during the same period.


Bending the Rules

What broke the seemingly hopeless case was an inspiration by Gus Coreris that went under the rubric of “bending the rules.”

Coreris sat down with SFPD sketch artist Hobart “Hoby” Nelson, and as Coreris told me last year, dictated generic sketches of two 20-something black males. Those sketches were then distributed to local newspapers, who published them on their front pages; to TV news operations, who led with them on the 6 O’Clock News; and to officers in the street, who pulled over every young black man who resembled one of the drawings.

In order to avoid constantly harassing the same innocent black men, the police gave out a special “Zebra Check” card to each black man who had already been stopped and questioned, with the time, date, and place of the stop, the driver’s license and social security numbers of the black civilian, and the name, badge number, and signature of the officer who had made the stop. If an innocent black man had already been stopped, he needed only to produce his Zebra Check card and valid ID showing that he was the card holder.

Note that a few years earlier, hundreds of young white men had been stopped and questioned in connection with the Nob Hill rapist, in which the suspect had been identified as white. Only in the Nob Hill case, no cards were issued to white men who had been stopped, and no one protested or went to court to get the practice stopped.

But this time, black San Franciscans were mad as hell! How dare the police inconvenience and “harass” them. What was the big deal, after all? And why the “Zebra” appellation? This was surely a racist dig at blacks! (You can’t make this stuff up.) Blacks of all social classes were particularly outraged that in a murder spree in which all of the suspects were black, police were stopping and questioning only black potential suspects. The term “racial profiling” had yet to be coined, but the mentality of shielding black criminals was already prevalent among blacks.

As Howard wrote, “The black organizations … were determined to interfere with the police effort in any way they could.” Some were definitely seeking, via political means, to aid and abet mass murderers. One activist preacher, the Reverend Cecil Williams, threatened a race war, if police didn’t back down. As if the race war were not already underway.

I know of only one black San Franciscan from the time, prominent or otherwise, who showed any support for the SFPD. Dr. Washington Garner, a prominent local physician and civic leader, called on the black community to cooperate with police, even emphasizing the tactics used in the Nob Hill rapist case. Unfortunately, Dr. Garner’s alternate pleading and scolding fell on deaf ears.


Jesse Byrd

The NAACP went to court to handcuff the police, and won. It was supported by, among other groups, a racist, black-dominated, counter-police organization called Officers for Justice, whose president was an SFPD officer named Jesse Byrd (spelled “Bird” in some accounts). Jesse Byrd was a Black Muslim.

(A counter-police organization is one which seeks to handcuff and destroy a police agency from within. Contemporary American counter-police organizations are typically formed by blacks or Hispanics, which, while demanding jobs, promotions, and power for unqualified and morally unfit members of their groups, often seek at the same time to aid and abet minority criminals. In addition to Officers for Justice, prominent counter-police organizations include The Black Sentinels in Cincinnati, and The Guardians, 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, and the Latino Officers Association in New York. When such groups succeed at getting unfit officer candidates from their respective groups hired, they follow up with frivolous lawsuits, charging that the incompetent minority hires suffer discrimination in promotions, no matter how rapidly those members were promoted, in order to gain them millions of dollars in extortion money.)

Gus Coreris’ bluff saved the day, in spite of Jesse Byrd and the NAACP.

One of the NOI killers was an ex-con named Anthony Harris who, as Gus Coreris told me last year, had wild imagination. Although neither of the police sketches resembled Harris in the slightest, Harris projected himself onto one of them, and convinced himself that he had been identified.

Harris came forward to gain $30,000 in reward money, immunity from prosecution, and new identities for himself, his girlfriend Debra, and her baby.

The SFPD initially secreted the family in either a Holiday Inn motel (according to Howard) or the Del Webb Hotel (as one of the detectives told me). The family was with Inspectors Gus Coreris and John Fotinos, the partners who were the SFPD’s top homicide inspectors, and who were the lead detectives in the case. However, one day while Anthony Harris was taking a shower, Debra called Sister Sarah, the wife of an NOI minister, and told her where the family was hiding.

Within minutes, an NOI assassin had appeared in the lobby, spoken with Harris on the house telephone, and called from a pay phone for reinforcements. Insp. Coreris called his partner, Insp. John Fotinos, from the house phone, to warn him of the impending arrival of the killers, and to get him to prepare Harris, his family, and attorney to escape.

Shortly thereafter, a car pulled up with four more NOI assassins. (Howard’s description of the five suggested they were from the Fruit of Islam, the NOI’s palace guard, as the FOI were much more disciplined than the Zebra killers.)

Feigning indifference to the assassins and to his witness, Inspector Coreris left the motel. The assassins then proceeded to undertake a floor-by-floor search for their prey. Presumably, they would have killed everyone present – including family, inspectors, and attorney.

Once on the street, Insp. Coreris hurried to his SFPD car, and peeling rubber, drove it up to the motel’s rooftop parking lot, where Fotinos, Harris’ lawyer, Laurence Kaufman, and Harris and family were waiting. Once everybody was in, Coreris again peeled rubber, only seconds ahead of the NOI assassins. (This story was told by Clark Howard in Zebra; Gus Coreris corroborated it to me during his telephone interview last year.)

As Howard recounts, when a San Francisco Examiner team of reporter Dexter Waugh and photographer Walt Lynott, and a later Examiner team that included reporter Hollis Wagstaff scoured the city, talking to people how they felt about the killings, not only were blacks not at all fearful – after all, they weren’t being targeted by the killers – not a single black the respective teams interviewed expressed any sympathy for the white victims.

The tenacious, brilliant, and resourceful team of Gus Coreris and John Fotinos are the heroes of the Zebra saga. They had two able younger detectives – Jeff Brosch and Carl Klotz from Robbery Detail – assisting them full-time, with every other member of the Homicide Detail working on the case on a rotating basis.

In Zebra, Clark Howard recounts an incident from a few hours after the assassination attempt at the motel. Gus Coreris returned to his office, where a message from a young black SFPD patrolman awaited him. When Coreris returned the man’s call, the latter did not want to discuss the matter over the phone. In person, the patrolman asked Coreris point blank where he was hiding Anthony Harris. Coreris asked the officer if he was acting on behalf of the NOI. As reported in Zebra, when the young officer answered in the affirmative, Coreris responded that the SFPD would protect Harris and the information he had “at any risk,” that Coreris was going to report the officer to SFPD Chief Donald Scott, Chief of Inspectors Charles Barca, and the Intelligence Division, and that the patrol officer had better stop inquiring after Harris’ whereabouts. (363)

In a telephone interview last year, Gus Coreris confirmed for me that the foregoing incident had occurred just as Clark Howard reported it. When I asked Coreris what had happened to the black officer working for the NOI, he replied, “Nothing.”

We are talking here about a police officer who, based on Coreris’ story, was guilty of conspiring to murder a government witness, conspiring to obstruct justice, and who was an accomplice after the fact in at least 15 murders, at least nine attempted murders, and various and sundry other felonies.

Last year, one of my SFPD sources who had been on the job at the time of the Zebra murders told me that the black officer who had tried to get Anthony Harris’ location for the NOI was none other than Jesse Byrd. Although one SFPD source would have been more than enough for a New York Times reporter, I wanted a source from the inner circle of detectives who ran the case.

I spoke to everyone from the Zebra team, save one, but no one could remember the identity of the black patrolman.


John Fotinos

The one inspector I didn’t reach was John Fotinos. He was the guy that got away.

The other day, Fotinos’ widow told me of the massive stroke her eighty-year-old husband had suffered on April 16 of this year, and which took him eleven days later.

John Fotinos was born on November 1, 1925. He served his nation honorably in World War II (as did his friend and partner, Gus Coreris). John Fotinos was an old-school cop who never took the job home with him. He and his wife had four children, five grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. One of their sons, one son-in-law, and two of their grandsons proudly wear the uniform of the San Francisco Police Department.

I never had any contact with John Fotinos, and never so much as saw his photograph. And yet, when I first read Zebra four years ago, he and Gus Coreris immediately became heroes of mine. John Fotinos will be missed anywhere people care about upholding the thin blue line that separates civilization from anarchy.

In the Zebra case, Inspectors Coreris and Fotinos were ably assisted by Inspectors Jeff Brosch and Carl Klotz, whom Coreris and Fotinos had brought over from the Robbery Detail.


Public Corroboration

[Postscript, 12:16 p.m., December 8, 2017: Actually, this was no public corroboration. All that happened was that Earl Sanders either took the Zebra Task Force files from the SFPD, either by physically removing them, or getting an accomplice to do so for him. In either case, Sanders violated SFPD Department regulations and all sense of policeman’s ethics, in order to try and make millions off of a case to which he had made no contribution whatsoever.

Since all that Sanders’ ghostwriter, Bennett Cohen, did was to repeat what he had seen in Gus Coreris’ reports from the time, the identical reports which Coreris had shared with Zebra author Clark Howard, Cohen did not provide any independent corroboration.]

So, where would I get my secondary corroboration? Hiding in plain sight, as it turned out. Hollywood screenwriter Bennett Cohen, with the assistance of retired SFPD Chief Earl Sanders, who gave Cohen’s researchers boxes and boxes of the old SFPD Zebra paper work Sanders had taken with him, wrote a just-released book on the case, The Zebra Murders: A Season of Killing, Racial Madness, and Civil Rights. Cohen, who must have found Gus Coreris’ old report complaining about Jesse Byrd’s yeoman efforts on behalf of the NOI assassins, writes that Byrd was, indeed, the NOI mole in the SFPD. Oddly enough, however, Chief Sanders argues that “all they wanted to do was ‘talk’ to [Anthony Harris].”

As crime historian and retired SFPD deputy chief Kevin J. Mullen, a peer of Gus Coreris and John Fotinos, quipped in his review of Bennett Cohen’s book, “Yes. And John Gotti had someone ask the FBI for Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano’s address in the Federal Witness Protection Program so that he could update his Christmas card list.”

It is impossible to overstate Jesse Byrd’s significance. We have many instances over the years of black activists and groups seeking indirectly to aid and abet black criminals and terrorists, through say, handcuffing police (e.g., prohibiting them from surveilling mosques that are known terrorist meeting places, such as San Francisco’s NOI Mosque #26). However, in all the other cases, there was always at least one degree of separation between the terrorists or criminals and their public supporters. Jesse Byrd is the only case I know of, in which there were zero degrees of separation.


Zebra Memorial Service

The 10th Annual Zebra Victims Memorial Services was held Friday at 12 noon on the steps of San Francisco City Hall. Organizers had announced that SFPD Commissioner Petra DeJesus had agreed to attend.


“New” Zebra Victims and the Zebra Project

The person who has helped me the most in studying the Zebra case is Lou Calabro, a retired SFPD lieutenant, who was a sergeant at the time of the NOI murders. Calabro encouraged me to undertake a Zebra Project, in order to determine and name all of the white victims of the NOI’s genocidal campaign. Calabro convincingly argued that the project must necessarily be a team effort, due to the massive workload, in seeking after official records and newspaper accounts from those pre-computer and pre-Internet days. Not to mention that with witnesses, survivors, and lawmen dying off, time is of the essence. I ask that anyone with information about any possible NOI racial attacks please write me at Add1dda@aol.com. All correspondence will be kept confidential.

In re-reading passages from Clark Howard’s book, I came up with one surviving non-San Francisco victim, Massachusetts native Thomas Bates, a hitchhiker who was shot three times near Emeryville. (Clark Howard cited several fatal and non-fatal non-San Francisco NOI attacks; however, Bates was the only such victim whom he named.) Howard has so far not responded to e-mails from me seeking information on his claim that “just under 270” California whites were murdered by the NOI at the time.

Since my Zebra article last year, two people have sent me information about other possible Zebra victims. In January, one reader wrote,

Richard Asbury was born on Nov. 11, 1940 and died sometime in the late summer early fall of 1970. He had brown hair and brown eyes, ht. 6'1", wt. 160 lbs. He was in Santa Rosa, CA and I believe he was found in the Russian River. I don't believe he had any tattoos or identifying marks. There is rumor of him having ties with the Hell's Angels, but it is all speculation. I will try to get more information.

And two months ago, I learned of Steve Conachy and yet another unidentified victim.

I found your article on the Zebra killings and wanted to give you some inside info. The first killings took place in Aug 3 1973. To young men were picked up (one in Pacifica in the Fairmont dist. ). One was 18 yrs the other was 21 yrs old. The 21 yrs old’s body was dumped in SF and the other in the San Bruno mountains. They are the very first 2 and forgotten victims of those sick murders done by Black Muslims in SF in 1973.

Those 2 young men did not know each other. They may have never seen each other until that night. They now rest in Colma 20 ft from each other for all eternity. How do I know this? One was my older brother….

These murders at the time were not put together, 2 different countys were investagting it. My father was a retired SF plice officer and they thought the killing was to get even with him. Which was not the case. About 6 to 8 weeks later the other murders began and my brother and the other poor soul murders were finally connected, but by that time the press was focus on the new killings and the first victims were
forgotten about. But that was the start of it in Aug 3 1973.

Thank you for you time in this matter. It is important to me to get the record right and my brother not a forgotten victim….

Four of the NOI murderers were tried and convicted for the San Francisco killings. They remain in prison today, but they come up periodically for parole:

Jesse Lee Cooks, J.C. Simon (aka J.C.X. Simon), Larry Green and Manuel Moore.

According to crime writer Julia Scheeres, Leroy Doctor was also an NOI assassin. Doctor’s intended victim, Robert Stoeckmann, turned the tables on him, and ended up shooting Doctor three times. Doctor, who lived, was ultimately imprisoned for assault with a deadly weapon. Scheeres is, to my knowledge, the only crime writer so far to list Doctor as an NOI assassin.


Known and Possible Zebra Victims

A partial list of the wounded follows, in Clark Howard’s words:

Richard Hague [Quita’s husband], his face butchered.
“Ellen Linder,” [a pseudonym Howard devised to protect her privacy], raped, ravaged, threatened with death.
Arthur Agnos [who would later be elected mayor], surviving after his insides were ripped up by bullets.
“Angela Roselli,” surviving with nerve damage in her back.
Roxanne McMillian, surviving but paralyzed from the waist down.
Linda Story, surviving with nerve damage in her back.
Ward Anderson, surviving but in serious condition after being shot down at a city bus stop.
Terry White, also surviving, also in serious condition, after being shot down at the same bus stop.

And courtesy of Julia Scheeres, at Court TV’s crimelibrary.com,
Robert Stoeckmann, grazed in the neck by a shot fired by Leroy Doctor.

A partial list of white NOI murder victims follows, as described by Clark Howard:

Quita Hague, hacked to death….
Frances Rose, her face blown apart by close-range gunshots.
Saleem Erakat, tied up and executed.
Paul Dancik, shot down at a public telephone….
Marietta DiGirolamo, thrown into a doorway and shot to death.
Ilario Bertuccio, killed while walking home from work….
Neal Moynihan, shot down while taking a teddy bear to his little sister.
Mildred Hosler, shot down while walking toward her bus stop.
John Doe #169, kidnapped, tortured, butchered, decapitated.
Tana Smith, murdered on her way to buy blouse material.
Vincent Wollin, murdered on his sixty-ninth birthday.
John Bambic, murdered while rummaging in a trash bin.
Jane Holly, murdered in a public Laundromat….
Thomas Rainwater, shot down on the street as he walked to a market….
And Nelson Shields IV, shot three times in the back as he was straightening out the cargo deck on his station wagon.

And …

Steve Conachy

John Doe (killed with Conachy) [Postscript, 1:01 a.m., December 8, 2017: Joseph M. Villaroman.]

Richard Asbury (?)

I wish to thank all of the retired SFPD officers who so generously helped me in the writing of this article, as well as Mrs. John Fotinos. The majority of my material came from Clark Howard’s 1979 work, Zebra: The true account of the 179 days of terror in San Francisco.