Reflections From a Murky Pond

We in America seem to have a very sad tradition. It is the tradition of falsely claiming to have been attacked for reasons based on Race, Religion, or Politics. We had Tawana Brawley, and then Safia Jilani. Now Ashley Todd makes three. Here are three young women who preyed upon longstanding fears and expectations of wrongdoing in order to either gain attention or to further their particular agendas:

Tawana Brawley claimed that six White law enforcement officers abducted and raped her, scrawled racial insults on her body, and smeared her with feces .

Those claims were declared a hoax by a grand jury.

Muslim student activist, Safia Jilani claimed that she was attacked in the bathroom at the Southwestern suburban college.  The incident was declared a “hate crime” when local police found threatening and Islamaphobic graffiti written on the bathroom’s mirrors and walls.

Local police later announced that an investigation determined the assault never occurred at all. It was a hoax.

Ashley Todd claimed that she was attacked by a Black man who robbed her and then – upon seeing her McCain-Palin bumpersticker – carved a “B” into her face while berating her.

She later admitted that this a hoax.

There have of course been others who have perpetrated such hoaxes. Three three are just ones who have in relatively recent times committed such atrocities and gained national media attention.

On Tuesday night, the second night of the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Sen. Hillary Clinton stood up in front of the crowd of Democrats and delivered a speech. It has generally been hailed as a very good speech.

It was a concession speech!

Clinton never used the word  “concede,” but that is what the speech was all about – Hillary giving up the race and supporting Obama as the Democratic Nominee.

Now the Democrats will have to wait and see if Clinton can manage to sway her supporters. So far the response has been mixed, with some some Clinton supporters seeming willing to support Obama and others somehow seeing this as another example of mysogyny in America.

Any thoughts?

What would have happened if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. hadn’t died four decades ago? How would MLK Jr. have responded to our modern America?

Aaron McGruder’s animated series, The Boondocks, presents a possible series of events that might have come to pass if Dr. King had only been in a coma after the shooting, instead of dead.

Boondocks Episode 9 – Return of the King

McGruder, with his usual “no one gets out alive” style of social sarcasm, shows Dr. King’s “dream” awakening into a modern “nightmare.”

Sometimes it seems quite strange the way that the US conducts it’s affairs with other nations, especially with the Middle East and other Islamic states. Our policies have a strange mixture of friendship and belligerence, always overlayed with our near unconditional and total support for Israel. It sometimes seems as if the United States is the agent of Israel’s foreign policy instead of it’s own policies.

The odd behavior of the US in regards to Israel and its Arab and Persian neighbors makes a great deal more sense when one learns that a large number of very important people either in the US government or advising the US government hold dual Israeli-American citizenship!

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It’s things like this video that may explain the existence of Islamaphobics like the Netherlands’ MP Geert Wilder. The words of the British Imam, Anjem Choudary during a recent interview on BBC’s Hard Talk certainly lends a certain creditability to Wilder’s views of Islam.

Listening to Mr. Choudary’s statements defending the terrorist bombing of the London Public Transport System on July 7, 2005, which killed 52 people and injured 700 others, is enough to incite rage and fear in most people.

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