Day: July 19, 2010

Conflict in Arizona: Africans vs. African Americans

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This story shows how stupid it is to think skin color is an important category. From the article:

Africans make up a small but growing part of the black population in metro-Phoenix, which limits opportunities for interaction. According to the 2008 American Community Survey, “foreign-born Africans” number around 18,500 in Maricopa County, or 10.8 percent of the area’s black population. The refugee population in Arizona is much smaller, although that figure more than doubled from 2006 to 2009, to 4,327, according to the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement.

In a 2008 supplemental report entitled “The State of Black Arizona, Volume I,” ASU associate professor Lisa Aubrey and colleagues found that many African Americans hold new arrivals “responsible” for their ancestral enslavement and “correlate Africa . . . with poverty and feel ashamed.” Aubrey and her coauthors call today’s African Americans “old diasporans,” descendants of slaves and other earlier African arrivals. The scholars refer to modern continental Africans, including refugees who fled strife in their countries, as “new diasporans.”

Most American Blacks are descended from Africans who came here hundreds of years ago, longer ago than the ancestors of most of us arrived. It is ridiculous to suppose that they should have anything in common with newly arrived Africans. And if many of them hadn’t been conned into thinking that their African ancestry is more important than their status as Americans, nobody would try to make an issue of these differences.

Old documents discovered: Palestinian “refugees” say they were not driven out of Israel

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I want to bring to your attention this item by Ruth King at her blog. It’s about interviews conducted by John Roy Carlson, the pen name of an Armenian-American investigative reporter who went undercover among Nazi groups in America in the 1930s.

Then, in 1948, presenting himself as an Armenian American, he traveled to the Middle East and – incredibly – fought in Israel’s War of Independence – on the Arab side!  Of course, he was undercover yet again, reporting honestly – but secretly – about the genocidal nature of the war against the Jews and lauding the Zionists’ courage and sacrifices.  Decades before Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” – so demeaned today among Islamists and their fellow travelers – Carlson understood the threat of Jihad not only to the nascent Israel, but to the West as well.  One of his chapter headings reads, The World of the Koran: “Islam Uber Alles.”

Then she goes on to report:

Now, another, unpublished and untitled manuscript has emerged from the Derounian collection housed at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research.  It was written in the early 1960′s and consists of interviews and observations on the Arab world from Beirut to Baghdad.  Perhaps the most fascinating excerpts from the book have to do with Carlson’s sojourn in Amman, Jordan.  He interviews a number of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war and, most importantly, UNRWA officials, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, established in 1949 exclusively for the benefit of Palestinian Arab refugees.  No other refugee group since then has been assigned a special UN agency.  Currently UNRWA’s budget is close to half a billion dollars.  All other refugees fall under the jurisdiction of the UNHCR (United Nations High Committee for Refugees).   Perhaps most controversial of all, UNRWA has become the unofficial trough for HAMAS.  In the words of former UNRWA General Counsel, James G. Lindsay,

“UNRWA has taken very few steps to detect and eliminate terrorists from the ranks of its staff or its beneficiaries, and no steps at all to prevent members of organizations such as Hamas from joining its staff. UNRWA has no preemployment security checks and does not monitor off-time behavior to ensure compliance with the organization’s anti-terrorist rules. No justification exists for millions of dollars in humanitarian aid going to those who can afford to pay for UNRWA services.”

There are some examples of the interviews — photos of the typed pages. I can’t copy them here, but the gist is that Arab families left because they didn’t want to live among Jews, or because they were told they could return and they didn’t want to be where there was fighting (remember, the Arabs started the war). Carlson asked specifically whether the Jews drove them out. He said he asked the question a hundred times and didn’t find anyone who claimed they were driven out.

Update: Here is the original source for this story, JStreetJive.