December 30, 2008

Jena Six Member Shot

Mychal Bell expected to survive

A Lesson From Jena

Western Voices readers

Mychal Bell, the convicted black "Jena Six" defendant whose case, involving the gang beating of a Jena, Louisiana white teen by a group of blacks made national headlines and stoked racial tensions, has been hospitalized after shooting himself. The shooting has been reported as either a suicide attempt or an accident in conflicting stories, which also report the location of the wound as either Bell's shoulder or chest.

Bell was rushed to a hospital in Monroe, Louisiana on Monday evening (December 29) with a single .22 gunshot wound that is not expected to be fatal.

The incident came shortly after Bell's Christmas Eve arrest on charges related to shoplifting at a local department store. Bell faces counts of shoplifting, resisting arrest, and simple battery after he allegedly attacked a store employee who found him hiding beneath a vehicle in possession of stolen clothing. (Bell pleaded guilty to a charge of simple battery in the "Jena Six" case and agreed to testify against his co-defendants). Bell is presently free on a $1300 bond.

The Associated Press initially surmised that Bell shot himself out of shame over his latest arrest, quoting Monroe Police Sgt. Cassandra Wooten: "I think he was upset over the incident ... and didn't want to be in the news again." But newer reports said the shooting was the result of an accidental discharge when Bell was cleaning a weapon. Why Bell, a convicted criminal, was in possession of a gun has not been explained.

Bell's Christmas Eve arrest did not make the general news outside of the area, an example of the selective coverage of the kind that generally occurs in racially sensitive cases of this kind, especially when the protagonist has been painted as a "victim."

An enormous media-driven campaign led by black special interest groups elevated Bell and his co-defendants to hero status after they were arrested for the gang beating of a white teenager in 2006 at the high school in tiny Jena, Louisiana. A white student at Jena High named Justin Barker was set upon and savagely beaten by Bell and five other blacks so badly that the blacks were charged with attempted murder. The mass media, which carried out advocacy in favor of the blacks, generated a "blame the victim" subtext because Barker had been released from the hospital the same day, as if that had any legal bearing on the charges. (The cost to Barker just of his emergency room visit came to over $5,000). The same media also made "links" between the attack on Barker and arson at the school as well as nooses hung from a tree on the school grounds. The tree, the media also said (in concert with radical black racist groups and demagogues like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson), had been a gathering place for "racist" white kids who supposedly violently kept blacks out of the vicinity. According to the confused tale, the existence and alleged role of the tree, which was subsequently chopped down, somehow ameliorated the attack on Barker.

A crowd of as many as 20,000 people, mostly black, descended on Jena for a "free the Jena Six" march and rally hyped by wall to wall press coverage. Apart from Sharpton and Jackson, the black supremacist New Black Panther Party was in attendance, along with rap stars like Mos Def and Ice Cube, plus members of tiny Marxist sects such as Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), a front group of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) which has almost singlehandedly destroyed the antiwar effort. In fact, the first national exposure of the case may have been through Left Turn, a spinoff of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) which, like the PSL, has roots in Trotskyite Marxism.*

Like many such cases, Jena became a cause célèbre. David Bowie, the singer, gave $10,000 to the Jena Defense Fund, and John Cougar Mellencamp, last heard of in the 1980s, released a ridiculous song and video ("Jena, take your nooses down"). At the Black Entertainment Television (BET) Hip Hop Awards, defendants Bryant Purvis and Corwin Jones presented the Video of the Year prize and got a standing ovation along with a "boys will be boys" observation of rapper/comedian Katt Williams: "They don't look so tough, do they?" Purvis and Jones thanked the Jena marchers as well as the "hip hop nation" for support. Rapper Ludacris would later employ the noose issue in support of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. In his song "Politics: Obama Is Here," Ludacris dismissed Hillary Clinton ("that bitch is irrelevant"), called to "paint the White House black" and declared that "the threats ain't fazing us, the nooses or the jokes, so get off your ass, black people, it's time to get out and vote!"

All of the media and mob pressure resulted in many of the charges being reduced against the defendants in the kind of circus-like atmosphere surrounding cases with famous or important people that has often made the justice system in the United States a laughing stock around the world.

In the aftermath, the case took on a life of its own, replete with urban legends. Noose sightings began to be reported nationwide as nooses, which had never really been much of a symbol of "white racism" before, began to be reported appearing in various places. Madonna Constantine, a black female professor facing a plagiarism investigation said she found a noose on the door of her at Columbia office. In Ohio a high school performance of Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians" play was stopped partly because the 1939 original edition published in England had a noose on the cover. State governments considered making noose displays "hate crimes," and a teenager in Louisiana was even hit with serious federal charges for rashly hanging a noose on his vehicle. In Alabama, the Mobile Museum of Art ordered all employees into mandatory sensitivity training after a rope that may have resembled a noose was found inside a closet, despite the director's admission that it wasn't even a noose at all. Halloween 2007 was especially spooky. A Halloween store in New Jersey had to take down a display after a complaint, while police in Madison, Wisconsin, repeatedly demanded local residents cut down a noose that was part of their home's Halloween decorations. After the mayor, no less, intervened against the homeowners they relented, citing fears of violence. United States government officials even went before the United Nations to pledge that they would grapple with the supposed noose epidemic.

"Noose incidents" involved outright hoaxes, unsurprising given the manufactured climate of white guilt, the mob mentality stoked by the media, and the readiness of officialdom to pander to nonwhite demands. An East Baltimore firefighter admitted placing a noose and threatening note in his firehouse. Black journalist Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who had also pointed out the cynicism of "Civil Rights Leaders" exploiting the Jena phenomenon, questioned the interpretation of embattled Madonna Constantine's claims about the noose at her office at Columbia University while going on to urge caution, using the shameful Duke rape hoax as an example of how easily racial claims may spin out of control. (The white Duke defendants were eventually exonerated largely because online alternative media were able to challenge "mainstream" coverage). And just as the media, as Hutchinson said, sought to portray the noose sightings as evidence of a new uprising of racial hatred, so too the same media gleefully reported the crackpot "opinions" and wild statements of a tiny number of white cranks who were granted disproportionate coverage in the hope of smearing any dissent and all questions of the process as the work of dangerous, violent hatemongers and lunatics.

The landscape of race, hate, opinion and the law grew increasingly complex around the Jena 6 issue as time went on. Broadcaster James Edwards of the Political Cesspool radio program wrote about one such case, which saw "hate crimes" charges being dropped against a "14 year old white kid in the Chicago area who not only wrote "a racial slur" on the locker of a black female classmate, but also used his computer to draw a picture of a black person being hanged, and labeled it with her name." Why were the charges dropped in such a seemingly open and shut case? The white boy was the former boyfriend of the black girl, and thus he could not be guilty of a thought ("hate") crime.

The protagonists also continued making news, thanks no doubt to the fear of "mainstream" media at being caught out by the online dissident media which had provided not only news but in-depth analysis on a scale that rendered easily controlled old line local and regional coverage obsolete. In February of 2008, Jena 6 member Bryant Purvis, the guy who didn't "look so tough" on BET, was charged with "assault causing bodily injury" and sentenced to community service and a year's probation. His partner from the BET appearance, Corwin Jones, was arrested in May, 2008 and accused of hitting a man from behind as part of a group, some of whom were allegedly armed with baseball bats. Jones was charged with misdemeanor simple battery, adding to a separate, nonviolent misdemeanor charge earlier in 2008.

Another Jena 6 member, Jesse Ray Beard, has been accepted to the prestigious Canterbury School, an exclusive prep school in Connecticut founded in 1915 for the sons of wealthy Roman Catholics. But Canterbury has a tuition price tag of just under $40,000. Half of this annual cost was going to be reportedly paid out of Jena defense funds, news that prompted Justin Barker to press his civil case. One group alone raised more than $200,000 for the Jena 6. Other fundraising efforts have allegedly been less than open, and donations may have reached over half a million dollars. Controversy about funds ensued when defendant Robert Bailey was photographed apparently eating a large number of hundred dollar bills.

The "Jena 6" issue consumed the national "mainstream" media in a frenzy of melodrama meant to appeal to conditioned white liberals. The narrative came complete with rhetorical flourishes about the pickup driving, inbred, snaggletoothed white trash of the "Ku Klux Klan country" around Jena, concerns over the nefariously iconic "all white juries," and ominous lynching nooses hung by nightriding rednecks. There was also an almost religious pride displayed in a noble and dignified "new civil rights movement" arising, bearing righteous witness against remnant Jim Crow injustice and the wrongs wrought by Katrina.

But while the images were meant to convey something out of "To Kill a Mockingbird," the preaching has been mostly to the choir. White people have had generations of white guilt propaganda thrust at them, and it has gotten old in the face of unremitting nonwhite crime, the corruption of black officials, affirmative action, unending racial vilification of whites (especially whites in the South), and Third World immigration on such a scale that it is even being felt in "backwaters" like Jena.

In actual fact, the whole "Civil Rights" phenomenon as a whole is largely a fantasy created in Washington, Hollywood and Manhattan, with little white support. According to neoconservative pundit and activist David Horowitz, a "red diaper baby" from a Communist Party family, the politically correct version of cross racial unity in the face of the "white racism" of the Jim Crow South is largely a myth: "More than half the the freedom riders who had gone to the southern states were Jews, although Jews constituted only only 3 percent of the population. It was an unprecedented show of solidarity from one people to another. Jews had put their resources and lives on the line to support the black struggle for civil rights, and indeed, two of their sons, Schwerner and Goodman, had been murdered for their efforts. (David Horowitz, Radical Son, p. 275). Horowitz speaks from experience. A key supporter of the murderous Black Panthers "back in the day," Horowitz reportedly not only now has black grandchildren but is a mouthpiece for some of the most extreme Zionist neoconservatism. In short, far from "uniting" whites against the "racism" of their own leaders, the "Civil Rights" juggernaut was a media creation fueled by serious financing and spun with expert advertising tactics, drawing soldiers from an extremely small ethnic group with power and influence far beyond their numbers and expressing interests at odds with the whites who tolerated their behavior and agenda.

With only shallow organic roots in history, the Jena 6 narrative was ultimately unable to prevail with the general public, despite the kind of hype that went into overdrive around the issue. The extreme partisanship seen in the one sided television and newspaper coverage had long alienated consumers, but survived because of a lack of competition. But now, with the advent of the internet and other alternative new media, their oligopoly of information and spin is challenged, as reflected in collapsing newspaper circulations and advertising sales across the Western world.

As a result, one-sided coverage of racial issues no longer goes unopposed.

* The ISO was founded by Yigael Gluckstein (alias Tony Cliff), who was key in constructing the Anti-Nazi League (better know as ANAL) with the help of powerful Jewish groups in the UK to carry out physical attacks with government collusion on the National Front in the 1970s. Cliff's nephew is Adam Kidron, the man behind "Nuestro Himno," the Spanish version of "The Star Spangled Banner" released as part of the amnesty for illegals campaign of 2006. Kidron, apparently thanks to his uncle's connection in the "Rock Against Racism" scene, originally worked as "a producer" for various bands, one of which blames him for ripping them off financially and ruining their recording. Steve Sailer of VDare quotes a band member: "We had a guy engineering called Adam Kidron, he was the millionaire son and heir of the Socialist publisher who owned Pluto Press. He was really funny and we were very naive and impressed by him. He talked us in to giving him producer royalties when we didn't even know what royalties were and we thought we were producing the album ourselves.... Adam hated guitars so we ended up with a far less powerful guitar sound than we would have liked. We were a guitar band after all."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The bell story was all over CNN. not sure why you would lie and say it hasnt received coverage except local. ugh. your ugly politics either blind you to the truth or force you to lie to make your point.

Anonymous said...

Your link to PSL destroying the anti-war movement said that only middle class whites have the social power to stop the war. funny. and false.