Daniel Cook
2015-01-01 02:12:57 UTC
It's that time of year again. You know what time I mean - the
time when the media promote that fake holiday created by a
crazed california felon who wanted to create racial discord.
That's right - Kwanzaa.
Do a news search and you'll find hundreds of articles about
wonderful Kwanzaa celebrations held all over America. Good luck
finding a single one that mentions the sorry fact that the
holiday's creator was imprisoned for torturing a couple of
African-American women.
You'll have to go here to my original article on Kwanzaa to find
that. The article originally ran in FrontPage Magazine back in
1998. It's easily found on the Internet by any journalist
willing to do the tiniest bit of research into Kwanzaa. I like
to run it this time every year as a corrective to all of the
dreadful journalism that occurs in every report of Kwanzaa.
If the media told the truth about Kwanzaa in these articles,
then every right-thinking American would realize it's a fraud.
Instead we get the same silly endorsement of this "African"
feast that has nothing to do with Africa and everything to do
with California in the 1960s.
If you don't have the time to read that long expose then you can
read the column I wrote on the subject back in 1998. Here it is
in full:
One of my alert readers called me the other day to inform me
that the public schools in New Jersey aren't allowed to
celebrate Christmas but are celebrating Kwanzaa.
This is intriguing. Christmas celebrates the legacy of Christ
who, by all accounts, was a nonviolent man who believed that
people of all types could learn to live in peace. Kwanzaa
celebrates the legacy of an extremely violent man from
California who has dedicated his life to spreading dissension
among the races.
More on that later. First let's deal with the question of why
schools can propagate a belief in Kwanzaa but not Christmas or
Chanukah. For an answer, I called Ed Martone of the American
Civil Liberties Union.
''Kwanzaa isn't a religious holiday," said Martone. "It's a
cultural holiday. It doesn't have the same restrictions as
Chanukah or Christmas."
I'll grant that there is a certain logic to the view. After all,
once the government gets involved in religion, the potential
conflicts among Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims and
atheists are so complex that perhaps we are better off avoiding
them altogether.
But by that same logic, the public schools should not be pushing
certain cultural practices. And the schools especially shouldn't
be endorsing cultural practices created by a character with the
beliefs and the background of Ron Karenga.
It is not easy to get a hold of the facts about the background
of the creator of Kwanzaa. In fact, it is nearly impossible. The
history of the founder of Kwanzaa has disappeared into an
Orwellian time warp. If you look up the name "Ron Karenga" on
any of the many newspaper data bases that are available these
days, you will read a glowing account of a deep-thinking
philosopher who comes across as a sort of jolly Father Christmas
for African-Americans.
You won't find any reference to murder or torture. Yet murder
was a specialty of US, the paramilitary organization that
Karenga ran in Los Angeles in the late 1960s.
As for torture, Karenga took that more personally. The accounts
of his personal role in a particularly sadistic episode of
brutality have been largely lost to history. The episode seems
to exist only on a few microfilmed pages of the Los Angeles
Times. It took two days of research and phone calls to track
them down. Here is an excerpt from an article headlined "Woman
describes two days of torture" on the May 1971 trial of Karenga
for torturing two dissident members of his group:
''Deborah Jones, who once was given the Swahili title of an
African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an
electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being
ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot
soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis' mouth and placed
against Miss Davis' face and that one of her own big toes was
tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and
running hoses in their mouths, she said."
Karenga was convicted and served more than three years in a
state prison.
This was not an isolated incident. In 1967, Karenga was accused
of having his thugs beat up a student who asked him an
impertinent question at a college forum. In 1969, US got
involved in a struggle with the Black Panthers for control of
the black studies program at UCLA. All involved carried guns on
campus. The US guys were quicker on the draw; they killed two
Panthers in a shootout at the student center.
It would be nice to say that after Karenga got out of jail in
1975 he repented, saw the error of his ways and invented Kwanzaa
as a means of atoning for his past. Nice, but untrue. Karenga
has never atoned for his thuggery, probably because no one ever
asked him to. And his sole concession to repentance was his 1975
conversion to Marxism. For him, this was considered to be a sign
that he had moderated his views.
Karenga invented Kwanzaa at the height of his gang days, in
1966. And he made it up not to bring peace among the races but
to divide them. That's why he placed this alleged "harvest
festival" in competition with Christmas, which he derided
because of its ties to the hated capitalist system.
It may be true that Kwanzaa has evolved into a ceremony that has
importance to a great number of well-intentioned people, people
who have no knowledge of its creator's questionable history. But
Karenga himself continues to champion the holiday as an example
of what he terms "cultural nationalism." This is the view that
black people are a separate "nation" within a hostile country.
During a visit to Newark in 1987, Karenga defined America as "an
insane, socially decaying society." "We need a value system and
a support system . . . because the world is organized against
your Africanism," he told Newark residents.
Karenga remains a leading spokesman for the multicultural
movement, a movement based on the idea that Americans should
emphasize their differences rather than their similarities. The
idea of Kwanzaa fits firmly within multiculturalism. And however
you feel about multiculturalism, you must admit that it is a
political movement and therefore one that should not be
supported with tax dollars.
As for Karenga himself, he should be given all the respect due a
convicted torturer. Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I believe
that once a man inserts a hot soldering iron into a woman's
mouth, he should be excluded from public discourse for eternity.
I may be wrong, however. Certainly, the people in California
don't seem to share this view. Karenga is now a professor at
California State University in Long Beach.
That's California for you. By that standard, there's a
university presidency waiting somewhere for Charles Manson when
he finally gets out.
http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2012/12/the_media_are_still
_falling_fo.html
time when the media promote that fake holiday created by a
crazed california felon who wanted to create racial discord.
That's right - Kwanzaa.
Do a news search and you'll find hundreds of articles about
wonderful Kwanzaa celebrations held all over America. Good luck
finding a single one that mentions the sorry fact that the
holiday's creator was imprisoned for torturing a couple of
African-American women.
You'll have to go here to my original article on Kwanzaa to find
that. The article originally ran in FrontPage Magazine back in
1998. It's easily found on the Internet by any journalist
willing to do the tiniest bit of research into Kwanzaa. I like
to run it this time every year as a corrective to all of the
dreadful journalism that occurs in every report of Kwanzaa.
If the media told the truth about Kwanzaa in these articles,
then every right-thinking American would realize it's a fraud.
Instead we get the same silly endorsement of this "African"
feast that has nothing to do with Africa and everything to do
with California in the 1960s.
If you don't have the time to read that long expose then you can
read the column I wrote on the subject back in 1998. Here it is
in full:
One of my alert readers called me the other day to inform me
that the public schools in New Jersey aren't allowed to
celebrate Christmas but are celebrating Kwanzaa.
This is intriguing. Christmas celebrates the legacy of Christ
who, by all accounts, was a nonviolent man who believed that
people of all types could learn to live in peace. Kwanzaa
celebrates the legacy of an extremely violent man from
California who has dedicated his life to spreading dissension
among the races.
More on that later. First let's deal with the question of why
schools can propagate a belief in Kwanzaa but not Christmas or
Chanukah. For an answer, I called Ed Martone of the American
Civil Liberties Union.
''Kwanzaa isn't a religious holiday," said Martone. "It's a
cultural holiday. It doesn't have the same restrictions as
Chanukah or Christmas."
I'll grant that there is a certain logic to the view. After all,
once the government gets involved in religion, the potential
conflicts among Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims and
atheists are so complex that perhaps we are better off avoiding
them altogether.
But by that same logic, the public schools should not be pushing
certain cultural practices. And the schools especially shouldn't
be endorsing cultural practices created by a character with the
beliefs and the background of Ron Karenga.
It is not easy to get a hold of the facts about the background
of the creator of Kwanzaa. In fact, it is nearly impossible. The
history of the founder of Kwanzaa has disappeared into an
Orwellian time warp. If you look up the name "Ron Karenga" on
any of the many newspaper data bases that are available these
days, you will read a glowing account of a deep-thinking
philosopher who comes across as a sort of jolly Father Christmas
for African-Americans.
You won't find any reference to murder or torture. Yet murder
was a specialty of US, the paramilitary organization that
Karenga ran in Los Angeles in the late 1960s.
As for torture, Karenga took that more personally. The accounts
of his personal role in a particularly sadistic episode of
brutality have been largely lost to history. The episode seems
to exist only on a few microfilmed pages of the Los Angeles
Times. It took two days of research and phone calls to track
them down. Here is an excerpt from an article headlined "Woman
describes two days of torture" on the May 1971 trial of Karenga
for torturing two dissident members of his group:
''Deborah Jones, who once was given the Swahili title of an
African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an
electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being
ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot
soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis' mouth and placed
against Miss Davis' face and that one of her own big toes was
tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and
running hoses in their mouths, she said."
Karenga was convicted and served more than three years in a
state prison.
This was not an isolated incident. In 1967, Karenga was accused
of having his thugs beat up a student who asked him an
impertinent question at a college forum. In 1969, US got
involved in a struggle with the Black Panthers for control of
the black studies program at UCLA. All involved carried guns on
campus. The US guys were quicker on the draw; they killed two
Panthers in a shootout at the student center.
It would be nice to say that after Karenga got out of jail in
1975 he repented, saw the error of his ways and invented Kwanzaa
as a means of atoning for his past. Nice, but untrue. Karenga
has never atoned for his thuggery, probably because no one ever
asked him to. And his sole concession to repentance was his 1975
conversion to Marxism. For him, this was considered to be a sign
that he had moderated his views.
Karenga invented Kwanzaa at the height of his gang days, in
1966. And he made it up not to bring peace among the races but
to divide them. That's why he placed this alleged "harvest
festival" in competition with Christmas, which he derided
because of its ties to the hated capitalist system.
It may be true that Kwanzaa has evolved into a ceremony that has
importance to a great number of well-intentioned people, people
who have no knowledge of its creator's questionable history. But
Karenga himself continues to champion the holiday as an example
of what he terms "cultural nationalism." This is the view that
black people are a separate "nation" within a hostile country.
During a visit to Newark in 1987, Karenga defined America as "an
insane, socially decaying society." "We need a value system and
a support system . . . because the world is organized against
your Africanism," he told Newark residents.
Karenga remains a leading spokesman for the multicultural
movement, a movement based on the idea that Americans should
emphasize their differences rather than their similarities. The
idea of Kwanzaa fits firmly within multiculturalism. And however
you feel about multiculturalism, you must admit that it is a
political movement and therefore one that should not be
supported with tax dollars.
As for Karenga himself, he should be given all the respect due a
convicted torturer. Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I believe
that once a man inserts a hot soldering iron into a woman's
mouth, he should be excluded from public discourse for eternity.
I may be wrong, however. Certainly, the people in California
don't seem to share this view. Karenga is now a professor at
California State University in Long Beach.
That's California for you. By that standard, there's a
university presidency waiting somewhere for Charles Manson when
he finally gets out.
http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2012/12/the_media_are_still
_falling_fo.html