A Passion Play
Timothy Birdnow
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Dr. Martin Luther King
Recently I received a chain e-mail detailing the horrific rape and murder of a young Knoxville couple in 2007. Channon Christian and Chris Newsom were carjacked by a group of black thugs, repeatedly gang-raped, sexually tortured, urinated on, and eventually murdered (after several days of torment). The story received no national attention, and is only now coming to light as it makes it's way through the internet in response to the hysteria over the shooting of Trayvon Martin. Needless to say, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the New Black Panthers, and the others who are so indignant about the killing of Martin (with little evidence) seem unconcerned about an horrific act of barbarism perpetrated on a white couple.
According to Knoxnews.com:
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/news/local/channon-christian-christopher-newsom-murders/
"In the early morning hours of Jan. 7, 2007, Christopher Newsom and his girlfriend Channon Christian were carjacked and held captive in a house on Chipman Street in Knoxville. Both were raped, tortured and killed. Newsom's body was discovered in the vicinity that afternoon burning alongside railroad tracks. Christian's body was found stuffed in a trashcan inside the house a couple of days later. Five people were arrested in connection with the crime . Eric Boyd was convicted in federal court of aiding the alleged ringleader, Lemaricus Davidson, after the carjacking and murders and is serving an 18-year prison sentence. The first defendant to be tried in Knox County Criminal Court, Letalvis Cobbins, was sentenced to life in prison without parole in August 2009. His brother, Davidsion, was tried next and was sentenced to death by lethal injection in October 2009. In December 2009, George Thomas was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Vanessa Coleman was acquitted of first-degree murder in May in the deaths but was convicted of facilitating the death of Christian. She is awaiting sentencing on July 30."
End excerpt
The race of the perpetrators should be immaterial to any moral judgment here, as should be the race of the victims, but this case illustrates perfectly the hypocrisy of the national news media and the professional race-hustling class; there is little concern for these "privileged" white kids.
There is a narrative, a passion-play, if you will, which permeates the media and the elite Left. Persons of color cannot be anything but victims, this narrative states, and if any perpetrate some monstrous act, why, it's simply an acting out of natural anger and must be dismissed as the result of white injustice. In this narrative the white person is always the guilty party, guilty by virtue of some perceived privilege, a privilege that was obtained through repression, through theft, through evil domination of persons of color, through racism. That is why they jumped on the Trayvon Martin case; they saw a story that they thought would fit their narrative. Ditto the Duke Lacrosse case. The best thing they can do to reinforce this narrative is to ignore stories like the Christian/Newsom murders, because it not only does not buttress their argument that white males are evil but it actually turns hearts and minds against their template. One sours on this "people of color are always good" narrative after being victimized.
This is part of the reason the Left is so quick to embrace Muslims; they are people of color, whose understandable anger is the byproduct of Western white racism and oppression. That Muslims have behaved this way since the Prophet Muhammad, that at the peak of their power they still engaged in terrorist attacks, in kidnappings, in enslavement, is forgotten or just not that important to the Liberals; what matters is that they are not white, Christian, Westerners. These liberals can ignore the fact that the Crusades were sparked in part by the murder of over 2000 Christian pilgrims peaceably traveling to Jerusalem, and they focus on the fact that the Christians attacked the Islamic world - when the Islamic world was only Islamic because of military conquest. It is the reason why the media carefully reported about the Fort Hood shooting, trying to say that Nidal Malik Hasan suffered from stress at being called up while ignoring that he had become increasingly radical and shouted Aluha Ahkbar! when he fired at the soldiers. We cannot give the pea-brained white Christian Right-wing hillbillies the idea that a man of color committed an atrocity, lest they rampage and lynch innocents.
For example, the left-wing blog site Crooks and Liars had this to say immediately after the Hasan shootings:
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/wingnuts-rush-conclusions-about-fort
"No sooner was the identity of the Fort Hood shooter released -- a man with the Arab name Nadal Malik Hasan -- than the wingnuts sprang into predictable action: Of course he was a jihadi embarking on a murderous terrorism spree!"
[...]
"Then Shepard Smith interviewed Hasan's cousin, and we found out that this was all so much tripe:
-- Hasan was American born and educated, but raised Muslim. He was not a convert.
-- He had never previously been deployed to Iraq or anywhere overseas, for that matter. So much for the theories he suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
-- He was regularly abused by his colleagues in the military for being Muslim -- called a "raghead" and other such terms -- and had been seeking to get out of the military because the environment had become so hostile.
Another interview, on just before this one, that Smith had with a former colleague of Hasan's indicated that Hasan was prone to making outrageous remarks about Muslims "defending themselves," particularly in reference to last summer's shooting of two military recruiters in Arkansas by a Muslim convert.
There are also reports that he had recently been the victim of a hate crime: His car was vandalized, with the word "Allah" scratched into the paint, and he was reportedly extremely upset by it."
End excerpt
But Crooks and Liars was spectacularly wrong, as evidence would clearly show. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/us/07forthood.html?partner=rss&emc=rss The Army knew it, too, knew about Hasan's involvement with radicals in Yemen and yet failed to act against him because of the narrative. But the important point to observe is that Crooks and Liars kneejerk reaction was to absolve Hasan of guilt; how can he be guilty? He's a person of color, and clearly a de-facto victim.
In typical fashion, the mainstream media was slow to call this an act of terrorism. The New York Times, for instance, quoted Administration officials who tried to claim it was a matter of combat stress, even though Hasan had never been in combat.
So the Left is quick to defend persons of color, and have been nearly apoplectic in their defense of Trayvon Martin and their insistence that his killer, George Zimmerman (a man they mistakenly identified as white and now call a "white hispanic") face the full fury of the law is only natural to their worldview.
Liberalism is a destructive force. It is about tearing down, about dismantling the edifice that has been built here in the West. Western culture was built upon the bedrock of Judaism and the Greco-Roman culture, and Christianity refined that culture and kept building, creating a cathedral of cultural heritage. The core of Liberalism is hatred for that system, hatred of the Church, hatred of the traditions and heritage that made our society. Western civilization had it's faults - many of them - but the fact remains it was superior to any other culture Man has ever employed. Concepts of charity, of justice, of kindness, were largely alien in the rest of the world. Ars Gratia Artist, art for art's sake, is a Western concept. So is knowledge for knowledge sake. So is participatory government. The list goes on and on.
But Liberalism fanned the flames of discontent, of hatred of God and Church, of rebellion. The Liberals were fortunate, as their movement came on the heels of the Protestant Reformation and they learned what worked for the Protestants. They had the printing press. They had a framework of educational institutions. They were uniquely poised to spread their misanthropy. And their philosophy of rebellion has come to dominate the modern Western world.
That philosophy has created the monsters who raped and murdered the young couple in Knoxville. And it continues to foster and nurture the same conditions that made this heinous act possible.
It was the sexual revolution and the Great Society that destroyed the black family, leading to innumerable children being poorly raised by overworked and stressed-out single mothers. It was the relaxation of disciplinary policies in the schools that made these unruly children feel untouchable, able to do anything. It was the failure of this same educational system that made it impossible for them to learn. It was the liberal notion of nonjudgementalism that made it impossible for even strangers to correct bad behavior. It was the liberal view that punishment should not be meted out when children are bad - or when adults perform evil acts - and these thugs learned early that they would receive lots of attention by acting up and would face no real consequence. It was the liberals who encouraged drug use, which has become an epidemic, particularly in black neighborhoods. The barbarism that we witness today in America's streets is entirely a creation of the Left.
And the fruits of this permissiveness coupled with restraint of those who would take action are ubiquitous. The Knockout Game in St. Louis is but one example of young males acting out because they can.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/knockout-game-case-shocked-st-louis-then-fell-apart/article_cdf5032a-b65e-51e0-a84e-de0f0ce0c5f8.html
The Left has systematically dismantled the centuries-old system designed to channel the courser portions of human nature into less destructive directions, and many are then surprised that the system is breaking down. (Actually, the hard Left knew full well it would break down, which is why they did it; their purpose is revolution, and that can only come when the hated culture loses it's grip.) Gun control is, of course, a big part of it; as long as there is an armed citizenry there is a defense se against the barbarians. The goal is to make the average person defenseless before evil, then they will cry out to the State. But there are many soft-headed liberals who really believed their way would improve things, completely ignoring history. History shows that Man is depraved and requires a system of levees and barricades to channel his passions. As James Madison pointed out in Federalist 51, if Men were angels they would have no need of government. Men are not angels.
But by government we mean more than just the formal institution of the State, we mean the entire sphere of culture and tradition. We mean the churches. We mean custom. We mean public pressures. We mean a man should be able to correct an unruly child without fear of reprisal. We mean school officials who will take action against a bad child who is disruptive in class; one bad apple does indeed spoil the barrel. Ask any school teacher about the power of one unruly child in corrupting the whole educational environment.
But first and foremost we mean a man should govern himself. That is the first, most primal, form of governing. Without that we are left to govern at the point of a sword, or allow barbarism to reign.
Liberals think that freedom means not being subject to any sort of discipline. They have dismantled every guardrail. That human beings need these guardrails to give them guidance never occurs to the Liberal; he sees only the focus of his own selfish desire to hold unlimited license. “Who are we to judge?”, they demand of us. A whole generation has grown up under the delusional viewpoint that nobody can tell anybody how to live because there is no right to judge. We would not raise a dog in such a fashion, yet children are allowed, nay, forced to invent their entire system of morality. Human nature is debased, according to the Bible. Liberals may not believe that, preferring to think Man is inherently good, but history shows little goodness in the undisciplined person. These thugs who committed this heinous act should be proof of that last statement.
The Left's answer is more of the same, more empowering of government at the expense of the people who are actually in the trenches. Free Man from every sin by simply denying there is such a thing! Excuse, dismiss, embolden, all the while restraining those who would act as a force for civilization. We are busily creating the barbarians who will bring our civilization down.
And so the liberals in the media go ballistic when a young black man is killed by a frightened non-black antagonist, while dismissing as unimportant one of the most hideous acts of pure evil imaginable because the perpetrators are persons of color. This dismissal is simply because the murders in Knoxville do not fit their paradigm, do not advance the passion-play morality lesson they wish to advance. Oh, and a passion play was often designed to inflame passions in the audience; many Jews were killed in the Middle Ages after such events. The modern media version serves much the same purpose.
The Fourth Estate has become nothing but a parliament of social revolutionaries.
Trayvon Martin may or may not have been murdered by a "white-hispanic", but these men murdered this young couple in cold blood. They deserve better than a yawn from the press.
(Hat tip to Dana Mathewson and Jack Kemp for several concepts in this work.)
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Dr. Martin Luther King
Recently I received a chain e-mail detailing the horrific rape and murder of a young Knoxville couple in 2007. Channon Christian and Chris Newsom were carjacked by a group of black thugs, repeatedly gang-raped, sexually tortured, urinated on, and eventually murdered (after several days of torment). The story received no national attention, and is only now coming to light as it makes it's way through the internet in response to the hysteria over the shooting of Trayvon Martin. Needless to say, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the New Black Panthers, and the others who are so indignant about the killing of Martin (with little evidence) seem unconcerned about an horrific act of barbarism perpetrated on a white couple.
According to Knoxnews.com:
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/news/local/channon-christian-christopher-newsom-murders/
"In the early morning hours of Jan. 7, 2007, Christopher Newsom and his girlfriend Channon Christian were carjacked and held captive in a house on Chipman Street in Knoxville. Both were raped, tortured and killed. Newsom's body was discovered in the vicinity that afternoon burning alongside railroad tracks. Christian's body was found stuffed in a trashcan inside the house a couple of days later. Five people were arrested in connection with the crime . Eric Boyd was convicted in federal court of aiding the alleged ringleader, Lemaricus Davidson, after the carjacking and murders and is serving an 18-year prison sentence. The first defendant to be tried in Knox County Criminal Court, Letalvis Cobbins, was sentenced to life in prison without parole in August 2009. His brother, Davidsion, was tried next and was sentenced to death by lethal injection in October 2009. In December 2009, George Thomas was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Vanessa Coleman was acquitted of first-degree murder in May in the deaths but was convicted of facilitating the death of Christian. She is awaiting sentencing on July 30."
End excerpt
The race of the perpetrators should be immaterial to any moral judgment here, as should be the race of the victims, but this case illustrates perfectly the hypocrisy of the national news media and the professional race-hustling class; there is little concern for these "privileged" white kids.
There is a narrative, a passion-play, if you will, which permeates the media and the elite Left. Persons of color cannot be anything but victims, this narrative states, and if any perpetrate some monstrous act, why, it's simply an acting out of natural anger and must be dismissed as the result of white injustice. In this narrative the white person is always the guilty party, guilty by virtue of some perceived privilege, a privilege that was obtained through repression, through theft, through evil domination of persons of color, through racism. That is why they jumped on the Trayvon Martin case; they saw a story that they thought would fit their narrative. Ditto the Duke Lacrosse case. The best thing they can do to reinforce this narrative is to ignore stories like the Christian/Newsom murders, because it not only does not buttress their argument that white males are evil but it actually turns hearts and minds against their template. One sours on this "people of color are always good" narrative after being victimized.
This is part of the reason the Left is so quick to embrace Muslims; they are people of color, whose understandable anger is the byproduct of Western white racism and oppression. That Muslims have behaved this way since the Prophet Muhammad, that at the peak of their power they still engaged in terrorist attacks, in kidnappings, in enslavement, is forgotten or just not that important to the Liberals; what matters is that they are not white, Christian, Westerners. These liberals can ignore the fact that the Crusades were sparked in part by the murder of over 2000 Christian pilgrims peaceably traveling to Jerusalem, and they focus on the fact that the Christians attacked the Islamic world - when the Islamic world was only Islamic because of military conquest. It is the reason why the media carefully reported about the Fort Hood shooting, trying to say that Nidal Malik Hasan suffered from stress at being called up while ignoring that he had become increasingly radical and shouted Aluha Ahkbar! when he fired at the soldiers. We cannot give the pea-brained white Christian Right-wing hillbillies the idea that a man of color committed an atrocity, lest they rampage and lynch innocents.
For example, the left-wing blog site Crooks and Liars had this to say immediately after the Hasan shootings:
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/wingnuts-rush-conclusions-about-fort
"No sooner was the identity of the Fort Hood shooter released -- a man with the Arab name Nadal Malik Hasan -- than the wingnuts sprang into predictable action: Of course he was a jihadi embarking on a murderous terrorism spree!"
[...]
"Then Shepard Smith interviewed Hasan's cousin, and we found out that this was all so much tripe:
-- Hasan was American born and educated, but raised Muslim. He was not a convert.
-- He had never previously been deployed to Iraq or anywhere overseas, for that matter. So much for the theories he suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
-- He was regularly abused by his colleagues in the military for being Muslim -- called a "raghead" and other such terms -- and had been seeking to get out of the military because the environment had become so hostile.
Another interview, on just before this one, that Smith had with a former colleague of Hasan's indicated that Hasan was prone to making outrageous remarks about Muslims "defending themselves," particularly in reference to last summer's shooting of two military recruiters in Arkansas by a Muslim convert.
There are also reports that he had recently been the victim of a hate crime: His car was vandalized, with the word "Allah" scratched into the paint, and he was reportedly extremely upset by it."
End excerpt
But Crooks and Liars was spectacularly wrong, as evidence would clearly show. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/us/07forthood.html?partner=rss&emc=rss The Army knew it, too, knew about Hasan's involvement with radicals in Yemen and yet failed to act against him because of the narrative. But the important point to observe is that Crooks and Liars kneejerk reaction was to absolve Hasan of guilt; how can he be guilty? He's a person of color, and clearly a de-facto victim.
In typical fashion, the mainstream media was slow to call this an act of terrorism. The New York Times, for instance, quoted Administration officials who tried to claim it was a matter of combat stress, even though Hasan had never been in combat.
So the Left is quick to defend persons of color, and have been nearly apoplectic in their defense of Trayvon Martin and their insistence that his killer, George Zimmerman (a man they mistakenly identified as white and now call a "white hispanic") face the full fury of the law is only natural to their worldview.
Liberalism is a destructive force. It is about tearing down, about dismantling the edifice that has been built here in the West. Western culture was built upon the bedrock of Judaism and the Greco-Roman culture, and Christianity refined that culture and kept building, creating a cathedral of cultural heritage. The core of Liberalism is hatred for that system, hatred of the Church, hatred of the traditions and heritage that made our society. Western civilization had it's faults - many of them - but the fact remains it was superior to any other culture Man has ever employed. Concepts of charity, of justice, of kindness, were largely alien in the rest of the world. Ars Gratia Artist, art for art's sake, is a Western concept. So is knowledge for knowledge sake. So is participatory government. The list goes on and on.
But Liberalism fanned the flames of discontent, of hatred of God and Church, of rebellion. The Liberals were fortunate, as their movement came on the heels of the Protestant Reformation and they learned what worked for the Protestants. They had the printing press. They had a framework of educational institutions. They were uniquely poised to spread their misanthropy. And their philosophy of rebellion has come to dominate the modern Western world.
That philosophy has created the monsters who raped and murdered the young couple in Knoxville. And it continues to foster and nurture the same conditions that made this heinous act possible.
It was the sexual revolution and the Great Society that destroyed the black family, leading to innumerable children being poorly raised by overworked and stressed-out single mothers. It was the relaxation of disciplinary policies in the schools that made these unruly children feel untouchable, able to do anything. It was the failure of this same educational system that made it impossible for them to learn. It was the liberal notion of nonjudgementalism that made it impossible for even strangers to correct bad behavior. It was the liberal view that punishment should not be meted out when children are bad - or when adults perform evil acts - and these thugs learned early that they would receive lots of attention by acting up and would face no real consequence. It was the liberals who encouraged drug use, which has become an epidemic, particularly in black neighborhoods. The barbarism that we witness today in America's streets is entirely a creation of the Left.
And the fruits of this permissiveness coupled with restraint of those who would take action are ubiquitous. The Knockout Game in St. Louis is but one example of young males acting out because they can.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/knockout-game-case-shocked-st-louis-then-fell-apart/article_cdf5032a-b65e-51e0-a84e-de0f0ce0c5f8.html
The Left has systematically dismantled the centuries-old system designed to channel the courser portions of human nature into less destructive directions, and many are then surprised that the system is breaking down. (Actually, the hard Left knew full well it would break down, which is why they did it; their purpose is revolution, and that can only come when the hated culture loses it's grip.) Gun control is, of course, a big part of it; as long as there is an armed citizenry there is a defense se against the barbarians. The goal is to make the average person defenseless before evil, then they will cry out to the State. But there are many soft-headed liberals who really believed their way would improve things, completely ignoring history. History shows that Man is depraved and requires a system of levees and barricades to channel his passions. As James Madison pointed out in Federalist 51, if Men were angels they would have no need of government. Men are not angels.
But by government we mean more than just the formal institution of the State, we mean the entire sphere of culture and tradition. We mean the churches. We mean custom. We mean public pressures. We mean a man should be able to correct an unruly child without fear of reprisal. We mean school officials who will take action against a bad child who is disruptive in class; one bad apple does indeed spoil the barrel. Ask any school teacher about the power of one unruly child in corrupting the whole educational environment.
But first and foremost we mean a man should govern himself. That is the first, most primal, form of governing. Without that we are left to govern at the point of a sword, or allow barbarism to reign.
Liberals think that freedom means not being subject to any sort of discipline. They have dismantled every guardrail. That human beings need these guardrails to give them guidance never occurs to the Liberal; he sees only the focus of his own selfish desire to hold unlimited license. “Who are we to judge?”, they demand of us. A whole generation has grown up under the delusional viewpoint that nobody can tell anybody how to live because there is no right to judge. We would not raise a dog in such a fashion, yet children are allowed, nay, forced to invent their entire system of morality. Human nature is debased, according to the Bible. Liberals may not believe that, preferring to think Man is inherently good, but history shows little goodness in the undisciplined person. These thugs who committed this heinous act should be proof of that last statement.
The Left's answer is more of the same, more empowering of government at the expense of the people who are actually in the trenches. Free Man from every sin by simply denying there is such a thing! Excuse, dismiss, embolden, all the while restraining those who would act as a force for civilization. We are busily creating the barbarians who will bring our civilization down.
And so the liberals in the media go ballistic when a young black man is killed by a frightened non-black antagonist, while dismissing as unimportant one of the most hideous acts of pure evil imaginable because the perpetrators are persons of color. This dismissal is simply because the murders in Knoxville do not fit their paradigm, do not advance the passion-play morality lesson they wish to advance. Oh, and a passion play was often designed to inflame passions in the audience; many Jews were killed in the Middle Ages after such events. The modern media version serves much the same purpose.
The Fourth Estate has become nothing but a parliament of social revolutionaries.
Trayvon Martin may or may not have been murdered by a "white-hispanic", but these men murdered this young couple in cold blood. They deserve better than a yawn from the press.
(Hat tip to Dana Mathewson and Jack Kemp for several concepts in this work.)
posted by Timothy Birdnow | 6:50 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home