Two Zambian students in Utah stole tens of thousands of dollars worth of books from the BYU bookstore, pled guilty, and are now being held as material witnesses against the trial of the alleged receiver of stolen goods, since they’re obvious flight risks if allowed out on bail–they’re supposed to be deported.

I think they’re victims of a culture clash–BYU and Utah have a non-diverse, low-crime culture where stealing is looked on as wrong, and where the non-violent theft of less than a hundred thousand dollars worth of property can lead to jail time and deportation. It’s almost like living in…the America anyone over forty was born in.

Two former BYU-Idaho students who stole tens of thousands of dollars of books from the campus bookstore are speaking exclusively to Channel 3 Eyewitness News reporter Nate Eaton

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The pair is charged with stealing tens of thousands of dollars of books from the BYU-Idaho bookstore. They pleaded guilty and were supposed to be released in August to be deported back to their homes in Africa.
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The pair is still being held as material witnesses to testify against Zachariah Rodgers. He’s the man police say Chikusu and Sinyangwe sold books to and then Rodgers would turn around and sell them online.

Rodgers is out on bond. His trial is set for December and that makes these guys angry.

Sinyangwe: “I’m sitting here on a quarter of a million bond like I killed somebody. And that guy is being charged with possession of stolen property and he’s outside. His bond was ten thousand and he got out with one thousand bucks. And I’m sitting here quarter of a million because I’m black.

Nate Eaton, Channel 3: “You think it’s because you’re black?”

Sinyangwe: “It definitely is. It is. This district attorney…I don’t think he likes black people.”

Sinyangwe says they are being targeted because of their race but officials say the men haven’t been released because they may flee the state or the country.
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Eaton: “They say it’s because they’re afraid if they let you out, you guys will leave.”

Sinyangwe: “I’m not a flight risk. They can hold my passport. Where am I gonna go without my passport?”
…

[America, of course. Deportable aliens can just vanish into America, somewhere where there's a large immigrant population, and wait for an amnesty.]

Chikusu and Sinyangwe say they just want to be released so they can go home. And the longer they stay locked up, the more they wonder why they’re still here.

Sinyangwe: “To me it looks like this is just a political slap on my face and on my country and on my continent too.”

The men’s attorney is working to get them out of jail as soon as possible. They also plan to fight against being deported.

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[EXCLUSIVE: BYUI Bookstore Thieves Speak from Behind Bars; Accuse Officials of Racism | KIDK CBS 3, By Nate Eaton, November 1, 2007]

Note that the video has subtitles, although it’s conducted in English, because the two convicts have Zambian accents. In New York, they might not think that was necessary, because everyone talks to foreigners everyday, but in Utah, people might spend all day talking to Americans.

“It was a guy ["Curveball"] trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth” — Tyler Drumheller, former CIA official quoted by CBS

The BBC Reports:

Iraq war source’s name revealed

A US TV network has revealed the name of “Curveball” - an Iraqi man whose information was central to the US government’s argument to invade Iraq.

The CBS show 60 Minutes identifies him as Iraqi defector Rafid Ahmed Alwan. The programme says he arrived in a German refugee centre in 1999 where he lied to win asylum and was not the chemical expert he said he was.

His claims of mobile bio-weapons labs in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq were backed until well after the 2003 invasion.

The CBS 60 Minutes programme airs on Sunday but material released on its web site says Curveball was “not only a liar, but also a thief and a poor student instead of the chemical engineering whiz he claimed to be”.

It also says it assumes Mr Alwan is now living in Germany under a different name.

The programme says he claimed to be a star chemical engineer at a plant that made mobile biological weapons in Djerf al-Nadaf. However, its investigation showed he received only low marks in chemical engineering at university and was the subject of an arrest warrant for alleged theft from a TV production company he worked for in Baghdad.

The programme also includes footage of his wedding in 1993 in the Iraqi capital.

It quotes former CIA senior official Tyler Drumheller as saying: “It was a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth.”

German intelligence agents warned the US in a letter that there was no way to verify Mr Alwan’s claims. However, his information was used in a speech by then Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN to back military action in Iraq.

The 60 Minutes report says the information was passed on by then CIA director George Tenet, who denies ever seeing the German intelligence letter. The programme says Mr Alwan’s story unravelled once CIA agents finally confronted him with evidence contradicting his claims.

Back in November 2005, Col Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to Mr Powell, told the BBC’s Carolyn Quinn he was aware the Germans had said that they had told the CIA of the unreliability. “And then you begin to speculate, you begin to wonder was this intelligence spun; was it politicised; was it cherry-picked; did in fact the American people get fooled?,” Col Wilkerson said.

A presidential intelligence commission into the matter found that Curveball was a liar and an alcoholic.

I can’t wait to hear libertarian Open Borders advocates explain that this just shows that we wouldn’t have to fight pointless wars based on misinformation if we just gave Green Cards to all the alcoholic liars in the world.

This is from Walter Olson’s Overlawyered.com:

Overlawyered: Lawsuit demands drugstores hire bilingual interpreters

Immigrant advocacy groups are filing a complaint with the New York attorney general’s office naming 16 pharmacies in Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island, claiming “that federal civil rights law and state health regulations require pharmacies to provide linguistic help” to “people who speak little or no English”. “That assistance should include interpreters at pharmacies and written translations of medication instructions, the advocates say.” The advocacy groups are New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, the New York Immigration Coalition and Make the Road New York.

It seems a creative reinterpretation of “national origin discrimination” has been going on for some time:

At which point he goes on to quote the New York Times story, [Non-English Speakers Charge Bias in Prescription Labeling, By Anne Barnard, October 31, 2007 ] but I’ll point you to Ho Ho! This Inverted Santa Clause Wants Your Money (In Any Language) By Thomas Allen, December 11, 2002, just to make the point that we were covering this almost five years ago. Not only has it been going on for some time, but we’ve been covering it for some time.

In Slate, William Saletan has a tussle with “Jewgenics:”

Are Jews a race? Is Jewish intelligence genetic?

If these notions make you cringe, you’re not alone. Many non-Jews find them offensive. Actually, scratch that. I have no idea whether non-Jews find them offensive. But I imagine that they do, which is why Jews like me wince at any suggestion of Jewish genetic superiority. We don’t even want to talk about it.

Actually, a bunch of us did talk about it, three days ago at a forum at the American Enterprise Institute. The main speaker was Jon Entine, an AEI fellow and author of a new book, Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People. He was joined by fellow AEI scholar Charles Murray and by Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist at Northwestern University. Entine and Zoloth are Jewish. Murray isn’t but talks as though he wishes he were. “One of my thesis advisers at MIT was a Sephardic Jew,” he announced proudly, turning the old “some of my best friends” cliché upside down.

Saletan’s assertion that Jews don’t mention that they are a race out of politeness — because gentiles would find the idea of Jews being a race offensive and Jews never want to cause offense–is pretty funny. In reality, of course, gentiles seldom mention that Jews are, more or less, a hereditary racial group because they don’t want to be denounced for it by hotly offended, verbally facile, high IQ, argumentatively tireless Jewish intellectuals.

My pet theory has long been that one important reason that Ashkenazi Jews are so suited to winning arguments in the modern world is because they developed for centuries in a largely unarmed shtetl culture where to argue aggressively didn’t put your life at risk. Heinlein famously asserted that “An armed society is a polite society,” but the converse would seem also to be true: “An unarmed society is an argumentative society.”

In contrast, gentlemen in England wore swords until some point in the 18th Century (and England was a fairly low violence society compared to the rest of Europe). Alexander Hamilton was removed from the gene pool in a duel in 1804, and a U.S. Senator was killed in a duel in San Francisco as late as 1859.

Argument is a two edged sword. Without arguing, you can’t make as much progress as fast in understanding the world (as the enormous number of hard science Nobel Prizes won by Jews attests). But, you can also use your ardor for verbal combat to browbeat others who lack your love of endless argument into either acquiescence or silence, as shown by the long history of bad ideas such as Freudianism that Jewish advocates have verbally badgered much of the rest of the world into at least temporarily conceding.