3 November 2009

How South Koreans Feel About Americans

From the NYT;

Today, the mix of envy and loathing of the West, especially of white Americans, is apparent in daily life.

The government and media obsess over each new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, to see how the country ranks against other developed economies. A hugely popular television program is “Chit Chat of Beautiful Ladies” — a show where young, attractive, mostly Caucasian women who are fluent in Korean discuss South Korea. Yet, when South Koreans refer to Americans in private conversations, they nearly always attach the same suffix as when they talk about the Japanese and Chinese, their historical masters: “nom,” which means “bastards.” …

Ms. Hahn said that after the incident in the bus last July, her family was “turned upside down.” Her father and other relatives grilled her as to whether she was dating Mr. Hussain. But when a cousin recently married a German, “all my relatives envied her, as if her marriage was a boon to our family,” she said.

The Foreign Ministry supports an anti-discrimination law, said Kim Se-won, a ministry official. In 2007, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended that South Korea adopt such a law, deploring the widespread use of terms like “pure blood” and “mixed blood.” It urged public education to overcome the notion that South Korea was “ethnically homogenous,” which, it said, “no longer corresponds to the actual situation.”

But a recent forum to discuss proposed legislation against racial discrimination turned into a shouting match when several critics who had networked through the Internet showed up. They charged that such a law would only encourage even more migrant workers to come to South Korea, pushing native workers out of jobs and creating crime-infested slums. They also said it was too difficult to define what was racially or culturally offensive.

“Our ethnic homogeneity is a blessing,” said one of the critics, Lee Sung-bok, a bricklayer who said his job was threatened by migrant workers. “If they keep flooding in, who can guarantee our country won’t be torn apart by ethnic war as in Sri Lanka?”

Generally speaking, rescuing your country from conquest and then garrisoning your troops there for half a century to prevent another war doesn’t make you popular. The French loved us when we owed them a favor for the Revolutionary War, but us bailing them out in two 20th Century wars has reversed their feelings. Thus, President De Gaulle kicked American troops out of France in the 1960s, which probably helped turned down the emotional temperature.

People Are Living Longer

Today is the first time I’ve ever seen the age of death on the New York Times’ three featured obituaries average over 100 years old:

Update On NC “Mayberry” Killings–VDARE.com Reader Finds Perp Certainly An Immigrant, Maybe Illegal

VDARE.com’s readers are willing to go to lengths that the Main Stream Media’s writers can’t or won’t go: one has established that the “Mayberry” perp was indeed an immigrant, maybe illegal.

Reader John J. Pershing (e-mail him) writes

Note that the NC Dept. of Corrections mug sheet on Chavez Gonzales indicates: “Detainer:-Y” That means that there was an INS detainer placed on this guy at some point between his original arrest for kidnapping and his illegal release on probation (people on probation are supposed to obey federal and state laws, IA’s are ipso facto probation violators as soon as their probation intake interviews are conducted) as the second part of his “split sentence”. A “split sentence” in NC is a ruse that allows judges to dodge the abolition of parole in NC under the “Truth In Sentencing Act” and “Structured Sentence Act”.

and later writes:

Just got off the phone with Lt. Shelton regarding our boy’s lodging history in the Surry County lock up.

First stay (under the name of Marcos Gonzalez Chavez anyway) was in 2001 for his felony child kidnapping charge which got him into the NC prison system with an INS detainer as previously pointed out.

Next was in 2006 for a little less than 30 days and a guilty plea in court for no operator’s license arrest–released on time served as sentence.

Again on 6/06/06 for a parole violation. (from his child kidnapping conviction split sentence)

And now.

Gonzalez Chevez told Surry County detention intake officers that he was born in Mexico on this arrest. ICE has not issued a detainer yet. As of a few minutes ago Chavez Gonzalez has not received any visitors since his transfer from Virginia. I didn’t ask, but my guess is that his first appearance in Surry County Court will be today and he’ll get a court appointed defense attorney.

P.S.–Lt. Shelton is an affable fellow with a good sense of humor. It took him about 10 minutes to get to the phone because he was dealing with some sort of computer control problem on the sally port gates. I remarked that it sure was quite a leap from “one bullet” Barney getting locked in a cell by Otis the drunk to having computer problems with the sally port. He got a kick out of that.

Dr. Norm Matloff On NPR Discussion Of H-1Bs

Dr. Norm Matloff writes:

Last Monday there was an interesting discussion of H-1B and related issues on KALW, an NPR affiliate run by the San Francisco Unified School District. Some of you may recall that back in April I was a guest on the main NPR affiliate in San Francisco, KQED; see here.

The KALW program’s guests were Professors Clair Brown and Ronil Hira of UC Berkeley and the Rochester Institute of Technology, respectively. You can listen to the audio record here.

The program, hosted by Lauren Meltzer, calls itself “the thinking person’s talk radio show,” a description that I consider apt. I must say, though, that that goal was weakened a little in this case by the fact that the two discussants strongly agree on a vital point (fast-track green cards, explained below), thus providing no alternate voice on this important issue.

Nevertheless, the discussants did disagree on another major issue, concerning whether the tech industry can be divided into Good Guys and Bad Guys in terms of H-1B. Brown stated repeatedly, in fact seemed quite anxious to bring the point up, that the tech industry, e.g. Intel, are the Good Guys while the Indian-owned firms such as TCS are the Bad Guys. Hira disagreed, basically saying that no such dichotomy exists, and that basically they’re all Bad Guys.

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Iraqi Woman In Arizona Dies After Father Runs Over Her

Noor Almaleki Noor Faleh Almaleki died Monday of injuries she suffered when her own father ran over her October 20 in a parking lot in a Phoenix suburb of Peoria, Arizona.

Noor was killed by her father because in his words, she was “too Westernized“.

Daddy sure solved that problem! Now he has another. ABC 15 video report

Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48 fled to Mexico after he ran over Noor. His escape was aided by family members who undoubtedly approved of his actions. Not surprisingly nobody seems to know how he got across the border without being detected. He got all the way to London before he was apprehended. Faleh is back in Arizona, thanks to British police who seemed to be more on the ball than our border patrol.

Faleh has been charged for two cases of aggravated assault. The other charge was for hitting  the mother of Noor’s boyfriend, Amal Khalaf with his Jeep Cherokee as he was running over his daughter. Amal is expected to live but is in serious condition.

Faleh is being held on Phoenix on $5 million bail.

I have yet to find out for sure, but I suspect that Faleh Almaleki came to Arizona as an Iraqi war refugee. President Bush dumped hundreds of them in Arizona. Read the Washington Post article titled: Iraqi Refugees in Arizona, Many Families Find Adjustment Tough, Even Though the Southwest Reminds Them of Home.” That subtitle from the 2007 article seems very ironic now.

More On The Mexicanization Of Mayberry

Mount Airy, NC, site of the recent quadruple murder, and inspiration for the town of Mayberry, is in Surry County, NC. Here are three out of five of the Sheriff of Surry County’s Five Most Wanted:

  • Avenida las Flores “AKA” Jose Torres Negrete….h/m… 23 years old.  Wanted for Felony child rape.
  • Jamie Romero-Espinoza….h/m….36 years old: Wanted for habitual impaired driving.
  • Gabriel Delgado….w/m….26 years old: Wanted for Felony maintaining a  dwelling house for keeping and selling controlled substances, possess with intent to sell and deliver controlled substance and possession of stolen property.

You may remember that it was a plot point in the Andy Griffith Show that Sheriff Andy Taylor was the “Sheriff without a gun.” I would tend to deprecate that as a policy even in 1960, but today, it appears, everybody in Surry County is buying a gun, and who can blame them? [Gun permits up in Surry County, Mount Airy News, June 21, 2008]

Another Honor Killing In America

Noor Almaleki It’s infuriating to see another honor killing in America. Noor Almaleki (pictured) died after being run down by her father and spending nearly two weeks unconscious in a hospital.

A young Iraqi woman whose father allegedly hit her with his car because she had become too Westernized died from her injuries Monday after laying in a coma for nearly two weeks.

Noor Faleh Almaleki, 20, underwent spinal surgery and had been in a hospital since Oct. 20, when police say her father ran down her and her boyfriend’s mother with his Jeep as the women were walking across a parking lot in the west Phoenix suburb of Peoria.

The other woman, Amal Khalaf, is expected to survive.

Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48, fled after the attack but was arrested Thursday when he arrived at Atlanta’s airport, where he was sent from the United Kingdom after authorities denied him entrance.

Peoria police interviewed him and brought him back to Arizona over the weekend, but have declined to release what Almaleki said to them.

At a court hearing over the weekend in Phoenix, county prosecutor Stephanie Low told a judge that Almaleki admitted to committing the crime.

“By his own admission, this was an intentional act and the reason was that his daughter had brought shame on him and his family,” Low said. “This was an attempt at an honor killing.” [Woman hit with car by Iraqi father in Ariz. dies, San Francisco Chronicle, November 3, 2009 ]

Say, how about mandatory capital punishment for anyone convicted of honor killing in America? That would send a nice message about assimilation to western values.

Andy “Hit Man” Jackson

I’m rereading Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison’s Oxford History of the American People.The second volume was fairly dull until the democratic age arrives with Andrew Jackson, after which it’s consistently comic. For example, here’s a bit on the 1836 campaign by Vice President Richard Johnson, whose supporters chanted in answer to William Henry Harrison’s claim to be the Hero of Tippecanoe:

Rumpsey dumpsey, rumpsey dumpsey
Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh!

But this slogan, never surpassed for electioneering imbecility, failed to give him a majority in the Electoral College.

Morison’s description of Andrew Jackson, entering office at age 62, is striking:

Six feet one in height and weighing 145 pounds, slim and straight as a ramrod, his lean, strong face lit up by hawk-like eyes and surmounted a mane of thick gray hair.

That’s really skinny for a 62-year-old. Boxer Tommy “Hit Man” Hearns, who was famous for his long reach, was also 6′1″. He won the 147 pound welterweight championship, but he typically fought at heavier weights. Of course, Hearns was packing more muscle, but still 145 pounds? My freshman year in college I was 6′4″ and 168 pounds, and I looked like a sapling.

In The Birth of the Modern, Paul Johnson finds Jackson’s failure to put on weight as he aged alarming, comparing him to Simon Bolivar as the kind of successful but unsatisfied man who maintains a dangerously lean and hungry look as he gets old. I never know how much credence to give to these body-shape-drives-personality theories associated with William Sheldon.

Morison points out that although Jackson is often thought of today as a sort of Jethro Bodine of American history, a purely American sort, his right-hand man Martin Van Buren, when ambassador to Britain, “found Jackson’s likeness in the ‘Iron Duke,’ Wellington.”

I was once showing my nephew around the Art Institute of Chicago. I got to four early 19th Century English portraits of important aristocrats. The first was fat, the second was fat and alcoholic-looking, the third fat, alcoholic-looking, and gouty, and the fourth … the fourth was a raptor, the most hawk-like visage I’d ever seen. Of course, it was the Duke of Wellington, the Northern Irishman Britain needed.

I wonder if Jackson’s rather brawl-filled Presidency had anything to do with him still carrying two slugs in his body from his duels. Was he suffering from lead-poisoning, which tends to lower inhibitions?

Update On Hispanic Killings In Mayberry

I should point out that in the Mount Airy, NC shootings, it seems that all the victims were Hispanic, and at least one of the survivors can’t speak English:

Watson identified the victims — all residents of the town — as Victor Alfonso Martinez-Jimenez, 22; Javier Manuel Martinez, 21; Juan Manuel Martinez, 26; and Marcos Oviedo Aguliar, 21.

Michelle Oviedo, 21, said her boyfriend and brother were among the dead and the alleged shooter is her mother’s boyfriend. She said she was sitting on her porch not far from Wood’s TV when she heard the gunshots.

“When I got there, Javier and my brother were already gone,” she said. “They were on top of each other.”

Jose Armando Hernandez, 46, said through a translator that three of the victims were his nephews. He said his family is “destroyed” over the deaths, which he said stemmed from a problem with a woman.[Ex-con charged in 4 fatal shootings in 'Mayberry' By ALYSIA PATTERSON (AP) – 7 hours ago]

See also the North Carolina Department of Corrections page for MARCOS CHAVEZ GONZALEZ, which lists his age as 29, his race as “Other,” and doesn’t mention his citizenship or immigration status at all.

Probably Not A Good Idea

From Reuters:

An epic film about Islam’s Prophet Mohammad backed by the producer of “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Matrix” is being planned with the aim of “bridging cultures.”Filming of the $150-million English-language movie is set to start in 2011 with American Barrie Osborne as its producer, Qatari media company Alnoor Holdings said on Sunday.

The film - in which the Prophet would not be depicted, in accordance with Islamic rules - is in development and talks are being held with studios, talent agencies and distributors in the United States and Britain, Alnoor said.

Osborne told Reuters the film would be an “international epic production aimed at bridging cultures.”

This was already done in the 1970s, in the movie Mohammed, Messenger of God, directed by Mustapha Akkad, producer of the Halloween horror movies, who was blown up by Al Qaeda in 2005 while attending a wedding at a hotel in Jordan. The 1976 movie starred Anthony Quinn getting top billings as Hamza, Muhammad’s uncle (the Prophet’s closest relative whom it wouldn’t be impious to show on screen). According to Wikipedia:

In accordance with Muslim beliefs regarding depictions of Muhammad, he could not be depicted on-screen nor his voice be heard. This rule extends to his wives, his daughters and his sons-in-law. This leaves Muhammad’s uncle Hamza (Anthony Quinn) and his adopted son Zayd (Damien Thomas) as the central characters. During the battles of Badr and Uhud depicted in the movie, Hamza is in nominal command even though the actual fighting was led by Muhammad.

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