N-E-G-U-S (spelled just like it sounds)

So I just turned on the National Spelling Bee on ESPN, right? A little redheaded white kid was at the microphone and – swear to God – they asked him to spell “niggas”!

Well, it was pronounced “niggas,” but the word turned out to be “negus.” And the redheaded kid didn’t know this word. He had to guess. It was totally like that ”naggers” routine on “South Park.”

And Opie got it right, too. He looked shocked as shit! I bet that video clip will become a YouTube sensation, y’all. I know I wanna see it again… like, right now!

Speaking of negus, I’d better go back to my TV set and see if there are any still in the competition. (Rooting for the black kid in a spelling bee is like rooting for the white boy in a boxing match.)

UPDATE (06/01/07): Multi-thanks to loyal reader SJ, who found the N-word video on YouTube this morning! Here it is:



I caught about that much of it when I turned on the TV yesterday. Now I wish someone would post the lead-up to this moment, when the word was first announced and pronounced and defined, etc. I wonder if there were any sniggers amongst the audience?

UPDATE (06/02/07): As for my prediction… this vidclip is logging 10,000 views a day on YouTube. You go, Opie!

Who is Nicholas Stix? And why is he spreading lies about black people?

Oh no, not another blog war, dammit. I’ve got interview tapes to transcribe. And cool audio to upload.

But this Svengali Media/”Yacub 7 Ali” crap is getting out of hand. All thanks to one man: self-styled “dissident journalist” Nicholas Stix, whom I had never heard of until this month. He is now the Internet’s number-one dupe in service to the Yacub 7 Ali hoax.

Unable to recognize a twisted joke when he sees one, Nicholas Stix has reported as fact that svengalimedia.com is the product of “black supremacist activists.” He believes there’s a group of Negroes on the Web literally cheering and bragging on behalf of black criminals who rape and murder whites.

Even after I’ve made him aware of a Svengali webpage that says, in black and white, “svengalimedia: cynical humor, more offensive than amusing,” Nick Stix insists on taking it seriously.

In mid-May, he disseminated the hoaxster’s cruelest fabrication. Couching it as an “obscene” rumor spread among blacks, Stix wrote: “According to this fantasy, [Channon] Christian wanted to die from black sexual torture, and arranged everything herself.”

How could any intelligent person take at face value anything found on svengalimedia.com? Particularly that the site was created by black people?

For instance, there’s this: “Famed Negro Clairvoyant Zelda Barrons X Investigates: Channon Christian Ghost: Damned for Eternity in Ghetto.”

Yep, according to Svengali Media, a black psychic has communicated with the ghost of rape-murder victim Channon Christian. The site describes Zelda Barrons X as the author of a book – “Life After Death for White Folks” – that is “cultishly popular among neo radical pro black groups.”

Of course, no such book can be found anywhere on the Web. And the only places you can read about the “famed” Zelda Barrons is on websites and blogs affiliated with the Yacub 7 Ali hoax… or else on legitimate discussion boards where the hoaxster goes a-trolling.

After I first blogged about this 13 days ago, the Svengali hoaxster put up a post headlined “SVENGALI MEDIA EXPOSED.” Momentarily abandoning the pretense of being a black hate group, the hoaxster offered a whole new cast of fictional characters – including site owner “Jeuger Niglery” and “Arthur Marshall, Web detective.”

“While Americans slept on creating ethical standards for Internet Appropriate Content,” the hoaxster wrote, “the Svengalimedia sensation birthed its media products and quickly advanced to the timeless & ingeniously creative realm of urban mythology.”

Also this: “Niglery, whose photo has never been taken, is often called by associates who dare to speak his name aloud as a media vampire.”

All of which is just more prankish bullshit. This seems to be the whole point… sheer Discordian mischief. Lies wrapped in jokes wrapped in disinformation. You get it now, Nicholas? Cult leader Yacub 7 Ali doesn’t exist! Neither does the “Sexiest & Hardest Ghetto Black Male Felon Bragging Rights competition”... which you reported as real.

Unfortunately, Nicholas Stix’s two articles this month advancing the Svengali Media hoax are now strewn all over the Internet. They’re on Stix’s four different personal websites. And one article or the other has been published by right-wing sites such as David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks, Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance, Intellectual Conservative, WEBCommentary, The Conservative Voice and Global Politician.

Worst of all, one of Stix’s articles was published Tuesday at Blogcritics.org, a huge grassroots-media site that logs between 1.2 million and 2 million unique visitors per month.

(Did I say this crap is getting out of hand?)

I sent an email to the publisher of Blogcritics, Eric Olsen. Then Nicholas Stix responded with an email of his own – which he subsequently posted on the Intellectual Conservative blog.

Here are both emails (though I’ve trimmed Stix’s for length... and it’s still way too goddamn long):

DAVID MILLS to Eric Olsen (05/29/07):

Greetings, Mr. Olsen.

I'm David Mills, a former reporter for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Now I blog as Undercover Black Man.

I dig Blogcritics, but you have unwittingly spread an Internet race hoax by posting Nicholas Stix's "politics" piece today. ("Knoxville Horror: Trial Dates Set; MSM 'Discovers' Case; Bloggers Continue Spreading Rumors.")

He describes svengalimedia.com as a "black supremacist" website that celebrates the murders of whites.

Svengalimedia actually is the hub of an elaborate hoax. It is NOT a black website.

Go to the following webpage, and you'll see svengalimedia describe itself as "cynical humor, more offensive than amusing."

http://www.freeforums.in/phpbb/index.php?c=2&sid=deaf0ca434e8f0b1e797c189df90d2d3&mforum=svengalimedia

An adjunct to this hoax is a supposed cult of "Negro Sun Worshippers" led by "Prophet Yacub 7 Ali," who have the power to inflict skin cancers on white people with just a look. I wonder if Nicholas Stix believes that's real too?

You can track this hoaxster's digital footprints via domaintools. All the websites associated with the svengalimedia/Yacub 7 Ali hoax are registered through the same IP address.

Svengalimedia.com was created last November 27; americanpatriate was created on January 9; yacub7ali.org was created on January 27.

The only places on the Web where you'll read about the "Black Male Felon Bragging Rights competition" (which Stix believes exists) is on these websites... or on any of the pseudonymous blogs created over the same span of time to drive traffic to these websites.

Apparently somebody's up to some Discordian mischief, Eric. He has duped Nicholas Stix, and now a racial lie is being spread on your website.

I have blogged about the Yacub 7 Ali hoax:

http://undercoverblackman.blogspot.com/2007/05/yacub-7-ali-hoax.html

http://undercoverblackman.blogspot.com/2007/05/yacub-7-ali-hoax-cont.html

Take it easy.

David Mills


NICHOLAS STIX to Eric Olsen (posted on 05/30/07)

Dear Eric,

The Hunchmeister

David has a hunch. A hunch is not proof, and a hunch is not journalism, but the place where journalism begins. When Mills initially wrote to me, I began an involved response, but cut it short when I realized that I was going to miss a deadline on his behalf, and wrote a short reply, which I posted together with his assertion:

http://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2007/05/undercover-black-man-svengali-media-of.html

What Maketh a Hoax?

That the site (Svengali Media: http://www.svengalimedia.com/race/sexiest_black_male_felon_2006.html
) is produced by nutjobs has no bearing on whether it’s a hoax. Black supremacists ARE nutjobs. (Very dangerous, violent nutjobs, I might add.) That the writers largely use obvious pseudonyms likewise has no bearing on whether it’s a hoax. I did some of my best journalism using pseudonyms, I know brilliant journalists who use them, and I heartily recommend their use to freelancers and whistleblowers who want to tell the truth and keep their day jobs. (Actually, quite a few people think I am presently using a pseudonym. Years ago, my wife concluded that newspaper editors who rejected all of my submissions didn’t believe my name was real; when I sent them stuff under a more normal-sounding pseudonym, they immediately bought it. Nick Stix is a better name for a comic than a journalist.)

Obviously, these guys are not doing this, in order to tell the truth.

Initially, David Mills strongly insinuated that a white supremacist was singlehandedly producing the site and its satellites. I responded that if it’s a hoax, it’s one of the most brilliant ones I’ve ever seen. It has the distinct flavor of black supremacism, as I have known it both firsthand since childhood, and through studying its “literature” since 1990. Black supremacists celebrate any act of violence against whites (and Asians, too, but they tend to be less obsessed with them), the more gruesome, the better. Interestingly, if it is a hoax, it is the first I know of in which whites imitated black supremacists; all the others I’ve found involved blacks imitating white supremacists.

But again, this is just David’s hunch.

Personally, I have never come across a white supremacist with this sort of literary talent. The Svengali sites have several different writers or at least authorial names, writing in several different styles and levels of literacy. If you check out sites like vnnforum or stormfront, you will find people of decidedly limited capacity.

The Blogger Who Cried Wolf

But in a later post, David denied ever having said a white supremacist was behind the “hoax.” So, what does he really believe?

He has charted the person or persons behind this phenomenon moving from site to site, and put up some whois information. I intended to check it out, but on my schedule, not his. (I’ve got real commissions to complete; he appears to be between scripting gigs and at loose ends. Besides, David comes across to me as The Blogger Who Cried Wolf. He has a history of shouting that so-and-so is this-and-that (e.g., “racist,” in the case of Lawrence Auster, whose freelancing gig at Front Page Mag he sneakily got killed, when Mills sent a poison pen letter last year to David Horowitz, and the latter lost his nerve), and other people have a history of jumping at his charges. Just look at all the people who apparently swallowed his “hoax” hunch whole. I’m not jumping.

Having mirror sites is not evidence of a hoax. Hell, I have multiple blogs and Web sites; I do it so that more people will read my work. At present, there are roughly 6,499,900,000 people I’m not yet reaching.

Even if the person behind the site jumped ISPs, it wouldn’t prove anything; people probably periodically alert his providers that his site is what it is, and the providers shut him down for violating their guidelines. The same thing likely leads to his (or their) material being removed from newspaper message boards.

Someone who claims to be named “Larry Collins” posted a comment to David’s blog, claiming that Svengali is the work of his brother, “Steven,” that the brothers are white, and that all of the names associated with Svengali are the creations of “Steven Collins.”

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=4486244714643027014&postID=157786534719405525

There are three problems with “Larry Collins’” assertion. First, among the fake names “Larry Collins” lists is mine. Am I a creation of “Steven Collins”? Not that I know of. But maybe I’m lying. Or maybe, being “Collins’” creation, I’m unaware of my true identity. Secondly, a later post to the same thread with the same linked signature (“lc,” for “Larry Collins”), sounds like it was written by someone else altogether. Thirdly, I followed the “Larry Collins” link to his blogger page, and from there to his blog, “The Truth About On Svengali Media and Jou” ( http://svengali-truth.blogspot.com/ ), where he is supposed to be exposing this media “hoax,” and found … nothing. There’s no there there.

If anything, “Larry Collins” and his “blog” are the hoaxes.

That leaves us with … nothing.

And so, I am not going to get flustered and put on the defensive by The Blogger Who Cried Wolf. If I have some spare time, I’ll try and check out the whois information, but I am not going to waste my time on David Mills. If it’s a hoax, let him talk straight (no more ‘It’s a white supremacist/It’s not a white supremacist’), and hunt down the offender. Until then, he’s just spreading hysteria.

Racist? Or cute?

Above, for your consideration, is a commercial for Spain’s national airline, Iberia.

The airline withdrew this ad last week after complaints that it was sexist, racist and insulting to Cubans.

I just learned of it on the Racialicious blog, where correspondent Wendi Muse broke the cartoon down histo-politically. “Before me... I saw an animated articulation of the remnants of European colonial dominance over a Caribbean nation and its women,” she wrote.

For Ms. Muse, this minute-long commercial calls to mind the rape of slaves by their masters. And “happy darky” stereotypes. And the modern bane of sex tourism. And even Spain’s racist soccer fans.

For me? Not so much. I think it’s just good clean dirty bad fun. And the reggaeton beat is pumpin’.

I’m curious to know what you all think about it.

UPDATE (05/31/07): There are two other cool animated Iberia.com ads on YouTube. I’ve got them showcased in my new “UBM-TV” feature in the upper right corner.

The one at the top deals in racial imagery also – set in New York with a hip-hop soundtrack – but there’s nothing close to objectionable about it. (Unless you want to make an issue of the sheep being “woolly-headed.” But let’s not.)

Now, the bottom one is my favorite of the three, from a pure animation standpoint. It’s about Argentina, it’s about the tango. And it’s about the world’s sexiest vacuum cleaner. It’s quite brilliant. Enjoy!

Q&A: Oprah Winfrey (pt. 2)

Here, at long last, is the rest of my Oprah Winfrey interview from 1986, right before her Chicago talk show went national and made television history. And made her the richest black person on Earth. (Part 1 is here.) We got into some deep race and class stuff, as you’ll see.

DAVID MILLS: It seems ironic to me – I hope you take this the right way – that you would get so popular in this particular town. As I said, I lived here for a year. And you came here right on the tail end of Harold Washington becoming mayor, and all that that brought out in people. And this is such a stratified town racially. Isn’t it kind of ironic that you are so popular here?

OPRAH WINFREY: Yeah, I do think – At least that’s what I was told. I was told that, coming to town, I would have people picketing outside my door. That’s what my bosses in Baltimore told me. Part of the reason was they wanted me to stay in Baltimore. They said, “Don’t do it, don’t do it. It’s the most racially polarized city in the country.”

And it is pretty racially volatile. Can’t deny that. But I have felt none of it. I have not felt any of it. And I think that one of the reasons is because I am person for whom race is not an issue. It is not an issue for me. I hold myself responsible for myself, based upon a history and a legacy of black women and men who have paved this way for me.

So I have crossed over on the bridges of Dr. King and Frederick Douglass, even Booker T. Washington. And Fannie Lou Hamer, Sojourner Truth, Madame C.J. Walker, Harriet Tubman. All of those people whose names made the history books and those whose names didn’t make the history books – your grandmother, my grandmother – who have made it possible for me to be and do what I do today.

And because of that, the civil rights struggle has taken on a new direction for me, and I think for my generation. And so I don’t belabor the past. I live from it and prosper from it. And as a result of what has happened in the past – the marches in Selma and Montgomery, forcing the FCC to hire black people on television, because we use Tide and Gleem too – because of that, I am where I am. So for me to still fight that battle would be ridiculous.

MILLS: But isn’t that battle still to be fought?

WINFREY: The struggle has taken an entirely different direction. The struggle is not to get into Woolworth’s. It’s what you gon’ do when you get in there now. It’s what you gon’ buy when you get in there. The struggle is not to be able to sleep at the Ramada Inn. It’s to be able to own one. And so my goal in this lifetime is to soar.

There’s a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay which says: “Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost, but climb.” And that’s what I’m about doing. I’m about climbing, always climbing.

And it’s what we’ve always been doing, but we just have a new direction, you know. Our ladders go a little higher now.

It’s like in Langston Hughes’s poem, “Mother to Son,” where she says, “Well, son, life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. It’s had boards in it, tacks on the floor, and places bare. All the time I been climbing mountains and reaching landings and going in the dark where there ain’t been no light. And I still climbin’. And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”

Well, this is about as close to a crystal stair as you can come to, for me. For me. And I still climbin’. I still climbin’. And I recognize that the reason why I can is because of this legacy. I mean, I owe, I owe, I owe them a resurrection.

MILLS: I hope people don’t take it wrong when you say that race is not an issue to you. “Is she forgettin’ about us now that she’s making –”

WINFREY: Oh, that’s such a – You know, I have people call me up and say there are not enough black people on the show. You don’t do this for blacks, you don’t do that. You’re not black enough.

And I say: I look in the mirror every morning, just as my ancestors did, who came and worked in the factories for pennies-per-day labor, and they graced their mirrors every morning, and no one had to tell them they were black.

When I was 14 years old, I heard Rev. Jesse Jackson say that excellence is the best deterrent to racism. And it was a truth that resonated with me. And it is what I have always believed. Even before I heard him speak, it’s what I believed. It had not been articulated for me.

And the doctrine that I have followed has been: If you are the best at what you do – there’s nobody else better in the class than you are – then the teacher better have a damn good excuse for putting you back. I mean, there are no excuses when you’re the best. So my goal is always to be the absolute best, period.

If something goes wrong in my life, I don’t say it’s because I’m a woman, because I’m black. I say, well, first let me check out what I did or didn’t do.

I was taken off the air as an anchorwoman in Baltimore in 1977. I was taken off the 6 o’clock news. Friends of mine said, “It happened to you because you’re black. It wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t black.” I knew – this was what I knew – that if I had been the best, if I had been ready for it, they couldn’t have done it to me. They could not have done it.

I wasn’t ready. I was still very immature… and wasn’t seasoned enough for that market. And now I’m seasoned. Now I’m ready. Had nothing to do with race. So when I say it’s not an issue, I mean that I have never used my race to defend my ability or inability to do or not do something.

I certainly recognize that racism exists, and has to be fought. People have different ways of fighting it. Mine is to be the best that I am. …

Even during the whole Black Power movement when everybody was saying “Black is beautiful, black is beautiful,” trying to convince themselves, it had never occurred to me that it wasn’t beautiful. It never occurred to me that this was something I now had to tell myself, because I always thought I was.

It never occurred to me that I was less than any other white person because in every class, in every competition, I was always the No. 1 kid.

MILLS: That’s the thing. If you’ve got a talent, if you have a world-class talent, you can afford to have that attitude. But I know you’re working with young girls from the Cabrini-Green housing project –

WINFREY: But everybody has a talent. That’s what I tell them. It’s a new day, it really is. The greatest lesson anybody can learn in this lifetime is that you are responsible for yourself. That is true now, it was true in slavery. It was true then.

That’s why some slaves rebelled and others didn’t. Because those who rebelled knew, “I am responsible for myself. The only way I’ma get out of this is to try to get out of this myself.”

I feel that that sense of rebellion has to be taken in a new direction now. And I say that to my girls. I say, “You are responsible for your life, period. You may have been victimized in your life, but you, alone, will have to claim your own victory. You can’t wait on Mr. Reagan to do it, you can’t wait on me to do it. You alone will do it. You will decide for yourself, now, at 9 years old and 10 years old, what it is you want to make of your life. And you start now doing it.”

I tell them that all the time. You don’t wait till you’re 20 and then say, “I’m gon’ have myself a big house.” You start now doing it. You start now knowing that every single thing you do in your life prepares you for the eventual end of your life.

Everything I have done prior to this moment – [that] you have done prior to this moment, David – has prepared you for this moment. Had I not started at 17, I would not be having this interview with the Washington Times. So everything I’ve done up until this moment has made this moment possible. And I say that to my girls. Everything you do –

MILLS: Do you get through? Is it encouraging or discouraging –

WINFREY: No. It’s discouraging and it’s like hitting your head up against a wall, because –

MILLS: That’s got to hurt your heart.

WINFREY: – because the girls believe that they’re owed something. That’s what they believe. And that’s taught, it’s learned behavior. Just like I learned you’re responsible for yourself, they learned that they’re supposed to be given things.

I took two of my girls out to – I had some work to do in L.A., took two of the girls out to Disneyland. So limos picked them up [at home]. By the time they get to California, they’re complaining because the TV isn’t big enough in the limo. (laughs) You know? These are girls who live in the projects. They’re now saying, “How can we see this TV? This TV’s not big enough.”

And I say, “You have got some nerve. This is your second limo ride in the history of your life…”

So it’s bits and pieces. You take little teeny tiny steps. I go out with the girls. I had to speak in Nashville, took two of my girls to Nashville to stay with me for the weekend, and give them each spending money, and say, “For every mistake you make in the English language, every time you miss a verb, I get a dollar.”

Now, by the end of the trip, they were both pouting, not speaking to me. Because I said, “That’s the rule. Because in this country, if you don’t know how to speak correctly – You are judged on the basis of how you speak. How you articulate, how you interpret other people’s thoughts. So you are not going to travel with me splitting verbs, okay?”

Whoo. So I end up with no friends in the end of the thing.

But they don’t believe it. One of the little kids, every time she’d open her mouth she’d say “he be, she be, they be going…” And I’d say, “All right, hand it over. Give me the money back.” She’d say, “So does that mean we’re supposed to think before we talk?” Like it’s an odd thought that you have to think before you speak. …

MILLS: That’s what the conservatives say. They call it the welfare ethic. It’s what that system – the idea of government helping you with your problems, taken a couple of generations, you wind up with kids like that.

WINFREY: I’m a product of welfare. I was on welfare when I was a kid. Getting out of it saved me. Because what it does is, it does create a welfare mentality.

MILLS: Really?

WINFREY: Yes it does. You help people by helping them to change themselves. You don’t help them by giving them a handout. You do not. I know that in my own life and my own family.

I mean, you’d think I was First National Bank with my family. But the more you give them, the less they want to help themselves. That’s just the truth.

MILLS: At what period of your life was that happening –?

WINFREY: Oh, now. I mean, uncles and aunts and cousins I haven’t heard of. Everybody needs a house, they need a car.

MILLS: I meant when you were on welfare. What period was that?

WINFREY: I was living with my mother. And I see it. I see it in my little nieces who were being brought up on welfare. Their feeling is – what did one of them say to me the other day? “When I [grow] up, I’m gonna find me a boyfriend who’s gonna help me. I’m gonna find me a boyfriend who’s gonna buy me a car.” Looking to relationships and looking to other people to do things that you should do for yourself.

I think, certainly, there is a need for programs to help people get grounded. Ground themselves. And to help them help themselves. But I don’t believe in handouts. I just don’t.

I’m interested in uplifting people. And you can’t do that by just saying, “Here. Go for it.” People should be made to feel responsible for themselves.

MILLS: And how’d it happen for you? What turned it around? The influence of your father?

WINFREY: Certainly it was the influence of my father, who believes the same thing I believe. Who wouldn’t tolerate anything below a B in our house, because he said I wasn’t a C student.

And I’d say, “But everybody else gets C’s.” “Well, you’re not everybody else, and you’re not a C student. … As long as you’re living in this house, under this roof, you will not bring C’s in this house.”

The lost art of the TV main title sequence

I remember the heartbreaking moment, about five years ago, when the first broadcast network announced that its sitcoms would no longer have main title sequences and full-blown theme songs.

It was the day I lost my faith in God.

The voracious expansion of commercial time had finally squeezed out one of the best parts of the television-watching experience. And I knew it wouldn’t stop at sitcoms. Hell, “ER” doesn’t even do a main title sequence anymore.

As a lifelong TV geek, I have sweet memories of the wonderful title sequences of the ’60s and ’70s. A well-designed title sequence, along with a kick-ass theme song, puts your mind in the right space for being told a story. It can make you tingly all over.

Thankfully, there is HBO, where the art of the main title sequence lives.

And thankfully, too, there’s YouTube, where you can find some of the classic ones. Here is one of the all-time greatest:



Now… tell me that didn’t make you feel good.

Songs of Negro patriotism

“Be wide awake and take no naps. Let’s bomb the Japs and change our maps…”

The last century’s two World Wars had a profound impact on race in America. After black folks laid down their lives on distant battlefields – such as the “Harlem Hellfighters” in France during WWI – it was harder to deny them their rights at home.

That much, most people are aware of. I had less of a sense of any gung-ho, stars-and-stripes patriotic fervor among black Americans. But it existed.

Consider the words of Kelly Miller (pictured), a prominent black intellectual of his day. In his 1920 book “An Appeal to Conscience,” Prof. Miller wrote:

“They sometimes tell us that America is a white man’s country. The statement is understandable in light of the fact that the white race constitutes nine-tenths of its population, and exerts the controlling influence over the various forms of material and substantial wealth and power.

“But this land belongs to the Negro as much as to any other, not only because he has helped redeem it from the wilderness by the energy of his arm, but because he has bathed it in his blood, watered it with his tears, and hallowed it with the yearnings of his soul. …

“It seems to be an anomaly of fate that the Negro, the man of all men who is held in despite, should stand out in conspicuous relief at every crisis of our national history. His blood offering is not for himself or for his race, but for his country.”

What’s really wild is to hear some of the gospel-style patriotic songs black people sang during WWII.

Click here to hear “We Are Americans, Praise De Lawd” by Bertha Houston.

Then click here and listen to “Tear Tokyo Down” by Deacon Sam Jackson.

You can hear more such recordings from the Fort Valley State College Folk Festival collection of the Library of Congress.

It might cause a little discomfort to hear black people shit-talking “the Japsies,” but hey, it was wartime. Like Sister Bertha said: “There is one thing they must not do: attack our red, white and blue!”

The ‘Yacub 7 Ali’ hoax (cont.)

I won’t be devoting my life to identifying whoever’s behind the “Yacub 7 Ali”/Svengali Media race hoax. But I’m sure glad I posted what I did nine days ago. (Even though the hoaxster, predictably, was thrilled by the attention.)

Now, whenever this fucknuts shows up in an Internet discussion group, trying to stir some shit, people can do a little Googling and find out it’s all bogus.

On Friday, “Shakespeare Johnson” – one of the hoaxster’s many pseudonyms – posted an article on the college-oriented chat board ProgressiveU.org. Headline: “YACUB 7 ALI SUN WORSHIPPER SETS WHITE WOMAN ON FIRE ON CITY BUS.”

One reader took the bait, calling the supposed Negro Sun Worshippers a “hate group.”

Shakespeare Johnson shot back: “Racist hate is a white people invention. Black reactionary hate is not vile and corrupted. … Black reactionary hate groups are righteous and ‘clean’, good and uncorrupted hatred.”

Sure enough, the gullible commenter responded: “Your group is still a bunch on religious zealots who are wacked in my opinion.”

Then, yesterday, a commenter known as “say_no_to_racists” posted this: “This person is a white supremacist troll. Quit feeding him.” And he linked to my post.

(Alas, say_no_to_racists didn’t heed his own advice. Today, he’s been wasting his time swapping posts with Shakespeare Johnson on ProgressiveU.)

Also last Friday, the hoaxster – using the name “Mirabeau Johnson” this time – got on the message boards of a Beaumont, Texas, TV station, KFDM.com. He started a thread called “Sun worshipers set innocent woman on fire on city bus.” He linked to an article about Yacub 7 Ali on one of his own hoax websites (americanpatriate.com).

Within hours, a KFDM.com reader busted him and linked to my post.

By the way, I never said this hoaxster has a white-supremacist agenda. Probably he’s just into mischief-making for the sick fun of it.

Which is not to say he’s harmless. On April 15, “Jacque Patrick Fitzgerald” (same asshole) posted an article on NowPublic.com, a “participatory journalism” site. It says: “ST. NICOLAS THIEF & KNOXVILLE BLACKS PLAN… SOCIAL ACTION PROTEST PARTY TO CELEBRATE UNDERPRIVILEGED BLACKS WHO VICTIMIZE PRIVILEGED WHITES.”

This piece logged 30,000 views before a NowPublic editor tagged it as “fishy” last Wednesday. “It has been alleged that this story is a hoax,” the editor wrote, with a link to my post.

The NowPublic article, to remind you, was picked up and reported as fact by Nicholas Stix, an Internet gadfly and self-styled “dissident journalist” who has written much about the Knoxville murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.

I sent Stix an email after my first Yacub 7 Ali post. Stix wasn’t persuaded that this “protest party” in support of black murderers is a sham. “If it’s a race hoax,” he replied, “it’s one of the most brilliant ones I’ve ever seen.”

That’s giving the hoaxster waaay too much credit. Although a white-power agitator known as “kickdrum,” who is active on YouTube, was also suckered. Embedded below is kickdrum’s May 1 video, in which he speaks of svengalimedia.com – the hub of the hoax – as if it were a genuine black racist website.



I would point kickdrum and Nicholas Stix to this webpage, where the hoaxster himself labels Svengali Media “cynical humor, more offensive than amusing.”

UPDATE (05/30/07): How much damage can one gullible yet hardheaded sap do? I guess we’ll have to wait and find out.

Internet gadfly Nicholas Stix is the closest thing to a journalist to have reported as fact the ludicrous Svengali Media/Yacub 7 Ali hoax. And he is single-handedly responsible for this hoax gaining a bit of traction on the Internet – particularly the notion that there’s a “black supremacist” group out there celebrating the vicious murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, a white couple, by a group of blacks in Knoxville, Tenn.

Stix wrote two articles this month describing svengalimedia.com as an authentic black website. One or the other of those articles has been posted on four of Stix’s own websites, and on at least six other opinion sites (including Blogcritics yesterday and Global Politician today).

These articles have also been reproduced (or linked to) by at least 10 other bloggers, as well as… wait for it… David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks site.

I’ve been swapping comments with Nicholas Stix on the Blogcritics site. But he continues to say there’s nothing fishy about Svengali Media, or the “Sexiest & Hardest Ghetto Black Male Felon Bragging Rights competition,” or even Yacub 7 Ali and his cult of “Negro Sun Worshippers.” “[T]he sites certainly are in character with black supremacy,” wrote Mr. Stix.

Amazing.

Meanwhile, I’ve found yet another of the hoaxster’s Internet outposts. He started a Facebook group (with only one member). It’s called “theSvengaliMedia Fan Club.” It says: “SvengaliMedia is quickly becoming known as the crack cocaine of the internet... highly addictive and outlawed.”

Does that sound like a black man who spends his time celebrating criminal violence against whites and studying the mystical secrets of inflicting skin cancers with his eyeballs?

Or does it sound like a damn troll, trying to pump up the Svengali Media meme and have some fun?

A shot of Travis Bickle, with a Betty Boop chaser

The winner of the Palme d’Or will be announced tomorrow at the Cannes Film Festival. Which is a good excuse to revisit a past Palme d’Or winner and one of my all-time favorite movies – “Taxi Driver.”

Click here to hear Robert De Niro (plus Bernard Herrmann’s marvelous score) on “Diary of a Taxi Driver” from the soundtrack LP.

And if that gets a little too dark for you, just click here for Cab Calloway and Betty Boop (voiced by Mae Questel) doing a duet – “You Gotta Hi-De-Ho” – from one of those old Max Fleischer cartoons.

Nothing puts a grin on my face like some Cab Calloway or some Betty Boop. Put ’em both together and, well, I’m good for the whole day.

‘A catastrophe for the white race’

Lawrence Auster, my second-favorite race-obsessed blogger – (my favorite being me) – sounded off today on the fact that America’s non-white population has grown to 100 million bodies. That’s a lotta wogs, no matter how you slice it.

Mr. Auster, being a traditionalist conservative, calls this “a catastrophe for America, for Western civilization, for the white race, and for the whole world.”

To which I would add: Unless you like burritos. (I love burritos!)

Actually, I think it’s worth discussing how America is different with a 67 percent white majority compared with an 89 percent white majority (as in 1965, when the immigration floodgates were opened). It’s certainly worth speculating how America might change as the white majority shrinks toward 50 percent.

I am not an open-borders guy. Maybe some sort of immigration moratorium is a good idea, so we can absorb the millions of new foreigners already in our midst.

But I’d like to remind Larry Auster of one thing. The last time Congress acted to restrict immigration – back in 1924 – Auster’s own Jewish immigrant grandparents were the sort of people that the white majority wanted to keep out.

For a bit of historical perspective, let’s read the words of Madison Grant (pictured), one of the ideological godfathers of the Immigration Act of 1924. To Mr. Grant, it is Lawrence Auster’s presence in America that represents a catastrophe for the white race.

Here’s some of what Madison Grant wrote in his 1916 treatise, “The Passing of the Great Race”:

MADISON GRANT: [T]he view that the Negro slave was an unfortunate cousin of the white man, deeply tanned by the tropic sun and denied the blessings of Christianity and civilization, played no small part with the sentimentalists of the Civil War period and it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man. …

Americans will have a similar experience with the Polish Jew, whose dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest are being engrafted upon the stock of the nation.

Recent attempts have been made in the interest of inferior races among our immigrants to show that the shape of the skull does change, not merely in a century, but in a single generation.

In 1910, the report of the anthropological expert of the Congressional Immigration Commission gravely declared that a round skull Jew on his way across the Atlantic might and did have a round skull child; but a few years later, in response to the subtle elixir of American institutions as exemplified in an East Side tenement, might and did have a child whose skull was appreciably longer…. In other words the Melting Pot was acting instantly under the influence of a changed environment.

What the Melting Pot actually does in practice can be seen in Mexico, where the absorption of the blood of the original Spanish conquerors by the native Indian population has produced the racial mixture which we call Mexican and which is now engaged in demonstrating its incapacity for self-government.

… Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type. The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew. …

The result of unlimited immigration is showing plainly in the rapid decline in the birth rate of native [white] Americans because the poorer classes of Colonial stock, where they still exist, will not bring children into the world to compete in the labor market with the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian and the Jew.

The native American is too proud to mix socially with them and is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which he conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners just as he is to-day being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews.

These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race.

Mother Nature likes race-mixing

White racialist types tend to be hung up on race-mixing… or what the extreme ones still call “mongrelization.”

The way I see it, if God or Nature didn’t want the races to mix, then God or Nature would punish the offspring of mixed-raced unions. With, you know, diseases and stuff.

But that doesn’t happen. Actually, Nature punishes populations who keep their gene pool too un-mixed.

I’ve long been aware that Ashkenazi Jews have a high incidence of Tay-Sachs disease, which causes mental retardation and early death. I also had a vague notion that this disease took hold among Eastern European Jews because of centuries of “endogamy” – that is, marrying within the “tribe,” within the group.

So I wondered: What about other populations that’ve practiced strict endogamy for generations upon generations, like the Japanese? Are they, too, more prone to genetic diseases than the rest of us?

What about the Icelanders, out there on that island for a thousand years with their unpolluted pool of Viking genes? Any booby traps in their DNA?

Or the Afrikaners, isolated not by geography but by ideology and will. No group of white people outside of Iceland has kept its gene pool as pure as the Boers. Does such “purity” come at a cost – a cost of disease, deformity, pain and death?

My guess was “yes.” And sure enough, I’m right.

Among Afrikaners, a variety of genetic disorders of the blood, skin and bones – such as sclerosteosis and lipoid proteinosis – occurs with high frequency. Afrikaners, at a rate five times higher than Americans, have a genetic abnormality which causes familial hypercholesterolemia (“FH” for short), a disease characterized by high cholesterol and severe hardening of the arteries. People with FH can have heart attacks as early as their 30s.

Other “endogamous” groups have a high rate of FH: Ashkenazi Jews, Lebanese Christians, French Canadians, and Finns.

Speaking of Finns, some 35 rare genetic diseases occur frequently in Finland. This is known as the “Finnish disease heritage,” and it’s attributed to a lack of “genetic diversity” among the Finns. One such disease is cartilage-hair hypoplasia (or “CHH”), a type of dwarfism that brings with it increased cancer risks and a flawed immune system.

One out of every 76 Finns carries the defective gene responsible for CHH. The only ethnic group in which CHH is more common is the Amish. (One out of every 19 is a carrier).

The more I studied, the more obvious it became: Nature punishes this sort of genetic exclusivism… this rigid rule of marrying-within-the-group.

Let’s look at the Acadians – better known as “Cajuns” – who arrived in Louisiana 240 years ago. The Cajun people pride themselves on their “group cohesiveness.” This is reflected in their long-term practice of marrying only other Cajuns… even if it meant marrying their own cousins.

The result? High incidences of Usher syndrome (a genetic defect leading to deafness and blindness) and Friedreich’s ataxia (a degenerative nerve disorder). There is a “Center for Acadiana Genetics” in Louisiana to study these diseases, as well as the higher rates of diabetes, cancer and heart disease among the Cajuns.

There’s another proud group of white Americans who are living the dream of racial purity and uni-culturalism. I speak of the Amish. Particularly the most conservative among them, known as the “Old Order Amish.”

We’re talking strict endogamy, of course; they only marry their own, no outside genes allowed. Matter of fact, the Old Order Amish are all descended from the same small groups of German settlers who arrived in the United States in the 1700s.

Genetic damage? You betcha.

Another rare type of dwarfism, Ellis-van Creveld syndrome (or “EvC syndrome”) is more prevalent in Lancaster Country, Pennsylvania, than anywhere else on Earth. Why? Because of a recessive gene that’s actually been traced back to one Amish couple – Samuel King and his wife, who immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1744.

All 50 of the Amish babies who’ve been born with Ellis-van Creveld syndrome are descendants of Samuel King.

(Oddly enough, in a different Old Order Amish community – this one in Holmes County, Ohio – there is no EvC syndrome, but there’s a high incidence of another rare genetic disorder, hemophilia B.)

At its furthest extreme, this kind of “reproductive isolation” can cause a gene pool to collapse on itself. That’s what seems to be happening to the Onges, an aboriginal tribe on one island in the Bay of Bengal.

There were about 700 Onges a century ago; today, only 98 are left. Why? Their strict endogamy led not only to a prevalence of genetic diseases, but to Y chromosome damage and consequent male infertility.

Meanwhile, on a neighboring island you’ll find the Nicobarese, a tribe that’s presumed to be a mix of Burmese, Malay, Mon and Shan bloodlines. Guess what? They’re thriving.

Everywhere you look, same story. In Iceland, a very high incidence of Parkinson’s disease, genetically linked. In Japan, the prevalence of a specific type of muscular dystrophy called Fukuyama-type congenital muscular dystrophy (or “FCMD”).

In Newfoundland, with its remarkably homogenous white population and very little genetic diversity, there are DNA mutations aplenty. On that island of half a million souls, you’ll find a variety of hereditary cancers, eye ailments and heart diseases rarely seen elsewhere. On top of that, 10 percent of the population has the heartbreak of psoriasis.

Then there’s Bardet-Biedl syndrome (or “BBS”), a rare and sometimes fatal genetic disease that occurs in Newfoundland at 10 times the rate of the rest of the world, according to Canadian science writer William Illsey Atkinson. “BBS patients often have extra fingers and toes at birth,” Atkinson wrote in 2000. “In childhood, they grow obese; in adolescence, blind. Death by kidney failure may follow in early adulthood.”

Wow. That makes “mongrelization” sound downright healthy, don’t it?

Fun with domestic violence

Popular music is social history. Drop the needle (figuratively) on an old “race record,” there’s no telling what you’ll discover about black American life in the 1920s and ’30s.

Take the once-famous comedy duo of Butterbeans and Susie. Evidently black folks thought it was funny to sing about spousal abuse and domestic homicide.

Now, I assume that Jackie Gleason’s “One of these days, Alice. Pow! Right in the kisser” shtick had some kind of roots in vaudeville. But is there a white comic tradition to compare with this?:

Papa, papa, you better stop bustin’ up my jaw.

Mama, mama, I’m gonna hit you every time you call the law.

I got myself a razor and a forty-one. Cut you if you stand still, and shoot you if you run.

Click here to listen to Butterbeans and Susie’s “Better Stop Knockin’ Me Around.”

The thing that strikes me is… this could only be funny if this kind of violence was commonplace. Which puts the modern-day listener in the weird position of appreciating the song’s entertainment value – the artful phrasing, the expert timing – while realizing that the people who laughed the hardest were laughing from experience.

The Wide World of Whaaa? (vol. 1)

Here are some curious news items from distant lands:

Jha spilled blood for petty reasons – Times of India
“NEW DELHI: Chandra Kant Jha, the alleged serial killer… apparently told the police that the man whose torso was recovered near Tihar Jail’s gate number 1 on Friday was his associate, Dilip. According to the police, Jha killed him because Dilip did not stop eating non-vegetarian food after Jha had asked him to.”

(05/22/07) Complete article

Mobile technology sweeping Nigerians off their feet – Nigerian Tribune
“… Before the advent of [cell phones] in the country, Nigerians would travel long kilometres to other parts of the country just to confirm if their files had been treated in the ministries, their schools had resumed, or if the contract had been approved, and with the bad Nigerian roads, thousands lost their lives on such journeys.

“Now, all they need to do is to pick their mobile phone and dial. According to a civil servant, Femi Akande, ‘I can’t imagine how I survived, or how the country survived before the advent of the GSM. … A lot of lives have been spared from terrible road accidents because of GSM.’ ”

(05/23/07) Complete article

‘Yes to Chess’ message – Guyana Chronicle
“Persons undergoing therapy at the Salvation Army’s Drug Rehabilitation Centre at Kingston, Georgetown, were yesterday reminded to say ‘No to Drugs!’ and ‘Yes to Chess!’ …

“At the one day seminar, it was recognised that there is no known cure for substance abuse, and emphasis was placed on nourishing the minds of addicts with healthy distractions and encouraging them to associate themselves with productive pursuits.”

(05/23/07) Complete article

Businessman jailed for baseball bat attack – Melbourne Herald Sun (Australia)
“A Sydney businessman was today sentenced to four months’ jail for destroying a solicitor’s office with a baseball bat.

“Jim Byrnes, 47, pleaded guilty in Downing Centre Local Court to charges of affray, malicious damage and possession of an offensive implement. …

“Byrnes’ lawyer Wayne Baffsky told the court his client was not normally a violent man and had experienced a ‘brain snap.’ …

“But Magistrate Paul Lyon said Byrnes had reverted to his old violent behaviour as a debt collector.”

(05/23/07) Complete article

‘One-eyed dragon’ given death sentence – Channel NewsAsia
“SINGAPORE: Tan Chor Jin, better known as the ‘one-eyed dragon’ because he is blind in the right eye, was given the death penalty on Tuesday morning.

“Tan, 41, had been on trial for shooting nightclub owner, 40-year-old Lim Hock Soon, at his Serangoon flat last February.

“Tan had fired six shots at Lim with a .22 calibre pistol. …

“He claimed the gun had misfired.”

(05/22/07) Complete article

Petey Greene on the silver screen!

Can’t believe I didn’t know about this. But my buddy Jeff Krulik just told me that a movie based on Petey Greene’s life is coming out this summer.

Then I find out the trailer’s been on the Internet for a couple of months already. And Don Cheadle stars as Petey! (The trailer is embedded above.)

If you never lived in Washington, you probably never heard of Petey Greene. Unless you’ve seen that “watermelon” video that’s all over YouTube. (I didn’t know about that shit either. But more about that watermelon video later…)

Petey Greene was the longtime host of a low-budget TV talk show called “Petey Greene’s Washington.” He was also an AM radio personality. I wouldn’t say I was a fan, but you couldn’t grow up in D.C. without being familiar with his signature rappin’ sign-off:

I’ll tell it to the young, tell it to the old. Tell it to the hot, tell it to the cold. I don’t want no laughin’, don’t want no cryin’. And most of all, no signifyin’.”

About all I seemed to know about Petey Greene was that he was an ex-convict who got his community-activist hustle on, in tune with the times. And he was ghetto. Petey Greene was ghetto before ghetto crossed over. Nobody on TV was streetier than Petey. Case could be made that he was too ghetto… even for Chocolate City in the 1970s. (Yeah, I’m getting to the watermelon. Be cool, y’all. Damn.)

Greene died in 1984, but the legend lives on. The movie, directed by Kasi Lemmons, is “Talk to Me.” It’s supposed to be really good. I can’t wait to see it.

“Talk to Me” opens in limited release on July 13. It’ll also screen on June 21 to open the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Now, for those of you in need of lessons on how to eat watermelon, I present the man himself… Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene, Jr.:

Name these performers, win prizes.

Comedy is fun. Laughter lifts your spirit, etc. But I likes my comedy with teeth in it.

One man or woman, alone onstage with a microphone, can lead you on twisty explorations of American society or human nature or language itself.

This contest is a two-fer. I’ve uploaded a couple of amusing audio files. The first person to name either of these two performers will win a prize.

The prize is your choice of DVDs: either “Bill Hicks Live – Satirist, Social Critic, Stand-Up Comedian” or “Paul Mooney’s Analyzing White America.” (Hicks and Mooney being two of the bitingest, twistedest comics of all times.)

After the first winner wins, the contest ain’t over. Whoever names the other performer will also receive the DVD of his or her choice. If you can name both of ’em, you get both DVDs! (But I think one of these guys will be easier to figure out than the other.)

Simply post your answers (or best guesses) in the comments section. Please, no telegrams.

Click here to hear Performer #1.

Click here to hear Performer #2. (Warning: R-rated language)

Have fun.

UPDATE (05/23/07): One down, one to go. Dez correctly identified Performer #2 as Eric Bogosian. The piece (titled “Stud”) is from his 1990 show “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll.”

UPDATE (05/24/07): We have our second winner. RJ Smith, that pop-culture savant, identified Performer #1 as Dick Davy. The audio clip comes from his 1966 LP, “You’re a Long Way From Home, Whitey: Live at the Apollo.”

Davy is one of those interesting untold stories. A Manhattan Jew who crafted the persona of a drawling, naïve redneck, Dick Davy was a civil-rights progressive, and he won over black audiences in places like Watts and, of course, Harlem.

Until Martin Luther King was assassinated. Then the hardcore black militancy kicked in, and Davy’s subtle left-wing bohemian wit was instantly out-of-date.

Kliph Nesteroff wrote a fantastic post about Dick Davy in January for WFMU’s blog. He points to places on the Web where you can hear “Live at the Apollo” and Davy’s 1967 follow-up album, “Stronger than Dirt,” in their entirety.

Misidentified Africans of the Week

Today, the Associated Press issued the following correction:

“In a May 18 story about 88 Burundian refugees flying to the United States for resettlement, The Associated Press misspelled the ethnic majority in Burundi. They are Hutus, not Tutus. Also, Tanzania is in eastern Africa, not western Africa.”

Artifact: Slave and master duke it out!

You’ll find some amazing documents floating around on the Internet. Stuff that makes history jump to life.

For instance, there’s the complete text of an 1895 memoir titled “The New Man: Twenty-nine Years a Slave, Twenty-nine Years a Free Man,” by Henry Clay Bruce.

What follows is a recollection unlike anything you might’ve seen in “Roots”… or even “Mandingo.” I’ll have more to say about H.C. Bruce and his autobiography at a later date. For now, just let your mind paint a picture of this:

HENRY CLAY BRUCE: I am reminded of a fight I once witnessed between a slave and his master. They were both recognized bullies. The master was a farmer, whose name I shall call Mr. W., who lived about three miles from Brunswick, Missouri. He had, by marriage I think, gained possession of a slave named Armstead.

Soon after arriving at his new home his master and he had some words; his master ordered him to “shut up,” which he refused to do. The master struck him and he returned the blow. Then Mr. W. said, “Well, sir, if that is your game I am your man, and I tell you right now, if you lick me I’ll take it as my share, and that will end it, but if I lick you, then you are to stand and receive twenty lashes.”

They were out in an open field near the public road, where there was nothing to interfere. I was on a wagon in the road, about forty yards distant. Then commenced the prettiest fist and skull fight I ever witnessed, lasting, it seemed, a full half hour; both went down several times; they clinched once or twice, and had the field for a ring, and might have occupied more of it than they did, but they confined themselves to about one fourth of an acre.

Of course Armstead had my Sympathy throughout, because I wanted to see whether Mr. W. would keep his word. They were both bloody and also muddy, but grit to the backbone. Finally my man went down and could not come to time, and cried out, “Enough.” There was a creek near by, and they both went to it to wash.

I left, but was informed that the agreement was carried out, except that Mr. W. gave his whipped man but six light strokes over his vest. Could he have done less? But I have been informed that these men got along well afterwards without fighting, and lived together as master and slave until the war.

Michael Moore’s ‘Sicko’

Michael Moore’s new documentary about the U.S. health care industry – “Sicko” – is raising hell at the Cannes Film Festival.

Even Roger Friedman of FoxNews.com calls the movie “brilliant and uplifting.” Variety’s Alissa Simon says it’s “affecting and entertaining.”

The rest of us won’t get to see “Sicko” till the end of June. But today Moore put up one brief scene on the Web. Here it is.

Stilled life

I hate to bum y’all out on a Monday. This link is definitely not for everybody.

But here is a Flash movie by James Allen based on his book “Without Sanctuary,” a collection of photographic post cards of black people lynched by whites.

It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around these grim artifacts of American social history. But the practice of lynching, the administration of “mob justice” – like so much of our shared past – was a more complicated phenomenon than we give it credit for.

Whites, for example, lynched plenty of white folks too. (Back in February, I mentioned the case of Roy Belton.) This Flash movie includes a photo of the hanging body of Leo Frank, whose lynching inspired the formation of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

Some blacks, such as followers of the Nation of Islam, place lynching high in their bill of indictment against the White Man. Some white racialists who express themselves on the Internet point to the disproportion of black violent crime today and say the lynchers did what they had to do to protect white communities from Negro savagery.

Me, I look at these photographs and struggle to connect with the humanity on both ends of the rope. Human beings did this. To other human beings. And nothing human is alien to me.

(Hat-tip: The Electronic Village by way of AfroSpear.)

The ‘Yacub 7 Ali’ hoax

An elaborate racial hoax has been simmering on the Web for several months. It involves “Prophet Yacub 7 Ali,” a supposed black cult leader who teaches his followers to inflict skin cancers on white people… with just a look.

Wait, don’t laugh. There’s a much uglier underside to this hoax.

These so-called “Negro Sun Worshippers,” the bogus “journalists” writing about them, and the Internet posters calling attention to them have been appearing in online forums wherever brutal, real-life black-on-white crimes are being discussed.

The posters – masquerading as black men, and using various pseudonyms – celebrate black violence against whites. They point readers to a website promoting the “Sexiest & Hardest Ghetto Black Male Felon Bragging Rights Competition.”

In one case, they’re spreading a grotesque lie about a white female murder victim. (Basically saying she asked for it, out of extreme sexual masochism.)

It all seems calculated to stir up anger amongst white folks.

Sure enough, some gullible whites are swallowing it.

The hoaxsters have inserted themselves most visibly into online discussions of the “Knoxville atrocity” – the rape, torture and murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom last January, for which five black suspects have been charged.

Yesterday, the American Renaissance website – run by a highly educated, media-saavy white nationalist named Jared Taylor – got suckered.

American Renaissance offers a daily list of weblinks on topics such as non-white immigration, non-white crime, affirmative action and political correctness. Usually AmRen links to mainstream media outlets – Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, etc.

Not so with this story on Thursday: “Knox Blacks Celebrate Carjacking Rapists in ‘Party.’ ”

For this one, American Renaissance links to NowPublic.com – a so-called “participatory journalism site” where anybody can post anything. No oversight whatsoever.

Here’s what the story says:

“St. Nicolas Thief, president and founder of Black Poverty Speaks, along with many local Knoxville blacks… has organized a social action protest celebration championing Lemaricus Davidson and Letalvis Cobbins” – two of the accused slayers of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.

“ ‘We’re coordinating the celebration to to jive with the march angry whites are planning in memory of the victims…,’ Thief, who is currently stationed in Knoxville, said.

“ ‘We’re celebrating underprivileged Knoxville blacks who victimize privileged Knoxville whites,’ he added. … ‘There’s going to be a party in Knoxville and America everytime black poverty speaks and privileged whites suffer.’ ”

(“St. Nicolas Thief” is one of the dubious monikers that pops up on websites and blogs associated with “Yacub 7 Ali.”)

Here’s how AmRen readers reacted to this “news” article:

“Outrageous. They are ‘celebrating’ a horrendous crime that defies description. This is the black mindset, we must be aware of how these people think to protect ourselves.”

“Interesting insight into the mentality of Blacks. This is very much an accurate portrayal of how most of them think.”

“I am actually sick to my stomach. … The fate that these two individuals met is unimaginable. Now, a story of a celebration for this garbage is just too much.”

“What can one expect? Blacks openly celebrated O.J.’s acquittal. … This nonsense is reason # 10 million why the races should never have been together.”

“Though our leftist press won’t report it, one hopes that blacks will have their ‘party’ and many others like it. They’ll dispel a great many multicultural myths by doing so. When liberal suburbanites learn that ‘white privilege’ entitles blacks to rape, sodomize, and murder them, they might just become white nationalists.”

The hoaxsters got what they wanted. Which was not, apparently, to make white readers such as these look foolish. But to make their blood boil.

By this morning, however, a few AmRen posters smelled something fishy. One wrote: “This is obviously a hoax. Look at the names. St. Nicolas Thief?”

Another poster apparently Googled the byline on the NowPublic.com article (“Jacque-Patrick Fitzgerald”) and found a May 9 story titled “Black Sun Worshippers Claim Responsibility for Greensburg Tornado.”

That piece quotes Yacub 7 Ali’s “spokesman,” Lucifer Nigaros, as giving thanks for the recent devastating twister in Kansas: “They are a wicked and vile people who live there and our prayers continue to be that God avenge us for the devastation whites caused the underprivileged in New Orleans.”

The enterprising AmRen poster concluded that “perhaps his extremely sick story about the [Knoxville] celebration should be taken with a pinch of salt.”

Who is behind this hoax? And why are they (or perhaps just a “he”) spending so much time and energy pretending to be black people who hate white people?

I don’t know. But I have been observing their mischief for weeks.

On January 11, a “Rice Whitman” posted this on the Jewish Defense League’s blog: “I am very disturbed with a new trend occuring in the New England states in the South East. Whites are being placed under curfew by blacks who maintain the ability to reradiate ultraviolet light and cause skin cancer. …

“Please focus attention on, a ‘Prophet’ Negroes are calling Yacub 7 Ali and his New Negro Movement. Do a Google search. … Thanks.”

On March 1, in a forum on BlackPlanet.com, “Bigger Thomas, Jr.” posted a link to www.yacub7ali.org with these words: “New Negro Prophet & scientist Yacub 7 Ali teaches blacks new science of aggressively absorbing and reradiating ultraviolet light onto the skin of whites giving them skin cancers (carcinomas, sarcomas & melanomas)”

On April 10, “Shakespeare Johnson” posted this on the liberal social-networking site Progressive U: “Yacub 7 Ali & the New Negro Sun Worship movement to announce nationwide ‘curfew for whites’ - Violaters Receive Skin Cancers.”

A variation on the theme appeared on February 12, when “Parker Whittman” posted this on his LiveJournal blog: “Good and descent citizens of Savannah are walking amongst a new evil man and a new evil group of people. Evil is Evil! I will be the first man in this community to state aloud I have developed skin cancer and believe it to be a result of the radical blacks of this new negro sun worship sect. …”

Here are more outposts of the Yacub 7 Ali hoax in the blogosphere:

http://waldorfcarathers.blogspot.com

http://chickengeorge.wordpress.com

http://biggerthomasjr.itsapundit.com

http://digg.com/users/calebfreeman/news/dugg

http://reddit.com/user/miguelasseno/

http://www.netscape.com/member/voxpopuli_jr/

All of these blogs debuted in February or April except for the “Waldorf Carathers” blog, which popped up last December. Back then, it was focused on a different black-on-white crime – the “Savannah Debutante Murder.” (Three black men were convicted of killing Jennifer Ross during a robbery the night of her debutante ball.)

All of these blogs deal with nothing else but the Yacub 7 Ali cult or a celebration of black-on-white violent crimes.

And, of course, there’s no mention of the existence of a “Yacub 7 Ali” anywhere on the World Wide Web except for this interlocking network of blogs, websites and discussion-board trolls.

Until a few days ago, the key websites of the Yacub 7 Ali hoax were www.svengalimedia.com, www.americanpatriate.com and www.yacub7ali.org. Those homepages are now inaccessible. (But here is a page from a Google cache.)

I will blog more about this in the coming days.

Malcolm’s disciple (cont.)

[Tomorrow is Malcolm X’s birthday. Below is a portion of an article I wrote for the Washington Post in 1990. This segment picks up the recollections of A. Peter Bailey, a writer and activist, at the point where Malcolm X had returned from Mecca as an orthodox Muslim, and founded a new black nationalist group.]

The group came up with a name: the Organization of Afro-American Unity, inspired by the Organization of African Unity, the association of independent African nations.

The OAAU’s purpose, as Malcolm X declared during a June 1964 rally, was “to bring about the complete independence of people of African descent here in the Western Hemisphere... by any means necessary.”

Peter Bailey, after two years of merely attending his speeches, was now part of Malcolm X’s political cadre.

“To sit down with the man in a small setting and watch him talk and laugh and joke with people, and to be serious and really talk about his ideas – I don’t know how to say it except that it was an incredible experience in your early 20s to be a part of something like that.

“At the time, you don’t really think that you’re dealing with some kind of historical figure. You’re just dealing with somebody who you admire and respect. If I had been thinking history,” Bailey says, starting to chuckle, “I would have copied down every word he said. But I was thinking that he’s going to be around for a while. Despite the danger.”

The danger. Bailey says Malcolm “didn’t dwell on it,” at least around members of the OAAU. But they all knew of threats on Malcolm’s life after he left the Nation of Islam.

On the morning of Feb. 14, 1965, Malcolm’s home was firebombed while he, [his wife] Betty and their daughters slept. He publicly accused “the Muslims.”

The following Sunday, Feb. 21, Malcolm X was preparing to address a crowd in the Audubon Ballroom [near Harlem]. Chatting backstage with OAAU members, he said, “ ‘The way I feel today, I should not even be here,’ ” Bailey recalls. “It was the first time I’d ever seen him actually look weary. He looked harried.

“We told him, ‘Why don’t you go home? The people will understand.’ He said, ‘No no no, the people, they came to hear me speak, and there are things I have to tell them.’ ”

Malcolm then instructed Bailey to go outside the ballroom and wait for a local activist Presbyterian minister who was also scheduled to speak. Bailey was still waiting outside when he heard Malcolm X issue his customary Islamic greeting over the loudspeaker: “Salaam aleikum” (“Peace unto you”).

“Those were the last words I ever heard him say,” Bailey remembers. “The next thing I heard was shooting. It literally sounded to me like hundreds of shots.”

When the shooting stopped, Bailey ran down to the stage. “His shirt was opened and I could see the bullet holes all in his chest,” he says. “I can remember thinking to myself, ‘He’s going to die.’ Of course, the feeling was one of intense rage and frustration.”

The assassins effectively killed the OAAU along with its leader, says Bailey, who continues to label himself a “Malcolmite.”

Paul Lee, 29, and Zak Kondo, 30, have devoted their lives to the study of Malcolm X. Both became fascinated with the man during their early teens.

“He was 24-hours-a-day committed to the freedom of our people,” says Lee, a professional researcher living in Highland Park, Mich.

Focusing on Malcolm X’s travels, Lee says that Malcolm spent 27 of his last 50 weeks abroad. “This should give you some idea of the importance he assigned to gaining international support for our struggle. He was in a real sense the foreign minister of African Americans.”

Most scholars have ignored these travels, according to Lee, who recently returned from a five-week visit to Europe. “The best interviews I have seen with Malcolm are not even in English. They are in French and Arabic. Malcolm is still highly regarded in the Islamic world. Malcolm is still highly regarded in the African world. They’ve got stamps of Malcolm X in Africa.

“And Africans you talk to abroad feel that no African-American leader since Malcolm has exploited the opportunity that he created.”

One of Malcolm’s goals was to get the United States brought up before the United Nations for human rights violations against blacks. This is why Zak Kondo, among others, believes the U.S. government was the architect of the assassination.

Kondo, a history instructor at Bowie State University, has studied FBI files on Malcolm X, and says the agency “was very much concerned about where he went and who he talked to,” and that the government “was not appreciating what this one man was doing.”

He believes that FBI infiltrators or informants within the Nation of Islam fomented the internal conflicts that led to Malcolm’s expulsion in the first place.

Admitting that he can’t document any FBI plot to “neutralize” Malcolm X, Kondo says, “That’s one of the problems that any researcher comes across. Agents are taught not to put certain things on paper.” But “one thing we do know is that assassination is not alien to the U.S. government.”

[For a rich archive of texts related to Malcolm X, visit www.malcolm-x.org.]

Name this band, win a prize.

The last contest was over so quick, let’s have another. This one’s in honor of the television industry’s “upfronts week,” when the networks announce all their new fall shows.

(Me, I can’t wait to see the one about the vampire who’s a private detective, can you?... Oh, you can?... Well, yeah, I guess I see your point… he’s a fucking vampire, and he solves crimes… No, no, you’re right…)

Anyways, click here, listen to the music track, and name that band. The first person to put the band’s name in the comments section will win a prize.

The prize is your choice. Either a DVD set of the HBO miniseries “The Corner” (written by David Simon and me), or a DVD set of the NBC limited series “Kingpin” (created by me). Now that’s kick-ass TV!

UPDATE (05/17/07): We have a winner. RJ Smith identified that band as Church of Betty, led by Chris Rael. The track is “Movie Star Blues” from the 2003 album “Revenge of the Hippies.” It’s available for download at eMusic.

Malcolm’s disciple

[May 19th is Malcolm X’s birthday. Below is a portion of an article I wrote for the Washington Post in 1990.]

A. Peter Bailey got his first taste of activism as a Howard University student between 1959 and 1961. During the Greensboro, N.C., sit-ins against segregated lunch counters, Bailey and other Howard students picketed the downtown Washington Woolworth’s to show their support.

Now a writer and lecturer living in Richmond, Bailey moved to Harlem in 1962, getting involved in rent strikes, school desegregation battles, “basically the civil-rights-integrationist wing of the movement.”

“My awareness of Brother Malcolm was strictly as the bogeyman that you read about in the newspapers,” he says, sitting on the floor of his cluttered apartment. “All of that changed in the summer of 1962 when I heard him speak for the first time.”

Bailey and his roommate noticed a crowd gathering at 116th and Lenox Avenue, outside the Harlem mosque. They decided to hear what the minister had to say.

“He came out, and he started analyzing the system and talking about history and culture and pan-Africanism,” Bailey says, his rich voice bouncing. “I felt physically like somebody was pulling layers of [crap] off of my mind. And I went back the next Saturday and the next Saturday and the next Saturday.”

Malcolm X “taught us that racism is not an aberration of individual white folks.” While the civil-rights approach was based on the assumption that whites could be shamed out of racism, he says, Malcolm considered racism “an integral part of the system.”

“Those speeches – those harsh, brilliant speeches that he was making in the early ’60s – you have to think of the times. In 1963 alone, Medgar Evers was shot down, that church was bombed in Birmingham that killed those four little girls, the fire hoses, the dogs,” Bailey says.

“He was verbally expressing the intense anger that a lot of black people felt but were afraid to say it. And I think his anger was righteous anger, because the government was saying, ‘There’s nothing we can do. That’s the states.’ ”

As captivated as he was by Malcolm X, Bailey did not want to join the Nation of Islam. He didn’t want to adhere to any religion at that point in his life.

But early in 1964, after splitting from the Nation of Islam, Malcolm established two separate organizations. Muslim Mosque Inc. would be his instrument for spreading orthodox Islam as he had come to understand it during a revelatory pilgrimage to Mecca, where he adopted the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. Malcolm said he saw that whites and blacks could achieve true brotherhood through Islam.

The second organization, strictly political, was designed to attract those, like Bailey, who weren’t interested in becoming Muslims.

Bailey remembers when a fellow activist asked him whether he’d like to join a new black-nationalist group. She didn’t say anything about Malcolm X.

There were 12 or 15 people at that first meeting in a Harlem motel room, Bailey recalls. “We were sitting around talking, and then Malcolm walked in with some of the Muslim brothers that were with him. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘Uh-oh, this is going to be serious.’ ” He smiles.

[TO BE CONTINUED]