Cultural Marxism

The Left Celebrates a Terrorist—Again
It took a backlash for Oscar López Rivera to lose his ‘hero’ status.
By Jillian Kay Melchior
June 6, 2017 7:40 p.m. ET

When the fourth bomb exploded in lower Manhattan on New Year’s Eve 1982, Detective Richard Pastorella took shrapnel from his stomach to his scalp. It blinded him, maimed his right hand, left him nearly deaf. Surgeons used 22 titanium screws to hold together his ruined face.

“When my granddaughters present me with crayon drawings and are pleased to show them to me, I have to pretend that I can see them and enjoy their effort,” Detective Pastorella later testified. “I have sacrificed my pride, my dignity and will never be free.”

Now the leader of the terrorists who maimed him is free. President Obama granted Oscar López Rivera clemency in January. This weekend he will march in New York’s Puerto Rican Day Parade.

López Rivera was the “prime recruiter” for the terrorist group FALN, as well as “a key trainer in bombing, sabotage, and other techniques of guerrilla warfare,” according to his presentencing report. From 1974 to 1983, his group carried out more than 130 bombings, killing six. He has shown little remorse. Last month he insisted that “colonized people” have the right to use “all methods within reach, including force.”

The Puerto Rican Day Parade had originally designated López Rivera its first-ever National Freedom Hero. After massive backlash, organizers tried to save face. He stepped down from his “formal role,” they announced, but will still march.

So will the city’s far-left political elite. Although both of the state’s U.S. senators said they wouldn’t march, Mayor Bill de Blasio was willing to do so even when the terrorist was the official parade honoree. His office called the uproar “needless controversy.” City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito overtly supported López Rivera.

That’s part of a broader trend: Over the past year, the far left has repeatedly venerated terrorists and murderers. Take Rasmea Odeh. In 1969 her group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, murdered two college students by planting a bomb in a box of sweets in a Jerusalem grocery.

Odeh awaits deportation after lying about her terrorism conviction on U.S. immigration papers. According to the feminist website Jezebel, she “epitomizes the progressive left movement and exemplifies the women to whom we should be listening.” The Women’s March gave Odeh a prominent role as it orchestrated the Day Without Women strike. She has also gone on the campus speaking circuit.

Another leftist cause célèbre: Leonard Peltier, serving a life sentence for murdering two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1975. He and other assailants ambushed the men, riddling their cars with at least 125 bullets. As one agent lay wounded and another tried to surrender, Peltier shot both point-blank.

The Standing Rock alliance of environmentalists, Hollywood progressives and Native American activists have fought for Peltier’s release, portraying his conviction as a legacy of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre.

The progressive media insists that it’s conservatives who are violence-prone—especially in the era of Trump. But it’s the left that champions monsters like Oscar López Rivera, Rasmea Odeh and Leonard Peltier.

Ms. Melchior is Heat Street’s political editor.

 

Wrong, arch.
They will have forgotten that by......wait....what are we talking about??

 

Another excellent bit from Jason Riley:

June 12 marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which held that states could no longer prohibit marriages on racial grounds.

“Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State,” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren. Like an earlier landmark decision on race, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Loving opinion was unanimous and brief—just 10 pages long. It was also unsurprising.

For starters, nearly two decades earlier, in 1948, the California Supreme Court had already ruled that the state’s antimiscegenation law violated the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Court rulings aside, polling showed that racial attitudes among whites nationwide had shifted significantly in the postwar period. Between 1942 and 1963, white support for school integration grew to 62% from 30%, and white backing for neighborhood integration jumped to 64% from 35%. By the early 1960s, 79% of whites supported integrated public transportation, up from 44% in the early 1940s.

As Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy wrote in “Interracial Intimacies,” his book on the history of cross-racial romance, the high court’s Loving decision helped to further an existing (and welcome) trend. “Although a large majority of whites continued to disapprove of interracial marriage throughout the 1960s—in 1964, 60 percent of adult whites polled declared their support for antimiscegenation laws—the matrimonial color bar eventually suffered the same fate as all the other customs and laws of segregation.” Nor were white views the only ones evolving. In 1968 only 48% of blacks approved of mixed marriages.

The Loving decision was handed down amid a civil-rights movement in full swing. The 1963 March on Washington had already occurred. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act had already passed. In 1967 Hollywood released “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” about an interracial couple planning to marry, and it became a box-office hit.

In 1967 Peggy Rusk, daughter of President Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, married Guy Smith, a black man. Time magazine called it “a marriage of enlightenment” and featured a wedding photo of the couple on its cover.

The irony is that we will mark the 50th anniversary of Loving at a time when race-consciousness is once again ascendant, not only among “alt-right” types, but more tellingly among self-styled progressives and left-wing institutions that once worked so hard to combat Jim Crow policies. The liberals who are cheering the recent removal of Confederate monuments to racial separatism also indulge the separatist rhetoric of groups like Black Lives Matter. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ’s calls for colorblind policies seem as dated as concerns about interracial hookups.

College campuses offer near-daily examples of this liberal devolution on racial matters. The most prominent recent episode involves Bret Weinstein, a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., who has come under fire from students and fellow faculty members for criticizing the school’s “Day of Absence” protest, which involved whites quitting campus for the day.

 

Sadly, these antics have become commonplace in recent years.

Students at the University of Wisconsin have demanded free tuition and housing for blacks. At the University of Michigan, a student group that previously complained about the lack of racial “diversity” and “inclusion” at the school has since requested a safe space on campus reserved for students of color to gather. At the University of Missouri, only students of color were invited to participate in a “die-in” protesting the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

If the student demands are getting more outrageous, it’s only because the authorities on campus have become more compliant.

Last year, at the urging of the school’s black student union, California State University, Los Angeles began offering segregated housing for black students.

The University of Connecticut, the University of California, Davis and the University of California, Berkeley are among the colleges that have similar arrangements in place.

“While these housing options are technically open to all students,” reported the College Fix, “they’re billed and used as arrangements in which black students can live with one another.”

This year, Harvard held its first-ever commencement ceremony for black graduate students. The New York Times reported that racially segregated end-of-year ceremonies “like the one held at Harvard have become more mainstream, more openly embraced by universities and more common than ever before.”

Many on the left today seem unable to decide whether all those Southern segregationists were wrong—or just ahead of their time. Progressives were more certain of themselves 50 years ago, and the court that decided Loving was right to follow their lead.

 

yankee ur slowly turning into archy lol

 

Whatever that means, ceppy. As for the article by Jason Riley (respected WSJ writer, US citizen & African-American dude), were you able to get through that piece? Did you understand what he's writing about?

Or are you one of the international leftist rager hacks who desperately wants to shove everyone who has a different opinion than thine into the metaphorical showers & let the Zyklon B flow?

 

Lol I think he thought you wrote that.

 

Crazy stuff Yank. Seems to me the outcry for equality and fairness is rooted in racism, separatism, and division. People tend to forget Hitler was a very popular "people's party" candidate that was elected on a platform that included, among others, fair wages. We all know what that turned in to.

 

Well first off, I see this picture and I don't feel threatened in the least. I see kids that are young, misguided and inexperienced that were most likely subjected to extremely poor parenting skills in combination with a chemical or genetic imbalance.

If this were to occur at one of the schools in rural Eastern WA, the situation would be handled in a more conservative manner no doubt.

But since it's happening in our state Capitol in the most liberal school in the state, I don't expect much to be done about it...except maybe that white professor getting his walking papers within the next 3-6 months under the guise of some perceived slight which can't be tied to the incident.

Unfortunately, Trump and his administration are so weakened right now that there is nothing they can say or do to right the ship.

I just see no end in sight right now. Bigly.

 

oh there is an end 20 years down the road when these people are made irreverent by the new gen Z of super conservative young people who look at this and cringe

 

The irony here is that minorities (blacks) have been fighting for inclusion, integration and equality.

Yankee posts a story which, in essence, clearly shows that they now wish to be segregated on almost every level of society. Except when they perceive that they somehow are getting the short end of the stick from the racist white slaveholder.

So maybe this is what the Democrat Machine knew all along.

Provide them with money and programs and scholarships and jobs and schools on equal footing with Racist White America, and they will eventually tire or become enraged and segregate themselves.

Brilliant!!!

 

He isn't attending spring semester, so no.

And even if he were, I can't logically expect the school or the state to reimburse me a couple hunnert buh. Their attorneys are much more powerful than anything that I could personally muster, and I don't see the logic in spinning my wheels and raising my blood pressure over it.

Now, if a large group of people paying tuition were to get together and form a Class Action suit, I could see myself considering something along those lines.

I would respect his decision to stay or go, that's what parents do. I wouldn't support his decision to kill someone, himself or rob a bank. Those are examples of poor decisions.

 

Well dude be objective. The closure is a temporary condition and I'm certain that contingencies will be put in place to ensure that the students are able to complete their curriculum.

It's not like they're shutting down Trump U., or giving the Penn St. football team the Death Penalty.

 

Handful of kids get raped by a coach on campus (in the locker room) over the course of 20 years and they fire the coach just because he knew it was going on and let it continue??? What is this Communist Russia?