I've been meaning to write this for ages, since the last criticism of Jesse Jackson showed up in this blog. In a nutshell, Jesse Jackson was sent to Sierra Leone to help negotiate a peace treaty between the RUF and the government. The RUF are very bad people. Back then they would train child soldiers, and have them engage in horrible attrocities. They would chop off peoples arms as a warning. Jackson twisted the government's arm into not only making peace with the RUF on fairly favorible terms, but put the head of the RUF - Foday Sankoh - in charge of the nation's mines. Since the war was largely driven by diamond profits, this was criminally negligent. Of course the RUF rearmed and restarted the civil war, and the US denied any involvement in the agreement they brokered. I can't go on - it just makes me too angry.
When I was in Freetown I was asked "Why did the US send Jesse Jackson to us?" as if he was one of the seven plagues visited upon Egypt. Worse than Chamberlain, since he knew what he was dealing with - he just didn't care. I think this arrogance was rooted in his belief that he could work with anyone, and that nobody is beyond redemption ... and as a consequence he didn't stop to think about what Sankoh and the RUF would do with the power he was giving them. There is an amazing appalling story of Jackson at the African/African-American summit where he led a room full of African leaders in repeating the phrase "I AM SOMEBODY" - for some reason he doesn't seem to have considered the fact that a lack of self-esteem is the least of these guys problems.
For the best essay on Jackson in Sierra Leone, click here to read what the TNR has to say.
How can anyone deal with the monster who did this ? Intentionally hacking the limbs off of people - children ?
| Africa | Jesse Jackson |
Several years ago, Jackson led a protest in front of a San Fernando Valley, CA Office Depot store I sometimes patronized. The store had declined to accept some black guy's personal check for $5,000. Jackson claimed racism. Depot said, "It's always been our policy to not accept checks in excess of $1,500 dollars without a major credit card," which the customer lacked. The policy was colorblind. The customer fell below the established risk quotient. Yet there was Jackson and his cronies (strange how these people are always available during weekday days) marching for the cameras they had called and screaming, what else, "Racism!" So, since the Depot had denied the sale per existing policy, why was Jackson protesting? You'll be shocked (not) to know that soon thereafter, Depot sent a six-figure check to the Rainbow Coalition. I'll lay 10-1 that Jackson's offices are supplied, at great discount, by... guess who? This longstanding M.O. is exactly what it sounds like: Extortion. The "struggle" has long since ceased to be about "rights" or "justice" or "diversity". It's about cash. Period. He and others like him are desecrating the legacy of King and Civil Rights for the singular purpose of personal enrichment. (And to pay off those staff members he knocks up.) The real crime, though, is that in this craven pursuit under the guise of "racism", the underlying problem in the black community goes unaddressed: Fathers who fail to stay with the women they impregnate. Were this an economic issue, as some on the Left might claim, low-income Latino, Asian and Arab families would have similar rates of fathers who fail to stay with the women they impregnate. Ironically, Jackson himself - wealthy, promiscuous, cheating on his wife and fathering children he has no intention of being a father to - is his own best evidence that this is not an economic issue. I guess that leaves culture and morality. How inconvienent when chanting "racism" at guilty white people has proven so lucrative.
