The Kunming Massacre in China, a Bloody and Horrific Miscalculation

The Kunming Massacre in Yunnan, China on March 1st was the bloodiest Radical Islam attack yet on the Middle Kingdom. Unfortunately, it won't make life any better for the Uighur (Chinese say wei war) inhabitants of Xinjiang in Northwest China. If there had been actual problems created by the influx of Han Chinese (94 percent of the Chinese population) into the Muslim Province of Xinjiang no one will sympathize with them now.

Because its bu ke neng (impossible) to get hold of guns in China, the carnage caused by knives makes it China's 9-11. 29 civilians and four terrorists are dead and a remarkable  140 others injured. These were animals who knew how to use knives.

There have been comments in British newspapers that the attackers were trained by Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but Chinese officials describe them simply as Muslims.

On March 1st, at 9:20 a.m., six men and two women pulled out their long knives at the Kunming Railway Station and began to slash the throats of others in the station. A bystander said the terrorists, dressed  in black , began slashing the heads, necks and shoulders to kill as many as possible. Another witness saw a five or six year old boy carried out of the station with slashed pants and blood streaming down his legs. Reportedly, after people were brought down by the initial attack, the terrorists moved in to finish them off.

Once again, we've seen how such slaughter negates any kind of honest compassion people may have felt for a Muslim population. The brutality and unconcern for the lives of others is the concept that people will take away from this incident. Restrictions on Muslim activities are bound to follow. By attacking people in Yunnan Province (where China grows tobacco and produces cigarettes, and is far away from Xinjiang) national outrage is building. Radical Islam may take delight in the enormity of this attack, but only those who wish to see China washed in blood should cheer.

If Hilary Were President

If Hilary were president today, we would be in a much stronger position. In the California primary, I voted for Obama and my wife and daughter voted for Hilary.

She would never have drawn a line in the sand  on Syria, then waffled, said she would defer to Congress (which would never have backed Obama's involvement in Syria) then decide to turn America's foreign policy over to Putin.

With the invasion of the Crimea (which we can't do anything about militarily, and shouldn't) we see how Putin has written off Obama as a lightweight. No one should ever make the mistake of putting Hilary in that category.  I wasn't someone who was for the Iraq War or the one in Afghanistan, but I want our president to be perceived as a strong person. If North Korea thinks they can invade the south because they think our president is a wimp, we are in a lot of trouble. I don't trust Obama to stand up.

I wanted our country to have a Black president, so we could move beyond our prejudices. But I didn't get someone with the character of Colin Powell, I got Obama.

Swiss Bank Uses Tricks to Help American Hide Billions from the IRS

A Swiss Bank has helped many Americans hide billions from the IRS. It may sound naive to connect paying taxes with patriotism, but the Americans who used Credit Suisse further exacerbated the distance between the one percent and poor Americans. After all, if you don't pay taxes you get to keep it all.

Right now, as I'm writing this, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on  Investigations is sharing a report that details the tricks and subterfuges the bank used to conceal the money Americans have, so they won't have to pay American taxes.

After this unbelievable litany of tricks, I don't understand how Credit Suisse is allowed to have a bank charter in the United States. Any country in this position should pull that charter immediately. If anyone thinks we need the Swiss more than they need us should have his head examined.

Some of the details defy comprehension. Americans were able to open accounts under the names of shell companies. Credit Suisse sent bankers surreptitiously from Switzerland to recruit rich Americans, so as to not leave a paper trail in the American division of Credit Suisse. They established banking offices at Swiss Airports so people could drop their money and then head to ski resorts.

Credit Suisse refuses to give the names of the Americans who have these accounts. They say Swiss law prohibits it. I say pull the bank's charter and let the bank disappear from American life. We have enough rich people not paying the taxes they deserve to pay because of loopholes in our tax laws. We don't need to have another bank helping America become a nation of have and have nots.

The New Face of Racism On College Campuses

The face of racism has changed on American campuses, from hatred to ignorance.

When I was at Syracuse University I dated a Chinese/American girl and a guy I once knew was dating an African American active in the civil rights movement. Because I was a townie I decided to take us to a bar that seldom saw Syracuse University students.

We had settled in when I was motioned over by someone I knew from high school. I had tried to integrate a high school fraternity and been roundly reviled for it, so this guy didn't mince words.

"The Oriental can stay, but if you don't get the nigger out of here, we're going to kill you," he said.

I reported this back to the table, and because we were  determined to show we wouldn't be cowed, we stayed there long enough to prove we weren't cowards. It wasn't pleasant but we emerged alive.

 Later that year a racist Southern governor, George Wallace, was welcomed on campus by students waving Confederate flags.

Later, when I became a professor at a university in which whites were a minority, I used to speak out on the use of the word "nigga" in rap. I would tell them about friends of mine who had suffered because of that word. I also told then that the white suburban kids who bought those albums would think it was alright to use the word.

Nowadays, the problem at American universities is affected by the fact students don't know how bad things used to be. Ignorance of the devastating toll of prejudice allowed a University of Michigan fraternity made up of whites and Asians to hold a party that revolved around coming "back to the hood."

I've seen students pulled over for DWB (driving while Black) and helped them deal with the way they're still regarded by many whites. Most whites in college don't have a clue and their ignorance of this world allows them to think they're in a color blind world where anything is OK to say. It isn't and with the presence of fewer African Americans at prestigious campuses, things are getting worse. Whites ought to understand that their classmates frequently come from tougher worlds than they inhabited growing up.

Japan, Which Denies Its Atrocities in World War II, Does Not Deserve Our Protection

Why should America have a strategic defense pact with Japan if they try to deny the horrific atrocities they perpetrated in World II. This includes enslaving Korean and Chinese women to provide sex for Japanese troops, the Rape of Nanjing and the Bataan Death March, in which American soldiers died from the cruelty of Japanese soldiers.

I once had a Japanese student who told me none of those things happened. Come to find out in Japanese schools none of these incidents were mentioned. Unlike Germany, which teaches about Nazi atrocities, Japanese deny what they did.

The Yasukuni Shrine holds the remains of Japanese war criminals. Last year a member of Shinzo Abe's cabinet paid a symbolic visit to it. This year Abe went himself. Abe's family includes a war criminal.

I've been to the memorial to the Nanjing Massacre. The details of this atrocity make you wonder how human beings could do things like this, from disemboweling to burying men and women alive. What happened to the Chinese population of Shanghai is equally disturbing. The Japanese created a phony explosion in Manchuria (Northeast China) so they could seize the three Chinese provinces to be the breadbasket for Japan. The Japanese press did not acknowledge that the explosion was set off by the Japanese themselves until 2007, a long way away from the incident in 1931.

The Koreans and Chinese have not forgotten how they suffered under the Japanese. These latest affronts make it impossible for me to support a defense treaty with Japan. I don't want  one American life shed for these people.

I taught in Germany and saw how an upright country acknowledges its past and learns from it.

Japan. on the other hand, can protect itself.

In what is, hopefully, an unrelated incident, libraries all over Tokyo have found copies of The Diary of Anne Frank destroyed. This diary depicts her Jewish family's attempt to survive the Nazis' occupation of the Netherlands. Anne Frank died at the age of 15 of typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, a camp which also, by the way, was where some of my daughter's ancestors passed away.