A crowdfunding site created this week to support Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson and his family continues to grow, despite a considerable amount of negative comments and requests to remove the page.
Created on Monday on the site GoFundMe, the campaign had raised over $200,000 and the goal was raised to $250,000 as of Friday morning, but the page is also littered with negative comments about the officer who shot and killed unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown on Aug. 9.
ECCLESIASTICUS 13:15 Every beast loveth his like, and every man loveth his neighbor.
16 All flesh consorteth according to kind, and a man will cleave to his like.
ECCLESIASTES 7:
12 For wisdom is a defence, and money is a defence: but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to them that have it.
A St Louis County police officer working in Ferguson, Missouri in the aftermath of Michael Brown's shooting death has been suspended from duty after disturbing video emerged of him referring to black people as 'little perverts' and President Obama as an illegal immigrant.
Officer Dan Page, who was caught live on CNN News earlier this week pushing the network's anchor Don Lemon and threatening to arrest him, made the hate-filled speech in April of this year during an Oath Keepers of St Louis/St Charles meeting.
His offensive remarks weren't limited to black people - he also had vitriol to spew about Muslims, women who have abortions, gay people and people who suffer domestic violence.
The raving speech goes on for more than an hour as Page, brandishing a bible, enlightens his audience with his unique views.
Page is the second St Louis county police officer to have been relieved of his duties during the Ferguson protests.
Lieutenant Ray Albers, 46, was caught on camera screaming, 'I will f***ing kill you!' and pointing his rifle at civilians.
An investigation is underway and he has been placed on indefinite unpaid leave.
The incidents have highlighted the racial divide in Ferguson, a largely black town where the police force and local politicians are almost all white. Civil rights activists say Brown's death was the culmination of years of police unfairly targeting blacks.
Protests in Ferguson, Missouri, were muted for a third straight evening on Friday as the National Guard began withdrawing from the St. Louis suburb racked by racial turmoil after a white police officer shot dead an unarmed black teenager.
Hundreds of protesters marched in the hot summer night near the site of the August 9 slaying of 18-year-old Michael Brown, chanting 'Hands up, don't shoot,' while police vehicles observed the demonstration, without intervening.
Clergy volunteers wearing bright orange T-shirts discouraged protesters who wanted to defy police orders to keep moving, while live singing and drums boomed out from a flat-bed truck.
The St Louis County Police released a statement saying the Police Chief Jon Belmar was 'disturbed' by the content of Page's speech.
'We hold our officers to a high standard of honor both on and off duty. While we as a department do not have an issue with officers expressing themselves, this was disturbing and unacceptable,' it reads.
'The officer is a 35 year veteran of this department and has been deployed numerous times in military service. He had passed the evaluations upon returning from deployment and there was no indication of this attitude.'
Early in the video, Page tells his audience that the bible is the foundation of the Constitution and that you cannot have one without the other, saying, 'I don’t know what them black little perverts don’t understand down there. But they need me to talk to them. I’ll square them away for you. Take me about a minute.
He reads from the Constitution, stumbling over several words, the meanings of which clearly elude him.
He rages against hate-crime laws, saying there are 'four sodomites on the Supreme Court' and describing himself as being 'into diversity - I kill everybody!'
'And I’m real good with a rifle. My best shot is 1,875 meters, I got me a gold star on that one. You run from me you’re gonna die tired,' he rants.
Page claims to be a Vietnam War Vet and a sergeant major in the U.S. Army who took retirement two years early in 2012 because he didn't want to take orders from President Obama.
He refers to the president as an 'illegal alien' and claims to have flown a plane to Kenya to see where 'my undocumented president lives at.'
Police Chief Jon Belmar says that while Page has never been involved in an 'officer-involved shooting,' his attitude and description of himself as an 'indiscriminate killer' was extremely
'I personally believe in Jesus Christ as my lord savior, but I'm also a killer. I’ve killed a lot. And if I need to, I'll kill a whole bunch more,' Page tells the OathKeepers.
'If you don't want to get killed, don't show up in front of me, it's that simple. I have no problem with it. God did not raise me to be a coward,' he said before launching into a rant about the government indoctrinating children to spy on their parents in public schools.
The OathKeepers is an association of former and present military personnel, police officers and first reponders who 'defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.'
Don Lemon, who was repeatedly pushed by Page during a live report from Ferguson Monday, described the video: 'It’s wide-ranging inflammatory remarks about a lot of people, about women, about gay people,' he said.
'[Page] talks about the president of the United States. He speaks out against affirmative action, women in the military and on and on.'
Following his interaction with Page in Ferguson, Lemon told audiences, 'We’re on national television, so imagine what they’re doing to people when you don’t see it on national television, people who don’t have a voice like we do.'
MATTHEW 12:
34 O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.
JOHN 8:
44 Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
At least two protesters cornered Jesse Jackson at a McDonald’s in Ferguson, Mo., tearing into him for what they saw as a lack of leadership after Michael Brown’s death, according to video posted by Western Journalism.
“Hey, Jesse Jackson. How you doing? Are you here to support us?” one protester began, approaching Jackson’s vehicle and recording the interaction.
“You’ve been marching all day long? We haven’t seen you marching all day long,” he said. “Are you going to pay the bond of those brothers that’s been locked up?”
“Are you marching today with us, or are you just going to sit in the car?” the second protester demanded.
“We ain’t seen you!” the first protester said. “When you going to stop selling us out, Jesse? We don’t want you here in St. Louis! When you gonna stop selling us out, Jesse?”
Jackson remained quiet throughout most of the interaction, but at that point, his driver interjected: “Wait a minute, brother…”
“Ain’t no, ‘Wait a minute brother,’” the first protester retorted, growing increasingly irate. “This is real! We activists out here! … You’re not a leader. We don’t want you here, brother. Matter of a fact, you’re not even a brother. You can keep moving and get them brothers out of jail. That’s what you can do!”
ISAIAH 13:
2 Lift ye up a banner upon the high mountain, exalt the voice unto them, shake the hand, that they may go into the gates of the nobles.
DEUTERONOMY 24:
7 If a man be found stealing any of his brethren of the children of Israel, and maketh merchandise of him, or selleth him; then that thief shall die; and thou shalt put evil away from among you.
The events in Ferguson, Missouri, should sober the US government or race-related conflicts may become more frequent, Russian Foreign Ministry Human Rights Commissioner Konstantin Dolgov said in an interview with Rossiya 24 news channel.
“We think US authorities should pay closer attention to burning internal problems, including those related to ethnicity and race that still exist in the United States. Try to solve them via legal constitutional practices rather than unjustified and inadequate violence,” Dolgov said.
“What is happening in Missouri right now should have a sobering effect on
US society and authorities. They are systematic problems. They are by no means limited to one particular city or state,” the commissioner added.
Experts’ Comments on Ferguson Protests
Zoom InAdd to blog
Dolgov pointed out the regularity of such confrontations and warned of a possible increase in the frequency of the conflicts. At the same time, US authorities are failing to create a dialogue with US citizens, as they rely too heavily on the use of brutal force, according to Dolgov.
The Russian official also mentioned the way the Missouri authorities treated the media. Since the beginning of the protests, 11 members of the press have been detained while attempting to cover the events in Ferguson.
Dolgov said the police actions stemmed from a desire to avoid showing Americans images the US government deemed negative. This policy contradicts Washington’s promotion of freedom of speech that now appears to have been violated in the Unites States itself.
Ferguson, a predominantly African-American suburb of St. Louis, has been shaken by protests since the police killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old teenager, on a residential street on August 9.
African-American residents, about 65 percent of the local population, often complain about harassment at the hands of the police.
Missouri National Guard troops have been deployed to tackle the violence, which has grown fiercer, according to the police. Law enforcement officers have been criticized for using tear gas, rubber bullets and other heavy-handed measures.
OBADIAH 1:
6 How are the things of Esau searched out! how are his hidden things sought up!
7 All the men of thy confederacy have brought thee even to the border: the men that were at peace with thee have deceived thee, and prevailed against thee; they that eat thy bread have laid a wound under thee: there is none understanding in him.
8 Shall I not in that day, saith the LORD, even destroy the wise men out of Edom, and understanding out of the mount of Esau?
REVELATION 18:
4 And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.
5 For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.
This past week’s racial crisis in Ferguson, Mo., has uncovered a divide within the black community—one based on generation, class and the cloudy political vision offered by African-American politics in the Obama age.
When asked who is the leader of the ongoing protests since the killing of Michael Brown—protests that have triggered Missouri’s governor to declare a state of emergency and curfew—one young man from St. Louis answered, “Do we have a leader? No,” and he went on to suggest that the martyred Brown, himself, offered the best example of leadership for Ferguson’s angry and alienated young people.
As last week progressed, protests on the streets of that city operated on two separate tracks: Civil rights leaders have organized effective nonviolent marches even as young protesters, and some would-be outlaws, have descended into violence and looting in parts of the city.
Leaders such as the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have visited Ferguson, but their pleas for calm have been ineffective.
Ironically, the black person who provided arguably the most visible leadership during the Ferguson events has been Missouri Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson, whose forceful, yet compassionate, presence and policing tactics helped to temporarily defuse the escalating crisis.
That young people in Ferguson refused to heed calls for nonviolence should come as no surprise. Demonstrations at the height of the civil rights era featured sporadic incidents of violence waged by angry black Americans outraged at racism and poverty, but unwilling or unable to commit to the discipline of nonviolence. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. encountered these episodes in Birmingham, Ala., and Memphis, Tenn., and was famously heckled when he visited Watts in the aftermath of Los Angeles’ 1965 rebellion.
What makes the current situation different from the 1960s is that we have no Stokely Carmichael or Black Panthers who can properly relate to the young people in and outside of Ferguson, who have used the language of violence to convey rage and disappointment.
Make no mistake: Brown’s killing is not the root cause of Ferguson’s violence. It’s merely the spark that triggered it. Poverty, segregation, unemployment and a climate of anti-black racism haunt tiny Ferguson and the wider St. Louis metropolitan area. Riots, King reminded us, are “the language of the unheard” and oppressed.
It’s no wonder, then, that local young black men and women can’t identify a single black leader or organization as the leader of the chaotic demonstrations in which they have participated.
National black political leaders from the civil rights era have tried, through organizational outreach, speeches, media—both traditional and social—marches and demonstrations to reach out to and stay connected with a new generation of young people. But this effort bumps up against the limitations of resources and outreach.
America’s racial underclass, the off-the-grid hustlers and entrepreneurs whom many black elites ignore or demonize, rarely sees political leaders of any color advocating for them.
The divide, while generational on the surface, is also fueled by class, since young people with education, networks and access tend to view politics as a long-term process—one that comes with victories but also compromise and setbacks. Millions of young blacks have no entree to the nuances of American democracy and racial struggle. Their world is more painfully straightforward and wrenching—black folks get shot in the streets with no hope of justice.
The ideal response to this tragedy, one that our national civil rights narrative promotes but, in fact, was never entirely true, is for the entire black population of Ferguson to put on their best church clothes and nonviolently show the world what happened to Michael Brown.
But in the age of Obama, these young people find the lessons of the civil rights era increasingly hard to comprehend. Certainly, the frequency of police killings of black men, the Iraq War-styled police presence in Ferguson, and the numbing persistence of racial segregation and violence make talk of racial progress ring hollow.
Putting civil rights leaders in a tough spot. They’re wary of being too critical of President Barack Obama’s track record on race and poverty, aware that the attorney general is his staunch ally and they’ve been pilloried by conservatives as “race hustlers,” eager to arouse the rabble. But perhaps most importantly, the very constituency they often claim to speak for—the voiceless black youths who have come out in Ferguson over the past week—find these leaders’ voices indistinguishable from the political white noise that only unfettered violence seems capable of breaking through.
JEREMIAH 14:
2 Judah mourneth, and the gates thereof languish; they are black unto the ground; and the cry of Jerusalem is gone up.
3 And their nobles have sent their little ones to the waters: they came to the pits, and found no water; they returned with their vessels empty; they were ashamed and confounded, and covered their heads.
ECCLESIASTES 1:
4 One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
A racial row has gripped an Alabama college campus where a sorority sister on Saturday posted a photo on Snapchat with a racist message bragging that their chapter had no black women.
'Chi O go no n*****!!!!!' reads the caption from a sister at the University of Alabama's Chi Omega sorority in Tuscaloosa.
The responsible sister has since been kicked out of the chapter, which just that day had pledged two African American women.
A message appeared on the national Chi Omega Fraternity Facebook condemning the message on Monday.
'What was expressed is absolutely reprehensible and completely inconsistent with Chi Omega's values and policies,' said the organization's post. 'Chi Omega took swift disciplinary action in accordance with the organization's policies and procedures.'
It also said that 'The Chi Omega chapter at the University of Alabama pledged a diverse group of young women, which included several new members who self-identified as minorities, including two African-American women.'
That information was supported by university newspaper The Crimson White, which tweeted '[...] All 16 Panhellenic sororities participating in recruitment offered bids to African American women.'
The woman responsible and the other sisters in the photo had yet to come forward as of Tuesday, but someone took the time to anonymously email Sorority humor blog Total Sorority Move with denials that the poster meant to use the racist epithet at all.
'The snap was, apparently, an auto correct from the word "ninjas" to “n*****,"' one tipster told the website.
'These so-called "ninjas" are, after how alabama rush works, a sorority gets stuck with girl that weren’t their top picks. The reason these dumb, non proofreading chi o’s were so happy was that they got a "perfect pledge class" this rush season. Now, don’t get me wrong, being a part of the alabama greek system there is a tradition of racism, but it stems from alumni in sororities not usually the actives.'
Last September, The Crimson White reported that black women had been systematically blocked from receiving bids from sororities at the university, calling it 'an almost impenetrable color barrier.'
Another user told Total Sorority Move the offending image had been Photoshopped.
'Whoever edited the image took the "g" from "got" and moved it into the "nj" in "ninjas" (the story update actually makes perfect sense),' the user said. 'If you zoom in and check the kerning of the letters then you can see that the first ‘g’ in "n*****" was stretched the make up for the wide empty space where the "n" used to be and that the second "g" was kept at the original dimensions.'
That user also wrote 'I sympathize with the girl because it seems someone saw an opportunity to be malicious and acted upon it.'
Requests for comment to the chapter, the national Chi Omega organization, and the University of Alabama from MailOnline were not immediately returned.
ZEPHANIAH 2:
1 Gather yourselves together, yea, gather together, O nation not desired;
2 Before the decree bring forth, before the day pass as the chaff, before the fierce anger of the LORD come upon you, before the day of the LORD'S anger come upon you.
ISAIAH 32:
9 Rise up, ye women that are at ease; hear my voice, ye careless daughters; give ear unto my speech.
10 Many days and years shall ye be troubled, ye careless women: for the vintage shall fail, the gathering shall not come.
11 Tremble, ye women that are at ease; be troubled, ye careless ones: strip you, and make you bare, and gird sackcloth upon your loins.
12 They shall lament for the teats, for the pleasant fields, for the fruitful vine.
