Up to 600 Black and Latino students were involved in racially tinged violence at the Locke High School in South Los Angeles. The riot was described as the worst violence many of the faculty had ever seen in a high school plagued with violence and what the L.A. authorities are euphemistically calling “tagging crews.” It took 60 officers, some in riot gear, to restore order and only four arrests were made. One of the arrested was a non-student carrying a knife.

From The L.A. Times:

A fight between rival groups of black and Latino students at Locke High School quickly escalated into a campus-wide melee Friday, with as many as 600 students brawling until police restored calm with billy clubs.

The troubled campus in South Los Angeles was locked down after the fight broke out at 12:55 p.m., as students returned from lunch to their fifth-period classes. Overwhelmed school officials called Los Angeles police for help, but students and faculty said it took about half an hour before dozens of officers, many in riot gear, restored order.

“The kids were crazy, running from place to place, jumping on other kids,” said Reggie Smith, the school’s band director, who said he ran to pull his students from the melee. “Some of my kids were crying because they were walking to class with friends and they got jumped.”

Los Angeles Unified School District police said that there are only two officers assigned to Locke but that the school police force brought in about 60 officers after receiving word of the brawl. The Los Angeles Police Department also dispatched more than a dozen patrol cars and about 50 officers.

Susan Cox, an LAUSD spokeswoman, said police arrested four people — three students for fighting and one non-student for illegal possession of a knife. Four students were treated in the school nurse’s office for minor injuries.

The campus at 111th and San Pedro streets has long been one of the city’s most troubled. This school year has been particularly difficult, with near-daily fights — albeit on a much smaller scale — during much of the fall and winter. Locke is about to be reorganized as a cluster of charter schools run by Green Dot Public Schools, which will take over in July, and some faculty and staff have accused the district of letting the campus drift in its final year as a traditional public school.

“Morale has really dropped because they don’t feel like they have everybody behind them,” cheerleading coach Marlo Jenkins said recently. “There are just fights upon fights upon fights now.”

Not the kind of leadership needed in areas where the growing tensions between Blacks and Latinos is creating a culture of racist warfare. Locke High School is 65% Latino and 35% black, and though many students say there isn’t much open hostility the people interviewed in the article admit to both self-segregation of the groups and near constant “black on brown” fights. The actions of the police after restoring order should tell you how bad the situation really is in Los Angeles despite the rosy picture many try to paint regarding race relations:

After securing order, authorities rounded up the students who hadn’t returned to class and segregated them by race, holding Latinos in the boys gym and African American students in Hobbs Hall, the school’s multipurpose room.

Beginning at 2 p.m., school officials began releasing students in small groups to go home. The school remained on lockdown until the last group had left about 3:15 p.m.

LAUSD’s Cox said that there would be an enhanced police presence at Locke during school hours next week and that the district would send human relations staff to the school to talk to students.

In recent years, melees have broken out periodically at many campuses with a black and Latino presence, including in Los Angeles, Lynwood and Compton. There have been fights between Latinos and Armenians in other areas that led to campus lockdowns.

Soon we’ll end up with segregated schools. The Latino vs. Armenian violence mentioned is a problem that has been going on since the 90s apparently, with a gang called Armenian Power forming up specifically to protect Armenians from Latino gang violence. A.P. is small but extremely violent and have fought MS-13 on occasion. In ‘05 there was a riot in Grant High School involving Latinos and Armenians.

If the youth in Los Angeles is any indication then race relations in America are getting much worse. The fact that authorities can barely control the groups involved make America’s future look bleak indeed.

There’s a video report from the local ABC affiliate. Breitbart has a nuts and bolts report.

I’ve had teachers like this before, luckily none of them ever thought to sue me for not believing their nonsense. From The Wall Street journal:

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”

The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful,” she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. “They’d argue with your ideas.” This caused “subversiveness,” a principle English professors usually favor.

Ms. Venkatesan’s scholarly specialty is “science studies,” which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, “teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth.” She continues: “Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct.”

The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan’s seminar, then, was to “problematize” technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the “problems” owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was “intolerant of ideas” and “questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways.” Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why.

After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on “ecofeminism,” which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But “these weren’t thoughtful statements,” Ms. Venkatesan protests. “They were irrational.” The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student’s “diatribe,” several of his classmates applauded.

Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was “fascist demagoguery.” Then, after consulting a physician about “intellectual distress,” she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.

Venkatesan’s insistence on her students’ acceptance of her fevered post-modernism reminds me a little of a class I took with in Narrative Non-Fiction with Lisa Jarnot, who is a very pleasant woman and an excellent poet but who literally spent a week of the class trying to convince us that there was no such thing as fixed gender. Not fixed gender roles mind you, which it can be reasonably argued by any rational person, but no fixed sex. It was an odd experience but actually not one that was as bad as many teachers would have made it and I actually quite enjoyed the class and my conversations with Lisa.

For her part though she no doubt sensed my skepticism of some of her ideas she graded me fairly and we parted amicably. I in fact did some of my best writing in that class.

The main difference between a Priya Venkatesan and a Lisa Jarnot is class. I’m sorry to say that on many a university campus there are students and faculty alike who are spoiled, thin skinned, and so utterly classless that the mere suggestion of criticism becomes ground for legal action, or at the very least a childish tantrum.

Stories like the one in the Journal would be amusing if it didn’t have such a deleterious effect on the academic environment:

That said, even at – or especially at – putatively superior schools, students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan’s. The main result is to make coursework pathetically easy. Like filling in a Mad Libs, just patch something together about “interrogating heteronormativity,” or whatever, and wait for the returns to start rolling in.

I once wrote a term paper for a lit-crit course where I “deconstructed” the MTV program “Pimp My Ride.” A typical passage: “Each episode is a text of inescapable complexity . . . Our received notions of what constitutes a ride are constantly subverted and undermined.” It received an A.

Where the standards are always minimum, most kids simply float along with the academic drafts, avoid as much work as possible and accept the inflated grade. Why not? It’s effortless, and there are better ways to spend time than thinking deeply about ecofeminism.

Indeed. And it is painfully obvious that the college student of today isn’t learning critical thinking, the scientific method or Gods forbid, to be an expert in a subject. Today’s students are learning that college is largely an exercise in irrelevance, boredom and hackery and we owe them much more than that.

h/t Don’t tase Me Bro!

Resurgent Chicano Nationalist/Marxist group the Brown Berets have announced a recruiting drive for “soldiers” to help them fight in Aztlan.

Aztlan would of course be Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. From the racist, anti-semitic Aztlan.net:

Los Angeles, Alta California - May 1, 2008 - (ACN) “The Brown Berets de Aztlan have undertaken an active campaign to recruit more soldiers and form new chapters throughout Aztlan,” said Chairman David Rico yesterday. “We will be having a series of presentations throughout the Southwest starting in San Diego on May 8, 2008,” he added.

David Rico is one of the original founders of the Brown Berets in California and was one of the Brown Beret soldiers that seized and took over land in Barrio Logan in San Diego that later became, the now world famous, “Chicano Park”.

In the first presentation in San Diego, David Rico and other Brown Berets will be speaking on what it takes to be a Brown Beret de Aztlan, what the organization believes in and on future plans. They will also be answering questions.

The first presentation is scheduled for May 8, 2008 from 6:30-9:00 p.m. at the Centro Cultural de La Raza located in Balboa Park at 2125 Park Blvd, San Diego.

After the recruitment campaign, the Brown Berets de Aztlan will be organizing caravans to the state of Arizona where our community is presently under siege by racists and other anti-immigrant elements.

The Brown Berets are a group of racist thugs who have claimed in the past to have shot down a police helicopter. Riding a wave of 60s style political activism they’ve been actively recruiting via MySpace and insinuating themselves and their anti-American rhetoric into the hard left. I have long suspected they were involved in the Columbia Minute Man riot.

The phrasing of their new recruiting drive is cause for concern. They aren’t looking for activists or supporters, but “soldiers.” Perhaps they think now is a good time to start a more, shall we say robust, campaign to “reclaim” Aztlan? Their caravans to Arizona will no doubt be a warm up for violence to come.

With the planed riots of Recreate ‘68 and the A.N.S.W.E.R. led R.N.C. protests coming up soon I’m betting a radical/criminal organization like the Brown Berets will be attempting to position themselves to take full advantage of the chaos leftist groups hope will ensue in the coming months.

White Plains is a city of contrasts where million dollar homes co-exist with slums that look as if they were sets of a movie. The rich who fled New York City to live in safer environs and better school districts are never more than a mile away from both the working class and the impoverished who were priced out of New York.

Less than 20 minutes from the Bronx by car, I’ve ended up in White Plains on many day hikes that began in Van Cortlandt Park, traveling into Yonkers’ Tibbetts Brook Park then picking up the Bronx River pathway. Those hikes were always stunning (though long) but the tranquil beauty of my hikes was often interspersed with the odd relic or ritual site. Stubs of candles, the smell of incense and sometimes the dead chicken or two.

“Voodoo” or in reality Santeria, Condomble, and the other Afro-Carib traditions, has crept from the slums of the Bronx well into upstate New York. Interesting, exotic, and largely harmless the traditions are often slandered by others, even other practitioners of esoteric religions like Wicca, and due to the secrecy inherent in the religion it has been an uphill struggle for adherents to be accepted in mainstream society.

As if there wasn’t enough bad press surrounding the worship of mysterious gods from Africa, along comes Hector Aviles, 51, who has got himself dubbed the “Voodoo rapist” because of the sex scheme he was caught using to rape teen girls:

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — A 51-year-old man who claimed to practice Voodoo has admitted telling underage girls that if they refused to have sex with him terrible things would happen to them and their families.

Hector Aviles of Yonkers pleaded guilty Thursday to second- and third-degree rape, said Janet DiFiore, the Westchester district attorney. Aviles could be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison.

DiFiore said that at various times in 2006, Aviles told three girls, ages 16 and 14, that he could help them with such problems as boys and parents if they engaged in a sexual “ritual” with him. He warned that if they backed out, he would make bad things happen to them and their relatives.

The district attorney said that when he was arrested, Aviles told police he practiced Voodoo.

If by Voodoo he means child rape then we can assume he’s a Voodoo practitioner. However I’m pretty sure the only religion he practiced was the religion of selfishness, perversion and depravity. This person’s rape and torment of those poor girls was disgusting enough, hell worthy if you were a Christian I’m sure, but his actions smear an entire religion that already struggles with equal treatment and that makes his crimes un-American as well.

And more shockingly it isn’t the first time Aviles pulled this scheme when he raped a child:

Aviles was convicted of raping a 12-year-old girl in 1997. In that case, the girl was threatened and intimidated into not reporting the crime for fear that Aviles would cast a “hex” on her family, prosecutors said.

Hector Aviles is a deviant, and like all deviants he’s unwilling to take responsibility for his actions and seek to excuse his crimes. Let’s hope that the people of White Plains can see through his lies and not use his crimes to attack the growing number of Santeria devotees whose only crime is belonging to a religion which is still fashionable to hate.

A few days ago I blogged the story of the vicious gang assault by “peace” protesters on an Iraq war veteran, his wife and their 14-year-old son. The Gathering of Eagles N.Y. chapter has been following this story and have some disturbing updates along with video of the attack on the family.

They still haven’t released the names of the villains, but the G.O.E. has now identified the two men involved in the beating as being from the Sociology department of Edinboro University. Here’s their description of the contents of the video, which I encourage you to watch for yourselves:

A man in a wheelchair comes forward and begins taunting the veteran. The veteran steps away from the wheelchair and places his sign on the ground leaning against his leg as he holds his flag.

The veterans sign is actually placed where it is not visible from the street. There is another American flag being held by one of the professors, so the presence of his flag does not interfere with their protest either.

Now the woman in white, who has been continuously badgering the Veteran’s son, uses the guise of moving a blue tupperware bin in front of his sign to mask her intent to grab it.
Grab it she does and throws it into the street. When the veteran goes to retrieve it she stands on top of the sign and taunts him to strike her.

She has now stolen his property and incited riot.

The veteran pulls his sign from beneath the woman’s boots while his wife comes over to interject her body between him and the woman.

The veteran walks back toward the sidewalk while a second woman, in a green shirt, comes charging up to the veterans wife and strikes her with the red sign she is carrying. The veteran’s wife moves her arm in a protective motion to fend off the sign and fend off this new woman.

The sign then strikes the woman in white.

At this point both women pile on the veteran’s wife punching and kicking. The wife, wearing an inflatable cast due to a leg injury, is caught off balance and falls to the ground. The veteran seeing what is happening spins around and grabs the woman in green to restrain her. In the meantime the woman in white continues to punch and kick the wife on the ground.

Several male protesters grab the veteran and push him to the ground. Punches are reported to have been thrown by these protesters although they are not recorded on this video. The video stops for a minute while the son pulls the woman in white off his mother. The video resumes in time to catch a last kick the woman in white makes to the head of the veteran’s wife. This is one of the blows that caused the concussion the wife suffered.

The camera pans around and the veteran can be seen on the ground, still restraining the woman in green, while the male protester in yellow is gripping both sides of the collar of his shirt from behind in the manner of a garrot around his neck. His hat and glasses are gone. The glasses were smashed in the street.

The woman in white then approaches the veteran as he releases the woman in green and appears to launch an attack against him while he is restrained. She then wheels around and assaults the son, who is still videotaping, in a graphic exhibition of the violence endemic to ‘peace’ thugs. This recorded assault on a juvenile should have produced an immediate arrest by the police officers reviewing the video, yet they did nothing.

The video ends with the parting remark of the woman in white “You got what you wanted you f_cks!”

Shocking, unless you’ve met peace protesters. The cops arrive on the scene and do worse than nothing, they take the “peace” protesters’ side and allow the assault to continue:

The two policemen arrived on the scene after the open hostilities had ended. One of the officers arrived with an attitude and that attitude did not improve throughout the time he was there or later at the police station. He allowed the protesters to taunt the veteran in his presence unhindered and then threatened to arrest the veteran when he responded verbally to the taunts. When the woman in white was called across the street by the police, and she took the opportunity to spit on the veteran, he did not threaten to arrest her. When he reviewed the video from the veteran’s son’s camera he decided that no one was going to be arrested even when it was pointed out to him that the lady in white had blatantly attacked a juvenile. Later in the police station this officer again displayed outright hostility to the veteran and threatened to handcuff him for inquiring why the woman wasn’t arrested for the assault on his son.

The favorable treatment given to this woman begs the question. Who is she and what is her relationship to the police officers or any public person in the Borough of Edinboro?

Updated: 4/26/2008. The woman in white has been identified as a student at Edinboro University

The G.O.E. and those covering this story, including Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly who did a segment on the story last night, seem perplexed as to the preferential treatment rich White liberals get from police in a college town. Let me explain.

Edinboro is reliant on the spoiled, priggish children of what even shallow liberals call The Worst Generation for its livelihood. Edinboro authorities, in collusion with the local University, pamper these overgrown toddlers because it’s good for business. I lived in such towns while an undergrad and later while receiving my Master’s and they’re all the same.

The protest was irrelevant to the cops’ shameful treatment of the veteran.  I’ve seen rich kids get away with buying drugs in front of cops, male college students get away with hitting women, colleges and police covering up rape and assaults and even have personal knowledge of a case of a famous east coast liberal arts college covering up child pornography.

The young, peaceful liberal is a myth dreamed up by people who romanticize the self-absorbed, drug-addicted nihilists that were spawned by parents who didn’t love their kids enough to care if they grew up to be decent people. The world is full of people who make comfortable livings off the excesses of people with easy access to cash and no sense of boundaries. Edinboro is an example of both those truths.

In short, the town of Edinboro is in the tank for the University and more importantly for the damaged, selfish cretin who attend the school and flood that town with money. The cops, the mayor and even the D.A. will go to bat for these criminals, even if it means breaking the law to do so. The D.A. has already shown the family what kind of justice Edinboro metes out:

Harassment charges are being filed against the Iraq Veteran and his wife and no charges are being filed against the thugs who assaulted them. How can the District Attorney justify this travesty of justice?

He’ll justify it by counting the money in his paycheck that comes from these students drinking, drugging and fighting in his town.

I contacted the Edinboro University public relations office for a statement when this story first broke and they have no comment. The D.A. also has not commented and was accused on last night’s O’Reilly Factor of ducking the press.

This story stinks. I expect that once more light is shed on this town’s disgusting treatment of this family the charges will be dropped and the town will bend over backwards to get out of the public eye as quickly as possible.

They wouldn’t want us to find out what other crimes they’ve been covering up.