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June 29, 2016
Dignity And Respect
Reburying the slaves, the would-be Islamberg pogrom, the Albany response to the Orlando shootings and the need for rational gun policies
Where to begin. I’ll start by mentioning the slaves, the ones found buried in the suburb of Menands right outside the City of Albany, discovered when a sewer line was being dug for a building project. These slaves were of course black, chattel apparently owned by a branch of the illustrious Schuyler family that lived on what was then back in the 1700s a country estate.
These 14 slaves were buried honorably in a forgotten graveyard in individual pine boxes, all oriented East to West, seven children six women and one man. This shows that the aristocratic Schuylers of Menands had some regard for their human property, after all the estate at that time was mostly isolated from the more settled areas and thus among the residents of the estate there must have been quite a bit of familiarity all around. Analysis showed, among other things, that all of these slaves were born in New York State, they were as much native to this land as their masters were.
When I heard that the remains of the slaves would be displayed at Schuyler mansion, at the home of Revolutionary general Phillip Schuyler which is located down the hill from my house, a ghoulish part of me was hoping to see the actual bodies. Not sure why, but that was in the back of my mind. There are a few photos of the archeological dig circulating, one shows a mostly complete skeleton exposed in the dirt. Some of the skulls were intact enough so that reasonable reconstructions of the faces of the slaves could be sculpted.
But displaying carcasses would have been terribly disrespectful. The theme of what has been called the Schuyler Flatts Burial Project was respect, bestowing a level of honor upon these underclass folks that surely would have baffled them when they were alive. Indeed the high level of interest in people who are being regarded as spiritual ancestors of the black communities in Albany produced some wonderful ceremony.
Each set of remains was placed in their own box which was constructed by 14 different groups or individuals, ranging from schoolkids to expert woodworkers. All the ossuaries as they were called were beautifully made, much effort went into this volunteer community effort. Each box was only a few feet long though, basically we are talking about collections of bones that did not require full sized boxes like those these folks originally were buried in.
The 14 ossuaries were displayed in the downstairs hall of Schuyler Mansion, which is where the white aristocratic Schuylers would have lain in state after their demises. It is unlikely that any of the slaves would ever have been allowed to set foot in that hall and certainly their remains would never have been honored inside that mansion when they passed. The portraits of the Schuylers looked down upon the ossuaries, I tried to imagine the shock and horror that the masters would have felt if they could see this, but I realized the depth of their aristocratic aversion was beyond my understanding.
The next day there was an elaborate burial ceremony at St. Agnes Catholic Cemetery in Menands near the original burial ground which I missed but I hear was very moving. Someone mentioned to me that it was a shame to put all those well crafted boxes in the ground like that, but that was the point. Honor and respect are for the living, despite all our wealth and decoration or lack of it we all will eventually confirm our inherent equality when we return to the dirt.
Back in the 1700s The Schuylers were the masters and the black slaves were the human beasts, everyone knew their place in the fixed hierarchy and few questioned it. Today that certainty about hierarchy is gone, thus all too many individuals strive to climb over and suppress each other, scratching and clawing and backstabbing in an ever changing landscape of pointless social struggle. It constantly amazes me how hard most people work at this. Perhaps such behavior is a nostalgic yearning for the days of fixed hierarchy.
These days the usual idea is not to better one’s self to achieve superiority but to downgrade the other person by whatever means are at hand. For example, white people of all economic classes have grudgingly been forced to abandon their automatic sense of superiority over black people. The Burial Project is a strong reminder of that change, a signpost you could say near the end of the road. However, if traditionally inferior people such as black folks can no longer be regarded as inferior by the rest of the population, then there has to be found another group of people who can be relegated to that bottom role.
In our present day perhaps the only group of people it is okay to denigrate and spit upon in this country is Muslims, or more specifically, lower income Muslims, especially immigrants. Rich Muslims, such as the the totalitarian Sheik of Abu Dhabi who owns the Global Foundries chip fab in Malta north of Albany, he and his representatives are of course regarded as exceptional. Money magically confers superiority. But if the Muslims are working class, immigrants or black, then we have been repeatedly told that they are fair game for abuse.
This past May The Wife got involved with physically opposing some of that “acceptable” discrimination of Muslims. Islamberg is a small isolated town in Delaware County near the Pennsylvania border with a population of not much more than 200 people. From Wikipedia:
The hamlet was founded in the late 1980s by... a group of primarily African American Muslims who left New York City, reportedly to escape crime, poverty and racism. They built a community of some 40 family houses, with its own grocery store and bookstore and place of worship... "Holy Islamberg", as residents refer to it, is also the headquarters of the Muslims of America organization.
While the founder of Isamberg was an immigrant Imam, the inhabitants are mostly Americans born in America who followed the venerable tradition of American religious groups leaving the Cities and establishing communities in the wilderness so they could practice their religious beliefs in peace. Famous examples are the Mormons and the Shakers. But please also note that the inhabitants of Islamberg are almost all black folks, a central detail that seems to be mostly ignored in accounts of this incident.
In recent years Rupert Murdoch’s FOX “News” has aired no less than nine bogus reports about Islamberg with titles such as smarmy “Islamberg: A Terror Compound in New York, or Misunderstood Neighbors?” from 2007, or the even more luridly false “Muslims Training for Guerrilla Warfare in New York” from last year. This despite every single police agency, from the federal government which heavily investigated Islamberg after Nine Eleven to the local cops who keep a close watch, have repeatedly denied any claims of even the remotest sign of “terroristic” activity in the community.
But an astonishingly large number of people obediently believe everything they are told by their TV sets without question. And an astonishingly large number of people are constantly looking for someone vulnerable to step on and hurt so as to assuage their own feelings of inferiority. The authoritative TV has been broadcasting permission to harass the the people of Islamberg, and sure enough a group of dimwits from way outside of the New York State area decided to act on that permission.
This collection of nitwits from Virginia and Tennessee who call themselves Bare Naked Islam (seriously!) scheduled a motorcycle ride through Islamberg that they called “American Bikers United Against Jihad.” This “event” was heavily advertised, at least one of these clowns was quite adept at producing videos and clearly somebody was financing their propaganda. So this was no secret, apparently these fools were hoping that they would be leading an angry mob.
There’s very little information about who exactly are the people behind Bare Naked Islam other than through disputes with other hate groups over ideological fine points. The organizers conceal their identities carefully and do not admit feedback on their website except for what look like fake comments. As a general rule these are signs of astroturfing, that is, persons or corporations with big money using their resources to fake a grassroots movement in hopes of starting one. (Wouldn’t that legally be defined as domestic terrorism if these rich people are financing propaganda that promotes violence?)
So on May 15 a delegation from Albany which included The Wife joined a group of several hundred people traveling to Islamberg to meet the dimwit Bare Naked Islam motorbikers. This response was primarily organized by NAACP and the Unitarian Universalist congregation from Oneonta, the nearest “big city” to Islamberg. Seriously, this place is in the middle of nowhere. Actually the Albany folks decided to go down on their own, they were surprised and delighted to see the size of the Oneonta groups when they got there.
The inhabitants of Islamberg welcomed the invasion of supporters which temporarily doubled the size of the town. About 400 people lined both sides of the one street of the small downtown and beyond almost elbow to elbow, with various media cameras interspersed among them. The locals distributed American flags to wave at the bikers, The Wife is keeping hers as a treasured souvenir.
The bikers were supposed to arrive at Noon, tension mounted as the Americans waited for America’s enemies to arrive. Would they start trouble? Finally about 1PM the State Troopers stationed downhill at the highway radioed to the troopers stationed at the entrance to town (of course they were there) that the Bare Naked Dimwits were on their way.
Five motorcycles followed by seven cars and pickups entered the main drag, past the Troopers and between the hundreds of flag waving patriots. The knucklehead driving the lead motorcycle made a gesture to the others as he drove and the parade of dimwits stared straight ahead and didn’t even slow down, they sped through the little town and kept going, presumably back to whatever unpatriotic toilet they came from. Thus for all their false bravado these would-be Christian Jihadists proved to the world that they are nothing but a bunch of spineless pussies.
The Wife told me that when the fools had sped past she overheard a little girl who lived in the town, who no doubt had experienced very little excitement in her life up to that point say, “Is that it?”
Bare Naked Islam Dimwit Passes A State Trooper
A per my instructions The Wife managed to take some decent photos with her phone of the Bare Naked Dimwits as they sped by. (She was also instructed, as usual, to walk calmly away from any violence if it happens.) Blowing up the photos I noted that the motorcycles had Virginia plates, but most of the cars had New York plates. So the Dimwits found a few like minded simpletons lurking locally. All the drivers were white males.
What exactly did these jerks have in mind? With their heavy advertising for the event apparently they were hoping for a legion of supporters to join them, and clearly the idea was, at the very least, to frighten and intimidate the inhabitants of the town. Because their TV sets had given them permission to pick on these people, they must have thought that the rest of the world had also obeyed the Corporate Media and were ready to follow them.
After The Threat Had Passed The Locals Fed The Visitors
The word for what they had in mind was pogrom. They probably hoped to lead an angry mob to threaten the locals, smash some storefronts, maybe loot and burn a few buildings, beat up a few innocents and perhaps even rape some underage boys. If maybe they had killed a few people then they may have imagined that sympathetic police officers would look the other way.
But that didn’t happen. Instead they fled in fear from the patriotic Americans and afterwards the couple of hundred visitors repaired to a big tent and were served tea and a great meal by the grateful locals. There was talk of organizing a joint kayaking trip on one of the nearby rivers which sounds like great fun if it happens. But The Wife said that even though it was the middle of May it was awfully cold up in those hills. There she was under the tent huddled over a glass of hot tea wearing her sunhat, while outside the tent she could see snow flurries.
Vigil After The Orlando Shootings At The State Capitol, June 14
There were several hastily organized and well attended local reactions to the horrific mass shooting of a gay nightclub in Orlando Florida, 49 dead and at least that many seriously wounded. The shooter Omar Mateen, born and raised in America, had been according to numerous witnesses visiting the nightclub for the past few years and was known to be using the gay dating site Grindr. It seems he was very much in the closet, and according to an experienced mental health professional I talked to who happens to be gay, this mass shooting was very much an expression of self hatred.
Despite these obvious facts, almost immediately, without any real understanding or confirmation, President Obama, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump declared that this was an act of Islamic terrorism. The Corporate Media enthusiastically followed their lead, inserting this falsehood into the initial reports and sidelining the real issues surrounding this mass murder, in particular the gay denial by the shooter and the easy availability of assault weapons in Florida.
That lying piece of human waste head of the FBI James Comey also immediately declared the shooter an Islamic terrorist and not the homegrown self-hating gay hater that he was, to this day the FBI continues to lie about that. Since then it has come out that the FBI not only tried to recruit Mateen as an “informant,” that is, as a point man in an entrapment operation, but earlier tried to entrap him but was rebuffed. So it is clear that the FBI was monitoring him closely, but somehow either deliberately or because of jaw-dropping incompetence let him carry out a mass murder, just as they did with the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston or the shooters in Sacramento.
I mean, isn’t it funny how the FBI routinely catches white native-born Americans before they actually carry out acts of terrorism but keep “missing” anybody with a Muslim name? Some examples: the same day as the Orlando shooting a certain James Wesley Howell from Indiana was on his way to shoot up the Los Angeles Pride Parade but was stopped, and on June 23 the FBI stopped Cliven Bundy family friend William Keebler who was preparing to blow up the federal Bureau of Land Management building in Salt Lake City. It looks to me like right now the FBI doesn’t want these terrorist white boys to act too soon.
Press Conference Denouncing The Orlando Shootings, In Front Of Masjid as Salam, Dr. Shamshad Ahmad Speaking
The Masjid as Salam mosque on Central Avenue in Albany held a vigil the Sunday night of the Orlando shooting. It was held at 9PM because of Ramadan, devout Muslims are not supposed to eat or drink anything until after sundown and presumably the members of the mosque did not wish to vigil until after breaking fast. A number of Albany elected officials and non-Muslim concerned citizens, including representatives of the local gay community participated in a press conference on the sidewalk in front of the mosque to denounce the Orlando massacre.
Judd Krasher of the Albany Common Council, who is a prominent member of the gay community, contacted Dr. Shamshad Ahmad, president of Masjid as Salam to suggest the vigil and press conference, which was readily accepted and carried out. I’ve heard that there is a widespread perception among the local gay community and by the Muslim community that the authorities and the Corporate Media are trying to drive a wedge between gay people and Muslims by falsely claiming that this shooting was some kind of Muslim jihad against gays rather than what it was, a homegrown homophobic act of violence. This press conference demonstrated that there would be no manufactured misunderstandings imposed upon either community in Albany.
Yassin Aref In 2013, Still In Federal Prison For No Discernible Reason
Masjid as Salam was, of course, the storefront mosque that suffered the shameful entrapment and perjuring into prison of their Imam Yassin Aref by the FBI in 2004. Despite no evidence of wrongdoing and no history of ties to terrorist organizations, and despite the FBI’s chief piece of evidence turned out to be a hamhanded mistranslation of a Kurdish document, a jury was browbeaten into convicting Mr. Aref of one minor charge, as a juror put it afterward, “just in case.” For this Mr. Aref has been incarcerated into maximum security federal prisons for 15 years and his family has suffered terribly.
This is why any patriotic American citizen with a lick of sense deeply distrusts and despises the FBI. It is easy to see why the congregation of the Masjid as Salam would be sure to publicly denounce the Orlando shootings as soon as possible and to immediately express solidarity with the gay community. Today the FBI entraps Muslims and encourages hatred of Muslims with their characteristic perjury, tomorrow they may drag the rest of us from our homes and murder us for deviance from the Corporate political agenda which aims to gut the US Constitution and obliterate the Bill of Rights. Okay, rant over.
Albany Common Council Members Richard Conti And Judd Krasher Address The Vigil For The Orlando Shootings At The State Capitol
The next day late in the afternoon I checked out the vigil at the west lawn of the State Capitol, this was sponsored by the Pride Center of the Capital Region and In Our Voices. I would guess about 2000 people attended, standing very solemnly in a great semicircle, I would also hazard a guess that the crowd was about half and half gay and straight. Supposedly this was to be a candlelight vigil but that was not going to happen under the blazing sun of early evening at high summer.
Vigil For The Orlando Shooting At The State Capitol
But this vigil did turn out to be a public expression of concern and grief as well as a statement of solidarity. Short speeches by local and State gay politicians and gay community leaders were not particularly memorable, after all what can one say about such a thing. More important was that people were present and standing together, defying the official false narrative.
I’m told that when Mr. Krasher contacted Dr. Ahmad on Sunday about holding a press conference in front of Masjid as Salam, the president of the mosque was still unaware of the Orlando shootings, apparently he was not following news events because of Ramadan. Daytimes during the holy month are to be devoted to prayer, but this of course constituted an emergency that needed a quick response. I did not see a single identifiable Muslim at the late afternoon Monday vigil at the Capitol, but this was undoubtedly because of Ramadan and not at all because of any rift.
G4S Security Guards
What is certain is that during the time the Orlando shooter was struggling with his homosexuality he worked for the multinational corporate militia called G4S as an armed security guard. For the last two years of his nine years at G4S Mateen was assigned as a prison guard at a privatized prison, a job for which he was completely unqualified. According to his ex-wife, during his time at the privatized prison he became physically abusive and generally unhinged.
Like most people locally I knew little or nothing about G4S, so I was surprised to learn that it is an enormous multinational based in England, is the largest security corporation in the world, and is the world’s third largest private employer. It is the largest private employer in both Europe and Africa. Among the many problems it has had in recent years are transporting and using illegal immigrants as prison labor, manipulating telephone data collected by police that they had no business handling in the first place, and failing massively to fulfill the security contract for the 2012 Olympic Games in London.
The Sig Sauer MCX
The gun that the shooter mainly used was a Sig Sauer MCX (and not the popular AR-15) which reportedly he purchased a few days before the mass murder at a Florida gun shop. I’ve heard plenty of gun apologists claim the MCX the shooter used was not an automatic weapon, but surviving witnesses at the Orlando nightclub described automatic fire. I learned a long time ago that it’s an open secret among assault rifle owners that most semi-automatic weapons can be converted to automatic quickly and easily.
I spoke to a gentleman named Max who once served in the army of Switzerland where he was issued a “Sig” as he called it and received intensive training with the weapon, which apparently is relatively harder to handle than other assault rifles but also more deadly. It seems the Orlando shooter also received intensive training with the Sig from G4S. So as a licensed professional with plenty of training, Omar Mateen was very much the model of a responsible gun owner.
Sitting with a cup of coffee in my kitchen, Max told me a story about the training he received with the Sig, he had to burst into a room and hit several randomly placed targets with a minimum of ammunition. “After you do that about 30 times,” he said, “you get pretty good at it.” He also told me that the gun is very deadly, it’s designed to shoot armor piercing bullets that can shoot clear through an engine block. “Oh it will kill you.” he added. “It will put a big hole through you.”
Congressional Representatives John Lewis Of Georgia And Paul Tonko Of Albany At A Press Conference On June 22
Meanwhile in Washington DC the Congressional Democrats, including our own representative Paul Tonko, sat down in front of the podium at the House of Representatives and chanted at House speaker Paul Ryan, a monumental brat, and demanded gun control. Well, not exactly. The rubbery-spined Democrats, who up until now have not had enough sense to openly defy the obstructionist anti-American Re-pubs, are merely demanding that war weapons be denied to known terrorists. This is pretty safe, despite opposition from both the Corporate Media and the National Rifle Association (NRA) more than 90% of Americans are in favor of this.
Except that there is a big problem here with who decides who is a terrorist. The terrorist watch list and the no-fly list are determined by a secretive bureaucracy that not only has no public standards for inclusion on the list but has no procedure for removal of citizens who have been placed on the list by mistake or have been exonerated. Tying this wimpy gun control measure to the secret police sets exactly the wrong precedent, it gives the secret bureaucrats judicial power that should be adamantly denied to them. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) agrees strongly with this opinion.
There are two workable solutions here. One is that the watch lists should be removed from the filthy hands of the secret police and become subject to vigorous public oversight by the legitimate judiciary, the public court system. When that is done tying gun control to watch lists would become Constitutional. But the much easier short-term solution would be to simply reinstate the national assault weapon ban that was allowed to expire in 2007, at least put it back in place until we have a rational comprehensive overhaul of gun policies in this country.
Ossuaries Of The Slaves At Schuyler Mansion
Naturally I’m not holding my breath waiting for rationality, but I’m always surprised and delighted when any sort of minuscule progress is made toward accountability and common sense. Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of gut-level despair from perfectly healthy people, which is terribly alarming. My advice is to stop dwelling on fear for the future and go do something, honor your despised ancestors, stand up to a pogrom, attend public vigils, and above all kick these elected officials repeatedly in their butts until they learn to serve The People instead of serving billionaires and corporations.
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