What is Nelson Mandela's legacy?

Too many people assume it's fun to be a contrarian.

I recommend they try wading through this week's inescapable sincere and heartfelt celebrations of the life of Nelson Mandela with a little voice in the back of their minds whispering that they've got it all wrong.

It's not the least bit fun.

When I was a kid our church had a viewing of the movie Sarafina! about South African activists who struggled against the Apartheid government using non-violent protests. This shaped my view on the struggle against Apartheid. I never learned many details about Mandela's life and I always just assumed he was a political prisoner who spent 27 years in prison for nonviolent activism against the clearly evil and racist government before an international campaign convinced them to free him.

I was wrong.

A dozen years ago I did a project for a college class about how South Africa was still plagued with violence, rape and poverty even after Mandela became president. I didn't understand economics at the time but I hit upon the idea that while Mandela was a great resistance leader in an important struggle, he didn't have the right skills to manage a country.

Fast forward to yesterday when after his death this picture surfaced online:

Oh boy.

I'm willing to cut Mandela some slack here. Although he dishonestly denied being a communist, Mandela was something of a Stalinst. However, he adopted these views decades before the fall of the Berlin Wall and wasn't presented with the same evidence we have today. He downgraded slightly over time and became a democratic socialist, and political interference prevented him from putting most of these views into practice when he was president.

He also allied himself with the USSR, China, Fidel Casto and even Muammar Gaddafi.
Yes, he was wrong, and he really should have known better, but having these terrible ideas can be overlooked when it's the man who ended Apartheid.

But that brings up a much more disturbing issue. Mandela's fight against the Apartheid government included terrorism. That's why he went to prison. Mandela tried non-violence and found it ineffective and was one of the founders of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the fighting force for African National Congress, which is the socialist political party that now dominates South Africa. Besides receiving combat training from communists, Umkhonto we Sizwe (which is abbreviated as MK) committed numerous acts of terrorism.

If MK restricted its activities to violence and bomb blasts at government soldiers and buildings I could understand comparing Mandela to America's Founding Fathers in the revolutionary war. However, they also bombed civilians and Mandela may have been part of the planning process, and it seems he continued to do so during his prison sentence.

While some MK operatives went rogue and bombed places without any guidance, such as Andrew Zondo when he bombed a shopping center because it was filled with white people, the group also planted antitank land mines on rural roads, killing at least a score of black laborers.

Did I mention Amnesty International refused to take his case because of his embrace of violence?

Details are murky on what MK actions were planned by Mandela and how many of them he gave his blessing from prison. This is all new to me and many of the sources linking Mandela to terrorist acts from MK are unknown to me and should be treated skeptically. One even has John Birch Society ads next to it. Because of this source quality, I don't feel comfortable labeling him a terrorist.

I asked some friends who studied international politics about this and I was told "I thought everyone knew Manedela was a terrorist." His story, they said, is one of redemption.

Contrast that to the left-wing search results that come up about Mandela and terrorism. There are numerous links out today trying to shame right wingers like Dick Cheney and Ronald Reagan for calling Mandela a terrorist in the past. None of them even mention MK or attempt to discuss the issue. They just want the reader to think it's a wild allegation.

Joan Walsh of Salon declared that Mandela renounced his violent past, but I've been unable to find any quotations where he did so.

This revelation of Mandela using violence to fight Apartheid undermines a lot of the inspirational quotes from Mandela people are passing around, such as "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." Clearly he didn't believe that when he was forming MK.

The Apartheid government was evil, and Mandela made a major contribution to the world in his pivotal role in dismantling it. However, the superficial and outright fanciful stories about his life floating around today are glossing over a lot of important information. It's an extremely lonely feeling to witness everyone else compare a man to Gandhi when you know he had grenades stuffed in his pockets.

Addendum: I'm surprised and impressed to see the most fair, positive, mature, warts-and-all obituary come from Breitbart. Some of the facts I came across are different than in here, such as its distancing him from terrorist planning, and I still endorse it. Please read.
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Calm down about a magazine neither of us read

In the past I've criticized Rolling Stone magazine's far-left journalism. I won't be doing that today. Instead, honor forces me to defend a publication I dislike.

It seems that absolutely everyone is freaking out that the next cover will show a flattering image of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bombing "suspect" who looks an awful lot like Jon Snow.

The popular narrative is that this glamorizes Tsarnaev and makes him look like a celebrity. A popular comparison is to one of the issue's featuring Jim Morrison:

As you can see, both men have faces, hair, and the Rolling Stone logo. Case closed.

This whole freak-out is ridiculous. The article in question is about the Tsarnaev's corruption and downfall, from a popular, kind young man into a murderous terrorist. The article is summed up on the cover as "How a popular, promising student was failed by his family, fell into radical Islam and became a monster."

I know people like to think of society's enemies as ugly cartoon villains, but like it or not Tsarnaev has an attractive face. This only adds to the contrast between the person he was and the person he became when he surrendered his morality to radical Islam.

The sad truth is, people who commit acts of evil often think what they are doing is not only morally permissible, but morally required. People could benefit from a well-written article explaining how a normal kid became a violent brute.

Compare that to the on-air conversation between NPR host Robin Young and her nephew Zolan, a former friend of Tsarnaev, who can't seem to fathom how someone who went to a diverse high school could become a monster. They go out of their way to remind listeners several times that the student body was extremely diverse at that school. My interpretation is that they think a non-diverse school can't teach student to respect other people and will be plagued by anti-immigrant bullies who drive their victims to murder, as if only victims of oppression become terrorists. Otherwise, what was the point of bringing up the high school diversity level multiple times?

No one batted an eye over that, but when an entertainment magazine that branches out into news puts his photo on the cover, suddenly it's an outrage. It doesn't seem to matter that the photo corresponds to a news story.

The picture doesn't look much different from the other pre-arrest photos of Tsarnaev that have been printed on magazine and newspaper covers since the attack happened in March. In fact, this same picture was used on the cover of the New York Times on May 5. Would people still object if the words "Rolling Stone" were replaced with "TIME"?

Now if Rolling Stone had set up a modeling shoot with Tsarnaev and given him a makeover, that would be something to scream about. Short of that, when you write about a handsome terrorist why should you dredge the archives to find a photo that looks ugly
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Immigration politics of the Boston Marathon Bombing

We thought it was a hoax.

I was in the newsroom a little after 3 p.m. on April 15 when Jack, a fellow reporter, said he just read on Twitter that there were two blasts at the Boston Marathon. We had shut the TV off after the early runners crossed the finish line and Jack switched it back on to disprove the rumor. You know how that went.

We spent the next few hours getting details to put on our website and Twitter. Our city editor said that The New York Post was reporting 12 people had died, but then added "but it's The New York Post" and we did not put those numbers online. We had a sports reporter who was at the event but had left before the explosions.

About an hour after the blast, when we were still calling them "explosions" and not "bombs," our editor asked for a reporter and a photographer to drive 50 miles to Boston to check it out. Jack was all over it and spent the rest of the day trying to get something, but it was all chaos. No one really knew what was going on and we had trouble getting any substance.

I finished writing the small potatoes stories I had reported on earlier in the day and on my way home I stopped by the commuter train station to talk to people coming from Boston. The local police had stationed a motorcycle officer there to watch people disembark. Most people didn't want to talk but I was able to speak to a father and son who made a day trip to watch the Red Sox. They were held up several hours getting back because the subway was shut down and they had to walk six miles to the train station where they were wanded and frisked.

The next day I got called in early to write about how the bombing would impact events in smaller communities. When a big story like this happens in our backyard we will have primary stories talking about the event supplemented with tons of lesser stories on different angles. We all wrote several of them. By the time Saturday rolled around and one suspect was captured and the other was dead I was talking to local state lawmakers, all of them democrats, about why they support the death penalty in this case.

The political implications of this case is overwhelming. On the night of the bombing a piece was being passed around from the Daily Kos about Carlos Arredondo, one of numerous civilians who helped save people by picking them up and rushing them to medical staff. In his case, he had the foresight to stop blood loss in a victim and tore down several barriers to help other people get to the victims.

Arredondo became a media darling and received more attention than anyone else who helped saved people. I suspect it wasn't just because of heroic actions and the famous photograph he appeared in, but also his status as an illegal immigrant from Costa Rica, war protester and father of a soldier killed in Iraq. People who support immigration amnesty jumped all over this case because it showed the value to our society immigrants can bring.

As the story unfolded we learned Arredondo wasn't the only immigrant that played a major role. Lu Lingzi, a Chinese grad student who studied statistics at Boston University, was one of three people killed by the bombs.

Then it turned out that the bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were Chechnyan immigrants.

So what lesson does this teach us about immigration? I say, nothing. Immigrants are just people. It's a bit embarrassing for people who wanted to trumpet Arredondo's heroism when it turns out the bombs came from immigrants too. It's also awkward for the anti-immigration people who want to stress the evil caused by the Tsarnaev brothers, both legal immigrants, when they are counting an immigrant as one of the victims and an illegal immigrant was clearly a savior.

Immigration needs to be debated on its own merits, and rare but horrible events like the one in Boston last week contribute little more than anecdotes. I've been in favor of open borders for a long time, although I support keeping tabs on who comes in to give us the chance to filter out known criminals. I dislike seeing anti-immigration folks capitalize on this tragedy. But by the same hand, is it any better for us pro-immigration supporters to capitalize on it in the same way? I don't see much of a difference.
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This proves nothing

We're still picking up the pieces from the chaos following manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects last night. Now that we have the identity of the terrorists, the moment I've been dreading is upon us. The villains are Chechen, a predominately Muslim ethnicity. I don't have it confirmed that Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev and his brother are Muslims, but they most likely are.

On Tuesday Ross Douthat put out a great message on Twitter:

Dreading the moment when we find out whose pre-existing political views this atrocity "vindicates."
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) April 15, 2013

I've been hearing wild, baseless speculation that the suspects will turn out to be Muslims, right wing extremists or left wing extremists. Perhaps they were motivated by American foreign policy or Boston's cosmopolitan atmosphere. Maybe they hate civilization and technology.

Well, all of those unfairly firm conclusions were based on groups the guessers hated. Someone was going to win, and whoever it turned out to be was destined to get smug about it.

It turns out, it will be the anti-Islamic people who get to say "I told you so" today when in fact, they didn't know so. They were only guessing.
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Only the White House defends drone strikes

I've seen a barrage of criticism dropped on President Obama this year about his lax rules on who to assassinate with a drone strikes, including NPR, the ACLU, The Daily Show, my liberal friends and now even Buzzfeed.

I think the Buzzfeed article is what brought it to critical mass. It's not fair to say that liberals are giving the O-man a pass on this issue because all one hears today is criticism of this plan from liberals. The only defense I have heard comes from within the White House.

So yes, if George W. Bush was still in office the left would be going crazy over this issue, but it's not like the Obama drones are endorsing Obama's drones. Maybe they'd be organizing more protests and recording stupid folk songs about it if there was a Republican behind it, but they aren't ignoring it either. I love pointing out liberal hypocrisy but it's not coming from the rank and file.

The only hypocrisy comes from the president himself. The sweetest part of this whole ordeal is that the even President Obama doesn't think this policy is a good idea, judging by the post-election New York Times story that started:

Facing the possibility that President Obama might not win a second term, his administration accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according to two administration officials.

I do need to separate myself from some of the other critics here. I don't oppose the United States using assassinations in the war on terror, and it doesn't make a difference to me if they targets are American citizen or not. By all means, Anwar al-Aulaqi needed killing. My issue is the method the O-man uses to approve the assassination and the lack of oversight or even judicial review that could influence further drone assassinations.

The president wants us to trust him, and by extension, everyone that takes office after him. That's a horrible way to run a country.
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The Libya attacks were not a game changer

I have to disagree with something Hillary Clinton said in response to the violent attacks on the U.S. embassies in Libya and Egypt this week that killed an ambassador, among others.

It wasn't this statement:

Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.

Some conservatives, including presidential candidate Mitt Romney, are falsely trying to paint President Barack Obama's administration as apologizing for the Internet video an obscure American citizen posted that inspired the attacks. Breitbart.com chopped off the final sentence, which completely changed the statement. That's bogus and I agree with the general idea of what she really said.

No, her statement I disagree with is that these events "Should shock the conscience of people of all faiths around the world.”

Who is shocked here?

I'm going to pull a CJ Cregg here and say the obvious: If some minor private citizens publicly does something insulting to Islam, we must expect crazed mobs to murder people. It's a simple cause-and-effect routine we all know very well.

As always, I have to clarify that it's the Islamic extremists who are behind all the killings, not the majority of peaceful Muslims, otherwise I will be assumed to condemn the entire religion and we all know how dangerous that is. However, it's still true that the bad ones are worse than the bad ones of any other religion.

I've been hearing for months on the BBC about the war crimes and human rights violations caused by rebel groups empowered by the Arab Spring uprising. Now some of those same protesters still wearing Guy Fawkes masks have turned their attention on U.S. embassies.

So no, I'm not shocked people were murdered because of some lame Internet video no one here ever heard of. Anyone surprised by this just wasn't paying attention.
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We lost a brave man this week

Pakistani Minority Affairs Minister Shahbaz Bhatti, a vocal opponent of a national blasphemy law that punishes insulting Islam with death, recorded a video in December to be released in the event of his assassination.

The BBC released that video yesterday.



This is not the same blasphemy law that the United Nations attempted to pass, it is a national law.

I live in a country where freedom of speech is still respected on the whole, for example this week the Supreme Court ruled that the obnoxious protests by the Westboro Baptist Church are protected by the First Amendment. It's important to remember that not everyone has that right, and to honor the people who die fighting for it.
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Terrorists make lousy bloggers

A 20-year-old college student was nabbed for plotting to blow up George W. Bush's home this week, along with a few other targets including nuclear power plants.

To save you the trouble of checking to see if he's a Muslim, yes. The suspect is from Saudi Arabia and is named Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari. A college student wanting to harm former president Bush had good odds of being a white unshaven vegan anarchist with a trust fund, but this case followed the cliche profile* instead.

This story reads like a deleted scene from Four Lions. Aldawsari got caught trying to buy concentrated carbolic acid from a chemical supplier, a substance with no household applications. He also wrote himself emails with titles like “NICE TARGETS 01” that contained lists of hydroelectric dams.

If that wasn't obvious enough for the authorities, Aldawsari kept a blog whose target audience was the FBI:

In a blog kept by the suspect, one post described how he obtained his scholarship with the hope that it “will help tremendously in providing me with the support I need for Jihad”. The post continued: “And now, after mastering the English language, learning how to build explosives and continuous planning to target the infidel Americans, it is time for Jihad.”

We bloggers are a diverse community that write about a wide variety of topics from many different views. There is a very delicate balancing act in deciding what aspects of your life to make public and it can be very tricky. But personally, I draw the line at intended criminal acts - horrific acts that people take very seriously and are quick to report.

How could he have made it easier to catch him? Make his handle "Terrorist Bomber 420" or tag his posts "Things I Plan to Blow Up" and "72 Virgins Here I Come"? Even brain-dead goombahs learned to say "I want him whacked" instead of "I would like you to go out and commit homicide - 'murder,' if you will."

Perhaps the FBI should consider a new task force in the wake of this near-tragedy - one that Googles the phrase "I am a terrorist" to see what comes up.

*Fun fact: Saying most terrorists are Muslims is not even close to saying most Muslims are terrorists.
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