N.Y. college students plead not guilty to fabricating racially motivated attack

Three New York college students pleaded not guilty Wednesday to claiming to be targets of a racially motivated attack when, prosecutors say, they actually had assaulted another bus passenger.

Ariel Agudio, Asha Burwell and Alexis Briggs, all 20, entered the pleas at an arraignment in Albany County Court on charges of third-degree assault and multiple counts of falsely reporting an incident...

A grand jury on Monday indicted the three women on the assault and false report charges. Agudio and Burwell also pleaded not guilty to charges of harassment, while Agudio pleaded not guilty to three additional counts of attempted assault.

The State University of New York at Albany rallied behind the students, who are black, when they came forward with claims that a group of white men and women attacked them on January 30 in a confrontation on a city bus. Students held a rally and university President Robert J. Jones said in a letter to students and faculty that he was "deeply concerned, saddened and angry about this incident." Others came to their defense on social media using the hashtag #DefendBlackGirlsUAlbany.

The People of Color Caucus issued a letter in support of them. But university police said an investigation revealed that no one used racial epithets against the women. Instead, they assaulted another passenger and falsely reported the incident, authorities said. "What happened on the bus was not a 'hate crime,'" University Police Chief Frank Wiley said in February. "The only person we heard uttering racial epithets was one of the defendants."

A tentative trial date was scheduled for September, the district attorney's office said. The three women pleaded not guilty in February to charges of assault and harassment. Two of them also pleaded not guilty to charges of falsely reporting the incident.

Black Power: A Done Deal

By Fred Reed

It is curious that blacks, the least educated thirteen percent of the population, the least productive, most criminal, and most dependent on governmental charity, should dominate national politics. Yet they do. Virtually everything revolves around what blacks want, demand, do, or can’t do. Their power seems without limit.

Courses of instruction in the schools, academic rigor, codes of dress, rules regarding unceasing obscenity, all must be set to suit them, as must be examinations for promotion in fire departments, the military, and police forces. Blacks must be admitted to universities for which they are not remotely qualified , where departments of Black Studies must be established to please them. Corporate work forces, federal departments, and elite high-schools must be judged not on whether they perform their functions but on whether they have the right number of blacks.

Do laws requiring identification to vote threaten to end multiple or illegal voting? The laws must go. Do blacks not like Confederate flags? Adieu, flags. Does Huckleberry Finn go down the Mississippi with the Jim, or did Conrad write The Jim of the Narcissus? These must be banned or expurgated to please blacks who haven’t read them or, usually, heard of them. Do we want to prevent people coming from regions infested with Ebola from entering the United States ? We cannot. It would offend blacks.

We must never, ever say or do anything that might upset them - as virtually everything does. It is positively astonishing. One expects the rich and smart to have disproportionate power. But America is dominated from the slums . One might think that a single set of laws should and would apply to all citizens, and that things should be done without regard to race, creed, color, sex, or national origin, and that all should have the same rights and responsibilities. It is, sadly, not so. The dominance of the media by blacks is impressive.

If a white shoots a black to defend himself, it becomes national news for weeks, or months, and riots follow. But when blacks engage in their unending racial attacks on whites, the media demurely look the other way. The attackers are never black. They are “teens.” Reporters who say otherwise are likely to be fired. In effect, the thirteen percent censor the national press.

Much of their mastery has become so deeply engrained as no longer to be noticed. There is the DC Hesitation . In the bars and restaurants of Washington , a man weary of an incompetent affirmative-action hire in his office will, before commenting to a friend, lean forward, lower his voice, and look furtively over both shoulders to see whether anyone might overhear: The DC Hesitation. People don’t even know that they are doing this.

Defensive behavior by whites has become nearly universal. A sort of Masonic recognition-ritual occurs among white people recently introduced in social gatherings. Is the other person, for want of better terms, a liberal or a realist? Dare one speak? One of them will say something mildly skeptical about, say, Jesse Jackson. The other rolls his eyes in shared disgust. The secret handshake. Or, if the listener is politically correct, the bait is not taken. In either case, blacks dominate political conversation.

So extreme is the power to control speech and even thought, that politicians have to avoid mentioning watermelons, or that neighborhoods of high crime must delicately be called “sketchy” instead of “black,” though all understand who lives there and what is meant. The avoidance of racial reference is not an even-handed if despotic attempt to oppose racism since, as we all know, blacks freely apply any derogatory wording they choose to whites. In short, they rule. Which is amazing.

The dominance extends to children. When in junior high one of my daughters brought home a science handout with common chemical terms badly misspelled in a way which suggested a particular speech pattern. “Is your teacher black?” I said without thinking. “Daaaaaaady!” she said in anguish, having made the connection but knowing that she shouldn’t have. Blacks control what you can say to your own children in your own home. And of course if I had gone to the school and demanded that the teacher be fired, it would have been evidence of my depravity and probable KKK membership.

The word “unbelievable” has lost all force. Things that ought to be unbelievable, and once were, have become routine. Still, there it was: Don’t expect a junior-high teacher to have the level of literacy I had in the fourth grade. Instead, make it dangerous to notice their stupidity. This is not new, and it hasn’t changed.

In 1981, in a piece for Harper’s, I wrote: “The bald, statistically verifiable truth is that the teachers’ colleges, probably on ideological grounds, have produced an incredible proportion of incompetent black teachers. Evidence of this appears periodically, as, for example, in the results of a competency test given to applicants for teaching positions in Pinellas County , Florida , cited in Time, June 16, 1980. To pass this grueling examination, an applicant had to be able to read at the tenth-grade level and do arithmetic at the eighth-grade level. Though they all held B.A.’s, 25 percent of the whites and 79 percent of the blacks failed. Similar statistics exist for other places.”

Nothing has changed. Blacks now control the presidency and thus, most importantly, the Attorney Generalship. In this the staggering political power of blacks is most evident. Obama was elected because he was black: an equally unqualified and negligible white politician would have had no chance. He is now fiercely pushing the most profound transformation of America ever attempted, by opening the floodgates to immigration from the south. To effect this end he apparently will simply ignore Congress and the Constitution. The people will not be consulted. Laws will be ignored.

It is hard to imagine why he does it except from racism, from a desire to get even with whites by enrolling their country in the Third World . A short-sighted policy, yes, since Hispanics do not like blacks and will soon be more powerful-but that will come a bit later.

Note that self-inflicted problems of blacks consume inordinate amounts of public and governmental attention, even though only blacks can solve them. I might say, “should solve them,” since they never have and we all know they seem to have no desire to do so. Yet we hear about them endlessly.

Are blacks in Chicago killing each other in large numbers? The solution might be to stop doing it, might it not? While I do not wish these young dead, I can do nothing to stop them, and it is not a problem I can solve.

Are black children growing up illiterate? This gives me no pleasure, and I have various reasons both selfish and moral to wish it were not so. But perhaps the solution is for their parents, or parent, to see that they do their homework, or even to teach them. I cannot do this for them, and again it isn’t my problem to resolve.

Why do I have to hear, endlessly, about the “achievement gap?” Whether of genetic or cultural origin, it seems as immutable as Avogadro’s number, and I can do nothing about it. I raise my children. They need to raise theirs. They rule. It is astonishing.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iowa-hatecrime-idUSKCN0XV0OJ

The University of Iowa and police said on Wednesday they are investigating as a hate crime a report that a black student was beaten by a group of white men in a racially motivated attack.

Marcus Owens, a 19-year-old freshman from Naperville, Illinois, was beaten after he left a bar on Saturday night by three white men who yelled racial abuse at him, according to an ABC television affiliate in Chicago.

The attack left Owens with a damaged eye socket. He also had his front teeth knocked out and needed about a dozen stitches to close a cut on his lip, ABC-7 in Chicago said.

An individual came to the Iowa City police department late Monday to report that he had been assaulted, police said in a statement. Police declined to identify the victim and suspects, saying they do not release the identities of victims and citing pending charges against the suspects.

The victim told the police that on late Saturday, an individual struck him multiple times in an alleyway and then he was struck several more times by other people while being called racial slurs, the statement said.

The victim later was treated for non-life threatening injuries at a university hospital, the statement said. Owens was released from the hospital on Monday, the station reported.

The suspects were described as three white males, about 19 to 22 years old, and of average height, the statement said.

The university was “deeply disturbed” and was seeking more details of the attack, officials said in Twitter posts after being contacted by the broadcaster.

Owens had just left an off-campus bar when three men approached and began punching him, his uncle Darrell Owens told the news station.

“This is 2016. You shouldn’t expect this to happen,” he said.

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