Obama Administration Used A Second "Former Internment Camp" For Migrant Children In 2014

    The Trump administration's decision to use the Fort Sill military base in Oklahoma as an emergency shelter for migrant children triggered a flood of stories drawing attention to Fort Sill's history as one of several dozen locations where the US government interned Americans of Japanese descent and others deemed as possible security risks during World War 2. Time Magazine appears to have kicked off the trend with a story posted Tuesday evening entitled "Trump Administration to Hold Migrant Children at Base That Served as WWII Japanese Internment Camp." (The Associated Press had run an earlier story on Fort Sill without a "Japanese internment camp" reference in the article.)
     Notably, however, the Obama administration also used Fort Sill in 2014 to temporarily house migrant children, but research indicates not a single news organization, advocacy group, or politician noted Fort Sill's history as an internment camp at the time. And, as it turns out, Fort Sill was not the only former internment camp location utilized by the Obama administration.

    In addition to Fort Sill, the Obama administration used Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, to house migrant children apprehended at the southern border. An official Air Force website reported on June 11, 2014, that the base had been told to "establish an emergency shelter to house up to nearly 1,200 unaccompanied migrant children." 

    According to the National Park Service website, in 1942 "[s]ome Japanese Hawaiians and about 40 Issei from Fort Missoula were held at Fort Sam Houston along with 300 Alaskan Eskimos." The Kooskia Internment Camp Project at the University of Idaho reports as many as "1,000; Japanese, German, Italian, and other aliens" were held at Fort Sam Houston. Further, a State of Texas website says: "The internment camp at Fort Sam Houston (San Antonio) opened in late February 1942. The confinement site’s first internees were Japanese, German, and Italian enemy aliens living in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi."

    Oklahoma Republicans in 2014 opposed the use of Fort Sill to house the migrant children, arguing that the use distracted from the military mission of the base. No 2014 contemporaneous news articles or statements by politicians either for or against the actions of the Obama administration mention either Fort Sill's or Fort Sam Houston's former status as World War 2 internment camps.

Planned Parenthood on Answering Children About Babies: "Answer Honestly... 'A Baby Grows In A Mother’s Belly'"

    Planned Parenthood is the country's de facto mouthpiece and leading advocate for unrestricted access to abortion from conception to just before birth. So it is rather jarring that the recommended answer for parents who wish "to answer honestly" their child's question "Where do babies come from?" is "A baby grows in a mother’s belly..." [Note: Katie Yoder first reported on this in December 2018 at National Review online which I discovered after running across this material on Planned Parenthood's website.]
    While Planned Parenthood is best known as an abortion provider, the organization itself tends to downplay that aspect of its services as a relatively small 3.4%. In addition to its other health services, Planned Parenthood also styles itself as an authoritative source for education about sex and pregnancy. The very first menu on the organization's website banner is "Learn" with submenus on various aspects of "sexual and reproductive health."
    In addition to abortion, cancer, birth control, and other health topics, the website devotes an entire section to helping parents educate their children about "sex, puberty & relationships." While Planned Parenthood makes what it considers age-appropriate distinctions in the level of detail shared with children, honesty and openness is stressed ("open and factual discussions") from the youngest ages up through older teens. The materials shuns euphemisms and discourages calling body parts anything other than their accurate anatomical names.
    When it comes to pregnancy, however, Planned Parenthood reverts back to a more traditional description that conflicts with the usual public characterization of an unborn child as just "part of a woman's body." In the section for ages 5-8 entitled "How do I talk with my elementary school aged child about pregnancy and reproduction?", there is no suggestion that what is inside the mother is anything other than a baby. Emphasis has been added to the excerpts here:

If a 5 year old asks, “Where do babies come from?” you can say, “A baby grows in a mother’s belly and comes out of her vagina.” That may be all it takes to satisfy their curiosity. 

If they ask, “How does the baby get in the mother’s belly?” you can answer while still being age-appropriate — you don’t necessarily need to describe all the details of penis-in-vagina sex. For example, you can say “Most women have tiny eggs in a special part of their belly. Most men have very tiny seeds, called sperm. Sometimes, when two grownups have sex together, one grownup’s penis goes into the other’s vagina. They can make a baby if a seed and egg meet. Do you have any other questions about that?” 

As children get older, you can fold in more detail: “Sometimes during sex between 2 grownups, sperm comes out of the penis, swims up through the vagina and into the uterus, looking for an egg. If the sperm and egg meet up, it can start to grow into a baby. The baby grows in the uterus for 9 months, and then comes out through the vagina or a small cut in the stomach.”
...
As always, simple is key: you can say things like, “There are medicines people can take if they don’t want to have a baby right now,” or “There are things people can use that stop sperm from getting to an egg, so a baby can’t happen.” As they get older, you can be more specific about how birth control works to avoid pregnancy (and sometimes STDs) from sex.

    By the time children reach age 9-13, advice to parents moves away dramatically from talk of "babies" and more towards discussions of sex, STD's, and pregnancy "options." And while Planned Parenthood now suggests telling pre-teens, "This is also a good opportunity to provide basic factual information — like that legal abortion is very safe and common," there is no mention of the fate of the "baby... in a mother's belly" and how parents should navigate through what is sure to be a difficult and thorny question from their child, "But what about the baby in the mom's belly?"

Linda Sarsour at 2015 Farrakhan's 'Justice Or Else' Rally: "I'm Tired of People Asking What The 'Else' Is"

    In 2015, Linda Sarsour, self-described civil-rights activist and "every Islamophobe’s worst nightmare" spoke at Louis Farrakhan's "Justice or Else" rally in Washington DC on the 20th anniversary of Farrakhan's Million Man March.
    Referencing the title of the rally, Sarsour said, "I'm tired of people asking us what the 'else' is. You would not have to ask that question if we already had justice." The video of Sarsour's speech is available on C-Span [1:42:18].

    Sarsour, a founder of the Women's March, was introduced by Tamika Mallory, also a founder of the Women's March and the emcee of the Justice or Else event, and was preceded by Rep. Danny Davis, a Farrakhan supporter who continues to serve in Congress, and Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's longtime pastor with whom Obama publicly split during Obama's 2008 run for president.
























   During her speech, Sarsour said:

We are one, sisters and brothers, and our liberation is bound up together. The same people who justify the massacre of Palestinian people and called it collateral damage are the same people who justify the murder of black young men and women. The same people who want to deport millions of undocumented immigrants are the same people who hate Muslims and want to take our right to worship freely in this country. That common enemy, sisters and brothers, is white supremacy. Let's call it what it is. We're not here to make people feel comfortable. I'm tired of people asking us what the 'else' is. You would not have to ask that question if we already had justice. We are angry, sisters and brothers. [emphasis added]

    Farrakhan himself has never been explicit about the 'else' either, but in an interview leading up to the rally, he gave some hints:

 A prescription for us is, those who kill us and seem to get away with it, we cannot allow it to continue. We must rise up and kill those who kill us outside of the law of justice and when they feel death like we feel death, when they feel pain at the burying of their dead like we feel it, then maybe we can sit down to a table and act like civilized people. [emphasis added]

   Sarsour herself made some remarks more recently regarding violence versus non-violence in the context the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

I am trained in kingian non-violence. I choose non-violence as a powerful means to change. BUT i don’t have to choose or justify violence to understand where it comes from when oppressed people see no way out. We have to be critical thinkers, advocate & present solutions.

    Sarsour continued:

Until we see both the Palestinian and Israeli people as equals than we will continue to see this cycle of violence. Don’t act surprised. Demand justice for Palestinians & let’s begin discussing peace. There’ll be no peace without justice.

New York Times: Jesus Was 'Most Likely a Palestinian Man'

    Based on a recent correction, the New York Times took a week to conclude that Jesus was Jewish.
    An April 19th article entitled "As a Black Child in Los Angeles, I Couldn’t Understand Why Jesus Had Blue Eyes" addressed the frequently-voiced observation that many artists' renderings of Jesus portray him as a "fair skinned, fair haired, blue eyed" man, a likely inaccurate Westernized version of Jesus, a middle eastern man.
    However, the article also asserted (because of an "editing error," according to the Times) that "Jesus, born in Bethlehem, was most likely a Palestinian man with dark skin." A screenshot of the article as it originally appeared (April 19th online, April 20th in print on page A2) is shown here:

    On April 27th, the article was updated to say, "But Jesus, a Jew born in Bethlehem, presumably had the complexion of a Middle Eastern man," as shown here:

    The full correction reads, "Because of an editing error, an article last Saturday referred incorrectly to Jesus’s background. While he lived in an area that later came to be known as Palestine, Jesus was a Jew who was born in Bethlehem."

In Six Weeks, Media Matters for America Tweets About Fox News 167 Times

    Media Matters for America describes itself as "a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." But a review of MMFA's tweets finds that a single network receives the lion's share of MMFA"s attention.
    In an article picked up widely across the media, MMFA reported under the headline "Six weeks of Fox's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez obsession": "In the six weeks from February 25 and April 7, her name was mentioned 3,181 times on Fox News and Fox Business[.]"
    Now a review of the Twitter account of Media Matters for America by The Script finds that during the same time period (2/25-4/7/19) Fox was reviewed by MMFA for Ocasio-Cortez references, MMFA tweeted about Fox 167 times. In contrast, other news networks were mentioned by MMFA as follows: CNN, 13; NBC, 4; ABC, MSNBC, and CBS, 2 times each.
    As of 1:45 PM on Sunday, April 14, there were 39 references to Fox on the website homepage of Media Matters. Other news networks mentioned on the page: NBC, 3; CBS, MSNBC and CNN, 1; ABC, 0.
    While MMFA's description of its mission is "comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting... U.S. media," it does limit itself to weeding out "conservative misinformation."

Rep. Ilhan Omar: 'Raise Hell, Make People Uncomfortable', 'Tired' of US Muslims 'Being a Second-Class Citizen'

   Rep. Ilhan Omar's recent comments regarding 9/11 at a Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) banquet have caused an uproar amongst her detractors, and their response has caused a similar uproar amongst her supporters. Omar's comments have mostly been heard in short excerpts, but her complete remarks are available here on YouTube. Below is a transcription of the remarks surrounding her mention of 9/11 and the video queued up to the excerpt is embedded below as well.

"It doesn't matter how good you are if you one day find yourself in a school where other religions are talked about but when Islam is mentioned we are only talking about terrorists and if you say something you are sent to the principal's office. So to me I say, raise hell, make people uncomfortable because here's the truth, here's the truth: far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and frankly I'm tired of it and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it. CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties. So you can't just say that today someone is looking at me strange, that I am going to try to make myself look pleasant.  You have to say this person is looking at me strange I am not comfortable with it I am going to go talk to them and ask them why, because that is a right you have."

   Rep. Omar has a history of making remarks regarding the US that rub her detractors the wrong way. In 2017, Omar wrote that "our nation was founded by genocide and we maintain global power through neocolonialism," as The Script reported earlier on Thursday.

Rep. Ilhan Omar, 2017: 'Our Nation Was Founded By Genocide'

    In the wake of the display of white nationalism and the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, WV in August 2017, then-Minnesota state representative Ilhan Omar wrote an op-ed for Time Magazine entitled "Unity Will Take Generations."
   Rep. Omar wrote that "American hate is not new — and it is not scarce," and that "our nation was founded by the genocide of indigenous people and on the backs of slaves, [and] that we maintain global power with the tenor of neocolonialism."
   She promoted her article on Twitter as shown here:

   Omar argued in the op-ed that there has been a "regression in our democracy [and] we are fighting for the lost promises of liberty, justice and pursuit of happiness." She suggested education and interaction "with those we fear and hate" can help "bridge the divide."
   Addressing the white nationalism and violence of Charlottesville, Omar wrote that "we have not focused on laws to protect us from domestic terrorism. We are at a bigger risk of destroying ourselves than falling at the hands of external extremists." (Rep. Omar has recently come under criticism for an offhand reference to 9/11 as "something" that "some people did.")
   Rep. Omar concluded her op-ed asserting that there is still hope to restore America:

It is possible, but it will take a long time — we are trying to undo centuries of institutional and personal hatred and exclusion. This is a generational project; do not underestimate the power of human connection.

    Rep. Omar's office did not respond to emailed questions from The Script regarding her comment that this country was "founded by genocide" and whether or not her statement that the United States "maintain[s] global power with the tenor of neocolonialism" applied during the Barack Obama administration as well.