“You should not rent to Mexicans or Hispanics since this would lower our property values!”, “Hispanic people are liars!”
These are some of the wordings Marylin and Kazuo Tsuchiya told their neighbors who was trying to rent his house to prospective tenants.
Audio Recordings from the Court Hearing
Here are the recordings from the court hearing where they admitted they made racist remarks: Download the file
Marilyn’s email pushing her neighbor not to rent to “Mexicans”
In early February of 2019 when Marylin and Kazuo Tsuchiya noticed that new tenants of Hispanic or Mexican background are moving to their neighborhood they could not stand it and decided to use any type of tactics and intimidation to push their neighbor not to rent to them. The fact was that out of three tenants none were Mexican or Hispanic race, they were White American, Japanese, and Hawaiian native! However Marylin & Kazuo Tsuchiya thought they were Hispanics just because one of them had a small trailer behind his truck! For that reason they decided that none of them should be their neighbors.
They told their neighbors that the prospective tenants have a landscaping business and everyday the area is going to be crowed with Mexicans coming from Home Depot to work with them! The fact is that the new prospective tenants were all into mortgage and real estate businesses but Marylin & Kazuo Tsuchiya told their neighbor that they were lying that they are into real state business! They told their neighbors that renting to Mexicans or Hispanic people would lower our property values and therefore we should not rent to them! Ironically Marilyn herself has a gardening and landscaping business herself and her husband’s business is gardening tour! After they failed to push their neighbor not to rent to the three respected professionals whom were not even Hispanic decent, they started a series of intimidation and harassment against the new tenants and this led them to appear in court. They also contacted the city telling them that the neighbor does not have a required permit for ADU, shed, and stairs that have been there for 10 years and it has never been an issue for Tsuchiya family! Furthermore, they are against any children to play in the neighborhood and in the past they had harassed the neighbors whose children were playing or riding bikes in the cul-de-sac. Marilyn had told neighbors that they should have a quiet neighborhood and not having kids in the cul-de-sac, at the court the judge rebuked them that if they want to have a quite neighborhood they should move to the woods! They regularly call the police for every little thing from kids playing to people washing their cars.
Marilyn writing to her neighbor that “the Hispanics” are not good neighbors!
Another case of tenant harassment by Marilyn
Name: Marilyn Tsuchiya
After El Paso shooting, Mexican Americans can no longer
Name: Kazuo Tsuchiya
Their Business: Japan Specialized Group Tours
https://japansgtours.com/
LET’S SPEAK OUT AGAINST RACISM AND BIGOTRY!
It suddenly seems that Bernie Sanders—the democratic socialist candidate competing in the Democratic primaries—might actually have a chance of winning a significant number of primaries, thus becoming the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 2020.
As Holly Otterbein and David Siders write in Politico, the man who was written off by party insiders “as a candidate with a committed but narrow base who was too far left to win the primary” is now forcing the party’s leaders to reevaluate that assumption. The authors argue that “in the past few weeks, something has changed.”
Dan Pfeiffer, an Obama adviser, told them that Sanders could win Iowa and New Hampshire and create a groundswell by the time the South Carolina primary takes place (which Joe Biden is now favored to win) as well as Super Tuesday. By then Bernie might be an unstoppable force. NBC news national political correspondent Steve Kornacki told Newsweek that “if he starts winning, there could be a bandwagon effect.”
President Donald Trump on Tuesday blamed Iran for planning an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq and promised to hold Tehran “fully responsible.”
“Iran killed an American contractor, wounding many. We strongly responded, and always will,” the president wrote on Twitter. “Now Iran is orchestrating an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq. They will be held fully responsible.”
“In addition, we expect Iraq to use its forces to protect the Embassy, and so notified!” he added.
The 14th Dalai Lama arrives to deliver the commencement speech to the 2017 graduating class at UC San Diego in San Diego, California, U.S. June 17, 2017. REUTERS/ Mike Blake – RC1479F59EE0
American universities need to show Beijing—again and again—that they reserve the right to unfettered debate.
About five times a year, the U.S. military conducts freedom-of-navigation operations, or FONOPs, in the South China Sea to challenge China’s territorial claims in the area. American Navy vessels traverse through waters claimed by the Chinese government. This is how the U.S. government registers its view that those waters are international territory, and that China’s assertion of sovereignty over them is inconsistent with international law.
Americans are witnessing a similar encroachment on territory equally central to our national interest: our own social and political discourse. Through a combination of market coercion and intimidation, the Chinese Communist Party is trying to constrain how people in the United States and other Western democracies talk about China.
This encroachment needs a measured response—what we might call freedom-of-speech operations, or FOSOPs for short. American universities can take the lead. They should routinely hold events on the fate of Taiwan, the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, the repression of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, and other topics known to be sensitive to the Chinese government. These events can be organized by students, faculty, or research centers. They need not originate from a university’s administration. If anything, the message that FOSOPs send—everything in the United States is subject to open debate, especially on college campuses—is even stronger if the pressure comes from the grass roots.
After bloody race riots rocked China’s far west a decade ago, the ruling Communist Party turned to a rare figure in their ranks to restore order: a Han Chinese official fluent in Uighur, the language of the local Turkic Muslim minority.
Now, newly revealed, confidential documents show that the official, Zhu Hailun, played a key role in planning and executing a campaign that has swept up a million or more Uighurs into detention camps.
Published in 2017, the documents were signed by Zhu, as then-head of the powerful Political and Legal Affairs Commission of the Communist Party in the Xinjiang region. A Uighur linguist recognized Zhu’s signature scrawled atop some of the documents from his time working as a translator in Kashgar, when Zhu was the city’s top official.
President Trump at the White House on Thursday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
President Trump is a horrendous racist. And it’s time for Democrats to stop calling him one.
Counterintuitive? Yes. But substantial evidence shows that labeling Trump “racist” backfires against Democrats. It energizes his supporters without providing any additional motivation to Democrats, and it drives soft partisans — voters who could be up for grabs in 2020 — into Trump’s arms.
This doesn’t mean letting Trump off the hook for being the racist he obviously is; I’ve been using the term for four years because it objectively describes him. But this means talking about his racism in a different way:
Say that he tears America apart by race and threatens our democracy.
Say that he pits Americans against each other by color and religion to distract from his cruelty.
Say that he enables and encourages white supremacists.
Democrats have a moral obligation to call out Trump’s racist campaign. But they can’t cry “racist” and assume that’s the end of the argument.
“The term ‘racist’ itself has taken on this new meaning,” says Duke University political scientist Ashley Jardina, author of the 2019 book “White Identity Politics.” “It’s become a politicized term. . . . Crying racism is seen as crying wolf.” In research done during the 2016 campaign, Jardina found out that when voters were read a statement saying some people oppose Trump “because he supports racism,” voters with high levels of racial resentment became overwhelmingly more supportive of Trump. Interestingly, the term “white supremacist” doesn’t backfire the way “racist” does.
Labeling Trump racist “tends to make more racially resentful whites angry,” Jardina tells me. “They hold more strongly the attitudes they have about racial policies, including doubling down on their support for Donald Trump.
Democrats have a moral obligation to call out Trump’s racist campaign. But they can’t cry “racist” and assume that’s the end of the argument.
Mass violence is not the product of religion or culture. It is born of narratives of insecurity
Sci-Fi films like the Terminator series (in particular Terminator II – Judgment Day), or The Matrix trilogy, use morphing – a special-effects process in which someone or something changes shape or form – to present the viewer with alternative perspectives on the same reality. In the Terminator, the “cyborg” robot has the power to take the shape of humans – usually after killing them – of any age or gender. Once it takes the human form, characters within the film start responding to the violent attacks against “the monster” with horror. However, the viewers applaud these brutal attacks, and even demand more. The narrative demands it, after all, especially after the atrocities it perpetrates!
This illustration of the effect of narrative framing holds the key to understanding instances of mass violence, such as the recent series of mass shootings in the United States. The two young men who carried out the mass shootings on August 3 in El Paso, Texas and August 4 in Dayton, Ohio, were acting in a different movie from the one we are all watching. In their story, they were not opening fire on “innocent people”, but heroically responding to “an existential threat”.
The two episodes occurred within 14 hours of each other, and only a few days after a similar attack in California. This indicates a shared story that is gaining traction. While the Time magazine counted 250 other mass shootings in the US this year, the last three were somewhat different. They seem to have a clear political message, with racist and anti-immigrant undertones. The El Paso incident, in particular, appeared to copy the notorious July 2011 Oslo massacre by right-wing “terrorist” Anders Behring Breivik, who uploaded a rambling Islamophobic “manifesto” on the Internet before murdering 77 people. While the Oslo attacker ranted about a “Muslim threat” to European identity, his El Paso copy-cat was also believed to have uploaded a racist “manifesto” deploring the “Hispanic invasion” of Texas.
As expected, these atrocities raised serious questions and an anguished soul-searching. And as Americans of all walks of life tried to answer the vexing question “why?”, their divergent answers once again highlighted the deep divisions the country is currently facing. Liberals blamed lax gun laws and racist rhetoric promoted by US PresidentDonald Trump. Those on the right cited mental illness, suspect Internet and social media sites and violent video games.
This mirrored the contested explanations of the 9/11 attacks and more recent atrocities committed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS). As they tried to explain the reasons behind these atrocities, serious academics and analysts focused on complex political, economic, psychological and ideological factors feeding terrorism across regions and cultures. However, right-wing ideologues focused on Islamism (even Islam) as the main factor. These views are now dominant in Trump’s inner circle. It is interesting – and ironic – that the resulting Islamophobic narratives have fed populist right-wing rage in Europe and the US, contributing in turn to right-wing militancy and terrorism.
The research I conducted in collaboration with colleagues from around the world has proven both sets of explanations inadequate. Our study (published in Genocidal Nightmares: Narratives of Insecurity and the Logic of Mass Atrocities, 2015) was unique in that it included an unprecedented array of cases and cultural contexts (from Europe, Asia and Africa). We rejected the simplistic cultural-religious explanations because mass violence is perpetrated in many cultural contexts – Orthodox/Catholic/Protestant Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim – and the majority in all these groups (even among “Islamists”) opposes terrorism.
However, alternative explanations looked equally unconvincing. Terrorism and mass violence do not result automatically from economic deprivation, political injustice or religious or ethnic polarisation. Psychological explanations are particularly problematic. It cannot be convincingly argued that the millions who abruptly engaged in intense mass violence, such as in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, India, Darfur, and so forth, have all suddenly become “insane”, as it takes plenty of sustained rationality even to conduct genocide.
This is where our “narratives of insecurity” solution comes in. As in the case of the science fiction narratives cited above, “It is the story, stupid!” People do not just wake up and attack their life-long neighbours and friends because of insanity. Rather, they act within a shared story, emphasising a threat to their values or existence. Like cyborgs (or monsters in old fairy tales), the neighbours become part of a bigger story of aliens threatening our very existence. They take on the role of “invaders” threatening Europe’s (or America’s, India’s etc) cultural identity. It is interesting that al-Qaeda and ISIL fighters also peddle similar narratives about “Crusaders” threatening Muslim land and even Islam itself.
Freeing of Iranian Hijab ‘Rosa Parks’ Hailed as Victory For Women: ‘She Has Broken This Huge Taboo
Freeing of Iranian Hijab ‘Rosa Parks’ Hailed as Victory For Women: ‘She Has Broken This Huge Taboo
Iranian activists have called the early release of Vida Movahedi a “huge victory” for women in the Islamic Republic after the protester was arrested in March for her opposition to compulsory hijab laws
Omid Memarian, Deputy Director at the Center for Human Rights in Iran, told Newsweek that Movahedi, like the African American civil rights figure Rosa Parks, had reset the expectation for what was acceptable in Iran with her protest What she did was enormous, in any movement the first one who stands up, like Rosa Parks, breaks a huge taboo. Then it is possible to stand up to oppression Memarian said This protest has cascaded down throughout the country. It has encouraged many women to think they can do the same thing,” he added The image of Movahedi brandishing a white hijab from a stick during street protests that rocked Iran at the end of 2017 into the beginning of 2018 became a rallying call on social media for other women to protest mandatory dress laws in the Islamic Republic.
Racism a public health crisis, Milwaukee County executive says
Racism a public health crisis, Milwaukee County executive says
Milwaukee County leadership declared racism a public health crisis and has pledged to examine and change institutions that may perpetuate negative health outcomes, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinelreports.
Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele signed a resolution May 20, which commits the county to assessing its policies and procedures for racial equity, identifying specific ways to increase diversity and inclusivity, expanding educational training on racism, and advocating for policies that improve health among people of color.
Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele signed a resolution May 20, which commits the county to assessing its policies and procedures for racial equity, identifying specific ways to increase diversity and inclusivity, expanding educational training on racism, and advocating for policies that improve health among people of color.
How poor Pakistani Christian girls are being lured into China marriages
How poor Pakistani Christian girls are being lured into China marriages
Pakistan says it has busted a major prostitution ring smuggling Christian girls to China for fake marriages, a week after Human Rights Watch said it was seeing a worrying and growing trend of such reports
Parents in poor Christian families are being pressured to offer up their daughters to Chinese husbands at a rate that has boomed since October last year, activists said, with members of the clergy complicit in the smuggling operations and sometimes helping brokers scout for young brides practice of smuggling “brides” to China from other Asian countries has become well established in recent years ahangover from Beijing’s one-child policy that skewed the gender balance of the population in favour of men Human Rights Watch says that after Vietnam, Laos and North Korea were targeted in the past, desperation has seen brokers expand into Pakistan as well. In a statement, the group called on China and Pakistan to act in the face of “increasing evidence that Pakistani women and girls are at risk of sexual slavery in China Christian community leaders, activists, Pakistani officials and smuggled brides .
