- Jan 11, 2013
- 18,115
- 11,770
Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
It's 2018...
MEMPHIS, Tenn. - A Memphis mom sent FOX13 video that shows her seven-year-old son being dragged off a Shelby County school bus.
The incident, which happened April 12, involved students at Robert R. Church Elementary School.
"Another parent of a child at the school contacted me Friday evening, and she said she had video of the teacher dragging my soon of the school bus," the boy's mother told FOX13. " Her son recorded it."
Shelby County Schools told FOX13 the teacher was breaking up a fight just before the camera started recording.
However, the child's mother said her son was not part of that fight and claims the district didn't tell her about the incident until days later. She told FOX13 her son was seriously injured and doesn't want to go back to school.
"He had a concussion and his back was bruised," the mother said.
Shelby County Schools is investigating the matter. The teacher in the video is off the job while the investigation is underway.
Below is the complete statement from Shelby County Schools:
An employee from Robert R. Church Elementary is being investigated based on reports of forcibly removing a student from a bus while breaking up a fight last week. We take any report involving student safety very seriously, and immediately reported this situation to the appropriate authorities. Per standard District procedure, this employee has been removed from the school while the matter is being investigated.
Prom season everyone
SANTA MONICA (CBSLA) — Santa Monica College says the school will take action after an apparent dispute over parking turned into a physical altercation and a racist tirade that was captured on video.
Enrique Conde started shooting video when he heard someone yelling the N-word at a student in the parking lot of the performing arts complex at Santa Monica College.
CBS2’s Tom Wait says as Conde approached, he captured the extremely disturbing and vile attack. After shouting racial slurs at the woman and telling her “she didn’t belong there” and “go back to South LA,” the man starts kicking and the woman starts throwing her arms out at him.
Enrique Conde, who watched it all unfold, could not believe what he was hearing and seeing.
“Right away, you hear expletives,” Conde says, “right away, racial slurs and expletives.”
A parking attendant is seen trying to keep the two apart, while bystanders stand still in apparent shock.
A college spokesperson identified the man in the video as 80-year-old Fredric Allan Shinerock. He was taken into custody, cited and released on the scene. The college says the case will be presented to the Santa Monica City Attorney as a hate crime.
Wait went to Shinerock’s home to speak with him and he refused to comment.
Santa Monica College released a statement, reading in part: “We will take immediate and evident action to reinforce to our students, college community, and guests that there is no room for hate at Santa Monica College.”
May 01st, 2018
By Whitney Webb Whitney Webb
South Carolina is to become the first state in the nation to legislate a definition of anti-Semitism that considers certain criticisms of the Israeli government to be hate speech. The language, which was inserted into the state’s recently passed $8 billion budget, offers a much more vague definition of anti-Semitism that some suggest specifically targets the presence of the global boycott, divestment and sanctions, or BDS, movement on state college campuses. The law requires that all state institutions, including state universities, apply the revised definition when deciding whether an act violates anti-discrimination policies.
Once it is reconciled with an appropriations bill previously passed by the state House, the measure will become law and take effect this July. However, the law will last only until the next budget is passed, meaning that the new legal definition of anti-Semitism must be renewed on a yearly basis unless new legislation making the language permanent is passed in the future.
The new definition uses the State Department’s current definition of anti-Semitism as its template — defining speech that “demonizes” or applies “double standards” to Israel “by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” as anti-Semitic.
However, the State Department’s definition was never intended to be used as an enforcement tool, and concern has subsequently been raised that South Carolina colleges may now move to criminalize conventional and factual criticism of Israel under the new, vague definition of anti-Semitism.
Pro-Israel lobby called “anti-Semitic”
Such concern is well-founded, in part because the bill’s sponsor, State Rep. Alan Clemmons (R-Myrtle Beach), previously calledthe pro-Israel lobby J-Street “anti-Semitic” for referring to Israel’s presence in Palestine’s West Bank as an “occupation.” Thus, in Clemmons’ view, discussing the military occupation of the West Bank, a reality recognized even by Israel’s Supreme Court, would be considered anti-Semitic under the new South Carolina law.
Clemmons, a Mormon who has previously hosted state delegations to Israel, also considers the non-violent Palestinian rights movement Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) to be motivated by anti-Semitism and has been called “Israel’s biggest supporter in a U.S. state legislature.”
View image on Twitter
Alan Clemmons@RepAlanClemmons
Honored to have visited with @realDonaldTrump @FLOTUS @netanyahu & @sara_netanyahu. #USA & #Israel are partners of light in a dark world!
In addition to the views of the bill’s sponsor, Kenneth Stern, the author of the State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism upon which the new South Carolina law is based, has vehemently opposed codifying into law the definition he wrote, asserting that applying that definition to colleges “is a direct affront to academic freedom” as well as “unconstitutional and unwise.”
In regards to the South Carolina Law, Stern stated that it “is really an attempt to create a speech code about Israel,” adding that it is also “an unnecessary law that will hurt Jewish students and the academy.”
Other groups, such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, have raised similar concerns, stating that “this vague and overbroad re-definition conflates political criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, infringing on constitutionally protected speech.”
Pro-Israel groups, in contrast, praised the law’s wording. The Brandeis Center, for instance, stated:
This bill gives South Carolina the tools to protect Jewish students’ and all South Carolina students’ right to a learning environment free of unlawful discrimination. We are hoping this momentous step will result in another national wave to, once and for all, begin defeating rising anti-Semitism.”
First clashes in a coming national battle?
The Brandeis Center’s allusion to a “national wave” aimed at legally conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism may be closer to reality than previously thought. Indeed, if Kenneth Marcus, Trump’s nominee to serve as the next Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education, is confirmed in the coming months, the newly passed South Carolina law is likely to be repeated across the country.
Marcus, who once boasted of instilling “fear” into BDS activists and considers any demonstration of solidarity with Palestine as anti-Semitic, has long desired the post, as he sees it as a way to shut down BDS at the national level. As Marcus himself has noted, changing the legal definition of anti-Semitism to include criticism of the Israeli state is a critical part of silencing BDS groups on U.S. college campuses.
Ultimately, the bill comes at a critical time for pro-Israel partisans seeking to curb the recent success of BDS at universities across the U.S. Indeed, just a week after the new South Carolina law was passed, the students at one of the country’s most Jewish colleges – Barnard College in New York –overwhelmingly supported a referendum asking its school’s administration to boycott, divest and sanction Israel for its violations of international law in Palestine. Such victories are apparently considered so dangerous by Israel’s right-wing and its U.S. equivalents that they have sought to restrict freedom of speech on college campuses nationwide in order to prevent them in the future.
In 2015, South Carolina became the first of at least 22 states to prohibit state agencies or institutions from contracting with any vendor participating in a boycott of Israel. A hub of the slaveholding South in the U.S., South Carolina is a deeply conservative state with strong ties to Christian evangelicals, but a relatively small Jewish population of roughly 20,000 — dwarfed by a state like Illinois with more than 300,000 Jews.
Top Photo | Rep. Alan Clemmons delivers an address from the steps of the South Carolina Statehouse in a speech given via satellite to the Restoring Courage rally in Jerusalem in 2011.
Why a Black Lawyer Says He’s Too Afraid to Take Wrongly-Delivered UPS Package to His Neighbor’s House
After a package was mistakenly delivered to his Arizona home, a Black lawyer says he’d rather wait for UPS to come get the parcel and deliver it to the right address than walk it over to his neighbor’s home on the next block himself. His reasons might surprise you.
In a lengthy Facebook post, Sean Carter wrote that he nor his teenage son would be delivering the package because “we are Black.”
“It is extremely unsafe to send our boys to the home of any family that we do not know in this predominantly white neighborhood,” Carter explained Friday. “Why? Because there’s a realistic chance that one of my neighbors will see my boy as a threat and call the police or even pull a gun on him.”
“That’s why this f—–g package will be sitting on my porch until UPS retrieves it,” he continued. “Because I cannot trust that my white neighbors won’t see me, a Harvard-educated lawyer (or my 14 y/o honor student son) as a roaming homicidal maniac.”
Carter brought up the case of 14-year-old Black boy Brennan Walker, who nearly lost his life after knocking on a stranger’s door in Rochester Hills, Mich. to ask for directions after he missed the bus to school earlier this month. The female homeowner suspected Walker was trying to rob her in broad daylight and summoned her husband, who opened fire on the young teen.
“THIS is what it’s like to be Black in ‘post-racial’ America,” the concerned father wrote.
Carter’s post has garnered over 15,000 comments since Friday, drawing mixed reactions from users. Carter said he’s received countless messages from white folks who could not wrap their heads around why he should be afraid. Then there were those who accused him of “race- baiting” and being a “p—y” for refusing to put his son in danger by sending him to a stranger’s doorstep.
Out of the thousands of comments, Carter said there wasn’t a single suggestion on how to “stop white folks from being irrationally afraid of black people in their neighborhoods, demonstrating that while black lives still don’t matter worth a damn, all package deliveries do,” the Daily Mirror reported.