Tag: Marion Barry

Trayon White: A disgrace even by the usual Democratic city government standards

Trayon White

Is he dumber than he is anti-Semitic, or more anti-Semitic than he is dumb? Your call.

First, on March 16 of this year, Trayon White, a member of the city council in Washington, D.C., posted a Facebook video of a snowfall along with a comment of his own suggesting that “the Rothschilds” are “controlling the climate to create natural disasters that they can pay for to own the cities, man.” It soon emerged that this was not the first time he had expressed the opinion that Jews run the weather.

Baron David René de Rothschild, current French chairman of N. M. Rothschild & Sons

International outrage led him to issue an apology. No sooner had the leaders of Jewish organizations accepted the apology and claimed to regard it as sincere did the City Council release video of a February 27 breakfast event at which White had accused the Rothschilds of controlling the federal government and World Bank. White apologized for this, too, writing that “Somehow, I read and misconstrued both the Rockefeller and Rothchild [sic] theories. At that breakfast, I indeed misspoke, was really misinformed on the issue and ran with false information. I think I heard other similar information before about the theory around the World Bank and put it all together.” Makes sense to us! No, seriously, let bygones be bygones. No reason to deprive the people of Washington of such a stellar intellect simply because he got a little confused.

The late Mayor Marion Barry

White, by the way, is a protégé of late Washington mayor Marion Barry, most famous for having been convicted of smoking crack. White is also a former member of the U.S. capital’s Board of Education, which to anyone familiar with public education in D.C. will not be all that surprising. He’s also donated money to Louis Farrakhan’s rabidly Jew-hating Nation of Islam. 

Anyway, after his Rothschild remarks, White, as an act of “conciliation” with the Jewish community – i.e., a PR move – agreed to take a 90-minute guided tour of the Holocaust Museum. Great idea, right? Nope.

U.S. Holocaust Museum

As the Daily Mail reported, when he saw a 1937 picture of “a woman surrounded by Nazi soldiers with a sign hanging from her neck that read: ‘I am a German girl and allowed myself to be defiled by a Jew,’ White asked, ‘Are they protecting her?’” The tour guide explained that they were not: they were marching her down the street to shame her. “Marching through,” replied White, “is protecting.” The guide, with what reads like a patience that passeth all understanding, said, “I think they’re humiliating her.”

And then, 90 minutes apparently being too much of a test of his attention span, he left the tour before it was over. He claimed to have a meeting to get to, but was later “seen walking around aimlessly outside of the museum.” Meanwhile one of his aides, who had decided to stick with the tour to the end, replied to a mini-lesson about the Warsaw ghetto by asking if it was like “a gated community.”

Rafael Shimunov

If there was anything more reprehensible than White’s unashamed display of bigotry and ignorance, it was the readiness of some members of the Washington, D.C., Jewish community to stand by him. In the Forward, Rafael Shimunov, an official of the Working Families Party, co-founder of ResistHere, and veteran of a long list of left-wing activist groups, argued that “many in the DC community and the Jewish community need to examine how easily they found themselves mocking a black man who has devoted his life to the public service of America’s most vulnerable.” Nice try, but no dice. It is preposterous that a fool and knave like White can hold high elective office in Washington, D.C. The best thing he can do to serve“ America’s most vulnerable” is to quit his job and work for the election of somebody with a minimally acceptable I.Q., education, level of intellectual curiosity, and moral compass. 

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A hymn to Kim

Yesterday we met Michael Bassett, a “Citizen Diplomat to North Korea” who in a September article for Counterpunch defended the Kim regime from the defectors who, he would have us believe, are despicable liars, besmirching a government that deserves better.

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Michael Bassett in the promised land

Bassett’s Counterpunch article was, it turns out, only one entry in a rather compendious list of publications in defense of Pyongyang. He often comes across as – what’s the mot juste? – more than a bit credulous. In one interview, he claimed that his “extensive education and experience” regarding North Korea “has mainly taught me the importance of ‘handshakes and hugs.’” In an account he wrote of a “cultural diplomatic trip” to North Korea, he asserted that “North Koreans expressed genuine support for the Kim family and their government” – as if people living under a monstrous dictator would dare to share their true feelings with a foreign stranger. Similarly, by way of proving that North Koreans “are not adverse [sic] to unification” with the North, he cited “signs all over the country” that “proclaim ‘Independence, Peace, and Unification’” – as if such signs were put up by private individuals and not the regime.

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Another touching hug shot

Bassett is also far from consistent. While he sometimes acknowledges that North Korea is “systematically brutal and disturbingly inhumane” and seems to accept the necessity of bringing down the Kim regime, more often he tends to suggest otherwise, blaming all the country’s afflictions on its enemies, arguing that introducing freedom (as you and I would put it) to North Korea would only increased social and economic inequality, and asserting that, yes, North Korea has committed human-rights violations, but “the U.S. has them on a larger scale.” In one article, he provides a long list of what he considers likenesses between North Korea and the U.S. A sampling:

  • The United States and North Korea both share a military-first policy, though the US military is on a global scale, while North Korea’s is strictly a domestic self-defense force.
  • North Korea has personality cults for their leaders – and so does the United States.
  • North Korea is a propaganda State – and so is the United States.
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Bassett’s rapper buddies

Some of Bassett’s stuff borders on the unintentionally comical. In an October interview, he portrayed North Korea as nothing less than a scientific and technological powerhouse. A couple of years ago, he took a rap duo with him to film a music video in North Korea, a venture that resulted in several news stories, one of which began as follows:

For kids growing up in Southeast Washington, D.C., hope is not always easy to come by. But for Pacman and Peso, two young rappers based in the area, hope has come in the form of a country over 6,000 miles away.

Among those who helped pay the expenses for the rappers’ North Korea trip was former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry.

bassett10We’re tempted to dismiss Bassett as a crank and leave it at that. Yet too many people and publications are willing to give him credibility. In an article about his rap trip, the Washington Post actually identified him as a “North Korea expert.” What’s more, the Kim regime has found him useful: recently, when a UN resolution criticized its human-rights record, North Korea responded by quoting Bassett. 

Last year, a contributor to the Free Korea website summed him up in these words: “Michael Bassett is an odd character of a kind that draws an increasingly selective audience – people who really, really hate other people who criticize North Korea about human rights.” That about says it. 

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