2000

"Loc, it's on for the two-triple-oh: Coming real, it's the next episode."

"When I came back to the world of music in 2000, my mission was to tell the truth. Now that I've surpassed my wildest dreams of fame and stardom, that mission hasn't changed."

"Bush v. Gore is the Supreme Court's worst example of recklessness since the Dred Scott decision in 1857 that said Congress lacked power to ban slavery in the territories. Several justices realized how bad their ruling was. Justice Antonin Scalia reportedly told a colleague that the equal protection reasoning about Florida procedures was "a piece of shit." Scalia, being Scalia, never indicated he regretted it, instead advising critics, "Get over it!" His justification for court intervention, he told an interviewer, was that "we were the laughingstock of the world—the world's greatest democracy couldn't conduct an election." Somehow Scalia—the great constitutional textualist—omitted to cite where in the Constitution he had unearthed a "laughingstock of the world" clause that allowed the court to ignore explicit text that left to Congress the resolution of electoral disputes for the presidency."

"The Florida Division of Elections announced the next day that Bush had won the state by 1,784 votes. However, this margin was so small that Florida law required a machine recount of the state, which reduced Bush’s lead to 327. The presidential choice on about 170,000 ballots could not be read by machine. Of these, 60,000 were “undervotes” — for instance, the voter had not fully punched through the ballot’s relevant perforated box. The remaining 110,000 were “overvotes,” in which the voter may have voted normally for Bush or Gore but also wrote in their name. The Gore campaign requested a recount by hand in four heavily Democratic counties. The Bush campaign sued to stop this. The Gore campaign’s efforts then disappeared for the next month into a mind-numbingly complex legal process, overflowing with ballot-design and deadline minutiae that no normal American could follow. Meanwhile, the Republican Party conducted a nationwide PR campaign with a message Americans could follow: that Gore was a pathetic sore loser who simply would not accept that he’d been defeated. Much of the national media eagerly adopted this frame."

"Was it appropriate for the Supreme Court to intervene in a dispute that almost always was left up to the states, even over federal posts? Given that there was a specific constitutional amendment and a specific federal statute dealing with contested presidential elections—and both of those provisions dictated that Congress alone should be the arbiter—did the justices adequately justify their decision to step in? (The 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act of 1887 spelled out the details; in drafting the latter, Congress specif­ically decided the court should play no role.)"

"In the days following the presidential election (of 2000), there were so many stories of African Americans erased from voter rolls you might think they were targeted by some kind of racial computer program. They were. I have a copy of it: two silvery CD-ROM disks right out of the office computers of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Once decoded and flowed into a database, they make for interesting, if chilling, reading. They tell us how our president (George W. Bush) was elected – and it wasn’t by the voters."

"Secretary of State Harris declared George W. Bush winner of Florida, and thereby president, by a plurality of 537 votes over Al Gore... Over 50,000 voters wrongly targeted by the purge, mostly Blacks. My BBC researchers reported that Gore lost at least 22,000 votes as a result of this smart little black-box operation. The first reports of this extraordinary discovery ran, as you’d expect, on page one of the country’s leading paper. Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country: Britain. In the USA, it ran on page zero – the story was simply not covered in American newspapers. The theft of the presidential race in Florida also grabbed big television coverage. But again, it was the wrong continent: on BBC Television, broadcasting from London worldwide – everywhere, that is, but the USA. Was this some off-the-wall story that the British press misreported? Hardly. The chief lawyer for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission called it the first hard evidence of a systematic attempt to disenfranchise Florida’s Black voters. So why was this story investigated, reported and broadcast only in Europe, for God’s sake?"

"Hoping to boost Ralph Nader in states where he is threatening to hurt Al Gore, a Republican group is launching TV ads featuring Nader attacking the vice president. The ads by the Republican Leadership Council will begin airing Monday in Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington, all states that are part of Gore's base and where Nader is polling well. The group plans to spend more than $100,000 at first and hopes to raise more over the weekend. While the ads boost Nader, they are a clear attempt to help Bush. Nader was in Iowa to announce his presidential bid as a Green Party candidate. He made his name as a consumer advocate and his campaign is a hard-core liberal assault on monied interests and what he sees as corporate control of the political system."

"Consumer activist Ralph Nader scoffed Wednesday at suggestions that his presidential campaign merely drains liberal votes from Democrats, saying that shrinking either major party is "exactly what we want." He pointed to studies of the 1996 election when he was on the ballot in California, and said he drew almost as many Republican voters as Democrats. "Our two parties are basically one corporate party wearing two heads and different makeup," Nader said. "There is a difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but not that much.""

"George W. Bush spoke to the nation for the first time as president-elect tonight, declaring that the "nation must rise above a house divided" after one of the closest and most disputed presidential elections in United States history. Speaking from the podium of the Texas House of Representatives, precisely 24 hours after the United State Supreme Court ended a five- week-long dispute by halting a recount of Florida's disputed votes, and thus preserving Mr. Bush's razor-thin lead, the 54-year-old governor devoted his entire speech to themes of reconciliation. "Whether you voted for me or not, I will do my best to serve your interests," he said, "and I will work to earn your respect.""

"It becomes clear from these attacks that whether it is Christians, Muslims, or Dalits, the attacks never end; they are part of the continuing spiral built into the sectarian ideology, out to justify acts of blatant violence and denial of fundamental rights to life, equality before the law, freedom of religion, and freedom of expression."

"It is worthy to note that Christian Padres were playing right into the hands of the terrorists. They behaved in a manner as exactly predicted by the terrorists themselves. They demonized an entire community, they put immense pressure on the NDA government which they believed was a manifestation of radical Hindutva and they were using the attacks to further their own political agenda. Due to the great work by the investigative agencies and the utter stupidity of the Jihadis, the perpetrators were soon caught and the Christians could no longer blame Hindus for it."

"In June, a series of blasts damaged Christian churches in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Goa. A month later, crude bombs were set off in two more churches in Karnataka. In August, police charged members of a Muslim sect, allegedly based in Pakistan, with masterminding the attacks. Human rights activists maintained that the arrests were meant to deflect attention from Hindu hardliners' campaign of anti-Christian violence."

"I do not know. I do not want to comment. Let the truth come out. In a few days, you will hear who are behind these attacks. The country is gong to be shocked when it hears that the attacks against Christians have not been perpetuated by pro-Hindu organisations. Look at the church blast in Bangalore. The police arrested a Muslim fundamentalist. I do feel there is a definite link between the bomb blasts in churches in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Goa. But these blasts were surely not carried out by Sangh Parivar outfits."

"The misperception of Hindus as bullies and minorities as their victims in turn conditions a distortion of the information flow concerning new instances of communal violence. Thus, when a series of bombs damaged churches in Goa, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh between 21 May and 9 July 2000, Christian and secularist fingers were immediately pointed at the RSS.... simply because everybody "knew" that the RSS is that big bad wolf... But then on 9 July, two of the real perpetrators made a technical mistake, killing themselves and exposing their identitites and the Pakistani origin of their equipment... If I hadn't been a reader of the Indian press for professional reasons, I would not have known that the whole bomb campaign had been the handiwork of a Muslim outfit. For, the Christian and secular press worldwide continued to refer to "Hindu bomb attacks on churches", obviously relaying the stories fed to them by Indian Church sources. A full two months later, Church spokesman John Dayal went before an American Congressional hearing... to reiterate the same old allegations of Hindu bomb attacks. The point here is not the dishonesty of Church spokesmen, but the fact that they correctly expected to get away with repeating their calumny against the RSS... A climate has been created in which every allegation against Hindu activists enjoys a priori credibility while every complaint of Hindu victims is shrugged off or even maligned as hate propaganda... A similar case is the rape of four nuns in Jhabua, also in 1998: in spite of Christian allegations, it turned out that Hindu militancy had nothing to do with the crime and that half of the gang of perpetrators were tribal Christians themselves, yet this "rape of nuns by Hindu fanatics" keeps reappearing in press stories about "Hindu atrocities on Christians"."

"In 1999, they tried to make the most of a spate of incidents between Christians and non-Christian tribals in which a few Christians got killed (mercifully far fewer than the periodic harvest of martyrs in Pakistan). They falsely blamed Hindu activists for some inter-Christian rape cases and for a series of bomb attacks against churches, which turned out to be the handiwork of a Pakistan-based Muslim group, Deendar Anjuman. Before ill-informed but consequential international audiences such as the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, they managed to uphold their original story, but in India the campaign to blame Hindu activists for everything had badly lost its credibility."

"A series of bomb blasts against Christian churches in South India was automatically blamed on the Hindu nationalists. In that version, the story made headlines around the world: Hindu bomb terror against Christians. Hindu organizations alleged that it was a Pakistani operation, a blame-shifting exercise which only earned them ridicule and contempt. Yet, when two of the terrorists blew themselves up by mistake, their getaway car led the police to their network, and the whole gang was arrested. It turned out to be a Muslim group, Deendar Anjuman, with headquarters in Pakistan. But this was not reported on the front pages in India nor made the topic of flaming editorials; and in the international media, it was not reported at all. In the worldwide perception of Hindu nationalism, the association with raping nuns and bombing churches has stuck."

"To offset this failure, critics of the BJP tried to make the most of a supposed wave of minor incidents between Hindu tribals and Christians in 1998-2000. There were only a handful of mortal victims, far fewer than the dozens of Christians killed in Pakistan after September 11, 2001, but with the media as amplifiers, an impression of terrible oppression of a poor hapless minority was created. Unfortunately (or rather, fortunately), the key allegations made initially under the international spotlights turned out to be untrue... Indeed, this turned out to be a pattern: all inter-Christian incidents in this period... were suddenly blamed on the evil hand of the Hindus. This game of blaming the Hindus for the suffering of Christians was so successful that it inspired a third party to try its own hand at it. A series of bomb attacks against churches in South India did take place, wounding some worshipers. It was duly blamed on the Hindutva forces, but the perpetrators turned out to be a Pak-based Muslim organization, the Deendar Anjuman. Please note the chain of guilt here: the Islamic terrorists are of course responsible for their own acts, but they would not have committed these but for the encouragement given to them by the secularists. After all, the latter had proven that any unpleasant incident can successfully be blamed on the Hindus, and that the blame could not be washed off by any amount of official refutation, which would remain under-reported while the original allegation would go on being repeated. This way, the secularists have blood on their hands, viz. the blood of the Christian victims of these Islamic bomb attacks."

"A series of bomb attacks on churches, sometimes accompanied by Hindutva pamphlets, seemed to set a new pattern, proving that Hindus are no better than Muslims... But on 17 July the truth came out: members of a Islamic group, Dindar Anjuman (founded in 1924 under the Nizam's patronage in order to convert synthesis-happy Hindus with claims of an underlying unity of all religions), were arrested and found to be in possession of both explosives and home-made Hinidutva pamphlets, and they confessed to having committed the bomb attacks in order to provoke Hindu-Christian hostility (after having similarly desecrated Ambedkar statures to foment clashes between Dalits and the RSS). Expectedly, the Christian information channels which had earlier trumpeted the Hindu aggression were slow in communicating the correction. As usual, the Hindus had been falsely accused of stooping to the same behaviour level as that of their enemies. But as it turned out, they were innocent. Since this might be reckoned as a virtue, all opinion -makers in india and abroad have (so to speak) conspired to keep this out of view."

"The potential for indignation on a national and international scale was clearly enormous, and any hesitation in putting the hated Hindus in the dock was glaringly non-existent. And so, innocent Christians were wounded or maimed by Islamic bombs presented as Hindu bombs. As the Church spokesmen had uttered such fiery indignation against the terrorists when these were assumed to be Hindus, you might have expected them to be just as indignated against the Islamic terrorists as soon as the true story was known. But no, Church fury suddenly became rather more subdued..."

"It ought to be remembered that the Christian religious leaders were demonizing an entire community before any investigation was even completed. Their first instinct was to play politics over the heinous attacks instead of comforting the attendees of their Churches and safeguard their evangelical interests. As time would go on to prove, they were all horribly wrong."