Journalists From Illinois

"I wanted only the beckoning world."

"...the dreams of simple human beings striving for some little happiness and understanding in a world that is largely cruel and intolerant."

"Frazier Hunt, well known writer and war correspondent, is broadcasting over Station WLS each Monday, Wednesday and Saturday evening at 6:45. Wednesday evening in his broadcast he spoke of his early life in North Manchester by "sleepy old Eel River." Gorman Grossnickle heard the broadcast and wrote a letter of Mr. Hunt, inviting him to visit North Manchester, and speak at the school and college. He promised to take him up to the "Devil's Hole", the famous deep hole in Eel River above the College football field, which was well known forty years ago, and which Hunt mentions in his book, "One American." Hunt, whose mother died shortly after he was born, came to North Manchester to make his home with his uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph "Posey" Mathews. The Mathews home was the large brick house on Mill street where the Frank Sausaman family now lives. Hunt, in his book, describes much of the happenings and a few of the characters of North Manchester. Mr. Mathews was an ardent prohibitionist, and every two years ran for congress, although at the most he never received more than 184 votes in the county. Hunt graduated from the North Manchester high school in 1903, and spent a year in the Michigan Military Academy. Later he attended the University of Illinois. Following graduation at the University he went to Chicago where he got a job as reporter on the City Press. Then followed journalistic and publishing adventures with no great success from any of them and just before the outbreak of the World War he went to New York and obtained work on The Sun. In February, 1918, Hunt went to France as a war correspondent and to continue his stories of the soldiers and camp life under the caption, "Private Danny" in France. Hunt was sent into Siberia where the American troops had made a vain attempt to halt the Bolshevists. In the ensuing years, Hunt was a roving journalist, usually managing to be where the world news was happening. He has had an interesting career and a fair measure of success. The older North Manchester people would be glad to welcome him if he visits his boyhood home."

"Lewis: Say! What in hell is your real name, anyway? You've surely got some other name besides Frazier. My name is Red. Hunt: Friends and enemies call me Spike."

"Frazier Hunt graduated from Manchester High School in 1903. As a successful war correspondent, radio commentator and author, Hunt traveled world-wide, interviewing all kinds of persons, from American Presidents to revolutionaries. A historical sign now stands in front of the large brick house on North Mill Street where he lived for ten years during his youth. Hunt even has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, being inducted in 1960."

"Frazier Hunt has had the unique experience of covering for newspapers and magazines every war and revolution from the original Mexican revolution and World War I down through the great Pacific campaigns of World War II. Following four months at MacArthur's headquarters and New Guinea in 1944, he wrote MacArthur and the War Against Japan. For a number of years he was one of America's well-known radio commentators. Born in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1885, the rugged Frazier Hunt has traveled far and wide and has met most of the world's great personalities of the last four decades. The Untold Story of Douglas MacArthur is his fourteenth book."

"With infinite courage and genius he had helped save South Korea from certain disaster, and he had led his victorious armies to the high cliffs of the Yalu. Only when a vicious new war broke and a hundred thousand hidden Red Chinese suddenly appeared from their caves hand snow-camouflaged forests and attacked, had he felt the utter frustration of not being permitted to unwrap his air and turn defeat into a certain victory that might well have settled the whole Asiatic threat for a score of years to come. And he was to live to see his able successors denied the same chance to win- and the icy hand of Russian fear and British trade demands closing tightly around the timid hearts of certain American leaders. Never for a day were either Generals Ridgeway, Van Fleet, or Clark permitted to win the Korean war by making full and fearless use of the weapons each had at hand. The psychosis of fear of Russia and the betrayal of American ideals before the pressure of her questionable Allies were to continue with the mockery of the surrender at Panmunjon and the disgraceful armed peace that followed, leading straight on into the vast problems of future local wars in the distant Pacific. So it was that the rejoicing among little Americans and their foreign tutors was great that day in mid-April 1951. The brave sentinel had been stabbed in the back. Those who bent their knees to the Red Bear finally had seen their plots against this fearless soldier succeed. Douglas MacArthur, the uncompromising American, had been destroyed. Or so they thought."

"In this man is the uncompromising will to win, and the character and integrity to lead his country to victory on the battlefields of the world. The respect of the world is his. Men and nations know that when others may fail they can always turn to him for leadership and victory."

"I am fully suspicious of the accepted theory that fundamental differences exist between various classes and races."

"However little she may realize it, every girl who rides her steel horse is a vivid illustration of one of the greatest waves of progress of this century, the advancement of women in freedom and opportunity."

"It seems to me that there is nothing in literature more valuable for young people to read than the lives of those who, in travelling the journey of life, have left their impress for good or bad on society. Every life carries its lessons - it matters not whether they are warnings or inspirations, they are alike valuable to the young who have the journey before them."

"History and experience are the two master teachers of nations and civilization."

"I have always made it a rule of my life to try and understand a subject before attempting to criticize or to influence others either for or against it."

"Viewed through any conventional lens, President-elect Donald Trump’s candidacy was improbable from start to finish. Today, two things about his victory seem to be in sharper focus: one, that Trump’s victory might best be understood as the success of the country’s first independent president, and second, that the Trump coalition may be even more uniquely his than President Obama’s has turned out to be."

"Trump owes his success in part to the fact that he ran for president in an environment that favored change over the status quo. But his luck or genius goes beyond that. It has long been noted that the conditions have existed for an independent candidate to run a serious campaign for president."

"What has stood in the way of people running as an independent is that winning the presidency in a system that so clearly favors the two major parties is something of a hopeless cause."

"Trump took the elements of an independent candidacy — the lack of clear ideology, the name recognition of a national celebrity and the personal fortune needed to fund a presidential campaign — and then did what no one seemed to have thought of before. He staged a hostile takeover of an existing major party. He had the best of both worlds, an outsider candidacy with crosscutting ideological appeal and the platform of a major party to wage the general election. By the time he had finished, he had taken down two political dynasties: the Bush dynasty in the primaries and the Clinton dynasty in the general election."

"15 year old Fulfuli Rani Roy was kidnapped by local Muslims from Dolapar in the state of Rajshahi. Her father filed a complaint with the local police, identifying the perpetrator as Mahabul Islam, the son of Rayaz Uddinbut. The police, however, said that they would not pursue a case in nthe matter, refusing as well to try and located and recover the girl. As a result, Fulfuli Rani Roy has not been seen or heard from since, and her father along with others allege that her kidnappers murdered her. (99)"

"On March 13, three-year old Milon Moni Das was abducted by local Muslims.... a neighbour found the Hindu child dead in some bushes.... Police then took one Muslim into custody, but released him after intervention by the local Awami League chairman. There has been no further action.... (99)"

"Jenny Lundstrom, who is a human rights officer for Global Human Defence in the Hague, is a tireless advocate for putting an end to the anti-Hindu violence in Bangladesh. She notes that according to one source, "200,000 Bengali women were raped with a genocidal motive during the 1971 war." She also refers to "mass rapes of Bangladeshi women in the 1970s and 1980s" as a precedent for using rape support genocide since then, including cites 1,000 rapes of Hindu women and girls in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 election. (p. 100, citing Lundstrom, "With Intent to Destroy? Rape as Genocide under International Criminal Law: The case of Bangladesh, 2007")"

"The case involves a Hindu woman named Koli Goswami. ... The local Awami League MP, Retired General Abdus Salam, was present during this episode and threatened him with "dire consequences" should he proceed with the case any further or dispute the conversion. (102-6)"

"Reports began trickling out of Bangladesh in the spring of 2009 about what can only be described as an anti-Hindu pogrom in the heart of its capital. ... This is not about one terrible event, but about a system of legalized ethnic cleansing that has proceeded non-stop for decades and which places every one of Bangladesh's 13-15,000,000 Hindus at risk. The Sutrapur pogrom merely provides more evidence that government protestations to the contrary, normal legal protections are suspended for Hindus and other minorities in Bangladesh who are subject to arbitrary actions by the Muslim majority. (112-114)"

"Pogroms were initially anti-Jewish riots in the empire of Czarist Russia.... What makes the term particularly apt in this incident is the fact that this anti-Hindu pogrom was also carried out by average (Muslim) citizens, but the entire process was inspired by the government , abetted by it, and the perpetrators were protected by it. It is this unholy wedding of mob action and deliberate government effort that makes it truly an anti-Hindu pogrom. (112-113)"

"The embassy [in Washington], however, has not commented on incidents of anti-Hindu violence in Bangladesh from 2009 forward; a period roughly consonant with the installation of the Awami League government in Bangladesh...(117)"

"In April (2008), 5 Muslims abducted 19-year old Durga Singh from Kolkata's Shibpur tram depot.... This happened after he protested the actions of.... a group of Muslims who would "molest [Hindu] girls" in Kolkata's Ghoshbagan area. The West Bengal government did not file any charges in this case."

"The attack on Bangladeshi Hindus is a crime against humanity. In and of itself, it is severe enough to spur our moral outrage and cause us to take action to stop it. But to make matters worse, it has been spreading across that open border into West Bengal, India. One would think these Hindu victims of Islamist terror would find a safe haven in the largest Hindu nation on earth, but they have not."

"In June (2008), a large mob of approximately 5,000 Muslim fundamentalists, "comprised mostly of Bangladeshi infiltrators", attacked a major religious gathering of Hindus at one of their holiest sites at one of the pilgrimage points of Gangasagar in West Bengal. They outnumbered the pilgrims by 25 to one, and focused assaults on women and children... the West Bengal police... did not charge any of them. But in a move reminiscent of Nazi Germany, which would charge the Jewish community when they were attacked, the West Bengal government arrested 15 of the religious pilgrims "under several sections of the Indian Penal Code for inciting communal disharmony, while the perpetrators roam Scott free." (152-3, citing Survey of Hindu Human Rights West Bengal)"

"In October (2008), Hindus were in the midst of celebrating one of their most important holidays, Durga Puja. "Religious fundamentalists... cut off the power supply and vandalized the pandal and hung up the severed leg of a cow." (154)"

"Every Hindu with whom we spoke said the women of the house could not go to market or anywhere else without harassment and threats of sexual assault. Their children could not attend school because of the threats. (158)"

"The most poignant testimony came from a woman in the village of Norit. She told us how five weeks before our visit, Muslims abducted her 22-year old daughter, and she has not been seen since. (159)"

"Scholars, journalists, activists, and others have an almost knee-jerk tendency to praise Bangladesh's beginnings as a secular nation and trace its slide into Islamist domination from the 1975 assassination of its founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. That praise is warranted - but only to a limited extent, for secularism and any semblance of democratic ideals were in their death throes long before Sheikh Mujib was."

"What we must understand is this: The Vested Property Act is legalized racism and legalized thievery. The fact that the Bangladeshi government has refused to repeal it, let alone compensate the victims, makes it quite clear that it is not interested in developing a society that allows freedom and equal protection under the law for all of its citizens. (176)"

"While the act has been used against other religious and ethnic minorities on occasion, only Hindus have faced a consistent and organized effort to use the law to eliminate them from the Bangladeshi polity. Hindus are the VPA's real targets. Professor Abul Barkat of Dhaka University undertook the most authoritative study of the VPA and concluded that by 1997, 40 percent of Hindu families in Bangladesh had been affected by it and more than half of all Hindu-owned land already had been confiscated under thee act. Much more land and many more Hindus have been affected in the fourteen years since then. So, there is no doubt that the VPA is a critical ingredient in ethnic cleansing. The fact that the percent of Hindus in Bangladesh has been cut in half concurrent with the act is evidence of those even more sinister, ethnic cleansing, motives behind the law. (177)"

"The VPA is so clearly immoral that the question of its being an outrage to every decent human being should not even be a legitimate topic for discussion among civilized individuals. There is no justification for it, and every Bangladeshi should be embarrassed by it. Trying to make a case for it is like trying to justify Holocaust denial.... Some appeasers in universities and elsewhere are now trying to say that holocaust denial is merely another point of view that is a legitimate topic for study. Nonsense!... Trying to justify the VPA is a racist lie, too. (177)"

"In an attack that was clearly planned in advance with the connivance of West Bengal authorities, a mob supposedly acting out of spontaneous outrage descended upon the workshop [by Tapan Ghosh] while loudly denouncing it as "communal." (199)"

"Five Muslim men broke into Koli's family [Koli Goswami] at 12:45 am on Junne 13, 2009. ... they carried her away. Her family has not seen her since. To many Westerners, stories like this strain credulity. It simply is not within the realm of their experience. (230)"

"Nipa Banarjee (17), a Hindu school girl, was kidnapped December 1, 2010... The police have taken no action.... (231-2)"

"Bangladesh is heavily invested in advertising itself to Americans and other potential trading partners as a "moderate Muslim country." ... Over the last few decades, however, they have come more and more under the thumb of radical jihadis. Yet, they have not stopped trying to portray themselves as what they perhaps were at one point, and few Americans know that the reality is not what they are saying it is."

"Police refused to register the case and destroyed the evidence. Officials including Superitendant of Police have refused to lodge case, intimidated family, and taken bribes. (324)"

"The most severe anti-minority activity, however, has been directed at Hindus, in part because they are the largest religious minority, in part because of the larger Hindu-Muslim conflict that so characterizes South Asia. Hindus are not safe in Bangladesh; not from radicals, not from their government. They were almost a third of the population after the population transfers that accompanied the Indian subcontinent’s 1947 partition. After Bangladesh gained its independence, they were less than a fifth; thirty years later, less than one in ten; and several estimates put the Hindu population at less than 8 percent today"

"Professor Sachi Dastidar (2008) of the State University of New York estimates that about 49 million Hindus are missing from the Bangladeshi census. This is not a phenomenon, as apologists try to assert, that is a mere consequence of demography or the actions of a small group of radicals. Rather, as Samir Kalra (2012), Senior Director and Senior Human Rights Fellow of the Hindu American Foundation, notes, there have been “nearly 1,200 incidents of violence directed against religious minorities (mostly Hindus) between 2008 and 2011.”"

"The election of an Awami League government was supposed to herald an end to the ethnic cleansing of Hindus, but it did not. During their first term in office, major anti-Hindu atrocities occurred at an average of at least one per week for the entire five years. They included murder, rape, child abduction, forced conversion, severe assaults, land seizures, religious desecration and more. There were periods of intense anti-Hindu activity, for instance, a 26-day period in the Spring of 2010 that saw three a week; and a nine-day period in May 2012 with an abduction and disappearance, a murder in broad daylight, and two gang rapes; one of a child on her way to a Hindu festival (Ghosh 2012; Benkin 2015).[1"

"On February 16, 2013, Bangladesh Minority Watch (BDMW) President and Founder Rabindra Ghosh and I walked into the remote Hindu village of Balai Bazaar, which is part of Chirir Bandor Upazilla, located in the far northern Bangladeshi state of Dinajpur.[14] Several months prior, the village had been overrun by a marauding gang of angry Muslims. According to numerous villagers with whom we spoke, the attackers moved “from home to home, taking some possessions and destroying the rest; from farm to farm stealing livestock and destroying crops.” They torched homes, burning many to the ground; and they abused many of the women, an all-too-common feature of such attacks. One woman described in detail how she and her daughter fled to nearby fields and hid there until the attackers left. Other women testified to me that they were sexually assaulted, and several witnesses claimed to have seen “five women rounded up by the rioters, forcefully disrobed, and their clothing thrown in a large bonfire and left publicly naked.”"

"After independence, officials of the Bangladeshi government under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman reviewed the laws of Pakistan under which they previously lived. Their mandate was to ratify some and eliminate or change others. At one point, they encountered Pakistan’s Enemy Property Act, passed in 1965 after another embarrassing defeat at Indian hands as a retaliatory law against Hindus. The openly anti-Hindu nature of the law matched the national rhetoric before and during the war, as well as most of the time since. Significantly, this was one of the laws that Bangladeshi officials decided to keep on the new nation’s books. Since, however, it had to maintain the fiction of a break from Pakistani bigotry, it was circumspect about it. They changed the name of the law from Enemy Property Act to Vested Property Act while adopting the Pakistani law verbatim"

"According to Professor Abul Barkat (and Shafique uz Zaman 2008) of Dhaka University, after about thirty years of Bangladeshi rule, approximately 75 percent of all Hindu land in Bangladesh was seized under the VPA. Nor did it matter if the ruling party was the Awami League or the BNP. Barkat’s data showed that the percentage of the spoils did not depend on which party was in power but on the party in power. Whoever held power took essentially the same amount of loot. During BNP rule it was BNP 45 percent, Awami League 31, all others 24. During Awami League rule it was Awami League 44 percent, BNP 32, all others 24. Despite the enormous amount of property seized, Barkat also noted that only about 0.4 percent of the Bangladeshi population derives any of the proceeds; the greatest number of it goes to party loyalists"

"During my 2014 fact-finding trip to Assam, locals frequently impressed on me how they believe the influx of “infiltrators” from Bangladesh is not only changing Assam’s culture, ecology, and demographics; they also are building support for radical Islam inside the state (Benkin 2014). I have been tracking the demographic change in West Bengal for almost a decade and have seen village after village on the border with Bangladesh, formerly with robust Hindu and Muslim populations, become entirely Muslim, the Hindu population having been forced to leave. The growth of Islamism in West Bengal through the influx of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh is well-documented."

"In 2015, the Bangladeshi Islamist party, Jamaat e-Islami, opened up a branch office in Kolkata, India. Extensive reporting alleged West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee helped funnel money to Jamaat inside Bangladesh (The Hindu 2014) and help Jamaat’s power in West Bengal politics grow (Banerjee 2015). By the end of November 2015, Banerjee appeared openly with Jamaat at a large public rally in Kolkata (Ali 2015)."

"One story men and women both told me repeatedly involved abductions of young Hindu women in Bangladesh. They might be walking by the road or on their way to school when groups of Muslims would force them into vehicles, carry them off, and then rape them. (224)"

"Brutalized and penniless, the refugees fled to the world's largest Hindu country right next door. But the area bordering Bangladesh, West Bengal, has had a communist governemntn since 1977 and offered no succor. Rigid atheists, the communists reject any bonds of faith in favor of their internationalist goals and have thrown their lot in with the Islamists. VPA victims have been put in camps then sent on forced marches when the government decided to seize the land. The West Bengal Stalinists refuse to recognize them as refugees or give them any legal standing, though many of them have been living there for decades. It also hast turned a blind eye to cross-border attacks and further Muslim atrocities."

"Rabindra Ghosh, I said " has extensive evidence that there are Members of Parliament heavily involved in stealing land from Hindus, and even in rapes and other atrocities. You know what your enemies think of you as you sit next to them smiling? 'We can steal their land, rape their daughters and sisters, and just give them a few Taka.'" (xiii)"