I recently wrote about Japan's Prime Minister Abe espousing an irresponsible and cowardly revisionism, denying that there was evidence that Japan exploited Asian women as "Comfort Women," a Japanese euphamism which basically means forced rape of women.

Well, I want to challenge Abe-san to face his accusers, who also are living evidence of what Japan did in WW II. And I challenge him to be a real man and admit the atrocities Japan did to these women and to do the right thing.

Abe-san, face these women:

To learn more, please read this from the Seuol Times, or here, or this wikipedia article.  read more »

Via Crooks & Liars. Not only is William Donohue, president of the extremist Catholic League, an anti-Semite, he is also apparently a racist:

DONOHUE: Look, just hold on here. You had your time. Look, the kid's a phony and here's why. I dealt with him earlier today on an MSNBC show, and I said we could hypothesize that there'd be a Columbia University ping-pong team made of Asians, and somebody goes out there and says "All gooks go home." So I — I asked him about my gook joke. And guess what? Andy's — Andy's sense of humor just collapsed. He found that offensive. You see what you are? You're a phony. You're a typical Ivy League little brat who thinks it's OK to dump on Catholics, but you don't like my gook joke. Now, what's wrong with a gook joke?

DONOHUE: Yes, like the gook joke!

(CROSSTALK)

DONAHUE: … "like an altar boy."

DONOHUE: What about the gook jokes? I want to know, why don't you have a sense of humor about gook jokes?

Should extremist hatemongers like this be tolerated in the mainstream media?  read more »

Several published reports - here's Norman Oder - indicate that Barclay's, the British bank recently in the news for sponsoring the Atlantic Yards arena, is sending out cease and desist letters to publications that have weighed in on the story.

We're still waiting, but here are a few thoughts. All correspondence should be addressed to editors – at – dailygotham – dot – com, by the way, just to be helpful. If we get something, we will publish it.

The bank asserts that it, contrary to published reports, had no connections to the slave trade, and that its founders were in fact abolitionists. There's no reason to doubt the latter assertion – Quakers, such as the founders of Barclay's, were in fact a driving force behind the early British abolitionist movement, which concluded in the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. The trade in slaves, which is at issue here, was banned by Act of Parliament in 1824; the Slave Trade Act banned the practice within the British Empire and, more importantly, was extra-territorial in its application, giving the Royal Navy the right to intercept slavers on the high seas. In consequence, the large-scale trade in slaves ceased, much to the annoyance, one might add, of the American slave states and their bankers on Wall Street.  read more »

New York State’s capital punishment law is in limbo, but the federal courts retain the power to put New Yorkers to death. And suddenly it’s looking like a trend. Just days after the sentencing of Ronell Wilson, a jury in Brooklyn's federal court convicted drug kingpin Kenneth McGriff of hiring hit men to murder his rivals. Prosecutors are expected to pursue the death penalty.

As the Albany Times-Union reports, Wilson's prosecutors may have been trying to make an end run around the New York Supreme Court's 2004 decision overturning the state's death penalty - "forum shopping," it's called. The United States of America will still strap a man down and put the needle in his arm, if New York won't. Of course, the Wilson jurors were New Yorkers, so let's not let ourselves too far off the hook here.  read more »

The New York Times had a deeply disturbing article in Sunday's Arts section. The article describes several exhibitions on Moses, and flowing from them, an effort to rehabilitate his name, which has since Robert Caro's The Power Broker never quite recovered.

“It could be that ‘The Power Broker’ was a reflection of its time: New York was in trouble and had been in decline for 15 years. Now, for a whole host of reasons, New York is entering a new time, a time of optimism, growth and revival that hasn’t been seen in half a century. And that causes us to look at our infrastructure.”

“A lot of big projects are on the table again, and it kind of suggests a Moses era without Moses,” added [Kenneth T. Jackson, a historian of New York City at Columbia who co-edited the exhibition catalog].

It's true enough that we have a new Moses era, but that requires us to precisely not forget his legacy. And that legacy is mixed. Robert Moses destroyed the South Bronx and built the Cross-Bronx Expressway. He built hundreds of playgrounds in Manhattan, only one of which – according to The Powerbroker, it was decorated with little brass monkeys playing – was north of 125th Street. Robert Moses segregated previously integrated neighborhoods. The parkways leading out to the open air, the ones he built while starving mass transit, feature pretty little bridges built so low that no buses can use them, cutting off the poor (read: the black) from this bounty. Robert Moses' racism permeates literally all he has done. Along the way, he engaged in staggering acts of corruption that would be impossible today, the best efforts of Joe Bruno and Efrain Gonzalez notwithstanding.  read more »