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Two resolutions condemning Islamophobia died quietly in the U.S. House of Representatives at the beginning of January, neither having made it out of committee. In their year-and-a-half lifespans, they drew only a few headlines, no debates on the House floor, no protests in the streets.
The next month there was no such silence in Canada.
The author of another anti-Islamophobia resolution stood before the House of Commons in Ottawa and read aloud a sampling of the thousands of bigoted messages and death threats she’d received online.
“We will burn down your mosques, draper head Muslim,” said one message read by Iqra Khalid, a member of the Liberal Party who represents an Ontario district. Khalid is a Muslim who was born in Pakistan and immigrated to Canada as a child.
“Kill her and be done with it,” read another message. “I agree, she is here to kill us. She is sick, and needs to be deported.”
“I’m not going to help them shoot you, I’m going to be there to film you on the ground crying,” said another.
The messages didn’t exactly feel like empty threats. Just a month before, a white supremacist had opened fire on a mosque in Quebec, killing six people praying there.
As she read the messages, Khalid politely replaced curse words by saying “blank.”
“Blank you gently with a chainsaw, you camel-humping terrorist incubator blank.”
“Shoot this blank.”
The horrifying messages, sent to Khalid after she introduced the M-103 resolution in the House of Commons, seemed to prove its premise: that anti-Muslim hate in Canada was real and scary, and that the government needed to take a stand.
M-103 called on all members of Parliament to condemn Islamophobia, collect information about hate crimes, and create a committee to investigate how best to combat religious discrimination in Canada. It was not a bill and did not create a new law.
Still, its introduction precipitated heated debates, with some Conservative Party lawmakers taking issue with the word “Islamophobia” itself and arguing that the resolution would somehow stifle free speech.
“If I think of myself, I am afraid that if ISIS jihadists came over, they might cut my head off and rape me. Is that Islamophobia?” Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu said. “I do not know.”
Gladu and other Conservatives pushed for a different resolution, one that condemned all forms of bigotry.
Khalid defined Islamophobia clearly for the House as “the irrational hate of Muslims that leads to discrimination.” Liberal MP Mélanie Joly, the minister of Canadian heritage, called the Conservatives’ new resolution “weakened and watered down.”
“The Conservatives have brought this motion forward in a cynical attempt to serve their political purposes and avoid addressing the real issue concerning Islamophobia,” Joly said.
Anti-Muslim websites were apoplectic over M-103, claiming that it would both criminalize criticism of Islam and lead to the implementation of Sharia law in Canada. Such falsehoods fueled tense anti-M-103 protests across the country.
Meanwhile, the press churned out over 1,000 news articles about the resolution in the space of just a few months, according to a search on Lexis-Nexis.
Finally, in March, the House of Commons, led by its Liberal majority, passed M-103 by a vote of 201 to 91. Although it was still just a nonbinding resolution, Khalid had accomplished something significant: a big, messy, very public discussion about Islamophobia in Canada.
That’s the discussion that former Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) wanted here in the United States.
Honda, who lost his bid for re-election in November, was a co-sponsor of House Resolution 569, which denounced “in the strongest terms the increase of hate speech, intimidation, violence, vandalism, arson, and other hate crimes targeted against mosques, Muslims, or those perceived to be Muslim.”
He chose to sponsor the resolution out of personal experience. He and his family were among some 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry incarcerated in so-called internment camps during World War II, where they lived behind barbed wire under the watch of armed guards.
Honda argued last year that what had happened to his family “could happen again” — this time to Muslim Americans, who were increasingly scapegoated and targeted for hateful speech in the wake of the 2015 terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California. Hate crimes against Muslims rose 67 percent in 2015. While the FBI hasn’t released hate crime statistics for 2016 yet, media reports show Muslims are still being targeted.
Honda was especially horrified in November, when Carl Higbie, a retired Navy SEAL and prominent surrogate for then President-elect Donald Trump, cited the World War II prison camps as “precedent” for a Muslim registry ― which was one of Trump’s campaign proposals.
The important lesson of his family’s story, Honda told The Huffington Post, is that “what they did to us was unconstitutional and they made it legal.” HR 569, he said, could have sparked “a debate about Islamophobia in the bright sunlight” ― like M-103 did in Canada ― and might have been a step toward defending Muslim Americans from future persecution.
Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) also had an anti-Islamophobia resolution ― HR 413 ― die in the House at the end of the last Congress. HR 413 sought to recognize and honor “the victims of hate crimes of Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.” It specifically cited nine murders of Muslims or those perceived to be Muslim in the five weeks after 9/11.
In a statement to HuffPost this week, Johnson said she wrote HR 413 as a rebuke to years of Islamophobic speech and government policy since the U.S. launched its “War on Terror.”
“A general climate of fear and anger toward Muslims and those who appear to be Muslim was fomented,” Johnson said. “Politicians kept using [such] terms as ‘Islamic jihadism’ in their speeches. This climate of fear has manifested itself for the past 16 years in institutional policies that view American Muslims as a threat. This climate of fear is unjust.”
She also said her Muslim constituents are worried.
“There is a vibrant, active Muslim community in my congressional district and not a day passes that I don’t hear from Muslim American constituents in North Texas about their concerns, fears or well-being for themselves or their families,” Johnson said.
Half of all resolutions introduced in the House of Representatives are never passed, many falling between the cracks during a busy legislative schedule. And the two anti-Islamophobia resolutions in the 114th Congress faced an especially uphill battle: They were introduced and sponsored by Democrats in a Republican-controlled chamber.
Still, resolutions condemning hate and violence against millions of Americans would seem like an easy “yes” vote for any member of Congress.
Robert McCaw, national government affairs director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, would put the blame in part on the rise of Trump.
“The fear among Republicans,” McCaw told HuffPost last year, “is that if they stand up to Islamophobia, they are going to be challenged by the 70 percent of the GOP that wants to ban Muslims entering the U.S.” ― another one of Trump’s campaign proposals. “There’s a lack of moral backbone in the Republican Party to stand up to Islamophobia and that’s what needs to be addressed,” he said.
The failure of the two resolutions to even get out of committee suggests how deeply anti-Muslim sentiment is entrenched in the House, with or without Trump. Among the committee members responsible for denying the resolutions a vote were three of the most Islamophobic congressmen: Reps. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), Steve King (R-Iowa) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).
Franks once endorsed a virulently anti-Muslim film titled “The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America” and spoke at a conference called “The Enemy of Freedom: Islam.”
Gohmert once claimed that Muslim terrorists were sending pregnant women to the U.S. to give birth to “future terrorists” who would “help destroy our way of life.”
And King ― who recently made headlines for tweeting a white nationalist message ― has said that the government should spy on mosques and that Muslims should have to renounce Sharia before entering the U.S.
“I don’t know if we as a nation are at the point yet where we’ll have a [Congress] condemning Islamophobia,” McCaw said this week. “America right now is facing its highest uptick of hate crimes in years, and we have a presidency unwilling to address its own anti-Muslim bias or the hate crimes happening on the streets,” he added.
While Canada transitioned from a Conservative government under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper to a Liberal one under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in its last federal election, America did essentially the opposite.
“The resolution in Canada addresses the systemic anti-Muslim bias that was seen to culminate in the Harper government,” McCaw said, “and under Trudeau’s leadership, the Canadian people are acknowledging the harmful effects of Islamophobia in their society.”
McCaw sees one bright spot in Congress with the April 5 passage of Senate Resolution 518, which condemns all hate crimes targeting “religious, racial, and ethnic minorities,” including Muslims. It also calls on federal law enforcement to expedite hate crime investigations.
“So while we haven’t seen individual resolutions singling out Islamophobia passing Congress, we have seen resolutions against all forms of hate,” he said.
If a measure like that can find bipartisan support and get adopted, McCaw said, maybe “there is hope” for other legislation to combat Islamophobia.
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), who co-sponsored HR 569 last year with Honda, told HuffPost recently that he plans to reintroduce that resolution sometime this year. Last month in his district, a Muslim family returned home to find a Quran destroyed and “FUCK MUSLIMS” written on the wall.
Rep. Johnson said she also plans to reintroduce HR 413 this year. Last month at the University of Texas in Dallas, a few miles from Johnson’s district, someone dumped Qurans in a campus toilet.
America does not do a good job of tracking incidents of hate and bias. We need your help to create a database of such incidents across the country, so we all know what’s going on. Tell us your story.
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A bill that could undermine science education in schools is moving through Oklahoma’s legislature ― again.
If the Oklahoma Science Education Act, which allows the state’s public school teachers to challenge scientific facts during classroom instruction, sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the seventh year in a row Sen. Josh Brecheen (R) has introduced some iteration of this bill.
The bill passed Thursday in the the House General Government Oversight and Accountability Committee after the House Common Education Committee declined to hear it. The bill, which already passed in the state’s Senate 34-10 last month, will proceed to the floor of the House for consideration.
The proposal seeks to create a classroom environment in which students “respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about controversial issues” and in which neither the State Board of Education nor any school district officials can prohibit public school teachers from “helping students understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.”
Critics of this bill and the six failed ones that came before it say the language is merely a backdoor attempt to let teachers inject science denialism into lessons about climate change, evolution and other hot-button subjects.
The bill “would allow science teachers to teach anything they pleased, while preventing responsible educational authorities from intervening,” the National Center for Science Education said in a press release Thursday. “No scientific topics are identified as controversial, but the main sponsor is [Brecheen], who introduced similar legislation that directly targeted evolution in previous legislative sessions.”
The Sierra Club’s Climate Parents organization and the social change network Credo Action have launched petitions that have gained traction against the bill.
“Parents want our kids to be innovators and problems solvers, and evidence-based science education is an essential prerequisite,” Climate Parents director Lisa Hoyos said in a press statement.
“We urge legislators to stand up for students, and their right to science education free of political interference, by rejecting this misguided ‘science miseducation’ bill.”
Brecheen did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the bill’s purpose.
It’s unclear how this bill would conflict with Oklahoma’s existing science education standards, which include lessons on both evolution and climate change.
Climate change has had a pronounced impact on the state. Temperatures in Oklahoma hit 100 degrees in the dead of winter early this year, and federal reports show that the increase in temperatures is changing crop growth cycles.
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Pope Francis washed and kissed the feet of 12 inmates at a maximum security prison for mafia turncoats on Thursday. The ceremony took place as part of the observances of Maundy Thursday, the Holy Thursday before Easter that commemorates the story of Jesus’ Last Supper.
In a powerful gesture of embrace, the pontiff knelt down before a group of nine men and three women, including one Muslim man, according to Reuters. The group included 10 Italians, one person from Albania and a prisoner from Francis’s native Argentina. The pope also celebrated a Mass for the 70 inmates at the prison, which is housed in a 16th century fortress south of Rome in Paliano, Italy.
The centuries-old tradition evokes the scene from Christian scripture in which Jesus washed the feet of his 12 disciples before he was crucified.
“If you can do something, a service for your companions in prison, do it,” Francis told the inmates during his homily. “This is love. This is like washing feet: to be the servant of others.”
The high-security prison primarily houses prisoners known as “collaborators of justice” ― former members of organized crime groups who have turned evidence over to the state to testify against other members.
The prison held turncoats from the Red Brigades guerrilla group during the 1980s and 1990s, Reuters reports, but now most of the “collaborators of justice” are former members of Italy’s three main organized crime groups ― the Cosa Nostra, the Camorra and the ‘Ndrangheta.
The Argentinian pope has spoken out against “the evil ways” of organized crime. In 2014, he officially excommunicated members of the Italian mafia, saying during a Mass in Calabria: “They are not with God, they are excommunicated.”
But the pontiff has also urged compassion for prisoners and other marginalized populations. In an interview with Italian newspaper La Reppublica published Thursday, he explained his reasoning for visiting inmates on Holy Thursday. “Some say: ‘They are guilty.’ I respond with Jesus’ words: ‘Whoever is not guilty, throw the first stone,’” he said, according to a translation from Crux. “Let’s look inside ourselves and we will come to see our own guilt. And then the heart will become more human.”
Two of the inmates who participated in the ritual foot-washing are serving life sentences, while the other 10 are due to be released between 2019 and 2073. Francis also visited two other inmates currently in solitary confinement, according to the Associated Press.
“The mercy of the good news can never be a false commiseration, one that leaves sinners in their misery without holding out a hand to lift them up and help them take a step in the direction of change,” the pope said in his Chrism Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica Thursday morning.
When the pope arrived at the Paliano prison Thursday afternoon, the inmates greeted him with crosses made from olive tree wood. They gifted him cakes, as well as zucchini, cucumbers and other produce from the prison’s organic garden, according to AP.
In previous years, Francis has observed Maundy Thursday by washing the feet of refugees, the elderly and people with disabilities. Shortly after his election as pope in 2013, the pontiff made waves by including women in his foot washing ceremony at a juvenile detention center.
Previous popes have held the Holy Thursday foot washing ceremony at the Vatican or in a Rome basilica, and they have reserved the ritual for Catholic men. Since his election, Francis has stressed the importance of going out to serve the poor, the sick and the imprisoned. In 2016, he officially decreed that women would be included in the ceremony going forward.
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David Dao, the passenger on the United Airlines flight who was violently dragged out of his seat by police on a plane Sunday, has suffered a broken nose and missing teeth.
He has also been compared to civil rights hero Rosa Parks.
On Tuesday, Dao’s lawyer Thomas Demetrio appeared on national TV and said he received an email that described Dao as the modern-day “Asian version of Rosa Parks.”
“Dr. Dao, I believe to his great credit, has come to understand that he is the guy, the guy to stand up for all passengers going forward,” Demetrio said.
Many on Twitter have criticized the comparison, saying Parks, who refused to be removed from her seat on a segregated bus during the height of the Jim Crow era, showed a form of defiance and experienced struggles that have absolutely no parallel to Dao’s experience.
Yes, Dao’s mistreatment is certainly something to be angry about, and yes, he deserves respect and justice. But we can understand and unpack his case without comparing it to the very specific and very pointed level of racial hate black people like Parks experienced ― and continue to experience.
Users on Twitter, many of them black, collectively weighed in to shut down the comparison and flatly label it offensive. Others even responded directly to USA Today’s tweet to slam the question they proposed: “Is United Airlines Passenger Dr. Dao an ‘Asian Version of Rosa Parks?’”
Read some of the reaction tweets below:
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A new gaming app is helping kids feel less frightened by hospitals. On Thursday, Toca Boca released Toca Life: Hospital, an app that gives children the opportunity the experience what happens in hospitals, from checking patients’ vitals to using tools like gurneys and wheelchairs to making diagnoses.
“Toca Life: Hospital gives kids unlimited space to discover the happenings of a busy medical center at their own pace, helping to increase their comfort level around hospitals,” Toca Boca play designer Petter Karlsson told The Huffington Post, adding that kids perceive hospitals in many ways ― from fun to thrilling to terrifying.
Karlsson said the app is like a “virtual dollhouse” with characters and equipment based on real-life hospitals. The activities put kids in control of the experience and help them develop positive associations with hospitals.
“Kids can experience welcoming newborn babies into the world and see how family members and medical staff love and care for tiny, swaddled babies,” he explained.
“They’ll also get to explore the operating room, discover the secret lab, stop by the waiting room, or grab a snack at the café,” he continued. “There is also a maternity unit with a fun ultrasound machine, garden to meditate and reflect, and a farewell room to say final goodbyes.”
The app developers visited hospitals and spoke with kids and medical professionals throughout the process of creating the app. In honor of the Toca Life: Hospital launch, some Toca Boca representatives visited Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn with photographer Marj Kleinman to observe and document how kids there have fun.
Kleinman is a photographer and children’s media consultant with a master’s degree in educational psychology. She brings that expertise to her vounteer work at Maimonides Medical Center and other hospitals.
“The children I’ve encountered at Maimonides have generally been incredibly resilient and hard at work at the childhood business of play,” Kleinman told HuffPost. “There are naturally moments of struggle, pain and boredom, but these kids wait for the playroom to open, request Wii machines in their rooms and ride wagons and IV poles around the halls.”
The photographer said she hopes people who see these photos understand the healing and motivating power of play, for both children and grownups.
“Although the hospital can be filled with unfamiliar and sometimes scary and upsetting situations, it’s a place where the business of childhood continues,” she explained. “Kids go to ‘hospital school’ with an on-site teacher and they engage in play and expressive arts, which leads to greater healing.”
Kleinman’s work appeared in a photo essay in Toca Magazine. Executive editor Ingrid Simone told HuffPost she believes the photos captured the value of playtime for kids and adults.
“One thing that stood out to me was that Marj connected with hospitalized kids through play and creativity, and also worked with them to share their own stories — all of which is in alignment with what we do in apps like Toca Life: Hospital,” said Simone.
Keep scrolling to see more photos of kids playing in the hospital and visit the Toca Boca website to check out the Toca Life: Hospital app.
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This week, the White House accused Russia of trying to cover up its knowledge of the Syrian chemical attack even as the Senate Intelligence Committee continued its investigation into whether members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the recent U.S. presidential election. Now Russia, which allegedly sought to favorably influence the election in Trump’s direction, is also denying knowledge about the chemical attack in Syria.
This is why the ploy and counterploy of “alternative facts” is so corrosive. It engenders paralyzing partisanship at home and provokes cold wars, if not something worse, abroad.
Writing from Moscow, Fyodor Lukyanov warns that Russia and the United States are not only back to their old and “normal” ways of confrontation, but could also clash militarily in Syria if the U.S. intervenes further. He is cynical about the impetus of the missile strike on a Syrian air base that boosted Trump’s presidential stature. “Having encountered challenges in implementing his domestic political agenda,” Lukyanov writes, “Trump decided to use foreign policy as an instrument for improving the political atmosphere around his administration.” Lukyanov further cautions against any perception that U.S. actions will force Russian President Vladimir Putin to rein in Syria’s President Bashar Assad: “For Trump, an agreement can only be reached from a position of strength. But for Putin, there can be no agreement under pressure. … If pressure keeps growing, Russia will respond in its own manner ― asymmetrically and sharply.”
Graham Fuller, a former CIA operative with long experience in the Middle East, sees only a quagmire if the U.S. succeeds in removing Assad from power. “A harsh peace under Assad would at least bring the war to an end,” he writes. But if there is regime change, he fears that “warring [extremist] factions would probably promote long-term sectarian cleansing and perpetuate a brutal civil conflict among themselves for years to come.”
The National Iranian American Council’s Trita Parsi argues that the U.S. missile strike last week will only lead the Assad regime and its Russian allies “to intensify their assault on the rebel strongholds and the civilians living in those areas. The end result will be a more intensified civil war with more civilian casualties and even greater difficulty for diplomatic efforts to bear fruit.”
Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former member of Iran’s National Security Council, also warns that Trump’s Syria strike portends even greater chaos and violence by returning to the U.S. penchant for unilateral military action. “America now stands at the precipice of another Middle Eastern war,” he writes, “one that promises to be even more of a quagmire than Iraq and will only serve to elongate the suffering of the Syrian people. The reality is that for Syria, there is no military solution ― only a political one. And Trump has sadly decided to pursue military action before giving diplomacy a chance.”
Tensions are growing in East Asia as well. Writing from South Korea, veteran diplomat David Straub fears the Trump administration’s “all options are on the table” threat against North Korea will only make matters worse. “Where the American threat is having a big impact is on its South Korean ally,” he writes. “The South Korean media now is full of concern that the Trump administration might actually launch a surprise attack on North Korea, as it just did against Syria.” He notes that South Korean progressives who are leading in the polls in upcoming elections “strongly favor unconditional negotiations and engagement with North Korea rather than, as the Trump administration wants, increasing pressure on Pyongyang.”
Writing from Hong Kong, Ankit Panda says that the summit between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping last week at Mar-a-Lago showed the U.S. and China to be only “near-peers” because the U.S. has a scope for military intervention well beyond China’s. “If this wasn’t a moment of humiliation for Xi with nationalistic audiences back home looking for signs of strength against a U.S. leader who had been vocal about pushing back against China,” Panda notes, “it was at least a moment of forced weakness.”
Greg Treverton, who recently stepped down as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which integrates information from America’s intelligence agencies, takes the long view of our evolving world order. He sees a “reemergence of geopolitics, especially as China and Russia turn to external adventures to shore up internal legitimacy; economic growth slowing or stagnating; individuals and small groups becoming more and more empowered; technology progressing at a dizzying and unequal pace across the globe; conflicts over values; and people becoming more and more disconnected from their governments.” One scenario he and others at NIC imagine emerging out of this constellation is a nuclear attack in South Asia, during which “artificial intelligence systems supporting the military decision makers [make] the crisis worse by misinterpreting signals meant to deter instead as signs of aggressive intent.” A “full nuclear exchange” is averted at the last moment by joint U.S. and Chinese intervention.
Writing from Manila, Richard Heydarian ponders the common characteristics between strongman leaders like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Narendra Modi in India and Vladimir Putin in Russia. Populists “have managed to firmly supplant the cold, calculating, rational-technocratic politicians across emerging market democracies,” he writes.
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EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at The Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost’s news coverage. Nick Robins-Early and Jesselyn Cook are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is World Social Media Editor.
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From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.
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There’s been a lot of talk about how HBO’s “Veep” will go about tackling its upcoming season.
The writers for the comedy show often sit around dreaming up the most ridiculous scenario that sits just outside to confines of D.C. reality. But considering how often the nation’s current political reality has leaned toward the absurd in the last year, where that line sits has become increasingly difficult to discern.
At least once already this year, reality has turned out to be exactly as ludicrous as the writers’ wildest imaginations.
“Veep” executive producer David Mandel revealed in a recent as-told-to in The Hollywood Reporter that the show had to pull a “golden shower” joke after it turned out that something very similar had shown up in a dossier that included unverified claims of a Donald Trump visit to Russia:
The only thing we did have to change — it sounds like a bad joke, but it’s true — was a “golden shower” joke in one of the episodes where someone is yelling at Jonah [Timothy Simons] about a golden shower. We hadn’t filmed it yet, and we realized, “Oh, we need to change that” [because of the Trump-Russia dossier]. Who knew we would literally have to change a “Veep” golden showers joke because of the real president of the United States of America? It doesn’t get any weirder than that.
This has been a problem in the past. A similar situation developed last season, except the moment made it into an episode. Timothy Simons, who plays the insufferable Jonah Ryan on the show, told The Huffington Post prior to the election last year that show writers thought a joke ― in which he accidentally salutes the crowd in a manner that would have made Hitler proud ― might be unbelievable. Cut to Trump being photographed doing just that in real life before the episode aired.
“That’s an example of, ‘What’s the dumbest thing a politician can do?’ And then a politician goes out and does it,” Simons said.
The issue, the writers believe, is that once something so absurd has happened in real life, it might seem stale months later on a comedy show. Tough times for political comedians. Tough times indeed.
Season 6 of “Veep” premieres on Sunday, April 16 at 10:30 p.m.
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For the second time this week, bystander video appears to show a white police officer stomping on a handcuffed black suspect’s head during an arrest.
Video shot in Georgia on Wednesday shows a Gwinnett County officer running toward a man lying handcuffed in an intersection. The officer, who is white, then appears to stomp on the black suspect’s head.
The Gwinnett County Police Department announced Thursday that the officer, three-year police veteran Robert McDonald, has been fired.
“What happened yesterday was clearly outside of state law and department policy,” the police department said in a statement announcing a criminal investigation into the arrest. “We do not tolerate actions that are not consistent with our core values or state law.”
The video, shared on Facebook by Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta, shows a second officer pull the man out of his car and roll him onto his stomach. The officer handcuffs the suspect and appears to take a step back, leaving the man lying face-down on the pavement. That’s when McDonald runs into the picture.
”The cell phone video is very disturbing and it speaks for itself,” the police department said in an earlier statement.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution identified the suspect as 21-year-old Demetrius Bryan Hollins of Lawrenceville.
Hollins was approached by reporters outside the county jail, where he was released on $7,500 bail. Video of his release shows him appearing to have injuries to his lip and nose that match a police mugshot showing his face bloodied.
“I wish this never happened to me,” Hollins told reporters in the company of his attorneys.
Hollins faces charges that include obstruction of a law enforcement officer, possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, failure to signal, having a broken brake light, operating with a suspended, canceled or revoked registration, and driving with a suspended or revoked license, according to jail records.
Defense attorney Justin Miller called McDonald’s firing “a good start.”
“We’re going to allow the Gwinnett County Police Department do their investigation and when we find out more, we’ll tell you more, but right now we want to get him to the hospital and get him checked out,” Miller said.
Police stopped Hollins’ vehicle because it didn’t have a license plate and changed lanes several times without using turn signals, according to a police report obtained by WXIA-TV.
The officer wrote in the report that Hollins was acting strangely and his vehicle smelled of marijuana. The officer said he recognized Hollins from a car stop and arrest last year for possessing marijuana and a loaded gun, and called for backup. He said Hollins yelled at him when asked who owned the vehicle, and refused to get out.
Meanwhile, in Columbus, Ohio, an investigation remains underway into an officer’s actions on Saturday that also were the subject of bystander video.
The video appears to show Officer Zachary Rosen, who is white, running up and stomping on a handcuffed black man’s head as another officer holds the suspect.
Two weeks earlier, a grand jury declined to indict Rosen in a deadly shooting of a black suspect last year.
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As president, Donald Trump has already hosted two world leaders for dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida instead of at the White House. But he might want to re-think what he serves with that chocolate cake.
The Mar-a-Lago Club was cited for its highest-ever number of health code violations in January, the Miami Herald reported.
Records from a routine inspection January 26 note 10 violations in all, including three deemed “high priority,” the most severe category. In coolers, foods like shrimp and burgers were found at temperatures up to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, much warmer than the required 41 degrees. A ham was stored at 57 degrees. And fish that was intended to be served raw had not undergone proper parasite destruction and needed to be cooked or thrown away immediately, inspectors said.
The number of violations was bigly for the property, but it’s not an uncommon number for a restaurant undergoing routine inspection, according to Stephen Lawson, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. A statement from Mar-a-Lago pointed out that all of the urgent violations were corrected on the same day they were found. As far as restaurants go, Mar-a-Lago’s inspection was relatively average.
But then again, when the Japanese prime minister is one of your upcoming dinner guests, one bad fish could really screw things up.
News of Mar-a-Lago’s inspection started trending after the Miami Herald dug up the report, which was made available on January 26. Less serious violations included a lack of hand-washing signage in a restroom and rust on freezer shelves. Lawson said diners have no cause to avoid the restaurant, which requires a $200,000 membership to enter.
We’ll stay away anyway, thanks.
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