The group wants to celebrate Hitler's birthday by marching through the Queen City's Over-The-Rhine community - ground zero for Cincinnati's 2001 rebellion which was sparked after Cincy police killed over a dozen Black men in five years.
Recognizing the provocative and potentially violent nature of the Nazi request, the city wants to find a legal way to move the march.
The police department initially granted the permit to march through predominantly black Over-the-Rhine, but City Manager Milton Dohoney Jr. on Friday revoked it and said the group would get a new permit only if organizers agreed to a new route – just three blocks along Central Parkway on the edge of downtown.That's right. Cincinnati's police department, well known for their love of Black people, granted the first permit. According to the Nazis, the ACLU may sue the city for revoking that license. The city also wants to send the Nazis a bill for the additional police needed to protect the white supremacist hatemongers.
Council members have been researching the possibility of using the “fighting words” exception to the First Amendment. The Constitution protects freedom of speech, but the U.S. Supreme Court has held as long ago as 1942 that some speech can be regulated. The court, in a 1942 case from New Hampshire, defined those unprotected words as those which “by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”
If the march, scheduled for April 20, does happen and police are needed, she said, the group should be billed. There’s precedent here for that – in 2000, the city billed the Ku Klux Klan more than $10,000 for the time spent by police officers in monitoring a cross the group erected on Fountain Square. The KKK, former councilwoman Alica Reece said, didn't pay the bill and “never came back.”Paul Hue will shout from the rooftops that these friends of his neighbors have a right to march through public streets and say anything hateful that they want to in front of Black people's homes.
(Of course, the Nazis don't march down Paul's street in a town where they would find willing supporters. Where's the fun in that?)
Paul will also claim that if Black people react to the Nazis' demonstration of hate with violence, then it is the Black people who are "uncivilized".
In Paul's world, the racist act of provoking a violent reaction is "civilized" and should be protected because though sticks and stones may break your bones, namecalling and defiant marches by organized paramilitary terrorist groups in front of your home will never hurt you.
P.S. Like Paul's non-racist hero Don Imus, the Nazis are against the war in Iraq. And they want to stop the spread of AIDS. Certainly their racism should be excused if they agree with Blacks on these issues, right Paul?
7 comments:
Nadir: My neighbors and yours are the same people. Tellingly, the only evidence that you have that even one of them supports the Nazis is by searching a website. No conduct by any of your neighbors, including cops, has demonstrated any anti-black racism, at least not which you have shared with me.
Yes, I consider it "uncivilized" for anybody to respond with violence to hate speech by Nazis, KKKers, NOIers, or anybody else; nor do I characterize such retaliatory, uncivilized violence "provocations", any more than I consider a rape to be "provoked" by revealing cloths.
I very much oppose the Supreme Court ruling that you celebrate here, along with many other poor rulings by that imperfect body.
What evidence have you found, Nadir, that a Nazi march in our neighborhood would draw hanky-waving supporters? Two things I am sure that such a group would want to draw:
1. Supporters.
2. Violent masses of opponents.
Where have these groups ever proven capable of drawing supporters in the past 50 years? It is clear to me that they only have the option of drawing violent masses of opponents, and thus pick spots to maximize that. They appear to have no option for drawing any supporters at all, much less any maximum show of supporters. Option 1 appears completely dead.
You are proposing that these groups are the firs in the history of the world to never attempt to have an assembly that draws supporters, despite their having sizable numbers of them. I believe that is preposterous, and that instead they are aiming for the only audience that they can get: angry opponents.
IMO, ignore them. Let them have their stupid, ignorant parade that nobody showed up for. By getting all bent out of shape over these morons you're giving them the publicity they crave. Ignore them and they'll just go away looking like the stoopid fools they are.
Nadir: The Nazis advocate a tyranny based on white supremacy. Their opposition to AIDS and views on the Iraq war and any other issues cannot rescue their damnation from hell (nor from my condemnation).
Imus, on the other hand, advocates zero public policies that I find reprehensible (I don't consider an immediate, 100% US troop pullout, or even impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney, as he advocates, to be reprehensible), and his deed under question here (calling a team of armature athletes "nappy headed hos", for which his apologized and promises not to do again), fails to meet my criteria of irredeemable reprehension (comparable to what the Nazis advocate).
But nice try attempting to hoist me with my own petard.
Six: Be cause essentially 0% of our population supports them, I think it would be counter-productive to even take the time to answer the utterances of the Nazis, or to protest them. That would, as you say, provide them the only form of attention that they can even hope to obtain. If this first line of opposition to them (ignoring them) does at some point fail, and if they start to attract an appreciable following, then I would join in protests against them, and take time to answer their vile.
"IMO, ignore them. Let them have their stupid, ignorant parade that nobody showed up for. By getting all bent out of shape over these morons you're giving them the publicity they crave. Ignore them and they'll just go away looking like the stoopid fools they are."
I'm sure you both would feel this way if they marched down your street in front of your houses.
Yes, if they marched down my street I would ignore them. I would either arrange to be away, or stay inside and pretend to not be at home. What could be worse for them than to isolate them with no audience? Certainly not thousands of angry people jeering them; that surely is not their greatest fear.
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