Colin Kaepernick explains protest of national anthem
SANTA CLARA, Ca. -- Forty Niners quarterback Colin Kaepernick has willingly and knowingly immersed himself into controversy by refusing to stand for the playing of the national anthem in protest of what he deems are wrongdoings against African Americans and minorities in the United States.
His latest refusal to stand for the anthem -- he has done this in at least one other preseason game -- came before the 49ers preseason loss to Green Bay at Levi's Stadium.
"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color," Kaepernick told NFL Media in an exclusive interview after the game against Green Bay. "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."
The 49ers issued this statement: "The national anthem is and always will be a special part of the pre-game ceremony. It is an opportunity to honor our country and reflect on the great liberties we are afforded as its citizens. In respecting such American principles as freedom of religion and freedom of expression, we recognize the right of an individual to choose and participate, or not, in our celebration of the national anthem."
By taking a stand for civil rights, Kaepernick, 28, joins other athletes, like the NBA's Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul, LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony and several WNBA players in using their platform and status to raise awareness to issues affecting minorities in the U.S.
However, refusal to support the American flag as a means to take a stand has brought incredible backlash before and likely will in this instance. The NBA's Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf of the Denver Nuggets, formerly Chris Jackson before converting to Islam, refused to acknowledge the flag in protest, citing similar reasons as Kaepernick and saying that it conflicted with some of his Islamic beliefs.
Abdul-Rauf drew the ire of fans and was briefly suspended by the NBA before a compromise was worked out between the league and player, who eventually stood with his teammates and coaches at the playing of the national anthem.
Kaepernick said that he is aware of what he is doing and that he knows it will not sit well with a lot of people, including the 49ers. He said that he did not inform the club or anyone affiliated with the team of his intentions to protest the national anthem.
"This is not something that I am going to run by anybody," he said. "I am not looking for approval. I have to stand up for people that are oppressed. ... If they take football away, my endorsements from me, I know that I stood up for what is right."
Kaepernick said that he has thought about going public with his feelings for a while but that "I felt that I needed to understand the situation better."
He said that he has discussed his feelings with his family and, after months of witnessing some of the civil unrest in the U.S., decided to be more active and involved in rights for black people. Kaepernick, who is biracial, was adopted and raised by white parents and siblings.
Kaepernick's Twitter feed is filled with civil rights Tweets and messages.
The former Super Bowl starting quarterback's decision to go public comes while he is fighting for his football life with the 49ers, who drafted him in the second round in 2011. He lost his starting job last season after being one of the most promising players in the NFL during his run under former coach Jim Harbaugh.
Over the past few months, his relationship with management has turned sour. He requested a trade last spring, which never came to fruition. He also has spent most of the offseason rehabilitating from operations to his left (non-throwing) shoulder, his hand and knee. That left him unable to fully compete with Blaine Gabbert for months and now, just weeks before the regular season starts, has him seemingly in a bind to regain his starting job.
He made his preseason debut against the Packers and played for the second quarter, completing two of six passes for 14 yards. He looked as rusty as you'd expect from someone who has not played since last November.
Following the game and without any knowledge of Kaepernick's non-football behavior, coach Chip Kelly said that there has never been any discussion about cutting Kaepernick.
Bill Whittle has a long history of promoting academic racism — and hits Barack Obama
Bill Whittle, a host for the National Rifle Association’s news outlet NRATV, claimed that the country’s first black president “set race relations back 100 years” with his administration, effectively comparing today’s America to a time when state-sanctioned segregation was permitted and lynchings were commonplace.
Whittle is the host of NRATV’s newest program, “Bill Whittle’s Hot Mic”, a show that supposedly focuses on “left-wing pop culture’s war on our freedom and rights,” but which routinely veers off topic to discuss race, with African-Americans bearing the brunt of the criticism. On his program, Whittle has repeatedly slammed Black Lives Matter for focusing on police brutality instead of “black-on-black homicide,” has claimed “90 percent or more of the racial problems that we have in this country are manufactured by the left,” and has accused both cities run by Democrats and mainstream news organizations of being racist.
Whittle has also made racially insensitive comments as a regular guest on NRATV’s news program “Stinchfield”. He previously called CNN’s Don Lemon a “miserable racist” against white people for noting that President Donald Trump sounds different when using a teleprompter, and he has claimed the country doesn’t need the Democratic Party because there is no “genuine black oppression as there was in the past.”
During the August 28 edition of Bill Whittle’s Hot Mic, Whittle claimed the goal of the Democratic Party over the last two decades has been “to take America, . . . divide it up into little tribes, and set the tribes at war against each other.” He went on to claim that the Obama presidency “set race relations back 100 years in this country”:
Bill Whittle (Host): Ladies, I want to talk to you about something real quick here. I had a friend who was talking about this today on camera. He said he watched a little clip of “All In The Family” last night and it was an episode where Lionel Jefferson had a girlfriend whose parents were mixed race or something. And he said you simply couldn’t air that show today, that episode of “All In The Family”, because it was so open, it was so honest about the discussion of these things. And it’s pretty clear to me that the entire job of the left over the last 20 years has been to take America, which is essentially unbeatable if it’s one country, divide it up into little tribes, and set the tribes at war against each other. And it seems to me that Barack Obama’s presidency set race relations back 100 years in this country.
Whittle also has a long history of promoting academic racism, including endorsing discredited theories that posit black people are intellectually inferior to other races, while appearing as a regular guest on “alt-right” commentator Stefan Molyneux’s YouTube channel. During interviews with Molyneux, Whittle described African-Americans who support the Democratic Party as literal slaves who prefer to remain in captivity because they can trade a willingness to commit voter fraud for welfare benefits. During one 2016 appearance, Whittle called inner city residents “unemployed and unemployable” and said that they should get jobs because a job “beats the laziness” out of people and “disciplines” them into “civility.” He also called then-President Barack Obama an “unqualified, unknown individual” who was elected “specifically and only because he is black” during a January 2016 appearance and said that by electing Obama, “we’re atoning for our slavery.”
Whittle’s comments should come as no surprise to viewers, as another NRA TV host recently suggested the Black Lives Matter movement is attempting to have white Americans “tortured and killed.” Besides the wild comments of their TV hosts, the NRA’s racial politics came under fire when there was an outcry for them to speak out about the killing of the legally armed Philando Castile.
MANILA (Reuters) - Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte told police on Monday they could kill “idiots” who violently resist arrest, two days after hundreds of people turned the funeral of a slain teenager into a protest against his deadly war on drugs.
Duterte met the parents of the schoolboy, 17-year-old Kian Loyd delos Santos, at the presidential palace in Manila on Monday, to assure them their son’s case would be handled fairly.
Delos Santos’ mother, Lorenza, said she was confident the president would help quickly resolve the case, while the father, Saldy, said he no longer feared for their lives and felt reassured by the meeting.
“He promised he would not allow those who have committed wrong to go unpunished,” the mother said in an interview posted online by Duterte’s communications office on a Facebook page after the meeting.
Duterte unleashed the anti-drugs war after taking office in June last year following an election campaign in which he vowed to use deadly force to wipe out crime and drugs.
Thousands of people have been killed and the violence has been criticized by much of the international community.
Domestic opposition has been largely muted but the killing of delos Santos by anti-drugs officers on Aug. 16 has sparked rare public outrage.
More than 1,000 people, including nuns, priests and hundreds of children, joined his funeral procession on Saturday, turning the march into one of the biggest protests yet against Duterte’s anti-drugs campaign.
Earlier, Duterte broke off midway through a prepared speech at the Hero’s Cemetery on the outskirts of Manila and addressed impromptu comments to Jovie Espenido, the police chief of a town in the south where the mayor was killed in an anti-drugs raid.
“Your duty requires you to overcome the resistance of the person you are arresting ... (if) he resists, and it is a violent one ... you are free to kill the idiots, that is my order to you,” Duterte told the police officer.
Duterte added that “murder and homicide and unlawful killings” were not allowed and that police had to uphold the rule of law while carrying out their duties.
Delos Santos was dragged by plain-clothes policemen to a dark, trash-filled alley in Manila before he was shot in the head and left next to a pigsty, according to witnesses whose accounts appeared to be backed up by CCTV footage.
Police say they acted in self defense after delos Santos opened fire on them, and Duterte’s spokesman and the justice minister have described the killing of the teenager as an “isolated” case.
U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Agnes Callamard, described the killing of delos Santos as "murder" in a tweet on Aug. 25, earning the ire of Duterte who in a separate speech on Monday called her "son of a bitch" and "stupid".
"She should not threaten me," Duterte said as he challenged Callamard to visit and see the situation in the Philippines.
A planned visit by Callamard in December was canceled because she refused to accept Duterte’s conditions that she must hold a debate with him. She turned up in unofficial capacity in May to address an academic conference on human rights.
Black Lives Matter protestors rally at home of officer involved in fatal shooting
Activists call for punishment in the shooting of David Jones outside officer's home in quiet Bustleton neighborhood.
Calling for justice in the recent, fatal police shooting of 30-year-old David Jones, a small group of Black Lives Matter protestors marched in the streets in front of the Bustleton home of the police officer who caused Jones’ untimely death.
The events unfolded at about 7 p.m. on Thursday, when a group of protestors began pasting “wanted” posters for Philadelphia Police officer Ryan Pownall on telephone poles near his home along Bridle Road in Northeast Philly.
The posters featured a photo of Pownall and claimed the officer was “wanted by the people of Philadelphia for the murder of David Jones.”
According to the police report on Jones’ death, he was fatally shot in the back by Pownall on June 8th after a scuffle over a gun in Jones' waistband.
Pownall had stopped Jones after seeing him riding a dirt bike erratically near the intersection of Whitaker and Hunting Park Avenues in Juniata Park, notes the report. An alleged witness to the shooting has claimed that he saw Jones' gun drop to the sidewalk before Jones ran and Pownall shot the fleeing Jones fatally in the back.
On Thursday, Black Lives Matter organizer, Asa Khalif led a group of about ten protestors in chants of “No justice, no peace, no racist police” and “We demand justice for David Jones,” as police vehicles quickly filled the block.
It was mere moments after the protestors placed their first “wanted” poster when law enforcement officials arrived en masse, creating a line of officers along the sidewalk, separating protestors from the home they had targeted.
“We want justice for his kids. We want justice for his family,” shouted Khalif. “We want justice or else we are going to keep going into your motherf***ing neighborhood.”
During the protest, local residents emerged from their homes. Some confronted the protestors, with one man even attempting to throw several signs that read “Black Lives Matter” into a plastic garbage bag.
He shouted “I saw trash and wanted to pick it up,” when officers on the scene stopped him and walked the man back towards his home.
Though the event was mostly peaceful, at times protestors clashed with residents in prolonged shouting matches. Police on hand seemed content to monitor the situation and make sure to keep the parties separate.
When asked to discuss the police response to the protest, officers on scene declined to comment to a Metro reporter.
At one point, someone in the crowd shouted that, if Khalif wanted to have his point heard, he should go directly to the mayor’s office.
Khalif replied that he had indeed done that.
In fact, he had, in recent weeks, stopped press conferences, marched on City Hall and stormed into the offices of the city’s managing director, Michael DiBerardinis, calling for Pownall to be arrested for Jones’ shooting.
Khalif replied that they had decided to come to Pownall’s home in a further effort to seek justice.
“[Police] come into our communities and we are flipping the script. We are coming to your neighborhood,” he said.
The investigation into Jones’ death is ongoing and is being handled by the Office of the Attorney General Josh Shapiro.
After about an hour, as the sun began to set, Khalif gathered his small group of activists and left for the evening.
“Black lives matter also,” said Khalif as he closed the rally. “When you kill someone, you should go to jail.”
No arrests were made. Mayor Jim Kenney praised the conduct of the police officers who, he said, "peacefully defused last night's event."
"There are many Philadelphians and officers who are productively working to build police-community trust, including pushing for transparency and reform which Commissioner Ross and I both agree must continue," Kenney said. "What happened last night did nothing to move those efforts forward."
Following the display, some locals seemed upset by the protest.
"This is a disgrace. Don't come to our neighborhood!" shounted one neighbor as Khalif's vehicle drove off. The man refused to share his name with a reporter.
Yet, others seemed to believe that it was everyone’s right to protest if they feel there has been an injustice.
Citing the fact that protestors promised to return to the neighborhood in the coming days, a neighbor of Pownall’s asked to remain anonymous, but he said that he could understand the protestors’ motivations.
“We live in a free country, so you should be able to voice your opinion,” said the neighbor. “But, my father was a cop and you show up at a guy’s house to express your opinion? I don’t know… That’s tough.”
Pownall was called a "racist, bigot pig cop" and Khalif said he has "a murderous spirit" referring to another shooting that the officer was involved. That 2010 shooting left Carnell Williams-Carney paralyzed when a bullet hit him in the back. The shooting was ruled justified and Williams-Carney lost a federal lawsuit against police.
Thursday's protest riled police union boss John McNesby. He called Khalif a "punk" who shoud've been arrested for protesting without a permit.
"I can't use the words I want," McNesby said Friday. "To take it to someone's house, a police officer's house, he doesn't have any respect."
"He's a two-bit punk who doesn't have the respect of decent protesters, if there is any in this city."
