The AP has now gotten around to realizing that the man accused for a string of stabbings in Flint Michigan and Virginia is a Palestinian Arab
The story says he is from a Christian Arab village, which may or may not mean he is a Christian, but that is a logical inference.
This is weird. I admit to a streak of paranoia, but my previous thread about Elias probably being a Palestinian has vanished. It isn’t in the database as “trashed” – it’s just gone.
Me thinks WordPress may have a security hole.
Never mind – it wasn’t a thread of its own, it was a comment on the Sugar thread.
I’m glad someone finally outed the media on this. I believe that the PC-driven media just hated to admit that this killer was an Arab, so they allowed audiences to believe he must be Jewish. Of course, there is NO anti-Jewish sentiment in Flint’s black community ready to be fanned into rabid hatred, is there?
I moved away from Flint in 1997, so my impression is quite old, and the place has deteriorated a LOT since then – Buick City is now just an empty lot overgrown with weeds. I think GM Parts Division may still have a warehouse and perhaps they are still making Chevy trucks there, but it is a shell of its former self.
Actually, the answer to your question is “No”. The “Why” requires a history lesson, so please bear with me. GM was an aggregation of a number of smaller car makers (the brands were originally independent companies). Flint was the headquarters of Buick. William Durant ran Buick and his company would become General Motors.
Following World War One, there was an intense labor shortage in the car making business. Ford and Durant (and other manfacturers in Chicago, Pittsburgh and other northern cities) looked to the Southern U.S. for labor to import to Michigan, including underemployed blacks in the South. The result was a thing called “The Great Northern Migration”
Durant and his associates – particularly Charles S Mott – realized that for his factories to run smoothly, it was imperitive that whites and blacks get along. The public schools were integrated, held night school classes to help the immigrants “catch up”, and made very conscious efforts to make it clear to everyone in the city that everyone was to be treated as an equal and no other attitude was acceptable. Flint was a city full of middle class blacks (similar to Atlanta), not an urban ghetto like the south side of Chicago.
The film Roger & Me contains lots of the history (with a significant Michael Moore bias) of just what an impressive place Flint once was. When I was working there, I was struck by how little racial friction there was (in contrast to Detroit where it was pervasive)
Eventually though the city drove enough business out of the city (through a city income tax and abuse of building inspectors, etc…) that areas of the city (particularly along the renamed MLK street) became havens for drug dealers and openly conducted daylight prostitution. The adjacent neighborhoods were still pretty much middle class -by that time a lot of GM retirees. The liberal do-gooders (Mott Foundation) kept pouring in money to try to solve the city’s problems, but to no benefit.
Flint is also noteworthy in that it was the site of the birth of the UAW when the unions finally broke the will of the company, and the rest is history.
Art, about that sugar … was anything, ah, dropped on it …?