dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Two ‘Snowden refugees’ land in Canada amid calls to help others who sheltered whistleblower

Canada has granted asylum to two of the people who housed whistleblower and U.S. fugitive Edward Snowden in Hong Kong, but is facing calls to take in the other five “Snowden refugees” whose Canadian asylum claims remain in bureaucratic limbo.

Vanessa Rodel and her seven-year-old daughter, Keana Nihinsa, arrived at Toronto Pearson International Airport Monday night after a flight from Hong Kong. The Filipino refugees will make their way to Montreal Tuesday, where they will settle into their new lives with the support of a non-profit group that privately sponsored them to come to Canada.

Robert Tibbo, a Canadian lawyer, represents the Rodels and the five other Snowden refugees. He is urging the Liberal government to provide refuge to the other five people, who are of Sri Lankan origin and who sheltered Mr. Snowden in Hong Kong.

In 2013, Mr. Snowden was on the run and landed in Hong Kong after leaking classified information about the U.S. National Security Agency’s programs, which collected private information on millions of people. Mr. Snowden soon fled Hong Kong but was stopped in Russia, where his passport was confiscated. He was granted asylum by the Russian government and remains there today.

“They all helped out on something extraordinary in helping Mr. Snowden, making their decisions of conscience to provide him shelter, humanity and empathy," Mr. Tibbo said.

“It’s a bit like their bond [as a group] is now broken … It’s been broken by Canada."

In a tweet Monday, Mr. Snowden also called on the Canadian government to resettle all of the asylum claimants who housed him in Hong Kong.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-snowden-refugees-to-resettle-in-canada/

Apple-backed Southern Poverty Law Center wracked in turmoil, called a ‘con’ for ‘bilking gullible liberals’

In August 2017, following the Charlottesville riots, Apple made a contribution of $1 million to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Apple also matched two-for-one employees’ donations to the Southern Poverty Law Center through September 30th of that year and had Apple’s iTunes Store offer visitors a way to donate to the SPLC.

In a letter to employees in August 2017, explaining Apple Inc.’s contribution, CEO Tim Cook wrote:

Apple will be making contributions of $1 million each to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. We will also match two-for-one our employees’ donations to these and several other human rights groups, between now and September 30. In the coming days, iTunes will offer users an easy way to join us in directly supporting the work of the SPLC. Dr. Martin Luther King said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.” So, we will continue to speak up. These have been dark days, but I remain as optimistic as ever that the future is bright. Apple can and will play an important role in bringing about positive change. – Apple CEO Tim Cook in a letter to employees, August 2017

Uh, yeah. Aging well, Cook’s missive hasn’t:

“In the days since the stunning dismissal of Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on March 14th, I’ve been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C. colleagues and I used to tell to keep ourselves sane,” Bob Moser reports for The New Yorker. “Walking to lunch past the center’s Maya Lin–designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs, we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King, Jr., etched into the black marble — ‘Until justice rolls down like waters’ — and intone, in our deepest voices, ‘Until justice rolls down like dollars.'”

“The first surprise was the office itself. On a hill in downtown Montgomery, down the street from both Jefferson Davis’s Confederate White House and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where M.L.K. preached and organized, the center had recently built a massive modernist glass-and-steel structure that the social critic James Howard Kunstler would later liken to a ‘Darth Vader building’ that made social justice ‘look despotic.’ It was a cold place inside, too,” Moser reports. “But nothing was more uncomfortable than the racial dynamic that quickly became apparent: a fair number of what was then about a hundred employees were African-American, but almost all of them were administrative and support staff— ‘the help,’ one of my black colleagues said pointedly. The ‘professional staff’ — the lawyers, researchers, educators, public-relations officers, and fund-raisers — were almost exclusively white. Just two staffers, including me, were openly gay.”

http://macdailynews.com/2019/03/24/apple-backed-southern-poverty-law-center-wracked-in-turmoil-called-a-con-for-bilking-gullible-liberals/

>>5905492

SPLC Implodes: President And Legal Director Resign Amid Sexual Misconduct Scandal

The Southern Poverty Law Center - the "vicious left-wing attack dog" used by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon to identify "hate groups" - is unraveling.

A week after co-founder Morris Dees was ousted over sexual misconduct claims - with two dozen employees signing a letter of concern over "allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism," the head of the SPLC, Richard Cohen, as well as the organization's legal director, Rhonda Brownstein, resigned on Friday.

Cohen had been with the organization 33 years and was one of its most prominent figures.

At 5:03 p.m. Friday, Cohen sent a message to staff, with the subject line “Stepping Down,” announcing that he, too, would be leaving the organization that he and Dees had turned into a research and fundraising juggernaut.

“Whatever problems exist at the SPLC happened on my watch, so I take responsibility for them,” Cohen wrote, while asking the staff to avoid jumping to conclusions before the board completes an internal review of the Montgomery, Ala., organization’s work culture. -LA Times

Earlier this week, the SPLC board of directors appointed Michelle Obama's former chief of staff, Tina Tchen - who, in an unrelated matter, unsuccessfully tried to pull strings and have the Jussie Smollett case transferred from the Chicago PD to the FBI. Tchen is heading up the inquiry into the sexual misconduct claims.

Also out on Friday was Rhonda Brownstein - who had worked with the organization for nearly three decades, according to the Montgomery Advertiser's Melissa Brown.

Inside the SPLC "Scam"

As the Washington Examiner's Beckett Adams writes, the Southern Poverty Law Center is a "scam," which has taken " no care whatsoever for the reputational and personal harm it causes by lumping Christians and anti-extremist activists with actual neo-Nazis."

As it turns out, the SPLC is a cynical money-making scheme, according to a former staffer’s blistering tell-all, published this week in the New Yorker. The center’s chief goal is to bilk naive and wealthy donors who believe it's an earnest effort to combat bigotry.

The only thing worse than a snarling partisan activist is a slimy conman who merely pretends to be one. -Washington Examiner

"“Outside of work," recalls Bob Moser of his days working for the organization, "we spent a lot of time drinking and dishing in Montgomery bars and restaurants about … the hyperbolic fund-raising appeals, and the fact that, though the center claimed to be effective in fighting extremism, ‘hate’ always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous than ever, with each year’s report on hate groups. ‘The S.P.L.C.—making hate pay,’ we’d say."

"[I]t was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam," added Moser.

by Tyler Durden

Sat, 03/23/2019 - 21:55

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-23/splc-implodes-president-and-legal-director-resign-after-co-founder-ousted-over

(Pic Tina Tchen)