Politics and Current
A white South African man convicted of attacking and killing 39 black people during the apartheid era has died days after admitting police involvement in his crimes.
A former white South African security guard who confessed to killing dozens of black people during apartheid has died. BBC News claimed that police officers were complicit in his reign of terror, is dead.
In a series of chilling interviews given to a British television station just every week before his death, 72-year-old Louis Van Schoor revealed that law enforcement officers were deeply involved in his crimes and should share the blame for 39 killings he confessed to while working as a security guard in the late Eighties.
Van Schoor died of sepsis brought on by a leg infection. Families of his victims still want justice. “He made it out alive!” Marlene Mvumbi said whose brother was amongst the victims. “I hope they continue to reopen these cases. The families deserve justice. We got nothing and the pain is still the same”
All his victims were black.
Van Schoor didn’t name any names in the report, and there is no such thing as a direct confirmation of his claims about the involvement of South African police officers, who were notorious for his or her brutal methods of suppressing activism and enforcing racial segregation during the apartheid era.
Despite confessing to committing at the very least 39 murders, Van Schoor was convicted of just seven murders and sentenced to greater than 90 years in prison.
However, a judge allowed the sentences to be served concurrently, resulting in his early release on parole in 2004 after serving just 12 years of his sentence.
The station’s investigation into Van Schoor goals to get to the bottom of the case and explain why South African authorities have yet to elucidate why his killings weren’t reassessed after the end of apartheid.
During questioning, the former policeman insisted he never intended to “kill black people” and denied being a racist, although he admitted that he found the persecution of black people “exciting.”
Before becoming a security guard in 1986, Van Schoor spent 12 years with the East London Police, where he worked with “attack dogs” to trace down and arrest mostly black protesters and criminals. He compared his job to “hunting, but a different kind,” the BBC reports.
Van Schoor, once a robust and brutal man, now uses a wheelchair after having each legs amputated, a shadow of the ruthless figure he was 40 years ago, when he was generally known as the “Apartheid Killer.”
In time, Van Schoor has turn into a vagabond figure, old and frail, stooped over with an untidy, gray beard. He is unapproachable, lonely, and has no friends to talk of.
Many of his teeth rotted and fell out years ago, and his face is lined with wrinkles from years of smoking and sleepless nights.
A recent heart attack also left its mark.
But unlike many of the people he shot, Van Schoor is alive and respiration.
His wrinkled clothes, like his house, reek of cigarettes, a continuing reminder of his declining health and befitting the dark past that also weighs on his mind.
Speaking to the BBC, Van Schoor attempted to lighten the mood by telling a disturbing joke about his decision to stay conscious during an operation to amputate his legs reasonably than undergo anaesthesia – in a way bragging about his endurance.
“I was curious,” he laughed enthusiastically. “I saw them cutting… cutting the bone.”
His voice trailed off. No one else found it funny.
Van Schoor’s face became serious again as he tried to persuade BBC reporter Charlie Northcott that he was “not the monster people think he is”.
In the Eighties, Louis Van Schoor carried out a series of assassinations that left 39 people dead over a three-year period. At the same time, South Africa was under a brutal apartheid regime that enforced a racial hierarchy and brutally oppressed blacks in favor of whites.
Van Schoor’s quite a few murders put him in line with some of America’s most notorious serial killers, including Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Gary Ridgeway, generally known as the Green River Killer — all of whom were chargeable for at the very least 30 murders.
The only noticeable difference was that each one of Van Schoor’s victims were black, the youngest being just 12 years old.
The murders took place in the rugged, windy city of East London, a once-poor area in the Eastern Cape where many residents lived in slums.
Working as a security guard at greater than 70 percent of the city’s white-owned businesses, including restaurants, stores, factories, and schools, Van Schoor had the perfect cover to murder with impunity in the name of maintaining a racist system.
“He was a kind of killer-avenger. He was a Dirty Harry character,” says Isa Jacobson, a South African journalist and filmmaker who spent 20 years investigating Van Schoor’s crimes.
When he was finally caught, Van Schoor claimed that everybody he killed was a “criminal” he caught red-handed in the act of burglary.
“These were intruders who were, in many cases, very desperate. They were going through the bins, maybe stealing a little food… petty criminals,” he said ruthlessly during the interview.
He never admitted that under South African law at the time, crimes of this sort weren’t punishable by death.
Van Schoor said he sometimes carried out multiple killings in a single night, spreading terror through the black community of East London. There were rumours of a bearded man, known in Xhosa as “Whiskers,” who made people disappear after dark. But his murders weren’t carried out in secret.
From 1986 to 1989, Van Schoor personally reported every homicide to the police.
However, the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 initiated a major change in South Africa that led to the end of apartheid and the transition to democracy.
Pressure from activists and journalists led to Van Schoor’s arrest in 1991.
Van Schoor’s trial, which featured a big number of witnesses and relied on extensive forensic evidence, ended in failure as a result of the continuing influence of the apartheid system on the justice system.
Police still classify Van Schoor’s remaining 32 killings as “justifiable homicides” as a result of apartheid-era laws that allowed the use of lethal force against resisting or fleeing intruders. Van Schoor used this defense to prove his innocence, claiming his victims were attempting to escape when he shot them.
The BBC investigation, led by Jacobson, examined old police reports, autopsies and witness statements to forged doubt on Van Schoor’s “justified” shootings. Jacobson spent years digging through scattered and hidden files in Eastern Cape towns to uncover the truth.
“The whole scale of it is just mesmerizing,” Jacobson told the BBC. “It’s astonishing that any court could allow this to happen.”
Among the most shocking evidence Jacobson uncovered were survivor testimonies that contradicted Van Schoor’s claims. Wounded victims described being shot while their hands were raised in give up, or that Van Schoor taunted them before being shot. One survivor recounted asking for water after being shot, only to have Van Schoor kick him in the wound.
His weapon was a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, often loaded with hollow-point bullets to inflict serious injury on his victims. In one case, he fired eight shots at an unarmed man.
In one other case in which the victim survived, Van Schoor shot and killed a 14-year-old boy who broke right into a restaurant for change. The boy said he hid in a restroom when he saw Van Schoor but got here out when a security guard cornered him and ordered him to face against a wall, then fired multiple shots at him.
“He told me to get up but I couldn’t,” the teenager said in his recorded statement, based on the BBC. “While I was lying there, he kicked me in the mouth. He picked me up and put me on the table and then he shot me again.”
Despite his account, the boy’s allegations were dismissed, and he was charged with breaking and entering. Many other young black men and boys who reported being attacked and shot by Van Schoor were met with similar skepticism.
Incredibly, the judge presiding over Van Schoor’s trial dismissed damaging testimony, calling the witnesses “unsophisticated” and “unreliable.” There aren’t any juries in South Africa, so the judge’s decision is final.
Van Schoor’s trial sparked a deep divide, with many in East London’s white community supporting him and even promoting him with bumper stickers depicting his image and the slogan “I Love Louis” surrounded by bullet holes.
Police can reopen Van Schoor’s case at any time and review his so-called “justified” shootings because there is no such thing as a statute of limitations under South African law for prosecuting murder or attempted murder.
“Louis Van Schoor just went out and murdered people for sport,” said Dominic Jones, a journalist who helped raise awareness about the corrupt vigilante at the time of the killings.
Van Schoor was a complicated angel of death—he had it set to receive notifications at any time when a silent alarm went off at the businesses he protected, giving him a way of where an intruder was so he could confront him single-handedly.
“I was barefoot. It’s quiet. You don’t have your shoes squeaking on the tiles and stuff like that,” he said.
Van Schoor used night to his advantage while filming his crime scenes. He would sneak up on his victims from the shadows, avoid the lights, and navigate the darkness by counting on his sense of smell.
“If someone breaks in, adrenaline gives off an odor. And you can smell it,” he told the station.
(*39*)This article was originally published on : atlantablackstar.com
WASHINGTON (AP) — When the Rev. Lee Scott publicly endorsed Kamala Harris for president during an Aug. 14 Zoom call of evangelicals for Harris, the Presbyterian pastor and farmer said he was taking a risk.
“The easiest thing we could do this year would be to keep our heads down, go to the polls, keep our vote a secret and mind our own business,” Scott told the group, which organizers said drew about 3,200 viewers. “But right now, I just can’t do that.”
Scott lives in Butler, Pennsylvania, the identical town where the potential killer was staying. shot former President Donald Trump in July. Scott told the Associated Press that the attack and its aftermath impact on his community prompted him to talk out against Trump and the “vitriolic” and “acceptable violence” he delivered to politics.
Trump maintained strong support amongst white evangelical voters. About 8 in 10 white evangelical voters voted for him in 2020, based on AP VoteForged, a survey of the electorate. But a small and diverse coalition of evangelicals is seeking to lure their coreligionists away from the previous president by offering not only an alternate candidate to support but additionally an alternate vision of their faith.
“I’m tired of watching meanness, bigotry and recreational cruelty being the global witness to our faith,” Scott said in the course of the conversation. “I want transformation, and transformation is risky business.”
Exploiting Cracks in Trump’s Evangelical Base
Trump was very courteous white conservative evangelicals since he got here onto the political scene almost a decade ago. Now he’s selling Trump-themed Biblespersuading overturning Roe v. Wade and he begged Christians to steer him to vote.
Some evangelicals, nonetheless, have seized on alleged cracks in his political allegiances to further distance themselves from the previous president, especially as Trump and his deputies I used to be hesitant whether he would do it sign a federal abortion ban should develop into president.
The Rev. Dwight McKissic, a Baptist pastor from Texas who weighed in on the evangelicals’ call to support Harris, said he saw “no moral superiority of one party over the other,” citing the Republican Party’s decision to “abandon its commitment to banning abortion through a constitutional amendment” and soften its stance on same-sex marriage in its platform.
McKissic said that while he has historically voted Republican, he’ll vote for Harris because he believes she has stronger character and qualifications.
“I certainly disagree with her on all policy issues,” said Scott, who identifies as an evangelical and is ordained within the mainline Presbyterian Church in the usA. “I’m pro-life. I’m anti-abortion. But at the same time, she has a pro-family platform,” citing Harris’ education policies and promise extend child tax relief.
Grassroots groups like Evangelicals for Harris are hoping to persuade like-minded evangelicals to support Harris relatively than vote for Trump or not vote in any respect.
With modest funding in 2020, the group, formerly generally known as Evangelicals for Biden, has been targeting evangelical voters in swing states. This election, the Rev. Jim Ball, the organization’s president, said they’re expanding and plan to spend $1 million on targeted ads.
While white evangelicals overwhelmingly vote Republican, not all evangelicals are GOP protected bets, and in a closely contested race, every vote counts.
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In 2020, Biden won amongst about 2 in 10 white evangelical voters but fared higher amongst evangelicals overall, based on AP VoteForged, winning a couple of third of that group. A September AP-NORC poll found that about 6 in 10 Americans who discover as “born again” or “evangelical” have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Harris, but a couple of third have a positive view of her. A majority — about 8 in 10 — of white evangelicals have an unfavorable view of Harris.
The same group, Vote Common Good, led by progressive evangelical pastor Doug Pagitt, has a straightforward message: political identity and spiritual identity usually are not related.
“There’s a whole group that felt very uncomfortable voting for Trump,” Pagitt said. “We’re not trying to change their minds. We’re trying to work with them once they change their minds to act on that change.”
Working with the campaign
In August, the Harris campaign hired Rev. Jen Butler, a Presbyterian minister (USA) and veteran faith organizer, to steer faith outreach.
Butler told the AP she has been in contact with evangelicals for Harris. With lower than two months until Election Day, she wants to make use of the facility of grassroots groups to quickly engage much more voters of the religion.
“We want to mobilize our voters, and we think we have real potential to reach people who have voted Republican in the past,” Butler said.
They deal with black and Latino evangelicals, especially in key swing states. They reach out to Catholics and mainline Protestants within the Rust Belt and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Arizona and Nevada. Butler’s colleagues work with Jewish and Muslim constituencies.
Catholics for Harris and Interfaith for Harris are each within the works. Mainstream Protestant groups like Black Church PAC and Christians for Kamala are also campaigning on behalf of the vice chairman.
Butler, who was raised an evangelical in Georgia, said Harris’ campaign could find common ground with evangelicals, especially suburban evangelicals.
“There are a whole range of issues that they care about,” she said, citing compassionate approaches to immigration and abortion. “They know that the way to solve any pro-life issues is to really support women.”
Hard sell
Even for evangelicals who dislike Trump, supporting the Democrat could also be difficult.
Russell Jeong, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and a speaker on the Evangelicals for Harris rally, told the AP that the group “doesn’t agree with everything Harris stands for” and that evangelicals can “hold the party accountable by getting involved.”
Other participants within the conversation noted that they’d use their voices to pressure Harris on issues they disagree with. Latinx evangelical activist Sandra Maria Van Opstal said she would push for a possible Harris administration “to better address the Palestinian-Israeli relationship, as well as immigration.”
Soong-Chan Rah, a professor of evangelism at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, describes himself as a nonpartisan progressive evangelical and a “prophet speaking to broken systems.” Although he has never endorsed a candidate before, he said the stakes on this election are so high that he desires to throw his public support behind Harris.
“Not only do I find this candidate, Trump, disgusting and repulsive,” Rah said, “but it’s so extreme that I want to support his opposition.”
Yet the chorus of evangelicals who find voting for Democrats unacceptable stays loud.
Pro-Trump evangelical cult leader Sean Feucht ridiculed the existence of pro-Harris evangelicals on X: “HERETICS FOR HARRIS rings so much truer!”
The Rev. Franklin Graham, a longtime Trump supporter, took issue with one in every of the group’s ads and its use of footage of his late father, the Rev. Billy Graham. “Liberals are using everything they can to promote candidate Harris,” he wrote on his public Facebook page, which has 10 million followers.
Imagining a New Gospel Identity
But the project of supporting democratic evangelical voters goes beyond partisan politics. It goes to the guts of what evangelicalism means.
The term “evangelical” itself is loaded with meaning and has develop into synonymous with the Republican Party, said Ryan Burge, a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University.
“Most people are probably evangelical theologically,” Burge said, “but they don’t get that word because they don’t vote for Trump or they’re moderate or liberal.”
Evangelicalism has historically referred to Christians who hold conservative theological beliefs about issues comparable to the meaning of the Bible and being born again. However, this has modified because the term has develop into more related to Republican Party voters.
Many imagine that evangelicalism must be defined primarily along racial and sociopolitical lines, and by endorsing Harris, Rah hopes to “show that there are other voices in the church besides the religious right and Trump evangelicals.”
Latasha Morrison, a speaker on the Harris Zoom evangelical conference, told the AP that as a black woman, “I never identified with the word ‘evangelical’ until I started attending predominantly white churches.”
For years, her anti-abortion views led her to vote Republican, but now the Christian writer and variety coach says, “I believe women and children have a better chance under the Harris administration than they did under the Trump administration.”
Ball, an organizer of Evangelicals for Harris, doesn’t intend to “tell people whether they’re evangelical” or not.
“Diversity is our strength. We are not looking for total unanimity. We are looking for unity,” Ball said. “We can be united as long as we have differences.”
Courtesy of Kendall Bessent
What does visibility appear to be? Growing up in Ethiopia, SheaMoisture Grant– Filmmaker and artist Herrana Adisu’s work is devoted to shedding light on women in conflict and sweetness standards in her home country. This can also be the case in her latest film, supported by Tina Knowles. “[River is] “It’s a story that I’ve been writing in my head my whole life because it’s the foundation of my life and my livelihood as a child,” Adisu tells ESSENCE.
After winning the Blueprint Grant last August, SheaMoisture has taken on the role of a creative agency Chucha Studio to provide a movie that might bring to life a narrative that the black community could relate to. Focusing on culturally and politically sensitive topics—from access to water and education to ancestral lessons, forced marriages, and sweetness standards—Adisu took the funds back to Ethiopia (to work with a neighborhood production house Dog Movies) tell her story.
“I wanted the film to have these complicated conversations that we don’t always have in this day and age,” she says. For example, Ethiopian stick-and-poke tattooing (often known as “Niksat”) is a standard tradition that runs through each of her pieces. “Growing up, I always thought it was beautiful,” she says. “But there’s a certain reluctance to do it, because a lot of women don’t feel like they’re consenting to have a permanent tattoo.”
Referencing cultural and traditional views of beauty, she cites spiritual icons of black hair within the church as a central theme. “Our old Bibles and paintings that I grew up seeing are of black angels and they have mini afros,” says Adisu, who placed them on the actors alongside cornrows, scarves and hairstyles. “My blackness was so obvious to me that I wanted to show that in the film as well.”
But as an artist, she also embodies the sweetness she captures. After shooting in Ethiopia, Adisu returned to New York to take part in the series alongside .[Photographer] Kendall Bessant I had the thought to check my limits in doing this cone on my head,” she says. “It’s very easy to push those limits to a certain extent whenever you’re behind the lens after which in front of it.”
In one photo, she props her chin on a jewellery stand, her hair bouffant, and in one other, her curls are in front of a riverscape, alluding to the source of life within the film. “Water flows in the global South, especially in the rivers of Utopia, are very important not only in rural communities but also in urban ones,” she says.
But the river can also be a source of vulnerability for girls, who’re exposed to violence, kidnapping and trafficking as they carry water. “I thought that was a powerful catalyst that brought the whole aspect of the film together.”
Politics and Current
A fight broke out in Kansas College Town after a man wrote “Fuck you, bitch” on a receipt instead of leaving a tip.
Racial slurs scrawled on a bill at a Lawrence, Kansas, bar led to a drunken brawl that spilled into the road and ended with several people behind bars, in line with police.
The violent incident occurred Sept. 15 at Leroy’s Tavern on New Hampshire Street, where a customer wrote “F—k You Ni—r” on his receipt and left it with the bartender.
Authorities haven’t yet identified a man who wrote a hateful message after cashing a $39 bar tab and, worse, wrote “0.00” in the tip box.
Police didn’t say what prompted the man to put in writing the “N” word, not once, but twice, on the banknote, whose time stamp showed 12:16 a.m. on September 15.
The card doesn’t indicate what number of drinks the man had.
He was still contained in the venue when the bartender finally noticed the offensive message and immediately called security to ask him to go away.
Instead of staying calm, the man became aggressive.
As he was being led out of the constructing, the attacker turned and punched the goalkeeper who caught him, According to Facebook post posted by Lawrence Kansas Police.
Then several bystanders stepped into motion.
Fists flew in the air before the normally quiet college town that was home to the University of Kansas erupted into a full-blown firestorm. Bars like Leroy’s lined the streets just off campus.
When officers arrived, several men were still involved in the fight they usually handcuffed them, restoring calm.
Three people were taken into custody, but police didn’t reveal the identities of the suspects.
The police didn’t say whether KU students were involved in the incident.
It is unclear whether the man who began the fight was amongst those arrested.
Multiple injuries were noted as evidence, but their extent was not immediately revealed.
The investigation remains to be ongoing, but police haven’t revealed what charges the man may face.
Authorities later released a photo of the receipt, which didn’t contain any offensive language or racial slurs.
Facebook commenters focused heavily on the race aspect of the problem, with many noting that closeted racists feel more empowered in today’s tense and divisive political climate.
“The fact that people are so comfortable being racist again is truly heartbreaking. Where has the shame gone? People are clearly starting to lose all sense of humanity,” one person wrote.
Facebook user Ben Porter reminded others in the thread that “this kind of thing didn’t just end and start again recently like people seem to think here. This kind of thing has always happened to some extent. We’re just looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses and acting like it’s gotten worse.”
Another person criticized Lawrence police for not taking a strong stance on racism in a Facebook post, arguing that a clearer condemnation was needed.
“I’m not sure what the point of showing this ignorance is, especially if you don’t condemn it in a post?” wrote Justin Adams. “As public officials, I think it’s reasonable to say that we will not tolerate hate in any form in our community.”
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