Majorityrights News > Category: Activism

Cédric Herrou, arrested for smuggling migrants to his Alpine farm

Vice News, “On trial for helping migrants: French farmer faces charges for helping migrants cross the Italian border”, 5 Jan 2017:

A farmer in southern France who smuggled migrants across the country’s border with Italy is waiting to discover his sentence after being prosecuted this week for his actions.

Hailed a hero by many in Europe, denounced by others, 37-year-old Cédric Herrou estimates that so far he has helped more than 400 migrants stuck in Italy pass into France.

Herrou drove the migrants across the border in his van – the same van he uses to deliver eggs in his tiny Alpine village – deftly avoided police checkpoints using mountain lanes, and later provided shelter at his hilltop farm.

VICE News followed Herrou in the autumn, when he opened a temporary refuge housing 53 migrants in a derelict government building high in the Alps. With 15 people already at his home, he’d run out of space. Herrou was arrested just days later and on Wednesday went on trial in Nice for smuggling migrants.

The case typifies the region’s struggle to resolve the migrant crisis and the public disagreement over how to handle it; drawing hundreds of demonstrators sympathetic to his cause to the court steps.

Herrou is the most prominent member in a migrant-helping collective formed in the valley village of Breil-sur-Roya. Their activities are well-documented by the local press and – until the arrest – they were tolerated by authorities.

“It is dangerous,” he told us, shortly before he was detained. “I expect many people would want my arrest. But we are well organized… and the law is completely absurd, and stupid.”

More than 170,000 mostly African refugees and migrants reached Italy in 2016, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Many paid traffickers to pack them into trucks for the long drive across Libya and the Sahara. Almost all clambered aboard the now emblematic rusting vessels which risk disaster to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Italy. But very few intended to remain there.

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News Sentinel, “Horror of Christian/Newsom killings in focus: What happened on Chipman Street”

In one of Knoxville’s most horrific crimes, Channon Christian, 21, and boyfriend Christopher Newsom, 23, were carjacked, kidnapped, raped and slain in January 2007. Five suspects were identified. One was tried federally as an accessory. Four others were tried in Knox County Criminal Court.

A drug scandal involving the judge in those state court proceedings would upend the convictions against two of those suspects. New trials were held, the most recent of which occurred last week.

Through it all, details of the horrors this young couple suffered have eked out. But with each suspect pointing the finger of blame at the other and jurors limited by law in what they are allowed to know, the real story of what happened when the couple were taken hostage and ultimately slain has proved just as elusive as the court cases convoluted.

Setting the stage

The News Sentinel has covered this case since its beginning. With the aid of interviews, trial coverage and transcripts of each defendant’s statement to authorities, the newspaper can now offer up a snapshot of not only what happened to these two innocents but exactly who did what to them.

Chipman Street resident Lemaricus Davidson was broke and angry. His girlfriend, Daphne Sutton, had left him. He had no car and no way to earn money.

“Selling dope, that’s what I do,” Davidson would later tell law enforcement.

Law enforcers knew, however, that Davidson was not simply a drug dealer. He was on parole for carjacking and, in the days leading up to the abduction of Christian and Newsom, was suspected in a series of robberies.

In the days before the couple’s abduction, Davidson’s brother Letalvis Cobbins came to Knoxville from Kentucky to stay with him. He brought along friend George Thomas and girlfriend Vanessa Coleman.

None of the three had jobs, money or vehicles. Cobbins and Thomas were homeless. Coleman had a salt-of-the-earth family to turn to for help but chose not to.

Davidson grew increasingly angry over what he viewed as the freeloading of his brother and his guests. He turned that anger on Sutton. She left him on Jan. 5, 2007.

A day later, Davidson had concocted a plan to solve all his woes. He, with help from Cobbins and a buddy, Eric Boyd, would carjack someone. Cobbins insisted that he wasn’t happy with the idea.

“Me and my brother got to arguing because he said he was going to do some crazy (expletive),” Cobbins said in an interview with law enforcement. “He like, man, I’m fixing to go carjack somebody, man, try and get me some money.”

        Savaging the victims

       

Christian and Newsom disappeared Jan. 6, 2007, from the Washington Ridge apartments where Christian’s best friend lived.

Hours later, Newsom’s body was found alongside railroad tracks near Chipman Street in East Knoxville. He had been raped with an object and then shot three times. The final shot was delivered execution style. He had been gagged with a sock stuffed in his mouth. His ankles were bound with his own belt. His hands were secured behind his back. His face was wrapped in a bandanna. His head was covered with a sweatshirt tied around his neck with shoestrings.Forensic evidence showed that he had been raped in the final hours of his life. He was forced to walk barefoot to the railroad tracks that ran parallel to Chipman Street and shot in the neck and back. As Newsom lay paralyzed on the ground, the muzzle of a .22-caliber gun was placed against his covered head and fired. His body would later be wrapped up in a comforter, doused in gasoline and set afire.

Christian, meanwhile, was tied up inside the Chipman Street house of Davidson, a stranger to her. She was repeatedly raped orally, vaginally and rectally. At some point, she was savagely attacked in her genital region, either kicked or beaten with an object. She suffered two blows to the head and was dragged into the carpeted living room of Davidson’s Chipman Street home. Bleach was sprayed down her throat, an apparent effort to destroy DNA evidence. She was hogtied with strips of fabric from a bedding set. Still alive, her body was encased in black garbage bags and her head wrapped in a white plastic grocery bag. Christian was then stuffed inside a trash can and left to die, slowly suffocating.

       
        The house at 2316 Chipman St., Knoxville

Suspect Boyd has long denied any role in the couple’s abduction. With no forensic proof tying him to the crimes, authorities were left to prosecute him for hiding out Davidson after the slayings. He is serving an 18-year sentence as a result.

But his statement to authorities provides striking details of the carjacking, details he insisted came from Davidson, not his own memory.

Christian was angry with Newsom because he had tarried in picking her up for the birthday party of a friend. As she sat in the front seat of her Toyota 4-Runner parked outside, Newsom sought to set things right, hugging and kissing her as he stood just outside the driver’s side door.

The couple never saw Boyd cruise into the parking lot at Washington Ridge with passengers Davidson and Cobbins. An armed Boyd and Davidson jumped from the car, leaving Cobbins behind. At that point, the pair intended only to rob Christian and Newsom of the SUV. But as they approached the couple, guns drawn, headlights from another vehicle spooked them. They pushed the couple into the SUV.

Testimony has shown that Christian and Newsom were bound in the SUV with whatever cords the assailants could find. Newsom was forced facedown in the vehicle. A bound Christian was dumped onto his back.

With Davidson behind the wheel of Christian’s SUV and Cobbins trailing behind in a car Boyd had borrowed from his cousin, the crew headed back to Davidson’s Chipman Street home.

There was no doubt then that the couple would die.

“Two white people, white kids, this (expletive) fixing to get crazy, man, you know what I mean?” Cobbins said.

Davidson and his cohorts are black, the victims white. Racial differences have never been suggested as a motivator for what authorities view as a random carjacking.

The perpetrators were never charged with “hate crimes.”

Diversity Macht Frei, 5 Jan 2017:

               
Alex Cioni, leader del Comitato Prima Noi, condannato dal Tribunale di Vicenza a 5 giorni di galera e 1.310 euro di ammenda per manifestazione non autorizzata.

Virtually every day, when I read Italian patriot sites, I see stories about asylum seekers, mainly sub-Saharans, staging spontaneous demonstrations, blocking traffic, holding up hand-scrawled placards protesting about something or other, usually the quality of the food they are given. Usually I don’t even bother posting articles about these incidents here, because there are simply too many of them.

Sometimes the police divert traffic so the invaders can carry on their protests undisturbed; sometimes they talk to them and persuade them to return to their accommodation; they almost never arrest them unless the invaders physically attack them. But here we have an incident where a small group of Italian patriots gathered and held up banners for a few minutes at a hotel that had been marked as a future asylum centre. And were charged and convicted for doing so. The incident in question is shown in the video above. Their banners say things like “Stop fake refugees. Stop the Asylum Industry”.

  Five days in prison and a fine of 1,310 euros. This is the penalty imposed on Alex Cioni, leader of the Prima Noi Committee, by the Vicenza Tribunal His offence was to have demonstrated in front of a hotel marked as a future reception centre for migrants to show his disagreement with the arrival of the refugees.

  The incident took place last 17 July when some representatives of the Prima Noi Committee displayed a banner and placards in front of the glass door in the Hotel Eden in Schio, expressing their unhappiness about the announced arrival of a substantial number of asylum seekers. An unauthorised demonstration, because - according to the judge - no request had been made in advance to the authorities responsible for public security.

  Cioni was convicted for this reason, although the sentence was suspended because he had no criminal record. “The complaint filed by the Digos officials and the related judgement from the tribunal in Vicenza,” said the Committee management, “represents an unequivocal clumsy attempt to intimidate our activity.”

  “A banner in a private place is not a demonstration for which reason the conviction for demonstrating is absurd,” the person involved explained to the Alto Vicentino Online. “It makes no sense to call an initiative like ours a demonstration, lasting only a few minutes. It is clear the incident has been instrumentalised.” Cioni will file an appeal however

Source

TNO, “Germany: 3,000 Sex Attack Victims in 2016”, 4 Jan 2016:

Third World invaders pretending to be refugees in Germany preyed upon 2,000 adults and 1,000 children in 2015, a new study by monitoring group XZ Einzefall has shown - at least 1,964 of the sex attacks were serious,

The true number of attacks and victims is much higher, because police are under orders to withhold hundreds of reports and only respond if the media makes inquiries.

XY Einzefall is a German-based monitoring group which has carefully recorded every sex assault carried out in Germany since Angela Merkel opened that country’s gates to the mass Third World invasion in 2015.

Their final report for 2016, which can be found in spreadsheet format here, reveals that reported incidents only total 1,964, consisting of at least 201 rapes, 1,559 sex attacks, and 204 sex attacks in public swimming pools.

Only incidents which were actually reported by the police, or which were reported in the controlled media, were added to the XZ Einzefall list. Their spreadsheet contains the links to the police and media reports.

Of the 201 reported rapes, at least 35 were minors, the study showed. Of the 1,559 sex attacks, 653 victims were minors, and of the 204 swimming pool sex attacks, 286 were minors.

This works out at nearly six serious sex attacks every day during 2016.

However, as XY Einzelfall points out in its study, these figures are merely the tip of the iceberg. Quoting a separate study in Austria, the groups said that “only a tiny fraction of all crimes are published as a police or media-report.”

The Austrian study quoted compared complaints laid with the police to those reported by the police’s media officers and those reported in the media. The difference was vast, the study said, finding that in Vienna, of the more than 200,000 complaints made to police, less than 2,000 police reports were actually published.

With regard to rape cases, the study found, of the 647 rapes reported to the police, only 15 were ever mentioned by police reports and media.

“For this reason,” the study says, “the total number of crimes committed by migrants is much higher.”

XZ Einzelfall also maintains an incident map which is regularly updated and which can be found here.

Reddit, “Yesterday a POLISH man accidentally hit a Kebab takeaway with a firework. THE OWNERS RAN OUT AND STABBED HIM TO DEATH BECAUSE ISLAM. Today BASED POLES are taking a stand and tearing down the takeaway brick by brick. SHOW THEM SOME LOVE!!HIGH ENERGY (youtube.com)

JewishPress, “Riots in Poland after Murder of Polish Man by Arab Immigrants”, 2 Jan 2016:

Riots erupted in Elk, north-eastern Poland, following to the murder of a local resident on New Year’s Eve, PAP reported.

According to PAP, on Saturday night, December 31, between 10 and 11 PM, a 21-year-old local resident named Daniel allegedly threw a firecracker at an Elk café called Kebab Prince. The café is owned by a local entrepreneur, and managed by immigrants from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. The café staff ran out at Daniel and, according to reports, stabbed him twice, which resulted in his death. The attackers were later arrested in connection with the stabbing murder.

       
        Kebab Prince

On Sunday, January 1, according to police, the café building was surrounded by between 200 and 300 locals shouting Nazi slogans. They threw firecrackers and stones into the place, knocked down the glass window, destroyed the equipment inside and eventually set fire to the premises.

When police arrived at the location, the rioters began throwing stones at the officers, damaging several police cars. Next, the angry mob moved on to a second café belonging to the same owner, which they also burned down.

By Sunday evening a few dozen people were arrested in connection with the riots.

Elk Mayor Tomas Andrukevich appealed to local residents to remain calm and to honor the memory of the murdered man.

Before World War II, the Elk (then Lyck) and its surroundings were almost 95% Lutheran. After the majority German population was expelled, the majority religion in Elk became Roman Catholicism.

Lyck was the city where the first-ever weekly newspaper in Hebrew, HaMagid was founded in 1856 by Rabbi Eliezer Lipmann Silbermann. The paper eventually moved to Berlin. The local Jewish population was being persecuted even before the Nazis took power in 1933. In 1932, local pharmacist Leo Frankenstein was attacked – a hand grenade was thrown into his home. The wave of anti-Semitic attacks intensified after 1933 and many local merchants and intellectuals of Jewish descent were arrested. During Kristallnacht, Jewish shops and synagogue were plundered and destroyed in Lyck. Many Jews fled Lyck, some getting as far away as Shanghai. Of the Jews who stayed, 80 were murdered in German-Polish death camps.

Clouds Over Europe, “More than 250 rioters SMASH kebab shop after ‘group of Arab men stab young local to death”

At least 25 people were detained in the Polish town of Elk on Sunday after they smashed up a kebab diner and clashed with police, throwing firecrackers and stones. Up to 300 people took part in a rally after a Pole was allegedly killed by men of Arab descent.

Kevin Crehan, 35, executed in his cell at HMP Bristol

DM, “Man jailed for leaving a bacon sandwich outside a mosque is found dead in prison halfway through his 12-month sentence”, 30 Dec 2016:

• He was serving a one-year sentence for racist attack on a Bristol mosque
   
• Crehan and accomplices left bacon sandwiches outside the building
   
• They also left a St George flag outside with ‘No Mosques’ written on it
   
• Man jailed after leaving bacon sandwiches outside mosque been found dead in his cell.

Kevin Crehan, 35, was halfway through a one-year prison sentence he received in July after admitting the racially-motivated attack on the Jamia Mosque in Bristol earlier this year.

He was accompanied by Alison Bennett, 46, and Mark Bennett, 48, and Angelina Swales, 31, who also pleaded guilty over the incident.

A St George flag with the words ‘no mosques’ was also tied to the fence outside the building in Totterdown, Bristol, and shouted racial abuse at a worshipper.

Bacon was tied to the door handles and sandwiches made of raw meat and sliced white bread were left at the entrance, in what was described in court by the judge as an ‘an attack on England’.

The prison service confirmed Crehan was found dead in his cell at HMP Bristol on Tuesday, December 27.

A spokesman told the Sun: ‘HMP Bristol prisoner Kevin Crehan died in custody on Tuesday 27 December.

       
The incident occurred at Jamia Mosque in Totterdown, Bristol, pictured, and all four of the gang were banned from going near a mosque for 10 years

‘As with all deaths in custody, the independent Prisons and Probation Ombudsman will investigate.’

Crehan was jailed for a year while Bennett was given a nine-month sentence.

Bennett was given a six-month sentence and Swales was given a four-month sentence - both suspended for two years.

They were all banned from going within 330ft of a mosque anywhere in England or Wales for the next 10 years.

Tory MP Philip Hollobone said: “Migration Watch’s forecasts have always been thoroughly reliable.”

Express, “BREXIT WARNING: 12 MILLION more migrants to arrive in UK in 25 years without hard Brexit”, 29 Dec 2016:

MASS immigration will continue at “unacceptable” levels for at least two decades unless Britain makes a full break with Brussels, a report predicted last night.

               

Figures showed that annual net migration to the UK from EU countries would be unlikely to fall below 155,000 in the “medium term” if the country stays in the EU’s Single Market.

And the Government’s ability to reduce the influx will be “extremely limited” as long as the EU’s free movement rules remain in force.

The disturbing forecast of near-record levels of migration for years ahead was set out in a report from the population think tank Migration Watch. It was being seen last night as a devastating blow to campaigners for a so-called “soft Brexit” that retain the UK’s full Single Market membership.

[...]

“An increase of anything like 12 million in just 25 years is, quite simply, unacceptable to the British public and certainly not what they voted for in the referendum.”

Tory MP Philip Hollobone said: “Migration Watch’s forecasts have always been thoroughly reliable and are the best we are going to get from anyone.

[...]

“The picture they paint is completely unacceptable.

“We simply can’t stay in the Single Market if it means we are going to get that sort of level of immigration.

“Above all, people voted in the referendum for a change in our approach to immigration.”

[...]

“Total net immigration will add 12 million people to the population in just 25 years, more than the equivalent of the entire current populations of Bulgaria and New Zealand.”

He added: “Theresa May needs to set out in no uncertain terms that when the UK leaves the EU it will also cease to be a member of the Single Market.

TNO, “U.N. Vote and Jewish Lobby Hypocrisy”, 24 Dec 2016:

And Alt-Right hypocrisy as well, since The US was the only nation which supported Israel in the UN with regard to their illegal settlements - their chutzpah to fly in the face of the rest of the world probably rests on anticipation of help from their boy Trump

Ibid:

The U.S. Jewish lobby has rushed to defend Israel following the United Nations’ Security Council (UNSC) motion condemning the illegal seizure of Palestinian land—highlighting the fact that they support the right of Jews to preserve their racial identity in their own ethnostate, but always strongly oppose any European demands for that same right.

TNO, “Israeli Illegal Settlements: The Facts”, 26 Dec 2016:

Israel has demanded that the 14 nations who voted against the illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank “explain themselves”—for daring to oppose the Jewish ethnostate’s breach of international law.

In reality, the Jewish settlements are illegal in terms of the Geneva Convention and the Hague Regulations, and if undertaken by any other state, would have resulted in international military intervention.

According to “Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War” of the Geneva Convention, an occupier is forbidden from transferring its own civilians into the territory it occupies.

“Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive. (12 August 1949. “Deportations, Transfers, Evacuations, Article 49.)

In addition, Article 55 of the Hague Regulations states that an occupying power’s role is to safeguard occupied properties and maintain the status quo:

Art. 55. The occupying State shall be regarded only as administrator and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate, forests, and agricultural estates belonging to the hostile State, and situated in the occupied country. It must safeguard the capital of these properties, and administer them in accordance with the rules of usufruct. (Annex To The Convention: Regulations Respecting The Laws And Customs Of War On Land – Section III : Military Authority Over The Territory Of The Hostile State – Regulations: Art. 55.)

The construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank are clear violations of both these international treaties, and for Israel to demand that nations who uphold this law “explain themselves” is merely an indication of the chutzpah and hypocrisy which underpins that state.

These then, are the facts about the occupied West Bank:

The West Bank—including East Jerusalem—and the Gaza Strip together constitute the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), which have been under Israeli military occupation since June 1967.

Prior to Israeli occupation, the West Bank was controlled by Jordan, and the Gaza Strip by Egypt.

Before the State of Israel was established in 1948, the West Bank and Gaza Strip were simply parts of Mandate Palestine; their “borders” are the result of Israeli expansion and armistice lines.

More than 300,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip became refugees during Israel’s conquest in June 1967; the vast majority were unable to return.

In 1967, Israeli forces ethnically cleansed and destroyed a number of Palestinian villages in the OPT, including Imwas, Beit Nuba, and others.

One of the first acts of Israeli authorities in East Jerusalem was to demolish the Mughrabi Quarter, expelling 600 residents and destroying 135 homes. In place of the 800-year-old Mughrabi Quarter, Israel created the Western Wall Plaza.