Difference between revisions of "2007-11-14 OHA Fact Check"

Revision as of 18:10, 14 November 2007

Following a series of devastating public hearings held by the Hawaii Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which exposed the fraudulent nature of both the basis and promise of the Akaka Bill, OHA produced a "corrections" report disputing the facts and arguments put forward by various experts in their testimony. Please enjoy these corrections to their "corrections".

1840 Constitution

OHA tries to whitewash the explicit assertion of the 1840 Hawaiian Kingdom Constitution statement that all people are "of one blood" by criticizing the Kingdom as being a mere pawn to Western interests.

At the time of the 1840 constitution, foreign interests put intense pressure on the monarchy to produce a Western-style constitution in order to secure their land holdings. - OHA's "Correcting the Record" 2007

The ideas of land reform and a Western-style constitution were important goals for all Hawaiians, regardless of their ancestry or heritage. The alternative, of maintaining a despotic monarchy with no land rights for anyone cannot be romanticized in any reasonable way.

Simple equality

In the Executive Summary of OHA's "Corrections", they speak of "indigenous peoples' civil and human rights" but apparently do not acknowledge the existence of these rights as applying to people who are not "indigenous". This apparent disconnect between understanding the idea of equality and civil rights drives throughout their entire polemic. Fastening on to a buzz-word marketing term "Restorative Justice", they demand that their neighbors and cousins of the present be solely responsible for some nebulous "restoration", regardless of the fact that they share the vast majority of their ancestry with their fellow, non-restoration eligible cousins. In a desperate attempt to reframe their victimhood status, the OHA report states:

With Native Hawaiian history as a backdrop, the Report shows that Native Hawaiians are asserting human rights as well as civil rights - not simply the right to be equal but to self-determination; not a right to entitlements but to restoration; not a right to special treatment but to reconnect spiritually with land and culture; not a right to simple equality but to a form of self-governance.

What of the self-determination of their cousins? Or the right of restoration to the Asians deprived of the vote by race in 1887? Or the right of all the people of Hawaii, regardless of race, to have spiritual connections with the land and culture of their ancestors and birth? What of the right of self-governance for other races and ethnicities?

The frightening thing is that these protestations of victimhood and innocence are said with full sincerity - these people truly believe that asking for more than equality is their right by blood, their right simply because of their race.

Attack the messenger

In their introduction, they complain about the 2006 USCCR report which recommended the following:

The Commission recommends against passage of the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2005 (S. 147) as reported out of committee on May 16, 2005, or any other legislation that would discriminate on the basis of race or national origin and further subdivide the American people into discrete subgroups accorded varying degrees of privilege.

Instead of addressing the issues raised by the report, OHA instead attacks the messengers, characterizing the people who testified before the USCCR as "anti-Hawaiian and anti-civil rights advocates". This simply does not pass the snicker test. When arguing for equality is somehow "anti-civil rights", one loses all credibility.

Keeping the deck stacked

After decades of control by extremists, OHA laments the end to a stacked deck, objecting to the following regulation for the selection criteria of committee members:

(b) No person is to be denied an opportunity to serve on a State Advisory Committee because of race, age, sex, religion, national origin, or disability. The Commisssion shall encourage membership on the State Advisory Committee to be broadly diverse.

Yes, you read that right. They objected to the idea that membership on any State Advisory Committee be open to anyone, regardless of their race, age, sex, religion, national origin, or disability. They flat out argue that State Advisory Committee members should be denied the opportunity to serve simply because of their personal demographics.