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

Revision as of 18:36, 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.

Historical errors?

In the section titled "Accurate Native Hawaiian History: The Lasting Harms of Western Encroachment and the U.S. Aided Overthrow", OHA flounders hopelessly with the factual record. Let's go over a few of these "accurate" observations:

Attorney William Burgess further claimed that the United States took no lands from Hawaiians at the time of the overthrow or the 1898 annexation.

All OHA has to do is identify a single parcel of private land that was taken by the United States in either 1893, or in 1898. Apparently, they are unable to give us a single example.

Calling the report inaccurate and flawed, Commissioners Yaki and Melendez voted against the recommendation.

Let's also not forget that Mr. Yaki himself stated, "I cannot possibly be impartial when it comes to this issue [the Akaka Bill]". Mr. Yaki also asserted that his grandfather was from the "island[sic] of Hana" during one hearing on the issue - apparently unaware that Hana is a city on the island of Maui.

"Enactment of this federal policy codifies United States recognition of the special legal and political relationship with Native Hawaiians as it has done previously with American Indians and Alaska Natives." - Haunani Apoliona

Except of course, that no American Indian or Alaska Native group has ever been recognized solely because of a single drop of blood. Were we to force open the tribal rolls to everyone who had even the slightest racial connection to pre-western contact peoples of the Americas, and institute race-based governments for them, that would be equivalent to what Ms. Apoliona asks for here.

The language of colorblindness

In their rather colorful characterization of the testimony of Jere Krischel, OHA complains:

Krischel testified before the HISAC on September 5, 2007. He used the deceptive language of "colorblindness" backed by seductive and misleading historical arguments to frame his opposition to the NHGRA.

If arguing that we should not "divide ourselves by race, deny our brothers, sisters and cousins, and forsake the values which have made Hawaii into the special place that it is" is somehow "deceptive", how does one argue for equality? How else can you say, "we should treat people equally regardless of their race"? Why is that deceptive at all?

The real deception here is the idea that we must discriminate to be equal. The Orwellian nature of OHA's argument that DISCRIMINATION is EQUALITY is shown vividly here.