Eideard

Yannick Martin

Hundreds of traditional musicians from Brittany’s top pipe bands, known as Bagadoù, convened on the town of Brest for the region’s most prestigious championships on Sunday.

They were joined by thousands of fans in showing their support for Yannick Martin, a 24-year old virtuoso of the bombard, a double reed instrument from the oboe family, who has twice been crowned Brittany’s champion player.

Mr Martin has been the target of a hate campaign by a Houston-based white supremacist website called Breiz Atao (Brittany Forever), the name of a Breton nationalist journal that supported Nazism in the second world war…

Mr Martin, born in Columbia but adopted and raised by a Breton family, has filed for charges of “racial discrimination”. His brother, adopted and raised by a different family is also a top pipe player. Both play in one of the region’s most acclaimed bands, Kemper, which competed in Brest yesterday.

Before the competition, Mr Martin said: “I’ve been judged by the colour of my skin by people who are totally out of touch with today’s Brittany. I feel entirely Breton and my response will be to continue to play.”

Sunday, around 2,000 players and fans wore the double ribbon sporting the Breton colours “gwen ha du” (black and white) in a poignant protest at the racist slur…

The Breton Democratic Union (UDB), the main autonomist and regionalist party in Brittany, denounced the attack. “The defence of the Breton cause has very unfortunately been hijacked by a minority of frustrated individuals with scandalous views about our Breton citizens of foreign origin. To be Breton has nothing to do with blood or the colour of your skin, it’s not a question of a Breton ‘race’ but of a Breton people rich in its diversity,” said the UDB.

One of the great “gifts” of American politics to Planet Earth since World War 2 has been the politics of racism.

Now, we see the new expansion of bigotry that accompanies this decade’s populism offered to cultures outside the United States as the way to behave, to follow this American example of musical “purity”.

Over the weekend, President Obama did something that all American presidents are called upon to do. Defend the Constitution of the United States.

One of those tenets is Freedom of Religion. Not amend section A: popular religion [this week] only.

It’s how and why I feel free to tell folks I’m an atheist – or introduce someone in my family as a student of Buddhism – or note in the course of a conversation about San Antonito Chapel down the road that most of my neighbors are Catholics.

But, right-wing nutballs and the proto-fascists who infest the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party go crap out of their mind if Christian godliness and morality ain’t the only way endorsed to fly straight to heaven. Much less catch a tax break from the IRS.

So, combine all the hypocrisy into one big ball of cigar-snot and mealymouthed punditry – and you get this weekend’s tempest in a teabag.

Here’s a copy of the dangerous sedition uttered by Obama.

I’m not getting into cutting and pasting and commenting line-by-line because, frankly, it’s just the usual straight-up rhetoric required of any official who’s trying to explain our Constitution to people who don’t think it’s worth defending. The whole point of having a standard by which to govern a nation is that it is a standard to be upheld – not amended every time someone asks a hard question or a tough challenge comes along.

Our Founding Fathers realized that and fought and died for it. Now, because some terrorist gangsters come along and say our standards are worthless – a certain portion of our population is willing to prove them correct.

Not today. Not any day.

After federal border agents detained several Mexican immigrants in western New York in June, an article about the incident in a local newspaper drew an onslaught of vitriolic postings on its Web site. Some were racist. Others attacked farmers in the region, an apple-growing area east of Rochester, accusing them of harboring illegal workers. Still others made personal attacks about the reporter who wrote the article.

Most of the posts were made anonymously. But in reviewing the logs of its Internet server, the paper, The Wayne County Star in Wolcott, traced three of them to Internet protocol addresses at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees border protection.

Homeland Security started an investigation into the posts this month, according to the reporter, Louise Hoffman-Broach, and Richard M. Healy, the Wayne County district attorney. A spokeswoman for the federal agency’s inspector general said she could neither confirm nor deny an investigation; department rules prohibit the use of office equipment for the personal transmission of material that could offend fellow employees or the public…

Local officials and residents say that beginning about 2006, federal officials stepped up their enforcement of immigration laws in western New York. Farmers and other residents said the push created a climate of fear in communities whose economies depend on migrant laborers, many of them illegal immigrants.

The Obama administration has moved to a less confrontational policy at work sites, focusing on employers. But Customs and Border Protection, which does not conduct work-site inspections, had not changed its strategy in New York, Mr. Price said.

The newspaper removed the posts. When they checked further, they found more racist and bigoted comments tied to previous articles coming from IP addressed belonging to DHS.

Nice to see the Department of Homeland Security living up to the standards of its founders.