Katrina Revisited: Randall Robinson

I think that this story is worth recalling.

It illustrates how the Hurricane Katrina coverage spiraled into the absurd. It reveals the extent of the misinformation that was disseminated.
From one year ago today--




On the Huffington Post, Randall Robinson wrote quite possibly the most troubling thing I've read to date about Hurricane Katrina.

Robinson's blog entry:

New Orleans

It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive. Four days after the storm, thousands of blacks in New Orleans are dying like dogs. No-one has come to help them.

I am a sixty-four year old African-American.

New Orleans marks the end of the America I strove for.

I am hopeless. I am sad. I am angry against my country for doing nothing when it mattered.

This is what we have come to. This defining watershed moment in America’s racial history. For all the world to witness. For those who’ve been caused to listen for a lifetime to America’s ceaseless hollow bleats about democracy. For Christians, Jews and Muslims at home and abroad. For rich and poor. For African-American soldiers fighting in Iraq. For African-Americans inside the halls of officialdom and out.

My hand shakes with anger as I write. I, the formerly un-jaundiced human rights advocate, have finally come to see my country for what it really is. A monstrous fraud.

But what can I do but write about how I feel. How millions, black like me, must feel at this, the lowest moment in my country’s story.

Randall Robinson is a social
justice advocate and author
whose works include The Debt –
What America Owes to Blacks

I've searched and I can find nothing anywhere on the Internet about this charge of cannibalism.
For such a horrific claim, I would expect to find a second source verifying it.

I can't.

Robinson says, "It is reported..."

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

I want to know his source.

Has the Huffington Post checked out the story?
Or, do they act like Michael Isikoff and Newsweek and just print anything that fits their liberal, anti-Bush agenda?

It takes one to two months to starve to death.

Are we to believe that someone would eat a human corpse after only three or four days without food?

That's ridiculous.

If Robinson's claim is true, then the individuals who chose to eat the flesh of other human beings must have been temporarily insane.

They were not about to starve to death.

Robinson says he's angry.

Well, so am I.
________________________________

What I found so disturbing about Robinson's claim was that there was so much real suffering in the wake of Katrina.

This idiotic "report" that "black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive" had the potential to make people doubt truthful reports of conditions in the Gulf region.

Worse, Robinson's baseless rumors were sure to stoke racially-based anger ("George Bush doesn't care about black people").

The devastation and desperation in New Orleans didn't need to be exaggerated to be horrifying.

I still don't understand how Robinson could write what he did, something so inflammatory. He must have been hysterical.