No tribute to Luzette King

EDITOR: Brenton Smith’s outrageous “A tribute to Luzette King” in the Friday, September 9 issue of Searchlight cannot go unchallenged. According to Mr Smith:

“Luzette, to me, is a very courageous woman who holds steadfast in what she believes. She is very knowledgeable on a wide range of issues.”{{more}}

To me, Ms King is no more than a mindless NDP ideological extremist, who parrots any and all the propaganda and conspiracy theories propagated by a party that has never been able to get its act together since Sir James Mitchell’s resignation as prime minister 16 years ago.

No matter how unlikely the disinformation, Ms King never hesitates to accept it as gospel truth, so extreme and irrational are her political opinions. Indeed, the very extremism of her faith is proof enough to her that she is right.

How else can one explain her irrational January 2016 statement that, “The ULP cannot prove to Vincentians and the world, beyond any doubt, that they did not steal the elections”?

Both logic and the law say that the burden lies with Ms King to provide the evidence that the ULP stole the election: When one party asserts a claim (the NDP’s assertion of election theft) that the other disputes (the ULP, not to mention the three external and impartial observer teams’ claim that the election was free and fair), the party who asserts the first claim has a burden of proof to justify or substantiate that claim. An argument from ignorance occurs when either an assertion is assumed to be true because it has not yet been proved false or a proposition is assumed to be false because it has not yet been proved true. Beyond a reasonable doubt, Ms King is guilty of presenting an argument from ignorance.

As for her reference to “beyond any doubt,” the term has no legal standing in SVG – or any other jurisdiction I am aware of: in criminal matters, the term used is “beyond a reasonable doubt” to convict people; in civil law, the standard is “a balance of probabilities.”

Using “beyond any doubt” as a criterion would be like asking an atheist to disprove the existence of God beyond any doubt using logic and/or concrete evidence, which would be just as impossible as asking a Christian to prove beyond any doubt that Jesus was the Son of God.

Given her mindset and reasoning skills, no wonder that Ms King has been roundly “scorned and ridiculed by many,” as Brenton Smith claims.

Still, to the uneducated and foolish devotees of Nice Radio, the NDP’s propaganda machine, Ms King is a fount of wisdom.

All this goes to show is that Ms King, acolytes like Brenton Smith, who don’t seem to know the difference between belief and knowledge, and the ruling elite of the NDP have neither logic nor the law on their side, only raw emotion and a hunger for power and glory.

The same Sir James, one of the longest-serving prime ministers in Caribbean history and a man who did not tolerate fools gladly, surely would never have allowed such a woman to be the party’s main street-level standard bearer, yet another reason to question the fitness of the current motley crew of party bigwigs to rule our country.

Finally, Mr Smith’s shameful comparison of Luzette King to iconic American freedom fighter Rosa Parks cannot be allowed to stand. Shame on him for scurrilously equating the two women.

Rosa Parks was a gentle and humble civil rights activist, who fought for the end of segregation and other forms of racial oppression that degraded and marginalized Black people in the southern United States during the 1950s; Luzette King is no more than an insignificant power-hungry sore loser, a loose cannon party hack, fighting only for that fraction of Vincentian society who happen to parade in yellow T-shirts.

But I suppose we should at least be grateful that Mr Smith refrained from comparing Ms King to Mother Teresa or the Virgin Mary!

C ben-David