America Commits Cultural Suicide

A Whole New World - Along the U.S.-Mexican border, where hearts and minds and money and culture merge, the Century of the Americas is born.

by Nancy Gibbs for Time

Some places the border is a muddy river, too thin to plow, too thick to drink. Other places it's just a line in the sand. Over the years mapmakers redrew it, wars moved it, nature yanked it all around as the course of the Rio Grande shifted. But what would it take to make it disappear altogether? If today is like any other day, this is what is going to come across the line from Mexico: a million barrels of crude oil, 432 tons of bell peppers, 238,000 light bulbs, 166 Volkswagen Beetles, 16,250 toasters, $51 million worth of auto parts, everything from the little plastic knob on the air conditioner to your cell-phone charger. It all comes in trucks and boxcars and little panel vans, and that's just the stuff that Customs can keep track of. There is also the vast shadow market, not just the cocaine and heroin and freshly laundered money, but cut-price Claritin and steroids and banned bug killers and boots made from the flippers of endangered sea turtles.

And then there are the people, more than 800,000 crisscrossing legally every day, some walking, more driving, not to mention the 4,600 or so who hop the fence and get caught a few minutes or hours later. The ones who make it are on their way to jobs as meat-packers in Iowa and carpetmakers in Georgia and gardeners in Pennsylvania. They want to come here so badly, they will risk the scorpions and the rattlesnakes, the surveillance cameras and underground sensors; they will fold into hidden compartments in the dashboard of a car or in the belly of a tanker truck. They know they can get a job no one else wants, save some money, send some home, maybe find a way to bring their families—because someday, this border may not look anything like what it does now: a barbed-wire paradox, half pried open, half bolted closed.

So how much has to cross a border before it might as well not be there at all? There is no Customs station for customs—for ideas and tastes, stories and songs, values, instincts, attitudes, and none of that stops in El Paso or San Diego anymore. The Old World fades away—salsa is more popular than ketchup; Salma Hayek is bigger than Madonna—and the border is everywhere. One day soon it may seem a little backward not to speak some Spanish, even the hybrid Spanglish of the Southwest: "Como se llama your dog?" Signs appear in the store windows in Garden City, Kans., that say, se habla español, and you can buy extremely fresh mangoes at bodegas all over that town. Dalton, Ga. (pop. 27,900), has three Spanish-language newspapers. Says longtime resident Edwin Mitchell, 77: "We're a border community—1,000 miles away from the border." Already, we are living in a whole new world.

Sometime in the next few years, Mexico will pass Canada as America's top trading partner. Hispanics have overtaken African Americans as the country's largest minority, the swing vote to woo, the sleeping giant to waken. If Presidents George W. Bush and Vicente Fox manage to solve the problems of two countries that need each other but don't completely trust each other, the American Century could give way to the Century of the Americas, and the border might as well have disappeared altogether.

America's 4,000-mile border with Canada is basically defended by a couple of fire trucks, and most Americans think that's about all we need. The southern border is half as long, has the equivalent of an army division patrolling it, and many Americans say it should be buttoned down even tighter. At the beginning of a new century, there may be no country on earth with as much potential as Mexico to destabilize the U.S.—and to preserve its standard of living. No wonder people can't decide how much the border should be a barrier, how much a bridge.

From the moment you set foot in the boomtowns of the Rio Grande Valley, you sense you are watching the gold rush, headlong and free spirited and corrupt and ingenious. Stand on a corner some morning in Laredo, and watch the first of 8,000 trucks a day hauling the global economy north and south, 18-wheelers full of bulldozer claws and baby cribs, all passing through a town that once didn't bother to pave the streets. Now it can't pour concrete fast enough. The banks are open 7 to 7, seven days a week; the pager shops are everywhere. Every road is being widened, the road shoulders littered with pieces of blown-out tires.

Locals say you are not really a borderlander until your windshield has been broken at least once, from all the rocks flying out from under the big rigs. Much of the border is still desperately poor—McAllen, Texas, at the heart of the fourth fastest growing metro area in the U.S., is America's poorest city, the Commerce Department announced last month, with average per-capita income of $13,339 a year. But people on both sides are helping one another do the deals, cut the corners, take a region that was forever left behind and turn it into the New Frontier. The nafta prospectors saw in the opening of the border a chance to make a killing, take factories that would otherwise head to Malaysia and plunk them down right across the border, where the average Mexican worker earns slightly more in a day than an American makes in an hour, and where the highways run all the way to Canada.

That means that both countries are growing more dependent on this relationship every day. Mexicans all across the interior follow the North Star, chasing the jobs. There are now four or five cities the size of Cleveland sitting right next door, and 25 years from now as much as 40% of the entire Mexican population may be living on the border. The region is Mexico's economic engine, a huge commercial classroom where the unskilled workers who were making gauze eye patches in 1980 now make atms and modems and the most popular Sony color TV sold in the U.S.

As for the U.S., we import not just the gizmos and gadgets but also a way of life, thanks to a shadow labor force that lets us eat out once a week because restaurants can hire dishwashers for sub-minimum wage. We depend on the maids and gardeners and carpenters and home-health-care workers whose children will probably become teachers and technicians and surgeons and Senators. If they all put down their tools tomorrow, we wouldn't be arguing about whether we are in a recession.

It's often said that the border is its own country, "Amexica," neither Mexican nor American. "The border is not where the U.S. stops and Mexico begins," says Laredo mayor Betty Flores. "It's where the U.S. blends into Mexico." Both sides regard their sovereign governments as distant and dysfunctional. They are proud of their ability to take care of themselves, solve their problems faster and cheaper than any faraway bureaucrat. The Brownsville fire trucks answer sirens on the other side; in Tijuana, health clinics send shuttle buses every morning to meet people coming over for everything from dentistry to dialysis. The school district in Mission, Texas, among the state's poorest, sends its old furniture over the border to help Mexican schools that are lucky to have roofs, much less desks and chairs. El Paso is redesigning the kilns of Juarez brickmakers to cut the soot from burning old tires; the twin cities have signed more treaties than their national governments can keep track of, much less ratify. "The only way the cities in this region can make it," says Juarez mayor Gustavo Elizondo, "is to forget that a line and a river exist here."

And yet for all the frontier pioneer spirit, local leaders do draw a line: Why should the whole country benefit from the blessings of free trade, if the border region pays the price? It costs border counties $108 million a year in law enforcement and medical expenses associated with illegal crossings, money most of these poor counties can't afford, to enforce immigration policies over which they have no control. Yes, there is a shortage of truck drivers, but there is also a shortage of judges to hear all the drug and smuggling cases. Arizona ambulance companies face bankruptcy because of all the unreimbursed costs of rescuing illegals from the desert. Schools everywhere down here are poor, overcrowded and growing. Truck traffic is good for your business but bad for your health; many border cities routinely fail to meet federal air quality standards. Border agents get sick from standing on the bridges and inhaling diesel exhaust all day.

Good health care has always been scarce here, but the border boom makes it worse: a third of all tuberculosis cases in the U.S. are concentrated in the four border states. Among the hospitals in El Paso, 50% of the patients are on some kind of public assistance, mainly Medicaid. Just about the only patients paying full freight, up front, are rich Mexicans who cross over to see a specialist. "Border towns have a double burden of disease," says Russell Bennett, chief of the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission: "those of emerging nations, like diarrhea, as well as [First World] diseases like stress and diabetes."

The poor on both sides are united by a struggle just to survive what most Americans can barely imagine. In the rural El Paso outpost of Revolución, mothers cross into Juarez to buy methyl parathion, a pesticide so lethal it is banned in the U.S.; they sprinkle it around their shanties, and it kills the roaches and tarantulas for a year. But their children play in that dust and dirt, and when they get sick, their parents take them to Juarez doctors, who are cheaper and stay open into the night. If the children die, they are buried across the border; it costs about $150, instead of the $2,000 for an American grave.

Local officials are forever pestering the feds for help: If you don't build another bridge and put more Customs people on the ones we have, how can we solve our pollution problem, with 15-year-old cars idling in lines that stretch for miles? How can you order us to educate any child who appears on our school doorstep but not give us the money to do it? Where are we going to find enough water? The congressional Hispanic caucus wants $1 billion in spending on roads and bridges and Customs officers; El Paso state senator Eliot Shapleigh and other Texas lawmakers have called for a Marshall Plan for the border; El Paso Congressman Sylvestre Reyes wants Bush to appoint a border czar who could cut through the red tape and make things happen.

For the first time in years, maybe ever, both the U.S. and Mexico have leaders who understand this region, know that in some ways their hemisphere's economic future may depend on whether they can fix what is broken here. Bush met with Fox three times in his first 100 days, blowing away the old once-a-year tradition. Fox dreams of a day when the border is open, and his countrymen no longer flee to survive. As Fox told Ernesto Ruffo, his top aide on the region, "Put holes in the border."

But that's not going to happen until Mexico goes straight, cleans up its justice and banking systems. Even some American borderlanders who cheer integration in public go off the record to talk about what's wrong, admit that they rarely visit the other side or whisper quietly that they haven't felt the same about the place since a friend's car was hijacked a few years ago, and they never saw him again. You can sense the same mysterious half silence no matter where you go; Mexicans call it Article No. 20, as in, which of the $20 is for me? Police and Customs people pay for their government jobs so they can get in on the mordida, the payoff system. Midwives in Brownsville, Texas, sold thousands of birth certificates to be used as proof of U.S. citizenship. The Arellano Felíx brothers, the Tijuana drug kingpins known for torturing, carving up and roasting their rivals, are paying $4 million a month in bribes in Baja California alone, just as the cost of doing business. The $4 million reward for their capture is one of the highest the U.S. has ever offered, and something of a bad joke under the circumstances. There hasn't been a single nibble in four years. What good is the money if you're dead?

And as lucrative as the drug-smuggling business is, the people-smuggling cartels are prospering as well. The more the U.S. cracks down on illegal immigration, the more expensive crossing becomes. The border patrol has a mission impossible: no matter how many surveillance cameras and motion detectors it installs, still the immigrants come. It's harder to cross and easier to die trying. In some ways it's the lucky ones, say the border agents, who get caught. "Everything out here will either bite you, burn you or arrest you," says the Rev. Robin Hoover, of the First Christian Church in Tucson, Ariz. The Mexican government is considering handing out survival kits, complete with snake-bite antidotes and rehydration tablets, for people intending to set out across the desert—a plan U.S. officials think amounts to an official blessing for breaking American law.

Up and down the border, everyone skirts the fence in his own way. A professor in south Texas says he pays someone $50 a month to smuggle his mom over in a boat for Sunday dinners. He doesn't worry, though, because a federal agent down the street does the same for his housekeeper. "Trying to stop this migration is like trying to stop a wave with a Dixie cup," says Raul Berrios, whose wife Karen runs the popular Renaissance Cafe in Bisbee, Ariz. "It's going to be impossible." There is a whisper network in Bisbee, of codes and messages telling weary crossers where they can stay, safely hidden from the border patrol.

Sometimes nature lends a hand. Highway 4 through Brownsville ends with a stop sign that needs to be taken seriously. The asphalt turns into beach and leads straight into the sea. But turn right, and you can drive down the beach like the old days at Daytona, on fine, hard-packed sand, hugging the Gulf of Mexico. It's a place to appreciate a pristine view: no condos, no concession stands, no concessions at all to anything except the fact that the border begins where the Rio Grande pours into the sea, and so it has to be guarded carefully.

For the first time in 500 years, the river is so low that it just dries up altogether about 50 ft. from its destination and turns into a salt flat. Two alien weeds, hydrilla and hyacinth—border officials don't know how they got there—are growing so fast they have blocked the flow of the river. Fighting them would require approval from both sides, which is practically impossible to get. And so here, all that is left of the border are four metal stakes in the sand, tied with orange ribbons whipping in the gulf breeze.The border patrol has had to make a little sand berm to keep the smugglers from just driving across. The Mexicans, in their window-darkened Pontiacs, drive right up to the very sticks themselves, and the border patrolmen in their Suburbans get out their binoculars, look across the beach and wait to be relieved at midnight.

Just at the moment when, all up and down the river, cities are arguing about where and whether to build more bridges, haggling over diplomatic papers and environmental clearances and political payoffs, all in order to build another truck bridge over a creek—here, nature just went ahead and did it, all on its own.

Reported by Hilary Hylton - Laredo, Tim Padgett - El Paso, Julie Rawe - New York, Elaine Rivera - Nogales and Cathy Booth Thomas - McAllen

A Hispanic nightclub owner in Reno, Nevada flies his true colors, showing where his real loyalties lie ! Viva La Reconquista!

[So-called 'Open Borders' have become all the buzz among the intellectual and political elite in our country. And it is the mantra of politicians on both sides of the aisle. Globalists want it because the endless supply of cheap labor fuels skyrocketing profit margins beyond their wildest speculative dreams. Liberals want it because it dovetails with their utopian fantasies of a borderless world without injustice and poverty in which everyone sits around holding hands and singing...shiny happy people indeed. But those of us with minds which are a bit more earth bound can see it for what it truly is - the death knell of Western civilization. Apparently, the elite in the US have not learned from the European experience - DEMOGRAPHY MATTERS! No matter how many photo ops they may appear in, Vincente Fox and Felipe Calderón are NOT friends of America or our way-of-life. Their country is in shambles, with terrorists, thugs and drug cartels operating with impunity and the best law enforcement money can buy. Their economy is a wreck, with runaway inflation and squalid standards of living. And they are busily exporting that same chaos here. Witness the immigrant fueled crime wave in SoCal and other southwestern states. The crisis in social services brought on by the flood of illegals cashing in on the freebies. The growing boldness of Hispanic street gangs who rule inner urban streets. The overall disregard for the rule of law so prevalent in our teeming ethnic ghettos. It may be too late for Brussels or Paris, but I truly hope and pray that the grassroots in America (hint: that means you dear reader) will wake up, realize what's happening, and take assertive action. Now is the time for "we the people" to exercise our prerogative, take our country back from The Professional Political Class, and secure the borders. Protect our borders to preserve our culture! Otherwise, watch closely what is happening in the American southwest. The Reconquista will be televised. Amexica is the wave of the future. - Martel]

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK

CAIR Goes Back To School
by Patrick Poole

As children all over the country prepare for the annual American rite of the beginning of school, hundreds of school children and their parents from the Columbus, Ohio Somali refugee community may be getting far less than they bargained for, as well as Ohio taxpayers.

These children will be attending two publicly-funded K-8 charter schools, International Academy of Columbus and Westside Academy, schools are sponsored under an Ohio Department of Education contract with the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation and operated by a politically-connected group of Islamic extremists associated with both the national and Ohio chapters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). At least one of the taxpayer-financed schools has been used during the last school year to play host to an anti-Israel CAIR-OH “teach-in”.

Even though many of the new students are learning English as a new language, an essential tool for helping them integrate into their new community, the schools instead focuses on Arabic as part of their core curriculum. As a result, standardized test scores for the schools are well below state standards; and yet Ohio educrats continue to give the project new life, pumping millions of taxpayer dollars into each school every year to keep the schools open and renewing their contracts. One board member for both schools has even co-authored an article advocating an educational policy of “selected acculturation” and “accommodation without assimilation” to “encourage Somali youth to develop an adversarial identity that will put them at odds with mainstream society” – thus trapping the students in a cycle of perpetual cultural alienation and isolation.

The student population of both schools is overwhelmingly drawn from the Central Ohio Somali community, which itself is comprised of refugees who fled their war-torn country to escape from the warlords and clan warfare that have torn the country apart since 1991. Sadly, these refugees have arrived only to find the warlords and clan leaders in charge of the very public and private institutions here in the US intended to help them resettle and adjust to life in their new home.

One of the new educational warlords these unsuspecting Somali families are encountering is Ahmad Al-Akhras, CAIR national vice chairman, who is listed as one of the incorporators of both charter schools, and who is listed as the treasurer of International Academy. Joining him on the board of both schools is Abukar Arman, the Somali terror apologist who was recently forced to resign from the Central Ohio Homeland Security oversight board following my FrontPage exposé regarding his published statements of support for terrorist organizations and individuals (see, “Hometown Jihad: The Somali Terror Apologist Next Door” and “Terror Sympathizer Tossed from Homeland Security Oversight Panel”). Arman identifies himself as the board president of Westside Academy and March 2005 press release announcing his appointment to a government board lists him as “building director” of International Academy.

Because the number of Somali refugees attending these two schools, both qualify for tens of thousands of dollars in federal grants under Title III. According to the US Department of Education, the Ohio Title III Director just happens to be none other than Al-Akhras and Abukar Arman business partner, Abdinur Mohamud, who also is listed as director of the Ohio Department of Education’s Lau Resource Center. (More on Mr. Mohamud’s financial ties to this operation and his partnership with Al-Akhras and Arman below.)

The other board members of both institutions are a collection of CAIR-OH officials and board members, and business partners and associates of Al-Akhras, many of whom have served or presently serve on the board of Sunrise Academy, the only full-time Islamic school in the area. In fact, the website for Westside Academy features a link to the Islamic school, even though the charter school claims to be non-sectarian. Sunrise Academy has also been the subject of a recent FrontPage exposé, “Hometown Jihad: The School Gym that Terror Built”, following their multiple fundraising events featuring Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and an advocate of replacing the US Constitution with shari’a law.

Ahmad Al-Akhras is one of Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman’s closest advisors, and Coleman has rewarded his political partner by appointing him to the city’s Community Relations Commission, along with several other city government boards and working groups. This despite the public support that Al-Akhras has given to two convicted Columbus-area Al-Qaeda operatives, another who was recently indicted for supporting terrorist activity, and his self-described longtime friendship with convicted and deported Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative, Fawaz Damra, who received considerable support from CAIR-OH and the national organization prior to his deportation (see, “Hometown Jihad: Getting By with a Little Help From His (Terrorist) Friends”). And in the current HAMAS/Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial in Dallas, where CAIR has been named unindicted co-conspirator, testimony by a FBI agent has placed two close associates of Al-Akhras, CAIR founders Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, at a critical 1993 HAMAS strategy meeting in Philadelphia designed to support the terror organization’s efforts to derail the Oslo Peace Accords. Those terrorist ties notwithstanding, Al-Akhras’ extensive political connections and business relationships seem to have paid off in getting the schools approved.

Apart from the operation of the schools by extremists, the poor academic performance of the schools ought to be cause for concern for parents, taxpayers and education officials alike. The recently released Ohio Department of Education 2006-2007 report card for International Academy shows that it meets only 2 out of 19 state indicators for proficiency – 7th grade writing and attendance (report cards are also available for 2005-2006 and 2004-2005). Westside Academy has not had a published report card yet because it has only had one year of operations.

Some additional findings from the most recent International Academy state education report:

* Since International Academy opened in 2003, it has never met the federal Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirement and it has never met more than 2 of the 19 state proficiency indicators.

* While the school’s performance index has crawled up slightly over the past three years, with a score of 72.2, it is still well short of the state goal of 100 out of 120.

* More than half of the students (54.9 percent) are rated as less than proficient.

* This year, in every single grade except the 3rd grade, proficiency in mathematics declined from the previous school year.

* While in the 2005-2006 school year, one-third (33.3 percent) of 5th grade students were rated as proficient in math, those same students dropped to one-quarter (25 percent) proficiency in 6th grade this past school year. This past year’s 5th grade scored only 11.1 percent in math proficiency.

* While 6th grade reading scored an impressive 83.3 percent proficiency in 2005-2006, rating higher than the state standard of 75 percent, those scores dropped precipitously this past year to 37.5 percent. Math scores also dropped in that grade from 38.9 percent in 2005-2006 to 25 percent last year. The 6th grade students who performed above the state standard in reading during 2005-2006, are now back below the state standard in the 7th grade at 64.3 percent.

* Students staying at International Academy for more than three years appear to fall further behind in academic proficiency the longer they remain with the school. According to Ohio Department of Education data, proficiency for students with three years attendance at the school is less than one year in four out of five categories. Even after three years at the school, all proficiency scores are still below state standards.

Even as these students fall further behind their peers academically, the educrats at the Ohio Department of Education continue to rubberstamp new contracts for these schools. Rather than wait for the school to improve at the expense of their children’s education, many parents have instead voted with their feet. Enrollment at International Academy has steadily declined since 2004-2005, when the average daily student enrollment was 227. The number of students dropped to 213 in 2005-2006, only to drop further to 193 during the last 2006-2007 school year. Both schools will reopen after Labor Day.

Ohio educrats are also apparently at ease with both schools taking time every day requiring the students to learn Arabic, which a August 2005 article in the Columbus Dispatch, “Seven New Charter Schools Seek Students, Staff, Buildings”, confirms that the language, which is foreign to virtually every Somali, is part of the schools’ core curriculum. The time spent on this Arabic foreign language instruction could otherwise be spent strengthening the schools’ lagging reading and math instruction; or instead, focusing on English proficiency, something the students use every day.

Leaders of the Somali community might be concerned about the open profiteering by the school’s board members and employees from their enterprise. A 2003 Ohio State Auditor’s report on International Academy noted (p. 17) that the school paid $83,500 to Strategic Education and Economic Development (SEED) for teacher training, curriculum development, financial management and State relations. According to filings with the Ohio Secretary of State, SEED was a trade name for the Consolidated Investment Group, Inc., which had the following incorporators: Ahmad Al-Akhras, Abukar Arman, Abdinur Mohamud (the Ohio Dept of Education Title III Director), and International Academy Principal Mouhamed Tarazi. The state legislature closed that loophole in 2003 preventing charter school developers and board members from profiting from their positions in this manner.

However, a bit of digging demonstrates that the profiteering may not be entirely over. The Franklin County Auditor’s property tax records shows that the building currently occupied by Westside Academy is owned by Unified Investment Corp., which lists its place of business as Mouhamed Tarazi’s home address and Tarazi is the listed as the business agent. The 2004 Ohio State Auditor’s report notes in addition (p. 22) that a corporation that Tarazi was a partner of, Sali International, was also paid $140,386 by International Academy.

One wonders how the Somali community would receive the news that these gentlemen had profiteered from the very same schools that have academically failed the children it claims to serve.

Extremist politics, rather than education concerns, seems to be the driving factor of the schools. One of the leaders of the two schools admits to creating a program designed to keep students from integrating into the “racist” American mainstream. In a published education article, “Educating Immigrant Youth in the United States”, Abukar Arman and his co-author lay out an educational plan of keeping Somali children from integrating into their new culture, and cite the experience of International Academy as the best example of their recommended “selected acculturation” educational philosophy in practice.

Another indicator of the partisan political and sectarian use of these schools is in an anti-Israel “teach-in” sponsored by CAIR-OH held at International Academy in September 2006, entitled “Palestine 101”. The event was co-sponsored by a number of Marxist and extremist organizations: The Committee for Justice in Palestine, International Socialist Union, World Can’t Wait-Columbus, and Not In Our Name-Columbus. CAIR national official and school treasurer Ahmad Al-Akhras served as one of the panelists.

From all the Ohio Department of Education data currently available for these schools, it is abundantly clear that in academic terms CAIR’s publicly-funded schools are failing students and their families miserably. But the anecdotal evidence also indicates that academics takes a back seat to the financial interests, political agendas, and alienating educational philosophies of the board members – all of whom are active with CAIR and other extremist groups whose views depart radically from the moderate and mainstream views of most members of the Columbus Somali community.

This situation is clearly not what Ohio taxpayers and state legislators had in mind when they approved charter schools; rather than improving performance, the data suggests that these schools are mired in chronic failure. All the while, Ohio educrats and the political friends and allies of Ahmad Al-Akhras seem reluctant to intervene in this deplorable situation. Don’t expect the ACLU to intervene, either, as Al-Akhras sits on their state board as well.

Ohio taxpayers, too, should be aware of this situation as they pour millions into the two existing schools, and while Ahmad Al-Akhras and his fellow educational warlords have incorporated yet another school, Eastside Academy, in the hopes of expanding their enterprise. Evidence suggests that the Somali refugee community would be better served by having their children in public schools, where they would be able to get the academic attention and assistance they needed to academically compete with their peers, instead of being pawns in service to an Islamic extremist cultural agenda. And while some of the families have understandably walked away from the program, all of the students surely deserve better.

Patrick Poole is an author and public policy researcher. He also maintains a blog, "Existential Space," where he writes on a number of cultural, political and religious issues. This article is posted courtesy of FrontPage Magazine.


[Once again, the fine folks over at FrontPage Magazine "dig the dirt" and expose the myriad of complex political machinations which are at work just behind the curtain allowing our enemies to operate with impunity underneath our collective noses. The connections between the leftists and the jihadists are extensive, and no one has done a better job of documenting and exposing them than Mr. Horowitz and company. Long may they blog! - Martel]

I KNOW MICKEY...AND YOU'RE NO MICKEY

As Hamas Grooms Next Generation Of Killers, The World Must Wake Up And Stop Pacifying Foes

by Michael Goodwin

You hear it all the time: If only the Israelis and Palestinians would make peace, the rest of the world would follow. The next time you hear it, remember that the Palestinian version of Mickey Mouse preaches death to Jews and Americans.

There can be no peace with a culture like that.

The article about Farfur, the clone of Walt Disney's gentle Mickey, in the New York Daily News on Tuesday was a shock to many New Yorkers. He sings and dances on Hamas' children's TV show "Tomorrow's Pioneers" about the need to eat right, pray — and kill. That Hamas comprises most of the Palestinian government shows Farfur is no rogue character — it is sponsored by the very people Palestinians elected to represent them.

Farfur Video 1

Farfur Video 2

To those who monitor the sewage spewing from Arab media, the only shock about the report is that many Americans don't grasp the depth of depravity. Television, newspapers and the Internet daily urge violence in the name of Islam. Cartoons and music videos are used to brainwash children.

The goal, openly stated, is to enlist children in the "culture of martyrdom" — to die fighting and killing the enemies of Islam. Suicide bombers are glorified and promised everlasting paradise. Grade-school textbooks fill children with dreams of a glorious death.

There is nothing remotely like it in our culture. Violence, especially ethnic, racial and religious violence, is universally condemned and carries extra punishment in America and much of the West. Even nasty speech is a no-no. Don Imus got booted to the curb even though he apologized for his overtly racist and sexist barbs. In most Mideast countries, Imus would be called a Western lackey, a sympathizer with the infidels, if that's the best he could come up with.

Organizations such as the Middle East Media Research Institute (www.memri.org) and Palestinian Media Watch (www.pmw.org.il) have been warning for years about the twisted nature of public discourse in Arab and Muslim countries. Their Web sites, complete with videos and translations of material from Muslim media, offer chilling examples of the daily diet of the death culture. I have visited those sites and it is absolutely shocking to see how Arab and Iranian mainstream media promote violence and anti-Semitism.

The sheer volume of this sickening garbage makes it clear that we are a long way from peace. The images, which shift easily from cartoon violence to grisly videos of the real thing in Iraq and elsewhere, illustrate the linkage. While we in the West endlessly study and debate the impact of video games on children's behavior, the merchants of hate in the Mideast have no doubt. They know that using violent images is a surefire way to raise a new generation of madmen.

What can we do about it? Maybe nothing — except be smart. We can start by dropping any pretense that we are not at war, or that Islamic terror will stop if only we get out of Iraq. The problem preceded our invasion, and it will last beyond the resolution. Whatever we do in Iraq, we shouldn't fool ourselves about the nature of the enemy or its goals.

We also have to accept that it is wrong and hypocritical to blame Israel for Arab violence and to insist that the solution is for Israel to make concessions to pacify its enemies. Israel's first duty is to protect itself. If Palestinians want peace, they have to abide by the basic rules of civilization. Playing Mickey Mouse games with violence isn't one of them.

[I often tell people in my lectures as well as in private conversation that Westerners commonly make the deadly mistake of projecting their own values upon other cultures, assuming that all men everywhere think like we do and are, at heart, just like us. This is a myth which must be exposed for what it is...naive at best and dangerous at worst. As I have often said, this is a clash of worldviews. Worldviews which are diametrically opposed to one another and cannot peacefully co-exist. Except of course in the blithe fantasy world of Hollyweird. Make no mistake about it, this is war. And the sooner the West rouses from it's slumber and wipes the sleep from it's eyes the better. However, in the West, both the media and the academy continue to perpetuate the lie of worldwide universal brotherhood. Peace and harmony are just a Coke and a smile away. However, this is a foolish Madison Square pipe dream masquerading as foreign policy. In this era when men are saying "peace peace when there is no peace", it falls to us in The Counter Jihad to sound the alarm and, if necessary, the call to arms. - Martel]

HOW THE WEST WAS LOST - PART NINE

The Islamic States of America?
by Daniel Pipes

The hardest thing for Westerners to understand is not that a war with militant Islam is underway but that the nature of the enemy's ultimate goal. That goal is to apply the Islamic law (the Shari‘a) globally. In U.S. terms, it intends to replace the Constitution with the Qur'an.

This aspiration is so remote and far-fetched to many non-Muslims, it elicits more guffaws than apprehension. Of course, that used to be the same reaction in Europe, and now it's become widely accepted that, in Bernard Lewis' words, "Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century."

Because of the American skepticism about Islamist goals, I postponed publishing an article on this subject until immediately after 9/11, when I expected receptivity to the subject would be greater. I argued there that

The Muslim population in this country is not like any other group, for it includes within it a substantial body of people—many times more numerous than the agents of Osama bin Ladin—who share with the suicide hijackers a hatred of the United States and the desire, ultimately, to transform it into a nation living under the strictures of militant Islam.

The receptivity indeed was greater, but still the idea of an Islamist takeover remains unrecognized in establishment circles – the U.S. government, the old media, the universities, the mainline churches.

Therefore, reading "A rare look at secretive Brotherhood in America," in the Chicago Tribune on Sept. 19 caused me to startle. It's a long analysis that draws on an exclusive interview with Ahmed Elkadi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader in the United States during 1984-94, plus other interviews and documentation. In it, the authors (Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, Sam Roe, and Laurie Cohen) warily but emphatically acknowledge the Islamists' goal of turning the United States into an Islamic state.

Over the last 40 years, small groups of devout Muslim men have gathered in homes in U.S. cities to pray, memorize the Koran and discuss events of the day. But they also addressed their ultimate goal, one so controversial that it is a key reason they have operated in secrecy: to create Muslim states overseas and, they hope, someday in America as well. …

Brotherhood members emphasize that they follow the laws of the nations in which they operate. They stress that they do not believe in overthrowing the U.S. government, but rather that they want as many people as possible to convert to Islam so that one day—perhaps generations from now—a majority of Americans will support a society governed by Islamic law.

This Brotherhood approach is in keeping with my observation that the greater Islamist threat to the West is not violence – flattening buildings, bombing railroad stations and nightclubs, seizing theaters and schools – but the peaceful, legal growth of power through education, the law, the media, and the political system.

The Tribune article explains how, when recruiting new members, the organization does not reveal its identity but invites candidates to small prayer meetings where the prayer leaders focus on the primary goal of the Brotherhood, namely "setting up the rule of God upon the Earth" (i.e., achieving Islamic hegemony). Elkadi describes the organization's strategic, long-term approach: "First you change the person, then the family, then the community, then the nation."

His wife Iman is no less explicit; all who are associated with the Brotherhood, she says, have the same goal, which is "to educate everyone about Islam and to follow the teachings of Islam with the hope of establishing an Islamic state."

In addition to Elkadi, the article features information from Mustafa Saied (about whose Muslim Brotherhood experiences the Wall Street Journal devoted a feature story in December 2003, without mentioning the organization's Islamist goals). Saied, the Tribune informs us, says

he found out that the U.S. Brotherhood had a plan for achieving Islamic rule in America: It would convert Americans to Islam and elect like-minded Muslims to political office. "They're very smart. Everyone else is gullible," Saied says. "If the Brotherhood puts up somebody for an election, Muslims would vote for him not knowing he was with the Brotherhood."

Citing documents and interviews, the Tribune team notes that the secretive Brotherhood, in an effort to acquire more influence, went above ground in Illinois in 1993, incorporating itself as the Muslim American Society. The MAS, headquartered in Alexandria, Va. and claiming 53 chapters across the United States engages in a number of activities. These include summer camps, a large annual conference, websites, and the Islamic American University, a mainly correspondence school in suburban Detroit that trains teachers and imams.

Of course, the MAS denies any intent to take over the country. One of its top officials, Shaker Elsayed, insists that

MAS does not believe in creating an Islamic state in America but supports the establishment of Islamic governments in Muslim lands. The group's goal in the United States, he says, "is to serve and develop the Muslim community and help Muslims to be the best citizens they can be of this country." That includes preserving the Muslim identity, particularly among youths.

Notwithstanding this denial, the Tribune finds MAS goals to be clear enough:

Part of the Chicago chapter's Web site is devoted to teens. It includes reading materials that say Muslims have a duty to help form Islamic governments worldwide and should be prepared to take up arms to do so. One passage states that "until the nations of the world have functionally Islamic governments, every individual who is careless or lazy in working for Islam is sinful." Another one says that Western secularism and materialism are evil and that Muslims should "pursue this evil force to its own lands" and "invade its Western heartland."

In suburban Rosemont, Ill., several thousand people attended MAS' annual conference in 2002 at the village's convention center. One speaker said, "We may all feel emotionally attached to the goal of an Islamic state" in America, but it would have to wait because of the modest Muslim population. "We mustn't cross hurdles we can't jump yet."

These revelations are particularly striking, coming as they do just days after a Washington Post article titled "In Search Of Friends Among The Foes," which reports how some U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials believe the Muslim Brotherhood's influence "offers an opportunity for political engagement that could help isolate violent jihadists." Graham Fuller is quoted saying that "It is the preeminent movement in the Muslim world. It's something we can work with." Demonizing the Brotherhood, he warns, "would be foolhardy in the extreme." Other analysts, such as Reuel Gerecht, Edward Djerejian, and Leslie Campbell, are quoted as being in agreement with this outlook.

But it is a deeply wrong and dangerous approach. Even if the Muslim Brotherhood is not specifically associated with violence in the United States (as it has been in other countries, including Egypt and Syria), it is deeply hostile to the United States and must be treated as one vital component of the enemy's assault force.

WAR OF THE WORLDS - PART THREE

Iran's Secret Plan For Mayhem
by Eli Lake
January 3, 2007

WASHINGTON — Iran is supporting both Sunni and Shiite terrorists in the Iraqi civil war, according to secret Iranian documents captured by Americans in Iraq.

The news that American forces had captured Iranians in Iraq was widely reported last month, but less well known is that the Iranians were carrying documents that offered Americans insight into Iranian activities in Iraq.

An American intelligence official said the new material, which has been authenticated within the intelligence community, confirms "that Iran is working closely with both the Shiite militias and Sunni Jihadist groups." The source was careful to stress that the Iranian plans do not extend to cooperation with Baathist groups fighting the government in Baghdad, and said the documents rather show how the Quds Force — the arm of Iran's revolutionary guard that supports Shiite Hezbollah, Sunni Hamas, and Shiite death squads — is working with individuals affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq and Ansar al-Sunna.

Another American official who has seen the summaries of the reporting affiliated with the arrests said it comprised a "smoking gun." "We found plans for attacks, phone numbers affiliated with Sunni bad guys, a lot of things that filled in the blanks on what these guys are up to," the official said.

One of the documents captured in the raids, according to two American officials and one Iraqi official, is an assessment of the Iraq civil war and new strategy from the Quds Force. According to the Iraqi source, that assessment is the equivalent of " Iran's Iraq Study Group," a reference to the bipartisan American commission that released war strategy recommendations after the November 7 elections. The document concludes, according to these sources, that Iraq's Sunni neighbors will step up their efforts to aid insurgent groups and that it is imperative for Iran to redouble efforts to retain influence with them, as well as with Shiite militias.

Rough translations of the Iranian assessment and strategy, as well as a summary of the intelligence haul, have been widely distributed throughout the policy community and are likely to influence the Iraq speech President Bush is expected to deliver in the coming days regarding the way forward for the war, according to two Bush administration officials.

The news that Iran's elite Quds Force would be in contact, and clandestinely cooperating, with Sunni Jihadists who attacked the Golden Mosque in Samarra (one of the holiest shrines in Shiism) on February 22, could shake the alliance Iraq's ruling Shiites have forged in recent years with Tehran. Many Iraq analysts believe the bombing vaulted Iraq into the current stage of its civil war.

The top Quds Force commander — known as Chizari, according to a December 30 story in the Washington Post — was captured inside a compound belonging to Abdul Aziz Hakim, the Shiite leader President Bush last month pressed to help forge a new ruling coalition that excludes a firebrand Shiite cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr.

According to one Iraqi official, the two Quds commanders were in Iraq at the behest of the Iraqi government, which had requested more senior Iranian points of contact when the government complained about Shiite death squad activity. The negotiations were part of an Iraqi effort to establish new rules of the road between Baghdad and Tehran. This arrangement was ironed out by Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, when he was in Tehran at the end of November.

While Iran has openly supported Iraqi Shiite militias involved in attacks on American soldiers, the Quds Force connection to Sunni insurgents has been murkier.

In 2003, coalition forces captured a playbook outlining Iranian intentions to support insurgents of both stripes, but its authenticity was disputed.

American intelligence reports have suggested that export/import operations run by Sunni terrorists in Fallujah in 2004 received goods from the revolutionary guard.

"We have seen bits and piece of things before, but it was highly compartmentalized suggesting the Iranian link to Sunni groups," a military official said.

A former Iran analyst for the Pentagon who also worked as an adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, Michael Rubin, said yesterday: "There has been lots of information suggesting that Iran has not limited its outreach just to the Shiites, but this has been disputed."

He added, "When documents like this are found, usually intelligence officials may confirm their authenticity but argue they prove nothing because they do not reflect a decision to operationalize things."

A former State Department senior analyst on Iraq and Iran who left government service in 2005, Wayne White, said he did not think it was likely the Quds Force was supporting Sunni terrorists who were targeting Shiite political leaders and civilians, but stressed he did not know.

"I have no doubt whatsoever that al-Quds forces are on the ground and active in Iraq," he said. "That's about it. I saw evidence that Moqtada al Sadr was in contact with Sunni Arab insurgents in western Iraq, but I never saw evidence of Iran in that loop."

Mr. White added, "One problem that we all have is that people consistently conduct analysis assuming that the actor is going to act predictably or rationally based on their overall mindset or ideology. Sometimes people don't.

"One example of a mindset that may hinder analysis of Iranian involvement is the belief that Iran would never have any dealings with militant Sunni Arabs. But they allowed hundreds of Al Qaeda operatives to escape from Afghanistan across their territory in 2002," he said.

THE GLOBALIST AGENDA - PART TWO

On The Re-Making Of The West
by Fjordman

As I’ve said before, Political Correctness was pioneered by feminists, including the totalitarian changing of the language to make it more gender-neutral and less “oppressive.” Those who successfully manage to enforce their definition of words win the ideological contest.

There was an interesting book called The New Totalitarians written by British historian Roland Huntford about Sweden in the early 1970s. It is especially noteworthy how the Socialist government deliberately broke down the nuclear family. This was presented as liberation from the oppression of women, but was in reality about tearing down the religious fabric of society and eliminating the Church and Judeo-Christian thinking as ideological competitors.

It was also about increasing state control over all citizens by breaking down a rival institution that obstructed the uninhibited state indoctrination of children. Besides, the state could foment animosity between men and women and step in as an arbitrator, thus further enhancing its powers. During the past few elections in Sweden, there has been virtually no debate about mass immigration, but a passionate debate about “gender equality” in which almost all contestants call themselves feminists, and only debate which ways to implement absolute equality between the sexes.

Mr. Huntford demonstrated how, when it was decided that a woman’s place was not at home but out at work, there was a rapid change in the language. Page 301:

“The customary Swedish for housewife is husmor, which is honourable; it was replaced by the neologism hemmafru, literally ‘the-wife-who-stays-at-home’, which is derogatory. Within a few months, the mass media were able to kill the old and substitute the new term. By the end of 1969, it was almost impossible in everyday conversation to mention the state of housewife without appearing to condemn or to sneer. Swedish had been changed under the eyes and ears of the Swedes. Husmor had been discredited; the only way out was to use hemmafru ironically. Connected with this semantic shift, there was a change in feeling. Women who, a year or so before, had been satisfied, and possibly proud, to stay at home, began to feel the pressure to go out to work. The substitution of one word for the other had been accompanied by insistent propaganda in the mass media, so that it was as if a resolute conditioning campaign had been carried out. Very few were able to recognize the indoctrination in the linguistic manipulation; in the real sense of the word, the population had been brain-washed.”

For my own part, I find it interesting that the same people who, in the 60s and 70s, broke up the traditional family structure in Western countries and warned people against the dangers of overpopulation, telling people to lower their birth rates, come back a few years later and say that we have to import millions of immigrants because we have such low birth rates.

Author Daniel Horowitz has written about the highly influential American feminist Betty Friedan, whose 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique” is widely seen as marking the beginning of the Second Wave of feminism. Horowitz documents how Friedan had for decades before this been a hardened Marxist. It is revealing that she tried to hide her background, presenting herself only as an average suburban housewife. In the early drafts, Friedan quoted Friedrich Engels, but these quotations were cut out before the book was published. In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had called for the abolition of family. Friedan denounced the American suburban family household as “a comfortable concentration camp.”

Roland Huntford noticed that the teaching of history was severely curtailed in Swedish schools because it was “impractical.” Religion, and Christianity in particular, was presented as superstition designed to fool the masses, which had been liberated from this ancient oppression by the Labor movement.

As he noted, “Scrapping historical knowledge deprives pupils of the instrument for criticizing society here and now. And perhaps that is the intended effect.” Journalist Christopher Hitchens later wrote that “For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught.”

“The State,” in the words of Mr Ingvar Carlsson, then Minister of Education, “is concerned with morality from a desire to change society.” Mr. Carlsson, who was later Swedish prime minister until 1996, also stated on one occasion that “School is the spearhead of Socialism.”

According to Huntford, the word “freedom” was almost entirely confined to the sexual field in Sweden:

“The Swedish government has taken what it is pleased to call ‘the sexual revolution’ under its wing. Children are impressed at school that sexual emancipation is their birthright, and this is done in such a way as to suggest that the State is offering them their liberty from old-fashioned restrictions.”

He describes a meeting with Dr Gösta Rodhe, the head of the department of sexual education in the Directorate of Schools. She stated: “You see, since there’s a lack of tension in Swedish politics, younger people have got to find release and excitement in sexual tension instead.”

Herbert Marcuse, one of the major theorists of the Frankfurt School of cultural Marxism, identified faith-based morality as the chief obstacle to a Socialist society. In his 1955 book Eros and Civilization, he argued for freeing sex from any restraints. He made a huge impact in the 1960s. Although he may not have coined the term “Make love, not war,” he undoubtedly endorsed it.

Mr. Huntford ended his book with a warning that this system of soft-totalitarianism could be exported to other countries. This was in the early 1970s, and he has been proven right since:

“The Swedes have demonstrated how present techniques can be applied in ideal conditions. Sweden is a control experiment on an isolated and sterilized subject. Pioneers in the new totalitarianism, the Swedes are a warning of what probably lies in store for the rest of us, unless we take care to resist control and centralization, and unless we remember that politics are not to be delegated, but are the concern of the individual. The new totalitarians, dealing in persuasion and manipulation, must be more efficient than the old, who depended upon force.”

“As political and economic freedom diminishes” said Aldous Huxley’s in Brave New World, “sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase.” This fits perfectly with Huntford’s description. The state strips away your personal, economic and political freedom, yet grants you sexual freedom in return, boldly hailing itself as your liberator.

Language is underestimated as a source of power. Those who control the language and the school curriculum control society.

George Orwell said: “If freedom of speech means anything at all, it is the freedom to say things that people do not want to hear.” In his book 1984, a totalitarian Party rules much of Europe. Their three slogans, on display everywhere, are: War is peace, Freedom is slavery and Ignorance is strength. It’s the ultimate glossocracy, even creating an entirely new language called Newspeak:

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.”

I love Orwell’s book, but frankly, it fits an openly totalitarian society more than it does Western nations. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, with its hedonistic society where people derive pleasure from promiscuous sex and drugs, is closer to the mark.

[This brilliant analysis of The New World Dis-Order and the agents of chaos who are it's architects is excerpted from the article The Rise Of Glossocracy by Fjordman which was recently posted at Gates Of Vienna and is reproduced here with full attribution. The fine people at GOV are outstanding fellow laborers in the ongoing battle for the imperiled soul of Western civilization and their site is a virtual repository of vital infomation. - Martel]

HOW THE WEST WAS LOST - PART EIGHT

Mexican Illegals Versus American Voters
by Tony Blankley

It's lucky America has over two centuries of mostly calm experience with self-government. We are going to need to fall back on that invaluable patrimony if the immigration debate continues as it has started this season. The Senate is attempting to legislate into the teeth of the will of the American public. The Senate Judiciary committeemen -- and probably a majority of the Senate -- are convinced that they know that the American people don't know what is best for them.

National polling data could not be more emphatic -- and has been so for decades. A Gallup poll (March 27, 2006) finds 80 percent of the public wants federal government to get tougher on illegal immigration. A Quinnipiac University Poll (March 3, 2006) finds 62 percent oppose making it easier for illegals to become citizens (72 percent in that poll don't even want illegals to be permitted to have driver's licenses).

Time magazine's recent poll (Jan. 24-26, 2006) found 74 percent favor "major penalties" on employers of illegals, and 70 percent believe illegals increase the likelihood of terrorism. Fifty-seven percent would use military force at the Mexican-American border.

NBC/Wall St. Journal's poll (March 10-13, 2006) found 59 percent opposing a guest worker proposal. Seventy-one percent would more likely vote for a congressional candidate who would tighten immigration controls.

An IQ Research poll (Mach 10, 2006) found 92 percent saying that securing the U.S. border should be a top priority of The White House and Congress.

Yet, according to a National Journal survey of Congress, 73 percent of Republican and 77 percent of Democratic congressmen and senators say they would support guest-worker legislation.

I commend to all those presumptuous senators and congressmen the sardonic and wise words of Edmund Burke in his 1792 Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe: "No man will assert seriously, that when people are of a turbulent spirit, the best way to keep them in order is to furnish them with something substantial to complain of."

The senators should remember that they are American senators, not Roman proconsuls. Nor is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee some latter-day Praetor Maximus.

But if they would be dictators, it would be nice if they could at least be wise (until such time as the people can electorally forcefully project with a violent pedal thrust their regrettable backsides out of town).

It was gut-wrenching (which in my case is a substantial event) to watch the senators prattle on in their idle ignorance concerning the manifold economic benefits that will accrue to the body politic if we can just cram a few million more uneducated illegals into the country. (I guess ignorance loves company.)

Beyond the Senate last week, in a remarkable example of intellectual integrity (in the face of the editorial positions of their newspapers) the chief economic columnists for the New York Times and the Washington Post -- Paul Krugman and Robert Samuelson, respectively -- laid out the sad facts regarding the economics of the matter. Senators, congressmen and Mr. President, please take note.

Regarding the Senate's and the president's guest worker proposals, The Post's Robert Samuelson writes:

"Gosh, they're all bad ideas...we'd be importing poverty. This isn't because these immigrants aren't hardworking; many are. Nor is it because they don't assimilate; many do. But they generally don't go home, assimilation is slow and the ranks of the poor are constantly replenished...[it] is a conscious policy of creating poverty in the United States while relieving it in Mexico...The most lunatic notion is that admitting more poor Latino workers would ease the labor market strains of retiring baby boomers...Far from softening the social problems of an aging society, more poor immigrants might aggravate them by pitting older retirees against younger Hispanics for limited government benefits. [Moreover] It's a myth that the U.S. economy 'needs' more poor immigrants. The illegal immigrants already here represent only about 4.9 percent of the labor force."

For all of Mr. Samuelson's supporting statistics, see his Washington Post column of March 22, 2006, from which this is taken.

Likewise, a few days later, the very liberal and often partisan Paul Krugman of the New York Times courageously wrote:

"Unfortunately, low-skill immigrants don't pay enough taxes to cover the cost of the [government] benefits they receive...As the Swiss writer Max Frisch wrote about his own country's experience with immigration, 'We wanted a labor force, but human beings came."

Krugman also observed -- citing a leading Harvard study -- "that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration. That's why it's intellectually dishonest to say, as President Bush does, that immigrants 'do jobs that Americans will not do.' The willingness of Americans to do a job depends on how much that job pays -- and the reason some jobs pay too little to attract native-born Americans is competition from poorly paid immigrants."

Thusly do the two leading economic writers for the nation's two leading liberal newspapers summarily debunk the economic underpinning of the president's and the Senate's immigration proposals.

Under such circumstances, advocates of guest worker/amnesty bills will find it frustratingly hard to defend their arrogant plans by their preferred tactic of slandering those who disagree with them as racist, nativist and xenophobic. When the slandered ones include not only the Washington Post and the New York Times, but about 70 percent of the public, it is not only bad manners, but bad politics.

The public demand to protect our borders will triumph sooner or later. And, the more brazen the opposing politicians, the sooner will come the triumph. So legislate on, you proud and foolish senators, and hasten your political demise.


Tony Blankley is a nationally syndicated columnist as well as the author of 'The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?' published by Regnery Publishing.

Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate