[Bret L]

La Raza Starting To Sweat Over Patriotic Resistance To Open Borders
Agenda

By Preston Blair

"Last week (July 25-28) the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) held its annual conference at Chicago’s McCormick Place West. The conference was originally scheduled to be held in Kansas City, Missouri, but organizers moved it in order to “punish” that town after its mayor had the audacity to appoint one of the Minutemen to an official position.

I decided to pay our friends at La Raza a little visit. One of the
workshops, “Lessons from Lucero: Overcoming Hate at the Local Level,”
sparked my curiosity particularly. With Orwellian-style hate crimes
legislation pending in Congress, I was interested to see exactly what
“overcoming hate” meant.

Lisa Navarrete, [email] Vice President of NCLR, introduced each of the
workshop’s speakers after lamenting the “wave of hate”(a La Raza
catchphrase) against Latinos that she seemed to believe was sweeping
the country and making it hard to pass “comprehensive immigration
reform”.

The first speaker was Jose Perez [email him] of LatinoJustice PRLDEF,
the successor group to the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education
Fund. Some readers might recall that Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s
connections to this organization were an issue during her confirmation
hearings—a development that Perez spent some time deploring.

He expressed amazement at the idea that anyone could ever consider his
organization a “hate group” and quoted a statement from its website:

“As the leading advocate for Latinos in New York and the Northeast,
and known nationally for its work in educating the next generation of
Latino lawmakers, LatinoJustice PRLDEF is well-positioned to bring
attention to the need to cultivate more Latino leaders in professional
fields and in decision-making positions.”

When he finished reading he lifted up his head and asked
incredulously, “Now, does that sound like a hate group?”



Of course, Perez’s inability to imagine how anyone could ever call a
group with such an agenda a “hate group” illustrates how deeply
ingrained the double standard is when it comes to ethnic activism.
Take the same exact paragraph and replace the word “Latino” with the
word “white” and Perez would probably be among the first to decry it
as the manifesto of “racists” and “supremacists.”



Indeed, Perez was quick to use exactly these words in describing
another organization. A lawyer by trade, Perez spends a lot of his
time locking horns with the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the
legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
And he repeated the SPLC’s smears about FAIR being headed by “white
supremacists” and “tied to the KKK”.



Perez condemned work place enforcement raids for creating a “climate
of fear”. In the process he slipped and used the word “alien” to
describe foreigners. He apologized immediately and told the audience:
“I never like to use that word. We’re all humans on this planet”.



Perez spent most of his allotted time talking about the work he does
investigating “hate crimes” against Latinos. If the stories he told
happened as described, I wish him every bit of luck bringing
perpetrators to justice.



However, it is a pity that Perez and LatinoJustice are nowhere to be
seen when non-Latinos fall prey to racially motivated attacks—like the
white family that was recently attacked by a black gang in Akron, an
incident the police did not think fit to classify as a hate crime
despite the fact that gang members shouted “this is a black world” as
they descended on their victims.



Next up was Ellen Gallagher [Email her] of Welcoming America, a
Massachusetts-based group that focuses on “building trust” between
Americans and immigrants. Apparently, she and her pals go to towns
where Americans have “clashed” with foreigners and hold events, such
as “unity picnics”, where these two groups can talk about their
“shared values” and Americans can learn how to be more “welcoming”.



One of the things they apparently do at these meetings is play the
“immigration board game” Players can roll dice and go around the
“undocumented loop” trying to land on squares with “good” news like
“You take part in the Church sanctuary movement”, and avoid ones with
“bad” news such as “You were detained in a raid. Go to detention”.



All of this, of course, is little more than psychological warfare
against Americans, attempting to make them feel guilty and ashamed of
defending their country and their culture from invasion and
displacement—as though wanting to keep illegal aliens out of your
country was any more “immoral” than wanting to keep strangers from
camping out on your front lawn.



Last to speak was Stacy Burdett [send her mail] of the Anti Defamation
League. She said that her organization would stand with Latinos on the
immigration issue. “We Jews have spent thousands of years being the
stranger, the other”, she said. “We know what it’s like when someone
says: ‘you see those people? They’re not really one of us. They have
their own agenda.’”



She said that the ADL would continue its fight for “comprehensive
immigration reform” and that “this issue is at the top of our domestic
agenda”.



The panelists then took questions from the audience. Many of these
questions were actually quite heartening, revealing just how much good
work we in the patriotic immigration reform movement have been doing.



One person asked about what they could do to change the anti-
immigration attitudes they encounter. Gallagher told them to speak
from their hearts, because “when you speak from your heart, people
listen”.



Perez had a more sinister comment to make. Blaming much of the problem
on talk radio and the media, he said that much of the problem comes
down to “controlling, not controlling, attempting to influence” media
discourse. Perez’s slip in word choice betrayed his totalitarian
impulses. He went on to say that it is “irresponsible” for television
networks to give a forum to people like Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan and
that Latinos need to work on getting those kind of people off the air.



Someone from Oklahoma complained to the panelists about the tough
immigration laws passed in his state and how they seemed to have taken
“any spark of hope away from Latinos who are undocumented”. He
lamented the supposed cowardice of Oklahoma politicians. “Their
constituency speaks louder than their heart speaks to them”, he said.
(Heaven forbid politicians actually listen to their constituents!)



Lastly, a blogger asked about how to expand the pro-immigration
movement’s online presence, because “we’ve been outnumbered online for
a long time”.



All of the panelists took their turns deploring the many “offensive”
comments posted online about immigrants. The ADL’s Burdett said it had
been working on trying to get newspapers to stop allowing anonymous
posting as a way to change the tone of online discussion on
immigration.

When the Q & A was over, I decided to walk around the rest of the
convention center to see what else La Raza had set up. The brief tour
I took served to emphasize the vast disparity in resources between our
side and theirs.

McCormick is a huge building with enough room to accommodate tens of
thousands of people. Walking around the convention floor, I saw booths
for virtually every major American corporation, all happy to donate
millions of dollars to La Raza even while many of them struggle to
make a profi t. Among others:

* McDonald's
* Wal-Mart
* ConAgra Foods
* Microsoft Corporation
* Univision Communications Inc

And yet at the same time, all of that should make any American patriot
swell with pride. Despite the other side’s corporate money, we’ve held
up well against them over the past few years. The speakers at the
workshop I attended repeatedly expressed their anger and frustration
at how so-called “xenophobia” and “stereotypes” had worked to defeat
recent attempts at granting amnesty.

The fact is that, because of us, wrecking America hasn’t been quite as
easy as they thought it would be. Let’s try and continue to frustrate
them."

http://www.vdare.com/misc/090804_blair.htm