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Jewish World Review June 21, 2006 / 25 Sivan, 5766 Razablanca By Julia Gorin
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The Hispanic-supremacist group La Raza, or "The Race," has been making more and more headlines with the advent this year of pro-illegal-immigrant rallies. Among the chants that can be heard as people march for lawlessness is "La Raza unida nunca sera vencida!" or "A united [Hispanic] race will never be defeated!" The Race openly declares its intentions to "reconquer" the American Southwest, demands that illegals be allowed to get drivers' licenses and free in-state tuition and health care, that state agencies and ballots be bilingual, and that the post-9/11 immigration laws be rolled back so that more illegals and terrorists can get in. The Race has been courted by both Democratic and Republican politicians, and actress Eva Longoria has hosted its award ceremonies.
Given these current socio-political realities--along with our earnest, ongoing dialoguing with representatives of a religion that seeks to establish a worldwide caliphate in which everyone is either Muslim or dead, isn't it about time we reached out to the other supremacists in our midst, whom society has shunted aside--the white supremacists, skinheads, neo-Nazis, KKK and other affiliates? Why do we discriminate against them? Why the double standard? It's long past time to bring them into the political fold and establish dialogue. After all, wouldn't the same logic apply to them that applies to immigrants and Muslims: when people are marginalized, it fuels their sense of otherness, and their anger festers. Besides, talk about traditionally disadvantaged products-of-their-environment who need a self-esteem boost! Yet in the case of redneck racists, the words "poor and ignorant" are said with contempt rather than a self-blaming social responsibility to "help." So why is one dismissed out of hand while others are "dialogued" to death — especially when the intention of the former is to preserve the country rather than to undermine it?
Apparently, the problem for white supremacists is that they don't propound their views in Spanish or Arabic, and to Americans, primitive ideas are more palatable when uttered in a foreign language--including Dios or Allah instead of God or Jesus. To be less of a pariah, the disorganized white nationalist groups should unite under an umbrella organization and call itself Raza Blanca, which sounds much more romantic than KKK or Stormfront. They'd also have an easier time espousing their views if they converted to Islam, as former Klansman Clinton Sipes, now Abdus Salam, has done. After all, consider how much more unsettled we are by blonde, blue-eyed 13-year-old twins who sing pop songs about white pride than we are about Arabic toddlers modeling belt-bombs. Lynx and Lamb Gaede, the duo that forms "Prussian Blue," say they're proud of being white and "want to preserve [their] race." That was enough to earn their talents a label as "preaching hate," while songs about black power or suicide bombers are indulged and tolerated, respectively. Can anyone recall a talk show host laying into an Islamist with the zeal that Donny Deutsch went after the Prussian Blue girls on his CNBC show in December? No, we are infinitely more freaked out by a pair of back-woods-minded white girls than we are by children holding placards reading "Death to Israel and America" and "Islam will Dominate."
On that subject, at least for the white nationalists it can be said that they cherish their children--a fundamental value they share with us normal folk. And whatever perverse ideas are included in their patriotism, at least they're patriotic (though this could be what doomed them from the start with the arbiters of good taste). Meanwhile, loving America is more than can be said for illegal (and plenty of today's other) immigrants, or for the fastest-growing religion, whose adherents have already modified the Pledge of Allegiance at some of their schools.
Even more uncomfortably, there's truth to at least part of what the white racists say. Note the deafening silence that greeted the 1998 film "American History X." It was the most provocative but least talked-about drama of the year, not least of all because of statements like the following from the protagonist, played by Ed Norton: Today's immigrants "don't give two s---- about this country. They come here to exploit it, not to embrace it. I mean, millions of white European-Americans came here and it flourished, you know, in a generation." Norton's Derek Vinyard lives in Venice Beach, CA, where black and Latino gangs have taken over. His father was shot and killed while putting out a fire at a Compton drug den by, Derek surmises, "a drug dealer who probably still collects a welfare check." Referring to the illegal immigrants who would become today's entitled marchers, Derek says, "This state spent $3 billion on services for those who had no right to be here in the first place....Our border policy is a joke. So is anyone surprised that south of the border they're laughing at us, laughing at our laws?" Though the recovering-racist protagonist adds these facts up to a vile outlook and destructive solution, Derek describes America not inaccurately as being "raped."
And so it is that while the founder and principal of a taxpayer- and La Raza-funded Los Angeles charter school sneers at the idea of racial integration and tells non-Spanish-speaking reporters "I would be very careful before I came down here," and while Virginia's Saudi Academy produces aspiring presidential assassins, and Fresno State holds separate "Latino commencements," we're more disturbed by John Birch schools and Bob Jones University.
The co-sponsor of the charter school Academia Semillas Del Pueblo is the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or MEChA, which Michelle Malkin has described as operating "an identity politics indoctrination machine on publicly subsidized college and high school campuses nationwide." Its members have rioted in Los Angeles and "editorialized that federal immigration 'pigs should be killed, every single one' in San Diego, and they refer to themselves as a bronze people with a bronze culture on a bronze continent. The group even has a twist on the old Marxist axiom "From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs": "For the race, everything; outside the race, nothing." Dismissed as a social club, the group's activists have directed racist verbal attacks against every non-Latino group, including blacks, Asians and Jews.
Speaking of which, why is white supremacists' anti-Semitism considered more specious than Islamic, Hispanic or black anti-Semitism when it's the least active? In fact, if one had to compare, anti-Semitism by the "minorities" is worse, considering it's also a betrayal--of a people who for generations have bent over backwards to improve the lives of these "disadvantaged groups," something that Jews haven't done for the Maya Angelou-dubbed "po' white trash."
So it's time to ask ourselves: Should there really be a singled-out race "for whom racial pride is a social taboo," as Wendy McElroy describes it? Why do we find white racism to be so much more unsettling than racism by the Other? Is it self-hatred? Or are we just pumping up people whom we truly do find inferior — thereby tacitly buttressing the premise of the white supremacists?
Rather than alienate the white power crowd and relegate them to the peripheries of society, shouldn't we be accommodating their views as we do the others', and trying to explain to them that there are more constructive ways to fight for one's country? Why pile on when skinheads probably already feel impotent and upstaged by Islamic terror, bewildered how these third worlders managed to hijack their movement, along with the swastika and Hitler salute.
Given the taxpayer-subsidized racial war against "the Anglos," as La Raza and MEChA have declared it, it's time to stop discriminating against our embarrassing white brothers. In fact, maybe it's time to give the Others the superiority contest they've been gunning for — and see who's for real, and who's just bluffing to cover up an inferiority complex. That would be worth buying front-row seats to.
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JWR contributor Julia Gorin is a widely published op-ed writer and comedian who blogs at www.JuliaGorin.com. Comment on by clicking here. © 2005, Julia Gorin. |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
