I try to keep track of the various terror trials that get local news coverage but little attention nationally. In September, the Christian Science Monitor counted up 21 terror plots uncovered in the U.S. since 9/11. Usually the dinosaur media doesn’t want to worry the pubic with such disquieting facts–that attempted terrorism goes on rather frequently and all around the country.

Also, the word “plot” implies collusion with others, so single Islamic killers are not counted, e.g. Naveed Haq who murdered Pam Waechter and shot five other women in the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. He phoned his mother after the shooting from jail and told her she should be proud that he was a martyr and would be going to heaven. Also, my blog post about the probable jihad killer Suleiman Talovic in Salt Lake listed other jihad criminals who apparently acted alone, Refugee Rampage in Salt Lake.

Anyway, the Sears Tower plotters were Haitians and the leader of the plot got a very lightweight sentence considering.

The leader of a group which plotted to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago has been sentenced to 13.5 years in prison.

Narseal Batiste, 35, also planned to bomb FBI offices, along with four other men who have already been given prison sentences.

Prosecutors said the men conspired to provide material support to al-Qaeda but defence lawyers said the plot was never serious.

Prosecutors in Miami had sought the maximum 70-year sentence for Batiste. [Sears Tower bomb plot leader Narseal Batiste jailed, BBC, November 20, 2009]

On Thursday, the Prayer,Action And News blog reported in S.O.S. on 909 that

Senate Armed Services Chair Carl Levin (D-Mich.) confirmed that a “hate crimes” bill will make its debut in a matter of days. Levin said he plans to attach an expansion of hate crimes law to the defense policy bill, meaning that a vote on the legislation, S. 909, could be as early as this week.

The Rev. Ted Pike who continues to be indispensible in following this matter (sign up for his E-Alerts at the top of this website) takes this seriously. In POSSIBLE HATE BILL VOTE ON MONDAY! 11 July 09 he points out:

The DOD bill is scheduled to begin Senate floor action at 11 a.m. EDT on Monday. Since S. 909 is an “omnibus bill,” Sen. Reid or any cosponsor might introduce it as an amendment. Amendments could be offered any time next week!

Pike further points out that since Attorney General Holder conceded last month that the Bill was not intended to protect Servicemen, there is not a shred of justification for attaching this controversial measure to military appropriations legislation. Of course, this is not likely to deter Levin.

He also reasonably complains of the defeatism of the larger Christian lobbying outfits

…on Thursday, Focus on the Family’s James Dobson and Tom Minnery along with Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins covered themselves with shame by announcing to Dobson’s vast audience that it is now impossible to defeat the hate bill…Focus on the Family and FRC, perhaps the two most powerful evangelical “watchdog” groups, have done virtually nothing of real significance to fight the hate bill since January.

Here at VDARE.com, we are equally disgusted with the silence of the Plutocrats of the Immigration Reform community – NumbersUSA, FAIR and CIS. Do they want the Immigration debate shut down?

On a happier note, Cato’s David Rittgers has succeeded in placing an anti-Hate Crimes Bill editorial in The Christian Science Monitor: Hate-crime legislation would backfire July 10 2009

Rittgers again deploys a favorite argument: that the legislation could stimulate these kinds of actions:

If there is a subset of the local population that shares the views that drove the perpetrator to commit his crime, then the imposition of federal jurisdiction based solely on the motive of the criminal engenders resentment and encourages others to mimic his behavior.
What is being proposed is feel-good legislation that gives ideologues more incentive to commit their crimes and a bigger platform for their views. The federal government should not create an aid program for hatemongers.

I have to say this analysis has never seemed particularly persuasive to me: but it has persuaded the U.K. authorities, who, shamefully, have actual experience in enforcing this type of measure:

TAKE IT EASY ON MUSLIM EXTREMISTS, POLICE TOLD By Macer Hall Daily Express Saturday July 11, 2009

POLICE will be ordered not to charge Muslim extremists in many hate crime cases – to stop them becoming more militant.
Officials… want to avoid alienating Muslims on the fringes of extremism by dragging them to court over petty allegations unlikely to result in conviction

A Home Office spokesman said: “Preventing people becoming radicalised is a key priority for the Government. The police response needs to be proportionate to deal with crimes people commit while reducing the risk to public safety.”

Of course, in reality this simply reflects the political strength of British Muslims – and demonstrates what a disaster politicizing the Justice system will be.

The Treason Lobby was on parade on Thursday – President Obama finally met with assorted Congressthings to plot how to foist Amnesty/Immigration Acceleration onto America. Apparently matters did not go well.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was no help. He has being widely quoted saying that the task is difficult – for instance at this Christian Science Monitor Breakfast the same morning:

I’ll say it’s self evident - one of the reasons you’re having the meeting is because the votes aren’t there. That’s kinda – If the votes were there, you wouldn’t need to have the meeting, you’d go to a roll call. OK?
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus and immigration groups have all asked for a meeting because the votes aren’t there. And they asked for the meeting and that’s why we’re doing the meeting, to help focus on what does it take….
It’s better that it happen from a policy standpoint. It’s obviously self-evident that it would be better if it happened from a political standpoint. But it’s also better that we continue to focus on moving the economy – getting the economy moving.

Possibly this lack of enthusiasm is what alarmed Amnesty fanatic Lindsey Graham (Scalawag-SC)

Senator Lindsey Graham…also said he saw only “one more chance” to pass a bill because of the political heat that immigration reform stirs up.

“If we can’t get it done this time around, no politician is going to take this up in a generation. That would be a shame for this country,” Graham said.

Obama pledges push this year for immigration reform By Doug Palmer Reuters Thursday Jun 25 2009

Graham of course has a record of making silly remarks on Immigration. But he is right to be alarmed. Without a supportive White House he is in serious danger of being proved a fool - like John McCain.

The Obama White House has no particular reason to do anything on Amnesty. The Hispanic lobby does not have the power to force the issue. They are not big enough, and they are bound hand and foot to the Democrats anyway.

The problem the Patriots have is that time is against us. By simply not enforcing immigration law, the degeneration of the country into a third-world Spanish-speaking slum will continue, and the Democrats can look forward to being permanently what Peter Brimelow called, at the end of his CPAC essay this past March

a minority occupation government.

Further evidence is accumulating that the Obama Administration is indeed abandoning enforcement of the immigration laws. They in particular want to curtail the work of Nashville’s patriotic sheriff, Daron Hall.

Illegal immigrants netted by local police could be released By Patrik Jonnsson The Christian Science Monitor June 23 2009 reports

Some undocumented immigrants swept up on minor charges such as fishing without a license won’t face federal detention. Instead, they’ll be released on their own recognizance under an Obama administration directive to a Nashville, Tenn., sheriff who charged 6,000 people with immigration crimes over the past 2-1/2 years.

(NB misleading headline.) ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is dishonestly trying to maintain that this is not a change in policy:

There hasn’t been a [policy] change: ICE always puts a priority on criminal aliens who pose a national security threat,” says Matt Chandler, a Department of Homeland Security spokesman in Washington. But he acknowledges: “We are taking a deep, hard look at the program.”

“The program” in which only some 66 law enforcement jurisdictions take part, is known as 287(g). It

in essence, deputizes local police to act as de facto immigration agents… Last year, local police made 20 percent of all immigration-related arrests in the US.

The problem with release:

Pre-2006 studies showed that about 85 percent of illegal immigrants released on bond did not show up for their court date.

Hat tip the Federale blog, which accurately said

the radical left has always considered local enforcement as unacceptable, and fought it at every step….liberals draw the line at arresting illegal aliens. And that is because they want more illegals here.

Nashville seems to be a target because the Davidson County (Nashville) Sherriff, Daron Hall, has been particularly effective in using 287(g). In discussing another report of this event ICE won’t detain non-U.S. drivers in Nashville By Kate Howard and Chris Echegaray • THE TENNESSEAN • June 22, 2009 Federale incisively remarked

ICE will no longer arrest illegal aliens before they commit other crimes, but only after. Only after an American citizen is dead, or injured, or a victim of another crime….ICE doesn’t want to participate in the Broken Windows method of solving the crime problem that Rudy Guiliani implemented in New York…Janet Reno Napalitano is ideologically obsessed with destroying America…

This is no more than the truth.

Applaud Patriot Sherriff Daron Hall.

VDARE’s Brenda Walker has frequently cited the work of Prof. Lawrence Harrison (Tufts University) on the relationship between culture and prosperity. See the chart here for an especially useful example.

Harrison repaired to the ivory tower after a career in the foreign-aid trenches in Mesoamerica. The Publishers Weekly blurb about Harrison’s 1993 book Who Prospers: How Cultural Values Shape Economic And Political Success starts out:

Why do some nations and ethnic groups prosper while others stagnate? Harrison, a former director of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, finds the answer in a culture’s values. In his diagnosis, Brazil’s hard-working, family-oriented European and Japanese immigrants spurred that nation’s dynamic growth, whereas Mexico’s economic disaster and failure to build solid democratic institutions are due to its “Hispanic value system” promoting passivity, mistrust of outsiders and an overemphasis on family.

Presumably spurred by what he saw during his years in Latin America, Harrison also has an enduring concern with mass immigration from points south. Colleague and admirer of the late Samuel Huntington, Harrison has proselytized for Huntington’s concept that preserving a livable American future depends upon our retention of “Anglo-Protestant values.” (At a conference I attended a few years ago, Harrison categorized himself as “an Anglo-Protestant Jew”!)

Although “Anglo-Protestant values” doesn’t explicitly appear in it, such concerns clearly undergird What will America stand for in 2050? The US should think long and hard about the high number of Latino immigrants, an op-ed Harrison has today, 5/28/2009, at the (now online-only) Christian Science Monitor.

Harrison minces no words:

Heavy immigration from Latin America threatens our cohesiveness as a nation.

The political realities of the rapidly growing Latino population are such that Mr. Obama may be the last president who can avert the permanent, vast underclass implied by the current Census Bureau projection for 2050.

Importantly for the forces of immigration sanity, Harrison mentions that he comes from the Democratic side, having been an early supporter of Wonderboy and, now, being an enthusiast about Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. This is important because, in this op-ed, Harrison is saying these stern and sensible things in a fairly prominent forum as a Democrat.

He also writes,

The healthcare cost of the illegal workforce is especially burdensome, and is subsidized by taxpayers. To claim Medicaid, you must be legal, but as the Health and Human Services inspector general found, 47 states allow self-declaration of status for Medicaid. Many hospitals and clinics are going broke because of the constant stream of uninsured, many of whom are the estimated 12 million to 15 million illegal immigrants. This translates into reduced services, particularly for lower-income citizens.

“Self-declaration of status for Medicaid”! No wonder the American middle class would happily throttle most of our political class and the “helping professions” bureaucrats whom they hire to–very compassionately–disburse the taxes we pay.

Further,

[T]he same traditional values that lie behind Latin America’s difficulties in achieving democratic stability, social justice, and prosperity are being substantially perpetuated among Hispanic-Americans.

[snip]

Latin America’s cultural problem is apparent in the persistent Latino high school dropout rate – 40 percent in California, according to a recent study – and the high incidence of teenage pregnancy, single mothers, and crime. The perpetuation of Latino culture is facilitated by the Spanish language’s growing challenge to English as our national language. It makes it easier for Latinos to avoid the melting pot and for education to remain a low priority, as it is in Latin America …

Language is the conduit of culture. Consider: There is no word in Spanish for “compromise” (compromiso means “commitment”) nor for “accountability,” a problem that is compounded by a verb structure that converts “I dropped (broke, forgot) something” into “it got dropped” (”broken,” “forgotten”).

Harrison says, straightforwardly, that our decisions about legal immigration must take into account “past performance of immigrant groups with respect to acculturation.” And he closes with a few policy recommendations, the second of which [italicized below by me] is a new one and a good one:

We must declare our national language to be English and discourage the proliferation of Spanish-language media. We should limit citizenship by birth to the offspring of citizens. And we should provide immigrants with easy-to-access educational services that facilitate acculturation, including English language, citizenship, and American values.

Of course, this concedes that immigration will continue. But why should it?

A reader pointed out to me a few years ago that the interesting but excitable Asia Times columnist Spengler was almost certainly David P. Goldman, an ex-acolyte of Lyndon LaRouche. I published the LaRouche connection, but kept Goldman’s name a secret to protect his privacy.

Now, Goldman, in his new job at First Things, has come out of the closet about his eight years working for LaRouche: (more…)

The open-borders gang is hustling up its next media campaign for the upcoming amnesty push.

Naturally it will be filled with teary-eyed Mexican kiddies (as shown by the sniffly example), preferably with an illness, whose suffering is made all the worse because of jack-booted ICE officers tearing families apart willy-nilly.

Nobody in the press cares about the millions of unemployed citizens who might need one of the jobs held by seven million illegal alien workers: Americans, ho hum!
[Religious campaign seeks immigration stories, Houston Chronicle, March, 4, 2009]

Religious and community leaders want U.S. citizens and legal residents who have been separated from family members by deportation or detention to come forward with their testimonies ahead of meetings next week in Texas to push for immigration reform.

Those with the most compelling stories will be asked to speak during church meetings that are part of a national campaign to show the public that current immigration policies affect not just immigrants but American citizens, Pastor Freddy Santiago, one of the organizers, said during a news conference Wednesday.

“Our people are being split up,” Santiago, of Chicago’s Rebano Companerismo Cristiano Church said in Spanish. “We are seeing how our government is violating the laws of God.”

Pastor Freddy must be thinking of a different religion than the one I learned in church, or perhaps he regards Marx as his apostle-in-chief.

And Freddy, where’s your concern about the abandoned wives and children in Mexico? The ones whose breadwinner went to El Norte and was never heard from again. (See As men go north, wives get forgotten from the Christian Science Monitor.) Sending daddy home to his family in Mexico would be the decent thing to do.

Unintended humor from the Christian Science Monitor with its headline [Drug violence tarnishes Mexico's international image,February 25, 2009]and earnest explanation of how Mexico is no longer considered a safe and beautiful tropical spot. Who knew?

Mexico has an image problem. It has long been internal – with newspaper headlines and nightly news broadcasting the menacing notes, severed heads, and bullet-riddled bodies that are the byproducts of a deadly drug war raging across the country.

But now Mexico’s vicious reputation has gone international.

In the past week, international newscasts have focused on protests along the US-Mexican border against soldiers battling drug gangs, which officials say were organized by drug gangs themselves. Then a chilling note left for the police chief of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s most violent city, made headlines around the globe: Step down, it stated, or one police officer will be killed every two days.

Hours later, Roberto Orduna resigned after a police officer and jail guard were murdered and left with signs on their bodies that said more people would be killed until he stepped down.

Now the US State Department has issued a new travel advisory, warning of “large firefights” across the country.

“Recent Mexican Army and police confrontations with drug cartels have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades,” it reads.

The Feb. 20 State Department travel advisory does indeed contain some hairy details… (more…)

A new documentary, A Singing Revolution, has been released, which tells the story of how Estonians stood strong against the Soviet bear through their shared culture, expressed through singing.

This tale of how peaceful crowds managed to fend off Soviet tanks as they attempted to take over the local television station is operatic in its drama, says the married couple. “This is the story of the power of nonviolent resistance to succeed where guns and rock-throwing would have resulted in death and more political oppression,” says Jim Tusty. The nation was trying to throw off the Soviet yoke, which ensnared it in 1939, when Hitler and Stalin secretly signed a pact to divide up the Baltic countries. But, says Jim Tusty, it is also the story of a relationship between art and politics. [...]

The music is a mix of modern and traditional folk songs, many of which have what the team calls the kind of oral traditions that are full of hidden, deeply patriotic meaning that sustained Estonians through centuries of oppression. As they investigated the festival itself, they discovered the role that the traditional songs played during the critical years leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union, 1987 through 1991. Rather than engage the Soviets directly, as Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania did, all with disastrous results, the various political groups united in song.
[How Estonians sang their way to freedom, Christian Science Monitor, Oct 24, 2008]

See also a Youtube interview with the film’s director for historical details.

The trailer below is filled with its stunning choral music. The final line of the voiceover is “This is the story of how culture saved a nation.”

Indeed, a united culture is very powerful, a basic knowledge about human nature that has been eroded by the daily multiculturalist propaganda from the liberal press. Hopefully a future immigration historian will not write “This is the story of how the false ideology of multiculturalism destroyed the American nation.”

The Christian Science Monitor, if it can be considered a Main Stream Media component, has far and away the most respectable record of MSM coverage of America’s immigration disaster. This was further sustained on Monday by IMMIGRATION CRACKDOWN MAY BOOST US JOB PROSPECTS
By David R. Francis June 23 2008

What’s needed to discourage illegal immigration into the United States has been known for years: Enforce existing law.

Amazingly, that is happening now – to some degree… Immigration prosecutions reached an all-time high in March, reports the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data research and distribution group at Syracuse University in New York. Using data from the Justice Department, it calculates that prosecutions were up 49 percent from February and 72.7 percent from March of last year…

If current moves to restrain illegal immigration trim that growth by 100,000 to 200,000 immigrants, it should have some effect on the nation’s labor supply, notes University of Chicago economist Jeffrey Grogger. He’s coauthor of a paper calculating that a 10 percent increase in the supply of a particular skill group caused by higher immigration prompted a reduction in the wages of similarly low-skilled black men by 4 percent between 1960 and 2000, lowered their employment rate by a huge 3.5 percentage points, and increased their incarceration rate by almost a full percentage point.

A intelligent article about Grogger’s work is here.

Apparently the logic of this has even occurred to the Socialist Government of Spain, which when it came to power in 2004 irritated other EU partners by legalizing huge amounts of illegal immigrants (which meant they could go anywhere in the European Community).

Now, the Spanish, faced with a huge property market slump and soaring unemployment, have proposed paying immigrants to go home!
Spain will pay unemployed migrant workers to leave By Lisa Abend and Geoff Pingree Christian Science Monitor June 20 2008

The incentive program signals a shift in Spain’s famously lenient immigration policy. In 2005, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s Socialist government sparked the ire of other European countries when it gave work and residence visas to 800,000 immigrants. Now the government has not only supported the European Union’s Return Directive for undocumented workers but has taken a more skeptical approach to legal migrants who fill construction and domestic jobs. The Labor Ministry is studying a plan to restrict family immigration to parents and their children under 18. Currently the law allows grandparents and in-laws to join their families.

This idea has received very little attention in the orthodox US MSM, with the honorable exception (for once) of The Wall Street Journal

Spain Proposes Paying Jobless
Immigrants to Return Home
By JONATHAN HOUSE
June 20, 2008; Page A8

In a year when Presidential candidates are proposing huge bounties for scientific invention, which will be the first to propose relieving working class Americans with this idea?

VDARE.com advises not holding your breath.