I’m following up on Peter Brimelow’s blog on Republican Florida Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart’s speech to La Raza about the importance of perpetuating the Spanish language among generations of U.S born children and grandchildren of Mexican descent.

Peter stated—correctly—that Hispanic extremists like Diaz-Balart and National Council of La Raza’s senior vice president for research, advocacy and legislation Cecilia Munoz, use Spanish as a form of segregation. Instead of encouraging the mastery of English–which served both Diaz-Balart and Munoz well–they promote clinging to Spanish.

In a related issue, Tecate Beer, brewed in Baja California, is running a telling radio advertisement.

In a dialogue between two men speaking with heavy accents, one asks for a “Tecate Beer.” But his buddy reprimands him and insists he calls for a “Cerveza Tecate.”

And, as the exchange continues, the “cerveza” guy claims that referring to Tecate as beer is like asking for ketchup on your taco.

This is marketing so anything goes. Mixing English and Spanish is not new…but it remains supremely irritating.

Three questions occur to me:

• Wouldn’t Tecate be better off promoting its product among Americans who may not be as familiar with it as Mexicans are?
• And, to that end, wouldn’t the company be better off using exclusively English to get its message across?
• Why demean English and all-American products like ketchup?

Interestingly, Tecate had a major advertising flap a few years ago. University of New Mexico students protested as “racist and sexist” Tecate ads claiming its beer represented “Finally–A Cold Latina”

On Friday, Mexican criminal Julio Villasana was sentenced to 25 years in prison for causing the drunk-driving accident that killed Nashville musician and mandolin expert Charlie Derrington. (See my initial VDARE.com coverage last year: Music Community Loses a Unique Figure).

Sadly, the death was preceded by a familiar litany of illegal immigrant crimes on the part of the killer. Villasana was drunk at three times the legal limit, with a blood alcohol level of 0.23. He has been a habitual criminal, including four DUI arrests and and 14 deportations.

For Susan Derrington (shown in court), the sudden death of her husband plunged her into a terrible darkness.

Losing her husband of 24 years, she said, has been almost unbearable.

“Just getting out of bed at times has been a daunting task,” Susan Derrington said. “I missed two months of work because I could barely function.”
[Illegal immigrant sentenced to 25 years in fatal DUI wreck, Tennessean 7/21/07]

She also understood the immigration aspect of the crime due to Washington malfeasance, remarking, “I’m very much in favor of closing the borders.”

The good news is that Villasana was sentenced to the maximum sentence possible, 25 years. The bad news is that Tennessee law permits parole after only 30 percent of the sentence has been served.

Everone knows that Cuban immigrants are conservative patriots - but, as often happens in the immigration debate, what Everyone Knows may not be true.

Speaking to delegates during lunch yesterday, Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Florida Republican and a Cuban immigrant, urged them to help preserve Spanish.

“It is important that we emphasize the Spanish language and that we keep the Spanish language, and that we transmit that emphasis to our children and our grandchildren,” he said.

Hispanic group aims to stop ‘wave of hate’, by Stephen Dinan, Washington Times, July 22 2007.

Diaz-Balart was speaking (why?) to the annual conference of La Raza, held (of course) in Miami, Occupied America.

By calling for Spanish to be spoken by immigrants’ children and grandchildren, Diaz-Balart is in effect calling for permanent Spanish-language enclaves. Quite apart from the obvious madness of encouraging such enclaves when the U.S. has a revanchist Spanish-speaking neighbor, this would also materially disadvantage monolingual Americans, because of the inevitable pressure to hire Spanish-speaking staff.

What is Diaz-Balart doing in the U.S anyway? More immediately, what is he doing in the Republican party - supposedly the vehicle of conservative patriots? (That’s American patriots). Why doesn’t House Minority Leader John Boehner expel him from the GOP caucus?

Hint: imagine what would have happened if Diaz-Balart had called for segregation!

Oh - he just did.

Kathy Shaidle of RelapsedCatholic.com has a posting on an assault on free speech taking place now in Canada. A website called FreeDominion.ca, similar in concept to the US’s FreeRepublic.com has been served with a complaint by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. This is apparently based not on what they said, but on what a commenter said.

OK, it looks like a non-Muslim woman was offended by “anti-Muslim” comments posted by an anti-gay-rights guy (who doesn’t own the site in question, unlike the person who was served the complaint).

Got that? Then you must be Canadian.

Allegedly, these are the offending comments by some guy named Bill Whatcott, (who has a history with provincial Kangaroo Courts for “distributing flyers denouncing homosexual behaviour” for which he was fined — $17,500!)

Here are the alleged offending statements made by Whatcott on some FreeDominion.ca thread, the ones that led to this new complaint:
04/24/06 “I can’t figure out why the homosexuals I ran into are on the side of the Muslims.
After all, Muslims who practice Sharia law tend to advocate beheading homosexuals.”

03/09/06 “I defy Islamic censorship and speak about what I believe is the truth
about violent Islamism and its threat to religious liberty in Canada.”

“Gentes also claims she was discriminated against [remember, she is not a Muslim] due to the appearance of the following posts which she claims appeared at Free Dominion:”

“How many of us pay nothing but lip service to the Muslim threat here in Canada?”
“Probably everyone want to jail a Muslim.”
“I have to ask why we are importing them here?”
“Islamic fundamentalism and its threat to Canada’s religious and civil liberties.”

I know, you’re thinking: but Kathy, I read that stuff every day at JihadWatch and LGF. Congratulations — you live in the United States of Frickin’ America.

With the First Amendment, is what she means. Canada doesn’t have one of those. This is something we don’t cover enough on VDARE.com, but we mentioned it in 1999 in response to a story in the Washington Post called In Canada, Free Speech Has Its Restrictions: Government Limits Discourse That Some May Find Offensive [By Steven Pearlstein, December 12, 1999]which Walter Olson called at the time the “Most unsettling thing we’ve heard about Canada in a while.”

Peter Brimelow wrote

This striking article is an example of how much of the best journalism is ignorance-broking, broking between relative levels of ignorance, since the facts are well known to anyone active in Canadian journalism, particularly on the right. I discussed them in in my 1986 book The Patriot Game: Canada and the Canadian Question Revisited, drawing a parallel with Roland Huntford’s seminal study of Swedish political correctness, The New Totalitarians. How could this happen to a nice country like Canada? Well, read my book. But one reason is that the country’s deep ethnic division between French and English has allowed the political left unnatural power, like a circus stuntman riding two horses in tandem. Imported ethnic divisions bid fair to do the same in the U.S.

I did a thing myself in early 2001, called Diversity vs. Freedom: Jihad on the Campus, about a case where a student journalist protested against Islamic brutality, and was shut down by a Canadian college dean with the un-Islamic name of Hogg.

And that’s the point–these assaults on free speech aren’t caused by an occupying power, we are all being asked to do it to ourselves.This isn’t an Islamic assault on free speech in Canada, it’s a Canadian assault on free speech in Canada.

Kathy Shaidle suggests that many Canadian websites publish the so-called offensive remarks, on the principle that they can’t arrest them all.

Another Canadian blogger, Colby Cosh in Alberta, pointed out during the cartoon crisis that bloggers (and webzines like VDARE.com) don’t have big Daily Planet style buildings for the Muslims to blow up or protest in front of. He also said

My own view is that if we’re not free to say fuck Islam, then we’re not free, period. My apologies to any Canadian diplomats abroad whose lives and property may be endangered by a simple statement of the essential credo of liberalism.

The immediate reaction of the Canadian left?

“Is it just me, or has Cosh just signed away his future as a Canadian journalist?”

Well, not so far. But you can see why Peter Brimelow didn’t want to be a Canadian journalist anymore.