Recently Presidential candidate Tom Tancredo reminded America in Churchillian fashion of the still active threat from Islamists to destroy Western civilization. For Tancredo’s trouble, his ad was called “fear mongering” and worse.

Did these critics sleep through 9/11? Did they not notice the follow-up attacks in London, Madrid, Beslan, Indonesia and many other places?

Osama would love to kill millions of Americans — he has said so. We should be listening to the stated goals of our enemies, and supporting elected officials who keep their eye on those unpleasant facts.

In a more direct confrontation with an enemy of America during a campaign Q&A in New Hampshire, Tancredo did not take any guff from an civilization-hating Islamist.

“I speak the same language as the people that flew into the towers; I speak the same language as all the Iraqis we are killing; I speak many languages, and I’m proud of it,” said Siham Elhamoumi, 22, who recently graduated from St. Michael’s College in Vermont and traveled to the event with a group from the college. “Am I the enemy?” Elhamoumi then pulled her shawl over her head, so it covered her hair. “Am I the enemy if I do this?”

“Do you take us for idiots, for people who have no appreciation of our history?” she asked. “Perhaps you don’t have an understanding of your country right now, of its composition.”

Tancredo repeatedly broke in, asking Elhamoumi to pose a question. He finally asked her a question of his own: “Do you believe that we should replace the Constitution with Sharia law?”

“That is below me,” Elhamoumi replied. “Do not belittle people’s opinions and people’s beliefs and people’s religions. Do not put one religion above the other.”
[Tancredo wants one tongue Concord Monitor 11/18/07]

The correct response from any normal person would have been, “Of course not.” But the heckler outed herself with her non-reply as a pro-jihad snake.

Further, when she said “our” history, she was obviously referring to Islam, not America. She is here to conquer and colonize as part of the Islamist movement for a worldwide authoritarian caliphate, not assimilate to American values.

More than a little too late, but, still, good for William Saletan, the “Human Nature” columnist for Slate, for gearing up his courage to become one of the few James Watson defenders:

Created Equal

Race, genes, and intelligence.

From: William Saletan
Subject: Liberal creationism
Posted Sunday, Nov. 18, 2007, at 7:57 AM ET

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …

– Declaration of Independence

Last month, James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced nto retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn’t “the same as ours.” “Racist, vicious and unsupported by science,” said the Federation of American Scientists. “Utterly unsupported by scientific evidence,” declared the U.S. government’s supervisor of genetic research. The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied “that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn’t a scientific leg to stand on.”

I wish these assurances were true. They aren’t. Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there’s strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It’s time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true.

If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you’re not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution. Their faith in human dignity rests on a literal belief in Genesis. To them, evolution isn’t just another fact; it’s a threat to their whole value system. As William Jennings Bryan put it during the Scopes trial, evolution meant elevating “supposedly superior intellects,” “eliminating the weak,” “paralyzing the hope of reform,” jeopardizing “the doctrine of brotherhood,” and undermining “the sympathetic activities of a civilized society.”

The same values—equality, hope, and brotherhood—are under scientific threat today. But this time, the threat is racial genetics, and the people struggling with it are liberals. [More]

As G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1922 in Eugenics and Other Evils:

“The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal.

Also, good for Saletan for showing some sympathy for William Jennings Bryan.

This is from Politico.com:

Immigration is new affirmative action - Politico.com
Immigration is new affirmative action
By: Peter A. Brown
November 16, 2007 06:39 AM EST

Immigration is becoming for the 2008 election what affirmative action/racial preferences was 15 years ago — the kind of emotional wedge issue that offers Republicans a way to split rank-and-file Democrats from their leaders.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the battle over programs aimed at helping minorities was a major factor in many political campaigns. The election results often appeared to contradict what seemed to be the public’s opinion on the issue.

Looking back, much of the confusion stemmed from the wording of many poll questions on the subject. They tended to show strong support for “affirmative action,” which was how the programs were described by supporters and, often, the media.

But opponents used the term “racial preferences” to describe programs that often gave minorities an edge in competition for college admission and jobs. When pollsters used that language to describe the programs, they found strong public opposition.

Affirmative action is an issue similar to immigration today, one on which Democratic activists, but not necessarily the mass of party members, differ from the general electorate. Activists often infer their opponents are racially motivated — creating strong and often hostile feelings on both sides.

I think he means “imply” here, when he says “infer” but that’s a technicality of language that need not detain us–whether they’re deducing or hinting that people who want to defend the border, or reduce numbers of illegals are racists is irrelevant. The point here is that the Democratic Party leadership is ideologically committed to minorities, even is said minorities are not Americans. And they can’t change that.

This means, of course, that if Republicans are willing to oppose illegal immigration, and lower the numbers of legal immigrants, they would have no problem winning the votes of Reagan Democrats, who are also Buchanan Democrats, regular guys with regular jobs who are bound to be more numerous than the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal, who only have 13 actual votes.

However, there’s a better than even chance they’ll just wimp out–see for example this case, where Alex Castellanos , who made the famous anti-preference “white hands” ad for Jesse Helms has recanted:

“In 1990, media consultant Alex Castellanos produced the Helms reelection commercial showing a white man’s hands ripping up a job rejection slip as the narrator said, ‘You needed that job . . . but they had to give it to a minority.’ … Castellanos, [send him mail] asked if he would use in 2004 an ad along the lines of his famous ‘white hands’ commercial of 1990, said: ‘The world has changed. That was 100 years ago—longer.’” [GOP Pins Its Future On Wooing Minorities, By Thomas B. Edsall Washington Post, December 23, 2002]

Or take 2003’s Michigan Cases, where we wrote about the Bush administration’s cowardice on the subject of racial preferences:

When the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the Michigan cases, the Bush Administration was widely expected to file amicus curiae briefs opposing the University’s use of quotas. (Amicus curiae briefs are filed by non-parties that have an interest in a case’s outcome. The Michigan cases have drawn more than any previous Supreme Court case – most support the University.) But after Trent Lott’s maladroit birthday kiss to Strom Thurmond, the Administration waffled. Finally, Solicitor General Theodore Olson did indeed file briefs opposing explicit racial quotas—but no more.

As VDARE.COM’s Steve Sailer predicted, the BushRoveans are trying to have it both ways. They hope to dupe the Republican faithful with a rejection of the most blatant form of affirmative action. Simultaneously, they aim to appease the racial lobbies and diversity racketeers by advocating nothing that might actually make admissions race-neutral.

What the Administration is really asking for: a reaffirmation of the affirmative action status quo of the last 25 years – discriminate, don’t tell.

So, yes, immigration is “the new affirmative action” in that it provides Republicans with a chance to make great electoral gains by standing on principle. But don’t hold your breath.

Henry Louis Gates writes in the NYT:

“I have been studying the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans, people in fields ranging from entertainment and sports (Oprah Winfrey, the track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee) to space travel and medicine (the astronaut Mae Jemison and Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon). And I’ve seen an astonishing pattern: 15 of the 20 descend from at least one line of former slaves who managed to obtain property by 1920 — a time when only 25 percent of all African-American families owned property.

“Ten years after slavery ended, Constantine Winfrey, Oprah’s great-grandfather, bartered eight bales of cleaned cotton (4,000 pounds) that he picked on his own time for 80 acres of prime bottomland in Mississippi. (He also learned to read and write while picking all that cotton.)”[Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth, November 18, 2007]

Of course, he needs a control group of unsuccessful African-Americans to see if they are significantly less likely to be descended from black property owners (not to mention white property owners, who often tended to be the original source of wealth for their mulatto offspring who disproportionately made up the African-American middle class), but I would hardly be surprised that black people who make something of themselves today tend to be descended from black people who made something of themselves in the past. Similarly, economic historian Gregory Clark found that today’s English tend to be descended from successful landowning farmers of the past, rather than from the propertyless poor who worked for them.

In summary, a lesson I’ve often pointed out is that we aren’t self-made Ayn Rand heroes. Who your relatives are matters