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Wednesday, May 05, 2010
In England, A Victory for Freedom
By Pamela Geller
http://www.americanthinker.com/
May 05, 2010
In an unprecedented victory for free people everywhere, a monster mosque costing $27 million that had been planned for the English town of Dudley despite overwhelming opposition from the townspeople has been scrapped. Fifty-five thousand locals had signed a petition against the mosque, but the dhimmi government went over their heads and said it was going to be built anyway. But in the end, the Muslims and the government didn't get their way.
That this mosque would have gone ahead at all after the petitions shows a contempt for the people that is breathtaking. But now it has been scrapped after a brilliant protest staged by the courageous English patriots of the much-maligned English Defence League.
Flag-waving: Members of the EDL wave St George's Cross and a flag supporting troops.
The EDL on Sunday occupied and camped out on the rooftop of the abandoned building slated to be turned into the mammoth new mosque.
The EDL's website said that the protesters had "food and water to last them weeks, and a PA system to give speeches." They played the Muslim call to prayer over their PA system, to give the locals a taste of what was in store for them.
Police closed streets as EDL members streamed into Dudley to show support. Riot vans and helicopters converged on the scene, hoping to bring the EDL's protest to a swift end. Muslims also trekked to Dudley to counter the EDL. Senior EDL leadership informed me that thousands of Muslims soon began rioting in Dudley, throwing missiles and objects at the protesters (although they were unable to reach them) -- and in the process, showing the true face of Islam.
EDL leaders also reported that in addition to the thousands of rioting Muslims, numerous Muslim gangs were roaming Dudley. Beatings and stabbings were reported as well. The West Midlands police, the second largest police force in the United Kingdom, could not control the wilding Muslims.
Yet in the mainstream media reports, they held back from reporting on how the Muslims were beating non-Muslims, and they never identified the assailants. What makes this more egregious is that the media has no trouble demonizing the EDL, which, ironically enough, is fighting for the very freedoms those decayed liberal journalist hacks so richly enjoy. Oh, the irony.
The EDL is routinely smeared in the British media, as the Tea Party activists are smeared in the U.S. media. The corrupt, biased media defames any group, person, or organization standing against Islamic supremacism.
They tar, feather, and destroy the good name of good people who stand for life, liberty, and individual rights. Libel and slander like "racist," "fascist," "bigot," etc. color every news report of every counter-jihad action. The quisling media is the propaganda arm of jihad. It's despicable. There is nothing racist, fascist, or bigoted about the EDL.
Nonetheless, the establishment is on the other side. Chief Inspector Matt Markham of the West Midlands Police said, "Our priorities are to minimise any disruption to the local community in Dudley and to prevent any further incidents of disorder from occurring." In other words, Islamic supremacists can destroy a town, a city, a country, ruin their whole way of life, and authorities snuff out any expression of opposition to such a plan. Got that?
The irony abounds.
Even so, in Dudley, the giant fortress, which was set to feature a 65-foot minaret, has now been stopped. The mosque plans have been pulled.
Why protest construction of a mosque? The Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once read from an Islamic poem that put it best: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and Muslims our soldiers."
Islamic expert Robert Spencer explains: "Recently we have seen mosques used to preach hatred; to spread exhortations to terrorist activity; to house a bomb factory; to store weapons; to disseminate messages from bin Laden; to demand (in the U.S.) that non-Muslims conform to Islamic dietary restrictions; to fire on American troops; to fire upon Indian troops; to train jihadists; and much more. In light of all that, it is entirely reasonable for free people to oppose the construction of new mosques in non-Muslim countries."
Yet despite the EDL victory, Muslims are still policing the streets in cars around Dudley. And of course the dhimmi Dudley police are doing nothing about it.
The British political establishment has sold its people down the river and suppressed popular dissent. This is self-enforced sharia law.
Free people should support the English Defence League in its efforts to stand for England and the West against the belligerent invaders and Islamic imperialists.
- Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs website and former associate publisher of the New York Observer. She is the author of The Post-American Presidency (coming July 27 from Simon & Schuster).
7 Comments on "In England, A Victory for Freedom"
Link
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1271118/18m-West-Midlands-mega-mosque-plans-scrapped.html?ITO=1490
http://www.americanthinker.com/
May 05, 2010
In an unprecedented victory for free people everywhere, a monster mosque costing $27 million that had been planned for the English town of Dudley despite overwhelming opposition from the townspeople has been scrapped. Fifty-five thousand locals had signed a petition against the mosque, but the dhimmi government went over their heads and said it was going to be built anyway. But in the end, the Muslims and the government didn't get their way.
That this mosque would have gone ahead at all after the petitions shows a contempt for the people that is breathtaking. But now it has been scrapped after a brilliant protest staged by the courageous English patriots of the much-maligned English Defence League.
Flag-waving: Members of the EDL wave St George's Cross and a flag supporting troops.
The EDL on Sunday occupied and camped out on the rooftop of the abandoned building slated to be turned into the mammoth new mosque.
The EDL's website said that the protesters had "food and water to last them weeks, and a PA system to give speeches." They played the Muslim call to prayer over their PA system, to give the locals a taste of what was in store for them.
Police closed streets as EDL members streamed into Dudley to show support. Riot vans and helicopters converged on the scene, hoping to bring the EDL's protest to a swift end. Muslims also trekked to Dudley to counter the EDL. Senior EDL leadership informed me that thousands of Muslims soon began rioting in Dudley, throwing missiles and objects at the protesters (although they were unable to reach them) -- and in the process, showing the true face of Islam.
EDL leaders also reported that in addition to the thousands of rioting Muslims, numerous Muslim gangs were roaming Dudley. Beatings and stabbings were reported as well. The West Midlands police, the second largest police force in the United Kingdom, could not control the wilding Muslims.
Yet in the mainstream media reports, they held back from reporting on how the Muslims were beating non-Muslims, and they never identified the assailants. What makes this more egregious is that the media has no trouble demonizing the EDL, which, ironically enough, is fighting for the very freedoms those decayed liberal journalist hacks so richly enjoy. Oh, the irony.
The EDL is routinely smeared in the British media, as the Tea Party activists are smeared in the U.S. media. The corrupt, biased media defames any group, person, or organization standing against Islamic supremacism.
They tar, feather, and destroy the good name of good people who stand for life, liberty, and individual rights. Libel and slander like "racist," "fascist," "bigot," etc. color every news report of every counter-jihad action. The quisling media is the propaganda arm of jihad. It's despicable. There is nothing racist, fascist, or bigoted about the EDL.
Nonetheless, the establishment is on the other side. Chief Inspector Matt Markham of the West Midlands Police said, "Our priorities are to minimise any disruption to the local community in Dudley and to prevent any further incidents of disorder from occurring." In other words, Islamic supremacists can destroy a town, a city, a country, ruin their whole way of life, and authorities snuff out any expression of opposition to such a plan. Got that?
The irony abounds.
Even so, in Dudley, the giant fortress, which was set to feature a 65-foot minaret, has now been stopped. The mosque plans have been pulled.
Why protest construction of a mosque? The Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once read from an Islamic poem that put it best: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and Muslims our soldiers."
Islamic expert Robert Spencer explains: "Recently we have seen mosques used to preach hatred; to spread exhortations to terrorist activity; to house a bomb factory; to store weapons; to disseminate messages from bin Laden; to demand (in the U.S.) that non-Muslims conform to Islamic dietary restrictions; to fire on American troops; to fire upon Indian troops; to train jihadists; and much more. In light of all that, it is entirely reasonable for free people to oppose the construction of new mosques in non-Muslim countries."
Yet despite the EDL victory, Muslims are still policing the streets in cars around Dudley. And of course the dhimmi Dudley police are doing nothing about it.
The British political establishment has sold its people down the river and suppressed popular dissent. This is self-enforced sharia law.
Free people should support the English Defence League in its efforts to stand for England and the West against the belligerent invaders and Islamic imperialists.
- Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs website and former associate publisher of the New York Observer. She is the author of The Post-American Presidency (coming July 27 from Simon & Schuster).
7 Comments on "In England, A Victory for Freedom"
Link
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1271118/18m-West-Midlands-mega-mosque-plans-scrapped.html?ITO=1490
Immigration and Sham Marriages
The jihadists’ deadly path to citizenship
By Michelle Malkin
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Maay 5, 2010
America’s homeland-security amnesia never ceases to amaze. In the aftermath of the botched Times Square terror attack over the weekend, Pakistani-born bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad’s U.S. citizenship status caused a bit of shock and awe. The response of Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer for The Atlantic magazine, was typical: “I am struck by the fact that he is a naturalized American citizen, not a recent or temporary visitor.” Well, wake up and smell the deadly deception.
New Yorkers faced tougher, more visible security measures as the arrest of Faisal Shahzad in connection with the Times Square bomb plot and a widening global investigation kept the city on edge. (AFP/Jewel Samad)
Shahzad’s path to American citizenship — he reportedly married an American woman, Huma Mian, in 2008, after spending a decade in the country on foreign-student and employment visas — is a tried-and-true terror formula. Jihadists have been gaming the sham-marriage racket with impunity for years. And immigration-benefit fraud has provided invaluable cover and aid for U.S.-based Islamic plotters, including many other operatives planning attacks on New York City. As I’ve reported previously:
* El Sayyid A. Nosair wed Karen Ann Mills Sweeney to avoid deportation for overstaying his visa. He acquired U.S. citizenship, allowing him to remain in the country, and was later convicted for conspiracy in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that claimed six lives.
* Ali Mohamed became an American citizen after marrying a woman he met on a plane trip from Egypt to New York. Recently divorced, Linda Lee Sanchez wed Mohamed in Reno, Nev., after a six-week “courtship.” Mohamed became a top aide to Osama bin Laden and was later convicted for his role in the 1998 United States embassy bombings in Africa that killed 12 Americans and more than 200 others.
* Embassy-bombing plotter Khalid Abu al-Dahab obtained citizenship after marrying three different American women.
* Embassy-bombing plotter Wadih el-Hage, Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary, married April Ray in 1985 and became a naturalized citizen in 1989. Ray knew of her husband’s employment with bin Laden, but like many of these women in bogus marriages, she pleaded ignorance about the nature of her husband’s work. El-Hage, she says, was a sweet man, and bin Laden “was a great boss.”
* Lebanon-born Chawki Youssef Hammoud, convicted in a Hezbollah cigarette-smuggling operation based out of Charlotte, N.C., married American citizen Jessica Fortune for a green card to remain in the country.
* Hammoud’s brother, Mohammed Hammoud, married three different American women. After arriving in the United States on a counterfeit visa, being ordered deported, and filing an appeal, he wed Sabina Edwards to gain a green card. Federal immigration officials refused to award him legal status after this first marriage was deemed bogus in 1994. Undaunted, he married Jessica Wedel in May 1997 and, while still wed to her, paid Angela Tsioumas (already married to someone else, too) to marry him in Detroit. The Tsioumas union netted Mohammed Hammoud temporary legal residence to operate the terror-cash scam. He was later convicted on 16 counts that included providing material support to Hezbollah.
* A total of eight Middle Eastern men who plotted to bomb New York landmarks in 1993 — Fadil Abdelgani, Amir Abdelgani, Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, Tarig Elhassan, Abdo Mohammed Haggag, Fares Khallafalla, Mohammed Saleh, and Matarawy Mohammed Said Saleh — obtained legal permanent residence by marrying American citizens.
A year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, homeland-security officials cracked a massive illegal alien/Middle Eastern marriage-fraud ring in a sting dubbed “Operation Broken Vows.” Authorities were stunned by the scope of the operations, which stretched from Boston to South Carolina to California. But marriage fraud remains a treacherous path of least resistance. The waiting period for U.S. citizenship is cut by more than half for marriage-visa beneficiaries. Sham-marriage monitoring by backlogged homeland-security investigators is practically nonexistent.
As former federal immigration official Michael Cutler warned years ago: “Immigration benefit fraud is certainly one of the major ‘dots’ that was not connected prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and remains a ‘dot’ that is not really being addressed the way it needs to be in order to secure our nation against criminals and terrorists who understand how important it is for them to ‘game’ the system as a part of the embedding process.”
Jihadists have knowingly and deliberately exploited our lax immigration and entrance policies to secure the rights and benefits of American citizenship while they plot mass murder — and we haven’t done a thing to stop them.
— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
By Michelle Malkin
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Maay 5, 2010
America’s homeland-security amnesia never ceases to amaze. In the aftermath of the botched Times Square terror attack over the weekend, Pakistani-born bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad’s U.S. citizenship status caused a bit of shock and awe. The response of Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer for The Atlantic magazine, was typical: “I am struck by the fact that he is a naturalized American citizen, not a recent or temporary visitor.” Well, wake up and smell the deadly deception.
New Yorkers faced tougher, more visible security measures as the arrest of Faisal Shahzad in connection with the Times Square bomb plot and a widening global investigation kept the city on edge. (AFP/Jewel Samad)Shahzad’s path to American citizenship — he reportedly married an American woman, Huma Mian, in 2008, after spending a decade in the country on foreign-student and employment visas — is a tried-and-true terror formula. Jihadists have been gaming the sham-marriage racket with impunity for years. And immigration-benefit fraud has provided invaluable cover and aid for U.S.-based Islamic plotters, including many other operatives planning attacks on New York City. As I’ve reported previously:
* El Sayyid A. Nosair wed Karen Ann Mills Sweeney to avoid deportation for overstaying his visa. He acquired U.S. citizenship, allowing him to remain in the country, and was later convicted for conspiracy in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that claimed six lives.
* Ali Mohamed became an American citizen after marrying a woman he met on a plane trip from Egypt to New York. Recently divorced, Linda Lee Sanchez wed Mohamed in Reno, Nev., after a six-week “courtship.” Mohamed became a top aide to Osama bin Laden and was later convicted for his role in the 1998 United States embassy bombings in Africa that killed 12 Americans and more than 200 others.
* Embassy-bombing plotter Khalid Abu al-Dahab obtained citizenship after marrying three different American women.
* Embassy-bombing plotter Wadih el-Hage, Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary, married April Ray in 1985 and became a naturalized citizen in 1989. Ray knew of her husband’s employment with bin Laden, but like many of these women in bogus marriages, she pleaded ignorance about the nature of her husband’s work. El-Hage, she says, was a sweet man, and bin Laden “was a great boss.”
* Lebanon-born Chawki Youssef Hammoud, convicted in a Hezbollah cigarette-smuggling operation based out of Charlotte, N.C., married American citizen Jessica Fortune for a green card to remain in the country.
* Hammoud’s brother, Mohammed Hammoud, married three different American women. After arriving in the United States on a counterfeit visa, being ordered deported, and filing an appeal, he wed Sabina Edwards to gain a green card. Federal immigration officials refused to award him legal status after this first marriage was deemed bogus in 1994. Undaunted, he married Jessica Wedel in May 1997 and, while still wed to her, paid Angela Tsioumas (already married to someone else, too) to marry him in Detroit. The Tsioumas union netted Mohammed Hammoud temporary legal residence to operate the terror-cash scam. He was later convicted on 16 counts that included providing material support to Hezbollah.
* A total of eight Middle Eastern men who plotted to bomb New York landmarks in 1993 — Fadil Abdelgani, Amir Abdelgani, Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, Tarig Elhassan, Abdo Mohammed Haggag, Fares Khallafalla, Mohammed Saleh, and Matarawy Mohammed Said Saleh — obtained legal permanent residence by marrying American citizens.
A year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, homeland-security officials cracked a massive illegal alien/Middle Eastern marriage-fraud ring in a sting dubbed “Operation Broken Vows.” Authorities were stunned by the scope of the operations, which stretched from Boston to South Carolina to California. But marriage fraud remains a treacherous path of least resistance. The waiting period for U.S. citizenship is cut by more than half for marriage-visa beneficiaries. Sham-marriage monitoring by backlogged homeland-security investigators is practically nonexistent.
As former federal immigration official Michael Cutler warned years ago: “Immigration benefit fraud is certainly one of the major ‘dots’ that was not connected prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and remains a ‘dot’ that is not really being addressed the way it needs to be in order to secure our nation against criminals and terrorists who understand how important it is for them to ‘game’ the system as a part of the embedding process.”
Jihadists have knowingly and deliberately exploited our lax immigration and entrance policies to secure the rights and benefits of American citizenship while they plot mass murder — and we haven’t done a thing to stop them.
— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Denying Jihad — Again
Posted by Robert Spencer on May 5th, 2010
http://frontpagemag.com/
We know now that the car bomb in Times Square was an attempted Islamic jihad attack. But the mainstream media, following its usual pattern, is once again denying, minimizing, or obfuscating this fact.
Writing in The Nation on Monday, Robert Dreyfuss epitomized the mainstream media’s hope that the car bomber would turn out to be a right-wing extremist: “It may be that the Pakistan-based Taliban, the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), has quietly established a Connecticut franchise while we weren’t looking. That’s possible. But it seems far more likely to me that the perpetrator of the bungled Times Square bomb plot was either a lone wolf or a member of some squirrely branch of the Tea Party, anti-government far right. Which actually exists in Connecticut, where, it seems, the car’s licence plates were stolen.”
In reality, according to Pakistani authorities, Faisal Shahzad, the would-be car bomber, attended a jihad training camp in that country. He spent five months in Pakistan recently, including some time in Peshawar, a center of Al-Qaeda and Taliban activity. A Pakistani Taliban group claimed responsibility for the attack — a claim that American authorities immediately dismissed, but which gained a new claim to serious consideration when Shahzad’s Pakistani connections were revealed.
Shahzad parked his explosives-laden SUV outside the offices of Viacom, the parent company of Comedy Central, which presents South Park, the cartoon whose creators were just threatened with death by Islamic supremacists in New York for daring to lampoon Muhammad. The Muslim group that issued the threat, Revolution Muslim, was proselytizing in Times Square just hours before Shahzad’s car bomb was discovered.
Yet for all this, virtually no media reports are saying anything about Shahzad being a Muslim. Such a reference, however, would hardly be gratuitous: Islamic jihad theology and the death penalty enshrined in Islamic law for anyone who insults Allah or Muhammad are the most likely keys to Shahzad’s motivation. But the politically correct, multiculturalist imperative demands that Islam and Muslims, being (at least in this addled view) non-white and non-Western, must always be portrayed as victims, no matter how imaginative the lengths to which analysts must go in order to find something, anything, to blame for the carnage other than Islam’s doctrines of hatred of and violence against unbelievers.
Ezra Klein in the Washington Post led the way in the imaginative department. Observing that Shahzad defaulted on the mortgage on his home in Connecticut and that the property is now in foreclosure, Klein discovered a hitherto-unnoticed motivated for violent jihad: “foreclosures generate an enormous amount of misery and anxiety and depression that can tip people into all sorts of dangerous behaviors that don’t make headlines but do ruin lives. And for all that we’ve done to save the financial sector, we’ve not done nearly enough to help struggling homeowners.” Help struggling homeowners, or they’ll try to set off car bombs in Times Square!
MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer, meanwhile, may not have had to face the heartbreak of foreclosure, but she had her own reason to feel “an enormous amount of misery and anxiety and depression”: what got Brewer down was that Shahzad turned out to be a Muslim. “There was a part of me,” lamented Brewer once the perpetrator was identified, “that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country.”
Brewer explained that she hoped that Shahzad’s action would not give rise to a resurgence of what she called “outdated bigotry” – voicing the common mainstream media preoccupation with a “backlash” against innocent Muslims. This preoccupation manifests itself in a flood of articles about Muslims fears of this “backlash” every time there is an attempted or successful jihad terror attack in America or Europe; the only thing that never appears is the backlash itself, which remains more a figment of the Leftist media’s imagination than an actual threat against innocent Muslims.
Nonetheless, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was likewise preoccupied with this phantom threat of a backlash, warning New Yorkers several times that any action against Muslims or Pakistanis. Bloomberg ought to be ashamed of himself. He should have been making statements about protecting Americans of all creeds, and calling the Muslim community in America to account for its tolerance of jihadists. There has never been a backlash against innocent Muslims in the U.S. It is a fiction that we only hear about when a Muslim plots mass murder of Americans. And then we hear about it endlessly, as if Muslims were the victims rather than the perpetrators.
Faisal Shahzad and his car bomb is yet another indication of the tenacity and persistence of the jihad against the United States – and of the continuing and even hardening resistance of American officials to the elementary step of even admitting that that jihad is being waged.
http://frontpagemag.com/
We know now that the car bomb in Times Square was an attempted Islamic jihad attack. But the mainstream media, following its usual pattern, is once again denying, minimizing, or obfuscating this fact.Writing in The Nation on Monday, Robert Dreyfuss epitomized the mainstream media’s hope that the car bomber would turn out to be a right-wing extremist: “It may be that the Pakistan-based Taliban, the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), has quietly established a Connecticut franchise while we weren’t looking. That’s possible. But it seems far more likely to me that the perpetrator of the bungled Times Square bomb plot was either a lone wolf or a member of some squirrely branch of the Tea Party, anti-government far right. Which actually exists in Connecticut, where, it seems, the car’s licence plates were stolen.”
In reality, according to Pakistani authorities, Faisal Shahzad, the would-be car bomber, attended a jihad training camp in that country. He spent five months in Pakistan recently, including some time in Peshawar, a center of Al-Qaeda and Taliban activity. A Pakistani Taliban group claimed responsibility for the attack — a claim that American authorities immediately dismissed, but which gained a new claim to serious consideration when Shahzad’s Pakistani connections were revealed.
Shahzad parked his explosives-laden SUV outside the offices of Viacom, the parent company of Comedy Central, which presents South Park, the cartoon whose creators were just threatened with death by Islamic supremacists in New York for daring to lampoon Muhammad. The Muslim group that issued the threat, Revolution Muslim, was proselytizing in Times Square just hours before Shahzad’s car bomb was discovered.
Yet for all this, virtually no media reports are saying anything about Shahzad being a Muslim. Such a reference, however, would hardly be gratuitous: Islamic jihad theology and the death penalty enshrined in Islamic law for anyone who insults Allah or Muhammad are the most likely keys to Shahzad’s motivation. But the politically correct, multiculturalist imperative demands that Islam and Muslims, being (at least in this addled view) non-white and non-Western, must always be portrayed as victims, no matter how imaginative the lengths to which analysts must go in order to find something, anything, to blame for the carnage other than Islam’s doctrines of hatred of and violence against unbelievers.
Ezra Klein in the Washington Post led the way in the imaginative department. Observing that Shahzad defaulted on the mortgage on his home in Connecticut and that the property is now in foreclosure, Klein discovered a hitherto-unnoticed motivated for violent jihad: “foreclosures generate an enormous amount of misery and anxiety and depression that can tip people into all sorts of dangerous behaviors that don’t make headlines but do ruin lives. And for all that we’ve done to save the financial sector, we’ve not done nearly enough to help struggling homeowners.” Help struggling homeowners, or they’ll try to set off car bombs in Times Square!
MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer, meanwhile, may not have had to face the heartbreak of foreclosure, but she had her own reason to feel “an enormous amount of misery and anxiety and depression”: what got Brewer down was that Shahzad turned out to be a Muslim. “There was a part of me,” lamented Brewer once the perpetrator was identified, “that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country.”
Brewer explained that she hoped that Shahzad’s action would not give rise to a resurgence of what she called “outdated bigotry” – voicing the common mainstream media preoccupation with a “backlash” against innocent Muslims. This preoccupation manifests itself in a flood of articles about Muslims fears of this “backlash” every time there is an attempted or successful jihad terror attack in America or Europe; the only thing that never appears is the backlash itself, which remains more a figment of the Leftist media’s imagination than an actual threat against innocent Muslims.
Nonetheless, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was likewise preoccupied with this phantom threat of a backlash, warning New Yorkers several times that any action against Muslims or Pakistanis. Bloomberg ought to be ashamed of himself. He should have been making statements about protecting Americans of all creeds, and calling the Muslim community in America to account for its tolerance of jihadists. There has never been a backlash against innocent Muslims in the U.S. It is a fiction that we only hear about when a Muslim plots mass murder of Americans. And then we hear about it endlessly, as if Muslims were the victims rather than the perpetrators.
Faisal Shahzad and his car bomb is yet another indication of the tenacity and persistence of the jihad against the United States – and of the continuing and even hardening resistance of American officials to the elementary step of even admitting that that jihad is being waged.
Baseball's Arizona Strikeout
The Nation's Pulse
By Aaron Goldstein on 5.5.10 @ 6:08AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
The biggest obstacle facing Arizona's much maligned new immigration law is not that it could be struck down by the Supreme Court but rather that it could be struck out by Major League Baseball.
Baseball is not only America's pastime but it also generates billions of dollars in revenue across the country. The economic benefits of baseball are seen not only in cities with major league teams but in smaller communities with minor league franchises. Outside of Florida there is perhaps no other state that derives a greater economic benefit from baseball than Arizona where professional baseball is played nearly year round.
Every March, baseball fans converge on Arizona to watch spring training games under the auspices of the Cactus League. Since 1998, the number of teams in the Cactus League has nearly doubled from eight to fifteen. This season, the Cactus League welcomed the Cincinnati Reds to its ranks. In 2009, the Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers joined up. The Dodgers were lured to Glendale from Vero Beach, Florida, which had been their spring training home since 1948.
Of course, there are the Arizona Diamondbacks. Remember Luis Gonzalez in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series? But if the D'Backs aren't playing post-season in October then baseball fans can satiate their appetites for extra innings through the middle of November with the Arizona Fall League. It is estimated that Arizona generates more than $350 million in revenue from the Cactus League alone. Not surprisingly those who oppose Arizona's new immigration law are hoping they can persuade MLB to swing into action.
Some want to boycott the D'Backs. This, however, might not be such an effective tactic. Should the D'Backs, who finished in last place in the NL West in 2009, end up playing poorly again this summer, fans will stay away from Chase Field immigration law or no immigration law.
But then there is the 2011 MLB All-Star Game which is set to be held in the aforementioned Chase Field. José Serrano, a Democratic Congressman in New York's 16th District, has called on MLB Commissioner Bud Selig to move the game from Phoenix. Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen has said he will not go west if he is asked to take part in the proceedings.
Late last week, Major League Baseball Players Association Executive Director Michael Weiner issued a statement (pdf) opposing the law:
We hope that the law is repealed or modified promptly. If the current law goes into effect, the MLBPA will consider additional steps necessary to protect the rights and interests of our members.
The same day Weiner issued his statement, the Arizona legislature modified the legislation and these changes were approved by Governor Jan Brewer.
Naturally, I was curious whether these modifications would mollify the MLBPA. If these changes weren't satisfactory, then what suggestions did they have to offer? And what "additional steps" would the MLBPA take if their demands were not met? However, when I spoke with MLBPA Communications Director Greg Bouris over the phone he declined to elaborate beyond what was contained in Weiner's statement.
As of this writing, Commissioner Selig has not issued a statement of his own concerning this matter. However, if Selig were to make a statement concurring with Weiner then all bets are off. While the MLBPA represents the interest of the players the Office of the Commissioner of Major League Baseball represents the owners. If the players and owners are in solidarity in opposition to Senate Bill 1070, this legislation might face an insurmountable obstacle.
If you are a fan of baseball then you will know that Latino players born both within the United States and outside its borders comprise a significant presence in the game. Nearly one out of every four players on major league rosters is Latino. This gives ample room for those who seek to engage in demagoguery. Exhibit A: President Barack Obama. Consider what he said at a town hall meeting in Iowa last week:
But you can imagine, if you are a Hispanic American in Arizona -- your great-grandparents may have been there before Arizona was even a state. But now, suddenly, if you don't have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you're going to be harassed. That's something that could potentially happen.
The idea that law enforcement officials in Arizona are going to stake out every Baskin-Robbins along Interstate 17 laying in wait for Hispanic families is not only preposterous but a poorly conceived notion. But when President Obama speaks people listen. No wonder Baltimore Orioles shortstop Cesar Izturis is freaking out. The Venezuelan born veteran infielder recently commented:
Now they're going to go after everybody, not just the people behind the wall. Now they're going to come out on the street. What if you're walking on the street with your family and kids? They're going to go after you.
But why would the police come after Izturis if he is merely walking the street with his family? Unless Izturis is engaging some kind of illegal activity, the only reason the police might stop him is to ask for his autograph. While Izturis is trouble on the baseball field he should have nothing to fear while walking Arizona's straight and narrow streets with his family.
Unfortunately, President Obama and others have taken ownership of the Arizona immigration bill with fallacies and fear instead of facts and figures. If Cesar Izturis honestly believes police are going to go after him, then it is incumbent upon Governor Brewer and State Senator Russell Pearce (the bill's sponsor) to give reassurance that he and others have nothing to fear from Arizona's new immigration law. Then perhaps Izturis will be at ease outside the lines.
By Aaron Goldstein on 5.5.10 @ 6:08AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
The biggest obstacle facing Arizona's much maligned new immigration law is not that it could be struck down by the Supreme Court but rather that it could be struck out by Major League Baseball.
Baseball is not only America's pastime but it also generates billions of dollars in revenue across the country. The economic benefits of baseball are seen not only in cities with major league teams but in smaller communities with minor league franchises. Outside of Florida there is perhaps no other state that derives a greater economic benefit from baseball than Arizona where professional baseball is played nearly year round.
Every March, baseball fans converge on Arizona to watch spring training games under the auspices of the Cactus League. Since 1998, the number of teams in the Cactus League has nearly doubled from eight to fifteen. This season, the Cactus League welcomed the Cincinnati Reds to its ranks. In 2009, the Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers joined up. The Dodgers were lured to Glendale from Vero Beach, Florida, which had been their spring training home since 1948.Of course, there are the Arizona Diamondbacks. Remember Luis Gonzalez in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series? But if the D'Backs aren't playing post-season in October then baseball fans can satiate their appetites for extra innings through the middle of November with the Arizona Fall League. It is estimated that Arizona generates more than $350 million in revenue from the Cactus League alone. Not surprisingly those who oppose Arizona's new immigration law are hoping they can persuade MLB to swing into action.
Some want to boycott the D'Backs. This, however, might not be such an effective tactic. Should the D'Backs, who finished in last place in the NL West in 2009, end up playing poorly again this summer, fans will stay away from Chase Field immigration law or no immigration law.
But then there is the 2011 MLB All-Star Game which is set to be held in the aforementioned Chase Field. José Serrano, a Democratic Congressman in New York's 16th District, has called on MLB Commissioner Bud Selig to move the game from Phoenix. Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen has said he will not go west if he is asked to take part in the proceedings.
Late last week, Major League Baseball Players Association Executive Director Michael Weiner issued a statement (pdf) opposing the law:
We hope that the law is repealed or modified promptly. If the current law goes into effect, the MLBPA will consider additional steps necessary to protect the rights and interests of our members.
The same day Weiner issued his statement, the Arizona legislature modified the legislation and these changes were approved by Governor Jan Brewer.
Naturally, I was curious whether these modifications would mollify the MLBPA. If these changes weren't satisfactory, then what suggestions did they have to offer? And what "additional steps" would the MLBPA take if their demands were not met? However, when I spoke with MLBPA Communications Director Greg Bouris over the phone he declined to elaborate beyond what was contained in Weiner's statement.
As of this writing, Commissioner Selig has not issued a statement of his own concerning this matter. However, if Selig were to make a statement concurring with Weiner then all bets are off. While the MLBPA represents the interest of the players the Office of the Commissioner of Major League Baseball represents the owners. If the players and owners are in solidarity in opposition to Senate Bill 1070, this legislation might face an insurmountable obstacle.
If you are a fan of baseball then you will know that Latino players born both within the United States and outside its borders comprise a significant presence in the game. Nearly one out of every four players on major league rosters is Latino. This gives ample room for those who seek to engage in demagoguery. Exhibit A: President Barack Obama. Consider what he said at a town hall meeting in Iowa last week:
But you can imagine, if you are a Hispanic American in Arizona -- your great-grandparents may have been there before Arizona was even a state. But now, suddenly, if you don't have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you're going to be harassed. That's something that could potentially happen.
The idea that law enforcement officials in Arizona are going to stake out every Baskin-Robbins along Interstate 17 laying in wait for Hispanic families is not only preposterous but a poorly conceived notion. But when President Obama speaks people listen. No wonder Baltimore Orioles shortstop Cesar Izturis is freaking out. The Venezuelan born veteran infielder recently commented:
Now they're going to go after everybody, not just the people behind the wall. Now they're going to come out on the street. What if you're walking on the street with your family and kids? They're going to go after you.
But why would the police come after Izturis if he is merely walking the street with his family? Unless Izturis is engaging some kind of illegal activity, the only reason the police might stop him is to ask for his autograph. While Izturis is trouble on the baseball field he should have nothing to fear while walking Arizona's straight and narrow streets with his family.
Unfortunately, President Obama and others have taken ownership of the Arizona immigration bill with fallacies and fear instead of facts and figures. If Cesar Izturis honestly believes police are going to go after him, then it is incumbent upon Governor Brewer and State Senator Russell Pearce (the bill's sponsor) to give reassurance that he and others have nothing to fear from Arizona's new immigration law. Then perhaps Izturis will be at ease outside the lines.
Ernie Harwell: Gone now, but never forgotten
BY MITCH ALBOM
DETROIT FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
http://www.freep.com/section/SPORTS
May 5, 2010
The Voice of Summer died in the spring, shortly before the Tigers' first pitch of the evening. That was fitting. Ernie Harwell would never want to interrupt the game.
Gone now. Like the home run that lands in the seats, like the final out of the ninth inning, like the thousands of games he closed with his signature sign-offs, his genteel voice telling us he'd see us tomorrow. Gone now. No more tomorrows. At 92, after a battle with bile duct cancer that stretched into extra innings, Ernie let go of this world and moved on to the higher place from which we were certain he was sent.
AP Photo Lad Strayer
Ernie Harwell in his radio booth at Comerica Park.
Gone now. We knew this was coming. Ernie, in his final grace, prepared us for it. He told us not to worry. We still worried. He told us not to cry. We cried anyhow. He told us he had led the life he'd wanted, that he was ready to say good-bye.
But we were not.
"I know into whose arms I'm gonna fall," he told me in one of our last conversations, on a wide stage in front of a sold-out Fox Theatre, a last, packed-house tribute to a man who became arguably the most popular figure in the history of our state simply by doing the same gentle thing over and over, simply by being there, by remaining consistent, pure, good and true, even as things around him became anything but. Ernie stood out because he stood still. He was reliable as a rock. A soul in a void. A heart in a sometimes heartless world.
As long as there was Ernie, there was still a piece of childhood, of summers gone by, a piece of what baseball was supposed to be about, a pastime, a joyous diversion, youth -- good, sweet, innocent youth. Even after he stopped broadcasting nearly eight years ago, just knowing he was here, seeing him on occasion at the stadium, his hands dug in his back pockets, that wide grin beneath a funny beret, made us feel that things were still OK in baseball, because the Voice of Summer was still around, watching over the game.
Gone now.
A man we all knew so well
And so the time comes to write the piece you never want to write. The one you build for over a career and must punch out in a matter of hours. So unfair, it seems. But then, what can I tell you that you don't already know? Normally, when someone dies, those of us on the inside can share the unique perspective of "a person who knew him." But everybody knew Ernie. If you heard him, you knew him. If you met him, you knew him. He was that rare thing, a man the same on the front side and the back.
Maybe I can tell you a few things. The way he re-enacted games in his early days as a voice of the Atlanta Crackers, following the action on tickertape, then broadcasting with sound effects, as if it happened in front of him. Sometimes, he told me, if the machine broke down, he'd have to invent a reason for the delay.
"Uh-oh, a dog just ran on the field," he'd say, or something like that. Ernie laughed at those memories. But in such moments, he had to use his imagination. And ultimately, that made him more like us. For wasn't imagination a key to listening to baseball on the radio? Didn't you paint pictures to Ernie's words as he called the action -- "the crafty left-hander" on the mound, or, on a nasty strikeout, the batter who "stood there like the house by the side of the road"?
Over time, Ernie's voice became the soundtrack of our internal pictures, until the game became a story -- a story told by a fatherly figure. I once said if baseball could talk, it would sound like Ernie Harwell -- unhurried, slightly southern, as comfortable as an old couch.
It was true then, it is true now.
But you knew that already.
What else can I tell you? That he loved his wife? This is almost too obvious to mention. For 68 years, they were together, acting like kids on their first date. The last time I saw them both, a few months back, in his modest residence at a senior center in Novi, he said, "Lulu, how about some of that butter pecan ice cream?" And she brought us some and we ate it together. I don't know why I remember that line. "How about some of that butter pecan ice cream?" It was just so innocent, so happy, a man in his 90s, asking for a treat. I don't even eat ice cream. I ate it that night. How could you not do what this guy wanted to do?
Ernie. He once wrote that his heroes were sportswriters. I guess we loved him for that. But I can tell you that whenever a new sportswriter or broadcaster came to town, Ernie would greet him as if we were lucky to have him. He never played the kingpin. Never acted like a boss checking out the new kid. Not with journalists. Not with players. He made humility his calling card, he shook hands and drawled, "Welcome to the Tigahs" or "Good to have ya here," and it usually would be someone else who would nudge the new guy and say, "Do you know who that is? That's Ernie Harwell. THE Ernie Harwell."
No one ever earned a "THE" more than him.
Truly one for the ages
There is, in the story of any good man's passing, the laundry list of achievements that should be mentioned, the fact that Harwell was likely the first baseball announcer to be traded for a player (in 1948), the fact that he called games for the Dodgers, Giants, Orioles and Tigers, the fact that he missed just two broadcasts in his 55 years behind the mike -- one because he was being inducted into a hall of fame. The fact that he was there for Jackie Robinson's career as well as Cecil Fielder's, the fact that he did 42 years in Detroit and that the press box in Comerica Park is now named in his honor, the fact that he wrote hundreds of songs and penned a famous baseball poem, the fact that he felt unsatisfied by his path in the 1960s, attended a Bill Graham speech in Florida one night and became a devout Christian, the fact that lived quietly by those precepts for the rest of his days.
An outsider may wonder why so many fans today are singing Ernie's praises, but it was largely because he never sang his own. In a sport full of big egos, Ernie's was invisible. He once told the media, when asked about his retirement, that pretty soon people would say, "Who's that old guy who used to do the Tiger games?"
That was the rare time Ernie Harwell miscalculated. Nobody says that. And we'll all be off this earth before anybody will.
Gone now. Ernie believed in heaven and you can see him in it, because where else could he be? He left this world Tuesday night with his wife and children by his side, and when the news was announced in Minnesota, where the Tigers were playing, fans there gave him a standing ovation. In Minnesota! His body will lie in repose at Comerica Park on Thursday morning, like a head of state, giving fans a chance to say good-bye. I can't remember that ever happening for an announcer.
But then, Harwell was more than an announcer. He was a voice inside of us as well as outside us. A voice you still can hear, even though the world has silenced it. He was a man to admire, an example of life lived purely and honestly. And because of that, Ernie will live on inside everyone who ever met him, shook his hand, gave him a hug, or simply heard his soothing words come through a tiny speaker in a car radio, or through an earphone hidden from the teacher on a school day afternoon.
In his last appearance at the stadium last year, he told the crowd, "The blessed part of (my) journey is that it's going to end here in the great state of Michigan."
And one last time, his call was on the money. Ernie Harwell, the Voice of Summer, is now, as they say in the game he loved, in the books. But his page will be read again and again, and remembered lovingly by any of us lucky enough to have heard, met or known him. Gone now. But not forgotten. Never forgotten. You don't forget your angels. And I'm sure Ernie's one right now, up there, because he was always one down here.
Contact MITCH ALBOM: 313-223-4581 or malbom@freepress.com. Catch "The Mitch Albom Show" 5-7 p.m. weekdays on WJR-AM (760). Also catch "Monday Sports Albom" 7-8 p.m. Mondays on WJR. To read his recent columns, go to www.freep.com/mitch
Ernie Harwell had great optimism, humor
BY DREW SHARP
DETROIT FREE PRESS SPORTS WRITER
http://www.freep.com/section/SPORTS
May 5, 2010
There will remain a part of our soul where it'll always be summer, a transistor radio in one hand, an attentive ear anxiously hoping that Mickey Lolich will get that called third strike to close out the ninth inning. The vivid tales Ernie Harwell spun with enthusiasm and genuine decency will endure in the hearts of every person he touched.
And, man, there were many.
We knew this day was coming, but that didn't make it any easier when we learned that cancer silenced the voice of every Detroit childhood Tuesday night.
TSN/Zuma Press/Icon SMI
Harwell, seen here with Henry Aaron in April 1974.
Ernie wouldn't want us crying at his passing. He lived 92 long years. That's one heck of an extra innings game. And there aren't many of us who can look back upon their lives and not at least concede one or two regrets along the path.
He always said that it was he who was the fortunate one, finding a city that he loved and that loved him unconditionally.
The mood of the Wings-San Jose playoff hockey game turned somber as word of Harwell's passing filtered through the Joe Louis Arena press box during the first period. Some fans remarked that even the possibility of a series-saving Wings' victory over the Sharks couldn't turn this into a happy day.
But there was a generally shared sentiment -- terrible sadness that someone so entwined to everyone who's called this state home was gone but appreciation that happy memories he gave us will stay with us forever.
We marveled at his indefatigable optimism and ability to mine the tiniest ray of light from the darkest situation.
His longtime friend, Gary Spicer, told me during the Tigers' home opener last month that Ernie wished to do something special for the doctors and health care providers who helped him during these final weeks. Spicer remarked how Harwell, despite the certainty of his fate and the physical discomfort endured, nonetheless lifted the spirits of those entrusted with making him comfortable.
The man had an incredible sense of humor, a dry wit that's often indigenous to journalists.
In one of his final Free Press columns, Ernie recalled his early fears regarding public speaking. He quoted a Jerry Seinfeld stand-up bit in which he cited a poll listing public speaking as the No. 1 fear in the United States.
No. 2 was dying. So the joke goes according to the poll, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than delivering the eulogy.
Laughing at death when you're the one dying is remarkable.
Ernie never took himself too seriously.
He once wrote about how, during his early days as a baseball broadcaster in Baltimore, the team's sponsors would dispatch him for various local speaking engagements if they couldn't land a better known ballplayer, coach, or in Ernie's Georgia drawl "any kind of belly dancer."
It's been often said and written about Ernie, but it bears repeating. The greatest impact in life isn't necessarily reserved for those with the most money, the most brains or the most power. Sometimes, it's those appreciated simply for the sincere sweetness and generosity of their being.
We lost a gentleman Tuesday.
Ernie doesn't want us crying. but we will be because it's is one heck of a loss.
Contact DREW SHARP: 313-223-4055 or dsharp@freepress.com.
DETROIT FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
http://www.freep.com/section/SPORTS
May 5, 2010
The Voice of Summer died in the spring, shortly before the Tigers' first pitch of the evening. That was fitting. Ernie Harwell would never want to interrupt the game.
Gone now. Like the home run that lands in the seats, like the final out of the ninth inning, like the thousands of games he closed with his signature sign-offs, his genteel voice telling us he'd see us tomorrow. Gone now. No more tomorrows. At 92, after a battle with bile duct cancer that stretched into extra innings, Ernie let go of this world and moved on to the higher place from which we were certain he was sent.
AP Photo Lad Strayer
Ernie Harwell in his radio booth at Comerica Park.
Gone now. We knew this was coming. Ernie, in his final grace, prepared us for it. He told us not to worry. We still worried. He told us not to cry. We cried anyhow. He told us he had led the life he'd wanted, that he was ready to say good-bye.
But we were not.
"I know into whose arms I'm gonna fall," he told me in one of our last conversations, on a wide stage in front of a sold-out Fox Theatre, a last, packed-house tribute to a man who became arguably the most popular figure in the history of our state simply by doing the same gentle thing over and over, simply by being there, by remaining consistent, pure, good and true, even as things around him became anything but. Ernie stood out because he stood still. He was reliable as a rock. A soul in a void. A heart in a sometimes heartless world.
As long as there was Ernie, there was still a piece of childhood, of summers gone by, a piece of what baseball was supposed to be about, a pastime, a joyous diversion, youth -- good, sweet, innocent youth. Even after he stopped broadcasting nearly eight years ago, just knowing he was here, seeing him on occasion at the stadium, his hands dug in his back pockets, that wide grin beneath a funny beret, made us feel that things were still OK in baseball, because the Voice of Summer was still around, watching over the game.
Gone now.
A man we all knew so well
And so the time comes to write the piece you never want to write. The one you build for over a career and must punch out in a matter of hours. So unfair, it seems. But then, what can I tell you that you don't already know? Normally, when someone dies, those of us on the inside can share the unique perspective of "a person who knew him." But everybody knew Ernie. If you heard him, you knew him. If you met him, you knew him. He was that rare thing, a man the same on the front side and the back.
Maybe I can tell you a few things. The way he re-enacted games in his early days as a voice of the Atlanta Crackers, following the action on tickertape, then broadcasting with sound effects, as if it happened in front of him. Sometimes, he told me, if the machine broke down, he'd have to invent a reason for the delay.
"Uh-oh, a dog just ran on the field," he'd say, or something like that. Ernie laughed at those memories. But in such moments, he had to use his imagination. And ultimately, that made him more like us. For wasn't imagination a key to listening to baseball on the radio? Didn't you paint pictures to Ernie's words as he called the action -- "the crafty left-hander" on the mound, or, on a nasty strikeout, the batter who "stood there like the house by the side of the road"?
Over time, Ernie's voice became the soundtrack of our internal pictures, until the game became a story -- a story told by a fatherly figure. I once said if baseball could talk, it would sound like Ernie Harwell -- unhurried, slightly southern, as comfortable as an old couch.
It was true then, it is true now.
But you knew that already.
What else can I tell you? That he loved his wife? This is almost too obvious to mention. For 68 years, they were together, acting like kids on their first date. The last time I saw them both, a few months back, in his modest residence at a senior center in Novi, he said, "Lulu, how about some of that butter pecan ice cream?" And she brought us some and we ate it together. I don't know why I remember that line. "How about some of that butter pecan ice cream?" It was just so innocent, so happy, a man in his 90s, asking for a treat. I don't even eat ice cream. I ate it that night. How could you not do what this guy wanted to do?Ernie. He once wrote that his heroes were sportswriters. I guess we loved him for that. But I can tell you that whenever a new sportswriter or broadcaster came to town, Ernie would greet him as if we were lucky to have him. He never played the kingpin. Never acted like a boss checking out the new kid. Not with journalists. Not with players. He made humility his calling card, he shook hands and drawled, "Welcome to the Tigahs" or "Good to have ya here," and it usually would be someone else who would nudge the new guy and say, "Do you know who that is? That's Ernie Harwell. THE Ernie Harwell."
No one ever earned a "THE" more than him.
Truly one for the ages
There is, in the story of any good man's passing, the laundry list of achievements that should be mentioned, the fact that Harwell was likely the first baseball announcer to be traded for a player (in 1948), the fact that he called games for the Dodgers, Giants, Orioles and Tigers, the fact that he missed just two broadcasts in his 55 years behind the mike -- one because he was being inducted into a hall of fame. The fact that he was there for Jackie Robinson's career as well as Cecil Fielder's, the fact that he did 42 years in Detroit and that the press box in Comerica Park is now named in his honor, the fact that he wrote hundreds of songs and penned a famous baseball poem, the fact that he felt unsatisfied by his path in the 1960s, attended a Bill Graham speech in Florida one night and became a devout Christian, the fact that lived quietly by those precepts for the rest of his days.
An outsider may wonder why so many fans today are singing Ernie's praises, but it was largely because he never sang his own. In a sport full of big egos, Ernie's was invisible. He once told the media, when asked about his retirement, that pretty soon people would say, "Who's that old guy who used to do the Tiger games?"
That was the rare time Ernie Harwell miscalculated. Nobody says that. And we'll all be off this earth before anybody will.
Gone now. Ernie believed in heaven and you can see him in it, because where else could he be? He left this world Tuesday night with his wife and children by his side, and when the news was announced in Minnesota, where the Tigers were playing, fans there gave him a standing ovation. In Minnesota! His body will lie in repose at Comerica Park on Thursday morning, like a head of state, giving fans a chance to say good-bye. I can't remember that ever happening for an announcer.
But then, Harwell was more than an announcer. He was a voice inside of us as well as outside us. A voice you still can hear, even though the world has silenced it. He was a man to admire, an example of life lived purely and honestly. And because of that, Ernie will live on inside everyone who ever met him, shook his hand, gave him a hug, or simply heard his soothing words come through a tiny speaker in a car radio, or through an earphone hidden from the teacher on a school day afternoon.
In his last appearance at the stadium last year, he told the crowd, "The blessed part of (my) journey is that it's going to end here in the great state of Michigan."And one last time, his call was on the money. Ernie Harwell, the Voice of Summer, is now, as they say in the game he loved, in the books. But his page will be read again and again, and remembered lovingly by any of us lucky enough to have heard, met or known him. Gone now. But not forgotten. Never forgotten. You don't forget your angels. And I'm sure Ernie's one right now, up there, because he was always one down here.
Contact MITCH ALBOM: 313-223-4581 or malbom@freepress.com. Catch "The Mitch Albom Show" 5-7 p.m. weekdays on WJR-AM (760). Also catch "Monday Sports Albom" 7-8 p.m. Mondays on WJR. To read his recent columns, go to www.freep.com/mitch
Ernie Harwell had great optimism, humor
BY DREW SHARP
DETROIT FREE PRESS SPORTS WRITER
http://www.freep.com/section/SPORTS
May 5, 2010
There will remain a part of our soul where it'll always be summer, a transistor radio in one hand, an attentive ear anxiously hoping that Mickey Lolich will get that called third strike to close out the ninth inning. The vivid tales Ernie Harwell spun with enthusiasm and genuine decency will endure in the hearts of every person he touched.
And, man, there were many.
We knew this day was coming, but that didn't make it any easier when we learned that cancer silenced the voice of every Detroit childhood Tuesday night.
TSN/Zuma Press/Icon SMI
Harwell, seen here with Henry Aaron in April 1974.
Ernie wouldn't want us crying at his passing. He lived 92 long years. That's one heck of an extra innings game. And there aren't many of us who can look back upon their lives and not at least concede one or two regrets along the path.
He always said that it was he who was the fortunate one, finding a city that he loved and that loved him unconditionally.
The mood of the Wings-San Jose playoff hockey game turned somber as word of Harwell's passing filtered through the Joe Louis Arena press box during the first period. Some fans remarked that even the possibility of a series-saving Wings' victory over the Sharks couldn't turn this into a happy day.
But there was a generally shared sentiment -- terrible sadness that someone so entwined to everyone who's called this state home was gone but appreciation that happy memories he gave us will stay with us forever.
We marveled at his indefatigable optimism and ability to mine the tiniest ray of light from the darkest situation.
His longtime friend, Gary Spicer, told me during the Tigers' home opener last month that Ernie wished to do something special for the doctors and health care providers who helped him during these final weeks. Spicer remarked how Harwell, despite the certainty of his fate and the physical discomfort endured, nonetheless lifted the spirits of those entrusted with making him comfortable.
The man had an incredible sense of humor, a dry wit that's often indigenous to journalists.
In one of his final Free Press columns, Ernie recalled his early fears regarding public speaking. He quoted a Jerry Seinfeld stand-up bit in which he cited a poll listing public speaking as the No. 1 fear in the United States.
No. 2 was dying. So the joke goes according to the poll, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than delivering the eulogy.
Laughing at death when you're the one dying is remarkable.
Ernie never took himself too seriously.
He once wrote about how, during his early days as a baseball broadcaster in Baltimore, the team's sponsors would dispatch him for various local speaking engagements if they couldn't land a better known ballplayer, coach, or in Ernie's Georgia drawl "any kind of belly dancer."
It's been often said and written about Ernie, but it bears repeating. The greatest impact in life isn't necessarily reserved for those with the most money, the most brains or the most power. Sometimes, it's those appreciated simply for the sincere sweetness and generosity of their being.
We lost a gentleman Tuesday.
Ernie doesn't want us crying. but we will be because it's is one heck of a loss.
Contact DREW SHARP: 313-223-4055 or dsharp@freepress.com.
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
Book Review: 'Foxy: My Life in Three Acts'
By LARRY GETLEN
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/news/opinion
April 18, 2010
Foxy: My Life in Three Acts
by Pam Grier with Andrea Cagan
Springboard Press
During a routine doctor visit, actress Pam Grier was stunned when her physician sat her down for a serious talk about a bizarre and dangerous epidemic that was rocking the nether regions of women in Hollywood — a buildup of cocaine residue.
The doc asked if she was doing drugs, and she said no. Then perhaps her partner might be sneaking off for a quick pre-coitus snort?
“That’s a possibility,” she said. “I am dating Richard Pryor.”
Of all the surprises in “Foxy,” a memoir from the Afro’d goddess of blaxploitation, “a chick with drive who don’t take no jive!” as one tagline put it, the biggest is that Grier is endearingly innocent. Surrounded by drugs, sex and abuse, Grier, by her telling, was the straight one, trying to hold her life together through a string of broken men and stereotyped roles.
With a father in the Air Force, she moved constantly, spending time during her childhood in Columbus, Denver, San Jose, even England. Growing up with a large extended family, Grier’s mother worked hard as a nurse, while her Aunt Mennon served as a different sort of role model — shoving a woman’s head in the toilet for even looking at her man. Later, these two women would inspire two of Grier’s most important roles: respectively, the title characters in “Coffy” and “Foxy Brown.”
A festive child at first, Grier was gang-raped by a cousin and his friends at age six, only to be rescued by a telephone repairman who chased off her attackers, then went about repairing the phone. The rape left her a quiet child, scared of people and afflicted with a stutter. Her salvation was the horses on her grandparents’ Wyoming farm. As she learned to ride, her stutter would mysteriously disappear — preparing her for a life of both acting and action.
Grier got her start in show business by winning beauty pageants, which led to singing back-up for Bobby Womack, Stevie Wonder, and Sly Stone, who she got to watch jam in the studio with Jimi Hendrix. She was soon sent to audition for a producer named Roger Corman, who was making films on the cheap in the Philippines.
She asked her agent what the movie would be about.
“Women in prison in the jungle,” he replied. “Bondage, torture, attempted escape, punishment, drug addiction, machine guns, sex. The usual.”
Despite having never read a script or acted, she was cast in “The Big Doll House,” and was soon off to Manila to play a “tough-talking bisexual prostitute named Grear” whose wardrobe consisted of one long T-shirt.
“The Big Doll House” led to “Women in Cages,” which was filmed in a mountain city called Baguio where “leeches, protozoa, and parasites feasted on our naked flesh.” Grier’s career in the genre that would come to be known as “blaxploitation” was off to a creepy, crawly, and rapidly successful start.
Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, Grier had caught the eye of a gangly, 7-foot-2 UCLA basketball star named Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. Bonding over martial arts, they watched “The Seven Samurai” together over a dozen times, and fell in love.
But the relationship hit a snag when Alcindor suddenly asked Grier to begin calling him by his new name — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
He initially assured Grier that she wouldn’t have to convert to Islam, but that message soon changed to, “I can only marry a woman of the same religion.” Grier studied Islam, and was horrified by its attitude toward women. When she asked Abdul-Jabbar why women had to walk behind men, he would simply reply, “that’s what Allah wants.”
When his friends, who were also converting, came to visit, Grier found that men she used to hug hello and share laughs with now regarded her as cattle, avoiding her touch “as if I had bad breath or a contagious skin disease.” In their presence, she was not to speak until spoken to or enter the room until called — although she was allowed to make them sandwiches.
The relationship finally ended when Abdul-Jabbar called Grier on her 21st birthday and, after wishing her a happy birthday, asked her if she was planning to convert so they could be married.
“If you don’t commit to me today, I’m getting married at 2 this afternoon. She’s a converted Muslim, and she’s been prepared for me,” he said, adding, “once you become Muslim, you might appreciate another wife.”
A stunned Grier turned him down, and Abdul-Jabbar was married that day while his mother, who was not allowed in the mosque due to her Catholicism, waited in the car.
While Grier’s love life was not exactly taking off, her stardom was, at least partially due to her ability and willingness to perform her own stunts.
“I rode horses and motorcycles and jumped off buildings into nets,” she writes. “If you needed a woman of color to handle a gun, do a wheelie on a chopper, or fall off a cliff into a rice paddie, I was the one to call.”
Corman’s “The Arena,” filmed in Rome, called for Grier to ride a wild black stallion named Donatello. The horse was especially feisty, and Grier knew from experience that he needed to be trotted around the set in order to burn off excess energy.
One clueless crew member, clearly devoid of this knowledge, “popped him on the flank with a towel,” causing the horse to take off with Grier on his back, “like he’d had a kick from Satan himself.”
Grier feared for her life as Donatello galloped onto a neighboring film set, right toward — and then through — a backdrop painted like an ocean liner. The director of that film looked on in amazement, as “he watched a nearly naked black woman with an Afro, wrapped in leopard skin, riding a black stallion. Then he said, ‘Oh, Il mio Dio. My fantasy has come true!’ ”
That director was Federico Fellini, who helped her up, invited her to lunch, and, as he taught her to cook Italian red sauce, unsuccessfully tried to convince her to move to Italy and become his new leading lady.
While promoting her film “Coffy,” Grier met comedian Freddie Prinze and fell instantly in love. Again she considered marriage, but again there was an obstacle — this time, drugs.
“Coke was becoming a daily thing for Freddie and the rest of his friends, but I couldn’t accept it,” she says, describing how Prinze’s language would turn coarse and his behavior rude, and how he would babble and lose track of time. He became paranoid when she wouldn’t do drugs with him, and began “forgetting” condoms, even confessing to her, “I’m trying to get you pregnant. I love you, and I’m afraid you may not marry me.”
Grier eventually broke it off, although the pair remained friends, but drugs were everywhere in Hollywood. In 1974, Grier met John Lennon when, after the Academy Awards, she was invited to accompany the Beatle — who was separated from Yoko Ono at the time — to see the Smothers Brothers at the infamous Los Angeles club the Troubadour.
Lennon knocked back drinks at the packed club as, increasingly slurring and glassy-eyed, he told Grier how much he missed Ono.
As the crowd sensed royalty in its midst, Lennon was persuaded to sing, and by the time the Smothers Brothers hit the stage, he was too drunk to stop. An acquaintance told him to cut it out because it was rude, and Lennon replied, “I don’t give a f - - -.”
When the manager asked Lennon, who had taken to banging on the table, to leave, fists flew. The manager tried to pull him over a railing, and drinks splashed everywhere as a flailing Lennon was “taking people out right and left in a drunken brawl,” with Grier shielding her head from flying chairs.
At least Lennon wasn’t a lecher. After befriending Sammy Davis Jr.’s wife, Altovise, at a charity event, she was invited to the Davis home for an intimate dinner party. After the meal, Sammy approached her and said, “I’d like to show you something.” Leading her forcefully by the arm, his face too close to her’s, it was clear that he was coming on to her — even with his wife in the house.
Grier panicked and escaped to the couch, wedging herself between Elizabeth Taylor and Liza Minnelli.
“Excuse me. Is Sammy always like this with women? In front of his wife?” she asked.
Taylor laughed.
“Oh yes,” she said. “It’s nothing.”
“Don’t take it seriously,” added Minnelli.
But when Sammy returned and angrily requested she follow him, Grier fled to the bathroom. Altovise then distracted him while Minnelli and her husband laid Grier down in the back seat of their Silver Shadow Rolls-Royce, and threw Minnelli’s full-length sable coat over her so Sammy wouldn’t see.
Soon after, Grier met another show biz wild man when Prinze brought her to see a friend of his. As they drove through the private citrus orchard to the gate of the “sprawling Spanish hacienda,” out walked Richard Pryor in a black and white robe and house shoes.
“Motherf - - - - -, you do know the b - - - -,” was Pryor’s opening pick-up line, and Prinze responded by pulling out a vial of pure liquid cocaine. Pryor invited the pair inside to party as he quoted dialogue from Grier’s “Foxy Brown,” but she demurred, making Prinze take her home instead.
It wasn’t until they were cast together in “Greased Lightning” in 1977 that Grier and Pryor struck up a friendship, and then began dating several months later.
Pryor confided in Grier, telling her, “I’m afraid if I don’t do drugs, I won’t be funny,” but she helped him face his fears and clean up his act, creating a health regimen for him and also helping him learn to read, as he had been learning the lines to his films phonetically.
But after six months sober, Pryor reverted back to his old druggie ways, and Grier ended the relationship.
After the blaxploitation craze faded, Grier remained active in theater and film, eventually battling cancer and finding television success on Showtime’s “The L Word” and “Smallville.” At 60, she still don’t take no jive.
She also experienced a brief career rejuvenation in the ’90s when, while driving though L.A. with a producer friend, she spotted an odd looking man with long, unruly hair talking with a hot young babe. Grier recognized director Quentin Tarantino, who had just hit paydirt with “Pulp Fiction.”
“Pam Grier,” he said. “I’m writing a movie for you — my version of ‘Foxy Brown.’ ”
Grier, by now a Hollywood veteran, thought he was full of it — until six months later when she received notice that the post office was holding a postage-due package for her, and her 44-cent investment got her the script for “Jackie Brown,” the film that ultimately earned Grier her only Golden Globe nomination.
Through the ups and the downs, the toughness she gained from her harsh well of personal experience never failed to define her career and her life.
To prepare to audition for the role of a murderous junkie hooker in Paul Newman’s “Fort Apache, The Bronx,” Grier bought a blond wig, red stockings, a garter belt, and stilettos from a sex shop, then headed down to 10th Avenue, which was then Manhattan’s Hooker Highway. She talked with the women and over the next few days she didn’t shower, wash her hair or brush her teeth. Stumbling into the audition in a halter top and a stained, satin Mickey Mouse jacket, she blasted out a blunt “Hey motherf - - - - -, wassup?” Newman and his producer watched as the film’s screenwriter attempted to read with her, but was too flustered after Grier squatted over him, and ground her body against his.
She then performed her scene, pretended to shoot up against a wall, slid to the floor, and died. After a moment of silence, Paul Newman stood up and applauded.
She got the part.
Pam Grier’s Collection of Lessons Learned
By FELICIA R. LEE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
May 4, 2010
Darren Michaels/Miramax Films
Pam Grier in the title role of Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film, “Jackie Brown.”
Pam Grier, who manages to exude toughness and sensuality in equal measure, has also managed to embody many of the cultural shifts of the last 40 years.
In her new memoir, “Foxy: My Life in Three Acts” (Hachette Book Group), Ms. Grier, 60, revisits a career that took off in the early 1970s when she became blaxploitation cinema’s first female action hero. She sprang to prominence again in Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film, “Jackie Brown,” and she popped up in the 21st century in the groundbreaking Showtime television series “The L Word,” about the lives of lesbians.
“Foxy,” however, reveals a darker personal life, including, for the first time, the details of her sexual assault at 6. It also recounts the diagnosis of cervical cancer Ms. Grier received in her late 30s and the untimely deaths and suicides of family members and friends. There is space, too, for her romances with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (who wanted her to convert to Islam), Freddie Prinze (who battled drugs and wanted her to have his baby) and Richard Pryor (who thought she could help save him from drugs).
Why tell her story now? “I’ve had mentors who know of my legacy and family history, along with my career in surviving and falling, crawling and learning, and being very, very open and curious,” she explained. “I said, ‘If I do it, I want it to be a work of lessons learned that I can share with others.’ You seek help. You seek friendship.”
Ms. Grier, who wrote “Foxy” with Andrea Cagan, was sitting in an Upper East Side hotel suite, far from the little Colorado ranch she shares with three dogs and four horses. Her face was unlined, her body curvy rather than Hollywood thin. She laughed easily and often, despite sharing sometimes harrowing details of her life.
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Pam Grier during her visit to New York to promote her new memoir, “Foxy: My Life in Three Acts.”
She grew up in Colorado, the daughter of an Air Force mechanic and a nurse. It was an era of racial segregation; the family (including two siblings) lived abroad for extended stays, but Ms. Grier considers her “rural sensibility” important to who she is. She said she was taught by her family to “sleep in a tent at night in the rain and go fish for your food in the morning.”
Life was forever altered when, left unsupervised at an aunt’s home, she was raped by two boys. After that she describes a lonely, traumatized childhood.
“I was very quiet,” Ms. Grier recalled, and she stuttered when she did talk. As a young woman, she was the victim of a date rape, she wrote, which led to years in which she tried to play down her prettiness.
“My life is probably more interesting and dangerous than some of the movies I’ve done,” she said.
She came by her steel the hard way, Ms. Grier said. And she referred to some of her biggest 1970s hits to explain how. “My aunt was Foxy Brown, and my mom was Coffy, and we were constantly struggling against disrespect,” she said.
In “Coffy” (1973) she played a nurse who turned to vigilante justice to avenge her little sister’s drug addiction. In “Foxy Brown” (1974) she fought against drugs and other ills.
Once derided as formulaic urban morality tales aimed at black audiences and featuring big helpings of white villainy, several of Ms. Grier’s blaxploitation films are now considered groundbreaking for their depictions of powerful black women.
And it took Ms. Grier’s winning combination of sex, sass and talent to pull it off, said Warrington Hudlin, a producer and the president of the Black Filmmaker Foundation. “She exists in the American imagination in a way that is permanent,” Mr. Hudlin said. “She represents a self-reliant, dynamic female figure that doesn’t have to forgo femininity for potency, for militant power.”
FC, top; David Gray/Showtime
Ms. Grier, at top, in “Foxy Brown” and, above, in the television series “The L Word,” with Kelly Lynch.
While the story lines were outlandish, Ms. Grier said some of her early films had their roots in the truth of urban life in that era.
“We had won so many aspects of civil rights, but we didn’t have a large enough community to lose people to gun battles and drugs,” she said. “We had to show we had a positive community, too, which was something that didn’t get on the news.”
When it comes to more personal topics, like men, Ms. Grier also aims to convey a lesson: a woman needs to love herself more than she loves a relationship.
“At some point you have to realize you will be walking away from someone you do love,” she said, describing her failed relationships. “But out of love for yourself, O.K.?” While she has never married or had children, Ms. Grier said she still fantasized about her dream wedding.
After years with few big roles, her fortunes were revived by Mr. Tarantino, an avowed fan of blaxploitation and other less-than-exalted movie genres. He took her talent global with “Jackie Brown,” an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel that was tailored for Ms. Grier and includes references to her earlier work.
The film showcased her acting chops and cast her in a more serious light in the film industry. “I owe him at least one child,” she said of her gratitude to Mr. Tarantino.
This year Ms. Grier joined the cast of “Smallville,” the CW science-fiction series, where she plays the brilliant covert agent Amanda Waller.
So now her fans are tweens as well as their grandparents, Ms. Grier said, and they pay attention to what she does. When she played the straight musician and club owner Kit Porter (half-sister of Bette, a lesbian) on “The L Word,” people stopped her in the street to say she helped them connect to gay family members and friends.
Now in the midst of a book tour, Ms. Grier said she felt good, and grateful. Her cancer is in remission. She is shooting a film with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts.
Staying the course goes back to the book she calls her bible in “Foxy”: “An Actor Prepares” by Constantin Stanislavski.
“He said there’s no such thing as a small role, there’s no such thing as a small heart,” Ms. Grier said. “He said I should approach any role as if it’s my life, and that’s what I did.”
Related
Filmography: Pam Grier
Excerpt: ‘Foxy’ (hachettebookgroup.com)
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/news/opinion
April 18, 2010
Foxy: My Life in Three Acts
by Pam Grier with Andrea Cagan
Springboard Press
During a routine doctor visit, actress Pam Grier was stunned when her physician sat her down for a serious talk about a bizarre and dangerous epidemic that was rocking the nether regions of women in Hollywood — a buildup of cocaine residue.
The doc asked if she was doing drugs, and she said no. Then perhaps her partner might be sneaking off for a quick pre-coitus snort?
“That’s a possibility,” she said. “I am dating Richard Pryor.”
Of all the surprises in “Foxy,” a memoir from the Afro’d goddess of blaxploitation, “a chick with drive who don’t take no jive!” as one tagline put it, the biggest is that Grier is endearingly innocent. Surrounded by drugs, sex and abuse, Grier, by her telling, was the straight one, trying to hold her life together through a string of broken men and stereotyped roles.
With a father in the Air Force, she moved constantly, spending time during her childhood in Columbus, Denver, San Jose, even England. Growing up with a large extended family, Grier’s mother worked hard as a nurse, while her Aunt Mennon served as a different sort of role model — shoving a woman’s head in the toilet for even looking at her man. Later, these two women would inspire two of Grier’s most important roles: respectively, the title characters in “Coffy” and “Foxy Brown.”
A festive child at first, Grier was gang-raped by a cousin and his friends at age six, only to be rescued by a telephone repairman who chased off her attackers, then went about repairing the phone. The rape left her a quiet child, scared of people and afflicted with a stutter. Her salvation was the horses on her grandparents’ Wyoming farm. As she learned to ride, her stutter would mysteriously disappear — preparing her for a life of both acting and action.
Grier got her start in show business by winning beauty pageants, which led to singing back-up for Bobby Womack, Stevie Wonder, and Sly Stone, who she got to watch jam in the studio with Jimi Hendrix. She was soon sent to audition for a producer named Roger Corman, who was making films on the cheap in the Philippines.
She asked her agent what the movie would be about.
“Women in prison in the jungle,” he replied. “Bondage, torture, attempted escape, punishment, drug addiction, machine guns, sex. The usual.”
Despite having never read a script or acted, she was cast in “The Big Doll House,” and was soon off to Manila to play a “tough-talking bisexual prostitute named Grear” whose wardrobe consisted of one long T-shirt.“The Big Doll House” led to “Women in Cages,” which was filmed in a mountain city called Baguio where “leeches, protozoa, and parasites feasted on our naked flesh.” Grier’s career in the genre that would come to be known as “blaxploitation” was off to a creepy, crawly, and rapidly successful start.
Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, Grier had caught the eye of a gangly, 7-foot-2 UCLA basketball star named Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. Bonding over martial arts, they watched “The Seven Samurai” together over a dozen times, and fell in love.
But the relationship hit a snag when Alcindor suddenly asked Grier to begin calling him by his new name — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
He initially assured Grier that she wouldn’t have to convert to Islam, but that message soon changed to, “I can only marry a woman of the same religion.” Grier studied Islam, and was horrified by its attitude toward women. When she asked Abdul-Jabbar why women had to walk behind men, he would simply reply, “that’s what Allah wants.”
When his friends, who were also converting, came to visit, Grier found that men she used to hug hello and share laughs with now regarded her as cattle, avoiding her touch “as if I had bad breath or a contagious skin disease.” In their presence, she was not to speak until spoken to or enter the room until called — although she was allowed to make them sandwiches.
The relationship finally ended when Abdul-Jabbar called Grier on her 21st birthday and, after wishing her a happy birthday, asked her if she was planning to convert so they could be married.
“If you don’t commit to me today, I’m getting married at 2 this afternoon. She’s a converted Muslim, and she’s been prepared for me,” he said, adding, “once you become Muslim, you might appreciate another wife.”
A stunned Grier turned him down, and Abdul-Jabbar was married that day while his mother, who was not allowed in the mosque due to her Catholicism, waited in the car.
While Grier’s love life was not exactly taking off, her stardom was, at least partially due to her ability and willingness to perform her own stunts.
“I rode horses and motorcycles and jumped off buildings into nets,” she writes. “If you needed a woman of color to handle a gun, do a wheelie on a chopper, or fall off a cliff into a rice paddie, I was the one to call.”Corman’s “The Arena,” filmed in Rome, called for Grier to ride a wild black stallion named Donatello. The horse was especially feisty, and Grier knew from experience that he needed to be trotted around the set in order to burn off excess energy.
One clueless crew member, clearly devoid of this knowledge, “popped him on the flank with a towel,” causing the horse to take off with Grier on his back, “like he’d had a kick from Satan himself.”
Grier feared for her life as Donatello galloped onto a neighboring film set, right toward — and then through — a backdrop painted like an ocean liner. The director of that film looked on in amazement, as “he watched a nearly naked black woman with an Afro, wrapped in leopard skin, riding a black stallion. Then he said, ‘Oh, Il mio Dio. My fantasy has come true!’ ”
That director was Federico Fellini, who helped her up, invited her to lunch, and, as he taught her to cook Italian red sauce, unsuccessfully tried to convince her to move to Italy and become his new leading lady.
While promoting her film “Coffy,” Grier met comedian Freddie Prinze and fell instantly in love. Again she considered marriage, but again there was an obstacle — this time, drugs.
“Coke was becoming a daily thing for Freddie and the rest of his friends, but I couldn’t accept it,” she says, describing how Prinze’s language would turn coarse and his behavior rude, and how he would babble and lose track of time. He became paranoid when she wouldn’t do drugs with him, and began “forgetting” condoms, even confessing to her, “I’m trying to get you pregnant. I love you, and I’m afraid you may not marry me.”
Grier eventually broke it off, although the pair remained friends, but drugs were everywhere in Hollywood. In 1974, Grier met John Lennon when, after the Academy Awards, she was invited to accompany the Beatle — who was separated from Yoko Ono at the time — to see the Smothers Brothers at the infamous Los Angeles club the Troubadour.
Lennon knocked back drinks at the packed club as, increasingly slurring and glassy-eyed, he told Grier how much he missed Ono.
As the crowd sensed royalty in its midst, Lennon was persuaded to sing, and by the time the Smothers Brothers hit the stage, he was too drunk to stop. An acquaintance told him to cut it out because it was rude, and Lennon replied, “I don’t give a f - - -.”When the manager asked Lennon, who had taken to banging on the table, to leave, fists flew. The manager tried to pull him over a railing, and drinks splashed everywhere as a flailing Lennon was “taking people out right and left in a drunken brawl,” with Grier shielding her head from flying chairs.
At least Lennon wasn’t a lecher. After befriending Sammy Davis Jr.’s wife, Altovise, at a charity event, she was invited to the Davis home for an intimate dinner party. After the meal, Sammy approached her and said, “I’d like to show you something.” Leading her forcefully by the arm, his face too close to her’s, it was clear that he was coming on to her — even with his wife in the house.
Grier panicked and escaped to the couch, wedging herself between Elizabeth Taylor and Liza Minnelli.
“Excuse me. Is Sammy always like this with women? In front of his wife?” she asked.
Taylor laughed.
“Oh yes,” she said. “It’s nothing.”
“Don’t take it seriously,” added Minnelli.
But when Sammy returned and angrily requested she follow him, Grier fled to the bathroom. Altovise then distracted him while Minnelli and her husband laid Grier down in the back seat of their Silver Shadow Rolls-Royce, and threw Minnelli’s full-length sable coat over her so Sammy wouldn’t see.
Soon after, Grier met another show biz wild man when Prinze brought her to see a friend of his. As they drove through the private citrus orchard to the gate of the “sprawling Spanish hacienda,” out walked Richard Pryor in a black and white robe and house shoes.
“Motherf - - - - -, you do know the b - - - -,” was Pryor’s opening pick-up line, and Prinze responded by pulling out a vial of pure liquid cocaine. Pryor invited the pair inside to party as he quoted dialogue from Grier’s “Foxy Brown,” but she demurred, making Prinze take her home instead.
It wasn’t until they were cast together in “Greased Lightning” in 1977 that Grier and Pryor struck up a friendship, and then began dating several months later.
Pryor confided in Grier, telling her, “I’m afraid if I don’t do drugs, I won’t be funny,” but she helped him face his fears and clean up his act, creating a health regimen for him and also helping him learn to read, as he had been learning the lines to his films phonetically.
But after six months sober, Pryor reverted back to his old druggie ways, and Grier ended the relationship.
After the blaxploitation craze faded, Grier remained active in theater and film, eventually battling cancer and finding television success on Showtime’s “The L Word” and “Smallville.” At 60, she still don’t take no jive.She also experienced a brief career rejuvenation in the ’90s when, while driving though L.A. with a producer friend, she spotted an odd looking man with long, unruly hair talking with a hot young babe. Grier recognized director Quentin Tarantino, who had just hit paydirt with “Pulp Fiction.”
“Pam Grier,” he said. “I’m writing a movie for you — my version of ‘Foxy Brown.’ ”
Grier, by now a Hollywood veteran, thought he was full of it — until six months later when she received notice that the post office was holding a postage-due package for her, and her 44-cent investment got her the script for “Jackie Brown,” the film that ultimately earned Grier her only Golden Globe nomination.
Through the ups and the downs, the toughness she gained from her harsh well of personal experience never failed to define her career and her life.
To prepare to audition for the role of a murderous junkie hooker in Paul Newman’s “Fort Apache, The Bronx,” Grier bought a blond wig, red stockings, a garter belt, and stilettos from a sex shop, then headed down to 10th Avenue, which was then Manhattan’s Hooker Highway. She talked with the women and over the next few days she didn’t shower, wash her hair or brush her teeth. Stumbling into the audition in a halter top and a stained, satin Mickey Mouse jacket, she blasted out a blunt “Hey motherf - - - - -, wassup?” Newman and his producer watched as the film’s screenwriter attempted to read with her, but was too flustered after Grier squatted over him, and ground her body against his.
She then performed her scene, pretended to shoot up against a wall, slid to the floor, and died. After a moment of silence, Paul Newman stood up and applauded.
She got the part.
Pam Grier’s Collection of Lessons Learned
By FELICIA R. LEE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
May 4, 2010
Darren Michaels/Miramax Films
Pam Grier in the title role of Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film, “Jackie Brown.”
Pam Grier, who manages to exude toughness and sensuality in equal measure, has also managed to embody many of the cultural shifts of the last 40 years.
In her new memoir, “Foxy: My Life in Three Acts” (Hachette Book Group), Ms. Grier, 60, revisits a career that took off in the early 1970s when she became blaxploitation cinema’s first female action hero. She sprang to prominence again in Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film, “Jackie Brown,” and she popped up in the 21st century in the groundbreaking Showtime television series “The L Word,” about the lives of lesbians.
“Foxy,” however, reveals a darker personal life, including, for the first time, the details of her sexual assault at 6. It also recounts the diagnosis of cervical cancer Ms. Grier received in her late 30s and the untimely deaths and suicides of family members and friends. There is space, too, for her romances with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (who wanted her to convert to Islam), Freddie Prinze (who battled drugs and wanted her to have his baby) and Richard Pryor (who thought she could help save him from drugs).
Why tell her story now? “I’ve had mentors who know of my legacy and family history, along with my career in surviving and falling, crawling and learning, and being very, very open and curious,” she explained. “I said, ‘If I do it, I want it to be a work of lessons learned that I can share with others.’ You seek help. You seek friendship.”
Ms. Grier, who wrote “Foxy” with Andrea Cagan, was sitting in an Upper East Side hotel suite, far from the little Colorado ranch she shares with three dogs and four horses. Her face was unlined, her body curvy rather than Hollywood thin. She laughed easily and often, despite sharing sometimes harrowing details of her life.
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Pam Grier during her visit to New York to promote her new memoir, “Foxy: My Life in Three Acts.”
She grew up in Colorado, the daughter of an Air Force mechanic and a nurse. It was an era of racial segregation; the family (including two siblings) lived abroad for extended stays, but Ms. Grier considers her “rural sensibility” important to who she is. She said she was taught by her family to “sleep in a tent at night in the rain and go fish for your food in the morning.”
Life was forever altered when, left unsupervised at an aunt’s home, she was raped by two boys. After that she describes a lonely, traumatized childhood.
“I was very quiet,” Ms. Grier recalled, and she stuttered when she did talk. As a young woman, she was the victim of a date rape, she wrote, which led to years in which she tried to play down her prettiness.
“My life is probably more interesting and dangerous than some of the movies I’ve done,” she said.
She came by her steel the hard way, Ms. Grier said. And she referred to some of her biggest 1970s hits to explain how. “My aunt was Foxy Brown, and my mom was Coffy, and we were constantly struggling against disrespect,” she said.
In “Coffy” (1973) she played a nurse who turned to vigilante justice to avenge her little sister’s drug addiction. In “Foxy Brown” (1974) she fought against drugs and other ills.
Once derided as formulaic urban morality tales aimed at black audiences and featuring big helpings of white villainy, several of Ms. Grier’s blaxploitation films are now considered groundbreaking for their depictions of powerful black women.
And it took Ms. Grier’s winning combination of sex, sass and talent to pull it off, said Warrington Hudlin, a producer and the president of the Black Filmmaker Foundation. “She exists in the American imagination in a way that is permanent,” Mr. Hudlin said. “She represents a self-reliant, dynamic female figure that doesn’t have to forgo femininity for potency, for militant power.”
FC, top; David Gray/Showtime
Ms. Grier, at top, in “Foxy Brown” and, above, in the television series “The L Word,” with Kelly Lynch.
While the story lines were outlandish, Ms. Grier said some of her early films had their roots in the truth of urban life in that era.
“We had won so many aspects of civil rights, but we didn’t have a large enough community to lose people to gun battles and drugs,” she said. “We had to show we had a positive community, too, which was something that didn’t get on the news.”
When it comes to more personal topics, like men, Ms. Grier also aims to convey a lesson: a woman needs to love herself more than she loves a relationship.
“At some point you have to realize you will be walking away from someone you do love,” she said, describing her failed relationships. “But out of love for yourself, O.K.?” While she has never married or had children, Ms. Grier said she still fantasized about her dream wedding.
After years with few big roles, her fortunes were revived by Mr. Tarantino, an avowed fan of blaxploitation and other less-than-exalted movie genres. He took her talent global with “Jackie Brown,” an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel that was tailored for Ms. Grier and includes references to her earlier work.
The film showcased her acting chops and cast her in a more serious light in the film industry. “I owe him at least one child,” she said of her gratitude to Mr. Tarantino.
This year Ms. Grier joined the cast of “Smallville,” the CW science-fiction series, where she plays the brilliant covert agent Amanda Waller.
So now her fans are tweens as well as their grandparents, Ms. Grier said, and they pay attention to what she does. When she played the straight musician and club owner Kit Porter (half-sister of Bette, a lesbian) on “The L Word,” people stopped her in the street to say she helped them connect to gay family members and friends.
Now in the midst of a book tour, Ms. Grier said she felt good, and grateful. Her cancer is in remission. She is shooting a film with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts.
Staying the course goes back to the book she calls her bible in “Foxy”: “An Actor Prepares” by Constantin Stanislavski.
“He said there’s no such thing as a small role, there’s no such thing as a small heart,” Ms. Grier said. “He said I should approach any role as if it’s my life, and that’s what I did.”
Related
Filmography: Pam Grier
Excerpt: ‘Foxy’ (hachettebookgroup.com)
Who Put Iran in Charge of Women's Rights?
The country's election to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women is a joke.
By Anne Applebaum
http://www.slate.com/id/2252718/
Posted Monday, May 3, 2010, at 8:03 PM ET
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad campaigned in Uganda and Zimbabwe. Behind the scenes, his flunkies twisted arms and offered favors. For weeks, feelers were sent out to all kinds of unlikely allies. What was the diplomatic prize at stake? Nothing less than a seat on the U.N. council on human rights.
All this was perfectly appropriate. Despite its title, this is a committee whose past members—Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe among them—have not been renowned for their adherence to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. On the contrary, authoritarian regimes have long battled to join the council and its predecessor organizations, the better to prevent any outsiders from investigating their own governments. Once they became members, much of their time was spent denouncing Israel and the United States, while studiously avoiding anything that might sound, say, like criticism of Russian behavior in Chechnya.
Different U.S. administrations have adopted different approaches to this peculiar institution. In recent years, the United States has quit the council, denounced the council, and isolated the council, generally with bipartisan support. Perhaps the only New York Times editorial ever written in praise of John Bolton, President George W. Bush's pugnacious U.N. ambassador, complimented him for advocating its radical reform.
Yet the council kept working to the advantage of its members. The fact is that in places like Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe, praise—or even lack of condemnation—from something called the "U.N. Human Rights Council" still carries a good deal of political weight. We might roll our eyes when a committee headed by Libya solemnly pats China on the back for its good behavior in Tibet, but inside China this makes useful propaganda. We might not take seriously the umpteenth denunciation of Israel by yet another U.N. body, but the Syrian government probably finds it helpful.
Knowing this to be the case, the Obama administration, while it was pressing its other reset buttons, decided to rejoin the council in 2009, the better to "reform the institution from within." This was not just a gesture of friendship to the human rights council; this was an olive branch for the United Nations itself: We were going to engage with the process, work with others, use diplomacy. We were going to change the way the committee operated, make the United Nations work for democratic values and not against them.
And we did. When Iran began to campaign for membership, Western diplomats—French, Swiss, and others, as well as American—took this prospect seriously for the first time in recent memory. They, too, began twisting arms and offering favors. They, too, sent their ambassadors to bat.
Western human rights groups planned major events around the council meeting. Two French human rights activists made a film about the whole affair. Other experts mobilized their evidence: The wave of arrests and killings that followed last June's disputed Iranian election, the women who are severely beaten for not covering their bodies, the wider discrimination against both women and religious minorities in courts of law, the ubiquitous presence of police thugs and informers on the streets.
It worked. Fearing it would lose, or fearing bad publicity that might get beamed back into the country, Iran withdrew its application on April 23. The human rights groups claimed "victory." American officials spoke loftily of a "step in the right direction."
And the result? Five days later, on April 28, another committee, the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women—a body dedicated to "gender equality and the advancement of women"—put out a turgid press release announcing its new members. Among them will be … the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Which is fine, unless you think that the "advancement of women" should not include the stoning of women for alleged adultery. And unless you think, as I do, that it is time to abandon the fiction of U.N. human rights diplomacy altogether—or if you worry, as perhaps we all ought to, that Iran knows its way around U.N. nuclear diplomacy better than we imagine.
By Anne Applebaum
http://www.slate.com/id/2252718/
Posted Monday, May 3, 2010, at 8:03 PM ET
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad campaigned in Uganda and Zimbabwe. Behind the scenes, his flunkies twisted arms and offered favors. For weeks, feelers were sent out to all kinds of unlikely allies. What was the diplomatic prize at stake? Nothing less than a seat on the U.N. council on human rights.
All this was perfectly appropriate. Despite its title, this is a committee whose past members—Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe among them—have not been renowned for their adherence to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. On the contrary, authoritarian regimes have long battled to join the council and its predecessor organizations, the better to prevent any outsiders from investigating their own governments. Once they became members, much of their time was spent denouncing Israel and the United States, while studiously avoiding anything that might sound, say, like criticism of Russian behavior in Chechnya.
Different U.S. administrations have adopted different approaches to this peculiar institution. In recent years, the United States has quit the council, denounced the council, and isolated the council, generally with bipartisan support. Perhaps the only New York Times editorial ever written in praise of John Bolton, President George W. Bush's pugnacious U.N. ambassador, complimented him for advocating its radical reform.Yet the council kept working to the advantage of its members. The fact is that in places like Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe, praise—or even lack of condemnation—from something called the "U.N. Human Rights Council" still carries a good deal of political weight. We might roll our eyes when a committee headed by Libya solemnly pats China on the back for its good behavior in Tibet, but inside China this makes useful propaganda. We might not take seriously the umpteenth denunciation of Israel by yet another U.N. body, but the Syrian government probably finds it helpful.
Knowing this to be the case, the Obama administration, while it was pressing its other reset buttons, decided to rejoin the council in 2009, the better to "reform the institution from within." This was not just a gesture of friendship to the human rights council; this was an olive branch for the United Nations itself: We were going to engage with the process, work with others, use diplomacy. We were going to change the way the committee operated, make the United Nations work for democratic values and not against them.
And we did. When Iran began to campaign for membership, Western diplomats—French, Swiss, and others, as well as American—took this prospect seriously for the first time in recent memory. They, too, began twisting arms and offering favors. They, too, sent their ambassadors to bat.
Western human rights groups planned major events around the council meeting. Two French human rights activists made a film about the whole affair. Other experts mobilized their evidence: The wave of arrests and killings that followed last June's disputed Iranian election, the women who are severely beaten for not covering their bodies, the wider discrimination against both women and religious minorities in courts of law, the ubiquitous presence of police thugs and informers on the streets.
It worked. Fearing it would lose, or fearing bad publicity that might get beamed back into the country, Iran withdrew its application on April 23. The human rights groups claimed "victory." American officials spoke loftily of a "step in the right direction."
And the result? Five days later, on April 28, another committee, the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women—a body dedicated to "gender equality and the advancement of women"—put out a turgid press release announcing its new members. Among them will be … the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Which is fine, unless you think that the "advancement of women" should not include the stoning of women for alleged adultery. And unless you think, as I do, that it is time to abandon the fiction of U.N. human rights diplomacy altogether—or if you worry, as perhaps we all ought to, that Iran knows its way around U.N. nuclear diplomacy better than we imagine.
Praising Arizona
The state’s new immigration law is perfectly reasonable, but you wouldn’t know it from the New York Times.
By Heather MacDonald
http://www.city-journal.org/
30 April 2010
Supporters of Arizona’s new law strengthening immigration enforcement in the state should take heart from today’s New York Times editorial blasting it. “Stopping Arizona” contains so many blatant falsehoods that a reader can be fully confident that the law as actually written is a reasonable, lawful response to a pressing problem. Only by distorting the law’s provisions can the Times and the law’s many other critics make it out to be a racist assault on fundamental American rights.
People protesting against Senate Bill 1070 walk past a banner depicting Arizona's Governor Jan Brewer as a Nazi outside the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix, Arizona April 29, 2010. REUTERS/Joshua Lott
The law, SB 1070, empowers local police officers to check the immigration status of individuals whom they have encountered during a “lawful contact,” if an officer reasonably suspects the person stopped of being in the country illegally, and if an inquiry into the person’s status is “practicable.” The officer may not base his suspicion of illegality “solely [on] race, color or national origin.” (Arizona lawmakers recently amended the law to change the term “lawful contact” to “lawful stop, detention or arrest” and deleted the word “solely” from the phrase regarding race, color, and national origin. The governor is expected to sign the amendments.) The law also requires aliens to carry their immigration documents, mirroring an identical federal requirement. Failure to comply with the federal law on carrying immigration papers becomes a state misdemeanor under the Arizona law.
Good luck finding any of these provisions in the Times’s editorial. Leave aside for the moment the sweeping conclusions with which the Times begins its screed—such gems as the charge that the law “turns all of the state’s Latinos, even legal immigrants and citizens, into criminal suspects” and is an act of “racial separation.” Instead, let’s see how the Times characterizes the specific legislative language, which is presumably the basis for its indictment.
The paper alleges that the “statute requires police officers to stop and question anyone who looks like an illegal immigrant.” False. The law gives an officer the discretion, when practicable, to determine someone’s immigration status only after the officer has otherwise made a lawful stop, detention, or arrest. It does not allow, much less require, fishing expeditions for illegal aliens. But if, say, after having stopped someone for running a red light, an officer discovers that the driver does not have a driver’s license, does not speak English, and has no other government identification on him, the officer may, if practicable, send an inquiry to his dispatcher to check the driver’s status with a federal immigration clearinghouse.
The Times then alleges that the law “empower[s] police officers to stop anyone they choose and demand to see papers.” False again, for the reasons stated above. An officer must have a lawful, independent basis for a stop; he can only ask to see papers if he has “reasonable suspicion” to believe that the person is in the country illegally. “Reasonable suspicion” is a legal concept of long-standing validity, rooted in the Constitution’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures.” It meaningfully constrains police activity; officers are trained in its contours, which have evolved through common-law precedents, as a matter of course. If the New York Times now thinks that the concept is insufficient as a check on police power, it will have to persuade every court and every law enforcement agency in the country to throw out the phrase—and the Constitution with it—and come up with something that suits the Times’s contempt for police power.
On broader legal issues, the Times is just as misleading. The paper alleges that the “Supreme Court has consistently ruled that states cannot make their own immigration laws.” Actually, the law on preemption is almost impossibly murky. As the Times later notes in its editorial, the Justice Department ruled in 2002, after surveying the relevant Supreme Court and appellate precedents, that “state and local police had ‘inherent authority’ to make immigration arrests.” The paper does not like that conclusion, but it has not been revoked as official legal advice. If states have inherent authority to make immigration arrests, they can certainly do so under a state law that merely tracks the federal law requiring that immigrants carry documentation.
The Times tips its hand at the end of the editorial. It calls for the Obama administration to end a program that trains local law enforcement officials in relevant aspects of immigration law and that deputizes them to act as full-fledged immigration agents. The so-called 287(g) program acts as a “force multiplier,” as the Times points out, adding local resources to immigration law enforcement—just as Arizona’s SB 1070 does. At heart, this force-multiplier effect is what the hysteria over Arizona’s law is all about: SB 1070 ups the chances that an illegal alien will actually be detected and—horror of horrors—deported. The illegal-alien lobby, of which the New York Times is a charter member, does not believe that U.S. immigration laws should be enforced. Usually unwilling for political reasons to say so explicitly, the lobby comes up with smoke screens—such as the Times’s demagogic charges about SB 1070 as an act of “racial separation”—to divert attention from the underlying issue. Playing the race card is the tactic of those unwilling to make arguments on the merits. (The Times’s other contribution today to the prevailing de facto amnesty for illegal aliens was to fail to disclose, in an article about a brutal 2007 schoolyard execution in Newark, that the suspected leader was an illegal alien and member of the predominantly illegal-alien gang Mara Salvatrucha.)
The Arizona law is not about race; it’s not an attack on Latinos or legal immigrants. It’s about one thing and one thing only: making immigration enforcement a reality. It is time for a national debate: Do we or don’t we want to enforce the country’s immigration laws? If the answer is yes, the Arizona law is a necessary and lawful tool for doing so. If the answer is no, we should end the charade of inadequate, half-hearted enforcement, enact an amnesty now, and remove future penalties for immigration violations.
- Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal, the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the coauthor of The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today’s.
By Heather MacDonald
http://www.city-journal.org/
30 April 2010
Supporters of Arizona’s new law strengthening immigration enforcement in the state should take heart from today’s New York Times editorial blasting it. “Stopping Arizona” contains so many blatant falsehoods that a reader can be fully confident that the law as actually written is a reasonable, lawful response to a pressing problem. Only by distorting the law’s provisions can the Times and the law’s many other critics make it out to be a racist assault on fundamental American rights.
People protesting against Senate Bill 1070 walk past a banner depicting Arizona's Governor Jan Brewer as a Nazi outside the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix, Arizona April 29, 2010. REUTERS/Joshua LottThe law, SB 1070, empowers local police officers to check the immigration status of individuals whom they have encountered during a “lawful contact,” if an officer reasonably suspects the person stopped of being in the country illegally, and if an inquiry into the person’s status is “practicable.” The officer may not base his suspicion of illegality “solely [on] race, color or national origin.” (Arizona lawmakers recently amended the law to change the term “lawful contact” to “lawful stop, detention or arrest” and deleted the word “solely” from the phrase regarding race, color, and national origin. The governor is expected to sign the amendments.) The law also requires aliens to carry their immigration documents, mirroring an identical federal requirement. Failure to comply with the federal law on carrying immigration papers becomes a state misdemeanor under the Arizona law.
Good luck finding any of these provisions in the Times’s editorial. Leave aside for the moment the sweeping conclusions with which the Times begins its screed—such gems as the charge that the law “turns all of the state’s Latinos, even legal immigrants and citizens, into criminal suspects” and is an act of “racial separation.” Instead, let’s see how the Times characterizes the specific legislative language, which is presumably the basis for its indictment.
The paper alleges that the “statute requires police officers to stop and question anyone who looks like an illegal immigrant.” False. The law gives an officer the discretion, when practicable, to determine someone’s immigration status only after the officer has otherwise made a lawful stop, detention, or arrest. It does not allow, much less require, fishing expeditions for illegal aliens. But if, say, after having stopped someone for running a red light, an officer discovers that the driver does not have a driver’s license, does not speak English, and has no other government identification on him, the officer may, if practicable, send an inquiry to his dispatcher to check the driver’s status with a federal immigration clearinghouse.
The Times then alleges that the law “empower[s] police officers to stop anyone they choose and demand to see papers.” False again, for the reasons stated above. An officer must have a lawful, independent basis for a stop; he can only ask to see papers if he has “reasonable suspicion” to believe that the person is in the country illegally. “Reasonable suspicion” is a legal concept of long-standing validity, rooted in the Constitution’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures.” It meaningfully constrains police activity; officers are trained in its contours, which have evolved through common-law precedents, as a matter of course. If the New York Times now thinks that the concept is insufficient as a check on police power, it will have to persuade every court and every law enforcement agency in the country to throw out the phrase—and the Constitution with it—and come up with something that suits the Times’s contempt for police power.
On broader legal issues, the Times is just as misleading. The paper alleges that the “Supreme Court has consistently ruled that states cannot make their own immigration laws.” Actually, the law on preemption is almost impossibly murky. As the Times later notes in its editorial, the Justice Department ruled in 2002, after surveying the relevant Supreme Court and appellate precedents, that “state and local police had ‘inherent authority’ to make immigration arrests.” The paper does not like that conclusion, but it has not been revoked as official legal advice. If states have inherent authority to make immigration arrests, they can certainly do so under a state law that merely tracks the federal law requiring that immigrants carry documentation.
The Times tips its hand at the end of the editorial. It calls for the Obama administration to end a program that trains local law enforcement officials in relevant aspects of immigration law and that deputizes them to act as full-fledged immigration agents. The so-called 287(g) program acts as a “force multiplier,” as the Times points out, adding local resources to immigration law enforcement—just as Arizona’s SB 1070 does. At heart, this force-multiplier effect is what the hysteria over Arizona’s law is all about: SB 1070 ups the chances that an illegal alien will actually be detected and—horror of horrors—deported. The illegal-alien lobby, of which the New York Times is a charter member, does not believe that U.S. immigration laws should be enforced. Usually unwilling for political reasons to say so explicitly, the lobby comes up with smoke screens—such as the Times’s demagogic charges about SB 1070 as an act of “racial separation”—to divert attention from the underlying issue. Playing the race card is the tactic of those unwilling to make arguments on the merits. (The Times’s other contribution today to the prevailing de facto amnesty for illegal aliens was to fail to disclose, in an article about a brutal 2007 schoolyard execution in Newark, that the suspected leader was an illegal alien and member of the predominantly illegal-alien gang Mara Salvatrucha.)
The Arizona law is not about race; it’s not an attack on Latinos or legal immigrants. It’s about one thing and one thing only: making immigration enforcement a reality. It is time for a national debate: Do we or don’t we want to enforce the country’s immigration laws? If the answer is yes, the Arizona law is a necessary and lawful tool for doing so. If the answer is no, we should end the charade of inadequate, half-hearted enforcement, enact an amnesty now, and remove future penalties for immigration violations.
- Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal, the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the coauthor of The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today’s.
Ahmadinejad Swaggers at the UN
Posted by Robert Spencer on May 4th, 2010
http://frontpagemag.com/
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was back in New York Monday, continuing his effort to intimidate and shame Barack Obama into dropping his policy of retaining first-strike capability against rogue states such as Iran. For 35 minutes at the UN, Ahmadinejad did his best impression of an anti-nuke crusader, working to eradicate these weapons for humanity’s sake. Behind his peacenik façade (which is sure to take in many on the Left), however, lurks a reality that couldn’t be more contrasting.
“The possession of nuclear bombs isn’t a source of pride,” Ahmadinejad intoned piously, sounding like a spokesman for Greenpeace. “It is disgusting and rather shameful. And even more shameful is the threat to use or to use such weapons, which isn’t even comparable to any crime committed throughout the history.”
And of course top on the Iranian President’s list of “disgusting” and “shameful” countries was Israel: “While the Zionist regime has stockpiled hundreds of nuclear warheads…it enjoys the unconditional support of the United States government and its allies and receives, as well, the necessary assistance to develop its nuclear weapons program.”
Referring to Obama’s reservation of first-strike capability, Ahmadinejad said that signers of the Non-Proliferation Treaty should consider “any threat to use nuclear weapons or attack against peaceful nuclear facilities as a breach of international peace and security,” and punish the offenders accordingly.
Delegates from the U.S., Britain and France walked out of the UN General Assembly during Ahmadinejad’s speech. Perhaps they didn’t relish having to sit through the absurd charade of a ruthless despot, the president of a country that gives aid to the jihad terror groups Hamas and Hizballah and yearns to wipe Israel off the map, being allowed to enter the United States and accuse it of being a terrorist state — all the while defending his nuclear program.
This was the same Ahmadinejad, after all, who just weeks ago warned Israel not to attack the jihadists in Gaza who still shoot rockets into Israel and plot the destruction of the Jewish State: “An attack on Gaza would not make you mightier,” he said, addressing the “Zionist entity,” “and would not restore your damaged prestige. And you should know that an attack on Gaza will end your inauspicious and filthy life.”
What could end Israel’s “inauspicious and filthy life” except…a nuclear attack?
These are favorite themes of Ahmadinejad’s public utterances. In mid-March, he declared: “Today, it is clear that Israel is the most hated regime in the world… It is not useful for its masters [the West] anymore. They are in doubt now. They wonder whether to continue spending money on this regime or not. But whether they want it or not, with Allah’s grace, this regime will be annihilated and Palestinians and other regional nations will be rid of its bad omen.”
How will Israel be “annihilated,” except by…a nuclear strike?
Iranian Major General Hassan Firouzabadi declared in early April: “If America presents Iran with a serious threat and undertakes any measure against Iran, none of the American soldiers who are currently in the region would go back to America alive.”
Not one? Not even one? How could the Iranians possibly accomplish that, except with…nuclear weapons?
Ahmadinejad mocked Obama’s impotence, telling him in an April 7 address that, faced with Iran’s nuclear program, American leaders who were “bigger than you, more bullying than you, couldn’t do a damn thing, let alone you.”
And indeed, the thuggish Iranian president is probably right about that. Barack Obama’s wrongheaded and weak policy of “engagement” has put a swagger in Ahmadinejad’s step. Besides funding Hamas and Hizballah and egging on their genocidal intentions toward Israel, Iran is training the Taliban in Afghanistan in the most effective use of roadside bombs, and continuing to meddle in Iraq.
For all this we have one man to thank above all: Barack Obama. After a year of Obama’s dogged wooing of the Iranian mullahs, his scandalous refusal to support the anti-regime protestors in Iran, and his abject failure to do anything effective to counter the Iranian nuclear program, which even his own Secretary of State now acknowledges is working toward developing nuclear weapons, the only thing the president has to show for his policy is an increasingly confident, belligerent and assertive Iran.
It was good that the Americans left the General Assembly hall while Ahmadinejad was speaking Monday. Now they should back this up by changing course, and showing more spine in the face of Iran’s bullying. But there is no sign that that is going to happen.
http://frontpagemag.com/
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was back in New York Monday, continuing his effort to intimidate and shame Barack Obama into dropping his policy of retaining first-strike capability against rogue states such as Iran. For 35 minutes at the UN, Ahmadinejad did his best impression of an anti-nuke crusader, working to eradicate these weapons for humanity’s sake. Behind his peacenik façade (which is sure to take in many on the Left), however, lurks a reality that couldn’t be more contrasting.
“The possession of nuclear bombs isn’t a source of pride,” Ahmadinejad intoned piously, sounding like a spokesman for Greenpeace. “It is disgusting and rather shameful. And even more shameful is the threat to use or to use such weapons, which isn’t even comparable to any crime committed throughout the history.”And of course top on the Iranian President’s list of “disgusting” and “shameful” countries was Israel: “While the Zionist regime has stockpiled hundreds of nuclear warheads…it enjoys the unconditional support of the United States government and its allies and receives, as well, the necessary assistance to develop its nuclear weapons program.”
Referring to Obama’s reservation of first-strike capability, Ahmadinejad said that signers of the Non-Proliferation Treaty should consider “any threat to use nuclear weapons or attack against peaceful nuclear facilities as a breach of international peace and security,” and punish the offenders accordingly.
Delegates from the U.S., Britain and France walked out of the UN General Assembly during Ahmadinejad’s speech. Perhaps they didn’t relish having to sit through the absurd charade of a ruthless despot, the president of a country that gives aid to the jihad terror groups Hamas and Hizballah and yearns to wipe Israel off the map, being allowed to enter the United States and accuse it of being a terrorist state — all the while defending his nuclear program.
This was the same Ahmadinejad, after all, who just weeks ago warned Israel not to attack the jihadists in Gaza who still shoot rockets into Israel and plot the destruction of the Jewish State: “An attack on Gaza would not make you mightier,” he said, addressing the “Zionist entity,” “and would not restore your damaged prestige. And you should know that an attack on Gaza will end your inauspicious and filthy life.”
What could end Israel’s “inauspicious and filthy life” except…a nuclear attack?
These are favorite themes of Ahmadinejad’s public utterances. In mid-March, he declared: “Today, it is clear that Israel is the most hated regime in the world… It is not useful for its masters [the West] anymore. They are in doubt now. They wonder whether to continue spending money on this regime or not. But whether they want it or not, with Allah’s grace, this regime will be annihilated and Palestinians and other regional nations will be rid of its bad omen.”
How will Israel be “annihilated,” except by…a nuclear strike?
Iranian Major General Hassan Firouzabadi declared in early April: “If America presents Iran with a serious threat and undertakes any measure against Iran, none of the American soldiers who are currently in the region would go back to America alive.”
Not one? Not even one? How could the Iranians possibly accomplish that, except with…nuclear weapons?
Ahmadinejad mocked Obama’s impotence, telling him in an April 7 address that, faced with Iran’s nuclear program, American leaders who were “bigger than you, more bullying than you, couldn’t do a damn thing, let alone you.”
And indeed, the thuggish Iranian president is probably right about that. Barack Obama’s wrongheaded and weak policy of “engagement” has put a swagger in Ahmadinejad’s step. Besides funding Hamas and Hizballah and egging on their genocidal intentions toward Israel, Iran is training the Taliban in Afghanistan in the most effective use of roadside bombs, and continuing to meddle in Iraq.
For all this we have one man to thank above all: Barack Obama. After a year of Obama’s dogged wooing of the Iranian mullahs, his scandalous refusal to support the anti-regime protestors in Iran, and his abject failure to do anything effective to counter the Iranian nuclear program, which even his own Secretary of State now acknowledges is working toward developing nuclear weapons, the only thing the president has to show for his policy is an increasingly confident, belligerent and assertive Iran.
It was good that the Americans left the General Assembly hall while Ahmadinejad was speaking Monday. Now they should back this up by changing course, and showing more spine in the face of Iran’s bullying. But there is no sign that that is going to happen.
Monday, May 03, 2010
The Continent's Crown
The Nation's Pulse
By Bill Croke on 5.3.10 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
In northwestern Montana hard against the Canadian border is Glacier National Park, "The Crown of the Continent" to repeat the phrase coined by anthropologist (and Teddy Roosevelt crony) George Bird Grinnell. The Blackfeet called the regal peaks "The Backbone of the World." It was the view they enjoyed as they roamed and raided across the buffalo plains to the east.
Glacier celebrates its centenary on May 11, President William Howard Taft signed the designating legislation on that date in 1910. For a comparison, its 1.2 million acres are about half the size of Yellowstone. Glacier --unlike its sister national park to the south -- lacks vast stretches of open country, and is a crowded concentration of rugged mountains, seven hundred lakes (131 of which are named), and abundant wildlife, including wolverines, grizzly bears, and white-as-snow shaggy mountain goats, the latter the park's official symbol.
Winters are ferocious and Glacier's main road, the "Going-to-the-Sun" Highway (53 miles) is in some years not opened until June, and only after weeks of plowing through huge drifts and avalanche control work. Going-to-the-Sun premiered in 1933, an engineering feat of tight switchbacks and retaining walls spanning the Continental Divide. At Logan Pass (elev. 6,646) snow can fall in any month of the year.
Before the highway opened the only way to get to Glacier -- other than by horse and wagon -- was by train. In 1891 the Great Northern Railway crested Marias Pass, which borders the present park's southern reaches. Railroad magnate James J. Hill saw the value of the Glacier area as a tourist draw utilizing his passenger service, and assigned his son Louis Hill the job of development on the periphery of these "American Alps" using their subsidiary Glacier Park Company. A number of chalets were built, and the Glacier Park Lodge in East Glacier in 1913, followed by the Many Glacier Hotel on the shore of Swiftcurrent Lake in 1915.
The naturalist-author John Muir visited once, and the experience moved him to write: "Wander here a whole summer, if you can. Thousands of God's wild blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go uncounted." In 1906, before Glacier became a national park, the artist Charles M. Russell built a cabin on Lake McDonald that he named Bull Head Lodge, and summered there with his family for twenty years, producing many fine landscapes of lakes and mountains. In a letter to a friend Russell wrote: "If its [sic] laying down you need Lake McDonald is the best bed ground in the world and my lodge is open and the pipe lit for you and yors [sic]. You know that Lake Country sings the cradle song to all who lay in her lap."
I drove the Going-to-the-Sun Highway in the summer of 1997. I started at St. Mary and stopped at its eponymous lake, the stones on its near-shore bottom showing crystal clear. St. Mary Lake has been a calendar subject for years, and I stopped to take in the familiar view of mountains that nudge both shores like a row of towering breaking waves. Pillars of cumulous clouds above them added to the magisterial effect. The lake is 10 miles long and was carved by those ancient glaciers now in historic retreat, whether one believes the validity of climate change or not (an estimated 150 of a century ago now number 37 according to scientific studies).
Back on the highway and climbing, small streams of water from melting snow spilled onto the pavement, which always seemed to be wet. The road was an actual wreck then (it is currently being repaired and resurfaced the last few summers in a painstakingly long multi-year construction project), with fissures and frost-heaves and potholes the result of the punishing winters. Gray stone walls that lined the road above deep precipices were crumbling like Roman ruins. There were short, dark granite tunnels with thin veils of water leaching down the walls. All around me were mountains, stony and snow-streaked.
On the west side the highway is a series of switchbacks leading down from the alpine country to the thick forests around Lake McDonald, where Charlie Russell had his cabin. The increased moisture on the western slope of the Continental Divide gives that side of Glacier a more verdant look than the drier high plains country bordering the eastern side. Present are tall Western Red Cedars, trees native to the Pacific Northwest and here found in their eastern extremity.
In West Glacier, Montana, the air was cool and moist, and the road signs pointed to Kalispell and Coeur D'Alene. The cottonwoods fluttered in the breeze above the jade-green Flathead River rushing west.
Bill Croke, formerly of Cody, Wyoming, is a writer in Salmon, Idaho
By Bill Croke on 5.3.10 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
In northwestern Montana hard against the Canadian border is Glacier National Park, "The Crown of the Continent" to repeat the phrase coined by anthropologist (and Teddy Roosevelt crony) George Bird Grinnell. The Blackfeet called the regal peaks "The Backbone of the World." It was the view they enjoyed as they roamed and raided across the buffalo plains to the east.
Glacier celebrates its centenary on May 11, President William Howard Taft signed the designating legislation on that date in 1910. For a comparison, its 1.2 million acres are about half the size of Yellowstone. Glacier --unlike its sister national park to the south -- lacks vast stretches of open country, and is a crowded concentration of rugged mountains, seven hundred lakes (131 of which are named), and abundant wildlife, including wolverines, grizzly bears, and white-as-snow shaggy mountain goats, the latter the park's official symbol.Winters are ferocious and Glacier's main road, the "Going-to-the-Sun" Highway (53 miles) is in some years not opened until June, and only after weeks of plowing through huge drifts and avalanche control work. Going-to-the-Sun premiered in 1933, an engineering feat of tight switchbacks and retaining walls spanning the Continental Divide. At Logan Pass (elev. 6,646) snow can fall in any month of the year.
Before the highway opened the only way to get to Glacier -- other than by horse and wagon -- was by train. In 1891 the Great Northern Railway crested Marias Pass, which borders the present park's southern reaches. Railroad magnate James J. Hill saw the value of the Glacier area as a tourist draw utilizing his passenger service, and assigned his son Louis Hill the job of development on the periphery of these "American Alps" using their subsidiary Glacier Park Company. A number of chalets were built, and the Glacier Park Lodge in East Glacier in 1913, followed by the Many Glacier Hotel on the shore of Swiftcurrent Lake in 1915.
The naturalist-author John Muir visited once, and the experience moved him to write: "Wander here a whole summer, if you can. Thousands of God's wild blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go uncounted." In 1906, before Glacier became a national park, the artist Charles M. Russell built a cabin on Lake McDonald that he named Bull Head Lodge, and summered there with his family for twenty years, producing many fine landscapes of lakes and mountains. In a letter to a friend Russell wrote: "If its [sic] laying down you need Lake McDonald is the best bed ground in the world and my lodge is open and the pipe lit for you and yors [sic]. You know that Lake Country sings the cradle song to all who lay in her lap."
I drove the Going-to-the-Sun Highway in the summer of 1997. I started at St. Mary and stopped at its eponymous lake, the stones on its near-shore bottom showing crystal clear. St. Mary Lake has been a calendar subject for years, and I stopped to take in the familiar view of mountains that nudge both shores like a row of towering breaking waves. Pillars of cumulous clouds above them added to the magisterial effect. The lake is 10 miles long and was carved by those ancient glaciers now in historic retreat, whether one believes the validity of climate change or not (an estimated 150 of a century ago now number 37 according to scientific studies).Back on the highway and climbing, small streams of water from melting snow spilled onto the pavement, which always seemed to be wet. The road was an actual wreck then (it is currently being repaired and resurfaced the last few summers in a painstakingly long multi-year construction project), with fissures and frost-heaves and potholes the result of the punishing winters. Gray stone walls that lined the road above deep precipices were crumbling like Roman ruins. There were short, dark granite tunnels with thin veils of water leaching down the walls. All around me were mountains, stony and snow-streaked.
On the west side the highway is a series of switchbacks leading down from the alpine country to the thick forests around Lake McDonald, where Charlie Russell had his cabin. The increased moisture on the western slope of the Continental Divide gives that side of Glacier a more verdant look than the drier high plains country bordering the eastern side. Present are tall Western Red Cedars, trees native to the Pacific Northwest and here found in their eastern extremity.
In West Glacier, Montana, the air was cool and moist, and the road signs pointed to Kalispell and Coeur D'Alene. The cottonwoods fluttered in the breeze above the jade-green Flathead River rushing west.
Bill Croke, formerly of Cody, Wyoming, is a writer in Salmon, Idaho
Blaming the citizen
Left fuels backlash on illegals
By Ralph Peters
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/news/opinion
May 3, 2010
American and European leftists share the conviction that the immigrant, legal or illegal, is always right -- and the native-born citizen's always wrong.
This bigotry toward the law-abiding American, Brit, Frenchman or Italian doesn't help the immigrant in the end. Instead, it's a powerful engine driving divisiveness.
People take part in a march to celebrate International Workers' Day and to protest Arizona's new controversial immigration law Saturday May 1, 2010 in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Jakub Mosur)
There are deep differences between Europe's experience with legal immigrants intent on importing intolerant lifestyles and our problem with illegals responsible for social friction and violent criminality.
But the left's blame-game is identical: Anyone who doesn't elevate the "rights" of the immigrant over the rights, safety and desires of the citizen is a bigot. No exceptions. Could there be a formula better designed to excite anti-immigrant sentiment?
In Europe, right-wing movements once consigned to the fringe have gained electoral traction from the Netherlands to Hungary as desperate citizens, ignored by political elites, struggle to preserve their way of life.
Here in America, where our political aristocracy's equally disdainful of the average citizen, Arizona found itself overwhelmed by illegals and abandoned by a federal government unwilling to enforce its own laws. The state felt compelled to act -- and has been damned for its self-preservation effort by the left and its media acolytes.
The left's fighting harder than ever to enforce its group-think on both sides of the Atlantic: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown trashes a voter with sober concerns as a "bigoted woman," while American activists condemn citizens in ravaged communities as "racists" because they don't like gunfights in their yards.
Racism does play a significant role in Europe, but it's profoundly dishonest of American leftists -- anxious to pander to such extremist groups as La Raza -- to paint anyone alarmed by illegal immigration as a white supremacist.
Take Arizona: Polls reveal that two-thirds to three-quarters of its citizens approve of the new enforce-the-law law. Yet only 58 percent of Arizonans are non-Hispanic whites. Over 30 percent are Hispanic. Another 5 percent are Native Americans, 4 percent black and 2 percent mixed race. According to the left's logic, every non-Hispanic white must be "anti-immigrant." Blacks and Indians must be piling on, too.
Of course, that's nonsense. Left-leaning whites don't support the legislation. Which means some Hispanics must favor it. Many do. Hispanic Americans have the same concerns as all other citizens. They don't unanimously support human trafficking, the narcotics trade and criminal gangs. They want safe neighborhoods, too. Assuming that all citizens who happen to be Hispanic automatically back illegal immigration is just the left's selective racism.
Hispanics have been in Arizona for centuries and take great pride in their lineage. Tucson's known as "the Old Pueblo," not "Ye Olde Village." They don't like what's happened to their state any more than does Parker Van Barker III in his retirement mansion in Scottsdale. And, by the way, Hispanics are far likelier than other citizens to be the victims of illegal-immigrant criminality.
As the left's blame-the-citizen demands for special privileges for all immigrants only intensify an anti-immigrant backlash, let's apply some commonsense maxims:
* It is always the responsibility of the immigrant to conform to the laws and social norms of the host society. It is never the responsibility of a society to alter its traditions and values to please immigrants.
* The primary responsibility of government is to protect its citizens and territory. That demands robust border security.
* Illegal immigrants are entitled to basic human rights, but have no civil rights: no right to an attorney, trial or "sanctuary."
* Washington must remove current incentives to illegal immigration. This means relentlessly pursuing both those who hire illegals and illegals themselves, doubling sentences for illegal-immigrant offenders, and a constitutional amendment eliminating the automatic citizenship granted to children born on our soil to illegals.
* At the same time, we must reform our legal immigration system to recognize the need for temporary workers, as well as for qualified new citizens.
* Turning 10 million illegals into US voters is not the answer.
While Europe's problems have veered beyond healthy solutions, immigration remains a vital source of national strength for us. But illegal immigration's purely destructive. Our borders must be subject to the rule of law.
And let's stop calling law-abiding citizens "bigots" just because they don't want their communities destroyed by illegal immigrants.
Ralph Peters' latest book is "Endless War."
By Ralph Peters
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/news/opinion
May 3, 2010
American and European leftists share the conviction that the immigrant, legal or illegal, is always right -- and the native-born citizen's always wrong.
This bigotry toward the law-abiding American, Brit, Frenchman or Italian doesn't help the immigrant in the end. Instead, it's a powerful engine driving divisiveness.
People take part in a march to celebrate International Workers' Day and to protest Arizona's new controversial immigration law Saturday May 1, 2010 in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Jakub Mosur)There are deep differences between Europe's experience with legal immigrants intent on importing intolerant lifestyles and our problem with illegals responsible for social friction and violent criminality.
But the left's blame-game is identical: Anyone who doesn't elevate the "rights" of the immigrant over the rights, safety and desires of the citizen is a bigot. No exceptions. Could there be a formula better designed to excite anti-immigrant sentiment?
In Europe, right-wing movements once consigned to the fringe have gained electoral traction from the Netherlands to Hungary as desperate citizens, ignored by political elites, struggle to preserve their way of life.
Here in America, where our political aristocracy's equally disdainful of the average citizen, Arizona found itself overwhelmed by illegals and abandoned by a federal government unwilling to enforce its own laws. The state felt compelled to act -- and has been damned for its self-preservation effort by the left and its media acolytes.
The left's fighting harder than ever to enforce its group-think on both sides of the Atlantic: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown trashes a voter with sober concerns as a "bigoted woman," while American activists condemn citizens in ravaged communities as "racists" because they don't like gunfights in their yards.
Racism does play a significant role in Europe, but it's profoundly dishonest of American leftists -- anxious to pander to such extremist groups as La Raza -- to paint anyone alarmed by illegal immigration as a white supremacist.
Take Arizona: Polls reveal that two-thirds to three-quarters of its citizens approve of the new enforce-the-law law. Yet only 58 percent of Arizonans are non-Hispanic whites. Over 30 percent are Hispanic. Another 5 percent are Native Americans, 4 percent black and 2 percent mixed race. According to the left's logic, every non-Hispanic white must be "anti-immigrant." Blacks and Indians must be piling on, too.
Of course, that's nonsense. Left-leaning whites don't support the legislation. Which means some Hispanics must favor it. Many do. Hispanic Americans have the same concerns as all other citizens. They don't unanimously support human trafficking, the narcotics trade and criminal gangs. They want safe neighborhoods, too. Assuming that all citizens who happen to be Hispanic automatically back illegal immigration is just the left's selective racism.
Hispanics have been in Arizona for centuries and take great pride in their lineage. Tucson's known as "the Old Pueblo," not "Ye Olde Village." They don't like what's happened to their state any more than does Parker Van Barker III in his retirement mansion in Scottsdale. And, by the way, Hispanics are far likelier than other citizens to be the victims of illegal-immigrant criminality.
As the left's blame-the-citizen demands for special privileges for all immigrants only intensify an anti-immigrant backlash, let's apply some commonsense maxims:
* It is always the responsibility of the immigrant to conform to the laws and social norms of the host society. It is never the responsibility of a society to alter its traditions and values to please immigrants.
* The primary responsibility of government is to protect its citizens and territory. That demands robust border security.
* Illegal immigrants are entitled to basic human rights, but have no civil rights: no right to an attorney, trial or "sanctuary."
* Washington must remove current incentives to illegal immigration. This means relentlessly pursuing both those who hire illegals and illegals themselves, doubling sentences for illegal-immigrant offenders, and a constitutional amendment eliminating the automatic citizenship granted to children born on our soil to illegals.
* At the same time, we must reform our legal immigration system to recognize the need for temporary workers, as well as for qualified new citizens.
* Turning 10 million illegals into US voters is not the answer.
While Europe's problems have veered beyond healthy solutions, immigration remains a vital source of national strength for us. But illegal immigration's purely destructive. Our borders must be subject to the rule of law.
And let's stop calling law-abiding citizens "bigots" just because they don't want their communities destroyed by illegal immigrants.
Ralph Peters' latest book is "Endless War."
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