The recent story out of Newark about three college students who were murdered, execution style, in a school playground was painful. Adding a political angle to the horrible crime, one of the suspects is reportedly an immigrant from Peru who entered the country illegally. Another suspect is a legal immigrant from Nicaragua.
In light of the murders, Newt Gingrich has a message for the nation: immigrants are more dangerous than terrorists.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Tuesday he is “sickened” that President Bush and Congress went on vacation “while young Americans in our cities are massacred” by illegal immigrants. […]
Gingrich said that the “war here at home” against illegal immigrants is “even more deadly than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“The federal government’s incompetence, timidity and uncoordinated efforts to identify and deport criminal illegal aliens have had devastating consequences for innocent Americans,” Gingrich said, in a newsletter.
The Gingrich newsletter did not appear to be a joke; the former Speaker really argued, in print, that we’re in the midst of a war against illegal immigrants, and the ongoing wars in the Middle East aren’t as deadly.
It’s hard to know where (or whether) to start with such crazed nonsense, but my very first thought is that high-profile conservatives, with increasing frequency, seem to be taking the terrorist threat less and less seriously. TV preacher Pat Robertson, who remains a major player in the conservative movement, for example, said members of the federal judiciary are more dangerous than “a few bearded-terrorists who fly into buildings.” This week, Gingrich sees immigrants as “more deadly” than Islamic radicals in the Middle East.
I thought the right believed Islamic religious extremists represented a fundamental threat to Western civilization? Are terrorists dropping on the conservative threat hierarchy?
For that matter, Dave Neiwert raises a good point about just how irresponsible Gingrich’s rhetoric really is.
Gingrich is obviously trying, as have so many nativists before him, to blame immigrants for bringing crime to our shores. Never mind that it’s clear that the crime rate among Latino immigrants is lower than that of the general population, and most other ethnic groups as well, including whites. What matters, for Gingrich, is exploiting sensational cases for political gain, as always at the expense of people who are essentially powerless.
This kind of ugly eliminationist rhetoric is the logical outcome of the rhetoric that has preceded it, declaring the current wave of immigration an “invasion” — everyone from Lou Dobbs to Pat Buchanan to Michelle Malkin to Tom Tancredo to American Border Patrol have declared it such. Couched in military terms, the immigrants thus become an “invading army” — so of course we are now at war with them.
[A]s for the current rise in violence against Latinos, well, I’m sure that Gingrich would assure us it has nothing to do with rhetoric declaring “war” against them.
Gingrich has been unhinged for as long as I can remember, but he’s apparently anxious to crank things up a notch. He must be gearing up for some kind of campaign or something.