Updated: In Defense Of The Fence

Constitution, Crime, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Private Property

Here’s an excerpt from my new WorldNetDaily column for Friday, April 4:

“[T]he Department of Homeland Security [has] proceeded to waive certain environmental laws for various project areas in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, so as to begin completing, this time apparently in earnest, the 700 miles of fencing mandated by the ‘Secure Fence Act.’”

“The Act was forced on the ruling class in 2006 by a passionately non-partisan American public, sick and tired of the farce on the southwest front. Naturally, after the primping and preening that accompanies the signing of a bill into law just prior to midterm elections, the politicians promptly side-stepped the popular will…”

“That the government has used its discretionary waiver authority to temporarily suspend a few of its countless ‘land management’ laws, never vetted by voters, is no tragedy. In fact, government should waive more superfluous regulations if this means fulfilling its one constitutionally mandated function: defending the nation’s borders…”

Read “In Defense of The Fence” here (or on WND, where we lead the Commentary Page).

Update: In reply to some of the hysterical yelps of “tear down this wall”:

“If you really want to see an immigration liberationist rise on his hind legs, mention a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. … Irrational minds have transformed a defensive wall à la the Emperor Hadrian’s, intended to keep the ‘barbarians’ out, into the Iron Curtain or the Berlin Wall, constructed to keep people in.”

A fence is the quintessential non-aggressive method of defense. You don’t attack, arrest, or otherwise molest undesirables, you keep them at bay, away. This is why it’s so dishonest of libertarians to protest the fence. Other than utopian solutions that’ll never come to pass, there is no other option. Libertarians are not that stupid. They know this, which makes their position all the more callous. Even sicker do such people make me when they protest Israel’s security fence. It has cut by over 80 percent the number of Israelis maimed and murdered by suicide bombers.

“Other barriers that fail to move the ‘tear-down-this-wall’ humanitarians to do their St. Vitus Dance are those separating India and Pakistan, Botswana and Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyztan, Thailand and Malaysia, and Turkey and Syria (this one is mined).” And, as Joseph Farah points out in his latest column, Egypt is erecting a fence to keep the bad-tempered Gazans from hurting Egyptians.

I suspect that the kind of person screaming bloody murder about a barrier would change his tune if his property was being traipsed by trespassers day-in-and-out. Here’s the left-liberal Time magazine on the ordeal:

“When the crowds cross the ranches along and near the border, they discard backpacks, empty Gatorade and water bottles and soiled clothes. They turn the land into a vast latrine, leaving behind revolting mounds of personal refuse and enough discarded plastic bags to stock a Wal-Mart. Night after night, they cut fences intended to hold in cattle and horses. Cows that eat the bags must often be killed because the plastic becomes lodged between the first and second stomachs. The immigrants steal vehicles and saddles. They poison dogs to quiet them. The illegal traffic is so heavy that some ranchers, because of the disruptions and noise, get very little sleep at night.”

Or if his beloved fell pray to a member of a group so well-represented among the criminal class:

“Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens.” In 2000 nearly 30 percent of federal prisoners were foreign-born. In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants are for illegal aliens. In 1995, already 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California was illegal. In the Mecklenburg County, where the sheriff recently broke with the country and began to enforce immigration law, “1,200 foreign-born people have been arrested since April, on charges ranging from traffic violations and trespassing to sex crimes, and nearly 600 have been found to be here illegally.”

Bad Dreams From Obama

Barack Obama, Elections 2008, Race

I said it before Ann Coulter did (here and here), and Steve Sailer said it before most: Obama boils with anti-white bile. He’s as dangerous as he is deceptive. Writes Coulter in “Obama’s dime store ‘Mein Kampf’”:

“If characters from “The Hills” were to emote about race, I imagine it would sound like B. Hussein Obama’s autobiography, “Dreams From My Father.”

Has anybody read this book? Inasmuch as the book reveals Obama to be a flabbergasting lunatic, I gather the answer is no. Obama is about to be our next president: You might want to take a peek. If only people had read “Mein Kampf.” …

Nearly every page – save the ones dedicated to cataloguing the mundane details of his life – is bristling with anger at some imputed racist incident….

When his mother expresses concern about Obama’s high school friend being busted for drugs, Obama says he patted his mother’s hand and told her not to worry.

This, too, prompted Obama to share with his readers a life lesson on how to handle white people: “It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved – such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.”

First of all, I note that this technique seems to be the basis of Obama’s entire presidential campaign. But moreover – he was talking about his own mother! As Obama says: “Any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning.” Say, do you think a white person who said that about blacks would be a leading presidential candidate?

The man is stark bonkersville….”

[Snip]

Read on.

Liar, Liar, Obama On Fire

Africa, Barack Obama, Elections 2008, Media, Race

If the media cared to cover the two Democratic candidates fairly, you’d hear more about Obama’s lies. But it so happens that the mindless ones don’t even bother with the appearance of an even reportorial hand with respect to the two.

Hillary’s “A Thousand Arabian Nights” about Serbia have been cast as the tall tales of a pathological liar. Barack’s beefing up his community activist’s résumé—he was never a professor—that’s merely a white lie. (I myself have referred to him by his undeserving honorific, professor.)

Barrack’s false claims-making concerning his “Camelot connection,” and the way in which his parents met—these episodes of amnesia have been framed as an “overstatement” by the Washington Post.

The less than truthful speech Obama gave at Selma is worth attention, replete as it is with his stock-in-trade strident race rhetoric. With respect to this particular biographical tidbit, slavery, colonialism, white hypocrisy, and black victimization (the stuff of Afrocentrism) are front-and-center in his address. Less so the benevolence that brought the elder Obama and other African students to the US.

Updated: Judenräte Turns on Geert Wilders

Free Speech, Islam, Judaism & Jews, libertarianism, The West

In “Nitwork Solutions Suspends Wilders Site,” you read about a heroic Dutchman by the name of Geert Wilders who is fighting Islam’s suffocating strictures. In a country of dhimmis, this Dutchman is a rare breed (so is Ayaan Hirsi Ali); he is trying to reclaim his country.

When the self-anointed Jewish leadership is not reaching out to libertines and left-liberals, it is siding with Jew haters. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League is still mum about the dangers to the American Jewish community of Muslim immigration.

On the other hand, Foxman had a fit over Mel Gibson, a man who has never hurt a Jew (unless hurt feelings count—and they don’t; sticks and stones and all that). But when a Seattle Jihadist murdered a Jewish woman and critically injured five other women at the downtown Jewish Federation building, our defender issued only the tersest of statements, making no mention of the dead, the injured, and the Muslim.

By the ADL’s telling, this was a random killing.

Now the Dutch Judenräte has turned its back on a friend of the Jews, Geert Wilders:

“In a statement following the film’s online release, the board said that Wilders – the leader of the Party for Freedom – was guilty of serious generalizations. ‘Wilders presented demographics on the increase of Muslims in Europe with pictures from scenes of terrorist attacks, suggesting all Muslims are potential terrorists,’ head of the Hague-based Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, Dr. Ronny Naftaniel, Saturday told Haaretz.”

Dr. Ronny Naftaniel’s incorrect deduction aside, Jews who side with him and his ilk ought not to complain when increased Muslim immigration coincides with more hate crimes against them. Nor should they be surprised when the many Dutch who secretly consider Wilders a patriot think of Jewish representatives as unpatriotic, and worse.

By the way, the response of the Muslim world and its representatives to “Fitna,” the Wilders film, proves irrefutably that Wilders is right about Islam. To deny that he is correct about the dangerous, dampening effects of Islam on a free society is to deny reality.

Wilders would have been shown to be wrong had the Muslim world and its proxies refused to bring pressure to bear on organizations that screened “Fitna,” and adopted a western live-and-let-live stance toward this form of speech.

Had Wilders not been subjected to death threats for his speech; and had the Dutch government not been pressured by Muslim leaders to denounce Wilders—I’d have been the first to concede that the Muslim Ummah is indeed benign, peaceful, and presents no threat to the West.

Speaking of the Ummah; where is my libertarian community on this? Have those few errant folks repented yet?

Update (April 1): “LiveLeak restores Fitna. Score one for freedom,” reports the intrepid Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch. LiveLeak had previously removed the piece.