Gravelly voiced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones touts himself as one of the few daring souls willing to tell the “truth” about 9/11 being an inside job, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s plans to intern dissidents in “death camps,” and the “New World Order” plot to exterminate 80% of the world’s population. The Austin, Texas-based radio host suggests that he is a lone voice “in the wilderness” of a corporate media too cowardly to tell the truth about looming disaster.

But at least one member of that media has shown Jones nothing but love. Judge Andrew Napolitano, senior judicial analyst for Fox News and host of the Fox Business program “Freedom Watch,” calls Jones a “dear friend” who is “doing more than anybody I know” to “educate the public” with “courage and fearlessness.” Jones responds by calling Napolitano the “best person” on national TV. Last Friday, according to liberal watchdog Media Matters for America, Napolitano was on Jones’ show for at least the sixth time, and promised to soon bring Jones on to “Freedom Watch,” which he announced was expanding from the weekend to weekdays.

Maybe they’ll get a chance to discuss a Jones theory that’s a little more racially charged than much of his usual fare: a purported secret plan on the part of undocumented Mexican immigrants to murder all whites over 16. ( continue to full post… )

Record-breaking high temperatures have been the norm this summer in the United States and other countries. But for Latinos, it’s been even hotter than the thermometer suggests, with one after another targeted for hate crimes around the country. Here’s a sampling of recent incidents:

• Early last Saturday in Baltimore, Martin Rayez, 51, was beaten to death with a piece of wood. The man arrested for the crime, Jermaine Holley, 19, allegedly confessed and told police that he “hated Hispanics.” He has been treated in the past for schizophrenia. The killing occurred in East Baltimore, the scene of other recent attacks on Latinos. ( continue to full post… )

This coming Aug. 31, the Fremont, Neb., City Council will consider hiking property taxes to pay to defend its recently passed anti-immigrant law. Two civil rights organizations have challenged the law, saying the voter-approved ordinance amounts to discrimination. The law, which bans the housing and hiring of undocumented immigrants in the town of 25,000 residents, is currently tied up in federal court.

City Administrator Robert Hartwig told the Omaha World-Herald that the council most likely will not vote on the proposed 18% increase in the city’s portion of the property tax rate until Sept. 14. If approved, the owner of a $200,000 house would pay about $116 more in taxes next year. ( continue to full post… )

There’s an old jest in the news business: Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. Some anti-illegal immigrant zealots in the blogosphere are taking the joke to heart. Two-and-a-half weeks after reporting with no factual basis that members of a dangerous Mexican drug gang had seized two Americans’ ranches near Laredo, Texas, the bloggers still insist their fairy tale is true.

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It has been an agonizing summer for Latino residents of Staten Island. Since April, there have been 11 known instances of racially motivated violence against Latinos in the New York City borough, most of it taking place in the economically depressed Mexican-immigrant neighborhood of Port Richmond. This past Saturday, an 18-year-old Mexican immigrant named Christian Vazquez became the latest victim when he was attacked and beaten by three young African-American assailants who yelled anti-Mexican slurs and accused him of belonging to a Mexican gang. (In fact, Vazquez is active in a local group working against bias crime and gang activity, called Eye Openers: Youth Against Violence.) Currently one of the assailants, a 15-year-old Liberian immigrant, is in police custody and facing hate-crime charges of assault, robbery and aggravated harassment.

The most recent attack follows a rising pattern of black-on-Latino bias crime in the borough. In another representative case, on April 25, 46-year-old Rogerio Vazquez (no relation to Christian) suffered lacerations to his head during a slur-laden assault and robbery at the hands of a 19-year-old Asian woman and 21-year-old African-American man.

The rash of attacks in the area has led to the construction of a “police skywatch tower” to better monitor the streets, as well as the involvement of the U.S. Department of Justice and the Mexican Consulate, which have participated in a growing number of community forums on the problem.

But some local community leaders say that much more is needed.

“While the City has dramatically increased police presence in Port Richmond, where many of these attacks have occurred, this surge in police presence fails to address the root causes of this violence,” said Ana Maria Archila, spokeswoman for Make the Road New York, a Latino advocacy group. “We can’t continue to wish discrimination and bias away. New York City must take concrete steps to promote tolerance and expand opportunities for young people.”

The steps proposed by Archila’s and allied groups include more public town halls and hearings; public awareness campaigns about hate crimes and how to anonymously report them; and educational programs for teenagers, who make up a large proportion of the perpetrators.

Though violence between black and Latino populations is generally associated with gang activity in Los Angeles and high school conflicts there and elsewhere in California, the recent events on Staten Island illustrate that the problem is national in scope, especially when the communities border each other and are in direct competition for scarce local jobs. Attacks on Latinos have risen in recent years, as anti-immigrant rhetoric ratcheted up across the country. According to the FBI, anti-Latino violence shot up 40% between 2003 and 2007, dropping back slightly in 2008. The FBI has yet to release hate crime statistics for 2009.

As if Arizona wasn’t already unfriendly enough territory for immigrants, now they have to face angry, armed neo-Nazis. Incredibly, a small group of heavily armed racists patrolled for migrants and drug cartels last week on the Southern border.

Led by J.T. Ready — a recent member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement (NSM) — the group, who call themselves Ready’s Rangers, took to the desert armed with semi-automatic rifles and clad in fatigues, military style helmets and Kevlar vests. The “rangers” ended up holding 11 immigrants at gunpoint, according to participant Harry Hughes, NSM’s media spokesman.

It wasn’t the first time out on the border for the group, which is mostly made up of NSM members. In June, Ready reported on the neo-Nazi forum New Saxon, which is run by NSM, having “captured” a total of “[t]hree live UDA’s (Undocumented Aliens) … and one UDA corpse” in Pinal County’s Vekol Valley. And we should expect more patrols. NSM Region 11 Director Jeff Hall promises “future large scale missions” in both California and Arizona.

Ready is a racist and an anti-Semite. His frequent postings on New Saxon are remarkably crude. Among other things, he has written that “the Jew is a two-headed cancer which corrupts and putrefies all that is natural and noble upon this earth.” Today, Ready made incendiary comments to Gawker about the Judge who placed an injunction on Arizona’s anti-immigration law SB1070, saying, “Perhaps [Judge Bolton] should step her ass outside the air-conditioned courtroom sometime and see what is really happening as Rome burns and barbarians with AK-47s are in gun battles twenty miles from the gates of Phoenix.”

But as scary as J.T. is, his pal in this endeavor, Harry Hughes, might be scarier. Hughes really, really doesn’t like Mexicans, citing approvingly on his blog an article that says: “Mexican illegal aliens are revolting. And they know it. It is their purpose to disrupt us, interfere with us and give us diseases that we haven’t had in this country for 100 years.” In September 2007, in a thread on the racist forum Stormfront.org that was devoted to getting Mexicans to move out of a neighborhood, Hughes provided the following observation: “Back where I’m from they would just get into a hunting accident but that might not work here as there are too many of them.”

Hughes’ anger, by his own account, sometimes spills over into action. In July 2007, Hughes posted under his moniker “vandal52900” to Stormfront that he had shot a Mexican family’s dog. “The dog with the bullet belonged to Mexicans. I legally shot it, but was arrested for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon because I yelled at the Mexicans.” Hughes said the charges were later dropped and “the Mexicans [sic] home mysteriously burned down.” In a September 2007 post that was later removed from Stormfront, Hughes wrote: “Does getting arrested for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for shouting at a latrino neighbor count? I was unarmed at the time and the cop was a spic.” ( continue to full post… )

Sometimes, pictures really are worth a thousand words.

In the 1980s, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) — a restrictionist group that insists it is not bigoted despite a small mountain of evidence to the contrary — put out an untitled, undated booklet of cartoons that featured on the cover what looks like Fidel Castro strangling the Statue of Liberty and lighting his cigar in the flaming torch she holds.

Not surprisingly, given FAIR’s track record of demonizing immigrants, the group’s pamphlet is filled with provocative drawings by professional cartoonists that are accompanied by often bigoted or defamatory subtitles written by FAIR. FAIR’s commentary is particularly vicious when discussing refugees who arrived in South Florida from Cuba during the 1980 Mariel boatlift.

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Mel Gibson just can’t keep his mouth shut. The director and actor’s latest reported epithet-spewing rants (here and here) have slammed “wetbacks” and “niggers,” adding Latinos and African Americans to his hit list of those he is known to slur. Gibson has also been accused of gay-bashing based on comments he once made to a Spanish newspaper.

Earlier this week, the gossip website Radar Online reported exclusively that it had a tape recording of a phone call Gibson made to ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, with whom he has an infant child who is the subject of a custody dispute. “You look like a pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of niggers, it will be your fault,” Gibson is said to have told Grigorieva, who recently alleged that Gibson punched her twice in the face and knocked out two teeth. Gibson added, “I am going to come and burn the fucking house down … but you will blow me first.” A day later, Radar reported it had obtained another taped phone call in which Gibson said of one of his staffers, “I will report her to the fucking people that take fucking money from the wetbacks.”

These minorities are only the latest to be targeted by the “Braveheart” star known for his uncontrollable temper. Gibson had already gone after Jews. Who can forget his outburst at a Malibu police officer in July 2006 that started with “Fucking Jews!”

It’s hard to know what drives Gibson, but his hate may be, at least in part, a Gibson family value. His father, Hutton Gibson, is a well-known Holocaust denier and anti-Semite with some seriously strange religious beliefs, at least some of them apparently shared by his son. ( continue to full post… )

Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), has fiercely defended the group’s founder and current board member, John Tanton, despite his long history of racism. Just this past September, Stein told The Washington Post that Tanton is a “Renaissance man” of wide-ranging “intellect.” Stein’s comments were part of a general defense of FAIR, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group (for a summary of the reasons, see here).

Stein’s comments came despite the fact that Tanton has questioned the “educability” of Latinos, written that “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that,” and wondered “whether the minorities who are going to inherit California … can run an advanced society?” No matter to Stein, who told the Post that attacks on Tanton for these and similar comments “are out of context and “simply do not reflect the true character of the man.’”

But documents stored in George Washington University’s Gelman Library by Otis Graham, a close friend of Tanton who helped him launch and run FAIR in the 1980s and who currently serves as a board member at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), make the point about Tanton’s interest in race one more time. Most instructive is a Tanton plan in the files to create what he called a “League for European-American Defense, Education and Research” or, to use Tanton’s acronym, LEADERs. In a 1993 cover memo attached to his LEADERs plan, Tanton, who is white, wrote to Graham: “For a decade or more, I have been musing about the drift in our society back toward organization along group lines, all the while realizing that there was no group for me – no legitimate group that I could join to further or defend my own particular social, cultural or linguistic interests.”

A serial creator of organizations, Tanton, who by then had already funded and founded an array of anti-immigration groups that included FAIR and CIS, added that “with the establishment of several national organizations behind me, I need to pick my targets carefully and in a way that reinforces what has gone before.” The plan makes clear that Tanton saw LEADERs as bolstering his anti-immigration work.

The document offers an argument as to why LEADERs, which is clearly a “European-American” (read: white) version of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, is needed: “[T[here is currently no socially acceptable umbrella organization to which persons of European ancestry can belong to defend and promote their common interests. Absent such an organization in a highly organized society, European-Americans will continue to see their history rewritten, their character and accomplishments denigrated, and their faults magnified. They will steadily lose ground and position to other groups… . For those not resigned to this gradual or not so gradual decline, a new organization tailored to the needs and interests of European-Americans as a group is essential.” ( continue to full post… )

A city councilman with a history of racial insensitivity in Prescott, Ariz., has been fired from his talk radio show after his complaints about a school mural featuring children of several races helped propel the artwork into an embarrassing national news story.

Last month, Steve Blair commented on KYCA about a mural at the Miller Valley Elementary School that depicted children of several races using “green” transportation. On the May 21 radio show, Blair took exception to the art prominently featuring a dark-skinned boy.

“I am not a racist individual, but I will tell you depicting a black guy in the middle of that mural, based upon who’s president of the United States today and based upon the history of this community — when I grew up, we had four black families who I have been very good friends with for years — to depict the biggest picture on that building as a black person, I would have to ask the question, ‘Why?’” the Associated Press reported Blair saying.

Last week, Blair was reported as saying, “I’m not a racist by any stretch of the imagination, but whenever people start talking about diversity, it’s a word I can’t stand.” He added that he had received complaints about the mural and that, “What these people don’t like is somebody forcing diversity down their throats.”

Never mind that several Miller Valley Elementary School students posed for a photo that was used as the basis of the mural.
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