Is opposition to illegal immigration hate speech? Is being against illegal immigration automatically a form of bigotry and an opposition to all immigration? To me, the answers to these questions is obviously no, but the ADL has the opposite view.
So which perspective is more common among American Jews?
From the ADL.org:
May 23, 2006
This report exposes the growing rage of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other racists toward immigrants, particularly Hispanics. A number of extremist groups have held anti-immigrant events and protests and racheted up their hateful rhetoric toward immigrants. In addition, racists have targeted Hispanics in a number of violent incidents. Read the full report, Extremists Declare ‘Open Season’ on Immigrants (PDF).OVERVIEW
As the public debate over immigration reform has taken center-stage in American politics and public life, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other racists have declared “open season” on immigrants and attempted to co-opt and exploit the controversy by focusing their efforts — and their anger — on the minority group at the center of the controversy: Hispanics.
As a result, to a level unprecedented in recent years, America’s Latino immigrant population has become the primary focus of hateful and racist rhetoric and extreme violence — aided, abetted and encouraged by America’s white supremacist and racist haters.
Spurred in recent weeks by the debate on Capitol Hill and the groundswell of grassroots activism in support of America’s immigrant community, extremists have become increasingly emboldened by, and fixated on, the controversy over immigration policy, encouraging their supporters to capitalize on the issue by encouraging anti-immigrant activism, and even violence against all Hispanics.
While white supremacists have for many years attempted to exploit rising anti-immigration sentiments in the U.S., the level and intensity of their attacks against Hispanics has reached dangerous new highs, with right-wing extremists joining anti-immigration groups, distributing anti-immigrant propaganda and holding frequent anti-immigration rallies and protests.
As a result, Hispanics, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status, increasingly are becoming the targets of hatred and violence from hardcore white supremacists.
Racists ranging from neo-Nazis to Klansmen to racist skinheads are among the most active anti-immigration activists in the country. Motivating their actions is the core conviction of modern white supremacist ideology: That the white race itself is threatened with extinction by a “rising tide of color” controlled and manipulated by Jews.
This report examines the recent record of extreme rhetoric and violence from white supremacist groups and their followers that has played out against the backdrop of the immigration debate in America.
The ADL’s latest assault on normal Americans is a report entitled “Extremists Declare ‘Open Season’ on Immigrants: Hispanics Target of Incitement and Violence.” The document wickedly conflates the current opposition to Bush’s Hispanic amnesty plan with a long catalog of racist hate crimes against Hispanics, all but two of which pre-date the current amnesty issue, many of them by many years.
The ADL is an evil, lying, anti-American organization.I therefore repeat the political truth, that if the so-called moderates in any given group do not forcefully denounce and dissociate themselves from the extremists in that group, then the group itself can rightly be seen as extremist. In the absence of a B’nai Brith Anti-Anti-Defamation League, the ADL’s equation of normal Americans’ opposition to amnesty with violent racist hate crimes can be legitimately seen as an expression of the American Jewish community.
Where is the large mainstream Jewish organization—not just Rabbi Lapin and Toward Tradition, not just Don Feder or Dennis Prager or Irwin Graulich—that is standing against the ADL and saying the ADL does not represent Jewishness? The ADL is perhaps the most powerful and best known Jewish organization in the country. In the absence of a powerful mainstream Jewish organization opposing the ADL and saying, “You don’t speak for the Jews,” the ADL does, as a political reality, speak for the Jews.
