Posted on March 30, 2006

American Dhimmitude

Mark Krikorian, National Review Online, March 30, 2006

Hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens and their supporters have marched over the past couple of weeks demanding amnesty and opposing stricter immigration enforcement.

This isn’t really about immigration, though — it’s about power.

What we’re seeing in the streets is a naked assertion of power by outsiders against the American nation. They demand that we comply with their wishes and submit our immigration policies for their approval, and implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met. Far from being a discussion among Americans about the best way to regulate immigration, the illegal-alien marches have been marked by the will to power: ubiquitous Mexican flags, burning and other forms of contempt for the American flag, and widespread displays of blatant racial chauvinism and irredentism.

This is precisely the same kind of challenge that aggressive outsiders are making against other parts of the West, including Muslim immigrants in Europe and, in the most extreme form, Palestinians in Israel. Supremacist Muslims have demanded that Europe repudiate Israel, legally prohibit public criticism of Islam, downplay acts of violent Jew-hatred by immigrants, and not deport Muslim illegal aliens. And some Palestinians, of course, demand that Jewish state abolish itself altogether, actually cutting it out of maps of the Middle East (just as illegal-alien marchers in L.A. held signs of North America with the United States crossed out).

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In a recent column, Mark Steyn identified the issue at hand as “civilizational confidence.” Though he was writing about the threat of radical Islam, the same holds true, in decaf form, for us with regard to immigration: “our side has tanks and planes, but they have will and faith, and they reckon in a long struggle that’s the better bet.” And in referring to bin Laden’s observation that “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse,” Steyn even seems to describe the 12 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who voted to send the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill to the floor: “Most prominent Western leaders sound way too eager to climb into the weak-horse suit and audition to play the rear end.”

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