02/23/2005
The President Bush Assassination Plot trial currently getting underway in Virginia looks depressingly like revealing a Constitutional outrage of the first magnitude. It appears all too plausible that the U.S. authorities may have engineered the arrest of an American citizen by a foreign government, his imprisonment overseas without trial for almost two years, and perhaps his torture. The Founding Fathers would have been up in arms over Crown behavior like this — as would 18th Century Englishmen, too, for that matter.
But that is not a direct VDARE.COM concern. The accused, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, guilty or not, is a perfect example of why the ridiculous "Birthright Citizenship" misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment is an outrage and a threat to the American people. Reversing it immediately is essential. Educated at an Arab High School in Virginia from whence he went directly to a Saudi University, the only thing American about this man was his Passport.
Chances of getting this blunder fixed are not high if the dishonesty and lack of integrity of the media’s handling of the facts are anything to judge by. Consider the introductory descriptions:
"An American Student" -San Francisco Chronicle
"A 23 year old American" — New York Daily News
"A Virginia Man" — Newsday
"A Virginian" — Los Angeles Times (Take that Robert E. Lee!)
"A US citizen" — Chicago Tribune
"A Houston native and Virginia high school valedictorian" — Houston Chronicle (A twofer of misrepresentation — he only spent a couple of years after birth in Houston and his high school was distinctly unusual.)
Given the factual subtleties here, it does take a certain amount of journalistic professionalism to present the truth. The overseas media did the job:
"Arab-American" The Scotsman
"An American citizen of Arab descent" — The Australian
While America’s Big media are too craven or dishonest to state facts accurately, how can the country’s immigration (or Middle Eastern) problems be addressed?
However badly affirmative action has turned out, it was at least meant to redress some of the inequities created by slavery, and to help the descendants of American slaves. Nowadays the program actually harms black American citizens with that background by using immigrants to fill up diversity quotas at universities. In fact, a recent study within some top universities found that 41 percent of the black students identified themselves as immigrants, children of immigrants or mixed race.
Diversity bean counters are happy to have a sprinkling of dark faces appearing on campus. According to retired University of California Regent Ward Connerly, "Recent immigrants are the beneficiaries of this terribly flawed program. The institutions don’t care about that — all they care about is chalking up the numbers."
The whole concept of quota- driven victimhood has become so twisted that in San Francisco there is actually an organization called Chinese for Affirmative Action (for Chinese, naturally). Meanwhile, across the bay at UC Berkeley there are more Asian undergraduate students than white. (As of 2004 the numbers of UCB Asian undergrads was 9390 versus 6980 for whites.)
Even so, the Chinese for Affirmative Action manages to whine with a straight face about the oppression of Asians in America. One outstanding idiocy was CAA’s objection to a sensible public health measure prohibiting China-resident students from attending UC Berkeley during the SARS epidemic. The ethno-pushers didn’t care that their recommendation of welcome for possibly disease-carrying foreigners would put the local community at risk. What does the general good matter when compared with greater "diversity"? A.K.A -. advantage for your ethnic group.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.