La Raza To The Bottom

La Raza To The Bottom

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, July 15, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Politics: Barack Obama tells "The Race" that U.S. law enforcement officers are terrorists and that communities that enforce immigration laws are vigilantes. But then, that's exactly what La Raza believes.

Obama, the "post-racial" candidate, pandered Sunday to a group of Hispanic activists that calls itself "The Race." The only thing that was missing at the convention of the National Council of La Raza was his wearing a Mexican flag lapel pin.

In Orwellian fashion, defenders of "La Raza" deny that it means "the race." San Francisco Chronicle writer Carla Marinucci says of Obama's appearance before the group's national convention in San Diego that Obama "embraced the ideas reflected in the organization's name, La Raza, loosely translated as 'the people.' "

A very loose translation it is. Why not use "la comunidad" or "la gente" when speaking about the Latino people and community? Because La Raza wants to be called La Raza, and they known exactly what it means to them.

La Raza has ties it refuses to condemn with the likes of MECHa, a group that has spent the last three decades indoctrinating Latino students on American campuses, claiming the states of California, Arizona, Mexico, Texas and southern Colorado were stolen and should be returned to their rightful owners, the people of Mexico.

MECHa's slogan is derived from the rhetoric of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro: "Through the race, everything, outside the race, nothing." Obama hopes the road to the White House leads through La Raza.

The group is not some Hispanic version of the Rotary Club. It supports driver's licenses for illegal aliens and in-state tuition rates for illegal aliens. The open-borders group opposes the border fence and any cooperation between local law enforcement and federal authorities such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement in enforcing U.S. immigration laws. Its goal is not assimilation.

Obama told the group what it wanted to hear, including that "communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids." And he condemned those "communities taking immigration enforcement into their own hands" — like those that have passed state laws or local ordinances to cooperate with the feds or check that the immigrants who are here are in fact here legally.

Former Los Angeles high school basketball star Jamiel Shaw Jr. was a victim not only of a gang crime but of a sanctuary policy La Raza supports. This policy adopted by many major cities has led to increased illegal immigration and increased crime by illegal aliens.

Charged with Shaw's murder is Pedro Espinoza, a member of the 18th Street gang, who'd been released just hours earlier from the Los Angeles County Jail, where he'd spent four months for brandishing a firearm and resisting arrest. Espinoza is an illegal alien. The feds were not told of his release.

This policy is embodied in Special Order 40, a 30-year-old Los Angeles Police Department rule that prohibits police from arresting anyone based solely on their immigration status, or from notifying immigration officials about an illegal immigrant in their custody.

Does Obama support sanctuary cities and Special Order 40? If not, why didn't he tell La Raza that?

Far from midnight raids by storm troopers, work site inspections are done on the order of warrants issued by a federal prosecutor. When a home is raided, it's because a federal judge signed a deportation order. It's all done professionally and legally. It's not true, as Obama claimed, that "nursing mothers are torn from their babies."

Obama told the group that 12 million illegal aliens "are counting on us to stop the hateful rhetoric filling our airwaves" — rhetoric, he says, that "has no place in this great nation."

Is it racist to criticize the policies of La Raza?

He seems to agree with current La Raza President Janet Murguia, who thinks that such "hate speech" should "not be tolerated, even if such censorship were a violation of First Amendment rights."

La Raza wants to restore the Fairness Doctrine. Does Obama agree?

Illegal aliens are here illegally, and the companies that hire them do so illegally. ICE is merely enforcing the laws of the United States, laws that Obama will swear to faithfully execute if he's elected president. Unless Obama has really embraced the ideas reflected in the organization's name.