This past Wednesday there was a skirmish over immigration in Escondido, a small city just a bit north of San Diego. Three of the five city council members voted to pass a law prohibiting landlords from renting to illegal aliens. Although it is a small and local victory we can only hope it’s effect will reverberate nationally much as Hazleton already has.

For those who don’t live along a major invasion artery this might give you some idea what the situation will shortly be like for you:

ESCONDIDO – The immigration debate raging here and across the nation seems to attract metaphors about rushing water – flood, deluge, awash, rising tide – to describe the numbers of people flowing illegally across the border.

City Councilman Sam Abed prefers precise figures to metaphorical references. Abed’s numbers are startling: One Escondido resident in four, he contends, is an illegal immigrant.

Emphasis mine. Chew on it a moment.

Would you believe there are some who quibble over the numbers? And at any rate they have a problem with local government getting involved.

(Escondido Mayor Lori Holt) Pfeiler doesn’t see it that way. Illegal immigration, she said, is a federal issue.

“If you want to stop the flow of illegal immigrants, you have to stop it at the border and on the job,” she said. “This whole debate about quality of life – how do you measure that? How do you define it?

“If the figures here really were 25 percent, what would happen if we removed 25 percent of our workers, 25 percent of our renters, 25 percent of our customers, in one fell swoop? It would be fascinating to do that and see what would happen.

Fascinating, yes. Is this a trick question? What would happen is there would be 25% less people. Less production and less consumption. Less load on the infrastructure. Less impact on the environment. Less crowded classrooms and hospitals and jails. Lower taxes. In fact, because the group that would be reduced tends to be more poor and less educated we can expect the positive effects of sending them away to exceed what would happen if we simply selected 25% at random.

What’s the illegal ratio where you live? There are 10-20 million illegal immigrants in the US, whose legal population is just topping 300 million. That would be about 3-6% on average. What numbers would impress you? Whatever they are they’ll be reached soon enough if the US maintains the status quo.

In defiance of such fatalism Marie Waldron, Sam Abed, and Ed Gallo voted to act:

Action begins when a resident, an official or business files a valid complaint with the city.

Landlord is then required to produce proof of a tenant’s legal status.

City verifies documents with the federal government.

Property owner would be notified of a violation.

Business license suspended if illegal tenants not removed within five days.

This hardly seems unreasonable to me, and in support I appeared outside city hall before the meeting Wednesday. Later I watched the preceedings on local cable.

If you want to see what real people really have to say in an area inundated by illegal immigrants, unsquelched and undistorted by the overwhelmingly pro-immigrant mainstream media, then go watch the meeting.

Allow me to summarize.

Those showing up in support of the new law were fewer, older, and frankly a bit more loner/oddball. Their speakers were generally respectful and thankful to the board. They see the flood of illegal immigrants bringing poverty, crime, and disease; and consuming the city budget. To stop this they want US immigration laws strictly enforced. They ask local government to act mainly because the Mexican, US federal, and state governments have not.

Those opposed to the new law were greater in number (outside at least), and generally younger. They included many children. Their speakers generally showed distain for the board. The most honest among them were obviously motivated by compassion. Their God knows no borders. No one is illegal. The immigrants are poor and we should help them.

This is understandable, though it seems hopelessly naive. There is no end to poverty. Once the other 9/10ths of Mexico have moved north who shall the US import next? Where will everyone go once the US has been turned into the same sort of 3rd world shithole Mexico already is?

Far worse than the compassionists are the slick and well-educated weasels who pursue instead one of several angles with a thuggish flavor.

First there is the ACLU lawyer who questions the constitutionality of the new law and threatens to sue. Does the A in ACLU stand for Alien now? Escondido taxpayers harmed by the ACLU’s actions might consider a class action lawsuit of their own.

The mayor agrees with the ACLU that immigration is entirely a federal responsibility. Law-abiding citizens are left to wonder why when a cop spots a bale of marijuana in a car driving through Escondido they don’t say, “whoa drugs, that’s a federal issue, and we can’t even call the DEA”! The notion that state and local government has no right to protect its citizens and carry out their democratically expressed will is nothing but the wishful thinking of criminals and their apologists.

Then there are the self-proclaimed activists who should know full well the generousity and tolerance Escondido has shown immigrants for decades. Even so they can’t keep themselves from throwing wild accusations of unfairness and rasism, obviously getting very wound up in their projected hatred. Their tone and demeanor at times becomes menacing.

Then there are the landlords and business owners. Does everyone realize this law will cost them money? Funny, they didn’t mention that it’s black market money. And they seem not at all concerned about the costs to their law-abiding neighbors.

Landlords also say they don’t know who is illegal or how to check. In this they have a good point. A point that puts in perspective the modest progress that has been made in the fight against open borders and how long a road there is left to travel.

Why won’t the government provide a secure, reliable, and drop dead easy way to verify anyone’s citizenship or immigration status? Why won’t they make this seemingly definitive service of government available at little or no cost? Why won’t they apply this database to anyone who interacts with the government in any way? Voting, traffic stop, DMV, hospital visit, … How if the government lacks the wherewithal to this can they require small business owners to shoulder such a burden?

I recently stumbled across some very interesting comments on the vast gulf between the elites and ordinary folk on immigration. It goes a long way toward explaining why US borders are open and why they will stay that way unless we continue to fight against it. Thankfully the Escondido city council isn’t yet controlled by either the elites or their imported lackeys.

As if Jimmy Carter wasn’t bad enough last week we got a visit from Llib Notnilc.

No, not this notnilc. I refer of course to affable ol’ country boy ex-President Bill Clinton’s angry alter ego. You know, the man we see every so often when Bill “Chuckles” Clinton steps back and Llib “Moonbat Superhero” Notnilc steps forward. The eyes get squinty, lips purse. A finger wags and a raspy voice rails in a petulant tone against the injustice, the impudence of the mere posing of a question. As of late, the performance ultimately devolves into a fulsome little turgid screed against the ever conspiring right-wingers.

The most recent sighting came during Chris Wallace’s interview of Clinton on Fox.

A few years ago Llib Notnilc lashed out at Peter Jennings.

Back on November 18, 2004, in the midst of a quite positive ABC News prime-time special about the dedication of the Clinton presidential library, Bill Clinton angrily wagged his finger at Peter Jennings, accusing ABC of conspiring with Ken Starr to “repeat every little sleazy thing he leaked” during the investigation into Clinton’s perjury and obstruction of justice.

And then there is of course this classic from 1998.

But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time – never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people.

Liar. He was too distracted to worry about bin Laden, al Qaeda, or the resuscitation and spread of jihad. And too small a man to take responsibility for that fault.

The Roots of Islamofascism run deep.

Know Our Enemy
by Rod Dreher
03:58 PM CDT on Sunday, August 27, 2006

The pious life and martyr’s death of Sayyid Qutb, and the legacy the Islamic theologian left behind, extend a powerful challenge to the West. Until we provide an answer to him and his followers, we can’t hope to prevail in the war of ideas with Islamic extremists. And most of us have no idea who this man even was. Sayyid Qutb (pronounced KUH-tuhb) has been called “the philosopher of Islamic terror.” He rose from humble origins in rural Egypt to become an influential theologian and leading light of Egypt’s fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood movement. He advocated global Islamic rule imposed by the sword.

The Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered him hanged for treason Aug. 29, 1966.

Yet, his ideas have spread like a prairie fire over the parched landscape of Islam’s last generation. As writer Paul Berman observed, Qutb was “the intellectual hero of every one of the groups that eventually went into al-Qaeda.”

. . .

What is to be done? Lenin famously asked about Czarist Russia. Qutb’s answer to the same question about the West was, in part, “Milestones,” a Leninist-style tract advocating worldwide Islamic revolution.

In this thin volume, Qutb argues that the Islamic nation must overthrow modernity if it wishes to continue to exist. Only Islam, with its divinely given law regulating all aspects of daily life, is capable of rightly ordering the soul and body, and of being most true to God-given human nature. He believed the West, whether or not it realized it, was engaged in a fight to the death against Islam. Though the conflict had military, economic and cultural aspects, for Qutb, this was essentially a religious war.

“Milestones” calls for the subjugation of all non-Islamic peoples, the total crushing of all non-Islamic institutions and entities, and the universal imposition of harsh sharia law. Reading “Milestones” as a guide to the mentality of jihadists is a bone-chilling exercise (even more so when you consider that Muslim teens participating in a 2004 quiz competition at the Dallas Central Mosque were assigned “Milestones” as part of their contest reading).

His is the voice of the genocidal utopian, an apocalyptic idealist who – like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao – will stop at nothing to create an earthly paradise on the bones of the Crusaders, Zionists, moderate Muslims and sundry infidels.

Via Rocco DiPippo at The Autonomist.

A common refrain from the Coalition of the Unwilling is that US arrogance upset the jihadis and neocon aggression made the problem worse. In other words the jihadis are not attacking, they are counter-attacking. They are acting only in self-defense and thus are not to blame.

Nice try. The logic is familiar because it is also used by those who support a vigorous defense of civilization against the jihadis. The distinction of course is that the silly infidels arguing in favor of the jihadis are, generally speaking, spectacularly ignorant of the ideology they defend or even the basics of its history.

The way they fit Sayyid Qutb into their worldview is to ignore him.

Confederate Yankee points out a similar Shia-flavored situation:

To admit that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad means precisely what he says, and has said time and again, is to admit to larger dangers that neither the press nor the Democratic party they overwhelming support can admit. To admit to the truth—to show what Iran and its leader represent as a threat to the world—is to shatter a carefully crafted illusion they have formulated that most of the problems of the world originate at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

When faced with revealing a truth that would create cognitive dissonance, the media has made the subconscious decision to simply excise, and then ignore, the facts that undercut their “larger truth.” They’d rather risk lives than admit the possibility that President Bush’s concerns about a nuclear-armed Iran are precisely on target.

They aren’t scared about the possibility of millions of people dying. That are far more fearful that the President is right, and that the world they’ve created for themselves is all too wrong.

A month ago in a review of Militant Tricks I dropped a reference to something that deserves more attention:

The 36 Stratagems stands out among the military classics of ancient China for its emphasis on deception as a military art; most other military classics are about battlefield tactics. Unlike many books of its genre, The 36 Stratagems focuses on the use of deception, subterfuge or hidden tactics to achieve military objectives. Hence its title, Secret Art of War: The 36 Stratagems.

The 36 stratagems are grouped into six sets; the first three are designed for use when one holds the advantage, and the second three when one is at a disadvantage. The categorisation, however, was never meant to be rigid. On the contrary, several millennia of practising and refining battle tactics have taught the Chinese strategists that the highest principle of all was flexibility.

Nevertheless, it may be argued that many of the stratagems are no longer applicable in today’s hi-tech world where technological superiority and sheer firepower would outweigh other factors.

That is not true. There are still many military operations today that uses variations of the 36 Stratagems. There has also been cases of the stratagems being used in the business world. As said above, the highest principle of all is flexibility.

Lesser known but more to the point than its sister work Sun Tzu’s Art of War both Chinese texts are a distillation of lessons learned during a millenium of warfare. Required reading for any modern student of strategy and tactics.

One of several traits the Chicom, Nork, Islamo, and Caribbean tinpots share is a talent for unscrupulous deeds. Deception and subterfuge. They lie, they cheat. Some wage proxy wars, fund terrorist attacks, toy with missles and nukes to blackmail neighbors. They sign treaties they have no intention of abiding. They mouth words of peace and democracy to disguise their polar opposite aims.

Here is some of what Hugo Chavez had to say to the UN today (via Drudge):

“Representatives of the governments of the world, good morning to all of you. First of all, I would like to invite you, very respectfully, to those who have not read this book, to read it. Noam Chomsky, one of the most prestigious American and world intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, and this is one of his most recent books, ‘Hegemony or Survival: The Imperialist Strategy of the United States.'” [Holds up book, waves it in front of General Assembly.]

“It’s an excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century, and what’s happening now, and the greatest threat looming over our planet. The hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads. I had considered reading from this book, but, for the sake of time,” [flips through the pages, which are numerous] “I will just leave it as a recommendation.

Well done Noam. You and Cindy Sheehan and Danny Glover and Harry Belfonte have befriended a real live dictator.

It reads easily, it is a very good book, I’m sure Madame [President] you are familiar with it. It appears in English, in Russian, in Arabic, in German. I think that the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is right in their own house. The devil is right at home. The devil, the devil himself, is right in the house.

“And the devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the devil came here. Right here.” [crosses himself]

“And it smells of sulfur still today.”

Hmmm. That kind of Devil talk would make the militant secularist moonbats bay for days if it came out of Bush’s mouth. Hugo? Crickets.

Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world.

I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday’s statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world.

Yes, call that psychiatrist. For yourself Hugo. It could be reality inversion or simple transference. Chirac Syndrome perhaps, the drive to unite countries in opposition to the US. Hugo’s manifestation is a tad déclassé.

An Alfred Hitchcock movie could use it as a scenario. I would even propose a title: “The Devil’s Recipe.”

As Chomsky says here, clearly and in depth, the American empire is doing all it can to consolidate its system of domination. And we cannot allow them to do that. We cannot allow world dictatorship to be consolidated.

These taunts were well-received at the UN. The would-be Dictator of the World however not only lacks the gumption to smoke Osama out of Tora Bora, he can’t even muster the cojones to snatch Chavez and Ahmadinejad when they serve themselves up on a silver platter. A true student of the 36 Stratagems would have seized the opportunity to decapitate his enemies:

To catch rebels, nab their leader first
Destroy the enemy crack forces and capture their chief, and the enemy will collapse. His situation will be as desperate as a sea dragon fighting on land.

The Axis of Evil certainly knows the stratagems. With the UN they’re pursuing this one:

Host and guest reversed
Whenever there is a chance, enter into the decision-making body of your ally and extend your influence skilfully step by step. Eventually, put it under your control.

Not long from now I fear civilization will look back with deep regret at our missed opportunity.

UPDATE 9/23/2006:

Via LGF:Chomsky says “I’m not dead yet…”

Proving that he was still up for a lively debate, Mr. Chomsky then went on to talk about income inequality in Latin America, the history of the United Nations, Iraq, Iran, Fidel Castro and, finally, the man who so fervently admires him, Mr. Chávez.

“I have been quite interested in his policies,” Mr. Chomsky said. “Personally, I think many of them are quite constructive.” Most important, he said, Mr. Chávez seems to have the overwhelming support of the people in his country. “He has gone through six closely supervised elections,” he said.

So the feelings are mutal between Chomsky and Chavez. Where is the debate?

Chavez attracts Moonbat Heroes like moths to flame. Or jihadis to OBL.

You may question how much the CBS television show The Unit blurs the line between reality and fantasy, but there is great value in its exploration of the kind of difficult situations the jihadis already have or will soon confront us with.

The show follows the members of an elite US counter-terrorist unit and their families, with each episode weaving several family/military, home/overseas subplots together. Last night’s episode titled “Change of Station” (2nd season premiere) involved a most relevant subplot.

Situation:

Pakistan/Afghan border, Taliban country. Martyrs self-infected with smallpox have boarded a bus, on their way to an airport, from which they will depart for a dozen major cities.

This is not mentioned in the Yahoo summary. The ramifications of such an attack — a smallpox pandemic wreaking worldwide death and chaos — are not explored even in the episode, but anyone reading the news should realize it is not a far-fetched scenario. Either the writer or the broadcaster probably thought it best not to drive home the point.

Well those of us who do read the news and do think about it can’t ignore such threats. We have some homework to do. Imagine yourself in charge as such a scenario unfolds. You have been told such the plan is in play. You know what the attackers will do and when they will do it.

Decisions required:

Do you take them out or let them move unhindered until they commit a crime?

If you take them out, where? When they land in the US? Before they leave Pakistan? Before they get off the bus?

How many innocent people do you suppose Howard Zinn would allow to be “indiscriminantly” killed in order to prevent an “indiscriminantly” concocted smallpox outbreak that would cost millions of other innocent lives?

Suppose we could literally bomb a single bus and know we’d kill only attackers, all with explicit suicidal/homicidal intent. Would killing them be ok? Would it be justified to question the motives of those who wouldn’t take the obvious path toward saving lives and minimizing suffering?

How many pacifists might be roused from their Copperheaded foot-dragging and conspiracy theories by the realization that they are making the suffering worse by emboldening our enemy and lengthening the conflict? How many actually intend to undermine our side, for whatever twisted reason?

Civilization has hard choices to make. We need sensible, reasonable, fair-minded people to make those decisions. We don’t need partisans who can’t stop tantruming because they or their party aren’t in power.