Today’s vocabulary lesson comes from Das Heimchen (The Cricket), who writes:

"Migrationshintergrund" is a new German term which describes the woeful handicap that poor immigrants, particularly those from Muslim nations, have to deal with in Germany. Its literal translation is migration background or immigrant’s background.

In his book "Hurrah, wir kapitulieren" by Henryk Broder, the author describes how his Grandmother had a Migrationsbackground because after WW-2 she was displaced from Silesia. I.e., had to flee the Red Army to find Asylum in what was left of Germany. But, he explains, while she harkened back to the peaceful days of her homeland and she complained about myriad things, she was too polite, she had manners that prevented her to act like today’s "foreigners" when they riot and burn and destroy. Her favorite saying was, "one does not do things like that".

The following is a translation from the German of the author’s book and his views on the kind of license that Migrationshintergrund affords the Muslim population of today’s Europe.

Today, on the other hand, "Migrationshintergrund" means a sort of free pass for any situation. He who has a Migrationshintergrund, only will require an Attorney in the most extreme of cases. For instance after he has slaughtered a film maker in broad daylight on the streets of a big city. Lesser infractions against rights, law and order only require a mention to the media and the public that he has a Migrationshintergrund, which will immediately evoke sympathy for the perpetrator and critical words vis-a vis the behavior of the victim (a provoker, who respected nothing and no-one), and the proven question: "What have we done to them that they hate us so much?"

The problem isn’t that illegal aliens skipped the line and broke the law. Or that they violate the wishes of their citizen neighbors, consume a disproportionate share of resources, commit a disproportionate share of crime, or import their corrupt values and diseases.

The problem is the insensitive word ‘alien’.

Move to ban “illegal alien” from state docs
Bill Cotterell – February, 27, 2007

TALLAHASSEE — A state legislator whose district is home to thousands of Caribbean immigrants wants to ban the term “illegal alien” from the state’s official documents.

“I personally find the word ‘alien’ offensive when applied to individuals, especially to children,” said Sen. Frederica Wilson, D-Miami. “An alien to me is someone from out of space.”

She has introduced a bill providing that “A state agency or official may not use the term ‘illegal alien’ in an official document of the state.” There would be no penalty for using the words.

In Miami-Dade County, Wilson said, “we don’t say ‘alien,’ we say ‘immigrant.'”

That’s right. A politician finds a word offensive so we should throw it away. Wilson has in fact already been using her bully pulpit to inflict the newspeak on any insensitive clod unfortunate enough to cross her path.

She said she encountered the situation when trying to pass a bill allowing children of foreigners to get in-state tuition at colleges and universities. Wilson, who directs a dropout prevention and education program in Miami, said she politely asks witnesses at public hearings on such issues not to use the term.

That’s right. When she’s not clouding the immigration debate by playing with words Wilson tries to get illegal aliens a break on tuition.

Wilson said the first word isn’t as bad as the second.

“‘Illegal,’ I can live with, but I like ‘undocumented’ better,” she said.

Asked if her bill might run afoul of Gov. Charlie Crist’s “plain speaking” mandate for government agencies, Wilson said, “I think getting rid of ‘alien’ would be plain speaking.”

Words words words. You only need stable definitions if you intend to think and argue rationally. Of course those who eshew reason and are driven by their emotions find it more comfortable to simply redefine anything that doesn’t make them feel right. If it feels good how can it be wrong?

This is why:

An alien is a person who comes from a foreign country. The term illegal alien is broader and more accurate because it includes undocumented aliens and nonimmigrant visa overstayers. An undocumented alien is an individual who has entered the U.S. illegally, without entry documentation. Any alien who violates the terms of his or her admission may be deemed to be out of status. Becoming out of status occurs when a nonimmigrant remains in the United States beyond the expiration date of their visa or when a nonimmigrant engages in employment in the United States for which she is not authorized. Roughly 60% of the illegal alien population are undocumented aliens and about 40% are nonimmigrant visa overstayers. Thus, the term illegal alien, being broader in scope, is the accurate term to use.

Shall we just cut the crap and call them citizens? After all if everyone can vote, get bank accounts, and go to state schools what point is there in distinguishing citizens from aliens?

The longer our leaders, in business and religion as well as politics, refuse to acknowledge the consequences of their open border policies the deeper the hole they dig for those of us who play by the rules. Those of us who support the US and its laws already distrust our leaders. If the immigration chaos doesn’t stop soon there won’t be any US or laws left to support.

Racist xenophobe gringos can at least take comfort in the hope that Frederica Wilson will help us redefine hurtful words like ‘crime’.

Drudge reports:

OBAMA: IF YOU LOOK AFRICAN-AMERICAN, YOU ARE TREATED LIKE ONE
Fri Feb 9 2007 15:51:32 ET

Acknowledging that his presidential campaign has opened a racial debate, Sen. Barack Obama, who has a white mother and an African father, says if you look African-American, you are treated like one. Obama and his wife, Michelle, who also addresses the race issue, appear in an interview with Steve Kroft to be broadcast on 60 MINUTES, Sunday Feb. 11 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS television Network. If, as expected, Obama declares his formal candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination tomorrow, it will be his first interview to be broadcast after that event.

When asked by Kroft if growing up in a white household had caused him to make a decision to be black, Obama replies, “I’m not sure I decided it. I think… if you look African American in this society, you’re treated as an African-American. “It’s interesting though, that now I feel very comfortable and confident in terms of who I am and where I stake my ground. But I notice that… I’ve become a focal point for a racial debate,” says Obama.

Obama’s wife also addresses the race issue when asked by Kroft whether she fears for her husband’s life as a black candidate. “I don’t lose sleep over it because the realities are that… as a black man… Barack can get shot going to the gas station,” says Michelle Obama. “You can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen.”

Will being African-American hold him back as a candidate? “No…. If I don’t win this race it will be because of other factors –[that] I have not shown to the American people a vision for where the country needs to go that they can embrace,” Obama tells Kroft.

X X X X X

While Obama is addressing the subject of race perhaps he could express to potential voters his opinions on the following issues.

Not a Chance
The electoral journey of Proposition 54.
By Ward Connerly
Oct. 15, 2003

When it comes to race, America is governed by a grievance industry. They make their case by the use of data, citing the number of black males in prison, the number of blacks who have difficulty hailing a cab, the dropout rate of Hispanics, the incidence of hate crimes and “racial profiling” by the police, and on and on. Whenever there is a disparity between whites and “people of color,” that disparity is defined as a form of “institutional racism.” During the [CA Prop 54] campaign, two additional forms of institutional racism were unveiled: “environmental racism” – the number of toxic-waste sites located near “minority” communities, for example; and “disenfranchisement” – the disparity between the number of blacks and Hispanics who vote and the number of whites who vote. In response to the latter, the California legislature enacted legislation a few weeks before the recall election requiring local elections officials to include race check-boxes on forms to be completed when individuals register to vote.

With “institutional racism,” actual incidents of discrimination are not required. It is the mere existence of statistical disparities that confirms patterns of “discrimination” by public and private institutions. The presumption of those who advance this argument is that if there were “social justice” and equity, the disparities would not exist; instead, all groups would be proportionately represented.

An ugly conspiracy of silence
Walter Williams

Last June, Jared Taylor, president of New Century Foundation, in Oakton, Va., held a press conference at Washington’s National Press Club to report on the foundation’s recently released study, “The Color of Crime.” Some of the study’s findings about interracial crime were surprising, so much so that I did an independent verification of the numbers.

Since 1972, the U.S. Department of Justice has conducted a National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to determine the frequency of certain crimes.

One category is interracial crimes. Its most recent publication (1997), “Criminal Victimization in the U.S.,” reports on data collected in 1994. In that year, there were about 1,700,000 interracial crimes, of which 1,276,030 involved whites and blacks. In 90 percent of the cases, a white was the victim and a black was the perpetrator, while in 10 percent of the cases it was the reverse.

Another finding of the NCVS report is that of the 2,025,464 violent crimes committed by blacks in 1994, 1,140,670 were against whites — that’s slightly over 56 percent. Whites committed 5,114,692 violent crimes; 135,360, or 2.6 percent were against blacks.

In 1997, there were 2,336 whites charged with anti-black crimes and 718 blacks charged with anti-white crimes, so-called hate crimes. Although the absolute number of white offenders was larger, the black rate per 100,000 of the population was greater, making blacks twice as likely to commit hate crimes.

So far the only answer the left has for Ward Connerly, Walter Williams, or Jared Taylor is ad hominem. The self-righteous self-proclaimed owners of the moral high ground on race shall not be compelled to answer lowly Uncle Toms and Klansmen.

Even the conventional wisdom, promulgated ad nauseum by our academia and press, is that racism is predominantly a white crime whose victims are predominantly non-whites. Notwithstanding presumptions of “institutional racism” crime statistics indicate the conventional wisdom is in fact backward.

Bureau of Justice Statistics Homicide trends in the U.S.: Trends by race

Racial differences exist, with blacks disproportionately represented among homicide victims and offenders

In 2004, homicide victimization rates for blacks were 6 times higher than the rates for whites.

In 2004, offending rates for blacks were 7 times higher than the rates for whites

The race distribution of homicide victims and offenders differs by type of homicide

For the years 1976-2004 combined –

* Black victims are greatly over represented in homicides involving drugs. Compared with the overall involvement of blacks as victims, blacks are less often the victims of sex-related homicides, workplace killings, and homicide by poison.

* Race patterns among offenders are similar to those among victims.

                       Homicide Type by Race, 1976-2004
                                     Victims                   Offenders
                             White   Black   Other      White   Black   Other
    All homicides             51.0%   46.9%   2.1%       45.9%   52.1%   2.0%
Victim/offender relationship
    Intimate                  56.5%   41.3%   2.2%       54.3%   43.6%   2.2%
    Family                    60.6%   37.1%   2.4%       59.1%   38.6%   2.3%
    Infanticide               55.8%   41.6%   2.5%       55.3%   42.2%   2.5%
    Eldercide                 69.1%   29.3%   1.6%       54.4%   44.0%   1.6%
Circumstances
    Felony murder             54.8%   42.7%   2.5%       39.1%   59.3%   1.6%
    Sex related               67.0%   30.6%   2.4%       54.9%   43.3%   1.9%
    Drug related              37.2%   61.9%    .9%       33.8%   65.1%   1.1%
    Gang related              57.6%   39.0%   3.5%       54.4%   41.3%   4.3%
    Argument                  48.5%   49.4%   2.1%       46.7%   51.1%   2.1%
    Workplace                 84.9%   12.0%   3.1%       70.5%   26.4%   3.1%
Weapon
    Gun homicide              47.3%   50.8%   1.9%       42.0%   56.2%   1.7%
    Arson                     59.2%   37.9%   2.9%       55.7%   42.0%   2.3%
    Poison                    80.2%   17.2%   2.5%       79.6%   18.6%   1.8%
Multiple victims or offenders
    Multiple victims          63.6%   33.1%   3.4%       56.1%   40.5%   3.4%
    Multiple offenders        55.0%   42.3%   2.7%       44.8%   52.8%   2.4%

Although slightly less true now than before,
most murders are intraracial

From 1976 to 2004 —

* 86% of white victims were killed by whites

* 94% of black victims were killed by blacks

These are government statistics, not the KKK’s. Though I only found out about the link because I was reading something written by Steve Sailer, who would undoubtably be dismissed by the media as a fascist xenophobe klansman for having the audacity to note that the white statistics include Hispanics, which obscures the relatively high rate of Hispanic crime.

US race problems go far beyond "the soft bigotry of low expections". The truth revealed by crime statistics is shocking. The deliberate suppression and inversion of this truth by our politicians and media is disgusting. By so quickly appealing to the victimhood of being “treated as an African-American” Obama chooses to perpetuate the distorted fantasy rather than facing the distasteful truth. Anyone who thinks Driving While Black is a burden should try to imagine Walking While White.

UPDATE 17 Feb 2007: Long Beach Hate Crime:

Suddenly, newspaper editors, TV-news directors and other media faced an unsettling prospect of their own: If white-on-black hate crime is covered with an apologetic tone and references to the legacy of slavery, what’s the tone for covering black-on-white hate crime? Can a minority be a racist? And how can we, the media, get out of this?

As the Press-Telegram reported on November 3, three white women aged 19 to 21 emerged from a “maze” walk in a house and were confronted by up to 40 black teenagers who pelted them with pumpkins and lemons. The paper said, “The taunts and jeers grew more aggressive, the victims recalled, as did the size of the crowd. Now females joined in, and everyone began saying, ‘We hate white people, f— whites!’ ”

The bizarre case, now in its fifth week of trial, resulted in hate-crime charges against nine girls and three boys, two of whom will be tried later. Yet the story didn’t run in the Los Angeles Times until November 7, buried inside local news. In that piece, writer J. Michael Kennedy quoted the Press-Telegram’s interview with the victims, watering down the racist language to the vague and more acceptable phrase “a series of antiwhite epithets.”

While some media tiptoed around the story, another outlook was emerging as the fast-tracked trial — required in youth cases — hurtled toward its late-November start date. Well-known black political columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who has explored both sides of the story in a levelheaded manner, was quoted by City News Service as noting that the latest FBI hate-crimes report showed that blacks now commit more than 20 percent of the hate crimes, the majority of victims white.

Emphasis mine.

In other words blacks commit a disproportionate share of hate crimes. Imagine how much more lopsided the statistics would be if DAs did not operate in a PC intellectual environment where simple questions like “can a minority be a racist” are considered profound.

This “bizarre case” is a wonderful illustration of the cognitive dissonance that arises when the liberal J schooler’s minorities-as-victims view of race and hate crimes meets the reality.

There are just a few points I review in my head whenever the urge arises to cry and give into the influence of anything the left has to say about foreign policy or international politics. Self-pity is in fact the key to their mindset. Rather than spin into such a narcissistic black hole I turn my attention instead to one or more of the following vexing facts:

• The jihadis have parasitized and warred on civilization (not just Jews and Christians, not just the West) continuously for 1400 years, before unclean infidel boots ever touched sacred Arabian soil, before Bush, and long before US soldiers invaded Afghanistan or Iraq.
• The jihadis will continue to attack even if pacifist infidels silence their neocons and disband their military.
• The jihadis have co-opted Europe and Russia and within decades will conquer them through immigration and reproduction.
• Africa is a vast social, political, environmental, and economic disaster area wracked by jihad and genocide.
• Secular socialist totalitarians in South/Central America and East Asia are not satisfied with simply producing goods for trade and feeding their people. They will continue to threaten and blackmail their more civilized neighbors.
• The nuclear and biowarfare genies are out of their bottles.

The world really is a violent and dangerous place, and it isn’t likely to change simply because pacifists wish it were not. The world’s problems weren’t caused by Bush and they’re not going to die when he does. This is what I think when accosted by self-absorbed progressives pontificating about corruption, incompetence, or lying:

WASHINGTON — Convinced this is their moment, tens of thousands marched Saturday in an anti-war demonstration linking military families, ordinary people and an icon of the Vietnam protest movement in a spirited call to get out of Iraq.

Celebrities, a half-dozen lawmakers and protesters from distant states rallied in the capital under a sunny sky, seizing an opportunity to press their cause with a Congress restive on the war and a country that has turned against the conflict.

We hear alot of complaining from leftists about divisive politics. Would that look anything like a gaggle of rich and famous movie stars spewing seditious bile to a mob, manipulating the masses with spectacle and demagogy?

Well who cares what pseudo-intellectual thespians think? After all, they’re not paid to think. What’s really scary are the petty partisan pronouncements of those elected to positions of authority. They are paid to think.

The House Judiciary Committee chairman, Rep. John Conyers, threatened to use congressional spending power to try to stop the war. “George Bush has a habit of firing military leaders who tell him the Iraq war is failing,” he said, looking out at the masses. “He can’t fire you.” Referring to Congress, the Michigan Democrat added: “He can’t fire us.

“The founders of our country gave our Congress the power of the purse because they envisioned a scenario exactly like we find ourselves in today. Now only is it in our power, it is our obligation to stop Bush.”

Spendthrift liberals aren’t normally concerned about the cost of anything, so something else is going on. It has to do with failure. When the goal is success any sane executive would fire any underling who can see only failure, and nobody would question it. In war you can’t protest or defund your way to victory. But by undermining their country’s will and ability to fight Conyers and his anti-war cohorts are trying to ensure victory. For themselves. It’s easy. Cut off funds, Bush goes down.

One of the great mysteries of leftist psychology is how they can feel inspired by rhetoric about thwarting their country’s commander in chief in a time of war, but then bristle when others question their belief in democracy, their support for the military, or their patriotism. How can people calling for peace be so vitriolic? Who, other than their similarly conflicted angry-pacifist friends, do they think they’re fooling?

On the stage rested a coffin covered with a U.S. flag and a pair of military boots, symbolizing American war dead. On the Mall stood a large bin filled with tags bearing the names of Iraqis who have died.

It’s a mortal sin when the neocons exploit the innocent lives taken on 9/11. To merely remember them nothing but a sly attempt to whip up hate and violence. But exploiting the brave warriors who volunteered and died for their country since 9/11? That’s just fine.

There is no draft. But that doesn’t stop the anti-war zealots from adopting a new victim group: those duped into volunteering for military service in the middle of a war, apparently unaware it will be dangerous and somehow under the impression they can choose where they will be sent. The zealots brazenly hijack the voices of their ideological opposites, the military dead, by compulsively gathering disrespectful arrays of boots, coffins, or lamely constructed crosses. The point might have had some basis back when a letter from Selective Services meant an involuntary tour of Vietnam. Today it ignores the reality that our soldiers volunteer.

So the pacifist view is dim and dishonest. They want Bush to lose, they don’t care who they have to exploit or manipulate or who else will suffer to make it happen. They don’t recognize that Iraq is just one battlefield in the never-ending Jihad. They deny the Jihad is even real. They think the CIA created Al Qaeda and orchestrated 9/11. They think Muslims are radicalized by poverty and oppression. They harp on the mistakes of others but never admit any of their own.

They note the complexities of the world and ridicule black and white solutions. Except when they propose them. They are hypersensitive to consequences after the fact, not before. They blame Bush for, at best causing all the suffering in Iraq out of negligence, and at worst deliberately lying to get exactly what he wanted in spite of the suffering it would predictably cause. No blame for Saddam, the Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians, Saudis, Russians, Europeans, or UN. It’s all on Bush and the warmongers who support him. It’s easy to put the consequences of immediate withdrawal in the same terms. Its advocates will be entirely to blame for the ensuing bloodbath and emboldening of totalitarians, at best because they are blind, and at worst because they consider it a tolerable price to pay for setting back Bush.

A reasonable person can argue that the US is responsible for some of the world’s mess. To argue that the US is to blame for most of it is ridiculous. To advocate that we simply surrender our future to the real warmongers of the world is deranged.

In the crowd, signs recalled the November elections that defeated the Republican congressional majority in part because of Bush’s Iraq policy. “I voted for peace,” one said.

They think voting for peace will produce it. QED.