A few days ago I posted on the Mohammed poster in Lewiston, ME and I’m seeing this morning that it is quite a hot topic on other blogs. Despite some criticism I got for saying people of good will should condemn this act, I’m sticking with that.
Obviously, I see the enormous frustration building in small and medium sized American cities that are frankly being inundated with refugees and are not able to cope. Either in some cases the new immigrants are bringing disease, or are unemployed and reaping welfare benefits, or are Muslims who are not attempting to assimilate, or there are just too many at once for communities that have no experience with immigration, whatever the reason some citizens are being driven to take extreme measures to vent their frustration.
The fault for this lies with our federal government, the State Department, so-called “progressive” legislators like Sen. Ted Kennedy and others, Republicans in name only, and the volags (voluntary agencies) who benefit financially while breaking their arms patting themselves on the back for doing good. The blame does not fall on the individual refugee who took advantage of this lax federal program and only gets guidance on how to be an American from some civil rights group or the local interfaith council, where demanding one’s rights seems to take precedence over blending in.
I don’t have a solution for the refugees already here, except to advise their handlers to start paying attention to the concerns of the local residents. However, for those not yet here….. No one has ever really challenged the legal immigration industry so the waves will keep coming unless we get smart and get organized to reform immigration policy. We must organize within our democratic process, not sit by and watch individual frustrated and angry citizens inflame already very tense cities. Concerned citizens need to be given an alternative to counter-productive methods (like this mad dog poster) of getting the attention of elected officials.
Finally we must stop yakking on blogs, dissecting every word and having behind the scenes pseudo- intellectual debates and actually do something. We must organize a political movement. More later…