Help Save Maryland makes the Washington Post

Although Help Save Maryland is about putting a stop to illegal immigration in Maryland we have written about their efforts previously here.   Today this fledgling grassroots organization is featured in the Washington Post.  One interesting angle is that the effort to stop illegal immigration is drawing other minority groups to the cause due primarily to the competition for employment.

Why I keep harping—write a blog—be a citizen journalist!

This is going to be long, but I need to say it.   I won’t be offended if you don’t want to hear it!

Just now I was looking for some information on Nepal and ended up reading at the Hudson Institute where I came across this report by Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News.   It struck a cord because long before Judy and I started this blog, we and others of our friends had been reading and learning about the Islamist threat and specifically the Muslim Brotherhood’s quite clearly stated goal to turn the United States into a Sharia governed country.  

You can protest that this goal is far-fetched, but it is indeed what they aspire to.    Then I noticed on January 1, 2007 that the head of the Muslim America Society (the Muslim Brotherhood spin-off) spoke at our local mosque in Hagerstown, MD.  His photo was on the frontpage but there was no mention of who he was.  I wrote some letters to the editor that were never published attempting to educate the public, afterall everything I said had already been published in the Chicago Tribune in 2004.

The editorial page editor at the Herald Mail clearly dismissed what I had to say and acted as if I was a rabid racist, bigoted, hatemonger.  That same attitude continued when the refugee issue began in earnest a few months later.    I was puzzled why professional journalists would not have any curiosity about Islam in America  in the wake of 911, or for that matter the refugee resettlement program.   It was plain to see that we were never going to get our views to the public unless we took matters into our own hands and started writing ourselves. 

Now comes Rod Dreher’s report last Friday at the Hudson Institute which answers my question so articulately about why journalists are not writing about the central issue of our time.    After you read this you will understand that it is imperative that you become a citizen journalist.

[Mr. Dreher has up to this point in his narrative described his experience with certain Islamic leaders and the newspaper for which he works, The Dallas Morning News, emphasis is mine]

Now, I cannot say how typical the Dallas experience is of the broader American experience, but my contacts around the country suggest that this is standard operating procedure. Islam remains a sacred cow in many American newsrooms. My experience with the Muslim leadership in Dallas provides insight, in my view, into why American journalists have ignored the radicalism present in mainstream US Muslim organizations, and in particular why—with the singular exception of an extraordinary 2004 series in the Chicago Tribune—the mainstream media has shown almost no curiosity about the Brotherhood. Why? Reflecting on my experience as a journalist, and as a journalist dealing with Muslim leaders, I have several ideas as to why.

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First, Muslims provide non-Muslim journalists with an opportunity to demonstrate their broadmindedness. Most journalists are secularists and cultural liberals, as survey after survey has shown. Cultural liberals have a natural sympathy for the
underdog, especially besieged minorities. As a general matter, they are predisposed to believe the best about all American Muslims, and to discount evidence to the contrary as right-wing paranoia.

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Muslim leaders like Sayyid Syeed of ISNA and Mohamed Elmougy understand this, which is why they pitch their presentations to journalists as they do. The legacy of McCarthyism has such a powerful hold on the minds of many journalists that it disarms the instincts that every journalist has to nurture in order to do a proper job.

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Now that the Cold War is over, we look back at the water-carrying and fellow-traveling so many mainstream liberals, especially journalists, did for the communists, and wonder how on earth they could have been so deluded.

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Well, they saw what they wanted to see. One day, I am confident that historians and others will wonder the same thing about the silence and incuriosity of today’s journalists with regard to the threat from radical Islam in America.

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Along those lines, I think at least some journalists sympathize with Muslim leaders because they—the Muslim leaders—have made enemies of conservative Christian counterparts. I have heard on many occasions journalists fuming that American society gets uptight about radical Islam, but ignores the threat from the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons of the country—as if they were remotely the same thing! As if the sins and failings of the Christian right justified ignoring Islamic militancy. It is nothing short of bizarre that the secular fundamentalists in the US media are so consumed by fear and loathing of conservative Evangelicals that they give a free pass to Islamic religious fundamentalists who stand for a far more intolerant form of faith.

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Similarly, I’ve observed that some canny Muslim activists have adopted the tactic of invoking the threat of danger to Muslims should critical stories appear in the media. The idea is that journalists should not write stories, even if true, that reflect poorly on the Muslim community, because somewhere, there might be a redneck thug who would use the information to attack innocent Muslims. Again, this plays well into the stereotype that many journalists have of the great right-wing un-
washed, lying in wait to carry out pogroms against defenseless minorities.

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This is just one more reason why I believe that leaders from these Muslim Brotherhood-influenced organizations—CAIR, ISNA, MAS—are typically good at understanding the psychology of liberal American journalists, and know how to intimidate them. But it‘s also true that they know how to present a positive spin on themselves and their organizations. They adopt the language of civic engagement and civil society, and deploy it at every opportunity.

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One young Muslim activist in Dallas who embraces Said Qutb’s message as spiritually enlightening is downright Tocquevillian in the language he uses in public. This is not entirely deceptive. The Muslim Brotherhood’s general strategy is to work through the institutions of civil society to achieve the ultimate goal, which is an Islamic state. It is obviously un-American to decide that Muslim citizens are to be distrusted when they want to participate fully in the political and civic life of this country. The Brotherhood activists understand this, and make this public goodwill work to their advantage. Without informed journalists making meaningful inquiries about the ultimate goal of this or that Muslim group, critics can come across looking like bigots who want to disfranchise and disempower honest Muslim citizens.

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It is vital that the public be able to tell the difference between Muslims who honestly and legitimately want to be part of American public life, and those who are using the laws and customs of this country surreptitiously to undermine, and ulti-
mately destroy, them. But the news media, which is the institution best able to make that distinction, is failing to do its job.

Europeans waking up (finally) to the danger of Muslim immigration

See this excellent post at Jihad Watch reporting on an article from the Daily Express that begins:

AN “overwhelming majority” of Europeans believe immigration from Islamic countries is a threat to their traditional way of life, a survey revealed last night.

Read it all and remember that we are blindly heading down the same path as Europe, except maybe we still have time to turn it around.   We need to get to work!  (Judy admonishes me on this and says I need to explain ‘work’).   The first bit of  work that needs to be done is that we all need to publicize the information we gather about immigration to as wide an audience as is humanly possible, starting with your next door neighbor!  

Start your own blog! After all it is “Common Sense”

I know I am harping on this, but a few weeks ago, writing in our new category called ‘creating a movement’, I suggested that a key element to advancing our concerns was to study the issues, gather some facts and start a blog of your own.    All over the world free speech is being limited— sadly even in countries like England and Canada.  So to make it harder for us to eventually have our free speech rights taken, we need to create more free speech and that is where blogs come in.

If you are thinking, ”Forget it, I could never produce a blog that would attract thousands of daily readers,” no you won’t (at first anyway), but don’t place that high expectation upon yourself.   

Here is a blog called “Common Sense” that was started a few months ago by my friend The Patriot Sharpshooter.  Mostly he covers local and state issues disgesting such exciting fare as the County Board of Education budget, and writes at the rate of about a post a day.  Today he has a post on immigration that relates to what we cover here at RRW and posts along with it an e-mail from a friend in Israel who describes his personal experience with terrorism there. 

In conclusion, here is an analogy that I am sure will appeal to the Sharpshooter:  You know they say they won’t be able to come for our guns if everyone has one, well the same idea applies to free speech.   Get a blog and join the fight for America’s continued strength through freedom of speech. 

Citizens for Walkersville, model for grassroots organization

Recently we posted a couple of articles about how to get organized and get a movement going.  Here is an article written by Steve Berryman, Vice President and spokesman for Citizens for Walkersville, on his view to date of the hearings that took place last week and continue tonight in this small central Maryland town.   The work the citizens have done there to protect the culture and character of their town is a prime example of how we need to organize.

At this point there has been four days of the hearings – with 18 hours into it – at Walkersville Town Hall on Frederick Street. I have derived some observations from this.

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It amounts to a civics lesson in some ways, but in others it boils down to be a real-life “David vs. Goliath” story of asymmetric warfare between the interested parties.

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You could never have scripted this. The AMC [Ahmadiyya Muslim Community] is invested in a positive outcome to the tune of $100,000 in legal fees and related expenses and is still counting. Being an enormous multi-national corporation with millions in available funds and operations in over 180 countries worldwide, they stand to lose much more than that in terms of their international expansion efforts should they lose the decision. This proposition is easily supported by their web site.

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In the other corner are the people of the Town of Walkersville. Speaking as groups of home-owners associations and the grass-roots “Citizens For Walkersville” (CFW), resources were home grown and donated in a heart-felt fashion……

Read the rest of Mr. Berryman’s commentary here.   Read our earlier coverage here.     Here is the website for the AMC.   

Steps to create a movement–#2 form groups and coalitions

This is the second in a series on creating a grassroots movement for immigration reform.   Of course, this group formation is already happening and organizations concerned about immigration are proliferating throughout the country.   There are old established groups like FAIR (now a distinguished hate group), NumbersUSA, Grassfire and so on.  Then there are little state and local groups.  In Maryland the grassroots group, Help Save Maryland, is on a roll and starting local chapters throughout the state.  I suspect the same is happening from coast to coast.  

It’s the local groups that are of interest to me here.  In Step 1 (research) I pointed out the importance of getting your facts which you will use in various parts of this campaign, but it’s especially important for the group formation stage.   You want to lead your fellow citizens and they will want to know that you know what you are talking about before they will follow.

Find like-minded people by talking to the people around you, in your neighborhood, town, at work.  You will be surprised how many people across the whole political spectrum feel the way you do about the need for immigration reform.  So, talk!  Start sharing information about the issue and about the situation in your town or city.  Identify those who are an impediment to reform and gather facts about the individuals, elected officials and groups that are blocking reform.

Have small meetings in peoples’ homes and make friends.  This is very important because it’s going to get rough when the opposition attempts to divide you by tactics like the “racist” namecalling and you will need the moral support of your new friends.

Choose some reasonable political goals and divide the work load.    Remember this is not about you, it’s about changing America, or better still restoring America.

I’ll talk more about the group action in coming posts on creating a movement, but do want to make this last point before this gets too long and no one reads it.

The more groups there are, the better off we will be!   Look at the Enviromental movement as an example.  There are hundreds and hundreds of groups promoting environmentalism across a wide spectrum and every one, large and small, has its own issues and concerns.  Sometimes they get down and dirty with each other, but they all march in the same general direction.  And, when the big issues come along, such as an important bill in Congress, they will meet and plan joint strategies.  The message they send out is tailored to the interests of their members but it is generally the same message.

We need  now to build coalitions.   We need to continue our individual group projects, then groups large and small need to be connected so that communication can happen quickly.  Someone needs to pull together, in one location, contact info. for all the groups, local, state and national (and don’t forget to link individual activists who might not have formed a group).     Obviously when action is needed the word goes out and each group contact person sends the message to its members.  

And, finally don’t forget to form coalitions with groups that have a tangential interest in immigration reform.  Groups that come to mind are taxpayer groups, groups concerned with the spread of radical Islam, gun owner groups and so on.

Note:  We have a new category called ‘creating a movement’.

Steps to create a movement–#1 research

Yesterday in a comment here in response to something Infinicat said, I said I would start putting some ideas out on what we need to do to bring about reform of legal immigration.  Our biggest handicap is that unfettered immigration has become such an entrenched part of American public policy, involving loads of money, paid lobbyists, volags (voluntary organizations), politicians on both sides of the aisle, big business benefits, politically correct media,  but not much for the ordinary citizen who pays for it in more ways than one; and, who must work on reforming it as volunteers who don’t have the luxury of spending whole days at it.

The first step in creating a successful movement is research and education.  We are well on our way with education thanks to the internet and blog proliferation.   But, now we need some hardcore research.   We need people to really begin documenting the problems with legal immigration and that means research on a very deep level using State Public Information laws and the Federal Freedom of Information Act and other types of document gathering.  Some national groups do a good job researching statistics etc. on a national level, Center for Immigration Studies comes to mind, but we need local documentation.  

And, then I’m asking all of you to start your own blogs.  Infinicat this means you too!   Don’t just rehash stuff in the news all the time, but start posting hardcore data—the kind of thing good investigative reporters used to do but don’t anymore except for a few exceptions like those at the Shelbyville Times-Gazette.   Just pick some aspect of this monstrous issue and start working on it!  Become an expert!

Believe me, blogs are free and easy to do!  If you don’t want to do it on your own then help us research and we’ll post it.  But, if you had your own blog it will have greater impact.  Contact me, I have loads of ideas on what needs to be researched!   Help move blogging to another level!   You will be absolutely amazed about how much you can move the political process with publication of documented facts.

P.S. to infinicat, I look forward to visiting your blog sometime soon!