December 4, 2008 1:41 PM
An article published on one of the leading anti-immigrant web sites chose to mark the death of Marcelo Lucero by mocking his family and his religious faith. VDARE, a site owned by Peter Brimelow a former Wall Street Journal writer and race-based opponent of most non-white immigration, published an article this week attacking the very idea of a newspaper covering the death of an immigrant in a humane way.
Peter Brimelow is a major figure in the anti-immigrant movement. He was the author of the bestseller Alien Nation in the 1990s. Since leaving the Wall Street Journal he has become a central figure in the "White Preservationist" wing of the anti-immigrant movement which holds that American liberties are only guaranteed if White people hold the reins of power. In fact, his web site VDARE is named after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World.
Brimelow is also important in his role as an intellectual influence on John Tanton, the founder of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). As I pointed out earlier today, FAIR's propaganda was extremely influential in forming both the approach to immigration taken by Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, and the language he employs when talking about that issue. FAIR's founder has been tied to a variety of anti-semitic and White supremicist thinkers and activists.
Here are extended excepts from the piece written by one of VDARE's regular contributor's. The piece was written in response to a Newsday article by reporter Bart Jones about the funeral of murdered Ecuadoran immigrant Marcelo Lucero. The excepts are in bold. My comments are [bracketed].
So let’s take a moment to have a little fun at Jones’ expense by picking apart his cornerstone sob story. [Lucero’s Family Hosts Mass at Home He Helped Build, Bart Jones, Newsday, November 17, 2008]
Jones, who filed from Ecuador, loves the Mass angle, mentioning it five times in his 800-word story intending to build sympathy for more illegal immigration.
[Ummm, Jones was there to cover the funeral. The Lucero family is Catholic. Catholic funerals typically involve a "Mass". That is the name we Catholics use for our primary religious service. Why would it be strange to use the word "Mass" in an article about a Funeral Mass?]
(Aside: Newsday still hasn’t recovered from its circulation scandal of two years ago. Advertising revenues remain soft. Company layoffs and buyouts have been ongoing since 2004. Yet, it foots the bill to send a reporter to Ecuador?)
[This interestingly echoes the point the Minutemen made at a protest outside Newsday 10 days ago. Basically-"How dare they send a reporter to Ecuador to cover the burial of an Ecuadoran immigrant". Good to see the anti-immigrant folks so concerned with Newsday's bottom line.]
To re-emphasize his point that the Lucero family is religious, Jones also included two references to the deceased’s wake.
[Sorry for being such a Catholic here, but we do have both wakes and funeral masses. Why, if a reporter is covering a funeral, would it be impermissible to mention that the deceased had had a wake TWO WHOLE TIMES?]
Religion is one of many common denominators in MainStream Media illegal immigration stories. The objective is to hammer home the message: illegals good; Americans bad!
[Boy I didn't see that one coming!]
In addition to the curious coincidence that such a high percentage of immigration stories involve deeply religious illegal aliens, there’s another statistical oddity: the high incidents of critical illnesses among the protagonists.
In the case of the Luceros, Marcelo’s father died of a heart attack and his mother survived a cancer scare.
[See the power of the pro-immigrant "advocates" and "community organizers". We carefully selected for execution by a "lynch mob" an immigrant with a back story so compelling that it would melt the hearts of all but Steve Levy. Or, perhaps, we caused his father's heart attack and his mother's cancer.]
I know that being cynical about their faith and skeptical about their health makes me appear insensitive, especially to readers less hardened than myself.
[Dude, you're not just being "skeptical about their health", Lucero's dad died while he was a kid. You're being skeptical about his death. I like the way he gives a sidelong blow to any of his presumably anti-immigrant readers who might have had a twinge of sympathy for the Luceros by essentially calling them soft.]
In the next section, the author writes about stories about immigrants who have been victims of hate crimes:
Having now read several thousand putrid stories, I’ve developed a tough stomach. And after a few years, I’ve been struck by the amazing quirk that such a large number of aliens are so religious and so sickly.
Somewhere out there must live an illegal alien who’s a heathen. And with all the free health care they receive, somebody should be in good physical condition.
[Fact Alert: Neither Lucero's mother, who has fought cancer, nor his father, who died from a heart condition, were immigrants. So the author seems not to have actually read the article he is slamming. And notice that he uses the remark to also rile his readers by claiming that undocumented immigrants have access to "free healthcare" unavailable to "Americans".]
The piece by VDARE's John Gazzardi is far from an outlier in anti-immigrant thinking. Unfortunately.
Related Blog: The weird logic of anti-immigrant argument against Lucero