February 01, 2008

Ariel Alexovich/New York Times lies about Tom Tancredo, misleads about NCLR

Ariel Alexovich of the New York Times discusses the new "We Can Stop The Hate" effort from the National Council of La Raza in A Call to End Hate Speech (link). The part of the article concerning the thoughts of Janet Murguia, NCLR president is discussed at that last link; this post just discusses Alexovich's lies and misleading statements.

1. In the title, "hate speech" is not put into quotes, and that's repeated twice in the article itself (not quotes from Janet Murguia, NCLR president). Alexovich does put the word "vigilantes" in quotes when referring to a statement made by Murguia, making her failure to do the same for "hate speech" more glaring.

2. She translates the "La Raza" part of their name as (meaning "the people"). The use of that is supposedly derived from "la raza cosmica", but it has a distinct racial connotation; I doubt whether, say, Alberto Fujimori would ever be considered to be "Raza".

3. She refers to the "single-issue, anti-immigration platform of Tom Tancredo". While it was to a large extent single-issue, it wasn't "anti-immigration".

4. She refers to the Tancredo shopping mall ad as "a particularly scary ad that portrayed Hispanic immigrants as dangerous criminals." First, that's a completely false characterization of the ad (link). Second, illegal aliens aren't "immigrants". Third, even the NYT blog post she links to (link) implicitly recognizes that Tancredo was drawing a distinction between illegal aliens who cross the border for work and Islamic terrorists who might also cross the border.

Posted to Immigration2008a at February 1, 2008 01:14 PM