Golden Dawn MPs Give Fascist Salute on Greek Parliament Floor
Formed in 1985 the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has long proved a vital organization within the constellation of groups that together comprise the contemporary anti-immigrant movement. Though residing behind the facade of an objective, unbiased group that simply researches and reports on immigration trends, CIS is staunchly nativist.
One only needs to read CIS’s blogs to recognize how woefully and laughably inaccurate its motto-“Low-immigration, Pro-immigrant”-truly is.
CIS Fellow James R Edwards, Jr. set about underscoring the group’s worldview of default nativism by issuing the following warning in a blog from this morning:
“Golden Dawn, a stridently nationalist political movement, has taken off in strife-torn Greece, the Washington Post has reported in a front-page news story. This development should serve as a cautionary tale to the Obama administration, whose actions to deprive Americans of their right to self-government could very well spark similar movements here in the United States.”
And by “a stridently nationalist political movement,” what Edwards means is full-on neo-Nazi: the group’s leader is a proud holocaust denier and an admirer of Hitler. The group’s symbols are even modeled after the Nazi’s repurposing of ancient symbols. We have written before about Golden Dawn here on Imagine2050, most recently in response to the party opening an office in the borough of Queens, New York City.
Edwards bows to victim-blaming by noting that Golden Dawn’s emergence as a violent street movement/political party is the result of a single factor: “Immigrants’ presence has reached critical mass.” He goes even further, fully blaming the Obama Administration’s immigration policies in a time of high unemployment for creating the toxic cultural conditions from which such a movement of violence may arise:
“This fully predictable reaction to Greece’s situation could happen here. Thank the Obama administration for creating the conditions for just such a response.
“Obama has deliberately assaulted state and local sovereignty. He has sued Arizona, Alabama, South Carolina, and other states and localities that have acted through their own legislative processes to use their own resources to protect their own citizens from the adverse effects of mass immigration.”
He doubles-down on these points near the blog’s close:
“Once this situation reaches critical mass, with Americans who have tried to work constructively through the legislative process finding all such official avenues of exercising self-government cut off, Obama’s actions could well lead to people turning to groups like Golden Dawn and taking matters into their own hands. It could get a lot more intense than the grandmas armed with cell phones and binoculars who formed the Minuteman movement back when the Bush administration was refusing to enforce the laws and lobbying for mass amnesty.”
I’m not sure what rock Edwards has been living under, but he’s clearly either blissfully unaware or negligently ignorant to the fact that the United States already has a neo-Nazi movement, and where that movement brushes shoulders with and even overlaps this country’s nativist movement-i.e. “the Minutemen,” in this case, which was founded in the early 1960s, not “formed” during the Bush Administration as Edwards claims-violence and deaths have resulted. Simply put, the marrying of these two ideologies attracts violent, anti-social individuals.
Edwards closes his piece with the following dangerous sentiment, which reads less like a warning and more like a reserved understanding of individuals’ frustrations:
“If and when Obama’s antidemocratic and unconstrained policies cause push to become shove, we may well see ordinary Americans looking to take back their country, too.”
Strange that Edwards has never heard of the following individuals, all of whom have garnered national condemnation for trying “to take back their country”:
- Wade Michael Page, the neo-Nazi skinhead of nearly 20 years who was apparently so concerned with the “critical mass” of immigrants in the US that he decided to walk into a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek Wisconsin and open fire on immigrants and police alike.
- Chris Simcox, founder of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps who was so overwhelmed by the “critical mass” of immigrants in the US that he allegedly threatened his wife and children with a loaded gun, saying he wasn’t afraid to kill police officers who got in his way.
- Shawna Forde, founder of Minutemen American Defense, who was a personal friend of Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, who was also so overwhelmed by the “critical mass” of immigrants in the US that she and others broke into the home of Raul Flores and murdered him and his 9 year-old daughter, Brisenia.
- JT Ready, former member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement turned founder of the vigilante border patrol group US Border Guard, who was so devastated by the “critical mass” of immigrants into the US that he stormed into a house in Phoenix, Arizona, and murdered 4 people, including his girlfriend and an 18 month-old toddler, and then killed himself. Ready was under investigation by the FBI and the ATF at the time of his death for suspicions relating to the murders of immigrants along the border and weapons violations.
As is well documented, Ready was a long-time close friend of Russell Pearce, who along with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach co-authored Arizona’s much maligned anti-immigrant law SB 1070-one of the state’s that Edwards claims the POTUS has abused to the point that we can now “Thank the Obama administration for creating the conditions for just such a response.”
At no point whatsoever in his piece does Edwards pause to mention that, maybe, Golden Dawn is full of very, very bad people-i.e. neo-Nazis.
Instead Edwards chooses to efface the emotional damage and deaths caused by those involved in the nativist and neo-Nazi movements by claiming that the Minuteman movement was “formed” by “grandmas armed with cell phones and binoculars.” Such claims are as ridiculous as they are ignorant, as are his claims that Golden Dawn is simply a nationalistic political party “engaging in practical aid to needy Greeks.”
CIS’s message: blame Obama for the violent actions of racists, not the racists themselves.