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ACLU vs. the Founding Fathers in the War on Terror
The ACLU--and President Bush--could learn a lot from America's Founders. If only the group would stop lying about the Founders and their views on civil liberties.
Since America just celebrated its 230th birthday, take a look at what American Revolutionaries did just to get to a first day, let alone a first birthday.
It wasn't at all the way lefty, self-proclaimed civil libertarians would have you believe.
Tory loyalists and other opponents of America's independence were crushed like bugs. Revolutionaries weren't the glowing respecters of dissent you'd think.
They treated British loyalists the way we should be treating terrorists and terror sympathizers in America. And they got the desired result we will never have with our limp policies of today: Toryists were the embarrassed class, second-class residents who held their heads low in shame. Today, the modern day worse-than-Tories-- pan-Muslim, pan-Arabist, pro-terrorist groups--are feted by FBI and Homeland Security officials. And yes, even by the President.
The fish rots from the head down. It's an old Greek saying. But so apt today. The head of the fish was alive and well in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. And long thereafter.
The Wall Street Journal's Cynthia Crossen reports that British loyalists "never stood a chance against the zealous Patriots." And sometimes, zeal is a good thing.
In 1774, just two years before Independence, the first Continental Congress "authorized local governments to form 'committees of inspection,' which would test their citizens' allegiance to independence," writes Crossen.
People who refused to take the Patriots' oath often lost their homes and were prohibited from working. The General Court of Massachusetts advised Harvard College's overseers to question their faculty and 'dismiss any instructors who appeared to be unfriendly to American liberty.'Today, it is the exact opposite. And that's why we're in trouble. You have to be unfriendly to American liberty to get a job at Harvard or pretty much any other college or university in America. To not hire a Muslim loyal to Hezbollah or refuse to sell him/her your home would invite a burst pinata full of lawsuits and prosecutions. You would be the Tory. They are the new revolutionaries. And, ultimately, we might be revolutionized out of the freedom business.
The founders recognized this. That's why they crushed dissenters. Crossen writes that at least 75,000 Tory loyalists fled to Canada, England, and the West Indies.
Today, it's just the opposite. Rather than shaming those who hate us and those who laugh at us, we have not thousands, but millions of those subversives, flowing into--not fleeing out of--our country. Unlike the Founders, we don't shame them. We make it easy and acceptable for them to invade our country and undermine it. Unlike the founding Patriots we've gotten a little too comfortable.
The Patriot Act? Military Tribunals (now ruled Unconstitutional)? Guantanamo Bay? Homeland Security? Deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)? All of these popular targets of the ACLU and Islamist groups had nothing on the machinations of the original American Patriots.
In the first days of America, it was a very different story than now. Instead of terror supporters like CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) and ADC (American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee) fighting America on its own shores every step of the way, Tory loyalists who remained in America "usually tried to keep their heads down," Crossen writes. She quotes the writing of one loyalist from Pennsylvania:
I am afraid to converse with persons here, or to write my friends in Philadelphia . . . a letter intercepted or an unguarded word would plunge me into troubles. . . . These oppressions on men who have never given offense are justified by the [Patriots] as necessary for the security of all government.So what was it the ACLU keeps saying about the Founding Fathers turning over in their graves over the Patriot Act? Actually, they are turning over in their graves . . . over how we've turned America over to the new, far worse Tory loyalists who have taken America hostage through the courts, the media, universities, everywhere else.
And then there was the physical punishment. The violence. There was a lot of it--all directed at loyalists. Crossen reports that the Patriots tarred and feathered them, jailing hundreds of them.
Are the cells and Sole Amandine at Gitmo excessive, "cruel and unusual" punishment for those who'd destroy us? A Delaware loyalist to England would have traded places with them to be in what Amnesty International absurdly calls "the gulag of our time." He was convicted of aiding and abetting the enemy and sentenced to be hanged, but, the sentence read,
not 'til you be dead for you must be cut down alive . . . and then your head must be severed from your body and your body divided into four quarters and these must be at the disposal of the Supreme Authority of the state.Makes the Abu Ghraib hoods and a death sentence for Zaccarias Moussaoui (sought and not attained at trial) sound like paradise.
Article Continued on Debbie's Website, LINK Check out the many other thought provoking articles there!
The ACLU vs. America
By Michelle Malkin
March 30, 2005
On April Fools' Day, the American Civil Liberties Union will show us what a joke its commitment to American civil liberties really is.
April 1st, in case you haven't heard, is the launch of the Minuteman Project, an all-volunteer effort by law-abiding American citizens to call attention to the nation's wide open southern border. Hundreds of Americans from New York to Michigan to California will travel down to the U.S.-Mexico border for a month to monitor illegal aliens and alert immigration enforcement officials if they witness law-breaking.
Call it the mother of all neighborhood watch programs.
In doing so, the Minutemen will be exercising their constitutionally protected freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Those would be fundamental civil liberties found in something called the, uh, First Amendment, of which the ACLU is supposed to be the foremost expert and champion. Or so the group and its celebrity supporters say. In sanctimonious new fund-raising ad campaigns, the organization features the likes of liberal actress Holly Hunter, who asks:
"Do you want to be heard without fear? I am not an American who believes that questioning or criticizing my government is unpatriotic."
Uh-huh. "Dissent is patriotic," the Left likes to preach. Except, apparently, if the questioning and criticizing deals with the government's abject failure to enforce immigration laws. Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist has been harassed by open-borders activists at his home. The group is reportedly being targeted by savage illegal alien gangsters from Mara Salvatrucha (a.k.a. MS-13). Mexican government officials are lobbying American law enforcement officials to suppress the Minutemen's rights to speak and assemble.
But instead of coming to the defense of the Minutemen who are challenging our government, the ACLU has warned the 1,000 volunteers that it will send monitors to document the Americans' activities. Moreover, the ACLU has already threatened lawsuits against the American dissenters for exercising their rights.
This bullying of pro-immigration enforcement activists comes as no surprise to those of us who have followed the ACLU's aggressive open-borders agenda -- from its support for driver's licenses for illegal aliens, to its opposition to detaining illegal alien terror suspects after 9/11 and profiling foreign visitors from terror-friendly countries, to its efforts to stop local and state law enforcement officers from helping federal homeland security efforts.
ACLU of Arizona spokesman Ray Ybarra argues that the mere presence of the Minutemen at the border constitutes "unlawful imprisonment" of illegal (excuse me, "undocumented" ) aliens (excuse me, "migrants" ). Ybarra told the Washington Times that the ACLU will have lawyers on standby ready to file civil cases against the volunteers. He warned that the Minutemen could "come to our state as 'vigilantes' and end up leaving as 'defendants.'"
The Minutemen have made it clear on their website and in repeated statements that they "will not violate anyone's civil rights, and will not abuse anyone from any country. . . . We will alert border patrol to the location of illegals, and wait for [the Border Patrol] to come and pick them up. We will follow illegal aliens from a distance and continue spotting them until authorities answer our cell phone and/or back-pack radio calls. All spotting, calls for assistance, and the response from the appropriate authorities will be chronicled and provided to any media representative."
Contrary to the ACLU and mainstream media representations of the group as racists and immigrant-bashers, the Minutemen are a diverse volunteer group that includes Americans of Mexican, Armenian, Russian, Lebanese, Indian and Cuban descent; and black and Native American minorities. Also among the volunteers are 19 legal immigrants from Mexico, Peru, Russia, New Zealand, England, Australia and the Philippines.
By recklessly linking the Minutemen to white separatists and casting them as outlaws, the civil liberties crowd engages in the very guilt-by-association smear tactics it has so loudly condemned. And in putting the protection of illegal aliens' rights over law-abiding Americans' civil liberties, the ACLU demonstrates on which side of the border its true allegiances lie.By Michelle Malkin
Quote from a Commie:APFTE Comment: Another great article by Michelle! She lays it on the line how the ACLU is really a fraudulent organization patronizing only the issues that are directed at undermining American values and beliefs. The "ACLU Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing" is determined to slowly strip away our personal choices while at the same time asserting a phony stance towards liberty… Double standards abound when the ACLU wants to push their Socialist agenda.
Founder of the ACLU, Roger Baldwin openly promoted socialism, the end to personal land ownership, and many more "over the top" positions on how he perceived the United States should be.
"I am for socialism, disarmament, and, ultimately, for abolishing the state itself... I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and the sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal."
Roger Baldwin Co-Founder ACLUThe ACLU is a camouflaged oxymoron, supported by obvious Morons, promoting the destruction of our American society, the American way, and dedicated to the regression into mediocrity of the greatest country that has ever evolved on the face of this planet.
We believe the ACLU conducts itself like a typical low-class anti-American organization, and anyone that supports their Socialist Anti-American agenda should be looked upon with much suspicion. When the ACLU denounces the founders comments promoting Socialism openly, the APFTE will consider re-evaluating our opinion of their organization.
Until then, the ACLU is as bad as any other organization trying to undermine the "American Way" it's just another enemy our country has to deal with...
