Waukegan Talk

"FIRST THEY CAME AFTER ....... "
Reknown excerpts from a sermon by Pastor Martin Niemöller

Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller, an eventual opponent of Hitler, came to write many anti-Nazi writings and delivered many anti-Nazi sermons in the
mid-1930's. Personally detested by Hitler, this led to his arrest in 1937 for which he became imprisoned by the Nazis, first in the horrendous Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp where over 35,000 were exterminated and then moved to the brutal Dachau Concentration Camp where over 30,000 were exterminated.

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/sachsenhausen.html">http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org ... ausen.html</a><!-- m -->

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/english.html">http://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/english.html</a><!-- m -->

Paster Niemöller was liberated from Dachau by the Allies in 1945. On January 6, 1946, he gave a sermon about his inhumane ordeal before
The Confessing Church of Jesus Christ in Frankfurt. This is the reknown excerpt from a part of it:

From Pastor Martin Niemöller:

"In Nazi Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me —
and by that time no one was left to speak up."

So here we have Arizona a newly enacted law to "come after" those who "look" llegal (i.e., NOT white) and IMPRISON THEM.

WHO then shall be NEXT ?????

In time, it could be YOU....unless you speak UP now!!

FURTHER, hundreds of THOUSANDS of brave BRAVE MEN and WOMEN of the Allied Forces (including the USA) fought and GAVE UP their LIVES
for HUMAN RIGHTS and FREEDOM in this world and in our country!

So ALL of this ultimate sacrifice for what?? So The Government of Arizona and all those along with them who HATE people of different colors/races other than their OWN White Race can now SPIT upon their very graves in this utter insult to human rights and the American vision of "liberty and justice for all."

What a total OUTRAGE! What sheer CONTEMPT for those who sacrificed so much to tell them their GOOD FIGHT and tragic deaths were ALL IN VAIN. All because we now have here in the USA as seen in Arizona AND across the USA a growing, spreading pernicious right-wing extremist movement commencing to transverse down the VERY SAME ROAD as Der Führer ADOLF HITLER HIMSELF did ... going after people of different races, of different color, of different cultures.

NOT affirming life in all its great and wondrous God-given diversity, but rather being life-negators... seeking THE ONLY CORRECT WAY,
"DIE EINZIG RICHTIGE WEG !!!"

WE MUST NOT ALLOW THIS to HAPPEN ANOTHER TIME !!

NEVER AGAIN!!
NIE WEIDER!!

- WT Reader

More about the courageous Lutheran Pastor, Martin Niemöller:

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Niem%C3%B6ller">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Niem%C3%B6ller</a><!-- m -->

-- WT Reader

I totally agree with you. We cannot let this happen again. I have always believed that SOMEONE in the USA knew what was going on, regarding the Holocaust and did nothing about it. It makes my heart ache. I don't know why, but I have always been interested in what happened back then. You watch WT, this Arizona thing is going to cause a big disturbance------REALLY BIG--and it scares me. I was talking to a dear friend of mine who's Mexican, and he said he agrees that if you live here you should speak English, but the Arizona thing is horrific.

Blackdiamond Wrote:I totally agree with you. We cannot let this happen again. I have always believed that SOMEONE in the USA knew what was going on, regarding the Holocaust and did nothing about it. It makes my heart ache. I don't know why, but I have always been interested in what happened back then. You watch WT, this Arizona thing is going to cause a big disturbance------REALLY BIG--and it scares me. I was talking to a dear friend of mine who's Mexican, and he said he agrees that if you live here you should speak English, but the Arizona thing is horrific.

BD,

I am pleased we agree here.

YES, what is occurring in Arizona is absolutely terrifying. So much how it all started under Hitler, and history does repeat itself.

Now I am a strong believer in the Rule of Just Law, and I do believe that those who come to our country should do so legally. FACT is that many have not because our government allowed this to be. So we need to develop a plan which President Obama and the Democratic Party has to allow for those who are not here legally to become legal through a series of steps towards naturalization and becoming a PART of our diverse society.

This makes sense, as it does no one any good to "hide in the shadows." Illegal persons here are being abused by greedy employers, they are being exploited by greedy landlords, all kinds of ill comes from this. The solution is not to "go after" with anger and hatred those who came here for a better life, albeit it not as they really should have done legally, BUT THEY ARE HERE so LET's CONSTRUCTIVELY and HUMANELY deal with this issue!!

And we need to control our borders, every nation has that right and also that need for security! For the $10 BILLION a month we are spending in Iraq and another $10 BILLION a month we are spending in Afghanistan for FUTILE WARFARE, we could be securing our borders here and improvoing the quality of life for ALL Americans and helping those here become Americans through support, quality education and bringing them into our society rather than DEMONIZING them!!

BUT there are the EXTREME right-wing HATERS who don't want to BUILD UP and AFFIRM LIFE, they want IT all for THEMSELVES and THEIR "EINZIG RICHTEGE WEG!"! So WHO will They "go after" next??

I say ENOUGH HATRED, let's reach out and HELP ! This is The American Way, after all, affirming ALL as contributors to our diverse and great nation , with gifts and talents to share!!! This will not make us weaker, but STRONGER!!

And truly better be that "city on a hill" as first referenced in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:14, which later Puritan/Pilgrim John Winthrop idealized what this new experiment in governance could someday be. Winthrop did so in his sermon circa 1630 titled "A Model for Christian Charity" preached to those who would organize the original Massachusetts Bay Colony in this, The NEW World.

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill</a><!-- m -->

-- WT Reader

"FIRST THEY CAME AFTER ....."

So who are those who seek to attack minorities due to the color of their skin, their place of origin, their ethnic background in Arizona with the extreme, right-wing Republican passed SB1070 ?

One major group is the Arizona Tea Party organization, as indicated in numerous Google search news reports, this being one:

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.examiner.com/x-41774-NY-Tea-Party-Examiner~y2010m4d27-Arizona-immigration-bill-backed-by-tea-party">http://www.examiner.com/x-41774-NY-Tea- ... -tea-party</a><!-- m -->

So who is it The Tea Partiers will go after NEXT, to achieve THEIR ONLY CORRECT WAY, "DIE ENZIG RICHTIGE WEG" ????

Could be YOU unless you say NOT HERE in the USA,
NO WAY!!

NEVER AGAIN,
"NIE WEIDER"!

--- WT Reader

WTREADER, This all sounds like volksverdummung to me. You seem to believe, like our media, that if you tell a lie long enough and loud enough and often enough that the people will believe it. Didn't that tactic come from the Adolf Hitler political playbook? You are obviously well-versed in Nazi political tactics. Fortunately, the American Public has gotten wise to the slanted broadcasting they were being fed 24/7, from the other two failing entertainment networks(CNN and MSNBC,) and now choose to get their news from Fox Cable News-- you know, the only fair and balanced news media organization in America today. Have a nice day

ClassicalLib17 Wrote:WTREADER, This all sounds like volksverdummung to me. You seem to believe, like our media, that if you tell a lie long enough and loud enough and often enough that the people will believe it. Didn't that tactic come from the Adolf Hitler political playbook? You are obviously well-versed in Nazi political tactics. Fortunately, the American Public has gotten wise to the slanted broadcasting they were being fed 24/7, from the other two failing entertainment networks(CNN and MSNBC,) and now choose to get their news from Fox Cable News-- you know, the only fair and balanced news media organization in America today. Have a nice day

Anyone who thinks any news media is fair, balanced and unbiased is the perfect subject for their propaganda.

Fact is the post-Weimar Republic in which Hitler became the new Chancellor of Germany, in time....
"first they came after..." was and still remains a FACT of history.

ALL started with "going after the Communists." Then it was another group, then another, then another.
All begun by right-wing extremists, and look where it ULTIMATELY led....Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Auschwitz.

Totally proper, fitting and necessary to ask the question, SINCE the extremist right-wing regime in the Arizona
legislature and in The Tea Party Movement are coming after those who They deem "look like illegals"... then who next
will They designate as "not looking just quite right"...not looking the Way They think citizens SHOULD look??

"DIE EINZIG RICHTIGE WEG!!!!"

I repeat since those critics here seem to have conveniently overooked the January 6, 1946 excerpts a reknown sermon
by Lutheran Pastor Paster Martin Niemöller, a former concentration camp prisoner of "DIE EINGIG RICHTIGE WEG" Regime of Der Führer,
I post the Pastor's most timely words again:

"In Nazi Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me —
and by that time no one was left to speak up."

I suggest looking beyond what FOX NEWS has to say about Their support of Arizona's SB1070 ....

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.politicususa.com/en/fox-news-nazi">http://www.politicususa.com/en/fox-news-nazi</a><!-- m -->

....to what others are saying about this New Act, such as Cardinal Roger Mahoney of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, along with a host of others
as seen in these links below:

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/04/arizona-illegal-immigrant-crackdown-akin-to-nazi-tactics-cardinal-mahony-says.html">http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2 ... -says.html</a><!-- m -->

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miguel-guadalupe/arizonas-sb1070-gestapo-l_b_545959.html">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miguel-gu ... 45959.html</a><!-- m -->

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=83950">http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=83950</a><!-- m -->

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/95123-mack-r-compares-ariz-law-to-nazi-germany">http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- ... zi-germany</a><!-- m -->

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2010/05/immigration-mexico-arizona">http://www.newstatesman.com/north-ameri ... co-arizona</a><!-- m -->

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/04/20/20100420lawmaker-says-arizona-immigration-law-like-nazi-germany-politico.html">http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/ ... itico.html</a><!-- m -->

"FIRST THEY CAME AFTER......."

-- WT Reader

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.city-journal.org/2010/eon0430hm.html">http://www.city-journal.org/2010/eon0430hm.html</a><!-- m -->


Heather Mac Donald
Praising Arizona
The state’s new immigration law is perfectly reasonable, but you wouldn’t know it from the New York Times.
30 April 2010

Supporters of Arizona’s new law strengthening immigration enforcement in the state should take heart from today’s New York Times editorial blasting it. “Stopping Arizona” contains so many blatant falsehoods that a reader can be fully confident that the law as actually written is a reasonable, lawful response to a pressing problem. Only by distorting the law’s provisions can the Times and the law’s many other critics make it out to be a racist assault on fundamental American rights.

The law, SB 1070, empowers local police officers to check the immigration status of individuals whom they have encountered during a “lawful contact,” if an officer reasonably suspects the person stopped of being in the country illegally, and if an inquiry into the person’s status is “practicable.” The officer may not base his suspicion of illegality “solely [on] race, color or national origin.” (Arizona lawmakers recently amended the law to change the term “lawful contact” to “lawful stop, detention or arrest” and deleted the word “solely” from the phrase regarding race, color, and national origin. The governor is expected to sign the amendments.) The law also requires aliens to carry their immigration documents, mirroring an identical federal requirement. Failure to comply with the federal law on carrying immigration papers becomes a state misdemeanor under the Arizona law.

Good luck finding any of these provisions in the Times’s editorial. Leave aside for the moment the sweeping conclusions with which the Times begins its screed—such gems as the charge that the law “turns all of the state’s Latinos, even legal immigrants and citizens, into criminal suspects” and is an act of “racial separation.” Instead, let’s see how the Times characterizes the specific legislative language, which is presumably the basis for its indictment.

The paper alleges that the “statute requires police officers to stop and question anyone who looks like an illegal immigrant.” False. The law gives an officer the discretion, when practicable, to determine someone’s immigration status only after the officer has otherwise made a lawful stop, detention, or arrest. It does not allow, much less require, fishing expeditions for illegal aliens. But if, say, after having stopped someone for running a red light, an officer discovers that the driver does not have a driver’s license, does not speak English, and has no other government identification on him, the officer may, if practicable, send an inquiry to his dispatcher to check the driver’s status with a federal immigration clearinghouse.

The Times then alleges that the law “empower[s] police officers to stop anyone they choose and demand to see papers.” False again, for the reasons stated above. An officer must have a lawful, independent basis for a stop; he can only ask to see papers if he has “reasonable suspicion” to believe that the person is in the country illegally. “Reasonable suspicion” is a legal concept of long-standing validity, rooted in the Constitution’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures.” It meaningfully constrains police activity; officers are trained in its contours, which have evolved through common-law precedents, as a matter of course. If the New York Times now thinks that the concept is insufficient as a check on police power, it will have to persuade every court and every law enforcement agency in the country to throw out the phrase—and the Constitution with it—and come up with something that suits the Times’s contempt for police power.

On broader legal issues, the Times is just as misleading. The paper alleges that the “Supreme Court has consistently ruled that states cannot make their own immigration laws.” Actually, the law on preemption is almost impossibly murky. As the Times later notes in its editorial, the Justice Department ruled in 2002, after surveying the relevant Supreme Court and appellate precedents, that “state and local police had ‘inherent authority’ to make immigration arrests.” The paper does not like that conclusion, but it has not been revoked as official legal advice. If states have inherent authority to make immigration arrests, they can certainly do so under a state law that merely tracks the federal law requiring that immigrants carry documentation.

The Times tips its hand at the end of the editorial. It calls for the Obama administration to end a program that trains local law enforcement officials in relevant aspects of immigration law and that deputizes them to act as full-fledged immigration agents. The so-called 287(g) program acts as a “force multiplier,” as the Times points out, adding local resources to immigration law enforcement—just as Arizona’s SB 1070 does. At heart, this force-multiplier effect is what the hysteria over Arizona’s law is all about: SB 1070 ups the chances that an illegal alien will actually be detected and—horror of horrors—deported. The illegal-alien lobby, of which the New York Times is a charter member, does not believe that U.S. immigration laws should be enforced. (The Times’s other contribution today to the prevailing de facto amnesty for illegal aliens was to fail to disclose, in an article about a brutal 2007 schoolyard execution in Newark, that the suspected leader was an illegal alien and member of the predominantly illegal-alien gang Mara Salvatrucha.) Usually unwilling for political reasons to say so explicitly, the lobby comes up with smoke screens—such as the Times’s demagogic charges about SB 1070 as an act of “racial separation”—to divert attention from the underlying issue. Playing the race card is the tactic of those unwilling to make arguments on the merits.

The Arizona law is not about race; it’s not an attack on Latinos or legal immigrants. It’s about one thing and one thing only: making immigration enforcement a reality. It is time for a national debate: Do we or don’t we want to enforce the country’s immigration laws? If the answer is yes, the Arizona law is a necessary and lawful tool for doing so. If the answer is no, we should end the charade of inadequate, half-hearted enforcement, enact an amnesty now, and remove future penalties for immigration violations.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal, the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the coauthor of The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today’s.