This week, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is holding a rally hosting a various extreme anti-immigrant radio hosts. Yet FAIR promotes themselves as a mainstream organization, touting their ability to “shed light on this complex subject on their website." Below the jump are some of the extreme, violent, offensive and false comments that FAIR's rally guests have made.
Jeff Katz
Katz Has Been Repeatedly Fired For Offensive Comments, Including A “Joke” Encouraging Violence Against Immigrants
Katz was fired from a radio station after he made a “joke” suggesting that drivers who run down illegal immigrants at the border should win food from Taco Bell. Katz was also fired from a separate radio station after The Islamic Center of Charlotte called for a boycott of advertisers. From a May 8, 2007, article in The Charlotte Observer (retrieved via Nexis):
[Jibril Hough, spokesman for the Islamic Center of Charlotte] said Katz sarcastically refers to Islam as “the religion of peace”; distorts passages in the Koran, the Muslims' sacred book; calls Muslims who disagree with him “apologists for terrorists”; and refuses to let Hough and other Muslims speak on his show.
Katz Claimed That Police Officers “Would Have Been Justified In Shooting” Rodney King
From a January 22, 1993, Hartford Courant article:
Katz said that in the Los Angeles incident, King had not “followed the lawful direction of these officers and, according to the police reports, had lunged repeatedly at a number of the officers, and in many places the officers would have been justified in shooting him, absolutely.”
Phil Valentine
Valentine's Immigration Policy: “Shoot Him!”
On April 27, 2006, Valentine held a "Demagnetize America Illegal Immigration Town Hall Meeting" in Franklin, Tennessee. More than 1,000 people attended. Jim Gilchrist, leader of the anti-immigrant vigilante group Minuteman Project, was advertised as the headliner but did not appear. Sharing the stage with Valentine were TN State Senator Bill Ketron (R-13), State Representative Tom DuBois (R-64), and State Representative Glen Casada (R-63).
During the town hall meeting, Valentine conducted a question-and-answer session with Susan Tully, the National Field Director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. At one point, Tully described how Border Patrol agents repeatedly would apprehend certain Latino immigrants, returning them to Mexico each time only to later detain them again. Tully claimed that a Border Patrol agent in Laredo, Texas, told her that they would sometimes apprehend the same individual as many as seven times.
Tully then said she asked the agent, 'What do you do on the eighth time?"
Valentine interjected, “Shoot him!”
Tully laughed, and the crowd cheered.
The exchange was broadcast live on 99.7 WTN.
Valentine Propagates Diseased Immigrant Myth
Valentine has repeatedly propagated the myth that Latino immigrants are reintroducing diseases such as leprosy and Chagas disease to America. As one flier promoting a Valentine anti-immigration event in June 2006 put it, “Diseases once thought eradicated are returning with a vengeance due to illegal immigration.”
Valentine Supported English-Only Ballot Measure
Valentine was a high-profile supporter of the 2008 “English-First” ballot measure in Nashville that was ultimately defeated by voters. The measure was in fact English-only, not English-First. It would have prohibited city government workers from communicating in any language other than English and eliminated all translation services for non-English speaking residents.
The drive for the ballot measure was funded almost entirely by ProEnglish, one of several anti-immigration groups founded by Dr. John Tanton.
Valentine Promotes "Ebonics Translator"
Valentine's website links to an “Ebonics translator” that invites users to “talk like a pimp.”
Valentine Promotes OKC Bombing Conspiracy Theory
Valentine has espoused the outlandish conspiracy theory that the FBI orchestrated the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City. He wrote that the FBI worked in conjunction with Islamic terrorists, including Jose Padilla, the U.S. citizen arrested in 2002 for conspiring with foreign Islamic terrorists in a “dirty bomb” plot. (Padilla was convicted in 2007.)
Steve Gill
Gill Suggested Sending The Military To “Shoot People” At The Southern Border
From a May 28, 2006, article in The Tennessean titled “Race sparks border debate” (retrieved via Nexis):
“They would never say we should bring cruise ships full of undereducated, disease-ridden, impoverished Haitians to this country to undercut the wages of the Hispanic community,” [Steve] Gill said.
The anger reflected on the Internet and the radio stems from the sense many feel that the country is being invaded, he said. While Gill said he's never told his listeners to use violence against Hispanics, he understands why some feel there should be a military response.
“If 100,000 Mexicans rushed the border at the same time and if people looked at the situation the way it really is, no one would call it anything other than an invasion, and we would send in the military and shoot people,” Gill said.
Gill: Obama And His “Evil Minions” Hate America
In August 2009, Gill wrote of President Obama: “This man, and his evil minions, really do hate this country! Democrats who do not denounce this President and his traitorous allies are in league with him and should be exposed for what they are!”
Gill Referred To Convicted Rapists As “Vicious Black Animals” And “Black Thugs”
In an August 26, 2009 post, Gill wrote:
The trial of another participant in the rape, torture and murder of a young white couple by a group of vicious black animals has led to a second conviction on charges of rape and murder...The mainstream media has ignored this trial because of the race of the victims who were brutalized by black thugs.
Heidi Harris
Harris Suggested Hispanic High School Students Were “Racist” For Criticizing Sharron Angle
During a discussion of Sharron Angle's remark to a group of Hispanic students that “some of you look Asian to me,” Harris suggested the students who complained were “racist” because “the Hispanics think it's insulting to be told that you look like an Asian.” In the same segment, on the October 20, 2010, edition of MSNBC's The Ed Show, Harris said, “you don't belong to a 'Hispanic' group if you want diversity,” using air quotes.
Harris Suggested That It Is Wrong For Teachers To Teach “Tolerance Of Others”
Harris has also played a song on the air called “12 Days of Winter” that suggests that it is wrong for teachers to teach “Suzie has two mommies” and “Islam is peaceful,” or encourage “diversity” and “tolerance of others.”
Joyce Kaufman
Kaufman: “If Ballots Don't Work, Bullets Will”
Addressing the crowd at a July 3, 2010, Tea Party of Ft. Lauderdale rally, Kaufman said:
I don't care how this gets painted by the mainstream media, I don't care if this shows up on YouTube, because I am convinced that the most important thing the founding fathers did to ensure me my First Amendment rights, was they gave me a Second Amendment. And if ballots don't work, bullets will.
I've never in my life thought that the day would come where I would tell individual citizens that you are responsible for being the militia that the founding fathers designed. They were very specific - you need to be prepared to fight tyranny, whether it comes from outside, or whether it comes from inside. And we are at a moment in history where I have a president who has declared to the entire world that he cannot secure my borders, that he cannot get rid of people who don't belong in this country, which means he cannot do his job.
Kaufman On Punishing Illegal Immigrants: “If You Commit A Crime While You're Here, We Should Hang You And Send Your Body Back To Where You Came From”
The Miami New Times reported:
The statement about hanging illegals prompted Aileen Josephs, a West Palm Beach-based immigration attorney, to report Kaufman to the Federal Communications Commission for “indecent” language. The Anti-Defamation League says it has also received complaints about “offensive” remarks on the program.
Kaufman says the “hanging” comment came from a listener and that it was taken out of context. The conversation that day, she says, was about a Mexican man who was smuggling drugs into the country. In August, however, it was Kaufman herself who said on her show: “If you commit a crime while you're here, we should hang you and send your body back to where you came from, and your family should pay for it.”
“There's nothing illegal about saying that people should be [hanged] in public squares for crimes,” Kaufman says, speaking to New Times. “Now, if I said, 'Okay, you guys need to go out and capture the first Hispanic immigrant that you think might have committed a crime and commit an act of violence on him' -- if I did that, I've violated FCC rules. But I wouldn't do that....
”I don't think violence will win this. I don't want to hurt anybody. I just want the laws to be enforced in this country. And my frustration leads me to make outrageous statements all the time."
Kaufman: Immigrants “Drive Without Mufflers” And “Bring Disease”
The Miami New Times reported:
In the Sixties, [Kaufman] supported the Zero Population Growth movement, which held that reducing the growth rate of human populations was essential for the health of the ecosphere. “We wanted to shut down immigration completely -- no legal, no illegal immigration -- until we got ourselves together in this country and started really figuring out how much we should consume, how much we should expend, how much space would be required,” she says.
“Back then, that's what left-wing tree-huggers were.... Then, somehow, they got all confused. The Sierra Club and all these organizations I used to belong to started being like bleeding-hearts about 'Oh, the poor people, poor people.' Well, guess what? We are destroying the environment in this country at an incredibly accelerated pace because of this group of people who have come to this country and have to live a very substandard existence. They don't have mufflers on their cars. I mean, it sounds like silly nonsense, but it's not. The cumulative effect is huge. They live, you know, 10 to a household; they bring disease with them.”
Kaufman Admits To Being “Obsessed With Exposing Radical Islam”
From a 2009 interview with Broward Palm Beach New Times:
“I am obsessed with exposing radical Islam,” Kaufman told us by phone. “Sharia law is infiltrating my society, and if something isn't done about it, America will fall. I'm just addressing these issues in an open and honest way. Islam needs to go through a major reformation; it's a nontolerant religion. You had the same thing with Christianity, the Crusades, early on, and eventually Christianity was reformed. I look at London; I have friends who can't live there anymore. The same thing is happening here.”
Les Kinsolving
Kinsolving: Americans With AIDS Should Be Quarantined
In a July 10, 2010 WorldNetDaily column, Kinsolving wrote:
“If ”typhoid Mary" Mallon was so isolated for so long, to protect the public from typhoid, when will New York and the United States begin protecting the public from spreaders of the far deadlier disease of AIDS?"
Kinsolving: Congressional Black Caucus Is “Racist”
In an August 31, 2010 WorldNetDaily column, Kinsolving wrote:
Also, there is nowhere in this Times article any mention of the regrettably outrageous fact that the Congressional Black Caucus is a racially segregated organization. These racists have repeatedly turned down membership applications from members of Congress who were born with insufficiently dark skin shade.
Seventy-one-year-old 10-term Rep. Waters is one of the most militant of these congressional black racists.
Kinsolving Is A Birther
Kinsolving, a “White House correspondent” for the far-right website WorldNetDaily, repeatedly pestered former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs about President Obama's “real” birth certificate long after it was posted on the Internet. When Gibbs asked Kinsolving last year whether Kinsolving believes the president was born in the United States, Kinsolving replied, "I don't know."
Kinsolving: Repealing DADT Will Put “Buggers Into The Barracks”
In response to the permanent injunction against DADT, Kinsolving wrote at WND:
If [repealing DADT] is ever done to our armed forces there will be a far greater drop in enlistments by service members who, with their families, are opposed to sodomy acceptance.
The recruitment of self-announced homosexuals would also cause a major medical problem given the sexual orientation's high rates of AIDS and syphilis.
In two weeks from today every member of the House and one-third of the Senate is either up for re-election or has retired. Does anyone believe that this California federal judge's attempt to force the acceptance of openly announced buggers into the barracks will not result in an even greater number of votes against the majority of Democrats who support this very dangerous and disease-ridden judicial decision?
Roger Hedgecock
Hedgecock Baselessly Claimed Census Worker's Death Was Due To “Open Border”
Hedgecock baselessly claimed that the death of a Census worker could be due to “our still open border with Mexico.” The Census worker's death was later determined to be a suicide.
Hedgecock Called President Obama An “Affirmative-Action Hire”
In a column at WND, Hedgecock wrote:
The black (as the half-white Obama described himself in the census) president has acted with all the thin-skinned self-consciousness of an affirmative-action hire.
Hedgecock Made False Claim About “Illegal Alien Home Mortgages”
On the October 10, 2006, edition of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, Hedgecock falsely claimed that the Department of Housing and Urban Development said there are “5 million illegal alien home mortgages that have gone bad.”
Martha Zoller
Zoller: “Leftists, Socialists And Communists Have Taken Over” The Immigration Movement
In a May 10, 2010 column for Human Events, Zoller wrote:
The rally was rounded out with chants for government-paid college education for illegal immigrants and the desire for “no borders” and “free movement for all workers.” They chanted “Si, Se Puede” (Yes, We Can), “It's still a crime to be brown in America” and “We must draw on the legacy of Che Guevara.” It's clear that leftists, Socialists and Communists have taken over this movement.
Now immigration has become an issue in the Georgia governor's race. Former Rep. Nathan Deal has been a champion of border security and ending birthright citizenship during his time in Congress and is taking that issue to his race for governor.
[...]
Arizona is acting on the needs of its people just as Georgia did several years ago when it passed legislation making it tougher for illegal immigrants to work and access the system in Georgia. GALEO (Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials) said Georgia was inhospitable to immigrants. Not exactly, Georgia has become inhospitable to illegal immigrants, there is a difference.