According to ACLU attorney Jayashri Srikantiah, “The government’s [post-9/11] activities target the most vulnerable group: immigrants, especially Muslims.” Why do people and organizations who say such things get any respect? Cantor Fitzgerald employees were vulnerable when someone decided to injure them, and the ones who were at their desks September 11 died. Does the ACLU claim that someone is trying to injure immigrants and Muslims in the same way? If not, what kind of motive, injury and vulnerability does Miss Srikantiah have in mind?
As to “targeting,” she does have somewhat of a point. We’re at war with a shadowy network of foreign Muslims whose members in this country have killed thousands of Americans and destroyed billions upon billions of dollars worth of property. So prosecuting the war will involve going after people in this country who are Muslims and foreigners, just as prosecuting the Second World War involved going after people in Europe who were Germans and foreigners. It’s unclear why anyone who doesn’t resent the existence of this country and its people should think that in principle it’s a problem to treat a threat coming from within a definable foreign group as coming from within that group.
The ACLU, from its
The ACLU, from its inception, has had as its political goal a wholesale revamping of the American political/cultural landscape. It primarily functions a radical filter, straining leftwing ideas and causes into its political basket and by use of the American judicial process presses the levers of power to force socio-cultural change.
In the ACLU’s earliest forays into the world of politics and the courts, it rarely, if ever took any risks of adverse judicial rulings. Instead of directly opposing well entrenched American legal principles, it attacked rather the soft, legally unprotected, underbelly of America’s social mores agreed on by common consent in a homogeneous America. The interstitial spaces between the laws was their favorite target.
For example:
In the mid 1940’s 50’s major cities it was common for some local police precincts to act as a social agency of last resort for the homeless, the inebriated “street” people and some mentally ill who came to the precincts to get out of the cold, or because they were hungry or confused.
There were no rules permitting this, so the precincts sergeants used fictional charges of minor petty offenses (spitting on the sidewalk, vagrancy etc. disturbing the peace and the like) to allow these unfortunates into the jails and off the freezing streets for a day or two.
The ACLU pointed out that the practice had no basis in law,that without legitimat criminal charge police could not hold these people and the tradition was stopped dead in its tracks.
For example.:
In that same time period, the mentally ill were often referred to hospitals and sanitariums informally but directly by police agencies. They got medical/ psychiatric/hospital care and could live in these facilities almost indefinitely. Doctors were given great latitude in these matters. The ACLU claimed the mentally ill were being held against their will.
The courts held that only persons dangerous to the community or themselves could be detained. Many, many, thousands of mental patients were released all over the country, whether they were ready or not. Today these walking wounded can be seen on the streets of every large city in the nation.
The ACLU is the prime mover of the left radical effort to change the American’s separation between church and into a state wall against church’s everywhere. Its goal, nearly complete, is the erasure of all public evidence of religion in America by denial of equal access to the public landscape.
It is, today, one of the most well heeled organizations imaginable and enjoys near unlimited support across a broad spectrum of the left radical coalition. It is truly a nine hundred pound gorilla statue on the American front lawn.