AJC’s editorial board member Mike King on the ADL attacks in today’s Atlanta Journal Constitution

The ADL and D.A. King. I’ve been on the receiving end of verbal and e-mail blasts from anti-illegal immigration activist D.A. King going back to my days as public editor of the newspaper. When I joined the editorial board and took up the immigration issue, he became an even more frequent correspondent, vigorously disagreeing with much of what we wrote. We often joke about how the two of us (we aren’t related) can look at the same set of facts and draw totally opposite conclusions.

In recent years, he’s put himself front and center whenever the topic comes up at a public forum. He writes letters to the editor, he authors an occasional column in the Marietta Daily Journal and he’s a frequent contributor to anti-illegal immigration Web sites.

Last week, a report by the Anti-Defamation League said King and his Dustin Inman Society, a small anti-illegal immigration group he organized, “borrow from the playbook of hate groups to demonize Hispanics.” The ADL’s Southeast Regional Director Bill Nigut told the Marietta paper that King uses “hate-filled speech to characterize undocumented workers as a threat to the safety and well-being of American citizens.” The ADL’s national director, Abraham Foxman, said of King and other anti-immigration groups: “The Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis were not the only ones who saw an opportunity to sow the seeds of racism as a means to derail immigration reform.”

I share the ADL’s concerns about how the debate over immigration reform can degenerate into ugly racial stereotyping and cultural insensitivity. I’ve seen it happen on both sides of the issue.

Nigut calls the people in question “undocumented workers.” D.A. King calls them “illegal aliens.” I’ve used both terms and been criticized by one side for being demeaning to hard-working immigrants and by the other for lying about their legal status. When words take on such inflated importance, it obscures areas of agreement and ruins the chance to achieve consensus.

Still, I think the ADL’s branding of King as a racist is over the top. I’ve been around commentators, politicians and leaders of well-funded interest groups (unlike King’s shoestring-activist Inman Society) who are much quicker to play to racial prejudices on this issue. Lou Dobbs at CNN stirs up more prejudice in his nightly bombast about the threat of illegal immigration than D.A. King could ever imagine.

He and his group don’t strike me as a threat.

( Note from D.A. – I emailed Mike King asking ” a threat to what”?…he replied ” to the public order. to the First Amendment. ” From here, it looks like the ADL and Bill Nigut represent the threat)

Find this article at:
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/king/stories/2007/10/31/mkinged_1101.html

From yesterday’s Marietta Daily Journal Bill Nigut from the ADL. When the first attack came from the ADL last week, I called several journalists for whom I have a lot of respect and asked about Bill Nigut ( he was once a reporter for WSB-TV in Atlanta). Having seen Nigut in action and knowing that he works in partnership with Jerry Gonzalez of Sam Zamarripa’s GALEO – I have discarded the few good reports on him and made up my own mind.

Another hustler who has no integrety and is using the illegals as a money maker. Note that he never mentions the criminal employers and corrupt who are at the root of the crisis…which for the ADL, like GALEO and the other open borders groups is the income producer.

Yuck, Mr. Nigut.

Please know that the ADL pushed heavily for the amnesty-again in the U.S. Senate this year and will do so again. To national goal for these people and the entire open borders lobby is to marginalize everyone they regard as an effective enemy to repeating the failed amnesty of 1986. This is what desperation looks like.

If you want to ask Nigut if he has the courage to debate me in public…he can be reached here.

Bill Nigut: Bludgeons of Bigotry

Published: 10/31/2007

There’s no question that the issue of undocumented workers in this country needs to be debated openly.

Legitimate voices representing various perspectives on this thorny problem should be heard, whether they favor returning all those who entered this country illegally, support proposals that will integrate workers into mainstream American life or propose other approaches.

The Anti-Defamation League believes that our current immigration system must be reformed in a comprehensive manner that will serve America’s security and advance our humanitarian and economic interests. We also believe that the tenor of our national debate on immigration will test America’s character. Will we allow prejudice and bigotry to infect this essential dialogue? Or will we address the complex problem as women and men of good will?

When MDJ columnist D.A. King writes in the pages of this newspaper, he speaks with a reasoned voice to a mass audience. But this hasn’t always been the case. His past speeches and writings use racial stereotyping and fear as weapons in his war against the undocumented.

Three years ago, writing for MICHNews.com, King said this: “We have become sadly acquainted with the absolute and brazen disregard for the law that comes from the Third World horde that is allowed to swarm over our border with Mexico … when the mostly Mexican mob illegally ‘migrates’ into our nation, it brings with it the culture of lawlessness and chaos that is responsible for the very conditions that they flee in the rapidly deteriorating example of democracy without the rule of law that is Mexico.” (Emphasis mine.)

In fact, there are presumed to be as many as 12 to 20 million undocumented workers now living in the United States, and crime statistics make it clear that the vast majority are living here peacefully. If King wishes to argue that their presence is a threat to full-employment for American citizens, fine. But instead he raises a specter of fear by characterizing Mexicans in offensive and pejorative terms.

In a speech to a handful of Georgia Republicans in Covington earlier this year, King cleverly intertwined our legitimate fears of the threat from Islamic terrorists with a rant against undocumented Mexicans. At one point, according to a report in the Rockdale Citizen newspaper, he displayed a mock-up of a Mexican photo ID card, filled in with the name supplied by King: “Al Qaida Gonzalez.”

When he told the gathering that “They’re not here to mow your lawn – they’re here to blow up your buildings and kill your children, and you and me,” King says he was speaking of the Islamic threat. But since Muslim yard services tend to be few and far between, his intentional mixing of images seems clear: He is out to create fear about all illegal immigrants, be they Islamic terrorists or Mexican gardeners. And once a climate of fear about undocumented immigrants becomes widespread, how quickly do we as a people begin looking at all Hispanics living here with a jaundiced eye?

To his credit, King has now distanced himself from inflammatory remarks about illegal immigrants and others that he once posted on a Website called VDare. ADL hopes King has decided to remain in the mainstream of political debate on immigration.

The ADL perspective on this issue is informed by our keen awareness of how Jews have been marginalized and demonized over the centuries. It is entirely appropriate that we speak out when we see tactics of dehumanization used against other groups of people who have no voice of their own. And so it was disturbing to see a columnist for this newspaper scornfully dismiss our deep concern for civil discourse and our call for an end to the bigoted characterizations of Mexicans that have crept into a crucial debate.

If this nation of immigrants tries to solve its current immigrant crisis using the bludgeons of bigotry and fear, then we will truly have forgotten our roots and abandoned the principles Americans uphold with such justifiable pride.

Bill Nigut is Southeast Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League.