Hispanic Fanatic

I’ve written before about the bond between Latinos and Jews. There’s even an official alliance to foster this connection.

And now we have statistical evidence that this bond is growing stronger. According to a study by the Anti-Defamation League  (ADL), anti-Semitism is on the decline among Latinos. About 14 percent of American-born Hispanics hold anti-Semitic views, which “represents a welcome decline” from 2011, when 20 percent of Latinos had issues with people named Goldstein and Silverman.

Of course, 14 percent is still way too high, but at least it’s moving in the right direction.

Now, if you had any doubts that Latinos and Jews are strongly linked, consider this related news story out of my home state of Wisconsin. Apparently, a few weeks ago, a severely inebriated man in Janesville exited a bar late one night and “overheard two men on the street speaking Hebrew. He confronted them, demanding they speak English.”

The drunk guy then hit both men “because he believed they were speaking Spanish.” This member of the English-only league has since been charged with two counts of battery with a hate crime enhancer.

No, it’s not an uplifting story. In fact, it sounds like an Onion headline. But clearly, to some Americans, it doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish or Latino — you’re marked for a beat down.

It’s a good thing, then, that Hispanics and Jews have each other’s backs.

Leave it the Onion to point out the irony of constructing a fence along the Mexican border. The Department of Homeland Security is using its authority to waive environmental and land-management laws to build this wall, which leads to the Onion’s punch line of “Hey, sometimes you’ve got to break the rules to do what you know is right—unless that involves crossing a border, of course.”

Yes, massive government agencies can ignore laws at their whim. But desperate people in Mexico must stay poverty-stricken because they haven’t gone through proper channels. If you’re keeping track, we’re breaking laws to prevent people from breaking laws. But we insist that if these people only followed the law, we wouldn’t have to waive other laws to stop them – exactly.

I find this all the more hilarious because one of the top arguments in the vilification of the undocumented is that “they’re breaking the law,” which is designed to end the debate before it begins. This point of view would have more validity if we weren’t a nation of speeders who cheat on our taxes and steal office supplies from our jobs.

But let’s assume that all the people who take this position – that the law is sacrosanct with zero tolerance for violations – have never broken any rules themselves, even for such minor justifications as, say, the very economic survival of their families.

Why then does all the preaching about the sanctity of the law suddenly get tossed aside when the rules are inconvenient to our government? If we’re standing up for the rule of law, why is admirable to kick regulations to the curb when they get in the way of what we want to do? How is this much different from an illegal who jumps a fence to do what he feels he has to do in order to survive, regardless of the law?

For the record, I’m not opposed to the building of a fence because I think it’s unfriendly to Mexico, or somehow rude to illegals. Those arguments are irrelevant.

I’m opposed because it’s a massive waste of money that isn’t going to work. People who are determined enough will dig under a wall or hop over it or go around it or find some way to teleport through it, David Copperfield-style.

But now I can add the charge of hypocrisy to my objections.