Left News and Views

From a Human Rights First newsletter:

In July, Luis Ramirez, a Mexican immigrant in Shenandoah,
Pennsylvania, was attacked by a group of teenagers yelling
racial slurs. Ramirez, a 25-year old father of two, died
later of injuries from the beating.

The incident is part of a disturbing trend. Violent hate crime is on the rise throughout Europe and North America. Our recently published 2008 Hate Crime Survey charts bias-driven violence and assesses government responses in the 56 countries that comprise the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It looks at hate crime by category (xenophobia and racism, antisemitism, anti-Muslim bias, homophobia, and others) as well as by country, and sets out a Ten-Point Plan for stronger government action to combat these crimes.

Violent hate crime can ruin lives, or, as it did in the case of Luis Ramirez, tragically end them. But these crimes are also an attack on the society at large, undermining the notions of equality and the equal protection of the law. HRF is urging governments to enact and enforce tougher laws, backed by stronger systems of monitoring and enforcement, to reverse this dangerous trend.

An August 19th update from Democracy Now:

Judge Reduces Charges in Killing of Mexican Immigrant

In Pennsylvania, a district judge has thrown out first- and second-degree murder charges against a pair of teenagers accused of beating to death a Mexican immigrant in the town of Shenandoah last month. Instead, the teenagers are now being tried on counts of third-degree murder and ethnic intimidation in the death of Luis Ramirez. A third teenager has been charged with aggravated assault, ethnic intimidation and other counts. On Monday, a fourth teenager testified in court that one of his friends kicked Ramirez in the head while he lay motionless in the street. After the teenagers beat Ramirez, one of them told an eyewitness, “Tell your Mexican friends to get out of Shenandoah, or you’ll be laying next to him.”

Well really, what do you expect in a country that is proud of it’s ignorance?

We like to think that America is number one. But number one in what?

Racism, sexism, ageism, weightism, whatever prejudice you can think to name, we practice it here. It is completely insane.

How can we possibly think to grow and thrive as a nation when we cannot even accept each other as fellow Americans or even as fellow human beings. You know, this country is all immigrants.

Even “native americans” aren’t. They may have come over way ahead of the rest of us, but even they started somewhere else. Archaeologists and anthropologists may not be able to agree on how they got here from Africa/Asia/Europe or even exactly when they came over, but they did not start here. We may call their coming here a migration as opposed to immigration but the fact remains that no human being is “native” to this part of the world.

Unless we pull our heads out and learn to accept and adapt we, as a species, are doomed. The earth won’t be inherited by the meek, it’ll be inherited by the insects.