Ruben Navarrette Bashes Activists Almost As Harshly As He Bashes Nazis

Navarrette has a column today up on CNN.com critical of the protesters at Columbia who unfurled a banner on stage while Minuteman bigot Gilchrist was speaking last week. As when he defended the appointment of the defender of torture, Alberto Gonzalez, he does his best to position himself in "the middle" - between human rights activists and some of the most powerful and evil people in the U.S. today. Some middle ground, but let's not forget this is the same Navarrette who once was in a shouting match with Cesar Chavez, and supports vouchers while opposing affirmative action and bilingual education.

He notes: "It's not tough to win an argument with someone like Gilchrist. You just let him talk, and, before long, he'll say something inaccurate, intolerant, or idiotic." Of course that doesn't stop cable news from giving the man and his allies far more air time than they've ever given to the immigrants his organization terrorizes along the border. And it certainly does little to stop his organization from continuing to recruit and invite the racist anti-immigrant bashers out of the shadows. I guess it's easier to ignore the man when you know you will never have to face any direct consequences from his hate-mongering.

He goes on: "The protesters admit that they planned to take the stage in a peaceful protest. But, they claim, things got out of hand when they were attacked by a pro-Minutemen contingent. That's a lame excuse. What these protesters did was wrong, foolish and self-defeating. They could have helped inform the immigration dialogue on campus, but they chose intimidation over information and resorted to a heckler's veto to shut out speech that they found offensive. They forgot the first rule of free expression: that the answer to offensive speech is more speech, not less."

This single act, however, did far more to inform the campus, it informed the world. So in that sense it was far more effective than the campus dialogue he contemplates. The question about how effective it was in relation to the immigration debate is another story.

My sense so far is that it was very effective, particularly among those people who have the potential to be mobilized. Still, I think it is a valid argument to say the activists may have turned off a lot of would-be supporters - I just think those would-be supporters are weak-kneed moderate conservatives like Navarette who would just push for some horrible bill in Congress that just happens to be slightly better than far more reactionary legislation. So, why worry about minding our manners just to please more folks like him?

Finally he ends his piece with a bad example: "It is the same lesson we all learned in 1977 when a group of Nazis wanted to march in Skokie, Illinois, a mostly Jewish suburb of Chicago. The question of whether they should be allowed to march split the Jewish community, pitting civil libertarians against community activists. The Nazis won the right to march when the courts held they had a First Amendment right to express their views even if their message was vile and deliberately provocative."

So the lesson we learned was that Nazis have the right to march just like anybody else as far as the government is concerned. Great. Thanks for the civics lesson. That says nothing about what activists ought to do in response to bigots who seek to essentially have a parade celebrating hate and anti-semitism. It says nothing about what activists ought to do in response to bigots who seek to terrorize Latino immigrants seeking to be with their families or find employment, and force them to take deadly risks instead. I'm glad Navarrette is intelligent enough to see the connection between the Minutemen and Nazis, but he knows nothing about how to confront these people or the real consequences of simply ignoring this kind of hate and hoping people recognize it as "idiotic."

For the record the Nazis never marched in Skokie, and hopefully they never will.