Ask Malkin why she
cannot learn to be civil
I hear lots of talk about civility, especially from political conservatives. Yet, in last week’s The Dominion Post, here’s Michelle Malkin, echoing President Trump’s speech about Baltimore: “… from the lawless hellhole of Portland to the D.C. swamp, to the Big Apple criminal sanctuary.”
Given time, I’m sure Malkin will vilify every big city in the country. She says that “terrorists” are attacking ICE and Homeland Security, but she can’t point to any deaths, unlike El Paso where an avowed racist drove clear across Texas to murder Mexicans, or Dayton, where a gunman attacked an entertainment district frequented by African-Americans.
She doesn’t focus on real problems, like too many assault weapons in our society, or racist attitudes from our president, but points out that 89-year old George Soros, who has donated most of his sizable fortune to anti-poverty and social justice programs, is somehow to blame for every problem in the United States.
Malkin says, “This is not anti-Semitism, white nationalism, or white supremacy, it’s fact.” What is fact is that she chooses to focus on people associated with antifa, a loose conglomeration of people who struggled with avowed white supremacists who rallied in Portland last week. She denigrates people by calling them “unvetted Muslim refugees” and “unassimilated low-wage Central American labor,” who will “erase the America my legal immigrant parents taught me to cherish.”
Malkin is a woman of color, but that doesn’t mean she is not a racist. And, as she was born nearly 50 years ago, the America of privilege she and I grew up in has changed and expanded. We can be generous and embrace change as it comes, or we can revert to demonizing refugees, marking them as less than human.
The next time a conservative columnist asks why people can’t be more civil, I will ask if they have confronted Malkin about her language.
Barry Lee Wendell
Morgantown
Some things that are
legal are still wrong
In a recent letter by Johanna Winant, she wrote that the cruelty of imprisoning immigrants in concentration camps is obvious. She shared facts — like that seeking asylum is legal, immigrants are good for the economy, and that they pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits.
She also mentioned her own family’s history — like many immigrants today, they sought asylum. But she also said that all of this is beside the point, because if you can’t see that our treatment of immigrants is evil, your moral compass is missing.
The letter must have touched a nerve, because a response (DP-Aug. 7) to it was recently published. She was accused of not knowing the history of the Nazis, because she used the term “concentration camps” to refer to how we are imprisoning immigrants on the southern border. I invite anyone who is still in doubt to look up the letter by 150 scholars of genocide to the U.S. Holocaust Museum from July 1, in which they agree that we are imprisoning immigrants in concentration camps, and that term is properly used.
Let us remember that seeking asylum is entirely legal. If someone crosses the border illegally, it’s a misdemeanor. And we don’t indefinitely separate people from their children because of unpaid parking tickets. Federal judges have repeatedly ordered the Trump administration to stop separating families; they have not, in violation of law.
However, I will say that even if imprisoning asylum-seeking immigrants in concentration camps and separating them from their children were legal I would still oppose it. Sometimes, things that are legal are still wrong. Slavery was legal, and it was evil. It is because we love our country that we must oppose its evil actions on the southern border.
Sara Anderson
Morgantown
