Monday was World Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the Turner Classic Movies Channel played the movie Exodus, the not entirely by-the-book movie inspired by Leon Uris’ historical fiction novel of the same name. I am rereading that book, which is on my Kindle stack, these evenings, and have thus far resisted the temptation to spend $66.63, plus $3.00 for shipping, to buy the International Collectors Library hardcover version. 🙁
Naturally, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s hard-left columnist tried to use it to slam President Donald Trump’s policy of enforcing our immigration laws:
In New York, the Center for Jewish History opened up a three-month special exhibit that completely recreates the cramped, secret attic annex where the Amsterdam teen Anne Frank hid with her family and other Jews for two years and wrote her famous diary, before dying of typhus in a concentration camp at age 15. It recaptures the place where, 82 years ago this month, Frank wrote: ”Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes … Families are torn apart: men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find their parents have disappeared.”
In Chicago, terrible things are happening right now, as federal agents and police roam working-class blocks to carry out the initial raids of the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants that new President Donald Trump promised his voters in the 2024 campaign. Once again, people targeted by their country as undesirables are hiding in attics or cowering in basements, hoping to avoid a knock on the door.
In the largely Latino Hermosa neighborhood on the city’s northwest side, a frightened young woman who only gave her name as Melissa told a Chicago Tribune reporter that her parents ran and hid in their attic when agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, were spotted near their home.
“They took our neighbor’s dad,” Melissa told the journalist. “My parents were crying. We are terrified.” This despite the fact that her parents have no criminal record — the supposed goal of the raids that marked the first week of the Trump regime — and have been living and working in the United States for two decades.
Let’s be clear here: Melissa’s parents might not have a criminal record, but if they have been living in the United States illegally, they are criminals.
Her neighbor was one of 1,179 immigrants taken into custody on Sunday, as swarming teams of agents not just from ICE but other federal agencies swooped into homes — or, in one Atlanta suburb, outside a church — from Miami to Los Angeles and took the apprehended away in handcuffs, toward the eventual goal of shipping them back across the border, often to Central or South America. Although Trump regime officials — reflecting popular opinion — have stressed that federal agents are targeting known felons, NBC News reported Monday that nearly half of those swept up the day before did not have a criminal record.
The distinguished Mr Bunch is using curious logic here. Some of the people being in the United States illegally had no previous criminal record; does that mean, to Mr Bunch, that they should get a free pass on being here illegally? Many of the Capitol kerfuffle political prisoners had no previous criminal records, but I don’t recall the columnist saying that they should get a free pass.
He did seem rather displeased when newly inaugurated President Trump pardoned the vast majority of those political prisoners, and commuted the sentences of the remaining fourteen.
The long-time columnist wants to convey to us the notion that arresting illegal immigrants to deport them back to their home countries is somehow akin to the Geheime Staatspolizei rounding up Jews to send them to the concentration camps and their deaths. No, it’s sending them back to their home countries, something very different. The deported get to live; they just don’t get to live here.
Working in crime-ridden Philadelphia — I believe that Mr Bunch actually lives outside the city, but I do not know that with certainty — and its George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating District Attorney, Larry Krasner, you’d think that the father of Inquirer reporter Jesse Bunch would have some understanding of the problems of not enforcing the law.
Oh, wait, sorry, he really isn’t. He excused the violent George Floyd protests, protests demanding reduced policing, nor has he appeared particularly upset about the anti-Semitic protests that rocked the city’s own University of Pennsylvania.