April 23, 2007

Diversity Is Strength! It’s Also...Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome

The Virginia Tech massacre compels inquiring minds to search out the many other instances of immigrants who purposely kill in quantity.

We must call this “Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome”, to match Daniel Pipes’ term “Sudden Jihad Syndrome” describing the distinct tendency of Muslims in the U.S. to start suddenly offing Americans. In fact, Sudden Jihad Syndrome may just be a special case of Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome.

But guess what? The Mainstream Media doesn’t seem to have any inquiring minds. Even to find these immigrant mass murders is extremely difficult because of the MSM's agenda-driven refusal to use the I-word.

Additionally, some true crime websites are suspiciously shy about noting immigration backgrounds. Gory crime details are meticulously catalogued, but foreign origin given little attention.

As VDARE.COM has pointed out many times, this pattern of hiding the immigration status of perps is reprehensible, unhelpful and (for what it’s worth) contradicts the media’s self-proclaimed principles—see the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics for unintentional hilarity.

But it’s not a laughing matter. In effect, political correctness is blinding Americans to very real danger that is being imported through immigration policy.

One example: four years ago, in an incident that eerily foreshadows the Virginia Tech Massacre, an immigrant gunman carrying two guns and 1000 rounds of ammunition took some 100 people hostage. He killed one and wounded two before police shot and captured him. Why didn’t you know about this?

(For more details, read on.)

James Fulford used the free search engine Google to make his compilation of immigrant mass murders a few days ago. Through the generosity of a VDARE.COM donor, I’ve been able to use the proprietary service LexisNexis.

Here is my quick, non-comprehensive list of additional immigrant mass murderers.

Railroad killer Angel Resendez, an illegal alien from Mexico, murdered at least nine and perhaps up to 15 people as he hopped freight trains to escape authorities. Strictly, Resendez was a serial killer rather than a sudden rage killer, but on at least one occasion he killed a husband and wife together. He was in the hands of authorities several times, but the government's identification database was not up to the task of spotting the criminal. Michelle Malkin used Resendez as the poster boy for inept tracking of foreigners in her book Invasion, using a whole chapter to analyze the failure of INS that cost so many lives.

Juan Corona, also a serial killer, was convicted in 1971 for killing 25 farm workers near Yuba City, California. His work as a labor contractor brought him into contact with fellow Mexicans, which may have facilitated his sick spree of sadistic homosexual attacks and machete murders.

Gian Luigi Ferri was born in Asmara, Ethiopia and was educated as an engineer, immigrating to the US at age 27. He fatally shot eight people and injured six others before committing suicide at 101 California Street in San Francisco in 1993. The crime shocked the area and convinced Sen. Dianne Feinstein that…gun control was needed against so-called assault weapons. This led to legislation in 1994 banning high-capacity magazines and some firearms entirely.

Humberto de la Torre killed 25 in a 1982 Los Angeles arson destroying the Dorothy Mae Apartment-Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. He set the fire because of an argument about his gang activities with his uncle who managed the building. A Mexican national, he pleaded guilty to 25 counts of first-degree murder and was sentenced in 1985 to 625 years in prison.

Julio Gonzalez, set fire to a New York nightclub in 1990 after having a quarrel there with his former girlfriend who worked checking coats. The arson at the Happy Land social club killed 87, making it one of the worst mass murders in U.S. history. The unemployed Cuban came to the United States in the disastrous 1980 Mariel boatlift. Another interesting immigration angle: the nightclub was unlicensed, having been closed in 1988 for code violation, and catered to Hondurans.

(It's curious how the mass murdering via fire doesn't seem to shock as much as when the crime involves guns. The victims are just as dead, and they may have had a far more horrific death by fire than if they had died from a gunshot. Remember how trapped 9/11 victims in the World Trade Center jumped to their deaths rather than be burned alive. But there is no Sarah Brady of gas cans.)

President Carter's welcome to over 125,000 Marielitos had plenty of immigrant crime blowback. They even included some 800-900 Cuban criminals who, while on their initial immigration parole into the United States, were convicted of violations of state or federal law ranging from attempted murder to trafficking in cocaine to petty theft and have been in detention ever since. A Congressional inquiry found that around 10 percent of Marielitos had a criminal or mental illness background that would have precluded their legal admittance.

Another immigrant category deserves attention: attempted immigrant mass murders that failed. Police thwarted these would-be killers before they could rack up their desired high death count.

Mehrdad Dashti, a 30-year-old Iranian, took 33 hostages in a popular bar near UC Berkeley in 1990. He killed one and wounded seven before police stormed the building and shot him dead, after attempts to talk him out failed in the eight-hour siege. He was described as hating blond-haired people generally and women in particular. Reports differ about whether the blond women hostages were sexually abused.

(The cultural disdain for women among Middle Eastern men is justly famous. As I've mentioned in a discussion of what Daniel Pipes has called “Sudden Jihad Syndrome”, a person who is under psychological stress or suffering mental illness may revert to early conditioning for the form in which his unhappiness is expressed. Among Muslims, that can mean a jihad-like fury against Americans, particularly women for the freedom they enjoy in this country. A 2002 Freedom House report noted that Muslims are urged in many American mosques to "behave as if on a mission behind enemy lines." We shouldn't be surprised when they follow that instruction.)

In March 2006, Mohammed Taheri-azar, a native of Iran, didn't kill anyone when he aimed his SUV at pedestrians on UNC's campus with intent to kill, but it wasn't for lack of trying. He did injure several and was charged with nine counts of attempted murder. His statement about his actions revealed jihadist ideology behind his intention to kill, writing from prison, "the Koran gives permission for those who follow Allah to attack those who have waged war against them".

Taheri had lived most of his life in this country and was a college graduate, yet the influence of Islam and his Muslim milieu were more influential than his years of American education.

In August, 2006, Afghan immigrant Omeed Aziz Popal used his SUV to kill Stephen Wilson as he walked in a bike lane in Fremont, California. Then Popal drove 33 miles in freeway traffic to San Francisco, where he ran down 19 on a cross-city automotive rampage. He was arrested after a police officer rammed his squad car into the SUV. One victim, Susan Rajic, 43, may be paralyzed as a quadriplegic for life.

And then the Virginia Tech lookalike I mentioned above:

Indian immigrant Biswanath Halder killed one and shot two others in the course of a seven-hour siege at Case Western Reserve University in 2003. This could easily have ended just as badly as or even worse than Virginia Tech. The young man murdered by Halder was just as poignant a story as the many Virginia students struck down: Norman Wallace, 30, was a hardworking graduate student who had recently been elected the president of the Black MBA Student Association.

At the time, news coverage at the time appeared excited by the prospect of another white-guy gun conflagration—until the identification of the shooter was made. Then the case disappeared from national media.

Google reports not one national media mention of Halder in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre. In contrast, there are “about 7,740,000” mentions of “Virginia Tech”and “Gun Control.”

Immigration enthusiasts will object to this sort of analysis. They will say that America has plenty of home-grown killers. That's true. In fact, that's the point. We've already had too many Americans mass murdering. Consequently, we don't need to import murderers from abroad.

The accumulation of mass-murdering immigrants is the merely worst indicator of a society grown too diverse for social harmony. The elite ideological infatuation with diversity as the highest good has had a terrible cost. Teddy Roosevelt warned against hyphenated Americans and Balkanization as destructive to the America's unity. Today, in contrast, those negative characteristics are actually celebrated by our elite.

Professor Robert Putnam, the Bowling Alone scholar of community values has cautioned, "More ethnic diversity means less trust." Policy-makers should pay attention.—now.

Meanwhile, our latest tally of the Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome cost: 23 killers, about 238 dead, some 111 wounded. And counting.

Brenda Walker (email her) lives in Northern California and publishes two websites, LimitsToGrowth.org and ImmigrationsHumanCost.org. Recent events have convinced her that the Second Amendment should apply to citizens only.