The Real Violence on the Border

In yet another example of how every accusation the repug frightwingers hurl at others (stealing elections, raising the deficit, violating the Constitution) are actually confessions of their own behavior, the immigrant bashers in Arizona screaming about a non-existent crime wave are doing the murdering themselves.

David Neiwert at Crooks and Liars:

There was a funny smell to the way Arizona's police-state immigration law was passed -- especially the way factions with ties to white supremacists whipped up the phantom menace of a wave of crime associated with illegal immigration, focusing on the still-unsolved murder of a border rancher named Robert Krentz, even though officially the crime is being laid at the doorstep of Mexican drug cartels -- but even on that score, the truth is unclear at best. Notably, the Arizona Daily star reports that the chief suspect in the crime lives in the USA, not in Mexico.

Moreover, as Sam Seder acidly observes, the entire claim that crime has skyrocketed in Arizona is so much cattle offal. In fact, violent crime in Arizona has been steadily declining in recent years.

It kind of makes you wonder, doesn't it, why Arizonans -- and particularly the Arizona media, not to mention the national media -- never picked up on the case of Shawna Forde and her gang of rogue Minutemen, who invaded the home of a Latino family near the border in Arizona and shot them, killing the father and his 9-year-old daughter in cold blood as she pleaded for her life, and wounding the mother -- who managed to get her own gun and shoot back, wounding one of the killers.

Even more incredible, really, is that this 911 call from the wounded mother received so little attention at the time, much less that it did not become a focus of Arizonans fretting about violent crime:

SNIP

What brings all this into laser focus is what's actually happening right now on the Arizona border: Latinos (some of them American citizens bearing blood-soaked birth certificates) are being shot and killed, and it's beginning to appear that white vigilantes -- not Mexican drug gangs -- are doing the killing.

Read the whole thing and watch the video here.