Over the last six years what has become apparent is that the anti-immigrant movements’ new motto has become “all’s fair in the name of bigotry and intolerance!” There isn’t a moral line they’re not willing to cross, which is evidenced by the gambit of organizations, like the Center for Immigration Studies, who are blatantly guilty of data manipulation and of recent attempts to spread xenophobia by playing on public fears of Swine Flu.

One month ago an organization calling itself the Council of Seniors sent out a slick solicitation letter in an attempt to frighten senior citizens into a donation of $19.00. They claim that by simply filling the coffers of the Council of Seniors, elderly who live on fixed incomes (social security) could protect themselves against Mexican President Felipe Calderon and his “gangs of Illegal Aliens [sic],” as apparently were the word-choices of Council Executive Director Carl Hagan.

Simply put, the snake oil salesmen of the new millennium are Sagan, the Council, and the other anti-immigrant bigots with which they network and organize. With their sales pitches promising remedies blended from pseudo-science, hype, and outright lies, theirs are nasty elixirs, indeed. And with this antiquated attempt to manipulate America’s elderly, I thought anti-immigrant leadership had reached a cavernous new low.

But, alas, I was wrong.

The Center for New Community reports in its latest issue of FAIR Exposed that Peter Gadiel, President of 9/11 Families for a Secure America, is dabbling in his own version of Holocaust Revisionism. In an essay published on April 29th, 2009, on the white nationalist website VDare, Gadiel callously argues that the victims and survivors of Hitler’s Nazi Germany were actually responsible for their own deaths. Referring to the millions of victims as “collaborator[s],” Gadiel uses the story of his own Jewish aunt to buttress his gross draft of histrionics:

“Aunt Lotte was a collaborator in her own death. Not actively of course, but—like millions of others—her refusal to wake up and resist allowed Hitler to commit the mass murder of which she became a victim.”

Gadiel then uses his brittle analogy to argue that by supporting rationale immigration reform the Jewish community at-large is no different than those who collaborated with the Nazis.

However, he cynically chooses to ignore that the United States’s own anti-immigrant National Origins Act of 1929 was passed in-part to bar Jews from fleeing to American shores to escape the plague-like Antisemitism that was permeating European social landscapes. As it would come to pass, the Act was finally overturned as part of the 1965 Civil Rights Movement.

Gadiel’s essay is simply the latest in a series of published attacks on Jewish institutions by anti-immigrant leaders who maintain ties to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Gadiel is himself  a former board member of FAIR, and his organization, 9/11 Families for a Secure America, shares two advisors with FAIR.

Founded in 1979 by John Tanton, FAIR is a controversial organization with numerous ties to political extremists and hard-line right-wingers. In 1995, Tanton himself supported Holocaust Denial while writing about the existence of hate crime statutes:

“These have generally been pushed by Jewish interests who are offended by those who have challenged the received version of the Holocaust.”

Three years later, Tanton was recommending the writings of Kevin McDonald, another Vdare contributor. In writing to a funder, he promises that McDonald’s words “. . . will give you a new understanding of the Jewish outlook on life, which explains a large part of the Jewish opposition to immigration reform.” McDonald, a professor at Cal-State Long Beach University, is an anti-Semite who in a popular YouTube video accuses the Jewish community of destroying America via immigration. MacDonald also writes for the wildly anti-Semitic publication The Occidental Quarterly.

Whether exploiting vulnerable seniors, playing on flu fears, or engaging in and attempting to ensure the general perpetuation of anti-Semitism, America’s anti-immigrant movement is admitting to we the public that the brain-trust of this bigoted movement has no realistic, rationale, or carefully crafted ideas to offer us about the complex issue of migration.

Even more disturbing is how rigidly and instantly the anti-immigrant movement would refuse to ever ponder even beginning to attempt to formulate such notions. Their brand of bigotry destroys, in their minds at least, the viability of such ideas, not to mention the credibility of those who refuse their implementing.

Such ideas, however, are not beyond those of us who are refusing to ingest their “remedies.”