The Alabama Statehouse was occupied today.
Several hundred protesters, mostly Hispanic were joined by a few clergy ostensibly to protest Alabama's immigration reform efforts. By all indications, the Spanish speaking crowd (including a number of children) were really used as "useful idiots" in the minds of organizers.
The real agenda appears to be brutally political.
One observer commented on the methods of the group saying, "It is really offensive to me, as a Christian, that my faith would be used against me".
Speaker after speaker, from various leftist clergy to young children, invoked Christian messages like "loving thy neighbor" or "we are all God's children". So was this a Christian group calling for Christian reawakening, or a group with a hidden agenda using the Alinsky tactic of cynically invoking a rule (in this case Christianity) and making one's opponent live by it?
The Bible says love your neighbor, but it also says to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.
Moreover, the Bible is full of commands to work hard and prosper with man's chief end to overcome his personal sin nature. By contrast, communism's chief end is overcoming material deprivation, specifically makng that deprivation the responsibility of someone else.
The protesters thus are being very selective here about what parts of the Bible they like.
Holding Catholic icons and invoking Christian platitudes, the group went on to distribute communist propaganda, and shout rants in Spanish. The worst parts came after the three hours of speeches and protests ended.
The next group scheduled to speak in front of the Capitol was a pro-life group. The "Christian" communists then proceeded to attempt to shout down the completely unrelated group. One radical came unhinged yelling "shame on you" until one of her cohorts pulled her back. Another covered her head with a tee shirt and went around during the prayer rudely photographing the pro-lifers in prayer.
One of the most noteworthy facets of the attacks is not who they criticize, but rather who they do not criticize. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Obama came under sharp criticism in February of 2011 for having a quota of 400,000 deportations.
When they actually hit that record in October, over two months ahead of schedule, it became a curious record for Obama to attain. He has the distinction of holding the single "season" record as well as the lifetime achievement award for Presidential deportations.
Yet his re-election campaign has made a central tenet out of the narrative that Republicans are genocidal maniacs in their zeal to remove "brown people" from their midst. The end game of course is to convince masses of "brown people" from a range of ethnic groups to look past Obama's dismal record and utter failure to improve their lot.
Most of all, he wants to convince them that Republican control would be much worse than him.
So are groups like the ACIJ really about immigrant rights or something deeper? Who paid for a Hollywood producer, and self-described "lapsed Catholic crypto-Buddhist" to come in and shoot a series of short films for a website IsThisAlabama.org?
A simple look at the three groups that are taking credit and we know:
Center for American Progress -