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Anti-immigrant Website Uses Boston Bombings to Target Immigrants

April 26, 2013

In the wake of the bombings during the Boston marathon, dozens of writers on the racist, anti-immigrant website VDARE published articles containing anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. The site’s contributors used the tragedy to decry multiculturalism and diversity, to criticize the U.S. asylum/refugee programs in the United States and to specifically target Muslim immigration.

On April 22, Steve Sailer, a longtime VDARE contributor known for making racist statements, compared the Russian region of Dagestan to the United States in order to criticize multiculturalism, claiming, “Seriously, Dagestan should stand as an object lesson to the DC-NY-Cambridge conventional wisdom about the benefits of multiculturalism. Everybody in Dagestan knows that diversity is their weakness. The lack of solidarity keeps the place futile and backward.”  The day before, on April 21, Sailer targeted immigration reform, stating, “The entire marketing campaign has been framed around pushing the mindset that it's racist for Americans to try to choose who gets in. Instead of choosing, we should just take what we are given by the rest of the world and be grateful for their vibrant diversity.  If you live in the Boston area and your windows have been rattling, well, that's just the vibrancy manifesting itself.”

In reaction to the Boston bombings, VDARE writers also attacked the refugee/asylum programs in the United States. Federale, another frequent VDARE contributor claimed on April 19 that terrorists are claiming refugee status in order to enter the United States: “Refugee status is a scam: Asylum and refugee status is a scam. Just ask the Somali terrorists who came here on refugee/asylum status.” Also on April 19, Sailer voiced his opposition to refugees/asylum seekers, claiming, “It's funny how the refugee system works. It's almost as if foreigners who are really good at getting their neighbors to hate them seem to wind up as refugees in America more than foreigners who are good at getting along with their neighbors.  I'd say that that's ironic, except that irony is racist.”

On April 19, Brenda Walker, a frequent VDARE contributor, attacked Islam claiming, “Islam has been at war with all non-Muslims for the last 1400 years. It’s crazy to believe otherwise just because liberals preach that ‘diversity is our strength.’” On April 20, Sailer also wrote, “The Muslims commit the spectacular suicide bombing attacks, but that's just the far right edge of a Muslim probability distribution that is shifted overall in the direction of hostility toward the host populations, which manifests itself in rape, riot, immigration fraud, cousin marriage, welfare cheating, and petty acts of bloodymindedness.”

The racist John Derbyshire called for a ban on all Muslim immigration to the US in a podcast before reprinting his talk as an article on VDARE on April 20. He wrote, “We should stop allowing entry of people from Muslim countries.  There would be no injustice involved:  it's our country, we can let in who we please.  We should have done this after 9/11. We should still do it.”