Content area
Full text
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster
Peter Brimelow
Random House, 1995
What began as a routine trip home for commuters on the Long Island Railroad suddenly turned into three minutes of sheer terror and death on a December evening in 1993. Six Commuters never made it home alive. For nineteen other passengers, who were severely injured or even paralyzed, life will never be the same, The perpetrator, Colin Ferguson, a Jamaican immigrant and self-proclaimed hater of whites, emptied a loaded 9mm pistol into a crowd of 90 passengers.
Journalists and other "analysts" in the media portrayed this incident as a result of "America's obsession with guns". The media hype, that firearms exclusively cause violence, obscured significant personal information about Ferguson. Although Time pointed out that Ferguson's family was quite affluent and that his childhood was better than the average Jamaican adolescent, most of their coverage focused almost entirely on handguns and the type of ammunition that was used. Details about Ferguson remained sketchy while the media exhausted the relationship between firearms and violence. For instance, Time's cover story featured a Ruger semi-automatic pistol superimposed over Ferguson's face with the caption: "Enough!"
As Peter Brimelow points out in Alien Nation, the fact that Ferguson was a Jamaican immigrant was never an issue among the "media elite." Again, the pundits explained away the broader implications of Ferguson's actions as being mainly a matter of guns and ammunition. Brimelow questions this narrow-minded view and boldly asks: What is the likelihood that those commuters would have reached their homes safely had Ferguson never emigrated to the United States? Moreover, do some immigrants individually reflect the social ills that in many cases besiege their native homelands? The fact that the press often "examines" various links to violence, guns or poverty for example, says little if anything about the media's thoroughness in probing other plausible causes of violence. Brimelow notes that the immigration issue never surfaced in the Ferguson case because it was tantamount to "racism" and "immigrant bashing". Given the fact that investigators found notes on Ferguson that detailed his racial hatred, it is bewildering why no one in the media raised the point as to whether Ferguson's actions constituted a "hate crime."
Consider the review of Alien...