About a week or so ago we suddenly began hearing stories in the news about Israel bombing targets in Gaza, Israel attacking in the Gaza Strip, and so on.
The picture that was painted was one of the State of Israel suddenly waking up one morning and deciding to attack, attack, attack for no particular reason. This perception was foisted on the American people by what has become a decidedly anti-Israeli American media.
Think about it from any reasonable perspective. How would you feel if Mexico was lobbing bombs and missiles at targets in California or Nevada or Texas, destroying businesses and buildings, killing hundreds of Americans?
Then one day the U.S. decided enough was enough, and fought back by attacking strongholds in Mexico where those who were attacking us were operating. Suddenly the world press is all over their broadcast news and in their newspapers with stories that the U.S. was attacking Mexico. How would that make you feel?
Do you think that the Europeans and those in the Middle East, Asia, Africa who were reading these headlines and listening to the talking heads on the news broadcasts would get the full picture? Or would they simply be left with the impression that the Americans were being bullies with the poor, little Mexicans? That is exactly what is happening with Israel, and it is a dangerous game.
The 'Arab-Israeli conflict' as it has come to be known in modern times has no resolution.
Could the world one day see a true "North American Union"?
Up in Canada this summer, President Bush met with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon in what should have been a standard, wholly positive “meeting of the minds” between the leaders of the three leading nations in our hemisphere.
But many are rightfully concerned that this meeting and other developments of recent years are setting the stage for a government-like North American Union.
At its fullest completed vision, the North American Union (NAU), which has also gone by a few other names as well, would essentially replace the United States, Mexico and Canada as a governing level above the three once-independent nations.
Styled nearly identically to the current European Union, there would be one currency, open borders, and many subtler features that would overwhelm the U.S. Constitution.
Back in 1973, U.S. banking leader David Rockefeller met with American geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski and along with other business and political leaders formed the Trilateral Commission.
Conspiracy theories aside, the commission was formed in order to foster closer working relationships among the leaders of the three leading economic spheres of influence: North America, Europe, and Pacific Asia.
A year later, one of the commission members, Richard Gardner of Columbia University, wrote an influential article for Foreign Affairs magazine titled “The Hard Road to World Order” in which he called for “an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece”.
It is from this line of thinking that covert attacks on the United States of America as an independent, sovereign nation began to take place.
In 1979, while running for President, Ronald Reagan called for a “North American Agreement” to produce “a North American continent where the goods and people of the three countries will cross boundaries more freely.” Upon taking office in January of 1981, Reagan called for a North American common market.
In October of 1984, the Congress passed the Trade and Tariff Act, a part of which extended the powers of the president to concede trade benefits and enter into bilateral free trade agreements.
In October of 1987, the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement was finalized, and signed into law by President Reagan and the Canadian Prime Minster in January 1988.
This led U.S. trade representative Clayton Yeutter to utter the statement “We’ve signed a stunning new trade pact with Canada, the Canadians don’t understand what they’ve signed. In twenty years they will be sucked into the U.S. economy.” Well, those twenty years have now passed, and Yeutter is proving to be a visionary.
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush began negotiations with the Mexican president to foster the same type of relationship as had been forged with Canada. A year later, Canadian PM Brian Mulroney asked that the negotiations become trilateral among the three nations.
Over the next couple of years the framework was laid for what has become known simply as NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which formally went into effect in January 1994.
NAFTA basically eliminated tariffs on products traded between the three nations while protecting intellectual property rights and removing many investment restrictions. Over the ensuing half dozen years, negotiations take place aimed at enlarging the scope of NAFTA to include the Caribbean region nations and Chile.
Mexico elected Vicente Fox as President in 2000, and Fox quickly proposed what became known as his “20/20” vision: the U.S. and Mexico would have a common market within 20-30 years.
For two hundred and thirty years now, the United States of America has been a beacon of hope for the rest of the world. As we have grown up as a nation, that reputation has only grown greater, has only become more solidified.
When people in other countries dream of a better life for them and their families, it is America to which their dreams turn.
There are no hordes of protesters marching in the streets of Moscow, Beijing, Paris, Tokyo or Mexico City hoping to ease their process of becoming citizens in Russia, China, France, Japan or Mexico.
As Neil Diamond famously sang: “They’re comin’ to America!”
For all the negative blather you hear about America from our own liberal press, the foreign press, and the many citizens of foreign nations interviewed on those broadcasts and in their articles, it is America to which they come to escape oppression and infuse hope into their lives.
In our past, we have been an immigration nation. We were born and nurtured through our earliest years as a nation as immigrants from England to a new set of colonies and then a new free country, on what is now the American east coast.
We grew and thrived, spreading across the land from east to west, thanks in large part to massive immigration from other European nations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
We are an immigration nation at our very core. That is our heart and soul, the accumulated values and experiences of our individual forefathers and our families’ ethnic and racial heritage, combined with the melding into American customs, laws and values that have formed over the centuries.
