Yesterday, the Hill reported that the political momentum is growing for the revocation of the portion of the 14th amendment which automatically grants citizenship upon birth in the country. Until recently, the movement to repeal “birthright citizenship” was once limited to the extreme right-wing fringe of the Republican Party. However, that all changed last week when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) indicated that he was considering introducing a constitutional amendment that would deny citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants. Today, former CNN anchor and immigration hawk Lou Dobbs went on Fox News to advocate for the “vigorous enforcement” of immigration laws — which he thinks should include upholding the 14th amendment in its entirety:

DOBBS: I part ways with the senators on that, because I believe that the 14th amendment — particularly in its due process and equal protection clause — is so important, it lays the entire foundation for the Bill of Rights being applied.

KELLY: Well you could repeal part of it and leave the other parts in place. They’re focused on the part that makes you an American citizen automatically upon being born here. [...] Do you support it? The controversy is — what are you gonna do? Criminalize a bunch of babies who are through no fault of their own born in this country to illegals?

DOBBS: I have absolutely maintained for years that the anchor baby issue is one of law. We have a law in which they become U.S. citizens for being born here. If you are going to insist on the rule of law and order — and I do — I have to insist that we recognize those anchor babies as citizens of this country.

Watch it:

After leaving CNN, Dobbs may have taken a softer tone on immigration when he started voicing support for a path to legalization, however, Dobbs once again sided with anti-immigrant zealots when Arizona’s controversial immigration law was passed. Dobbs has described SB-1070 as “entirely defensible” because it “literally mirrors federal” — which it doesn’t. Dobbs also accused the Obama administration of “consciously refusing to ignore immigration law,” despite the fact that deportations are at an all-time high.

Nonetheless, Dobbs draws the line there. When it comes “anchor babies,” a derogatory and “politically charged” term used to refer to the U.S. citizen children of undocumented parents, Dobbs avoids falling into the hypocritical pitfall that “rule of law” politicians like Graham and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) have recently embraced. Denying the American-born children of undocumented immigrants citizenship would involve either rejecting a monumental constitutional amendment or, as some politicians have suggested, reinterpreting it so that undocumented immigrants and their U.S.-born children are not considered under the jurisdiction of U.S. law. As the Center for American Progress points out, the consequences of either option would be disastrous and, as Dobbs suggests, a perversion of a document that conservatives claim to defend.

In 1790, President George Washington wrote a letter to the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island, affirming the values of tolerance and religious freedom that he saw as the bedrock of the country that he had had helped found and done so much to secure. “The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy,” Washington wrote. It was “a policy worthy of imitation.”

All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens. [...]

May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.

Americans would do well to re-read Washington’s letter, as an increasing number of them clearly seem intent on rejecting the principles of freedom and tolerance that it celebrates. I’m referring, of course, to the conservative hysteria over the Cordoba House Islamic Center — known in the media as the “Ground Zero Mosque” — in lower Manhattan.

What started as just another wingnut obsession has now bubbled up from the right-wing sewer into mainstream conservative discourse.

On July 20, Sarah Palin wrote on her Facebook page that “To build a mosque at Ground Zero is a stab in the heart of the families of the innocent victims of those horrific attacks” — ignoring the fact that some of those innocent victims happen to be Muslim-Americans.

Last week, disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich published a piece in Human Events and delivered a speech at the American Enterprise Institute that trafficked in the worst sort of stereotypes of Muslims and Islam, using discredited anecdotes to cynically cultivate Americans’ fear of their Muslim countrymen and where they choose to site their houses of worship.

On Fox News yesterday, pundits Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney piled on, asserting that the man behind the project — Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf — has “has ties to radical Islamist terror.” I contacted Keep America Safe today for some evidence for Kristol and Cheney’s charge — one that most people would regard as pretty serious — but the organization’s press representative refused to provide any sources on the record.

This is deeply offensive stuff. Here we have a faction of conservatives targeting their fellow Americans simply on the basis of their religion, purely for political profit. If Gingrich, Palin, Kristol and Cheney think that George Washington was wrong about American tolerance and religious freedom, let them say so. But let the rest of us understand this: The debate over the Ground Zero Mosque is, in fact, a debate over American values. Those who oppose it don’t have them.

Two separate reports were released this weekend documenting the troubling effects of Arizona’s new immigration law, SB-1070, on race relations in the state. First, a poll by the Arizona Republic revealed that nearly half, or 46 percent, of Arizonans think the immigration debate has “exposed a deeper sense of racism in our community”:

In The Republic’s telephone poll of 616 adults, conducted statewide between June 30 and July 12, nearly half of respondents – 48 percent – said Latinos are more likely to be discriminated against compared with non-Latinos than they were six months ago. More than a third of respondents disagreed. The rest did not know or had no opinion.

Nearly half of Arizonans also believe the immigration debate has revealed racial problems here and that Latinos are more likely to have their legal status questioned than they were at the start of the year, the poll indicates. [...] Non-Hispanics were nearly evenly divided about whether people are more likely now to wonder about the legal status of those who look Latino than they were six months ago. By comparison, 72 percent of Hispanics agreed.

The East Valley Tribune also reports that “[w]hite supremacist activity is on the rise in Arizona.” Experts point to the fact that the immigration debate has always been a recruiting tool for racist groups, even before the passage of SB-1070. However, heightened tensions over the polarizing new law give the groups a leg up. “They become more emboldened every day,” said Bill Straus, Arizona regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. “It does seem like the distance between what most of us would consider the extreme fringes of political thought and the mainstream of political thought, it seems like that distance has shrunk.”

One of the most disturbing illustrations of their stepped-up activity is the presence of heavily armed neo-Nazis who started patrolling the border in search of undocumented immigrants shortly after SB-1070 was signed into law. One neo-Nazi border “ranger,” Harry Hughes, has written: “Mexican illegal aliens are revolting. And they know it. It is their purpose to disrupt us, interfere with us and give us diseases that we haven’t had in this country for 100 years.” The leader of the group, J.T. Ready responded to Judge Susan Bolton’s decision to block key provisions of the by stating, “perhaps [Judge Bolton] should step her ass outside the air-conditioned courtroom sometime and see what is really happening as Rome burns and barbarians with AK-47s are in gun battles twenty miles from the gates of Phoenix.” State Sen. Russell Pearce, who sponsored SB-1070, endorsed Ready when the he ran for City Council in the spring of 2006. Ready describes his newest initiative as “the Minuteman Project on steroids”

Watch it:

SB-1070 enjoys high levels of support amongst members of the National Socialist Movement. However, the majority of SB-1070 supporters are not neo-Nazis. What’s troubling is that despite the widespread belief that SB-1070 will lead to increased racism and racial profiling, the majority of Arizonans still support it.

Our guest blogger is Patrick Disney, former Assistant Policy Director for the National Iranian-American Council, who is currently pursuing a Master’s in International Relations at Yale University. Disney publishes the blog Talking Warheads.

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellows Ray Takeyh and Steven Simon asked whether President Obama would be willing to attack Iran if it looked like an Iranian nuclear weapon were imminent. Takeyh knows more about this subject than most, having served as Obama’s key Iran expert during the campaign and as a State Department special adviser for a short time in 2009. Simon authored a memorandum on the possible consequences of an Israeli strike on Iran. While Takeyh and Simon conclude that “political, military and policy constraints” would prevent Obama from authorizing war against Iran, the authors ignore two critical facts about why such action would be disastrous.

First, there is no military option short of a full-blown invasion and occupation. Even if all of Iran’s nuclear facilities can be located, and even if they can all be destroyed with surgical air strikes, the ruling hardliners will just rebuild them — only this time without the constraints of IAEA safeguards. Just like Iraq after the first Gulf War, when Dick Cheney decided (rightly) not to pursue regime change and occupation, an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities now will simply set the stage for a full-scale war later. After a few years following an airstrike, Iran’s nuclear program will be back on track and the same voices in Washington will be calling for blood once again.

The only difference will be Iran will have been given the perfect excuse to pull out all the stops and openly declare the need for a nuclear deterrent. “We’ve always believed nuclear weapons are un-Islamic,” they will say, “but Western aggression has given us no other choice.” With the cards all on the table, the US will find itself with no other options besides Iraq War-style invasion, occupation, and — most likely — counterinsurgency.

Secondly, and most disappointingly, Takeyh and Simon’s analysis totally ignores the devastating impact an attack would have on the long-term prospect of democracy in Iran. Iranians last summer took to the streets in the most passionate outbreak of popular dissatisfaction since the 1979 revolution. Those who know their history viewed the events of last year as the latest step in Iran’s democratic evolution — a process that began over 100 years ago with the constitutional revolution of 1906. Although the street protests have died down and the democracy movement is in some disarray, it is clearly still a factor in Iran. Unfortunately, dropping bombs on Iran now is the surest way to uproot any hope for peaceful democratic change in the country. The hardliners will most likely use an act of foreign aggression as justification for a brutal crackdown, and the focus of political discourse will shift away from questions of internal reforms and regime legitimacy toward external threats and the need to rally the nation’s defenses.

This would be a tragedy, as absent a diplomatic coup de grace, democratic reforms in Iran are the only long-term hope for peaceful coexistence between the US and Iran.

With the anti-Iran rhetoric at a fever pitch in Washington, it’s easy to forget sometimes just how remote of a threat Iran’s nuclear program actually is. According to numerous unclassified assessments by the US Intelligence Community, Iran has not yet decided to pursue a nuclear bomb, and the US and international community still has time to convince them not to. The three to five years an attack would gain now will most certainly not be worth the cost it would incur: a non-democratic Iran with an overt nuclear weapons program and a vendetta against Western powers who attacked it.

Better to put the war plans on hold and sit down for real, sustained negotiations.