Since Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that he would be introducing a defense authorization bill next week that includes the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has been desperately trying to justify his opposition to a bill he co-sponsored in 2005, 2006, and 2007. One of McCain’s main arguments is that for “many many years we never put any extraneous items on the bill” and that, starting last year, “Carl Levin and Harry Reid put hate crimes on it which had nothing to do with it.”

However, today, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) noted that not only was hate crimes legislation considered as an amendment to the defense authorization bill in 2001, 2005, and 2008, each time the hate crimes amendment was approved. The only difference last year, Levin points out, is that the provision was not dropped in conference and was included in the enacted in legislation.

Levin also noted that “over the last dozen years” the Senate has debated “non-relevant amendments” to the defense authorization bill “on a number of issues.” One of those amendments was introduced by McCain himself.

In 2000, McCain offered an amendment to the defense authorization bill that required public disclosure of donors and expenditures. McCain faced similar criticism from his opponents who argued that his amendment had nothing to do with defense. Even one of his critics conceded that McCain was “acting under the rules.”

Levin explains why he supported McCain’s amendment at the time:

I supported the McCain amendment at that time and I also supported the right of the Senator from Arizona to offer it — not because it was relevant to the defense authorization bill, it was not. But because it was the only opportunity apparently to consider that bill and it was the right thing to do.

Watch it:

The DREAM Act has a lot more to do with defense than a campaign finance amendment. Back in 2006 when the Senate was about to debate comprehensive immigration reform that would legalize millions of undocumented immigrants, McCain explicitly made the connection himself, stating “[r]ight now, at this very moment, there are fighting for us in Iraq and Afghanistan soldiers who are not yet American citizens but who have dreamed that dream, and have risked their lives to defend it. They should make us proud, not selfish to be Americans.”

Republicans, meanwhile, have shown zero interest in taking up either the DREAM Act or comprehensive immigration reform on its own. And, in the past, McCain has clearly agreed that passing the DREAM Act is in fact the “right” thing to do through his repeated sponsorship of the bill. In his 2006 speech, McCain concluded, “They came to grasp the lowest rung of the ladder, and they intend to rise. Let them rise. Let them rise.”

This Sunday, Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) appeared on Univision’s Al Punto with Jorge Ramos to talk about immigration and Arizona’s new immigration law, SB-1070. In the interview, Brewer insisted she was not a racist and proclaimed that she loves Latinos. “I love them from the bottom of my heart,” Brewer told Ramos:

RAMOS: I remember having an interview with him [Arpaio] and he told me that some people call him racist. Are you concerned that some people might think the same thing of you?

BREWER: Not only am I concerned, it’s really disappointing to me. I’ve lived in the southwest my whole life. I’ve got many friends, of many cultures and certainly a great deal of them are Hispanics, and I love them from the bottom of my heart. I love everybody Jorge, from the bottom of my heart.

RAMOS: Do you feel rejected by the Hispanic community?

BREWER: I feel that I’m somewhat hurt that they would think that I would be a racist, you know. And I was… and a bigot and that I would stand by and allow any kind of racial profiling or anything like that to take place.

Watch it [in Spanish]:

However, Brewer stood by many of the comments that have most offended the Latino community.

Brewer downplayed her controversial and erroneous claim that illegal immigration has led to beheadings in the Arizona desert. “Well I think that was a misunderstanding,” said Brewer, suggesting that the public misunderstood what she meant by “border region.” (Brewer’s actual statement was: “We cannot afford all this illegal immigration and everything that comes with it, everything from the crime and to the drugs and the kidnappings and the extortion and the beheadings and the fact that people can’t feel safe in their community.”)

When Ramos challenged Brewer on her statements that most undocumented immigrants are drug mules, Brewer defended her remarks. “Well, if you know; if you are coming across with the drug cartels, and you’re hauling drugs, then you are,” said Brewer. “We can’t assimilate it,” Brewer told Ramos in reference to the number of undocumented immigrants coming to the U.S. “Those people that are coming across are now under the control of the drug cartels,” she affirmed.

Brewer denied that SB-1070 will lead to racial profiling simply because racial profiling is illegal. Racial profiling “is illegal in Arizona,” Brewer reasoned, so therefore “Senate Bill 1070 didn’t have anything to do with that.” Nonetheless, Brewer has “no idea” what to do about the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and has “not a clue of what an undocumented, anybody looks like.” Brewer additionally affirmed that she believes that “illegal immigration doesn’t have anything to do with human rights.”

Meanwhile, the largest Latino civil rights group, National Council of La Raza, holds, “SB 1070 would make Latinos in Arizona suspects in their own communities—even though the vast majority of them are native-born U.S. citizens and legal residents.” Even Arizona Hispanic Republicans slammed SB-1070, stating “SB 1070 is a direct slap in the face to Hispanic Americans who have fought and died for several American wars because this new law can be abused by authorities to pull us over with mere ‘reasonable suspicion.’”

As a champion of Arizona’s immigration law, Brewer’s popularity has soared. However, her support of the law probably won’t win her too many Latino votes: 84 percent of Latinos think that SB-1070 will result in police in Arizona stopping and questioning legal Latino immigrants or U.S. citizens and 81 percent percent of Arizona Latino registered voters oppose the bill. Approximately 80 percent of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are from Latin America.

I wrote last week that the new “Team B” report from neoconservative activist Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy on the threat of Islamic sharia law is notable for, among other things, the fact that its authors consulted with no actual Muslims or Islamic scholars in writing it.

A key “expert” behind the report’s interpretation of Islamic law is a man named David Yerushalmi. In addition to running a DC law practice, Yerushalmi serves as General Counsel of the Center for Security Policy. Yerushalmi is also a contributor to Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace. On his law office website, Yerushalmi claims to be “considered an expert on Islamic law.”

The release of the sharia report was hailed last week by three leading Congressional conservatives — Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), and Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) — so it’s worth looking into what one the report’s key contributors actually believes about Muslims and Islam.

Here’s what Yerushalmi wrote in the American Thinker in 2006:

Islam was born in violence; it will die that way. Any wish to the contrary is sheer Pollyannaism. The same way the post World War II German youth were taught by their German teachers and political leaders to despise the fascism of their fathers, with strict laws extant still today restricting even speech that casts doubt on the Holocaust, so too must the Muslim youth be taught from the cradle to reject the religion of their forebears.

Yerushalmi also wrote in 2006 that the Muslim Brotherhood “has succeeded in penetrating our educational, legal, and political systems, as well as top levels of government, intelligence, the media, and U.S. military, virtually paralyzing our ability to respond effectively.” He criticized President Bush for his “fatal, but well-intentioned ideological whim to build democracies among a ruthless people who believe in a murderous creed falsely labeled a ‘religion of peace.‘”

Yerushalmi heads an organization called Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), whose charter — now hidden behind a paywall but shared here by Talk to Action’s Brian Wilson — states:

America is a unique people bound together through a commitment to America’s Judeo-Christian moral foundation and to an enduring faith and trust in G-d and in His Providence… America was the handiwork of faithful Christians, mostly men, and almost entirely white, who ventured from Europe to create a nation in their image of a country existing as free men under G-d. The founding fathers understood that party-led parliaments and democracy were the worse form of government and sought to resist the movement that was soon to find fertile ground in France with the French Revolution…

…at its core, SANE is dedicated to the rejection of democracy and party rule and a return to a constitutional republic…

…Any world view, ideology, or -ism that promotes directly or indirectly the elimination of national existence and the establishment of a world state is our foe. So you can know at the start that liberalism (and this includes libertarianism) and Islam are in our sights.

Yerushalmi’s group suggests the following measures for dealing with America’s Muslim problem:

- It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.

- The Congress of the United States of America shall declare the US at war with the Muslim Nation or Umma.

- The President of the United States of America shall immediately declare that all non-US citizen Muslims are Alien Enemies under Chapter 3 of Title 50 of the US Code and shall be subject to immediate deportation.

- No Muslim shall be granted an entry visa into the United States of America.

Unsurprisingly, Yerushalmi’s antipathies extend beyond Muslims. In a 2006 article, “On Race: A Tentative Discussion” — tentative because, as Yerushalmi laments in the article, one cannot engage in “a discussion of Islam as an evil religion, or of blacks as the most murderous of peoples (at least in New York City), or of illegal immigrants as deserving of no rights” without being labeled a racist — Yerushalmi writes that the American founders were on to something when they limited the vote to white men:

There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote. You might not agree or like the idea but this country’s founders, otherwise held in the highest esteem for their understanding of human nature and its affect on political society, certainly took it seriously. Why is that? Were they so flawed in their political reckonings that they manhandled the most important aspect of a free society – the vote? If the vote counts for so much in a free and liberal democracy as we ‘know’ it today, why did they limit the vote so dramatically.

So Yerushalmi isn’t crazy about Muslims, African-Americans, immigrants, or women. But wait, he also strongly dislikes liberal Jews:

Jews of the modern age are the most radical, aggressive and effective of the liberal Elite. Their goal is the goal of all “progressives:” a determined use of liberal principles to deconstruct the Western nation state in a “historical” march to the World State…

…one must admit readily that the radical liberal Jew is a fact of the West and a destructive one.

I contacted Mr. Yerushalmi to give him an opportunity to explain these writings. He declined.

For more, see Sheila Musaji, Charles Johnson, Brian Wilson, Alex Kane, Dan Luban, and Richard Silverstein.