About a newspaper read on Saturday

In the Jan. 7 Wall Street Journal is a letter from Kenneth S. Hoyt of Tampa, FL. Mr Hoyt claims to oppose illegal immigration, but opposes building a security fence on the US-Mexico border. He writes:

“Ronald Reagan demanded freedom for East Berlin when he said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Could you imagine someday those words being hurled against America, land of liberty?”

Well, no - because a wall built by the United States to keep Mexicans out of the United States is in no way like the Berlin Wall, which was built by the Soviet Army to enclose East Germans, and keep them from the rest of their own country. How Mr. Hoyt could confuse two so disimilar projects, merely because both are walls is beyond me. Does Mr. Hoyt think the insides of his local Wal-Mart and Wallgreens’ also resemble East Berlin? He might.

Where, I wondered, could Mr. Hoyt aquire such a strange idea? I think I have found the source: in Phoenix, Arizona last December 24-year-old Ali R. Warrayat, a Jordanian immigrant:

“crashed his car into a Home Depot…where he formerly worked, igniting an explosive blaze in the stores' paint section and causing $1 million in damage...After crashing through the doors at 6 a.m., Warrayat headed for the paint department and slammed the vehicle into the flammable goods. He jumped out of the car, ignited the blaze with a lighter.”

Ali stated he was motivated in part because he had not received a desired raise. He also said, “he was mad at the United States for proposing a 700-mile fence along the Mexican border and wanted to make the country ‘more free.’”

Warrayat seems to not only have inspired Mr. Hoyt, but Mexican Presidente Vicente Fox as well, who made the same demented Berlin Wall analogy in speech on the very day of the Jordanian immigrant’s terrorism. Syndicated columnist Neal R. Peirce adopted Warryat’s idea a shortly thereafter, as has congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. Is espousing the Warrayat-Wall analogy the new ‘radical chic’? I fear it may be.