Obama’s Newest Racemongering Judge: California’s Edward Chen

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/15870

President Obama has gone out of his way to “diversify” the federal bench with his spate of nominations of various minorities chief of which was his successful seating of the “wise Latina,’ Sonia Sotomayor, on the Supreme Court. Obama’s nominees* for 10 district court openings include four African-Americans, three Asian-Americans, one Latino and four women. One of those nominees, San Francisco U.S. Magistrate Judge Edward Chen, received a favorable vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington today.

So what sort of judge is Edward Chen? Well, for one, the left-wing American Bar Association rated Chen a “well qualified” nominee and many of his associates at the ACLU speak highly of him. As an ACLU lawyer, Chen was known for opposing English-only policies and for pushing discriminatory affirmative action ideals. He even came to the aid of gang members in one case. Chen was quite the ACLU activist between 1979 and 2001.

His ACLU history would suffice to make many wary of him, of course. But for a segment of America, working for the ACLU is not a disqualifier. So in order to judge Edward Chen one must look at his past. Discovering what Judge Chen thinks of the country upon which he apparently assumes to sit in judgment is a telling exercise. Sadly, it seems he has quite a low opinion of the nation that he will be serving.

One hint at Judge Chen’s feelings about our nation can be seen from his appearance at the 2005 graduation ceremony at the Hastings Public Interest Law Foundation. There, Chen wondered aloud if American patriotism was justified. Chen told the crowd of his, “feelings of ambivalence and cynicism when confronted with appeals to patriotism — sometimes I cannot help but feel that there are too much [sic] injustice and too many inequalities that prevent far too many Americans from enjoying the beauty extolled in that anthem.” Apparently, Chen feels that America is too racist to justify anyone feeling patriotism for her.

In fact, racism seems to be one of Chen’s major concerns and he sees it everywhere. Immediately after the attacks on 9, 11, 2001 Chen’s first thoughts were about racism but not that of the Arabs that sent over three thousand Americans to their deaths. No, as soon as Chen learned of the attacks of 9/11 Chen’s first worry was that white Americans were going to use their racism to justify racist attacks on Muslims and anyone else that got in their way.

Racism and Chen’s overactive imagination
Only ten days after 9/11 occurred, Chen remarked that he imagined that America would revert to the “irresistible forces of racism, nativism and scapegoating” of the past and begin systematic oppression of American Muslims. Later he likened America’s post 9/11 military and security policies to the climate that led up to Japanese interment during WWII. In fact, he seemed to imagine that “a thousand Americans” were being swept up and held in secret prisons right after 9/11.

In a speech given at the Operation Protect and Defend dinner on May 4, 2006, Judge Chen referred to “secret surveillance of Americans without a judicial warrant, secret no fly lists, [and] secret detention of nearly a thousand American residents held without charges.” Naturally, he offered no proof of this wholesale but secret detention of Americans.