CM Protest Against Three Little Pigs: Silly, Garbage & Baloney

(July 8, 2006)

Costa Mesa residents and others marched across town Saturday to Skosh Monahan's Steakhouse and Irish Pub, mainly to protest the City Council majority's complicity in the nationwide attack on workers' rights often passed off as immigration law mansoor terroristreform.

The restaurant is owned by Costa Mesa city council person Gary Monahan.

The group, which varied from 40 and 65 in number as it marched, opposed militarization of the U.S. and Mexican border, the use of local police to enforce immigration law and the criminalization of undocumented immigrants seeking work.

The protesters also called attention to the links between some members of the Costa Mesa city council and various anti-immigrant organizations and individuals, such as the Minuteman Project, founded by self-proclaimed vigilante Jim Gilchrist, and Costa Mesa activist Martin H. Millard, who writes for National Vanguard, a neo-Nazi organization that markets itself as a “white separatist” group.

Protesters displayed signs in English and Spanish to express their concerns. One sign, showing Mayor Allan Mansoor dressed in military fatigues and heavily armed, said “Stop Terrorizing Our Community.” Another demanded “Minutmen OFF of Costa Mesa city council,” as the group marched from 19th and Placentia and passed through Triangle Square on their way to the pub, a distance of about 2 miles.

The city council majority of Mansoor, Monahan and Eric Bever voted within the past year to close the city's 16-year-old job center for immigrants and to use police to check the residency status of immigrants suspected of “aggravated” or “serious” felonies prior to their arrest or incarceration.

The Mayor, who has declared his intention to seek reelection in November, says that the intent of the city's proposed plan is to have Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) train city police to identify and help deport only the “worst of the worst” immigrant criminals.

The proposal, which could cost well over a million dollars, was passed pending the establishment of a county ICE program to be run by the Sheriff's department with government funding to pay for training officers. But the mayor recently said that he favors going ahead with the city's ICE plan even without funding through the county. The council majority recently passed a city budget that included over $180,000 for a program that may never exist.

Critics say that the proposal would do nothing to increase deportations because that aspect of immigration enforcement is beyond the city's control, and that fewer criminals will be deported because crime witnesses who are undocumented will fear talking to police.

Chicano business owners say that even though the ICE program hasn't been implemented yet they have lost up to 30 percent of their normal business since the council passed it. Some say that the mayor and his supporters have divided the city in order to implement an extremist agenda and divert attention away from other local issues in an election year.

A delegation that included this writer entered the pub to personally invite Monahan to go outside and expsensenbrennerlain his past votes with Mansoor and Bever, including the appointment of an alleged neo-Nazi propagandist Martin H. Milard to a citizens committee that makes recommendations on redevelopment policy and for the dispersal of federal federal funds to help lower income residents, including immigrants and people of color.

Monahan politely declined the invitation.

At the June 20th city council meeting an enraged Monahan denied that he was a neo-Nazi, although he had not been called that, and said that “Anyone who knows me personally knows better.”

But when Monahan was asked by this writer from inside of his bar on Saturday to tell the crowd why he voted to appoint the neo-Nazi to a citizens committee, he replied that “I can't give you an answer for that.”

Reporters from Fox News, the Daily Pilot and the Orange County Register were present at the demonstration, but none mentioned in their reporting the issue of the neo-Nazi appointee nor the council majority's relationship to the Minuteman Project, a self-proclaimed vigilante group that the Mayor is a member of—although both issues were explained in the group's official press release, according to Scott Sink, an official spokesperson for the protesters.

The neo-Nazi connection had been raised in the local press before and repeatedly at city council meetings. And as far back as 1998 the OC Weekly had written about Millard’s connection to the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens and again in 2002 when it reported that he and Monsoor were campaigning to “clean up” the city.

For the most part, the three member council majority, sometimes referred to as the Minuteman Junta, has refused to respond to comments about its ties to Millard. At the June 20th city council meeting, however, Bever denied knowledge of Millard's neo-Nazi writings and defended him in response to a request by this writer that he, Monahan and the mayor disavow Millard's views.

“There's this fantasy...out there that's gotten kind of ridiculous,” he said, referring to “aspersions” by this writer and Sink that the council majority was linked to extremists. He compared the allegations to fairy tales about the Three Little Pigs and Hansel and Gretel and then defended Millard.

“Mr. Millard has sent out a newsletter for a number of years that related to Costa Mesa issues and they (sic) don't have swastikas or any other insignia on them,” he said, adding, “I'm not sure what it is you're talking about.”

(Bever was referring to the “Costa Mesa Press,” which is not online. The OCO is currently reading through its back issues.)

Bever also questioned the patriotism and politics of this writer and Sink, who routinely refers to the council majority as vigilante hate group members during public comments and advises them to read history books about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo available in the city's children’s library.

“I do know that, however, when you attend our meetings neither of you stand for the pledge of allegiance and neither of you pledge allegiance...Are you un-American? Are you socialist? Communist? Fascist,” Bever asked.

Millard's gallery of white supremacist (he says “white separatist”) essays can be read online at www.nationalvanguard.org and www.newnation.org. Selections have been read at city council meetings frequently over the past seven months. One selection was “Attar [fragrance] of Roaches,” which refers to Mexfox news interviewicans as “illegal alien cockroaches” taking over [white] “Anthill California.”

“Something stinks in Anthill California,” the essay begins. “Anthill California has become Cockroach Central....Cockroach droppings are everywhere...the genetic recipe that made the anthill a prosperous anthill has now been changed and...will never be prosperous again until the old genetic recipe is brought back.”

Mansoor, who became a member of the Minuteman Project last January, said he had responded in the past and called allegations by this writer and Sink “silly garbage baloney,” adding that he would not waste the public's time responding any further.

The mayor had, in fact, responded on two known occasions in the past four years. In a 2002 OC Weekly article, for example, Mansoor was quoted saying that "I don’t agree with everything Martin says, and I haven’t read everything he writes...But the issues he speaks about at City Council meetings have been Costa Mesa issues. . . I will not exclude anybody. If he wants the streets cleaned up, then I agree with him on that."

But Hitler also wanted to clean up the streets, and the nationalvanguard website that Millard writes for is a recent outgrowth of the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi organization that in 1989 celebrated Hitler's birthday by calling him “the greatest man of our era,” according to Wikipedia.

Nor has the mayor, who works as an Orange County sheriff's deputy for his day job, responded to concerns over his membership in the Minuteman Project, even though its leader crazy gilchrist2Jim Gilchrist has proclaimed himself proud to be a vigilante and all but called for an armed insurrection on May 1st, and its official spokesperson, Ray Herrera,.who is a dark-skinned Chicano, spoke before the council several months ago to contrast the (white) Anglo-American culture of “divine decency” with the Mexican culture of rapists and murders, receiving a healthy applause from other Minuteman among the audience. // Video of OCO's entrance into Monahan's bar can be found from www.ocorganizer.com