Posts Tagged ‘Muslim’
Monday, February 6th, 2017
President Trump’s first two weeks have been extremely busy, including making good on his campaign promises to secure America’s borders in the form of three Executive Orders:
Executive Order 13767, Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements, which states:
It is the policy of the executive branch to:
(a) secure the southern border of the United States through the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border, monitored and supported by adequate personnel so as to prevent illegal immigration, drug and human trafficking, and acts of terrorism;
(b) detain individuals apprehended on suspicion of violating Federal or State law, including Federal immigration law, pending further proceedings regarding those violations;
(c) expedite determinations of apprehended individuals’ claims of eligibility to remain in the United States;
(d) remove promptly those individuals whose legal claims to remain in the United States have been lawfully rejected, after any appropriate civil or criminal sanctions have been imposed; and
(e) cooperate fully with States and local law enforcement in enacting Federal-State partnerships to enforce Federal immigration priorities, as well as State monitoring and detention programs that are consistent with Federal law and do not undermine Federal immigration priorities.
Executive Order 13768: Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States, which states:
It is the policy of the executive branch to:
(a) Ensure the faithful execution of the immigration laws of the United States, including the INA, against all removable aliens, consistent with Article II, Section 3 of the United States Constitution and section 3331 of title 5, United States Code;
(b) Make use of all available systems and resources to ensure the efficient and faithful execution of the immigration laws of the United States;
(c) Ensure that jurisdictions that fail to comply with applicable Federal law do not receive Federal funds, except as mandated by law;
(d) Ensure that aliens ordered removed from the United States are promptly removed; and
(e) Support victims, and the families of victims, of crimes committed by removable aliens.
Pursuant to which, Executive Order 13768 further states:
Enforcement Priorities. In executing faithfully the immigration laws of the United States, the Secretary of Homeland Security (Secretary) shall prioritize for removal those aliens described by the Congress in sections 212(a)(2), (a)(3), and (a)(6)(C), 235, and 237(a)(2) and (4) of the INA (8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(2), (a)(3), and (a)(6)(C), 1225, and 1227(a)(2) and (4)), as well as removable aliens who:
(a) Have been convicted of any criminal offense;
(b) Have been charged with any criminal offense, where such charge has not been resolved;
(c) Have committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense;
(d) Have engaged in fraud or willful misrepresentation in connection with any official matter or application before a governmental agency;
(e) Have abused any program related to receipt of public benefits;
(f) Are subject to a final order of removal, but who have not complied with their legal obligation to depart the United States; or
(g) In the judgment of an immigration officer, otherwise pose a risk to public safety or national security.
Executive Order 13769: Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States, which states:
It is the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from foreign nationals who intend to commit terrorist attacks in the United States; and to prevent the admission of foreign nationals who intend to exploit United States immigration laws for malevolent purposes.
Sec. 3. Suspension of Issuance of Visas and Other Immigration Benefits to Nationals of Countries of Particular Concern.
(a) The Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence, shall immediately conduct a review to determine the information needed from any country to adjudicate any visa, admission, or other benefit under the INA (adjudications) in order to determine that the individual seeking the benefit is who the individual claims to be and is not a security or public-safety threat.
(b) The Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence, shall submit to the President a report on the results of the review described in subsection (a) of this section, including the Secretary of Homeland Security’s determination of the information needed for adjudications and a list of countries that do not provide adequate information, within 30 days of the date of this order. The Secretary of Homeland Security shall provide a copy of the report to the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence.
(c) To temporarily reduce investigative burdens on relevant agencies during the review period described in subsection (a) of this section, to ensure the proper review and maximum utilization of available resources for the screening of foreign nationals, and to ensure that adequate standards are established to prevent infiltration by foreign terrorists or criminals, pursuant to section 212(f) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1182(f), I hereby proclaim that the immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of aliens from countries referred to in section 217(a)(12) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12), would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, and I hereby suspend entry into the United States, as immigrants and nonimmigrants, of such persons for 90 days from the date of this order (excluding those foreign nationals traveling on diplomatic visas, North Atlantic Treaty Organization visas, C-2 visas for travel to the United Nations, and G-1, G-2, G-3, and G-4 visas).
(d) Immediately upon receipt of the report described in subsection (b) of this section regarding the information needed for adjudications, the Secretary of State shall request all foreign governments that do not supply such information to start providing such information regarding their nationals within 60 days of notification.
(e) After the 60-day period described in subsection (d) of this section expires, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of State, shall submit to the President a list of countries recommended for inclusion on a Presidential proclamation that would prohibit the entry of foreign nationals (excluding those foreign nationals traveling on diplomatic visas, North Atlantic Treaty Organization visas, C-2 visas for travel to the United Nations, and G-1, G-2, G-3, and G-4 visas) from countries that do not provide the information requested pursuant to subsection (d) of this section until compliance occurs.
(f) At any point after submitting the list described in subsection (e) of this section, the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Homeland Security may submit to the President the names of any additional countries recommended for similar treatment.
(g) Notwithstanding a suspension pursuant to subsection (c) of this section or pursuant to a Presidential proclamation described in subsection (e) of this section, the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security may, on a case-by-case basis, and when in the national interest, issue visas or other immigration benefits to nationals of countries for which visas and benefits are otherwise blocked.
(h) The Secretaries of State and Homeland Security shall submit to the President a joint report on the progress in implementing this order within 30 days of the date of this order, a second report within 60 days of the date of this order, a third report within 90 days of the date of this order, and a fourth report within 120 days of the date of this order.
Much has been written abut these executive orders, a great deal of which is wrong:
First, it was not the Trump Administration who selected the seven nations covered by Executive Order 13769, it was the Obama Administration, which in February of 2016 added Libya, Somalia, and Yemen to “Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Syria as countries subject to restrictions for Visa Waiver Program travel for certain individuals.”
Because they were chosen by the Obama Administration, the decision of which countries to include had nothing to do with Trump’s business interests.
It’s not a “Muslim ban”:
What did Trump do? Did he implement his promised Muslim ban? No, far from it. He backed down dramatically from his campaign promises and instead signed an executive order dominated mainly by moderate refugee restrictions and temporary provisions aimed directly at limiting immigration from jihadist conflict zones.
Let’s analyze the key provisions, separate the fact from the hysteria, and introduce just a bit of historical perspective.
First, the order temporarily halts refugee admissions for 120 days to improve the vetting process, then caps refugee admissions at 50,000 per year. Outrageous, right? Not so fast. Before 2016, when Obama dramatically ramped up refugee admissions, Trump’s 50,000 stands roughly in between a typical year of refugee admissions in George W. Bush’s two terms and a typical year in Obama’s two terms.
Despite what various liberal protestors would have you believe, President Trump’s Executive Orders are firmly within the bounds of existing federal immigration laws:
Federal immigration law also includes Section 1182(f), which states: “Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate” (emphasis added).
Section 1182(f) plainly and sweepingly authorizes the president to issue temporary bans on the entry of classes of aliens for national-security purposes. This is precisely what President Trump has done. In fact, in doing so, he expressly cites Section 1182(f), and his executive order tracks the language of the statute (finding the entry of aliens from these countries at this time “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States”).
The mainstream media would like you to believe that Trump’s orders limiting immigration are widely unpopular. That’s not the case:
Politically, the open borders rhetoric helps Trump. Even in California, three-quarters of the population, according to a recent UC Berkeley survey, oppose sanctuary cities. Overall, more Americans favor less immigration than more. Most, according to a recent Pew Research Center study, also want tougher border controls and increased deportations. They also want newcomers to come legally and adopt the prevailing cultural norms, including English.
You know how all your liberal Facebook friends say that “no Muslim refugees” have been involved in terrorism in the United States? That’s false. At least 20 have. Among these lovely individuals was Ramadan Alwan. “He pleaded guilty to conspiring to kill U.S. nationals abroad; conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction (explosives) against U.S. nationals abroad.” He also “boasted about attacks on American troops in Iraq.”
All of which makes it amazing that unlimited Muslim immigration seems to be the hill liberals want to die on.
Even more ridiculous and blinkered is the suggestion that there may be something unconstitutional about refusing entry to refugees or discriminating among them on religious or other bases (a reaction that was shared at first by some Republicans, including Mike Pence, when Trump’s plan was announced in December 2015). There are plenty of moral and political arguments on these points, but foreigners have no right under our Constitution to demand entry to the United States or to challenge any reason we might have to refuse them entry, even blatant religious discrimination. Under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, Congress’s powers in this area are plenary, and the president’s powers are as broad as the Congress chooses to give him. If liberals are baffled as to why even the invocation of the historically problematic “America First” slogan by Trump is popular with almost two-thirds of the American public, they should look no further than people arguing that foreigners should be treated by the law as if they were American citizens with all the rights and protections we give Americans.
Liberals are likewise on both unwise and unpopular ground in sneering at the idea that there might be an increased risk of radical Islamist terrorism resulting from large numbers of Muslims entering the country as refugees or asylees. There have been many such cases in Europe, ranging from terrorists (as in the Brussels attack) posing as refugees to the infiltration of radicals and the radicalization of new entrants. The 9/11 plotters, several of whom overstayed their visas in the U.S. after immigrating from the Middle East to Germany, are part of that picture as well. Here in the U.S., we have had a number of terror attacks carried out by foreign-born Muslims or their children. The Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing were children of asylees; the Times Square bomber was a Pakistani immigrant; the underwear bomber was from Nigeria; the San Bernardino shooter was the son of Pakistani immigrants; the Chattanooga shooter was from Kuwait; the Fort Hood shooter was the son of Palestinian immigrants. All of this takes place against the backdrop of a global movement of radical Islamist terrorism that kills tens of thousands of people a year in terrorist attacks and injures or kidnaps tens of thousands more.
President Trump is also working to limit immigrants who need welfare.
John Hindraker thinks that President Trump’s orders are only a good first step.
Back in the dim, long ago fairy tale days of 2006, plenty of Democrats voted to build the border fence, including Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Chuck Schumer.
Evidence suggests that Hilary Clinton received 800,000 votes from illegal aliens. Not the three million Trump claimed, but clearly more than the “zero” Democrats falsely claim.
Austin is now ground zero for cutting both state and federal fund for refusing to cooperate in enforcing immigration laws. Expect more detail on this at a future date.
“The House chairman who oversees Justice Department spending is telling so-called ‘sanctuary cities’ that funding for police, jails and housing will end under President Trump’s new executive orders tightening immigration control. ‘It’s real easy, their money disappears. There’s no fight, their money is gone,’ said Texas Rep. John Culberson, chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that funds Justice.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
At least one sign that the sanctuary city crackdown is working: Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez has ordered his jail to start cooperating with the INS to deport illegal aliens.
Of course, people working to defy the law and keep illegal aliens from being deported are freaking out over Trump.
Current state of legal play on Executive Order 13769:
It’s unfortunate that Judge [James] Robart’s decision, like the one handed down last weekend in the Eastern District of New York, includes nearly no legal reasoning or explanation, such that we could judge why he found the order unconstitutional or illegal. Federal district judges often issue very summary orders when they are asked to rule on an emergency basis on a request for a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction, so expecting a scholarly opinion is unrealistic. But with the order halting a nationwide Executive Branch policy in its tracks and sure to be used as a political club, it should not have been too much to ask the court to provide some clue to its reasoning for just saying “this is illegal.”
Fourth, this is a TRO: it applies only until the court can hold a more complete hearing, which it scheduled for Monday.
Byron York also says that the Trump Justice Department demolished Judge Robart’s case.
Other border control actions are going to require congressional approval (including much wider use of E-Verify) and whatever tax changes “make Mexico pay for the wall” (there are ways).
Could Trump’s orders have gone farther? Sure! But it’s a tremendous start for somehow who many in the Republican primaries thought was a secret fan of illegal alien amnesty.
Tags:Austin, Border Controls, border fence, Byron York, Carlos Gimenez, Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Illegal Aliens, James Robart, Jihad, John Culberson, John Hinderaker, Mexico, Miami, Muslim, National Review, sanctuary cities, terrorism, Texas
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Democrats, Jihad, Texas | 1 Comment »
Friday, August 12th, 2016
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Here in Texas it’s been hitting 104°F during the day. That’s bad enough, but worse is trying to walk your dog at night when it’s still 93° with no wind.
Hillary’s lead over Trump isn’t quite as wide as Dukkakis’ lead over Bush.
Trump raised $80 million in July.
DNC email hack a whole lot bigger than previously thought.
ObamaCare premiums set to explode again in 2017.
Ace of Spades HQ contends we’re in this mess because the GOP establishment is secretly all-in on illegal alien amnesty and think the base is racist for opposing their Olympian insight, but has steadfastly refused to tell voters what they actually think:
The Establishment and establishment-aligned commentators are guilty of the Yeah Yeah Evasion I spoke of above with respect to amnesty.
Oh, sure, in 2014, they’ll run on a super-border-hawk national platform, and vow to oppose, unto their dying breath, Obama’s executive amnesties.
And sure, they’ll trot out a field of 17 candidates, fifteen of whom who have been coached to give the corporate/donor class evasive answer on the border.
Snip.
Now, the Trumpkins come along — I’ll use the Establishment’s slur for them — and the Trumpkins believe that it is standard GOP doctrine that we should have a border wall and be tough on border security, up to and including deportations.
They think there’s broad support for this in the party. They don’t think this position is controversial — they think it’s just a base plank of the platform.
Gee — I wonder where they could have gotten that idea, Establishment, huh?
I guess those stupid Trumpkins did something crazy — the believed the lies pouring out of your mouths every election eve.
So once again we have a political calamity brewing– the Establishment types, the college educated set who has no fear of being displaced by a cheaper foreign worker, misled the white working class into thinking they agreed with them on immigration, while secretly — silently — holding the opinion that anything short of open borders was kinda-sorta (or definitely) racist.
Rahm Emmanuel steals from the poor (Chicago utility users) to give to the rich (union pension funds). (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
New Jersey teacher’s union wants to write its pension gravy train into the state constitution, vows revenge on Democrat who blocked it.
Rotherham is still a center for Muslim child rape gangs. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Alumni have started to decide that if college administrators insist on preemptively surrendering to Social Justice Warriors, then their donations can go elsewhere. (Hat tip: Hot Air.)
“State Sen. Judith Zaffirini and her associates have agreed to pay roughly $38 million to settle a lawsuit in which they were accused of seizing control of a massive real estate inheritance for their own enrichment. The Laredo Democrat still has a chance to get richer. She and her crew will walk away owning 444 acres of prime Laredo real estate that nobody bequeathed to them. They’ll need to continue developing the land to come up with the $38 million, but everything they clear above that will be profit. That’s not including, of course, the millions that the Zaffirini crew has already paid itself in legal and management fees out of the inheritance, including roughly $1.5 million paid to Carlos Zaffirini’s law firm.”
My friend Karl Rehn’s study on just what the best aiming system (red dot vs. laser vs. iron sights) gets a nice writeup by Massad Ayoob. (Hat tip: Stuff from Hsoi.)
Title IX is killing men’s teams at historically black colleges and universities.
British MPs facing a booze ban due to having to move to a Muslim-owned building while Westminster is refurbished (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Hungary says no to more “Syrian refugees.” EU to shove more of them down Hungary’s throat, because joining the EU means signing your national sovereignty away
Wal-Mart acquires Jet.com (which is an online retailer, not an airline).
Facebook to users using Adblock: “Shut up and eat some ads.
“Fisking the Latest Diversity in Sci-Fi Freak Out.”
Buy your own Sherman Tank. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“It’s ridiculous for anyone to worry that the new Ghostbusters will ruin their childhoods retroactively. We should worry about this piece of shit ruining childhoods in real time.”‘
Heh. The Ghostbusters reboot to gross “almost exactly $.78 for every $1 the first one earned.”
In another sign of 2016’s impending apocalypse, corpse flowers are blooming across America.
Crime scene dioramas. Or, as the creator calls them, “dieoramas.” (More here.)
Cat-like typing detected.
Tags:2016 Election, 2016 Presidential Race, Border Controls, cats, college, Democrats, Donald Trump, EU, Facebook, Guns, Hungary, Jihad, Judith Zaffirini, Karl Rehn, Laredo, LinkSwarm, Massad Ayoob, Muslim, New Jersey, Rahm Emanuel, Rio Grande Valley, Rotherham, Social Justice Warriors, tanks, Texas, unions
Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Elections, Guns, Jihad, ObamaCare, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 21st, 2016
This is more like “this last two months in Jihad,” it’s been so long since I did an update. But there’s a whole host of Orlando updates, and a lot of other jihad-related news, so let’s dig in.
“My name is I pledge of allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.” I’m reminded of Gene Wolfe’s The Citadel of the Autarch, where there’s a character named Loyal to the Group of Seventeen.
And of course, this is after the Obama Administration’s FBI initially tried to release a censored transcript of Omar Mateen’s 911 call removing all mention of the Islamic State.
They even tried to change “Allah” to “God”. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instaundit.)
“The Obama administration and the liberal media have decided that when a radical Islamic terrorist kills Americans, the one thing the narrative cannot be about is radical Islamic terrorism….In fact, the reason that the administration and the media are so intent on downplaying the role of Islam is because they are afraid that if they told the truth, people might vote Republican in November.”
An early entry in the timeline on just how badly the FBI farked up the Mateen investigation.
Evidently the FBI dropped the investigation immediately after Mateen played the Islamophobia card.
And that was even after Mateen threatened to have al-Qaida kill a sheriff’s deputy and his family. Mateen didn’t have warning signs, he had warning billboards…
If you hadn’t already heard, Mateen was at the very least bijihad curious.
He also checked Facebook to see if he was trending during the massacre.
London’s new mayor and Muslim child rape in the UK. Zero Hedge offers a month of UK jihad news.
“At some point we’ll have a president who cares about destroying ISIS.” Clearly we don’t have one now… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Bahrain strips Sheikh Isa Qassim, the country’s leading Shiite cleric, of his nationality for being too cozy with Iran. Is this something? Maybe. Bahrain’s royal family is Sunni, they’re not quite the scumbags the Saudi and Qatar royal families are, and there’s a significant American military presence there.
Muslims attack Radiohead listening party in Istanbul. Cause I’m a creep…
Facebook bans gay magazine critical of Islam.
Speech by Milo Yiannopoulos at University of Central Florida in Orlando cancelled because police couldn’t guarantee his safety. One wonders if police in Orlando are capable of protecting anyone at all…
From here on down it’s mostly old news, but maybe you didn’t read it the first time around.
Two month old Mark Steyn column on Germany’s cowardice in prosecuting that comedian who made fun of Turkey’s scumbag Islamist president? Yeah, because it’s still worth reading if you haven’t already.
Islamic State’s brutality makes Kurds abandon Islam for Zoroastrianism. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Taliban kill over 60 in Kabul. They were evidently targeting Kabul’s VIP security team. (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
Woman hitchhiking to prove Muslims are peaceful raped and murdered in Turkey. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Muslims riot in Greece.
The Islamic State is openly recruiting members at the employment office in Malmo, Sweden. (Hat tip: Blazing Cat Fur.)
Is Saudi Arabia reigning in their religious police?
Tags:Afghanistan, al Qaeda, Bahrain, Democrats, Facebook, FBI, Florida, Germany, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Jihad, Kabul, Kurds, London, Mark Steyn, Media Watch, Milo Yiannopoulos, Muslim, Omar Mateen, Orlando, rape, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Taliban, Turkey, UK
Posted in Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch | No Comments »
Thursday, December 31st, 2015
Police have found out who set fire to a Houston Mosque on Christmas day. Guess who did it.
Go ahead. Guess.
Using surveillance video from other area businesses to identify the arsonist, Gary Nathaniel Moore, 37, was arrested and charged with starting the Christmas Day fire that devastated a Houston, Texas mosque. Moore is a devout Muslim who attended this same mosque for years, praying up to five times a day every day of the week.
Funny how the majority of high profile “hate crimes” against Muslims or black activists seem to be committed by the supposed “victims”…
Tags:arson, Crime, Gary Nathaniel Moore, Houston, Jihad, Muslim, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, victimhood
Posted in Crime, Jihad, Texas | No Comments »
Friday, December 11th, 2015
Been an awful week for a variety of reasons, perhaps the least of which is I’m getting over a nasty cold.
Hillary Clinton and the Chamber of Suckups.
Hey Democrats: Why do you insist in shoving Hillary down our throats?
“Our royal elites have decreed that we must stop worrying about terrorism. Now shut up and eat your Syrian refugees!”
Speaking of which, Obama shut down an investigations that could have thwarted the San Bernardino attack. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Gozer: “Choose your destructor!” Liberals: “Donald Trump!”
Meanwhile, Ted Cruz has picked up the key endorsement of Bob Vander Plaats in Iowa.
Old and Busted: We need to tone down violent rhetoric. The New Hotness: We need to shoot Trump supporters. Bonus: Same guy.
Principled lefty Nat Hentoff says the ACLU is worse than useless when it comes to defending campus free speech.
Largest percentage of hate crimes are against Jews.
Study shows campus rapes are actually very rare, on par with numbers seen in the general populace. Naturally, feminists are enraged…
More stomach-churning details of how Rotherham’s Muslim child rape gangs operated. Funny how our elites, when faced with real Muslim child rape gangs, prefer to talk about a pretend campus rape epidemic…
After twenty years of relentless anti-gun propaganda from the mainstream media, a majority of Americans now oppose an “assault weapons” ban. Good work, New York Times!
El Chapo, the head of the Sinaloa Mexican drug cartel, threatens the Islamic State.
Signs that the life of “everybody makes $70,000” Gravity CEO Dan Price may not be perfect: accusations he waterboarded his wife.
Wendy Davis even lies when shes admitting to lying.
There can be only one.
Tags:ACLU, Dan Price, feminism, feminists, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Jews, Jihad, LinkSwarm, Muslim, Nat Hentoff, rape, San Bernardino, Sinaloa Cartel, Social Justice Warriors, Swords, Syria, Ted, terrorism, Wendy Davis
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »
Saturday, April 4th, 2015
Once upon a time, American anti-antisemitism was seen as a bastion of the poorly-educated nativist right. (This was never entirely true, as quotas limiting Jewish admissions were imposed at many Ivy league universities in the 1920s, and Father Coughlin, perhaps the most prominent American anti-Semite of the 20th century, founded the National Union for Social Justice.) But William F. Buckley was fairly diligent in excluding anti-Semites from the modern conservative movement, a vigilance that continued well into the 1990s, as Joseph Sobran and Patrick Buchanan (cast out for tiptoeing up to the line) can attest.
Conversely, antisemitism has been rising on the left, both here and in Europe, as John-Paul Pagano details:
Israel’s stunning victory against combined Arab armies in 1967 set in motion streams of hostility—some anti-Israel, some “anti-Zionist,” some anti-Jewish—which would pool, roil, and gather strength until the turn of the millennium, when the Second Intifada unleashed them in a cataract of anti-Semitism. Two groups were swept along most forcefully by the current: Arabs and Muslims; and Left-wing radicals, who took their cues on Israel and Zionism from Moscow, where “anti-Zionism” assumed a central place in the Soviet anti-colonial catechism.
That’s the first strand. Pagano then offers a section on the rise in the unassimilated Muslim immigrant population in Europe, and the increasingly open antisemitism and attacks against Jews by those populations over the last decade. Then he gets to the meat of his argument:
I think there are three main drivers guiding progressives like [Freddie deBoer] who have similar responses to the very real injuries suffered by Jews who are targeted, excluded, abused, and sometimes murdered for reasons that are clearly the result of hatred: an excess of rationalism, the way anti-Semitism short-circuits the “privilege” analysis of racism, and a prioritization of some victims of racism over others.
But it’s the “privilege” theory so beloved of Social Justice Warriors that really ties it all together:
Paul Berman made the point in Terror and Liberalism—a book the mere mention of which sends deBoer types running for the bathroom—that we in the West are inheritors of Enlightenment rationalism, and as such we find it difficult to understand and constructively respond to irrational political movements. In this respect “we are all Noam Chomsky,” Berman wrote in reference to the man who has done the most to advance this reductive Weltanschauung. In politics Chomsky proposed two warring innate ideas—an instinct for greed (embodied by the corporatized West) and an instinct for freedom (embodied by those opposing the West)—and honed this analysis by applying it to the abattoir in Cambodia during the 1970s. There have been few enormities that more clearly exhibit irrationalism than the Khmer Rouge auto-genocide; but in Chomsky’s hyper-rationalist view, no such movement of self-cannibalizing lunacy could exist (at least not among victims of American imperialism). So, he wrote that there was no genocide to speak of in Cambodia, and if there was violence, it was because greedy U.S. war-making had driven the Cambodians to it.
So too with some interpretations of crises relating to radical Islam and the Middle East. Irrationalism is the wrong explanation, because it simply can’t be right; or if violence and hatred do exist, they assume the discrete and contingent form of being a rational (i.e., predictable and understandable) response by the victims of the United States and Israel. For deBoer and the segment of the Left he represents, anti-Semitism is not a coherent and meaningful force among Muslims—that is to say, a movement; or if it is, it is not a self-sustaining irrational movement, one founded on conspiracist racism against Jews and drunk on salvationist violence. Rather it is tightly correlated to the wrongdoing of Americans and Jews themselves, and thus acute in onset and understandable.
Hyper-rationalism pairs well with the dogmatic underdog-ism of the Left, which assumes that weakness is a source or at least a marker of virtue. Yet just as the poverty of Chomsky’s political analysis became clear after the United States withdrew from Indochina, the silliness and toxicity of New Left ideas about race have become plainer as Jim Crow recedes.
Perhaps the worst of these is the formula that racism equals prejudice plus power. People of color can’t be racist, according to this definition, because they are structurally disempowered by our racist-capitalist “system.” Whites are racist, wittingly or not, because they are existentially driven to oppress non-whites in order to preserve their “privilege.” Analyses of “structural racism” and “privilege” assert a kind of Wizard of Oz sociology that exhibits some elements of conspiracy theory—false consciousness, social determinism, and peoples of good and evil locked in Manichean struggle.
In the mental shorthand of many, Muslims are people of color and Jews are white. That demarcation has fateful consequences. We in the West have a horrendous history of racism; in the United States the oppression of African Americans for hundreds of years is an enduring betrayal of liberal values. Responses throughout the educated West to the Arab-Israeli conflict have been warped by fear that Zionism is a form of racism—as the Soviet architects of that libel surely intended. We are prone to seeing Israeli violence as illegitimate per se, and to regarding violence, hatred, and illiberalism among Arabs and Muslims as a rational—predictable and understandable—response to Western and Israeli imperialism. We miss the part that is a will to power, aspirational imperialism in its own right.
The “prejudice plus power” idea erases real anti-Semitism—a construct with its own history of horrific effects, which is often lumped in with racism, but is actually something else. To borrow from comedy parlance, most racism “punches down”—an incumbent group constructs and subordinates an underclass. The stereotypes that make up such racism diminish their victims. For example blacks, to the white racist, are inferior, criminal, stupid, lazy, and lusty. Anti-Semitism is often the opposite, envisioning the Jew as a preternatural creature—as evil, brilliant, controlling, connected, rich, and powerful beyond measure. Anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory. As such, Anti-Semitism often “punches up.”
When deBoer implies that anti-Semitism is not increasing in Europe and that the real problem is Islamophobia, he ties all of these threads together. Muslims, people of color, can’t be racist, at least not in any coherent and self-sustaining way; they are an oppressed people reacting to the depredations of Jews and other whites. Irrationalist movements that are powered by Jew-hatred don’t exist anymore; that sort of thing was the preserve of white people 70 years ago. Anti-Semitism today is embraced most frequently and fervently by people of color—but to note that is “the basic logic of bigotry,” blaming the victim while aggrandizing the powerful. As Chomsky put it himself, “Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It’s raised, but it’s raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98 percent control.”
Most people on the Left today prioritize the well-being of Arabs and Muslims over Jews.
Read the whole thing.
Tags:anti-semitism, Democrats, Europe, Father Coughlin, Freddie deBoer, Jews, Jihad, John-Paul Pagano, Joseph Sobran, Muslim, Noam Chomsky, Patrick Buchanan, Social Justice Warriors, William F. Buckley
Posted in Democrats, Jihad | No Comments »
Monday, March 9th, 2015
“As many as 373 children may have been targeted for sex by gangs of men in Oxfordshire in the last 16 years, a serious case review found.”
All the men were from “Muslim backgrounds”.
It’s infuriating that political correctness and fears of offending Muslim sensitivities have caused so many officials to repeatedly look the other way and fail to investigate child rape cases in the UK. As in Rotherham, the officials that let this happen should end up in prison.
Rotherham was disturbing enough. To find out that there was another Muslim child rape ring operating in the UK (albeit one with only one-third the victims) rather staggers the moral imagination. It also begs the question: How many more Muslim child rape gangs in the UK remain to be uncovered?
Tags:Crime, Jihad, Muslim, Oxfordshire, pedophilia, rape, Rotherham, UK
Posted in Crime, Jihad | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, January 28th, 2015
Once again, Pat Condell cuts right to the heart of the matter progressive multiculturalists desperately seek to obfuscate.
Samples:
“Not all Muslims hate Jews, but crucially the religion of Islam does hate them.”
“Every anti-Israel rally that’s full of Muslims quickly turns into an anti-Jewish hate fest. Pointing this out does not make me or anyone else a racist. However, denying it in the face of the evidence does make you a coward and a liar, especially if you call yourself a journalist.”
“Yet we in Europe are busy importing this mentality wholesale as part of our multicultural rainbow coalition of suicidal stupidity and moral cowardice.”
“The number of Jews leaving France for Israel is doubling every year.”
“In fact Jews are the new Jews. Muslims are the new Nazis.”
Watch the whole thing.
(Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
Tags:anti-semitism, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Muslim, Pat Condell, video
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Thursday, October 16th, 2014
Pat Condell offers some pungent thoughts on the connection between mass Muslim immigration and rising rape statistics in Sweden:
Is Sweden the rape capital of Europe? Indeed, this BBC report confirms it, though they claim that it’s an artifact of how the statistics are kept.
However, I’m finding a hard time finding official statistics to verify what percentage of rapes are committed by immigrants or by the children of immigrants. (I have seen these statistics referred to in some discussions, but have not been able to locate them directly.) There does seem to be evidence that immigrants are “five times more likely to be investigated for sex crimes.” But that’s from 2005. Are Muslims committing the majority of rapes in Sweden? It seems entirely possible, but I don’t want to fall prey to my own confirmation bias.
Of course, since Sweden has fined Michael Hess for making a connection between Islam and rape, one can understand why published statistics could be hard to come by. Especially since “the question of whether Michael Hess’s statement is true, or at least for Michael Hess appeared to be true, is irrelevant to the proceedings.”
Anyone have any better sources?
Tags:Crime, Islam, Muslim, Pat Condell, rape, Sweden, video
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Monday, July 21st, 2014
Here’s something from the “Blind Squirrel Find Acorn” department: Bill Maher actually making sense on Israel’s incursion into Gaza.
Some choice quotes:
“If Hamas had the opportunity, they would kill the maximum number of Israelis, which would be all. And Israel has the capability to kill a lot more and they do not. They seem victims of the soft bigotry of high expectations.”
“Can we ask why Israel wins all the time? Because they’ve won every war. They have to. You can’t go 8-1 and be Israel. You have to go 8-0 every year to still exist.”
“Jews have 155 Nobel Prizes and Muslims have two. Maybe it’s who you know, but that seems a big advantage for Team Hebrew.”
Tags:Bill Maher, Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Jews, Jihad, Military, Muslim, video
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