December 19, 2015 Bye Bye Jeb! Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Bye Bye Jeb!

Posted on December 19, 2015 by Luke Ford

* Jeb Bush never becoming president of The United States works out quite well for his wife Columba, because if she is the First Lady than she will have to do a lot more media interviews in English, a language she is not comfortable with.

In Miami she can get away with participating in Spanish only interviews because Miami is not really part of The United States in a cultural and language sense, but she can not get away with only doing Spanish interviews in Washington DC where the vast majority of the population is Non Hispanic.

Donald Trump putting his hat into the presidential race is really a blessing in disguise for Columba. She just dodged a bullet and can now continue to remain in her Hispanic bubble in Miami.

I remember reading that Columba was uncomfortable living in Tallahassee because it is too culturally Southern and not culturally Latin American enough for her. Tallahassee shares more cultural similarities with Alabama than it does to Miami.

* My candidate is Kevin Sutherland, the Democrat DC staffer who was butchered to death by one Jasper Spires in a DC metro train car.
Sutherland was knifed so hard by Spires that his liver literally fell out and hit the floor of the train car.

There’s a moral there – surely – for all those who think.

* That one went down the memory hole instantly, even on local news. My favorite part is there were thirty or so other passengers on the car, and not only did nothing to help, afterwards handed over their wallets and watches to the murderer. Almost makes me believe that a couple of guys with razor knives could actually hijack four planes. Almost.

* The big news is that Donald Trump said nice things about Putin, and ¡Jeb! said Trump was evil for not condemning Putin. That Putin kills journalists and political opponents, while the US President just kills terrorists. As if Russia could or would do any better than Putin. What, a drunk kleptocrat like Yeltsin or an aging one like Brezhnev? As far as I am concerned if Putin wants to fight ISIS, Turkey, the Gulf Cooperation Council, let him.”

Never having a girlfriend drove Enrique Marquez to convert to radical Islam because he was told by other Muslim men that 72 female virgins will F his brains out once he dies and goes to heaven. Back in the real world, Enrique could not afford an escort in the Los Angeles metropolitan area or travel to Thailand on his Walmart salary.

Mexican guys don’t usually have a problem getting laid because of their Latin lover reputation, but Enrique Marquez is not your average Mexican.

* The majority of 20 something, male Wal-Mart employees live empty lives of involuntary celibacy and functional nihilism. Say what you like about radical Islam, but at least it’s an ethos. Americas’s young, male demographic is a sucking, dark, spriritual void waiting to be filled. ISIS could turn an army from the minions of the Walton family overnight with a halfway credible promise of getting them laid and giving them some meaning or purpose beyond World of Warcraft.

* I’m thinking Marquez is just some combination of dim-witted and emotionally stunted. But the motivation of Jihadists makes them punch above their weight in terror. One, or maybe the central, reason we’re always flogged with the “white mass murderer” cliche it’s because the perception white guys are just so much better at it.
And Muslims are seen, as happens with every ethnic group the more familiar they become, as falling on a continuum of intelligence and capability, in their case, fairly or not, as somewhat below the average white dude and above most NAMs. We can be heartened by the obvious weakness of any inherent political skill–Muslims will only be as good as whoever’s running the Narrative is willing and capable of making them. Of course clock boy Ahmed and the abundance of silly pc responses to San Bernardino demonstrate, there’s an enduring willingness to prop them up. It started in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and hasn’t really stopped, the reflexive decision to make Muslims the next Minority Group.

I’ve tried to find this old MTV PSA that–I want to confirm if my memory’s correct about the timing–aired just days, maybe a week, after 9/11. It’s an attractive young woman who we are to take for a Muslim American, complaining about stereotyping; people are supposedly asking her if she’s “related to any of the terrorists”; maybe I’m naive, but how many people are stupid enough to ask you that? One, I might believe. Still, the Muslim myth the Left spins for us has gotten bigger, but no better than that stupid, slick piece on MTV.

Anyway, the impulse to normalize Muslims within the still optimistic conventional view of US history was habitual. These people have no idea what they’re foisting on the US. The Muslim problem goes so far beyond the HBD heresies of group differences in IQ and aggressiveness, which are nonetheless real and negative in consequence here, but to a profoundly opposed religious worldview. No group contributing significantly to the history and demographics of the nation have been this foreign to it, and none by such a long-held, continuing, and as powerful a tradition, as Islam. What in the world are people thinking? Was it something we said, powers-that-be?

* What in polite circles is now called intellectual disability is not the same thing as mental illness. I suppose you are going to scold us that it is also “sick” to mock anyone on the left side of the Bell Curve?

But how “limited” can this man be, and how Muslim can he be, after he found out about the consequences of his actions that he 1) went on a drinking binge, 2) started crying with the 9-1-1 operator, and 3) “spilled his guts” to the FBI?

This guy’s level of terrorism doesn’t even rise to the level of the “free as a bird, guilty as sin” university professor pal of the President. I think he was harboring the adolescent fantasy of “wouldn’t it be cool to blow stuff up” much as he was fantasizing about “making it with a girl” without regarding that either of those events would ever take place.

Anyone with two brain cells to rub together would say “I accepting money to harbor a Russian here illegally, and I am sharing my guns with these two Middle Easterners”, but then that would be “profiling”, now wouldn’t it, and our betters have been trying to educate us to harbor such prejudice

That he engaged in his cathartic confession to the FBI suggests, again, that he is not very bright but that he at least has a moral compass. In this day and age of “what you say can and will be used against you in a court of law”, tough-on-crime prosecutors, and the neutering of Constitutional jury nullification, no attempt will be made to make a wise decision of just what is the appropriate level of punishment for this guy.

* The one thing that can keep Americans of so many different backgrounds united is Christianity. Even the unbelieving can go along nodding their heads and being polite. Islam, however, doesn’t play that game. They will use our politeness and Golden Rule against us until they get whatever they want.

Two thoughts: No more Muslims. Atheists and agnostics, stop trying to stamp out Christianity; You need us more than you realize.

* So, successful and connected Hispanics like Rubio take orders from Jews, and unsuccessful and disconnected Hispanics like Marquez take orders from Muslims.

Rubio: make me president and I’ll supply Pentagon with all the arms it needs to smash Russia and Iran.

Marquez: be my friend and get me a Russian bride(even if only as make-believe), and I’ll buy some assault rifles for you.

* There’s a fun passage in singer Linda Lewis’s memoirs where the young Elton is distraught that he will never have children. Linda, a close friend from their poor-struggling-artist days, bravely offered to bear his child for him. And if the process made him uncomfortable, then she was quite willing to do it with a bottle.

Posted in America, Islam | Comments Off

Is It a Copout for Jews to Say They Are ‘White’?

Posted on December 19, 2015 by Luke Ford

Are Jews white? It depends on the incentives.

From Haaretz:

A few weeks ago I began the long process of applying to several American universities. So there I was, filling the lines away, until I found myself faced with a nasty old foe – the ethnicity check box.

For any Jewish person faced with the spare prose of official U.S. forms, there always comes that strange moment of stumbling across that stubborn box. It’s not that you don’t know it’s coming – if you’ve been around the block once or twice you know for a fact that it’s coming – but you hope maybe this time they forgot. Maybe this time you won’t have to face that strange decision.

But, time and time again, it appears, out of the proverbial bend, just when you least expect it. You stand facing that monolithic square and try to decide for the umpteenth time what you are: “white” or “other”?

That choice is seemingly easier as a result of the little parenthetical remark next to the “white” option, which now includes “original peoples of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East.” That addition should, ostensibly, solve the problem for Mizrahi Jews – Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent – but I’m still stumped. As an Israeli of Ashkenazi descent, am I a people of the Middle East? I mean, I think I am, but then again I’m told I’m not that either.

More recently, the U.S. census bureau, following lobbying by American organizations and activists, started testing of a new separate category for individuals identifying themselves as originating from the Middle East and North Africa ahead of the planned 2020 census. In other words, on that questionnaire they would have the option of choosing MENA, and not “white.”

But the issue of Jews identifying themselves as white or not, is not just one of race or complexion or even origin, but of attaching oneself, or distancing oneself, from power. The problem is whether Jews are willing to stop being white.

There was a time, one that perhaps persists, when being white, or being able to pass as white, meant power. It meant you could, in a racist world, move ahead, create a better life for your children. That made the choice quite easy for Jews living in the white world: they would definitely mark down “white,” since every other choice meant discrimination and pain. It’s that Jewish survival thing, where you choose what aids in not being killed, not being marginalized, or at least reduces the chances of both. If white works, go for white….

But, in a world that is becoming increasingly multicultural, and in which distinct ethnic groups, including the many Jewish extractions, begin to not only attempt to hide their differences but take pride in them, that “assimilate” part is beginning to take on a much more sinister tone. Passing as white, in this sense, is its own quiet extermination of identity and history, the kind in which one discards any trait that marks them as different in the hopes of surviving another day.

So yes, a good student of Jewish history definitely should go for that “white” box, since it provides you with a sense of security and of proximity to power. But, I think until a different box comes along, perhaps one that reads “accepted as white by whites as long as you’re nice,” I’ll stick with my “other.” It seems that’s what the world is telling me to be anyway. Might as well enjoy it.

COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:

* If Jews were tabulated separately from whites for the purposes of racial bean-counting, it would be terrible for the Jews and the Narrative in general. It would make their extreme overrepresentation in elite institutions very obvious, and give the lie to the notion that generic “whites” are dominating these institutions.

* Why aren’t Jews counted ethnically on the US Census, like everyone else is? I think the terms “Ashkenazi” and “Sephardi” would cover 98% of them, referring to blood not faith (eg, Lawrence Auster, not Sammy Davis, Jr), so it’s not a First Amendment issue.

Instead, they’re Russians, Poles, Hungarians, etc, clouding matters not only for themselves but for those other groups as well.

* ‘Other’ box?

If they are proud, they should check JEWISH.

And we shall soon find out that there is a group even MORE POWERFUL than the whites.

Of course, that is why Jews prefer ‘other’ than ‘Jewish’.

* Is the flight-from-beauty phenomenon related to this?

For example, the stunning French singer Alizée in 2003:

And (after some very conscious choices) in 2014:

* I’ve always considered Jews to be a white ethnic group- Irish, Italians, Greeks, Jews.

* I am still looking for a Judeo-Christian. I am not sure how the ‘Judeo’s’ hijacked the narrative.

* Flight from white, meanwhile Trump is making a flight to white. Recent speech had the stage decked out with Christmas trees. Sure, it’s a direct appeal to Christianity but more broadly he’s wrapping himself up in the identity of pre-65 America.

Posted in Jews, Whites | Comments Off

Steve Sailer: The Arab-American Flight from White: Is It Good for the Jews?

Posted on December 19, 2015 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: I went looking for recent articles on this subject of the Census Bureau’s experiments with dealing with Arab demands to not be white anymore. Not surprisingly, the most interesting articles I found were in the Jewish press debating whether it would be good for the Jews. From The Forward:

U.S. Census May Add Controversial ‘Israeli’ Category
Debra Nussbaum Cohen (Haaretz)June 19, 2015
Does being Jewish mean being part of a race? Or a religion? What ethnicity are Jews? Many American Jews have found these questions difficult to answer every 10 years, when a census taker knocks on the door as part of the decennial national head count.
The only choices: “white, black or Asian” for race and, under ethnicity, “Hispanic/Latino” don’t quite fit the way many American Jews – and others – see themselves. Religion is not asked about at all, for reasons rooted both in privacy concerns and objections by American Jewry in the years immediately following the Holocaust.
Now the United States Census Bureau is testing a new category, “Middle East-North Africa” or MENA, in response to more than three decades of lobbying by Arab American organizations for a designation that better represents them. The testing, to start in September, will refine wording and sub-categories for the 2020 census. Nineteen options will be offered under the MENA designation, among them Israeli and Palestinian, as well as Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Turkish, Iranian, Moroccan and Algerian. Even Sudanese and Somali are being considered.
“Most Arabs don’t consider themselves white,” said Samer Khalaf, national president of The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, which has long lobbied for a more accurate label than “white.” Khalaf was one of 30 participants in a May 29 meeting convened by the U.S. Census Bureau so that researchers and representatives of MENA communities could discuss and offer feedback on the proposed changes.
“It’s a little arrogant for the government to dictate to any citizens what you should be identified as,” Khalaf told Haaretz later. “The MENA category was a bit of a compromise for us. In a perfect world we’d have an Arab category.” Instead, they agreed to settle on the geography-based MENA designation.
At least some in the Israeli-American community welcome the addition of a MENA option, though others prefer not to label themselves.
At a time when notions of race and ethnicity in America, like gender, are increasingly fluid, what will the addition of this category mean for the American Jewish community? If Israelis choose to be identified as part of MENA, will that in any way separate them from American Jews who opt for “white?”
And as the meaning of race is being refracted through the lens of the Rachel Dolezal scandal, after the head of the Spokane, WA NAACP chapter was outed as white, though she long identified as black, will these census changes serve to clarify ethnic identity in America or cloud the issues further?
… “We allocate billions of dollars to state and local governments based on these counts,” said Ramirez.
The last change to the race and ethnicity categories was in 1970, when Hispanic was added as an option to some questionnaires. In 1980 it became part of the form distributed to every household. While the census bureau is testing MENA and other issues under consideration for changes in the 2020 census, ultimately it is up to the White House Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. Congress to approve new classifications, Ramirez said.
To date, the only way to glean the contours of foreign-born communities has been through a census question asking where respondents were born. But that doesn’t capture people’s real sense of national/racial/ethnic identity, particularly when it comes to a country like Israel, where people are often born in other countries and there is a great deal of mobility.
Oren Heiman, chairperson of Moatza Mekomit, was part of the May 29 census meeting in Washington and is a good illustration of some of the unique challenges of Israeli identity: Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, he moved to Israel at the age of 9, where he lived in Herziliya until age 30. Now an attorney in New York, Heiman has lived here for many years and is returning shortly to Israel with his wife and infant daughter. Since he previously answered American-born, until now he would not have been counted by the U.S. government as Israeli, though it is very much the way he identifies himself.
“How do you count people who deem themselves Israeli, have Israeli citizenship, did the military, speak Hebrew at home and children who have both parents Israeli? Now if you have a MENA category, with Israeli in a drop-down menu, they can,” he said in an interview.
But some Israelis don’t even like the notion of being identified that way on a U.S. Census.
Ronit Lavi was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, to a Jewish mother and Lithuanian father. She emigrated to Israel alone as a young teenager, becoming religious, and Hebraized her name. Lavi, who is now a physical therapist in Brooklyn and lives in Sheepshead Bay, a heavily Russian-Jewish neighborhood, stayed in Israel for 16 years. Blond and with a fair complexion, she was catcalled by Israeli men and teenagers when she lived in Jerusalem. …
The addition of new census categories will be good for the Jews beyond Israeli Americans, said demographer Steven M. Cohen.
In America, with its “melting pot” orientation, Jews assimilate more rapidly than do fellow tribe members in Canada, Great Britain or Australia, which have smaller Jewish populations but cultures more sympathetic to the perpetuation of ethnic group ties, Cohen said.
“Being unwelcoming of the perpetuation of ethnic identity actually speeds up Jewish assimilation,” he told Haaretz. “Jews have an interest in an America which is more vividly Hispanic, Hindu, Muslim and Middle Eastern. This would be a small blow in favor of recognizing ethnic variation in America, which in the long run will survive as a distinct ethnic group.”
“Anything that fosters ethnic identity in America actually helps Jewish continuity,” he said. “It makes the culture more empathetic to perpetuation of ethnic group ties.”
In Jewish population studies most, though far from all, American Jews say they are Jewish by religion. And no race/ethnicity category, by itself, can fully reflect the truth of what it means to be Jewish.
“Faced with a census form and the mental images of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, a black Baptist, a Korean Buddhist or a Hispanic Catholic, white, black, Asian and Sephardi Jews might have some conflicted feelings,” said Rabbi Avi Shafran, a spokesman for Agudath Israel of America, in an email. “While Judaism is a religion, the Jewish people is a people. Peoplehood, at least Jewish peoplehood, transcends ethnicity and race.”
The last time the federal government asked about religion was 1957, said Alan Cooperman, director of religion research at the Pew Research Center, in a population survey rather than decennial census. Subsequently “there was a debate and a number of religious groups and civil liberties groups asked that the census not ask about religion, as a violation of church and state or intrusion on privacy.”
Concepts of race and ethnicity have a complicated, terrible history for Jews, and American Jewish organizations were among those opposed to census questions about religion….
Yet “there was a time when Jews referred to themselves as the Hebrew race,” noted Kelner.
“American Jews want to maintain a distinct identity and on the other hand want to be fully integrated into broader society and don’t want the distinctiveness to come at a price,” Kelner said. “Being marked on the census as Jewish gives you more information. It affirms the difference. Maybe it will have some type of legal consequences and benefits. But on the other hand, it goes against a century-plus of how American Jews have managed that tension.”

Comments:

* Steve, why exactly do you want Indians and Arabs to be classified as white? In what context are we thought of as white? For example, if immigration were entirely restricted to Arabs and Indians, would your fellow travelers suddenly stop worrying about whites becoming a minority?

As to your concern about “flight from white” for benefits, couple of points:
1) the government and the media already have no trouble at all distinguishing between Asians and underrepresented minorities (URM or NAM, as your readers call them).
2) I’m pretty sure discrimination or disparate impact can be decided on national origin too, not just race. If Russians were heavily discriminated against or badly underrepresented, I’m fairly sure the government can address it without requiring them to identity as non-white. Same for Arabs.

This drive to get a MENA category is likely motivated by the same impulse as the drive to get people to use “ze” or whatever – some people are really into the minutiae of asserting identity. I really don’t see why it would affect eligibility for benefits.

* Barring a tiny minority of wealthy indians, primarily from the northwest of the country, no one in India could seriously be considered White.
Yes, Indians can have some caucasoid facial features, and look more similar to Whites than to Chinese, but that’s akin to classifying Native Americans as East Asians, just because they both have slanted eyes.

Posted in America, Arabs, Jews, Whites | Comments Off

Black Crime Claims Life of Apologist for Black Crime

Posted on December 19, 2015 by Luke Ford

Colin Flaherty writes:

David Ruenzel knew, better than most, about the white privilege that killed him.

As a writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of this favorite topics was rooting out racism. And how white racism is permanent. White racism is everywhere. And white racism explains everything.

This mantra of the Critical Race Theory and the Southern Poverty Law Center applied to all white people because, even if they were not personally cracking the whips, or breaking the skulls, white people benefitted from a racist system that did all that — and a lot more.

Ruenzel was writing about white privilege for the Southern Poverty Law Center as far back as 1997 — long before it became the rage at college campuses, newsrooms, churches, high schools and even grade schools.

By the time of his death, Ruenzel had accumulated many of the trappings of the white privilege he exposed: The job. The home. The intact family. And most importantly in his case, white privilege endowed Ruenzel with an expectation of safety in the Oakland neighborhood where last week two black people are suspected of killing him.

A black NPR reporter explained the connection between white privilege and violence to Tracy Halvorsen earlier this year during Black History Month. In an article called Baltimore, You Are Breaking My Heart, Halvorsen described the relentless crime and violence in her gentrified Baltimore neighborhood. How she had to borrow her neighbor’s pit bull to walk around the block. How her neighbors were victims.

How public officials accepted that as normal.

Halvorsen included all the requisite denials that race had anything to do with the patterns of crime and hyper-violence in Baltimore.

Activists in Baltimore corrected her quickly and in large numbers: Race had everything to do with it, they said. Her white privilege gave her an unrealistic expectation of safety in her neighborhood. Her white race blinded her to the real causes of black crime.

“I think the problem here is that many white and/or upper/middle-class residents of Baltimore – and, of course, the Maryland suburbanites who work or play in Baltimore – show no sense of the structural problems plaguing the city and the roots of violence,” said a commentator known as Shereen at a local blog that focuses on journalism and music operated by NPR reporter Lawrence Lanahan.

Lanahan says it’s time to give some tough love to the white people in Baltimore who do not like crime.

“It’s tough to talk about white privilege in the face of crimes like the ones Halvorsen cites, with innocent victims killed and badly injured and stunned families left to grieve,” Lanahan said. “There’s also a lot that goes on, from individual decisions to local, state, and federal policy, that ensures – whether intentionally or not – that all the social ills stay where they ‘belong’ in the neighborhoods that people like Halvorsen and, frankly, I won’t live in.”

White neighborhoods “get more resources” than black neighborhoods, Lanahan said. That racial disparity causes violence, he said.

Or as President Obama called it in a recent speech to the Black Caucus: The “justice gap.”

This is the kind of atmosphere that David Ruenzel helped to create with his early and oft-cited work on white privilege for the Southern Poverty Law Center. The kind mentioned in his obituaries. The kind that blinded him to the dangers of being a white person in a black neighborhood in Oakland.

Other visitors to the Huckleberry Botanic Regional Preserve where Ruenzel was murdered describe the trail as idyllic. An oasis. A hidden gem.

But commentators to the Oakland news site that reported Ruenzel’s death were a bit more explicit: “That parking lot is a well known site for smash and grabs,” said one of several. Others pointed out graffiti and other crimes.

Another commentator, as if he were channeling the dead writer, chided anyone who suggested however slightly that white people are at risk of violent crime from black people in Oakland: “I’ve never read more atrocious comments. The white fear/hate is pretty scary.”

This is the world the Southern Poverty Law Center hath wrought: Comments about killing are scarier than killing itself.

Psychologist Marlin Newburn says the comments are not based on fear. Or hate. Just a feeling that something is very, very wrong with astronomical levels of black mob violence and black criminality.

And something is even worse among those who would deny it — or explain it away.

Like Ruenzel.

“Some liberals, most of which are ego-soaked, look for ways to support their self-perceived importance so they champion imaginary causes for that purpose,” Newburn said. “They are adult-children who feel free to construct fantasies about their greatness. Their narcissism in part functions to blind them to inconvenient realities. So to compensate, they idealize the targets of their misdirected and pathological ‘caring.’”

Posted in Blacks, Crime | Comments Off

NYT: Shhhhh, Europe Has a Muslim Rape Crisis, But Don’t Let the Evil Right Hear About It

Posted on December 19, 2015 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: From the New York Times, an article about how some European governments are debating whether or not it would be a good idea to mention to the young male migrants flooding in that raping unbelieving kafir slags isn’t allowed in Europe. Or will saying that out loud might boost the vote totals of the Real Enemy: immigration restrictionists?

Norway Offers Migrants a Lesson in How to Treat Women
By ANDREW HIGGINS DEC. 19, 2015
SANDNES, Norway — When he first arrived in Europe, Abdu Osman Kelifa, a Muslim asylum seeker from the Horn of Africa, was shocked to see women in skimpy clothes drinking alcohol and kissing in public. Back home, he said, only prostitutes do that, and in locally made movies couples “only hug but never kiss.”
Confused, Mr. Kelifa volunteered to take part in a pioneering and, in some quarters, controversial program that seeks to prevent sexual and other violence by helping male immigrants from societies that are largely segregated or in which women show neither flesh nor public affection to adapt to more open European societies.
Fearful of stigmatizing migrants as potential rapists and playing into the hands of anti-immigrant politicians, most European countries have avoided addressing the question of whether men arriving from more conservative societies might get the wrong idea once they move to places where it can seem as if anything goes.
But, with more than a million asylum seekers arriving in Europe this year, an increasing number of politicians and also some migrant activists now favor offering coaching in European sexual norms and social codes.
Mr. Kelifa, 33, attended the education program at an asylum center in this town near the western Norwegian city of Stavanger. Like similar courses now underway in the village of Lunde and elsewhere in Norway, it was voluntary and was organized around weekly group discussions of rape and other violence.
The goal is that participants will “at least know the difference between right and wrong,” said Nina Machibya, the Sandnes center’s manager.
A course manual sets out a simple rule that all asylum seekers need to learn and follow: “To force someone into sex is not permitted in Norway, even when you are married to that person.”
It skirts the issue of religious differences, noting that while Norway has long been largely Christian, it is “not religion that sets the laws” and that, whatever a person’s faith, “the rules and laws nevertheless have to be followed.”
In Denmark, lawmakers are pushing to have such sex education included in mandatory language classes for refugees. The German region of Bavaria, the main entry point to Germany for asylum seekers, is already experimenting with such classes at a shelter for teenage migrants in the town of Passau.
Norway, however, has been leading the way. Its immigration department mandated that such programs be offered nationwide in 2013, and hired a nonprofit foundation, Alternative to Violence, to train refugee center workers in how to organize and conduct classes on sexual and other forms of violence. The government provided funding for two years to pay for interpreters for the classes and is now reviewing the results and whether to extend its support.
“The biggest danger for everyone is silence,” said Per Isdal, a clinical psychologist in Stavanger who works with the foundation, which developed the program Mr. Kelifa attended in Sandes.
Many refugees “come from cultures that are not gender equal and where women are the property of men,” Mr. Isdal said. “We have to help them adapt to their new culture.”
The first such program to teach immigrants about local norms and how to avoid misreading social signals was initiated in Stavanger, the center of Norway’s oil industry and a magnet for migrants, after a series of rapes from 2009 to 2011.
Henry Ove Berg, who was Stavanger’s police chief during the spike in rape cases, said he supported providing migrants sex education because “people from some parts of the world have never seen a girl in a miniskirt, only in a burqa.” When they get to Norway, he added, “something happens in their heads.”
He said, “there was a link but not a very clear link” between the rape cases and the city’s immigrant community. According to the state broadcaster, NRK, which reviewed court documents, only three of 20 men found guilty in those cases were native Norwegians, the rest immigrants.

17/20 = 85% immigrant. Seems pretty clear to me, but what do I know about arithmetic?

The claim that refugees and immigrants in general are prone to commit rape has become a main rallying cry of anti-migrant activists across Europe, with each case of sexual violence by a newcomer presented as evidence of an imported scourge. …
Norway, like most European countries, does not break down crime statistics by ethnicity or religion. A 2011 report by Norway’s state statistical bureau noted that “immigrants are overrepresented in the crime statistics” but suggested that this was not due to cultural differences but because many of the immigrants were young men.
“It should not be surprising if groups with large proportions of young males have higher crime rates than groups with large proportions elderly women,” the report said.
Hanne Kristin Rohde, a former head of the violent crime section of the Oslo Police Department, said she ran into a wall of hostility when, in 2011 while still in the police force, she blamed sexual violence by foreign men on cultural factors and went public with data suggesting that immigrants committed a hugely disproportionate number of rapes.
“This was a big problem but it was difficult to talk about it,” Ms. Rohde said recently, asserting that there was “a clear statistical connection” between sexual violence and male migrants from countries where “women have no value of their own.” The taboo, she added, has since eased somewhat.
“There are lots of men who haven’t learned that women have value,” said Ms. Rohde, who wants mandatory sexual conduct classes for all new male migrants. “This is the biggest problem, and it is a cultural problem.”
But many question whether there is a clear link between migrants and crime. Last month, the German interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, said that asylum seekers were no more prone to crime, including sexual violence, than Germans.
“In general, the available recent trend findings show that refugees commit just as few or as many crimes as groups of the local population,” he said.
Mr. Kelifa, the African asylum seeker, said he still had a hard time accepting that a wife could accuse her husband of sexual assault. But he added that he had learned how to read previously baffling signals from women who wear short skirts, smile or simply walk alone at night without an escort.
“Men have weaknesses and when they see someone smiling it is difficult to control,” Mr. Kelifa said, explaining that in his own country, Eritrea, “if someone wants a lady he can just take her and he will not be punished,” at least not by the police.
… A class held on Wednesday in Lunde, a village southwest of Oslo, focused on differing perceptions of “honor” and how violence that might be seen as honorable in some cultures is shameful and also illegal in Norway….
Hero Norge’s teaching material studiously avoids casting migrants in a bad light and instead presents a fictional character called Arne, a native Norwegian, as a model of predatory behavior. The main immigrant character, a 27-year-old called Hassan, is, by contrast, introduced as a “good man” who is “honest and well liked.”
In one episode, Arne, the Norwegian, tells Hassan he plans to ply a young woman with alcoholic drinks “to soften her up.” People taking the course are asked questions such as: “How should Hassan react?” “What do you think Arne means when he says he wants to ‘soften her up?’ ” “Is it O.K. to ‘soften someone up’ with alcohol?”

In other words, the Norwegian NGO has created a Norwegian Haven Monahansen to teach Horn of Africa men that blond, blue-eyed men are the devil.

Berit Harr, a course monitor at a refugee center in Ha, a coastal village south of Stavanger, said it was important to avoid making migrants feel as if they were under suspicion while getting them to talk about their own views on relations between the sexes.

COMMENTS:

* At first I would feel anger reading of such Northern European vacuousness; now I am indifferent, they don’t deserve the civilization they inherited. May their young women enjoy their rapes.

Posted in Europe, Islam, Rape | Comments Off

Martin Van Creveld: How My Family Survived the Holocaust

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Luke Ford

Martin Van Creveld writes:

How did your family survive the Holocaust? Is a question I have heard many, many times. So this week, instead of addressing the usual topics, let me say a few words about that.

My maternal grandfather, Louis Wijler (1890-1977), was a self-made man He was also a very rich one, having worked his way up from practically zero to become the largest grain-dealer in the Netherlands. When the Germans came in 1940 they took his business, Granaria NV, away from him, appointing a Verwalter, administrator, in his place. However, the Verwalter only showed himself occasionally. My grandfather had always been a generous employer and the other directors, most of whom were gentiles, remained loyal to him.

Towards the end of 1942, when the deportations were already forging ahead, he succeeded in having himself and most of his family put on a list of a thousand “prominent” Jews. Including businessmen, artists, former politicians and officials, etc. In January 1943—it was a cold winter—these people were interned in De Schaffelaar, a large country house in the Eastern Netherlands, on the understanding that they would be allowed to remain there until after the war. But this promise the Germans broke. In November they and their Dutch collaborators came to evacuate the camp and transfer its inhabitants to Westerbork. Westerbork had been erected by the Dutch government before 1939 as a camp for Jewish refugees from Germany. During the war it was where trains went to “the east.” Meaning, Auschwitz. But that was a name no one at De Schaffelaar seems to have heard

Most of the interned Jews went docilely enough. No one like the Dutch in bowing to “de overheid” (the authorities) and following orders! Not so my family. My grandfather, fully expecting that the Germans would break their promise, prepared accordingly. When the day came, he, his wife, their children four daughters, one in-law, two future in-laws, and two nephews) all managed to escape. My father, who had golden hands, used to work as a handyman in camp, simply put on his overalls, picked up his tools—my son Eldad still has his electric tester, which still works—and walked out. What nerve! But to this day he feels a little guilty about having left his fiancé, my mother to be, behind.

In the event, my mother and a cousin of hers hid under the floor of a wooden barrack used by the internees to wash and perform their ablutions. Listening to the Germans and the Dutch police looting, drinking and partying, they waited until nightfall. Then they crept out and left. Later this same man, along with his brother, succeeded in reaching the Swiss border, only to be turned away by the Swiss police. Both of them died at Auschwitz.

Others, including an aunt of mine who had just given birth, made their way out by similar methods. But that was only the first step. Next, two things were needed. First, a place to stay; second, money. Both were provided by my grandfather by way of the business. As an importer of cattle feed, he had many clients in the eastern, less developed, agricultural part of the country. Some he had known for decades. He was thus able to compile a list of “addresses,” as the saying went; meaning, people of whom he knew that they were reliable and would be willing to take him and members of his family in. Money, too, came from Granaria NV. In his memoirs, which he wrote in 1974, he laconically said that they used “all kinds of methods” to get the money out of the business without drawing the Verwalter’s attention.

Not having IDs—their own, stamped with a large “J” for “Jood,” they had hidden or thrown away—they could not show themselves on the streets. Not before they got false papers. First, fake ones, some of them produced by another relative who was a chemist and knew how to do these things; later, “real” ones. Real in the sense that the personal details and photograph were entered on official blanks the Underground had stolen from the Dutch ministry of the interior.

Even so it was a risky business. For example, at one point my grandparents were betrayed by a company employee who had a gun put to this head. They were having their afternoon tea when the house in which they were staying was surrounded; they were barely able to hide in a pre-prepared hole between the first and second floors when the door was broken in. “Wo sind die Wijlers,” “waar zijn de Wijlers” (where are the Wijlers, in German and Dutch.) “Just left”, came the answer. Whereupon the man of the house was beaten up and taken to a concentration camp. Fortunately he survived.

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MULTICULTURALISM IS KILLING US

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Luke Ford

Ben Shapiro writes: While Americans fret over Donald Trump’s plans to ban Muslim immigration to the United States temporarily thanks to the government’s inability to keep us safe, the government continues to prove its inability to keep us safe. This week, we found out that President Obama’s Department of Homeland Security prohibited agents from screening foreign citizens applying for visas to enter the country.

According to former acting undersecretary at DHS for intelligence and analysis John Cohen, “During that time period immigration officials were not allowed to use or review social media as part of the screening process. … The primary concern was that it would be viewed negatively if it was disclosed publicly and there were concerns that it would be embarrassing.”

He continued, “It was primarily a question of optics. There were concerns from a privacy and civil liberties perspective that while this was not illegal, that it would be viewed negatively if it was disclosed publicly.”

So 14 Americans in San Bernardino died for optics.

While President Obama insists that the government must check the metadata of American citizens to catch terrorists, he insists that his own people stop checking the publicly posted Facebook messages of potential terrorists.

This is the essence of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism suggests that all cultures are equal, that they carry equal values, that they pose equal threats to public safety. Extending that logic, we must treat suspects from all cultures with equal care. But what if not all cultures provide an equal threat? What if the people who engage in some cultures are more likely than others to participate in terrorism? Then, in order to maintain the multicultural fiction, we must bend over backwards not to check out threats from such cultures. Either that, or we must violate everyone’s civil rights equally.

The former is happening in the United States; the latter is happening in France, where the government has been knocking down the doors of hundreds of mosques on grounds of “preach[ing] hatred” or using “takfiri speech,” according to French imam Hassan El Alaoui. In the United States, we’d see such raids as a violation of the First and Fourth Amendments. In France, they have no such amendments. They do, however, have a multicultural view of the world.

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AFFIRMATIVE ACTION QUOTAS TURNING BLACKS INTO FAILURES

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Luke Ford

Thomas Sowell writes:

Among the many sad signs of our time are the current political and media attacks on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for speaking the plain truth on a subject where lies have been the norm for years.

The case before the High Court is whether the use of race as a basis for admitting students to the University of Texas at Austin is a violation of the 14th Amendment’s requirement for government institutions to provide “equal protection of the laws” to all.

Affirmative action is supposed to be a benefit to black and other minority students admitted with lower academic qualifications than some white students who are rejected. But Justice Scalia questioned whether being admitted to an institution geared to students with higher-powered academic records was a real benefit.

Despite much media spin, the issue is not whether blacks in general should be admitted to higher ranked or lower ranked institutions. The issue is whether a given black student, with given academic qualifications, should be admitted to a college or university where he would not be admitted if he were white.

Much empirical research over the years has confirmed Justice Scalia’s concern that admitting black students to institutions for which their academic preparation is not sufficient can be making them worse off instead of better off.

I became painfully aware of this problem more than 40 years ago, when I was teaching at Cornell University, and discovered that half the black students there were on some form of academic probation.

These students were not stupid or uneducable. On the contrary, the average black student at Cornell at that time scored at the 75th percentile on scholastic tests. Their academic qualifications were better than those of three-quarters of all American students who took those tests.

Why were they in trouble at Cornell, then? Because the average Cornell student in the liberal arts college at that time scored at the 99th percentile. The classes taught there — including mine — moved at a speed geared to the verbal and mathematical level of the top one percent of American students.

The average white student would have been wiped out at Cornell. But the average white student was unlikely to be admitted to Cornell, in the first place. Nor was a white student who scored at the 75th percentile.
That was a “favor” reserved for black students. This “favor” turned black students who would have been successful at most American colleges and universities into failures at Cornell.

None of this was peculiar to Cornell. Black students who scored at the 90th percentile in math had serious academic problems trying to keep up at M.I.T., where other students scored somewhere within the top 99th percentile.

Nearly one-fourth of these black students with stellar qualifications in math failed to graduate from M.I.T., and those who did graduate were concentrated in the bottom tenth of the class.

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Guns and race: The different worlds of black and white Americans

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Luke Ford

Whites use guns to shoot themselves, blacks use them primarily to shoot others.

Brookings:

“The nation’s consciousness has been raised by the repeated acts of police brutality against blacks. But the problem of public space violence—seen in the extraordinary distress, trauma and pain many poor inner-city families experience following the killing of a family member or close relative—also deserves our special attention.”

So argued William Julius Wilson, world-renowned scholar and newly appointed Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow, on this blog yesterday. That special attention could usefully start with some of the most important facts. Gun deaths vary dramatically by gender and race:

In 2013, firearm deaths accounted for over 11 percent of all years of potential life lost among the black population, but less than 6 percent of all years of potential life lost among the white population.

White suicides, black homicides

Gun deaths also vary dramatically by type. The vast majority (77 percent) of white gun deaths are suicides; less than one in five (19 percent) is a homicide. These figures are nearly opposite in the black population, where only 14 percent of gun deaths are suicides but 82 percent are homicides:

The firearm homicide rate among black men aged 20-29 is about 89 per 100,000.To put that fact in some international perspective, in Honduras—the country with the highest recorded homicide rate—there were 90.4 intentional murders per 100,000 people in 2012. That includes all means, not just firearm homicides.

‘Distress, trauma, and pain’: social costs

Gun violence can have a series of serious snowball effects in education, health, incarceration, family instability, and social capital. To take one example, anxiety levels rise and cognitive functioning worsens among school children following a violent crime within half a mile of their home, according to a study by Dana Charles McCoy, C. Cybele Raver and Patrick Sharkey. Individuals who witness violence are also at increased risk for a variety of mental health issues, which can manifest as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, poor academic performance, substance abuse, risky sexual behavior, delinquency, and violent behavior, notes David Hemenway. And as Wilson suggests, these costs weigh largely on the shoulders of black Americans.

Gun violence is part of a vicious cycle of race and inequality in the U.S., reflecting existing social inequalities, and also making it even more challenging for young black people, especially young black men, to escape poverty and violence.

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The Racial Gap for Titles Among American Chess Players

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Luke Ford

Jamaal Abdul-Alim, World Chess, December 15, 2015:

After Emory Tate, Jr., an American international master, died in October during a chess tournament in California, one grandmaster described his death as a “devastating loss.”

Tate’s death at 57 was not only sad for those who knew him and admired his tactical skill and outsized personality, it left a major void among international titled black players from the United States.

Only four black Americans–including Tate–have become at least international masters, according to “Drum Majors of Chess,” a web-based wall of fame maintained on “The Chess Drum,” a website devoted to Black chess players throughout the world. Kassa Korley, who lives in New York, is one of the three, but on the Web site of the World Chess Federation, he is listed as playing for Denmark, where he has familial roots and dual citizenship.

Maurice Ashley–the chess commentator and impresario–is often cited as the first and only African-American grandmaster from the United States, though even he was born in Jamaica.

The only other titled black American player is Stephen Muhammad, an inactive international master from Georgia, who is also a Nation of Islam minister.

As the obstacles to playing chess appear to be low–players only need a board and pieces and do not need to be athletes–and the game is popular on the streets of many cities, the dearth of titled black players is puzzling on its surface. But, according to players and people involved in teaching chess, lack of money is one of the biggest barriers to blacks excelling in the world of tournament chess.

“Most of the people that play, they have disposable income,” said Ronald J. Jones, a black expert player and former Washington, D.C., champion. “They can afford to spend $300 for a tournament, $500 for a hotel, another $1000 for an airline ticket to another state.” {snip}

{snip}

Jerald Times, a master and chess coach at the elite Dalton School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, said, “I believe grandmaster is more an economic measurement than an intellectual one. The idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, yes, that can happen every once in a while. But for the most part, that kid (in the inner city) is not gonna take six hours of his life a day and study chess.”

Times noted that the lack of black grandmasters is a worldwide phenomenon. “The numbers are low,” he said. “Out of the 1500 grandmasters in the world, only three or four are black.”

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