November 30, 2015 Have You Learned The Lessons Of The Holocaust? Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Have You Learned The Lessons Of The Holocaust?

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Luke Ford

American Jewish historian Peter Novick writes in his book The Holocaust in American Life:

…The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is the principal symbol and “address” of American Jewry, our “epistle to the gentiles” about what it means to be Jewish. The museum on the Mall is matched by dozens of smaller Holocaust museums in cities across the country. …[T]hese monuments to suffering and death are described by their builders as “the natural site for interfaith services”; they function to “explain our Jewish heritage and our Jewish needs to the Gentile as well as to the Jew.”

…Since the 1970s, the Holocaust has come to be presented — come to be thought of — as not just a Jewish memory but an American memory. In a growing number of states the teaching of the Holocaust in public schools is legislatively mandated. Instructions for conducting “Days of Remembrance” are distributed throughout the American military establishment, and commemorative ceremonies are held annually in the Capitol Rotunda. Over the past twenty years every president has urged Americans to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. …How did this European event come to loom so large in American consciousness?

A good part of the answer is the fact — not less of a fact because anti-Semites turn it into a grievance — that Jews play an important and influential role in Hollywood, the television industry, and the newspaper, magazine, and book publishing worlds. Anyone who would explain the massive attention the Holocaust has received in these media in recent years without reference to that fact is being naive or disingenuous. This is not, of course, a matter of any “Jewish conspiracy” — Jews in the media do not dance to the tune of the “elders of Zion.” It’s not even a matter of Jews in the media per se, which is an old story, but of what sort of Jews. Beginning in the 1970s, a cohort of Jews who either didn’t have much in the way of Jewish concerns or were diffident about voicing the concerns they did have came to be replaced by a cohort that included many for whom those concerns were more deeply felt and who were more up-front about them. In large part the movement of the Holocaust from the Jewish to the general American arena resulted from private and spontaneous decisions of Jews who happened to occupy strategic positions in the mass media.

But that movement was not completely private and spontaneous. If, as many in Jewish organizations believed, Americans could be made more sympathetic to Israel, or to American Jews, through awareness of the Holocaust, efforts had to be made to spread that awareness throughout American society. Blu Greenberg, the wife of Rabbi Irving Greenberg, wrote that she had originally favored exclusively Jewish commemoration of the Holocaust; such occasions were “a moment to withdraw into the embrace of one’s group.” After attending an interfaith Yom HaShoah ceremony, however, she found it “moving and comforting to see Christians share tears with us, acknowledge Christian guilt, and commit themselves to the security of Israel.” Indeed, even the aim of promoting awareness of the Holocaust among Jews — for “survivalist” or other purposes — could be accomplished only by making that awareness general. “For Jews to solidify the place of the Holocaust within Jewish consciousness,” wrote Michael Berenbaum of the Washington Holocaust Museum, “they must establish its importance for the American people as a whole.”

…Without doubt the most important moment in the entry of the Holocaust into general American consciousness was NBC’s presentation, in April 1978, of the miniseries Holocaust. Close to 100 million Americans watched all or most of the four-part, 9 1/2-hour program… The Anti-Defamation League distributed ten million copies of its sixteen-page tabloid The Record to promote the drama. Jewish organizations successfully lobbied major newspapers to serialize Gerald Green’s novelization of his television play, or to publish special inserts on the Holocaust. The American Jewish Committee, in cooperation with NBC, distributed millions of copies of a study guide for viewers; teachers magazines carried other curricular material tied to the program. Jewish organizations worked with the National Council of Churches to prepare other promotional and educational materials, and organized advance viewings for religious leaders. The day the series began was designated “Holocaust Sunday”; various activities were scheduled in cities across the country; the National Conference of Christians and Jews distributed yellow stars to be worn on that day.

Those activities were directed at gentiles. But, following Berenbaum’s dictum that making the Holocaust important to all Americans would also make it more important to Jews, the NBC miniseries offered an unmatched opportunity to further that task as well… The director of a Jewish school in Pittsburgh called Holocaust a “shock treatment for developing Jewish identity.” …The study guides for Jewish young people, prepared by a consortium of Jewish organizations, were rather different. Christian anti-Semitism and Eastern European collaborators were frequently mentioned. There were disparaging references to how assimilated the family of Jewish protagonists were, and that they weren’t bothered by the son’s marriage to a gentile…

Not everyone was willing to endorse Wiesel’s claim that the Holocaust was a sacred mystery, whose secrets were confined to a priesthood of survivors. In a diffuse way, however, the assertion that the Holocaust was a holy event that resisted profane representation, that it was uniquely inaccessible to explanation or understanding, that survivors had privileged interpretative authority — all these themes continue to resonate… Many also came to believe that the Holocaust was uniquely inexplicable…

A substantial literature has developed on special problems that are alleged to exist in portraying the Holocaust in film, in fiction, and in scholarship. But it is a very academic literature — written by and for academics, almost always published in academic journals, often jargon-ridden…

The airing of the series, in January 1979, became the turning point in Germany’s long-delayed confrontation with the Holocaust…

…in 1993 public officials from the president on down were so actively promoting Spielberg’s film that it was hard to find room on the bandwagon. Free showings for high school students were arranged (during class time) across the country, as a contribution to their moral education, following the example of Oprah Winfrey, who announced on her talk show that “I’m a better person as a result of seeing Schindler’s List.”

…But nowadays, for a great many people, the real number of Holocaust victims is eleven million: six million Jews and five million non-Jews…

The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer reports that [Simon] Wiesenthal acknowledged to him in a private conversation that he simply invented [the numbers]… Wiesenthal’s invention of “eleven million” was bizarre…

…in return for a subsidy for his program of tracking down war criminals, a California rabbi obtained the use of his name for what became a highly visible Holocaust institution, the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “Eleven million” was part of the baggage that came with the name…

At a ceremony on the White House lawn in honor of Israel’s thirtieth birthday, President Jimmy Carter announced that he was setting up a commission to explore creating a national memorial to “the six million who were killed in the Holocaust.” …Carter’s initiative was an attempt to placate American Jews, who were increasingly alienated by what they saw as the president’s “excessive evenhandedness” in dealing with Israelis and Palestinians. If the estrangement continued, it could be devastating for Carter’s prospects for reelection… The final staff discussions of the proposed memorial were conducted amid all the hoopla over NBC’s Holocaust.

On the day after Carter’s announcement of a proposal to commemorate “the six million,” one of [Stuart] Eizenstadt’s aides suggested to her boss that the new commission might “consider expanding this to eleven million,” following the example of the Simon Wiesenthal Center… This redefinition was, of course, deeply offensive to [Elie] Wiesel…

The following months saw an intense struggle between Wiesel and Jewish staffers in the White House over how the Holocaust should be described — who would be included. It was “morally repugnant,” said one presidential aide, “to create a category of second-class victims of the Holocaust as Mr. Wiesel would have us do.”

…Though Jewish survivors of the Holocaust had no role in the initiative that created the museum, they came, under the leadership of Wiesel, to dominate the council… When one survivor, Sigmund Strochlitz, was sworn in as a council member, he announced that it “unreasonable and inappropriate to ask survivors to share the term Holocaust…to equate our suffering…with others.” At one council meeting, another survivor, Kalman Sultanik, was asked whether Daniel Trocme, murdered at Maidanek for rescuing Jews and honored at Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile, could be remembered in the museum’s Hall of Remembrance. “No,” said Sultanik, because “he didn’t die as a Jew… The six million Jews died differently.”

There were also attempts to mobilize Jewish opinion at large against blurring the distinction between the victimhood of Jews and that of others. Survivor Henryk Grynberg even objected to the ancillary role accorded to gentiles in Wiesel’s phrase about other being, “as night descended…swept into this net of death.” This was, Grynberg said, “absolutely false.”: “Those millions of others would have perished in the war even if the Holocaust had never taken place.” Children of survivors were often among those who insisted on the distinction between the deaths of gentiles and of Jews. Gentiles, said one, “died a death invented for the Jews…victims of a ‘solution’ designed for others.” For another child of survivors, dismayed by what he saw as the museum’s blurring of the issue, the deaths of gentile victims “were of a different, non-theological order, untouched by the mysteries that reign at the heart of…the ‘Tremendum.'” Yehuda Bauer enlisted in the battle against what he called the “Wiesenthal-Carter definition.” It reflected, he wrote, gentile “envy” of the Jews’ experience in the Holocaust, which “would seem to be an unconscious reflection of anti-Semitic attitudes.”

…In the end, largely as a result of the influence of survivors on the council, “other victims” wound up receiving little more than perfunctory mention in the museum’s permanent exhibition…

Americans are exhorted that they must “confront” or “remember” the Holocaust, but what is it that they are to confront or remember?

…Poles and Ukrainians…never had the political, cultural or financial resources to press their case. this was even more true of Gypsies, whose proportional losses to the Nazi murder program approximated that of Jews. And there were no lobbyists for former Soviet prisoners of the Germans, whose losses through deliberate starvation, disease, and execution ran into the millions.

…The actual number of gays who died or were killed in the camps appears to be around five thousand… But unlike other groups that wanted to be recognized as victims of the Holocaust, gays do have political and cultural resources, and they don’t face the same hostility to inclusion…encountered by Poles and Ukrainians. Their inclusion, moreover, could be seen as a contribution to the cause of combating homophobia. And many of their spokesmen, who press for inclusion, are Jewish.

* We respond not to events, but to representations of events.

* In the end, it hardly seemed to matter whether one was learning the lessons of the Holocaust or the lessons of the Potato Famine, because the lessons were all pretty much the same: tolerance and diversity were good, hate was bad.

* Though some Holocaust educators disapprove, role-playing games continue to be a feature of many Holocaust courses, and this certainly increases student interest.

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Fox News: Son of Holocaust survivor: Don’t let Syrian refugees in to US

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Luke Ford

Fox News: The son of Holocaust survivors, Harry Maryles tells stories of his father hiding out in underground bunkers and his mother living off food scraps in a Polish forest for years to avoid the clutches of Hitler’s henchmen.

So Maryles is in a unique position to push back against a rising narrative from those claiming Americans fearful of accepting Syrian refugees are repeating the “jingoistic” mistakes of a country that rejected Jewish asylum seekers prior to World War II.

“No Jew would have come in disguised as a peace-loving individual and then joined a sleeper cell and become a suicide bomber,” Maryles told FoxNews.com on Thursday. “It was a different situation. Now you have situations where [terrorists] will do anything to achieve their goals. And keeping out innocent people is part of the price you pay.”

Maryles, 69, who is retired from a Chicago dental laboratory business, said he is “torn” when he sees the Syrian refugees who have fled their country’s civil war and the expanding ISIS caliphate.

“How could you not want to help?” Maryles said.

But Maryles also recognizes the risk that Islamists have infiltrated the refugee’s ranks, and he questions the wisdom of the Obama administration’s plan to shrink the vetting period from at least 18 months – while at the same time increasing the number of refugees accepted into the U.S. five-fold, to 10,000 in 2016.

“The problem is you now have a situation where people of similar backgrounds and similar looks can easily come in with these refugees and create the kind of problems that we saw in the Paris terror attacks,” Maryles said.

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A Shanda For The Goyim

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Luke Ford

James Deen always struck me as a Nice Jewish Boy and consummate gentleman.

Shlomo* emails: “You’ve read, no doubt, that Reb Baruch Menashe Sevilla, otherwise known as James Deen, is now being accused by multiple women of sexual assault. ‘The boy next door’ they called him. I’m sure there weren’t too many Jewish boys next door in La Canada-Flintridge where he grew up. I never did figure out why he claims to have been raised in Pasadena. Maybe he doesn’t want people to think he grew up privileged.”

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Refugee Resettlement Watch

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Luke Ford

Source:

Those who are promoting the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of refugees to America (like these churches we told you about this morning) are now pulling out all the stops. I’ve been following this issue for eight years and I have never seen a campaign like the one that started in the wake of the Paris terror attack.

BELIEVE ME! THEY ARE WORRIED!

The resettlement contractors have never been as worried as they are at this minute that their gravy train is being threatened by citizens standing up to them and that the issue is being discussed in American homes like never before.

The Obama Administration is worried that its final year to bring as many immigrant “seedlings” in to America as they can is in jeopardy.

There will be action in Congress, legal challenges to Governors who are standing up for state’s rights, and a major media blitz (already underway) to make you sound like a heartless bigot by the NO Borders Left who knew all along that Obama was changing America by changing the people!

We will have more tomorrow on what you need to do!

Here are our top three posts of the week (top daily posts are in the right hand side bar). The third one is an older post. It is always surprising to me why some old post takes off and goes viral.

Putin Vs Erdogan

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* The difference between the two is that Erdogan has been very successful, and Putin has been a failure. Turkey is now more influential internationally than at any time since the Ottoman Empire collapsed. It has a balanced economy, and low priced Turkish manufacturers of fairly sophisticated products are taking market share in Euope and competing with the Chinese. Meanwhile Russia is still a dig-and-deliver state that survives by selling off its natural resources and is now almost bankrupt. Putin has managed to weaken Russian soft power to the extent that even most of Ukraine is now violently anti-Russian. Erdogan has the advantage that most Turkish elites, even the ones opposed to him, are patriots and nationalists and will generally support Turkish interests. Rich Turks invest in Turkish companies. Rich Russians invest in real estate in London. Putin has the disadvantage that most Russian elites, even the ones that nominally support Putin, are interested only in accumulating wealth and power and will betray their own mothers given the chance.

* I wonder what is up with those disloyal “Russian” elites. There must be some possible explanation for this, but I just can’t imagine what it could be ….

* Imagine if the United States had hostile relations, to the point of low intensity wars, with Canada and Mexico, was sanctioned by and expelled from the G-7 and had an economy that was shrinking by 3 or 4 percent in real terms per year with no end in sight. Overseeing this remarkable state of affairs was a strutting president in his 15th year in office.

Putin has backed his nation into a situation that may require him to become even more dangerous and reckless. The only economic solution he has to his nation’s problems is to raise the global oil price and the only way he can do that is by expanding the war in Syria into the great oil fields of Iraq and the Persian Gulf! His geo-political position to the West is deteriorating too as Europe rearms. Time and technology are passing his nation by. He is desperate.

* Putin and Erdogan are not that similar, except in the mind of the Western media. As Alexander Mercouris recently said, “Erdogan is someone who far more closely resembles the Western image of Putin than Putin himself does.” Mercouris explains some of the discrepancies between the real Putin and his image in the West.

In the NYT piece I like the quote by Ivan Krastev (who for once did not compare Putin to Stalin,) “Not looking weak is something very important for both Putin and Erdogan. Neither knows how to retreat, nor apologize.” This is terrible! Fortunately, America has a leader who has no problem looking weak and who retreats and apologizes all the time.

* Turkey’s economy indeed improved during the Erdogan period, but the country is now involved in disputes with almost all its neighbors — Greece, Syria, Iran, the Kurds, Russia. It’s not getting along too famously with the EU, the USA or Israel either. What that article could elaborate on a little more is that Erdogan is corrupt corrupt corrupt. His son is selling ISIS oil to eastern Asia.

* Contextually, they have something in common.

Both are ‘traditionalist’ quasi-autocrats ruling over a major nation somewhere between modernity and the third world.

But that’s about as far as it goes.

Putin is rational and has a sense of limits. He is also cautious. It’s not difficult to know what he wants. He got involved in Syria as the last resort.

Erdogan, in contrast, is contradictory, impetuous, petty, confused, craven, and full of bluster.

Russia’s role in the Middle East makes sense. Putin wants good relations with Israel and all the legit ruling powers.

Erdogan’s methods are all over the map.
Turkey is pro-Israel, anti-Israel. Turkey was pro-Assad, then anti-Assad. Had Assad’s power been stable, Turkey would not have aided the rebels. But Erdogan was so sure Assad would fall and aided the rebels. If Assad survives, Erdogan is ashamed to have to deal with a man(right across the border) whom he tried to destroy. So, Erdogan tries his bestt desperately to destroy Assad.
It’s like Sollozo the Turk failed to kill Don Corleone and so plots to try again. And Michael knows this.

Putin has been forced into tough decisions, as in Georgia and Ukraine. He doesn’t look for trouble.
Erdogan looks for trouble.

Maybe Russia feels as a major power simply due to its size and resources.
In contrast, Turkey’s neo-Ottoman-ish sense of importance depends on being at the center of crises.

So, Erdogan keeps courting crisis after crisis.

A bear need not make trouble to be feared and respected.
A badger has to keep growling that it is tough and badass.

Also, Putin is a secularist despite his professed Christianity and revival of religion in Russia.
Erdogan is far closer to certain aspects of Islamic faith. He is less rational.

Erdogan’s one big payoff in crisis may be EU’s plan to allow Turkey into the EU.
The refugee gambit that made EU afraid of the Muslim tide is making EU allow Turkey into the union as the favored Euro-Muslim nation.
‘We will take you Turks if you Turks keep the other Muzzies out.’

It’s like ‘we will accept you mulattos if you work with us keep out the blacks.’

Not gonna work.

PS. erdogan is more like Netanyahu.
Both live on crisis and are full of nasty bluster.

* Let’s be realistic the Russian economy is basically a gas station with an army. Besides natural resources and armaments, there’s very few things that Russia can produce competitively on the global stage. You can’t discount that the handover from Yeltsin to Putin coincided with the trough of a multi-decade commodity super-cycle. Add in that global military spending has also nearly doubled during the same period, particularly among the middle-income non-Western nations that love buying Russian weapons.

* McCain’s line about Russia being a gas station hasn’t been true for a while. In 2000, Russia’s natural resource rents (which include not only oil and gas but also coal, minerals, and timber) were 43% of GDP. In 2013 (last available year) they fell to 18%. The figures are from World Bank.

It’s true that majority of Russian goods are not competitive on the world stage*. Russia has been cut off from the world economy for so long, it will take decades for them to re-enter it. But what did happen, and I guess it’s an achievement of Putin’s economic team, is that Russian goods have largely become competitive on the internal market. If you think that’s not important, you should look into the history of Asian tiger economies.

But more competitive than you may think. For example, I recently discovered that Russia quietly exports combine harvesters to America and Europe.

* Russia makes weapon systems that are competitive on the world market now. They also export wheat at competive prices (without starving themselves as in USSR days). They can launch and build communication satellites, something very few countries can do.

* A century ago, Aboriginals had terrible problems with tuberculosis and alcoholism. Now they just have alcoholism. Perhaps focused medical research could someday solve their alcoholism problem the way it has mostly solved their TB problem? But it might require finding out which genes make them so vulnerable to alcohol.

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Is Importing Muslims Wise? Look At Sweden!

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Luke Ford

From VDARE: With President Obama’s determination to use the Syrian refugee weapon to transform America becoming more blatant as the GOP Leadership obeys its paymasters and retreats from taking any action on the influx, it is timely to consider the experience of other countries where Muslimization is more advanced.

An excellent source of information on this is the blog Creeping Sharia and a good country to inspect is Sweden. One Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in Sweden: October 2015 was posted today. Here are some items:

October 7: TV4’s popular investigative journalism TV program, Cold Facts (Kalla Fakta), revealed that public health centers in areas with high immigrant populations perform so-called “virginity tests” on young girls…. The doctors (several of whom were immigrants) ignored the loud protests from the girls, and examined them against their will. The doctors also offered, for a cash bribe, to issue “virginity certificates” for the girls.
October 13: Three men were arrested as suspects in an August 24 hand grenade attack against police in the Stockholm suburb of Tumba. The hand grenade exploded a few feet from a police van, and the vehicle was riddled with over a hundred pieces of shrapnel…The police also suspect there is a close connection between the Tumba attack and the armed robbery of a supermarket in Stockholm on October 12. A few days later, one of the three suspects, an 18-year-old man, was remanded on suspicion of armed robbery, aggravated larceny and attempted murder.
October 13: Swedish public radio revealed that the Migration Courts, established in 2006 to give greater legal recourse to asylum seekers, are completely swamped. The problem is that more and more rejected applicants now appeal their decisions to the Migration Courts
October 13: It was reported that Swedish schools are now overcrowded, as many schools struggle to cope with the enormous influx of migrants. Minister of Education Gustav Fridolin discovered that many of the migrants arriving do not have any formal education at all, and he wants to open Swedish elementary schools to adult immigrant men, placing them in the same classes as 8-year-olds.
October 15: The Södersjukhuset Hospital in Stockholm opened what is believed to be the world’s first rape clinic for men. More and more men are being subjected to homosexual rape in multicultural Sweden.

(See John Derbyshire’s Sweden’s Gender-Inclusive Muslim Rapists)

October 16: Lennart Holmlund, a Social Democratic former municipal councilor of Umeå, complained on Facebook about the Roma people, and is now under suspicion of having violated hate-speech laws…The councilman argued that one should be able to talk about everything, so long as it is true. However, two days later, he was forced to apologize and stress that he is not a racist.
October 16: Internal police documents were revealed that show 70% of people who have their asylum application rejected ignore the decision and stay illegally in Sweden. Of the 9,000 deportation cases sent to the police by the Immigration Service this year, 70% had vanished from their registered addresses, and had left the police completely nonplussed…
October 17: The Swedish strategy seems to be to keep the borders open and then redistribute the asylum seekers to EU countries that have an immigration policy completely different from Sweden’s open borders and generous welfare benefits. Whether other EU countries want to relieve Sweden’s burden remains to be seen. Denmark has already declined, saying that Sweden (which has time and again accused Denmark of being racist) needs to clean up its own mess.
October 21: It was reported that the psychiatric evaluation of the IKEA killer Abraham Ukbagabir showed that he had deliberately and consciously chosen his victims — Carola and Emil Herlin — because they “looked Swedish.”

(See James Kirkpatrick’s African “Asylum Seekers” Arrested For Stabbing In Ikea In Sweden)

October 21: It was reported that the Swedish police are being called out to asylum houses more and more often because of brawls, threats and fights between asylum seekers — on this day, at the facilities in Tomelilla, Söderhamn and Sundsvall.
October 21: The weekly paper Lokaltidningen revealed that weapons smugglers have figured out a way to drive through customs without being pulled over. The customs officers have orders never to stop cars with more passengers than there are customs officers present. “Of course, the criminals have learned this,” said retired District Attorney Sven-Erik Alhem. “They place five large, sturdy men in a Mercedes or BMW and blow right through customs. Minutes later, we have additional illegal weapons in Malmö…”
October 22: Mark Saliba, the elder of two brothers in their twenties suspected of a triple murder in Uddevalla on March 7, was sentenced to life in prison. His younger brother was acquitted…The Saliba brothers, of Lebanese/Syrian descent, have several previous convictions.
October 23: Akram Ali, Yonés Hachimi and Mohamed Mesawe were indicted for brutally gang raping a Swedish girl in the Fåfängan park area in Stockholm. The three young men, who claim to be teenagers but refuse to disclose what country they are from… The men were believed to be under 18, and were therefore sentenced to juvenile detention. In six to nine months, they will be cruising Stockholm by night again.
October 26: Once again, a group of asylum seekers refused to move into their new lodgings. This time, it was a group of about 30 who thought the asylum housing in Lima was not “urban” enough. They said they were afraid of “wild animals in the forest.”
October 26: Malmö police were powerless to stop a criminal gang who had taken over a residential building…The house in question is on Rasmusgatan Street, which is so crime-infested that even the police seem to have given up on it. Erik Åberg, the police commander in the area, told the website KIT that there is a limit to the amount of time the police can invest in a single address: “Even if we arrest them, they are back on the street again in the near future.”
October 27: Member of Parliament Kent Ekeroth (Sweden Democrats) filed a complaint…According to Ekeroth, the Immigration Service has ignored Swedish law concerning the age assessment of so-called unaccompanied refugee children, who in many cases are actually “men aged 18-40.” Even though a law concerning age testing has always been in place, the Immigration Service did not implement assessments until this fall, only now forcing the “children” to prove their age.
October 27: The Red Cross announced its new “helpline against extremism.” …The service is a pilot project that will continue until June 2016, after which the government will decide whether or not to make it permanent. The brains behind the support line is Mona Sahlin, the government’s National Coordinator Against Violent Extremism

(Among the stories I omitted is a murder by a Congolese and a rape by a Nicaraguan.)

Over the years VDARE.com has written a great deal about Sweden. As I remarked in The Irish Savant On The Ruin Of Sweden

This is entirely the fault of Sweden’s crazed totalitarian leftist elite, as discussed for us by Jared Taylor in Can It Happen Here? Sweden`s “Hate Speech” Laws Hateful—And Unequally Enforced

And yes it IS happening here.

Don’t forget: Sign Refugee Moratorium Petition At Whitehouse.gov by Dec. 14!

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Jewish Exponent: As Anti-Refugee Sentiment Builds, Jewish Agencies Push for Settlement

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Luke Ford

Nothing in this article mentions that the Jewish state should take in more Muslims aka people who hate it.

Jewish Exponent: WASHINGTON — As debate rages in Congress over the settling of Syrian refugees in the United States, Jewish agencies and community members are stepping up to assist those who have made it to our shores.

Last Friday, Corine Dehabey, resettlement officer with Us Together, welcomed the 11th Syrian refugee family to arrive in Toledo, Ohio, through her HIAS-affiliated agency this year.

When Us Together receives a call, Dehabey springs into action. In as little as 24 to 48 hours, Dehabey has to find refugees a place to live, furniture and food, schedule health assessment appointments and get ready to guide the new family through the Social Security offices so they can get identification cards to then apply for jobs and family services.

Local churches have been a good resource, she said, and recently the Jewish Federation of Greater Toledo has offered assistance through its food bank.

The Syrians, when they get here, “are excited. It’s a weird feeling. It’s totally a new world for them. They are very grateful to the American government,” said Dehabey. “They want to make the best of their lives.”

“They’d love to stay in Syria, and they pray and hope that their country will heal and they can go back, but realistically, they know that can’t happen right now, so they’re with us in this fight against extremism,” said Deborah A. Drennan, ex-officio executive director of Freedom House Detroit, which works with asylum seekers.

Drennan said that the fear displayed by the more than half of U.S. governors, including of her own state, who have called on the Obama administration to halt plans to resettle Syrian refugees in the United States is unfounded. She called the concerns of anti-refugee politicians like Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) nothing more than “Islamophobia.”

“People are afraid that they’re going to bring with them a terrorist lifestyle and not understanding that they’re trying to flee that violence,” said Drennan, whose organization has partnered in the past with Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue in Detroit.

Catholic Charities and the local Muslim community, she said, have played a large role in resettling refugees from Syria and Iraq.

Since the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, some 7,014 Syrian refugees have been interviewed by the Department of Homeland Security, but only 2,034 have been resettled in the United States, according to numbers released by the White House. A total of 23,092 Syrians have been referred to the United States Refugees Admission Program by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

HIAS, whose motto is “welcome the stranger, protect the refugee,” was founded in 1881 to help Jews who were fleeing pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe.

“We’ve been helping to connect local congregations” with refugee families coming to their area, said Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, vice president of community engagement at HIAS in New York.

She noted that there has been an uptick in inquiries and “the community is starting to wake up” and get involved.

…Temple Sinai has been working on the issue of refugees since 2014. Last year, when large numbers of Central American refugees were coming into the United States, 10 Temple Sinai members went down to Texas and paired with another Reform congregation to conduct relief work. Back home, a grant from the Gendler Grapevine Project enabled Temple Sinai to run the Open Door: Helping Refugees and Immigrants Initiative.

Though Temple Sinai cannot directly sponsor refugee families, as congregations in Canada currently are, Roos pledged that his congregation will do all it can to provide assistance to refugees and local agencies.

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To the refugees it doesn’t matter that we’re Israeli

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Luke Ford

Link:

ISRAEL21c talks to IsraAID volunteers helping thousands of refugees, often from enemy countries like Syria and Iraq, streaming through Greece and the Serbian borders.

As she extends a helping hand to 2,500 refugees landing every day in Greece mostly from Iraq and Syria – sworn enemies of Israel – IsraAID global programs manager Naama Gorodischer does not announce that she is Israeli.

But if they ask where she’s from, the reaction is always the same: “They shake my hand, give me a hug and tell me they love me. It’s irrelevant where we’re from; when you meet people in such situations of vulnerability it makes everybody concentrate only on the human aspects of the care.”

Gorodischer was speaking to ISRAEL21c from the island of Lesbos, where about 17 boatloads of 50 refugees each are arriving daily. On September 13, she and other relief workers from IsraAID-The Israel Forum for International Humanitarian Aid rescued newcomers whose boat had overturned.

She does not want to dwell on that incident, however.

“Our being here is much more significant than the one event of rescuing people in the water,” Gorodischer said on September 17. “I’ve been to disasters in Kenya, Vanuatu, Myanmar and Jordan, and I have to tell you this is the most unfortunate, sad experience I have ever had.

“Though we have a lot of experience working with refugees – including Ebola survivors and earthquake survivors — usually we offer humanitarian aid in reception centers, trying to make their life better while they are there. Here we’re working with refugees on the constant move. They are not staying in Greece, and it makes our ability to offer proper humanitarian aid very different and challenging. It’s very intense.”

Posted in Immigration, Islam, Israel | Comments Off

Is The Holocaust Sacred?

Posted on November 29, 2015 by Luke Ford

American Jewish historian Peter Novick writes in his book The Holocaust in American Life:

“Holocaust envy” contends with “Holocaust possessiveness.” Claims by others that they have experienced genocide or a holocaust — claims that are indeed sometimes hyperbolic — are treated as felonious assault…

Even many observant Jews are often willing to discuss the founding myths of Judaism naturalistically — subject them to rational, scholarly analysis. But they’re unwilling to adopt this mode of thought when it comes to the “inexplicable mystery” of the Holocaust, where rational analysis is seen as inappropriate or sacrilegious. Consider “awe,” which my dictionary defines as “a mixed emotion of reverence, dread and wonder.” For how many Jews does the word describe their emotions when contemplating God? For how many their emotions when contemplating the Holocaust? It has become standard practice to use the term “sacred” to describe the Holocaust and everything connected with it. “Sacred Image, Sacred Text” was the title of an exhibition of art dealing with the Holocaust at the B’nai B’rith’s Klutznick Museum in Washington. Survivors’ accounts are routinely described as sacred, as are the survivors themselves: “the American Jewish equivalent of saints and relics,” says Leon Wieseltier, himself the son of a survivor. An important influence in all of this, of course, has been Elie Wiesel, the most influential American interpreter of the Holocaust. Like Greenberg, Wiesel sees the Holocaust as “equal to the revelation at Sinai” in its religious significance; attempts to “desanctify” or “demystify” the Holocaust are, he says, a subtle form of anti-Semitism. And Wiesel, with his insistence that “any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined about what happened,” appears to have persuaded many Jews to treat the Holocaust as something of a “mystery religion,” with survivors having privileged (priestly) authority to interpret the mystery. “The survivor has become a priest,” the education director of Yad Vashem said, with some irritation: “because of his story, he is holy.”

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Boston Globe: Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.

Posted on November 29, 2015 by Luke Ford

We’re talking about the Deep State.

Democracy, to a large extent, is a sham.

Link:

The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon
THE VOTERS WHO put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.
But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.
Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn’t have changed policies much even if he tried.
Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.
Glennon cites the example of Obama and his team being shocked and angry to discover upon taking office that the military gave them only two options for the war in Afghanistan: The United States could add more troops, or the United States could add a lot more troops. Hemmed in, Obama added 30,000 more troops.
Glennon’s critique sounds like an outsider’s take, even a radical one. In fact, he is the quintessential insider: He was legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a consultant to various congressional committees, as well as to the State Department. “National Security and Double Government” comes favorably blurbed by former members of the Defense Department, State Department, White House, and even the CIA. And he’s not a conspiracy theorist: Rather, he sees the problem as one of “smart, hard-working, public-spirited people acting in good faith who are responding to systemic incentives”—without any meaningful oversight to rein them in.
How exactly has double government taken hold? And what can be done about it? Glennon spoke with Ideas from his office at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. This interview has been condensed and edited.
IDEAS: Where does the term “double government” come from?
GLENNON:It comes from Walter Bagehot’s famous theory, unveiled in the 1860s. Bagehot was the scholar who presided over the birth of the Economist magazine—they still have a column named after him. Bagehot tried to explain in his book “The English Constitution” how the British government worked. He suggested that there are two sets of institutions. There are the “dignified institutions,” the monarchy and the House of Lords, which people erroneously believed ran the government. But he suggested that there was in reality a second set of institutions, which he referred to as the “efficient institutions,” that actually set governmental policy. And those were the House of Commons, the prime minister, and the British cabinet.
IDEAS: What evidence exists for saying America has a double government?
GLENNON:I was curious why a president such as Barack Obama would embrace the very same national security and counterterrorism policies that he campaigned eloquently against. Why would that president continue those same policies in case after case after case? I initially wrote it based on my own experience and personal knowledge and conversations with dozens of individuals in the military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies of our government, as well as, of course, officeholders on Capitol Hill and in the courts. And the documented evidence in the book is substantial—there are 800 footnotes in the book.
IDEAS: Why would policy makers hand over the national-security keys to unelected officials?
GLENNON: It hasn’t been a conscious decision….Members of Congress are generalists and need to defer to experts within the national security realm, as elsewhere. They are particularly concerned about being caught out on a limb having made a wrong judgment about national security and tend, therefore, to defer to experts, who tend to exaggerate threats. The courts similarly tend to defer to the expertise of the network that defines national security policy.

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