Why Americans Dislike Islam

David French writes: There will be no doubt some hand-wringing about “Islamophobia” and further calls to continue the American elite’s fourteen-year track record of whitewashing Islamic beliefs and culture, but I wonder if the media is missing a powerful, largely-uncovered influence on America’s hearts and minds — the experience and testimony of the more than two million Americans who’ve served overseas since 9/11 and have experienced Islamic cultures up-close. Yes, they were in the middle of a war — but speaking from my own experience — the war was conducted from within a culture that was shockingly broken.

I expected the jihadists to be evil, but even I couldn’t fathom the depths of their depravity. And it was all occurring against the backdrop of a brutally violent and intolerant culture. Women were beaten almost as an afterthought, there was a near-total lack of empathy for even friends and neighbors, lying was endemic, and sexual abuse was rampant.

Even more disturbingly, it seemed that every problem was exacerbated the more religious and pious a person (or village) became. I spent enough time outside the wire and interacting with tribal leaders to get a sense of the reality around me, but the younger guys on the line spent weeks at a time living in the heart of the local community.

I remember one young soldier, after describing the things he’d seen since the start of the deployment, gestured towards the village around us and said — in perfect Army English — “Sir, this s**t is f**ked up.” It is indeed.

While it’s certainly unfair to judge Indonesia or Malaysia by the standards of Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s very hard to shake the power of lived experience, nor should we necessarily try. After all, when we hear stories from Syria, Yemen, Gaza, the Sinai, Libya, Nigeria, Somalia, Mali, Pakistan, and elsewhere they all fit the same depressing template of the American conflict zones. Nor is the dazzlingly wealthy veneer of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or the other Gulf States all that impressive. Tens of thousands of soldiers have seen the veritable slave labor that toils within the oil empires and have witnessed first-hand their casual disregard for “lesser” life. But this same experience has caused us to treasure the Muslim friends we do have — in part because we recognize the extreme risks of their loyalty and defiance of jihad. That’s why American officers fiercely champion the immigration of local interpreters, even to the point of welcoming them into their own home. That’s why there’s often an intense connection with our Kurdish allies, the single-most effective ground fighting force against ISIS.

Posted in Islam | Comments Off on Why Americans Dislike Islam

Do the benefits of Muslims in America outweigh the cost? Asking for a friend.

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Nobody here, or anywhere else, is scared of the vast majority of Muslims either. It’s just that the vast majority of non-terrorist Muslims don’t provide any benefit to this country that outweighs the problems caused by the terrorist minority, so there’s really no reason to have any of them here.

* I would like to see Trump for President and Cruz for AG. I don’t know why more people aren’t talking up this rather obvious synthesis.

Trump would not give Jeb any job in his administration more prestigious than serving carved meat at a pool party, and even that would be an honor.

* Trump isn’t David Duke. Trump has spent yeeeeaaaaarrrrrss (Trump voice) on TV. As the laughable butt of jokes on Oreo commercials with the Manning brothers (“Double Trump!”) or hosting the Apprentice or feuding WWE style with Rosie O’Donnell. NBC promoted him for years, and now he’s an un-person?

The problem with that is that 99.9999% of US entertainment idolizes rebels. The street cop who does it “his way” with the loud Black superior screaming at him. Bruce Willis as a “rascal” (in the clean-for-tv version) in Die Hard 2, or all the Die Hard movies, Liam Neeson in Taken 1-23, every action movie ever made, most TV shows, etc. Conformity, toeing the line, going along, have been shown in American entertainment to be the province of either villains or weaklings.

Trump is just playing Dirty Harry, the Man with No Name, John McClain, Captain America, and Iron Man all in one. He importantly says “I love Muslims” and “I love Mexicans and will get the Hispanic vote,” so he’s not the bad guy. The difference between the villain and the hero is the latter is motivated by decency and former by power. Trump knows this story has been playing out in America for more than a century and plays to it very well.

Duke was a Klan member, he didn’t offer much of anything but the Klan, so he went nowhere and lost to the crook.

It seems that the GOP is planning a “floor fight,” with the establishment just throwing out the rules and refusing to acknowledge Trump delegates/votes, and choosing its own candidate. Rubio acts like he’s got the deal to be the nominee. Presumably the GOP can do that if it wants.

Which means it would be Trump vs. Hillary vs. Rubio. By no means is that a certain victory for Hillary. Many suspect that Bill Clinton out of rivalry with Gore sandbagged his electoral effort against W. Would Obama be happy to remain the Democratic Big Man leader instead of President Hillary? Does Rev. Wright live by a golf course in a lily White area? Moreover as noted above, Trump draws substantial amounts of support from Democrats. If you are a White union voter, would Hillary! be your candidate? If you were a lesbian, maybe. Outside the pantsuit set, not much. Nor would Boy Rubio be a choice either. Trump, Northeastern, employs union labor, fairly liberal in social attitudes but embracing Nationalism and White identity? Sure.

Trump would lose the Romney set, and also the Lindsay Graham Log Cabin Republicans (all five of them), as well as the cuckservative insiders. His gains among blue collar Whites however would IMHO more than offset losses. That’s because Trump is liberal enough in social areas to get blue collar White votes, while being assertive for White group rights but not pursuing racial conflict.

Indeed the coming defenestration of Rahm Emmanuel*, who is toast in Chicago and WILL be replaced by some Black candidate, is going to be instructive. The go along, get along, White leadership and Black votes of the past is no longer tenable, as divided as Republicans are Democrats face an outright racial split with Whites in the Northeast and Midwest being purged out of Universities and City leadership in favor of … Blacks. Chicago going full Detroit, with a general White purge of leaders in favor of Blacks, only gains more White blue collar votes for Trump and away from Hillary!

Posted in Islam | Comments Off on Do the benefits of Muslims in America outweigh the cost? Asking for a friend.

Trump Has Judged The Moment Better Than I Expected!

Again.

I’m stunned by the lack of a response to his latest provocation.

A friend says: Just think of him as Crocodile Dundee on steroids.

I never thought that Trump could relate to ordinary folks the way he has.

Although Trump never backs down, other parts of his personality that play well are his arrogance, confidence, brashness and narcissism. Also, he is pretty upbeat. Even when he outlines problems, he always has a solution that will be “great,” and he seems to be enjoying himself immensely.

They always say that the candidate who wins is the one you could most easily see yourself having a beer with, and on that score, even though Trump doesn’t drink, he seems like a guy I would much rather hang out with than any other presidential aspirant, Republican or Democrat.

Maybe you could see yourself davening with Sanders before drinking your Manischewitz from a Kiddush cup, but can you imagine sitting down with John Kasich, let alone Marco Rubio, or Carly Fiorina? Jesus, I would slit my wrists.

Maybe it is that he has spent more time in the public limelight and on television than anyone else. Maybe because he promotes his brand even more than politicians seeking election.

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off on Trump Has Judged The Moment Better Than I Expected!

Time: Airbnb Hosts Are Racist, Study Finds

Steve Sailer: “A lot of the new Sharing Economy unicorns get an edge by ignoring anti-discrimination laws. They’re high tech! So they don’t have to obey the laws that weigh down old-fashioned businesses.”

It is just common sense that a landlord will be more careful about renting to blacks because they have such high crime and dysfunction rates. It is just common sense to be more careful about picking up blacks if you are a taxi driver and it is just common sense to avoid large gatherings of blacks if you don’t want to get stabbed, mugged or shot.

Many AirBNB hosts I know won’t rent to blacks. The sharing economy only works with people you can trust.

Blacks are not inherently inferior to non-blacks. They just have their own gift set. Every people have their own gifts. Every people have their own norms. Every people should use common sense to spend time with those who share their values. Blacks understandably find whites uptight and stiff because compared to blacks, whites lack spontaneity and grace. From a white perspective, asians are boring. From an asian perspective, non-asians are dangerous. From a Muslim perspective, non-Muslims are infidels. From a Christian perspective, non-Christians are lost. From a Jewish perspective, goyim are stupid. From a goyish perspective, Jews are clannish.

Time:

African American travelers may have a harder time securing an Airbnb rental than white ones, according to a new study from Harvard Business School.

In an experiment, the researchers found that Airbnb hosts were 16% less likely to accept fictional guests with African American-sounding names than guests with white-sounding names — even though the guests had otherwise identical profiles.

On Airbnb, ordinary people can rent out their own housing as lodging. Airbnb users see the service as a win-win: Hosts make some money by renting out extra space, and guests can stay in accommodations with more character and lower costs than a hotel. However, the vast growth of Airbnb has raised some legal questions, as rentals may violate city housing codes and guests might not have the same safety protections as they would at hotels.

The Harvard Business School study raises another question: Are guests more vulnerable to discrimination when individual hosts have the power to accept and reject applicants based on their profiles? “Clearly, the manager of a Holiday Inn cannot examine names of potential guests and reject them based on race,” the researchers write. “Yet, this is commonplace on Airbnb, which now accounts for a growing share of the hotel market.”

Posted in Blacks | Comments Off on Time: Airbnb Hosts Are Racist, Study Finds

Bigotry Sells?

Peter Beinart writes:

Three days after Sept. 11, Ann Coulter proposed that America “invade their [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.” A week later, she mused that, “Congress could pass a law tomorrow requiring that all aliens from Arabic countries leave.” To its credit, National Review, which had published Coulter’s column, said it would no longer do so.

But Coulter kept appearing on TV. And she remained just as bigoted as ever. Asked in 2003, whether airlines should offer “Muslim-free air travel?” Coulter responded that, “I’m way ahead of you. I think airlines ought to start advertising: ‘We have the most civil-rights lawsuits brought against us by Arabs.’’’ Asked how Muslims would then travel, she responded: “They could use flying carpets.” When a student from the University of Western Ontario told Coulter in 2010 that she didn’t own a magic carpet, Coulter replied: “Use your camel.”

It gets worse. In 2006, Coulter said, “our motto should be post-9/11, ‘raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.’” On another occasion she said, “our motto should be after 9/11: Jihad monkey talks tough; jihad monkey takes the consequences. Sorry, I realize that’s offensive. How about ‘camel jockey’?”

Coulter is not a marginal figure. Since 9/11, according to the liberal group Media Matters, she’s appeared at least 192 times on CNN and MSNBC and a whopping 450 times on Fox. In that time, according to BookScan, she’s sold 2.3 million books, more than four times many as David Brooks. A few years ago, a sympathetic profiler called her “the Rush Limbaugh of the printed word … the most successful conservative writer working today. … No 21st century conservative writer—male or female—comes even close.”

In her exploitation of bigotry, Coulter is not only one of Trump’s forerunners, she is one of his inspirations. Trump has called Coulter’s latest book, Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole, a “great read.” She’s warmed up for him at rallies. And she’s claimed credit for some of Trump’s most notorious lines. “Where do you think all that spicy stuff about Mexican rape culture came from?” she tweeted this summer. “@realDonaldTrump got an advance copy.” Coulter has been ahead of Trump on Muslims, too. This January, after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, she suggested that “maybe you take a little pause in Muslim immigration for a while.”

Like Trump, Coulter gets away with it, in part, because she’s considered an entertainer: “Bold, brash, provocative, talented, fearless, witty, and outrageous,” in National Review’s words. But her massive success—fueled by massive media exposure—has shown other conservatives that bigotry sells.

Posted in Ann Coulter, Islam | Comments Off on Bigotry Sells?

Judge Mugged By Reality

Colin Flaherty writes:

Federal Judge Susan Dlott wrote the book on racial profiling in 2002.

Last week, she ripped it into one million tiny pieces when three black people broke into her $8 million Cincinnati home and started beating her and her 79-year old husband.

“There’s three black men with guns at our house,” Dlott told a 911 operator after she escaped the home invasion and ran to her neighbor’s house one mile away.

And just in case the operator did not hear her the first time, Dlott said it again: “My husband and the dogs are still there. There are three black men with guns and masks at the house.”

That’s Racial Profiling 101: Identifying the criminals by race, as if that had something to do with it.

You remember, the same thing NBC tried to pin on George Zimmerman when it maliciously (mis)edited his 911 call about Trayvon Martin.

Dlott became a national heroine of the movement to outlaw — and define — racial profiling in 2002, the year after the Cincinnati riots. Another memory refresher: That was when thousands of black people rampaged through Cincinnati for four days, burning, destroying, threatening, vandalizing, beating, defying police — all because a police shooting reminded everyone that black people are relentless victims of relentless white racism.

And cops were always picking on black people for no reason what so ever. Even Bill Cosby cancelled a concert. That’s how bad it was.

That is what the NAACP said when it sued the city in federal court. Once the NAACP lawsuit was assigned to Dlott, they consolidated all their cases in her court. Because everyone knew they had a kindred spirit on the bench in Dlott.

Posted in Blacks | Comments Off on Judge Mugged By Reality

Please pray for Avi Davis

Trevor Loudon writes:

My friend Avi Davis, president of the American Freedom Alliance, is in the UCLA Ronald Reagan Hospital fighting for his life.

Avi was cycling in Los Angeles when he suffered a major heart event. He is currently in an induced coma while doctors run neurological tests. The prognosis is very unclear at this stage.

Avi is physically as tough as nails and extremely strong-willed, but this is a serious injury, and he needs all the prayers and support you can give him.

Posted in Los Angeles | Comments Off on Please pray for Avi Davis

Ann Sterzinger: Why I’m Scared of Widows & Orphans

Ann Sterzinger writes: There’s a lot of raspberrying and dismissiveness in the debate over whether to let the wave of “Syrian” “refugees” wash up on U.S. shores. In the partisan sandbox-fights to which we tend to reduce even the most serious questions, it’s easy to forget that in a case like this, there is probably a strong moral argument to be made on either side.

And while I ultimately come down on the side of “Get these nutjobs far, far away from me!”—I continue to subscribe to the Daffy Duck school of pain—each argument in a case like this suffers greatly when it dismisses the opposition out of hand.

By now we’ve all heard the loudest argument for opening the gates: Barack Obama’s snide little speech in which he informed the GOP that they’re crybullies to sound the tocsin over a pack of harmless widows and orphans. (They may well be crybullies, but not for that.) Never mind that many of the terrorists who have been rocking European civilization are second- or third-generation immigrants.

This isn’t the first time Obama has ridden his love-unicorn roughshod over the realities of what Muslims themselves actually think and believe. In his 2009 must-read summary, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran, Robert Spencer describes how in a 2009 speech Obama “proved” the peacefulness of Islam by cherry-picking a few peaceful-sounding phrases from a Koran passage that’s mostly about violence:

Obama cited verse 5:32: “The Holy Koran,” said the President, “teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.” This sounds peaceful enough, but Obama studiously ignored the next verse (5:33), which mandates punishment for those whom Muslims do not regard as “innocent”—punishments including crucifixion or amputation of a hand and a foot for those who fight against Allah and Muhammad.

The “peace” that Islam promises is less like unicorn turds and more like a Muslim Pax Romana: we’ll have peace when everyone else is subjugated.

To be fair to this side of the question as a whole, however, one must remark that the welcome-wagon-in-chief has hamstrung himself in his ability to present the case. He’s stuck repeating the weakest arguments—twisting scripture and screeching “Let’s be nice!”—because, if he were to present the best argument for his side, he would have to draw attention to his own foreign policy.

To wit: while American taxpayers do not owe every foreign human being on Earth an apartment and a welfare check, it could certainly be argued that we have some moral responsibility to open our doors to people whose countries we’ve bombed the shit out of, particularly in proxy wars. (I still hold that it’s valid to bomb ISIS wherever they are on Earth, since we’re for all intents and purposes at war with that entity; but playing chicken with the Russians over Syria’s civil war? Not so much.)

However, though this argument is perfectly valid, it is trumped by two equally moral counterarguments.

First, fewer and fewer Americans want anything to do with being the world’s damn policeman anymore. But who listens to the serfs who foot the bill? I’m not willing to be dismembered in my hometown because my government keeps pretending to the rest of the world that we’re a democracy.

Second, however many stupid things our government might have done in the past, that doesn’t override our imperative to steer it to the right course whenever we see a possibility for doing so.

And d’ya know what is always the right thing for a government to do? Protecting its own citizens.

I said it about Gee-dub when he sent young men to die to avenge his father, and I’m saying it about Obama as he prepares to sacrifice his civilians so he can look charitable on the world stage: Could you at least pretend to give a shit about your subjects?

A government that doesn’t care about the lives of foreign citizens is bad, but considering the overall history of the world, it’s not particularly bad; you could even say it represents a normative dose of human evil.

But a government that’s just as glib about its own citizens’ lives is completely psychotic.

Clearly, we need to quit killing Muslims abroad, even if we think we’re doing them some sort of twisted favor; if they want to pretend it’s 700 A.D., that’s their problem. (I’ve argued elsewhere that Islamists would want to kill us even if we weren’t bombing them; as Spencer says, “[Obama] doesn’t seem to have considered that if the Koran mandates jihad against non-Muslims, displays of U.S. goodwill are unlikely to have much effect.” But even if you threw out the ethical question, this is clearly a case of “better safe than sorry” . . . and in case you hadn’t noticed, these wars have nuked the federal budget.)

But if we can’t do that, at least we need to quit importing people who hate us.

Posted in Islam | Comments Off on Ann Sterzinger: Why I’m Scared of Widows & Orphans

The Leahy Amendment: ‘It is the sense of the Senate that the United States must not bar individuals from entering into the United States based on their religion’

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Here are the names of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary that voted in favor of the Leahy amendment and against the people of the United States. Make sure they hear from you, especially if you live in their state:

Chuck Grassley, (R-IA)
Orrin G. Hatch0 (R – UT)
Lindsey Graham (R – SC)
John Cornyn (R – TX)
Michael S. Lee (R – UT)
Jeff Flake (R – AZ)
David Perdue (R – GA)

* You know, this is what happens when your elites do their business clandestinely; nobody learns anything from history, because nobody understands history in the first place. Not only is an honest history of Islam completely off the table, the entire history of religion. People simply assume that religion just is the neutered version that exists in America (which liberals still manage to build up as some all powerful monolith in their minds) or that entering the borders of constitution-land just magically turns religion from a shared, lived, communal experience that embraces all aspects of life (hey, like liberalism!) to a set of arbitrary opinions with no relevance to the outside world except for determining which days to throw a party. The truth is, Christianity in the west, including the US was intentionally neutered by its chief competitor liberalism. Christianity in America is mostly just liberalism with tackier music.

Maybe the elites can neuter Islam too, but I doubt it. Not that Islam is less vulnerable than Christianity, but today’s elites are more clueless than yesterday’s. Yesterday’s elites knew they were engaging in a vast conspiracy. Today’s elites seem like they are only slightly more clued in than the ignorant masses that they manipulate.

You know we are in a bad state when you can’t tell if the people in charge are evil or stupid.

* This is an unbelievably scary development, one that goes right to the core of our sovereignty.

Can similar moves against our freedom of speech be far behind?

Do we still have a country? Or not?

* William Perry, an ex Secretary of Defense and leader, with ex Senator Sam Nunn, of the Nuclear Threat Initiative which has resulted in cooperation with Russia to reduce levels of nuclear weapons by factors of around ten, said about a week ago at a book signing in Washington DC that he believes a terrorist nuclear attack on a city in the United States is “imminent”.

* Countries are stupid idea. Feeds right into white privilege and white supremacy.

* Here in the U.S. we are just beginning to learn the true nature of Islam and how it differs from Christianity. Thus where Jesus taught by precept and example an ethic of self-sacrifice and nonresistance to evil, which is no threat to the other members of society, Muhammad — whom all pious Muslims are taught to revere as the perfect model of what a Muslim should be — taught political domination and submission by any means necessary, which most definitely does threaten the liberty and safety of non-Muslim members of society.

We are just waking up to the possibility that Islam may not be compatible with the liberal ideals and institutions that lie at the heart of our culture and civilization, leading to the unhappy conclusion that the only good Muslim is one that does not take his religion too seriously.

Thus a joke currently making the rounds: What is the difference between a moderate Muslim and a radical Muslim? A radical Muslim pursues jihad. A moderate Muslim wants radical Muslims to pursue jihad.

Unfortunately this is no joke but is accurately reflected in the five schools of Islam.

* If we didn’t have Middle East wars and Islamic terrorism to worry about, what would our political system be focused on right now? Energy? Polygamy? Even more BLM?

* What do you call a Muslim who wants Enlightenment values in Islam? Dead man walking?

* Here are the bullet points of Ted Cruz’s position on immigration.

SECURE THE BORDER

* Build a wall that works …. I will complete the wall.

* Triple the number of Border Patrol agents.

* Increase vital aerial surveillance and other technology along the border.

* Finish the biometric tracking system at our nation’s ports of entry.

RESTORE THE RULE OF LAW

* End President Obama’s illegal amnesty. …. I will rescind each and every one …

* Increase deportations and end catch-and-release.

* End sanctuary policies, sign Kate’s Law, and deport criminal immigrants.

* Prohibit illegal immigrants from receiving financial benefits and strengthen E-Verify.

REFORM LEGAL IMMIGRATION TO PROTECT AMERICANS

* Suspend the issuance of all H-1B visas for 180 days to complete a comprehensive investigation and audit of pervasive allegations of abuse of the program.

* Halt any increases in legal immigration so long as American unemployment remains unacceptably high.

* Enforce the public-charge doctrine. Current law requires legal immigrants to certify that they will be economically self-sufficient. A Cruz Administration will ensure they do not receive government assistance, which defies the law and harms American taxpayers.

* End birthright citizenship. …. I will take steps to pass legislation or a constitutional amendment to end it.

* When the details of the Rotherham nightmare, and Blighty’s meek acquiescence to no-go sharia zones in their own homeland, began to emerge in US media – granted we’re still waiting for 80% of that media to get around to acknowledging any of it – it became easy to whistle past the graveyard and recall Archie Bunker’s long-ago dismissal of our cousins across the pond with England is a fag country.

Easier to laugh in disbelief than begin to grasp that this most distressing/repulsive of realities: a native population cowed into lickspittle servility out of fear of its unstable and unwanted immigrants – a condition encouraged and enforced by its own quisling elites – becomes, over time, the natural order of things.

Look! We’ve already begun! Just as Rotherham was enabled by the fear of being labelled and prosecuted as ‘racist’, so the dead of San Berdoo came about partly because the Americans who knew, or strongly suspected, were too terrified of Loretta Lynch clapping the darbies on them to blow even a warning whistle…. and with Salon, HuffPo – and sooner rather than later, the NYT and WaPo – screeching for the harshest possible punishment the better to ‘send a message’, it’s hard to blame them.

The next stage – law enforcement declining to wear any sort of identifying garments out of the fear of death – is no longer an IF proposition, but a WHEN.

Don’t believe me? Go back a few days to the point where the identity of the shooters became known, and count up the articles appearing questioning what sort of knuckle-dragging white racism had prompted the massacre. When you start to see headlines – as I did – shouting “Victims had made fun of killer’s beard”, you can woof and bark all you like, because so long as it’s backed up by knock-kneed parliamentary cowardice, it’s all shadow-boxing in empty rooms. You can save yourselves a lot of time and just blow out the pilot light right now.

* You see all these Muslims worshiping at Mosques and they are all men. No women.
It is a man’s religion, the exact opposite of Christianity which is a woman’s religion. Rodney Stark made the point in the Rise of Christianity (1997) that Christianity gained adherents by paying particular respect to women(and their ideal world) and taking care of the weak.What do some people call Jesus? The bearded woman.
It’s probably only due to the success and concomitant incursions of Islam into Europe that Christianity at least paid lip service to masculinity. Bill Whittle has called the Koran a ‘manual for conquest.’ And the Muslims did a damn good job of conquering the Mediterranean rim.
Nowadays no more lip service from the pulpit.Things have changed and Christianity does not even nod its head to masculinity. Now Christians socially compete to womanize themselves and ‘give’ to the ‘other’ (the one with the beheading knife.)

* We shouldn’t bar people based on their religion because you can never really prove who is a true Muslim or a true Christian. I don’t want “Christian” Syrians admitted either because they could simply be Muslims lying to the immigration official.

We should bar people based on their country of origin. Allow no immigration from nations with significant jihadist activity. That would included essentially all of the Middle East and North Africa, and parts of Central Asia. In fact, Trump should have phrased his proposal that way to eliminate all of this hand-wringing about religious persecution. Though, I suppose Trump intentionally phrased it his way so he can dominate the news cycle and troll the media intelligentsia.

* Trump seems to have judged the moment far better than I’d initially assumed. I think the backlash is not as intense because politicians and media recognize that grandstanding comes with a significant risk. Obama’s lecture on admitting Syrian refugees was a totally boilerplate cost-free no-brainer reiteration of noble American principles but Paris and San Bernardino quickly turned it into a political liability.

Even mocking people for being afraid of women-and-children turns out to be politically risky.

* The reason why this resolution is out there is because a lot of people don’t like the idea of disallowing someone to come to the US simply on the basis of a religious test: it sounds too much like not allowing Jewish immigrants from Nazism, etc.

But two points:

a) As has been repeatedly said here, an immigration policy that is preferential to one group must necessarily discriminate against all other groups. If we accept the premise that some groups can be preferred, then it should follow that some groups can be actively not preferred.

b) In this case, “religion” is just a criterion, like anything else: height, weight, skin color, ability to work in Silicon Valley, ability to harvest green onions, etc. Obviously we should have criteria for immigration — because we do in fact have such criteria, and I’m not even talking about the quotas. This is particularly so since, in this case, the particular religion in question has a large intersection with terror attacks.

c) I appreciate what Trump is doing WRT Overton window, but his billboard pronouncements, while getting a lot of attention, lack nuance and thus are easy prey for MSM misrepresentation. Should we have what is, in effect, a moratorium on Muslim immigration? Well, any such moratorium is going to have exceptions: that’s the first point we should recognize. Second, a strictly religious test (i.e., “are you a Muslim?”) is insufficient, since all a terrorist would need to do would be to declare himself/herself a Secular Humanist and they’d get in, no question.

Overall, I think Trump would have better served if he had simply said that the Arab lands, including those Muslim countries adjacent to Arab lands (that would include Afghan, Pakistan, Iran, and the Caucasus) are in turmoil and are closely associated with terrorism, and for the sake of our own citizens we should temporarily suspend immigration from those countries until we can control the risk of allowing political radicals into the country. I mean, really, I don’t think anyone is particularly concerned about, say, an immigrant from Djakarta. At least, not yet.

* The only problem with your proposal is that Islamists also come in, visa-free, from places like France and Belgium. And there a lot of them there too, extreme even, as we have seen.

Notice the, “home-grown,” terrorists. Or the “American citizens” and “French citizens” who shoot, stab and blow up people in the name of Allah/Mohammed/Islam.

The one consistent variable in all this crap for my entire life has been Muslims, wherever they come from. (Yes, most Muslims are wonderful, ordinary people whose concerns in life are pretty much like mine, but the rotten ones are a subset.

Now, the question is, how do we identify Muslims for this purpose? We can’t. There is not way to do it. This Trump proposal is just a thought experiment, a campaign stunt, and talking point.

* The time before Inauguration Day is going to be interesting. As one Twitter wag stated, its like hearing a rattling from your engine and you’re just hoping you can make it home.

* I find it interesting, and definitely worthy of note in this context, that the Green Card Lottery specifically excludes various nations. Those include Mexico, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, which is probably of benefit to America. But Canada is also excluded, and so is part of my country, the UK, in rather an offensive way: although UK citizenship is unitary, the US makes a distinction between the Northern Irish (come on in!) and the English, Scots and Welsh (beat it, you damn limeys!).

* Look, prior to 1965, all ‘Asiatics’ were more or less prohibited from immigrating to the USA on the grounds of ‘national origin’, but which everyone really understood to mean ‘race’, if not ‘religion’.

Despite intermittently whipped-up hysteria about ‘civil rights abuses’ in the southern USA concerning blacks, virtually no serious commentator at that time regarded the USA as a ‘moral pariah’ or even a ‘tyrannical “human rights” abusing regime’. In fact the common perception of the USA was around the globe at that time, was of the final, ultimate guarantor of ‘freedom, democracy and liberty’.

* Trump has done great service to America by cutting through to the very core of the issue. Yes, we may quibble that his proposal lacked nuance and so on, but once you have the big idea planted in the public sphere it is relatively easy to fill in the details. No politician or commentator was even willing to go there and Trump did. For this, I am grateful to him.

Trump is doing this more for dog-whistling than anything else.

His message to the worldwide Muslim ummah is ‘put your house in order, clean-up your act and police yourselves – only you can police yourselves and apply moral pressure to the troublemakers’.
‘Look for the past half century you’ve dealt with lily livered coward after lily livered coward as ‘western leaders’ and you – quite rightly – have taken them for the pussies that they are. ‘You think that things will always be like that, and that you can always walk all over us, but things are going to change, the worm has turned’.

Trump, the shrewd, ruthless and intelligent man that he is, knows that if he – god willing – ever became American president , holds the ‘Trump card’ in all of this.
The bare fact is that Muslims need the USA far more than the USA needs Muslims. The USA thrived and dominated the world, from inauspicious beginnings, entirely *without* the presence of Muslims on its soil.
To avoid eating each other, Pakistanis *need* to move in on the USA.
The USA can do very nicely, thank.you, without Pakistanis.

* Mandatory insurance on immigrants, just like you have to prove you have insurance when you buy a car. Maybe we could get some Republican politicians onboard with the idea of creating a new industry for private enterprise: mandatory immigration insurance.

Posted in Immigration, Islam | Comments Off on The Leahy Amendment: ‘It is the sense of the Senate that the United States must not bar individuals from entering into the United States based on their religion’

David Frum: Coming to the United States would benefit millions—but policymakers seldom ask whether their arrival would benefit the United States

David Frum writes:

However one assesses that chain and its consequences, it seems clear that the large majority of legal immigrants choose to come—or, more exactly, are chosen by their relatives—for their own reasons. They are not selected by the United States to advance some national interest. Illegal immigrants are of course entirely self-selected, as are asylum seekers. Even the refugee process, reportedly the most tightly screened, operates to a considerable extent outside national control: The first assessment of refugees is typically made by the UN High Commission on Refugees from within camps it operates. That explains why, for example, Christian Syrians make up only about 3 percent of the refugees admitted to the United States, despite accounting for 10 percent of the country’s population: Fearing violence from Sunni Muslims, they apparently hesitate to enter UN camps in the first place.

Donald Trump’s noisy complaints that immigration is out of control are literally true. Nobody is making conscious decisions about who is wanted and who is not, about how much immigration to accept and what kind to prioritize—not even for the portion of U.S. migration conducted according to law, much less for the larger portion that is not.

Nor is there much understanding of what has happened after it has happened. A simple question like, “How many immigrants are in prison?” turns out to be extraordinarily hard to answer. Poor information invites excessive fears, which are then answered with false assurances and angry accusations.

Nervous about Syrian refugees in the wake of the Paris massacre? How dare you! Would you turn away Jews fleeing Hitler? Oh, you think that analogy is hyperbolic? Tell it to the mayor of New York City.

This frequent invocation of the refugee trauma of the 1930s shuts down all discussion of anything that has happened since. Since 1991, the United States has accepted more than 100,000 Somali refugees. Britain accepted 100,000 as well. Some 50,000 Somali refugees were resettled in Canada; some 40,000 in Sweden; smaller communities were settled in the United Kingdom, Norway, and Denmark.

How’s that going?

Minnesota is home to America’s largest Somali community, 33,000 people. The unemployment rate for Somali Minnesotans in 2015 was triple the state average, 21 percent. As of 2014, about 5,950 of the state’s Somali population received cash assistance; 17,000 receive food assistance as of 2014.
A close study of Somali refugees by the government of Maine (home to the nation’s second-largest Somali community) found that fewer than half of the working-age population had worked at any time in the five years from 2001 through 2006.
The U.S. unemployment rate of 20+ percent still represents a huge improvement over rates in Europe. Only about 40 percent of working-age Somali men in Norway are employed. In the Swedish city of Malmo, home to one of the largest Somali communities in Europe, only 20 percent work.
Somalis have so much difficulty finding work in the developed world because their skills badly mismatch local labor needs. Only about 18 percent of boys and 15 percent of girls attend even primary school in Somalia. UNICEF has given up trying to measure literacy rates. Much of the U.S. refugee population is descended from people held as slaves in Somalia, who accordingly lack any family tradition of education. Their children then flounder in Western schools, baffled by the norms and expectations they encounter there. In the U.K., Somali students pass the standard age 16 high school exams at a rate less than half that of Nigerian immigrant students.
Struggling with the transition from semi-nomadic-herder society to postindustrial urban life, young Somalis in the West are tempted by criminal activity. Danish Somalis are 10 times more likely to be committed of a serious offense than native-born Danes. At least 29 young Canadian Somalis were murdered in drug-trafficking-related deaths between 2005 and 2010. In July 2012, Richard Stanek, sheriff of the county that encompasses Minneapolis-St. Paul, testified to Congress about the rising danger of American Somali gangs.

Posted in Immigration | Comments Off on David Frum: Coming to the United States would benefit millions—but policymakers seldom ask whether their arrival would benefit the United States