TabletMag: SONIA NAZARIO’S CHUTZPAH GIVES A VOICE TO LATIN AMERICA’S VOICELESS MIGRANTS

Report:

Like many Jews, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author comes from a family that was persecuted and that migrated. She continues to help people fleeing violence and hopelessness.

Some might call Sonia Nazario a heroine. Others might call her a troublemaker. Some might not like her position on immigration. Others might not like her outspokenness about the inherent problems of immigrants leaving children behind. By any measure, however, Nazario may be one of the most important Jewish social activists that you have never heard of.

In 2015 alone she has received awards from the First Focus Campaign for Children and the Golden Door Award from HIAS Pennsylvania. She has also testified before Congress and the United Nations and is routinely speaking at college campuses around the nation. This week she was awarded an “honorary visiting professorship” at the Universidad Autónoma de Hidalgo in Mexico, from where she’ll also be reporting for the New York Times on migrant deaths in the country.

Nazario is a woman of coraje or chutzpah. She rode on top of rickety Mexican freight trains, better known as the trenes de la muerte or la bestia (trains of death; the beast), from Chiapas, Mexico, to the U.S. border to report on unaccompanied minors. With her on this journey were hundreds of immigrants, children, women, men, and gang members.

Many are fleeing unimaginable violence in Central America and Mexico in large part due to drug trafficking and gang warfare; by some measures Honduras now has the highest murder rate in the world, El Salvador the second, and Guatemala the fifth. Many are looking for better economic opportunities. And many, many more, especially the children, are following an implacable urge to find their mothers.

It took Nazario three months, seven freight trains, and one hitchhike with a driver of an eighteen-wheeler semi to travel from what she calls Mexico’s “heart of darkness,” Chiapas, to the U.S. border. Along the way she almost got knocked off the train by a tree branch, experienced extreme cold and heat, fear, and hunger. Why did she do this? Because she had heard from Carmen, who cleaned her house in Los Angeles, that her son, like many, was making the journey by himself to reach her. And that many more were doing the same thing. She set out to find out why. But nothing had prepared her for what she discovered: This year alone the United States projects that 40,000 unaccompanied minors will try to cross the border. That is down from last year’s high of 69,000, but Nazario says the number is likely higher, at least 85,000, because the numbers do not include the children who are just “tossed back over the border,” nor does it include those who were not caught…

Nazario’s U.S. citizenship—she is the only one of her siblings born in the United States—would prove useful during the military dictatorship. At 14, when she was safely back in the United States, she personally lobbied congressional leaders to save family friends…

The history of her own personal family is what served as the compass for her truth telling. “I think coming from two families that were persecuted and migrated had a big impact on me. There is always a sense of being an outsider, of being ostracized, and of being the other. I think Jews have always felt that way. Having a foot in both worlds means you never really fit in,” she said. “I think that has made me want to write about social issues.”

..Nazario told me that she is not “a radical pro-immigration open borders kind of gal.” She also knows that many of the governments in Central America are to blame for their current economic and political situation. But our tangled history with Latin America is also to blame. Today’s immigration is largely predicated on push factors that are deeply rooted in the United States’ long and infamous history of destabilizing the region through political and economic intervention for our benefit, our love affair with illegal drugs—we use more than any nation on earth, she said—and our failed immigration policies.

“As part of Plan Colombia we have spent about $8 billion to disrupt the drug trafficking up the Caribbean corridor,” she explained. “But narco-traffickers simply reroute. They even use submarines. Today four to five cocaine flights land every day in Honduras, and the cartels are fighting for turf to move the cocaine north. They recruit children to be their foot soldiers in this enterprise. They try to get young kids hooked on drugs. They especially target 10- and 11-year-old boys, telling them to start using crack or they will beat or kill them.”

Our failed immigration policies, past and present, are responsible as well. Since 1996, the United States tightened laws toward permanent residents who had committed certain crimes, which resulted in higher numbers of deportations back to Central America. “We have deported some 300,000 people, many with criminal histories. We deported gang members from the MS 13 gang and the 18th Street gang. So, we exported violent gangs to Central America, and that only increased the violence in those countries.”

In an attempt to protect these children, Microsoft and Angelina Jolie in 2008 founded the nonprofit Kids in Need of Defense: KIND, which recruits pro-bono attorneys to represent unaccompanied immigrant children. To date, over 9,000 lawyers have taken on a case.

…Nazario will continue her fight by using her position as a journalist and her involvement with KIND to advocate for society’s most vulnerable citizens.

Why would America want these low IQ immigrants from Central America? What advantage will they give America? The article does not bother with these questions.

Notice how the article calls these illegal immigrants “citizens”!

At least we can better get to know somebody who’s destroying our country. It makes us better at recognizing these people.

According to Wikipedia: “In 2006, Nazario published a book, Enrique’s Journey, which significantly expanded her newspaper series. It became a national bestseller and won two book awards. It has been published in eight languages and has been adopted by 54 universities and scores of high schools nationwide as their “freshman read” or “all-campus read.” In the fall of 2010, it was the second most-chosen book for freshman or all-campus reads at universities across the country.”

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Swamping Europe With Muslims

Clancy Sigal writes:

FAR FROM HOME, IN NEED OF HELP—BUT FROM WHERE?

As millions of Syrian refugees search for safety, their dire situation is reminiscent of those who fled Nazi Germany via British kindertransports

…Full marks then to Angela Merkel and the Germans who have a lot to live down and are doing it handsomely. And a salute to those individual Hungarian kids on the roadside who hand out water to exhausted Syrian trekkers. Boo to the official Hungarians whose Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, presiding over a country with a short memory and a rising tide of anti-Semitism, tells the refugees, especially if they’re Muslim, to eff off. Obviously he doesn’t remember how many countries took in Hungarian refugees after the 1956 revolution.

It’s not a moment for blame but for feeding, housing, and taking care. Yes, U.S. “foreign policy” got it wrong, wrong about Syria. Yes, Bush and Iraq. Yes, the hugely rich Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc. can’t care less.

But if I was a Syrian I too would hit the road rather than risk more lung-bursting barrel bombs from Assad’s air force or ISIS going door-to-door executing anybody they please.

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Understanding Hitler’s Hatred Of Jews

Historian Timothy Snyder (author of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning): So what Hitler does is he inverts; he reverses the whole way we think about ethics, and for that matter the whole way we think about science. What Hitler says is that abstract thought—whether it’s normative or whether it’s scientific—is inherently Jewish. There is in fact no way of thinking about the world, says Hitler, which allows us to see human beings as human beings. Any idea which allows us to see each other as human beings—whether it’s a social contract; whether it’s a legal contract; whether it’s working-class solidarity; whether it’s Christianity—all these ideas come from Jews. And so for people to be people, for people to return to their essence, for them to represent their race, as Hitler sees things, you have to strip away all those ideas. And the only way to strip away all those ideas is to eradicate the Jews. And if you eradicate the Jews, then the world snaps back into what Hitler sees as its primeval, correct state: Races struggles against each other, kill each other, starve each other to death, and try and take land.

Delman: And that’s a good world to Hitler?

Snyder: Yeah, that’s the only good. It’s a very dark, empty universe. I mean, that’s how Hitler describes it to himself. There are really no values in the world except for the stark reality that we are born in order to take things from other people. And so Hitler sees the only good thing as removing the Jews who pervert, as he says it, human nature and physical nature.

…I was struck that Hitler explicitly said that states are temporary, state borders will be washed away in the struggle for nature. In other words, the anarchy that he creates was actually there in the theory from the beginning. He says from the very beginning, what we have to do is destroy the Jews; strip away the artificial political creations that the Jews are responsible for; and let nature just take its course. And what he means by nature’s course is [that] the stronger races destroy the weaker races. …

If Hitler had just been a German nationalist who wanted to rule over Germans—if he was just an authoritarian who wanted to have a strong state—the Holocaust could not have happened. The Holocaust could happen because he was neither of those things. He wasn’t really a nationalist. He was a kind of racial anarchist who thought that the only good in the world was for races to compete, and so he thought that the Germans would probably win in a racial competition, but he wasn’t sure. And as far as he was concerned, if the Germans lost, that was also alright. And that’s just not a view that a nationalist can hold. I think a nationalist cannot sacrifice his entire people on the altar of the idea that there has to be racial competition, which is what Hitler did, and that’s what made him different from a Romanian nationalist, or a Hungarian nationalist, or what have you. At the end of the war, Hitler said, ‘Well the Germans lost, that just shows the Russians are stronger. So be it. That’s the verdict of nature.’ I don’t think a nationalist would say that.

And with the state, if anything that’s even more important. Hitler doesn’t so much make the German state stronger as prepare the German state to be an instrument for destroying other states, which is what the SS [Nazi paramilitary organization] does, and what the concentration camps are models for. And insofar as German power reaches outward, beginning in 1938, and destroys Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and then tries to destroy the Soviet Union, it creates a zone where the escalation of the Final Solution is possible. And again, that’s only possible—killing Jews is only possible—because states are destroyed. And the idea in the end, which is not true of course, … [is that] this racial struggle is going to eventually transform the German race until there’ll be some kind of final revolution at the end. That of course never happens…

Hitler uses popular frustrations to come to power. He uses the Great Depression to come to power. He presents himself precisely as a German nationalist who is going to get the German economy going, who is going to bring Germans inside the borders of Germany. That’s how he presents himself, but that is a lie. He’s quite consciously manipulating German national sentiment to get to power and then to start the war, which he thinks will transform the Germans, as it were, from a nation into a race. So he’s aware that German nationalism is a force in the world, but he’s just using it in order to create the world that he wants, which is this world of racial struggle. And he’s actually pretty explicit about that, which is pretty striking. So he knows that the Germans care about Germany, but he doesn’t. He actually just wants to manipulate their attachment to Germany—to toss them out into this struggle, which will purify them and so on…

You can create this fictional world in which you live, and which guides you and which allows you to move forward. In fact, it can even be a source of your success. So in December of ’41, when Hitler faces this unbeatable alliance basically of the British, the Americans, and the Soviets, he interprets that as the Jewish international conspiracy, which of course it wasn’t—the Jews had nothing to do with that whatsoever. But he interprets it that way, and he says, ‘Ah-hah! This is what I’ve always said, that all the world powers are controlled by the Jews, therefore they’re lining up against us,’ and then that becomes an argument for escalating the Final Solution. So the fictional world provides arguments that you then use to change the real world, because it’s at that point that the Final Solution becomes a total policy of killing all throughout Europe…

Sure, there was lots of anti-Semitism in, for example, Vienna, but the Jews of Vienna were murdered in Belarus. Why is that? And the answer is that the German state couldn’t actually murder them inside Germany—not in very large numbers. To carry out mass killing, it had to first create this zone of anarchy out in the east and then physically take the Jews and send them out there. …

Hitler’s goal is to spread anti-Semitism within the German population, and he succeeds in doing that, but he comes to power much more radical than the population, and he comes to power in part by concealing just how anti-Semitic he is.

In Poland, you have something like the opposite situation. … The government is less anti-Semitic than the population, and for the government anti-Semitism is a kind of problem…

It’s that his primary concern was unleashing some kind of correct world order which was just lurking beneath the surface. The right way to think about Hitler is that he thought there was a natural order, and you just had to do a few things to unleash it. You had to kill the Jews, you had to get the Germans into the war, and then you would return to the struggle, which was nature. And that was the only thing for Hitler which was good.

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Der Spiegel: The Man Who Divided Germany: Why Sarrazin’s Integration Demagoguery Has Many Followers

From Der Spiegel in 2010: Rarely has a man influenced the German public discourse as much as Sarrazin has done with his book “Deutschland schafft sich ab” (“Germany Does Itself In”). In just two weeks, Germany has been hit by three waves of debate stemming from the tome.

Criticism bordering on revulsion dominated the first wave of the reaction. Politicians and opinion leaders condemned Sarrazin almost unanimously.

But then it slowly became apparent that many citizens agreed with Sarrazin. The publisher announced that, due to high demand, it was going to increase the book’s initial printing to 250,000 copies. Furthermore, Internet forums and political events made it clear that Sarrazin — a member of the center-left Social Democrats, which has initiated proceedings to throw him out of the party — had broad public support. Many are saying he is right; or, even if he does make a mistake here and there, he isn’t being treated fairly.

The following e-mail, for example, was received at Social Democratic Party (SPD) headquarters: “Sometimes I’m frustrated and even furious about the fact that, in today’s Germany, it’s no longer possible to speak your mind and call a spade a spade! This is the sort of thing I’m used to seeing in totalitarian countries.” Suddenly Sarrazin seemed like a popular hero.

The third wave arrived in the middle of last week. Politicians have begun demanding that the political elite cease ignoring the fact that many in Germany support Sarrazin. Peter Hauk, head of the Christian Democratic Union’s parliamentary group in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg, says: “Even if I don’t share some of his views, he does address issues that our citizens are concerned about.”

Out of Control

The procedure to dismiss Sarrazin from the Bundesbank board is taking place in parallel with the public debate. The Bundesbank has officially requested that German President Christian Wulff remove Sarrazin from his position. Wulff will hardly be able to deny the request, even if it turns Sarrazin into a martyr for some. Indeed, the case is making it clear that German political leaders will have their hands full this autumn reconciling Germans with integration.

To be sure, the subject of immigration should be up for discussion, but the current debate has gotten out of control. From the very beginning, Sarrazin’s choice of language has been unfortunate. He described problems with integration, which are indeed deplorable, but he introduced an element of biological determinism. He reflected on the inheritability of intelligence and speculated over a “specific gene” that “all Jews share.”

This placed him squarely in the disgusting realm of race theory — and has called forth uncomfortable memories of the Nazi scourge. Sarrazin, too, sensed that he had gone too far and apologized for his statement about the Jewish gene. But he almost certainly has enjoyed the provocative nature of his statements, as have, no doubt, some of his supporters.

It would seem, in short, that Germany has been cleaved in two, between those horrified by Sarrazin’s choice of words and those who support such a forthright assessment of integration. That, in fact, is the first of three big questions the book has raised: In what country are we living? After the 2006 World Cup, it seemed that Germany had become cheerful and cosmopolitan. But the popular approval of Sarrazin leads us to question whether there isn’t an underlying xenophobia after all. “There are many Sarrazins,” says Aylin Selçuk, a university student and co-founder of a group called “Deukische Generation” (or “German-Turkish Generation”).

The second question the debate raises concerns the current state of affairs. Is Sarrazin right when he claims that the integration of Turks and Arabs has largely been a failure?

New Copies on Wednesday

The third question has to do with the relationship between the political and journalistic class with the rest of the country. Do citizens feel abandoned on the question of integration? Or, asked another way, does Germany have a fertile breeding ground for the kind of populist right-wing party that is already par for the course in many European countries?

Sarrazin’s theories meet with widespread approval in large segments of the German population. His book quickly sold out and is currently difficult to obtain. “We hope to have new copies on Wednesday,” says Wilfried Weber, 69, manager of the Felix Jud bookstore in Hamburg. “There are diehards who show up every day, hoping that I might just have a copy left.”

There is a weekly market in Hamburg’s Eppendorf neighborhood. The customers arrive in large SUVs and push their babies around in expensive strollers. Rainer Schaefer, 67, and his wife Barbara are regulars. When asked how he feels about Sarrazin’s theories, Schaefer promptly replies: “I agree with him completely. He was just went too far on the genetic issue. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t stifle the man. Rather, we should address the problems of integration instead.” In general, says Schaefer, “those who come to this country ought to like us and be willing to integrate.” Then, his wife Barbara chimes in: “But if we’re honest, we too have sometimes said that it was getting to be a bit much with the foreigners.”
Sarrazin even has some supporters among immigrants in Germany. On the third floor of the Emil Krause Gymnasium in Hamburg, German teacher Manfred Jäger is asking the class to quiet down. His students are between 17 and 19 and hope to graduate this year. Most of them support Sarrazin and his ideas. “He’s right about many of the things he says,” says Depak, who is from Afghanistan, noting that many immigrants are criminals and take advantage of the social welfare system.

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Germany Abolishes Itself

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* That was why I raised the issue the other day about the former German Prime Minister coming out and declaring the guest-worker experiment with Turkish workers had been a “great mistake.” It turns out to have been Helmut Schmidt, now in his late 90′s but still clear thinking—and still smoking. I posted articles from 2004 (when he was a young man of 86). So we have had instances of knowledgeable Germans whose sage advice is totally rejected by the current ruling class. Back in 1968, former Conservative MP Enoch Powell was raising prophetic warnings about the influx of blacks and Asians from former Empire countries coming to England, and he was read out of the Conservative Party by Edward Heath. So the warnings have been there; they just aren’t heeded. BTW I would remind you that Sweden changed its immigration laws in 1974. That’s 41 years ago. So these instances of insanity can last a very long time. And I would also point out that the very liberal Jew Theodore H. White, whose own parents had emigrated to the U.S., stated in the last of The Making of the President series, “America in Search of Itself” (published in 1981), that he thought the Immigration Act of 1965 was a terrible mistake for the U.S. So that makes a leading opinion-maker from Britain, the U.S. and Germany clearly warning of the dangers and being totally ignored.

* I love schnorrer stories (“schnorrer” is a Yiddish word referring to a beggar with a lot of chutzpah – if you don’t know what that is, read on). I can’t wait for the Muslim equivalent from Germany:

A schnorrer came as usual to the home of a wealthy man, expecting his usual generous charity. The wealthy man said “I’ve had some business setbacks – I can only give you a quarter.”
The schnorrer said “Why should I suffer because of your misfortune?”

A schnorrer came to the back door on his biweekly rounds.
“I haven’t a penny today,” apologized the lady of the house. “Come back tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” frowned the schnorrer. “Lady, don’t let it happen again. I’ve lost a fortune, extending credit.”

A schnorrer knocked on the door of the rich man’s house at 6:30 in the morning.
The rich man cried “How dare you wake me up so early?”
“Listen,” said the schnorrer, “I don’t tell you how to run your business. Don’t tell me how to run mine.”

* Today is 9-11, and what happened 14 years ago today precipitated our Iraq Attack of 2003 and the follow on actions in Egypt, Libya and Syria. Which of course has now led to the latest islamic invasion of Europe. Does anyone wish we could just go back in time and leave Saddam, Murbarak, Gaddafi and Assad ALONE? Heck knowing what we know today, I’d have actually supported arming those guys to keep the lid on. I wonder what the architects of that policy think now. I remember General Odom calling the 2003 invasion the worst strategic blunder in the history of U.S. foreign policy.

If this were a sane country calling oneself a neocon would be as toxic as claiming to be a communist or nazi. The neocons would be purged from any position of responsibility and our leaders would not seek their advice. Unfortunately they seem as entrenched as ever, and the guys like Buchanan who correctly predicted this disaster are the ones in the wilderness.

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The More Europe Responds, The More Migrants It Will Get

Peggy Noonan writes: As Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations notes, it will not soon go away, for two reasons. First, the Mideast will not be peaceful anytime soon and may well become more turbulent. Second, “The more that Europe responds the more it will reinforce the supply of migrants. Europe is caught.” If it doesn’t respond with compassion and generosity it is wrong in humanitarian terms; if it does, more will come and the problem grows. “This is now part of the architecture,” says Mr. Haass.

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Why Vladimir Putin Embraces Jews — But Not Gays

Forward: “We, all of us, will not put up with attempts to legitimize homosexual wedding,” Samoilenko boomed. “Wedlock between men and women assures the continuation of life and we’re duty-bound to resist dangerous ugliness like homosexuality and promiscuity. I know I speak for my Jewish and Muslim colleagues, too.”
None of the dozens of dignitaries present at the roundtable disputed this assertion, which came just minutes after Samoilenko had reassured his listeners that persecution of minorities in Russia was a thing of the past. But at least one of the prominent rabbis, David Rosen, later distanced himself from Samoilenko’s comments.
“I don’t share it,” Rosen, a former chief rabbi of Ireland and the American Jewish Committee’s director of interreligious affairs, said of Samoilenko’s concern about homosexuality. “I don’t see alternative lifestyles as a threat to my own religion.”
To Rosen, a professional builder of bridges between Jews and other faith groups, Samoilenko’s anti-gay tirade was a symptom of how many Christians and Muslims fear phenomena they see as subversive. Jews, he said, feel less threatened because Judaism seldom has power structures to preserve. He called this openness “the privilege of powerlessness.”
As an Orthodox rabbi, Rosen would not officiate at a gay wedding any more than Samoilenko would, but he feels no need to fulminate about it, he explained…

Russian Jewry has experienced a golden age under Putin. From the maritime border with Japan to the land border with Finland, dozens of synagogues in Russia have been returned to communities that, with help from Chabad rabbis, began to flourish and open hundreds of kindergartens, schools and jewish community centers.
Kazan is a case in point. Home to 10,000 Jews, it last week hosted its first Limmud Jewish learning conference, which local volunteers set up for 450 participants, with help from Limmud FSU. In 2012, the city saw its first Jewish music festival – an annual event in which klezmer bands from across the world perform in open-air venues before Rosh Hashanah.
The Kremlin has not been shy about leveraging this cultural revival, as the chief rabbi calls it, in the battle for public opinion – including in the West. And the constant expansion of RT — the huge television network the Russian government set up in 2005 — to additional languages and channel packages speaks volumes of Putin’s willingness to invest in public relations abroad.

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NYT: Netanyahu Makes Quick Pivot From Loss on Iran Deal

Maybe his dramatic opposition to the deal was a deal-making ploy?

Many Jewish organizations such as AIPAC have fundraised for millions by opposing the deal.

NYTIMES.com: JERUSALEM — In the week since it became clear that Congress would not block the Iranian nuclear deal he loathes, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has largely toned down his rhetoric on the issue and pivoted to others.

He did not utter the name of his nation’s nemesis in a pre-New Year’s toast to his office and the national security council on Monday, nor at the induction of his new military secretary on Tuesday. In a brief public statement before meeting with his British counterpart in London on Thursday, Mr. Netanyahu did mention Iran — but not in the usual context of its nuclear program posing an existential threat to Israel, only as a leader of “militant Shiites.”

And even that was ticked off between two other priorities: Mr. Netanyahu reiterated his readiness to restart negotiations with the Palestinians (though he rejects their conditions for doing so) and he boasted of Israeli innovation, “especially in cybersecurity.”

David Horovitz, the editor of The Times of Israel news site, observed, “He is not particularly interested in playing up the fact that a deal he bitterly opposed is going through.” Mr. Horovitz added, “Although he’s not saying that the cause is lost, if he hammers away at the same level, he reminds everybody that it’s been lost.”

FORWARD.com: The second major battle took place in 1991, when president George H. W. Bush conditioned a $10 billion loan guarantee to Israel on freezing building in West Bank settlements. The Israeli government, led by Yitzhak Shamir, refused, and AIPAC took to Congress to fight against the condition. This led Bush to famously describe himself as “one lonely little guy” fighting the powerful pro-Israel lobby. AIPAC lost this battle, too, but once again suffered no adverse consequence.
Fundraising, in fact, leaped upward after each incident, as it did following the 2007 publication of a book by prominent political scientists Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer that critically depicted the pro-Israel lobby. Fundraising also increased after the arrest of two of the group’s top lobbyists on espionage charges that were later dropped, and following the formation of AIPAC’s dovish rival, J Street.
AIPAC now has an enormous $110 million budget and has launched a five-year plan to double it.
Insiders foresee no financial hit for AIPAC. Those opposed to the deal, an official with a major Jewish organization said, will appreciate the effort and keep on supporting the lobby, and those undecided will also likely maintain their support. “They’re not going to go over to J Street,” the official said, explaining that for the centrist and hawkish pro-Israel crowd, AIPAC is the only option.
A bigger issue is the damage, if any, to the lobby’s political clout. But if history offers any clue about the future, the lobby will emerge unscathed, mainly because of the administration’s reluctance to take revenge on a still formidable organization.

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Who is Behind Canary Mission Website Targeting Pro-BDS Activists?

Tangling with the Jews is very bad for your career in America.

Forward.com: A sshadowy website that posts dossiers on pro-Palestinian student activists has grown rapidly in recent months, while continuing to zealously guard the identity of its own staff and backers.
Since a Forward report drew international attention to the Canary Mission this past May, the number of students and other pro-Palestinian activists on whom it has posted lengthy dossiers had jumped to 140 from slightly less than 50. The site includes photographs, and encourages employers to shun the students profiled on its pages.

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Deborah Lipstadt: 4 Reasons We Should Think Before Acting Rashly on Migrant Crisis

Deborah Lipstadt writes: “Years ago I began my exploration into the Holocaust by studying the American response. I was appalled by the deep-seated hostility American officials and bureaucrats showed toward Jewish immigrants. They erected, in the words of historian David Wyman, “paper walls” to keep out the foreigners. Jews were turned away simply and solely because they were Jews, even when that meant they would be sent to concentration camps. Seeing Aylan’s lifeless body washed up on a beach, who among us does not wonder: Is history repeating itself?”

A solid majority of American citizens for more than 150 years have been against more immigration but rarely have they had an opportunity for their views to be expressed in legislation. Why did America have an obligation to take in Jews or any other group? During the 1930s, America had massive unemployment and about 90% of the country was solidly against taking in immigrants.

It’s not the responsibility of Gentile nations to take in Jews or any other immigrants. It is their responsibility to act in their self-interest to perpetuate their culture, civilization and genes. It is up to Jews and other immigrants to prove that they will be more of a blessing than a curse to their host nations.

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