CNN: “Some Muslim men told Coppejans their decision was in reference to the Prophet Muhammad, who is believed to have dyed his hair as well. Some men had just returned from Hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca.”
* I see the henna-bearded types (henna barbarians?) pretty often here in NYC. To my dirty kafir eyes, they look mentally ill.
* My wife, who was a nurse for a while in the Asia, said that even though Muslim women from the Middle East who were treated at her hospital were dressed head to toe in long black robes, underneath, they wore very bright, colorful underclothes.
* How long before we realize that Saudi Arabia is the real enemy and go after them? If US forces were to seize the major oil fields on the Arabian peninsula, for instance, we could eventually turn them over to a series of small Shia ruled emirates along the coast that we could set up much like the British did (didn’t they?) in the 19th century. The security of these small political statelets would of course be guaranteed by US forces in the region, which would give us the necessary leverage to control their behavior. Such a “Trumpist” foreign policy is not quite as inconceivable as it used to be, is it?
As long as we are thinking outside the box, what about the Sunni areas in eastern Syria and western Iraq? Another Trumpist idea would be to encourage the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan to take them over. Isn’t the Jordanian army the most potent in the region? I know it used to be. And even if it isn’t still we could certainly make it so in reasonably short order. Indeed, we might go further and encourage Jordan to reconquer the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, which it traditionally administered for centuries until the Wahhabi-backed Saudis pushed them out.
This Jordanian option has the advantage that it would kill three birds with one stone:
1. The end of Isis
2. The end of radical Islamic control of the holy sites of Islam
3. A Jordanian kingdom so large that it might be induced to relinquish control of Palestinian areas on the east bank of the Jordan river as part of a future Palestinian state, without which a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in unviable.
The current mess in the Middle East is largely a legacy of the way Britain carved it up when it was still a world power. Maybe it is time for America to carve it up again?
* The Prophet of Allah (peace and blessing of Allah be upon him) declared that because the Jews (anguish and damnation be upon them) let their hair go gray, Muslims should colorize their gray hair. However, black dye is not allowed, nor is it allowed to imitate the hair-dyeing habits of kafirs (the immoral people).
Sharia’s intricate rules on hair dyeing are nicely laid out here.
* ESPN has lost 7 million subscribers over the last 2 years. Each subscriber means (via their cable bill) almost $80/year in revenue for Disney, which owns ESPN. The $555 million in lost subscription fees doesn’t count lost advertising revenue.
Posted inIslam|Comments Off on Why Do So Many Muslims Dye Their Beards Orange?
Laquan McDonald said little, if anything, to Chicago police as they tried to detain him last year for breaking into trucks while carrying a knife.
What was going through his 17-year-old mind on that stretch of Pulaski Road before he was fatally shot by a Chicago police officer won’t ever be known.
But in the teen’s final month, some caught a glimpse of a kid who showed signs of hope and promise to maybe untangle himself from a troubled life.
…According to court records, McDonald’s father abandoned the family and had “no presence” in his life. At 3, McDonald became a ward of the state when the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services took him into protective custody over allegations that his mother had neglected him, according to state records.
He spent about two months in foster care before he was moved to a relative’s home and eventually back to his mother in 2002. But after just a little more than a year, he was again back in foster care when his mother’s boyfriend beat him, causing cuts, welts and bruises, according to the records.
…Court files show he racked up numerous juvenile arrests and had spent time in juvenile lockup.
…McDonald enrolled in Sullivan House Alternative School in September 2014, a month before his shooting. In the few weeks he had been there, staff said he was engaged. He tended to arrive early, ahead of the 8 a.m. start, they said.
…McDonald, who was tall at 6-foot-2, liked to rap and dance, his teacher recalled. And he was happy.
COMMENTS:
* The life and shooting of this young man is tragic, but this LA Times article is almost the same quality of a bad SNL skit. If anyone ever doubts the media being liberal, show them this article.
* Wasn’t Mike Brown also just turning his life around? These kids always seem to get shot just as they were turning their lives around.
* PCP isn’t a turning your life around. It’s turning your life inside out.
* With a name like his, it’s no wonder. Now that mommy got a $5,000,000 pay out for bad parenting, I wonder how long it will be before his long lost father shows up demanding a piece of the pie.
Posted inBlacks, Crime|Comments Off on LAT: In final weeks, Laquan McDonald tried to turn around troubled life
Dexter Thomas is from San Bernardino and is a PhD candidate in East Asian studies at Cornell University. He has taught media studies and Japanese and is writing a book about Japanese hip-hop. Thomas began working in new media as a student director of programming at KUCR-FM (88.3), independently producing podcasts as well as music and news programs. He has written for several outlets internationally on topics as diverse as Internet and youth culture, social justice and video games.
…Again, black people will have to answer insincere questions from co-workers and friends, and again combat memes of fake statistics on black crime, spread by the most popular GOP presidential candidate.
It’s exhausting.
The activists marching in Chicago don’t necessarily expect all of America, or even all black people, to join them in the streets. But they know that they will be a topic of conversation at millions of dinner tables this Thanksgiving. And they may wonder if the well-meaning folks all across America who “like” their Facebook posts will speak up this time when their uncle starts calling Black Lives Matter a “terrorist group.”
Being black in the digital age is exhausting for the same reason that being brown after 9/11 is exhausting, or being an immigrant, or a woman, or gay, can be exhausting: because whenever the weight of hundreds of years of injustice comes to light, you are told that it is your fault.
And you are left to shoulder the burden, again, alone.
From the LATIMES comments section:
* This misnomer that only White people can be racist is one of the biggest farces in modern life. People of color are just as racist against each other as whites are to anyone. Ever talk to an African American about Latinos or Asians or vice versa!? Well, it’s not a plethora of love and festivities.
* And comments by obviously non-Black ppl are exhausting, too. Comments come from zero relevant experience, only the experience of the privileged. (“Privileged you say?” Yes — so much so you don’t notice or don’t care. And for those with no logical skills and didn’t both the read nor think, black-on-black crime has zero relevance to the unnecessary killing of this man.)
Down-vote to your “hearts delight.” Continue your cycle of deflection, while the new generation listens and feels.
* Having to remind blacks that they must obey the police is exhausting. Young black men think their skin color intimidates policemen so they disobey orders, walk down the middle of vehicle lanes, and brandish knives. The police reacted properly to Laquan McDonald’s provocation.
* Nothing can be changed unless blacks are exempted from all civil and criminal laws. Brandishing deadly weapons would have to be a new constitutional right reserved only for blacks.
* I’m exhausted by that late 80’s hair cut.
* Color-blind Rules for a “successful” interaction with Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs):
1) Be respectful, even if they are not. They represent the Law and the Government
2) Immediately follow any legal order, even if it is marginal.
If it helps, you can pretend that they are the biggest, nastiest MF in town and they will beat you into the ground for fun if you backtalk them or put a cap in your rear. This is not the time to show your Bravado.
3) If you feel that you have been mistreated, please report the incident AFTER following rules 1 & 2.
LEOs are not being paid to deal with your BS or playing fair if you threaten them. In the end, they are there to protect your family from others that want to break the law. Cursing them out for doing their jobs is not helping your situation.
Yes, there are “bad” cops (see rule 3). I have dealt with them, so can you.
Each of the several incidents of possible LEO misconduct started with someone breaking rules 1 & 2. That is not to say that the LEOs were necessarily justified and obviously in some cases they should face charges.
* Dexter, I like your hair, so I’m going to give you some good advice:
You will expend a lot less energy if you restrict your concern for innocent people getting shot by the police, rather than exorcising yourself when criminals involved in criminal activities run afoul of the police.
I sincerely hope this helps.
* Well, thank god you don’t have to watch every video of a black man killing another black man. You wouldn’t just be exhausted, you’d be positively bedridden then!
* I’m exhausted by bad syntax, diction, and grammar.
* It was exhausting, to hear about the 9 year old boy, murdered in Chicago, by gang members, several weeks ago. Where were the demonstrators then?
* Being around black people is exhausting, too.
* Chicago, is approaching 400 Black on Black murders, so far this year. Where is the outrage from the citizens of Chicago?
* “For too many Americans, admitting that the U.S. has a race problem, and that black people bear the brunt of that race problem, is an insurmountable task.”
I don’t buy the authors argument for a second. Black people from a cultural perspective have a big problem with violence, period. US DOJ statistics are consistent, blacks account for 12.5% of the population, yet are responsible for 51% of all violent crime. There’s no way getting around that, yet the author wants to ignore the elephant in the room.
Let me help the author. There are roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies throughout the nation, and about 900,000 sworn cops. There is a tiny minority among that large group that has no business being cops because they are racists, power freaks, predators, incompetent, you name it. There is no magic screening process that will bar their entry into the police ranks, there is no training that will make them better cops, heck you can’t even make them decent human beings – but they are still there, minimally competent in civil service protected jobs, one tragedy away from the evening news.
There is no such thing as perfect policing, and no one is going to pay more in taxes to try reach that impossible goal, either. Since its a given there are bad cops out there, then why on God’s earth would young black men keep insisting on testing the waters by assaulting cops, resisting arrests, getting high on PCP and arming themselves with a weapon they refuse to drop when ordered to do so? The Chicago kid came across one of these bad cops, and he did not deserve to be shot down like a dog. What his family needs to accept, however, is that he had no business doing what he did at the time he came across the bad cop.
Grad photo aside, he was on PCP, doing auto burgs, and armed.
* Don’t do drugs and commit crime. Police, racism, shootings, these won’t be issues if you don’t do those two things. Trust me.
* High on PCP, slashing police car tires & brandishing a blade…HE DID NOT deserve to be shot by that psycho cop 16 times but…you know, if he was in the library studying on a weeknight at 10pm instead of smoking some sherm, perhaps things might have been different.
I moved out of the house at 19 and did terribly stupid things all the time and managed to survive it. But sometimes kids don’t. The cop needs to be convicted, but the poor kid was culpable as well.
* Sometimes I wonder if the best solution would have been to repatriate the slaves, with a generous gift of money, back to Africa following the Civil War. In the long run I bet the former slaves also would have been happier. In fact, of that I have absolutely no doubt.
* In nearly all of these events, the suspect ran or was resisting. That’s not “bizarre racial gymnastics!” That’s violating the law and subjecting yourself to needless risk. I really take umbrage with that statement by Dexter.
* What’s exhausting is to constantly hear the media, activists and almost an entire community who thinks all these events occur in a vacuum. The suspect is never at fault or even partially at fault. No one is expected to bear any personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions. No, these are all blameless little saints doing nothing provocative and those damned racist police (even when they’re “of color”) are always at fault. All with a healthy dose of insinuation that every white person in the US is somehow culpable. Yeah, its exhausting all right.
* I can’t look past Dexter’s haircut. Come on.
* Imagine being brown. That’s actually invisible. Is it exhausting not existing? In a city that’s 50% Hispanic and 10% African-American how many black writers and how many brown writers does the la times have? How many columns do they run on the Hispanic experience?
While they tilt at every windmill they somehow are blind to the community they are supposed to be serving. If you just read this paper you would think the numbers were flipped that it’s 50% African-American and 10% Hispanic.
* Since you are the majority now you should stop whining. You have an absolute majority. Encourage your people to do well in school and go to college. That’s a start.
* Exactly right… you would think this country is 60% white, 30% black, 10% hispanic, and .01% asian the way the media reports things.
* How many white, black, and Asian writers and reporters does La Opinión have?
* That is kind of the thing that bothers me about the black leadership. It’s like black kids are worth more to them dead than alive. I mean seriously, South LA doesn’t have to be that dangerous but what are the city leaders doing about it? Nothing unless someone is killed by a police officer.
* I taught in South LA and it was clear that the political leadership there does nothing about quality of life issues. In fact, often thousands are spent on the funeral of a young black male but how much attention was given to him when he was alive? This is a legitimate question. There is a ton of posturing, but when you get down to it, no jobs materialize in South LA and the city’s answer to everything it more police or gentrification.
* Poor, exhausted Dexter! And, apparently, poor, exhausted everyone else, per his column (except, of course, non-immigrant heterosexual white males, who basically just hang out on Bill Gates’ yacht while playing polo with Price Harry on the fantail.)
It’s haaaaaard being Dexter. My sympathies!
Posted inBlacks, Crime|Comments Off on Being Black Is Exhausting Because Of White Racism
Pederasty, child brides, honor killings, clitorectomies, stonings, wife beatings—when will America grow up and join the 21st century? (A lot sooner if Marco Rubio has his way!)
The New York Timesboasts about how amazingly painstaking the “vetting” of Syrian refugees will be, but I notice the main point the paper keeps stressing is how long it will take. Twenty-four months!
As we found out from Michael Steinbach, assistant director of the FBI, in congressional testimony last month, there are no Syrian computer databases for our investigators to use in their famed “vetting” of refugees.
“You’re talking about a country that is a failed state, that does not have any infrastructure,” he said. “So all of the data sets—the police, the intel services—that normally you would go to seek information don’t exist.”
It seems that another value the rest of the world doesn’t share with the West is our painstaking record-keeping. There’s no Syrian FBI running the National Crime Information Center. Syria barely has a phonebook.
Our investigators can take fingerprints all day long, but if there’s nothing to check those fingerprints against, there’s no “vetting.”
It’s possible that during that agonizing 24 months of waiting, someone will warn our immigration officials about particular refugees. Then, our government will admit them anyway—as they did with Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
Tamerlan’s suspected co-conspirator in the murder of three Jews, Ibragim Todashev, was another beneficiary of America’s generous humanitarian policies—humanitarian toward foreign criminals and terrorists, monstrous toward Americans.
Our crack investigators admitted Todashev after concluding he had a credible fear of persecution in Chechnya. Meanwhile, his own father said, “He has nothing to fear … he would have faced no oppression.”
Good job, meticulous vetters! (Luckily, during an interrogation after the Boston Marathon bombing, Todashev attacked an FBI agent and got himself killed, saving the taxpayers 60 years of room and board.)
American officials were also warned about the blind sheik, Omar Abdel-Rahman, not only by U.S. consular officials in Egypt—but by Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt himself.
But the Blind Sheik was allowed to go about his business in America, plotting terrorist attacks with other widows and orphans, such as Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—and American asylee.
Under our immigration policies, being a member of a noted terrorist group qualifies you to come to America; being a talented scientist from Switzerland does not.
Our aggressive refugee vetters couldn’t even figure out which Iraqis were helping American troops during the war and which were trying to kill them. During the terrorism prosecution of Iraqi “refugees” Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, the FBI produced Alwan’s fingerprints from IEDs that had been used against American troops in Iraq.
Incidentally, every one of these terrorists was a “legal” immigrant. How many World Trade Centers, Boston Marathons and Fort Hoods do we need before Republicans drop the “Illegals, bad; Legals, good” shibboleth?
Some Republicans have called for admitting only Christian refugees—the main point of which is to allow Jeb! and Rubio to talk tough on immigration, without alienating their imaginary Hispanic base.
Fazliddin Kurbanov was admitted as a Christian refugee in 2009 from the booming world power of Uzbekistan. He claimed that he and his family were being persecuted in the majority Muslim country.
He began communicating with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, telling them: “We are the closest ones to the infidels …. What would you say if with the help of God we implement a martyrdom act?”
At trial, Kurbanov’s defense was that he was just trying to get information on the terrorists in order “to capture them.”
The jury was unconvinced, perhaps swayed by the stores of ammonium nitrate, acetone, aluminum powder and Tannerite found in Kurbanov’s apartment. Our immigration officials would have found Kurbanov’s story as believable as his Christianity.
After the last 50 years of mass immigration from the Third World, we’re good on Islamic terrorists, Mexican rapists, Russian arms dealers, Asian human traffickers and Pakistani Medicare scammers. We’re not running short on those anytime soon.
Posted inImmigration|Comments Off on Ann Coulter: Importing Terrorism And Other American Values
* From Hot 96.7 FM: “L.A. business man Shlomo Rechnitz saw 400 American troops about to eat their brown bag lunches at an airport in Ireland earlier this month. He chose to buy them all a HOT meal instead. He gave each of them $50 to get whatever they wanted at the food court. That’s $20,000.”
* Jewish Journal 2013: Philanthropist donates $250,000 to Mount Zion cemetery repair
Shlomo Rechnitz, a Los Angeles businessman and philanthropist, has donated $250,000 to restore the badly vandalized Mount Zion Cemetery in East Los Angeles.
Fifteen years ago, Shlomo Rechnitz co-founded TwinMed, a wholesaler of medical supplies serving nursing homes. Since then, Rechnitz has founded, or bought, and grown a number of other businesses, including Brius Healthcare, now the largest operator of nursing homes in California.
Along the way, Rechnitz, 41, also became a major philanthropist, giving away millions of dollars — to Jewish charities and also directly to people in need. On more than one occasion he’s come to the aid of a major Orthodox organization, offering gifts or loans in times of crisis.
It was a combination of these two attributes — business expertise and an expansive view of philanthropy — that led Rechnitz to buy Doheny Glatt Kosher Meat Market, the scandal-ridden Los Angeles kosher meat distributor and retailer that closed its doors last month.
“The Rabbinical Council of California [RCC] approached me and said, ‘Shlomo, could this be one of your charity things?’ ” Rechnitz recalled in an interview with the Journal earlier this month. “Kosher meat is expensive enough.”
…Rechnitz calls himself “a nondenominational giver” and said that at times he reaches out to those who aren’t coming to him. Last year, Diana Aulger, a pregnant woman in Texas, decided to have her doctors induce labor so that her husband, Mark, who was dying of cancer, could meet their child. Mark got to hold their daughter, Savannah, for 45 minutes before he died.
Rechnitz saw the story online and sent Aulger a check for $20,000.
He also sends $10,000 checks to the families of police officers who are shot while on duty in Southern California. Those gifts are inspired in part by an urge to assist individuals who put themselves into harm’s way for the public good, but Rechnitz said he’s also driven by another motive.
“I don’t think that [non-Jews] should ever look back at the Jewish people and say, ‘You only care about your own,’ ” he said.
* From Wikipedia: Rechnitz reportedly spends half of his day overseeing the Shlomo & Tamar Rechnitz Charitable Foundation which distributes funds to over 1,100 institutions yearly. He is known in the Los Angeles area for opening his home every Saturday night to listen to the needy and to hand out charity.[7] Rechnitz donated $5 million to the Mir Yeshiva in November 2011 when the head of the Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem, Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, died suddenly, leaving the institution with $15 million in debt. Rechnitz donated $5 million to support the yeshiva and encourage others to come to its aid. Soon after Rechnitz’s donation others followed suit and the debt was paid in full within three months.[1][8] In December 2011, Rechnitz purchased a creditor’s note against Chabad of California’s headquarters in Westwood for $2.35 million in order to help the organization avoid foreclosure[1] After Hurricane Sandy, Rechnitz gave $1 million to aid in the rebuilding of Orthodox Jewish day schools and to assist the families whose children attend those schools.
Posted inShlomo Rechnitz|Comments Off on Astonishing Acts Of Generosity
Since the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris by the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, Republican presidential candidates, led by Donald Trump, have mainstreamed everything from proposals for registering Muslims nationwide to setting up Christians-only religious tests for Syrian refugees. But on November 19, even the Orthodox Union — a group that has often opposed the Obama administration — clearly articulated the theme driving many Jewish groups to oppose such measures.
“Just a few decades ago,” the group noted in a statement, “refugees from the terror and violence in Hitler’s Europe sought refuge in the United States and were turned away due to suspicions about their nationality.” Anti-Semitism was common at the time, and tied frequently to fears about letting socialists, communists and anarchists into the country. But “in fact,” the OU noted, “the Jewish immigrants that ultimately came to these shores fully adopted American values and have contributed greatly” to the country. Responding to the November 19 passage of a bill in the House of Representatives that would effectively halt the resettlement of refugees from Syria and Iraq, the OU urged Congress to work with the president to iron out any problems in the U.S. vetting system with the aim of “getting to yes” on a bipartisan admissions program.
“We’re not saying ‘open the doors wide and come one, come all,’” said Jason Isaacson, associate executive director of the American Jewish Committee, which also joined in the communal consensus. “But to say that people fleeing persecution cannot escape to the United States after they are properly checked, that is cruel.”
The measure must now also be approved by the Senate, and President Obama has threatened to veto it if it reaches his desk. But in the House vote, Jewish members showed the same sense of solidarity as Jewish communal groups — and often cited the same reasons.
Still, there, too, exceptions existed.
“My No. 1 priority is to keep New Yorkers safe,” said Rep. Steve Israel, a Jewish Democrat in New York, explaining his vote in favor of the House bill. “To do that, we must defeat ISIS to protect our national security and prevent the hateful terrorist attacks.”
Israel, a member of the House’s Democratic leadership who represents a district in Long Island, and Representative Jared Polis of Colorado were the only two Jewish Democrats to support the legislation out of 18 total. Together they constituted 11% of the House’s Democratic Jewish members. That compared with some 25% of Democrats overall who voted for the measure. Many cited fears stoked by the Paris attacks and the discourse from GOP presidential candidates, which sparked a spike in constituent pressure to block the refugees. Representative Lee Zedlin of upstate New York, the body’s sole Jewish Republican, also backed the bill, which passed overwhelmingly, 289 to 137.
But for the majority of Jewish lawmakers, there was no dilemma. If anything, there was anger at those who tried to tie the Paris attacks to President Obama’s plan to settle 30,000 Syrian refugees in America over the next two years. This would be above and beyond their much smaller presence in the planned total of 70,000 refugees worldwide to be admitted to the United States during this period.
“I am appalled by the actions of this House and by some of the words of my colleagues today,” New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler said on the House floor. Asked later by the Forward how he views the vote of fellow Jewish Democrats Israel and Polis, Nadler said: “I was frankly surprised when I saw those votes.”
…Jewish activists did not dispute the notion that Syrian refugees coming to America are likely to be biased against Israel and possibly against Jews, mainly because of their upbringing under the Assad dictatorship, which promoted such ideas.
Isaacson argued that proper integration of refugees in their new homelands could help uproot any hostile sentiments they might carry with them from the country they are fleeing.
“Before we turn our back on a humanitarian crisis, let’s be serious about the need to integrate migrants in the society,” he said.
As the anti-refugee bill moves to the Senate its opponents hope that “cooler heads will prevail” and that the legislation will be prevented from moving forward. Jewish groups, including AJC, the Anti-Defamation League and HIAS, the largest Jewish immigration and resettlement agency, as well as the Reform Movement, have been speaking to members of Congress and to governors and state legislators in an effort to counter the current wave. Most continue to believe that the bill will never become law and that its House passage was no more than a political statement.
If the current wave indeed subsides, the Jewish community will, in fact, return to its previous immigration priority: significantly increasing the quota for resettlement of Syrian refugees beyond Obama’s plan.
On Nov. 19, less than a week after the deadly series of terrorist attacks in Paris, Mark Hetfield, president and CEO of HIAS, the 134-year-old refugee resettlement organization, was summoned to the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C., to testify before Congress. The topic was the swelling Syrian refugee crisis.
Hetfield, 48, a lawyer and policy specialist in refugee and immigration resettlement, had been tracking the Syrian crisis since it began in 2011. What started as a civil war between Syrian president Bashar Assad and a handful of rebel groups seeking to unseat him had morphed in large part into a religious war with the self-declared Islamic State (ISIS) leading the rebellion, internally displacing 11 million Syrians and pushing another 4.1 million out of the country.
Hetfield hoped to convince Congress to take in 100,000 Syrian refugees “over and above” the United States’ annual refugee quota of 70,000, a number far exceeding the additional 10,000 Syrians President Barack Obama had already agreed to welcome. (In Hetfield’s address to Congress, he called the American gesture “tepid.”) Hetfield knew a green light was unlikely: In the week after the Paris attacks, the revelation that a fake or stolen Syrian passport may have been used by one of the terrorists to infiltrate the refugees streaming into Europe set off panic among some Americans that Syrian refugees are indistinguishable from the Islamic State terrorists they are fleeing. As the U.S. election cycle continues to heat up, the refugees have become a political flashpoint, with distortions and fear-mongering shifting focus away from their desperate situation.
As civil discourse last week descended into talk of Muslim registries and permitting only Syrian Christians to enter the U.S., Hetfield prepared to fight the toxic political climate of xenophobia and fear.
“Politicians who fixate on the refugee crisis — it’s perplexing,” Hetfield said from his office in New York the night before his hearing. “They do it because it’s easy. Refugees are defenseless; they don’t have a constituency, they don’t vote. And it’s lot easier dealing with refugees than it is dealing with ISIS.”
Posted inImmigration, Islam|Comments Off on The Jewish Journal Wants To Bring More Muslims To America
Germany cannot afford to reject refugees, says Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of German Jews (Zentralrat der deutschen Juden). It (Germany) has brought “evil” upon others and is indebted to other nations.
According to the President of the GJCC, Josef Schuster, Germany is “the last land that can afford to reject refugees and persecuted people.” It has brought so much evil [“perdition”] upon the world and it is deeply in debt with so many countries, he said on Sunday during a memorial ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau on Apr 29, 1945.
He asks himself, when today, again, some citizens hunt [agitate] against refugees or talk in a demeaning way about Jews, how deep the need for protecting human dignity is anchored in people´s minds.
Dachau´s prisoners would have known, Schuster noted, how fast human civilization could be laid into ruins. “How a people from a supposedly [sic!!] cultured nation (Kulturvolk] became barbarians.” Fundamental values such as tolerance, respect, humility and responsibility should always be re-exercized and defended.
“I get sick when I see that in Dresden not less than 10,000 people cheer up an Islamophobe and right-wing populist like Geert Wilders” (he spoke there once), said the doctor from Würzburg. Growing numbers of refugees and Islamic terrorism are “not a reason to fight for a Christian-Jewish West without Muslims”, or to threaten to murder politicians.
Schuster said that Holocaust survivors´ memories are nowadays “more precious than ever.” What happened moves always further away; for many young people, NS terror and the Shoah are “only historical dates/facts” without a personal relationship (to them): “Distance grows, and empathy (levels) drops — except when you set foot on this place” [i.e., Dachau].
On these grounds, visiting a concentration camp memorial should be compulsory for all junior high school students. He hopes that his suggestion will be discussed again in the Bavarian Parliament. Chancellor Angela Merkel participated also in the ceremony. The Dachau concentration camp was created on March 22, 1933. Around 200,000 people from all over Europe were kept prisoners in Dachau and in several of its satellite camps , at least 43,000 were murdered there.
Not long ago I was so pleased to find myself linked in the same sentence with Mark Steyn — in John Birmingham’s Sydney Morning Herald article about witty righties and humorless lefties — that I immediately ordered Birmingham’sout-of-print book, “How to Be a Man.” I figured this would be the perfect 40th birthday present for Luke Ford, especially because of the Australian connection. And indeed it was, at least in my opinion. Luke isn’t very gracious about presents, but I assume he’ll at least learn something from it. It’s a good book, as of course I read it first. (Along with Maia and Grandpa, who were both quite glued to it.)
…Someone else gave Luke some AMC movie passes, so Monday he took me and Maia to see “United 93,” which we all liked very much, although Maia thought it was too sad and Luke had to march around my backyard afterward for a good 20 minutes, demanding that we all imagine him saying manly things like “Scramble those jets” and “I want action, not answers” and (of course) “Let’s roll.” He only stopped when my Dad finally came
outside and distracted him with a dirty joke.
One good thing about Luke: He’s an appreciative audience and when he laughs, he laughs so long and loud you think his sides actually might split. He also cackled happily for quite a while at the pre-movie commercial about some bed-wetting product.
Luke’s “let’s roll” dialogue fantasies were at least a relief from his conversation on the way to the movie, which consisted almost entirely of him saying things like, “Do you think I’m exploitative of women?” “Am I self-centered and narcisstic?” “People say I’m manipulative — am I?”
He wouldn’t let me change the subject, and just saying “yes, yes, yes” gets boring after a while, so eventually I reminded him that, you know, some women charge 95 cents a minute for these kinds of conversations.
From My 40th Birthday Party Thrown By Holly Randall
