A newly formed pro-transgender political action committee has sent out a questionnaire to each of the major 2016 presidential candidates — but only Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders has responded.
The Trans United Fund, launched in April with the goal of building the transgender community’s political power, sent out a questionnaire to campaigns for both Hillary Clinton and Sanders. Although the Clinton campaign initially signaled it would answer the questions, the campaign has yet to return the questionnaire, the committee says.
The 15-page questionnaire prepared for the candidates covers a range of transgender issues, seeking candidate’s positions on transgender employment as well as access to transition-related health care, education and housing.
Why do transpeople need education and housing? I mean, anymore than anyone else?
In his responses, Sanders affirms support for trans rights in each of these areas. Additionally, he volunteers a proposed executive order requiring all federal employees to have access to workplace facilities consistent with their gender identity and to establish an interagency working group to increase opportunities for the trans community.
Okay, bathrooms again. How do we increase opportunities for transpeople?
The candidate also recommits himself to fighting HIV/AIDS in response to questions on the epidemic and pledges to work to reform state HIV criminalization laws, which to varying degree penalize the transfer of HIV.
WTF, I thought knowingly transferring a deadly infection was criminal, and it should be.
Sanders identifies as his greatest achievement for transgender people his role in enacting the Affordable Care Act, which he says secured $11 billion to expand the network of Federally Qualified Health Centers to assist minority communities like transgender people.
$11 B is not enough.
But Sanders didn’t respond to all of the questions. One on whether he has employed a transgender person to work for him in a government and business context, and another on whether he supports the legalization of sex work were left unanswered.
What does TG have to do with prostitution (sex work)? Apparently, a lot; perhaps these are the opportunities previously referred to. I was right, others were wrong: legalized prostitution is apparently next, call it WWP.
Many of Sanders’ answers reflect his responses during an interview last year with the Washington Blade in which he promised to make transgender people visible in his administration and became the first presidential candidate to endorse openly transgender military service.
How do you make TG’s “visible” in your administration? As for the armed services, I have my doubts.
* In my lifetime, the politically correct term for black people has changed maybe four or five times, from colored people to Negroes to black to African-American to people of color (which is good but colored people is bad – go figure). I may have missed a couple in there – I think there may have been a short period where it was Afro-American instead of African-American. A lot of this is just shit testing for loyalty to the party line – the powers that be change the acceptable name and you have to signal your virtue and hipness by following the party line that is current this week. Maybe next week the correct term for blacks will be “sun people”. If you don’t follow along with this, you can be accused of being racis’, not to mention “childish, passive aggressive, and effeminate”. Maybe some people don’t want to play this game anymore.
* The reason these names keep changing is because a word designates an object, and if an object accrues bad associations, then by re-naming the object, it is thought that you remove the bad associations. But the bad associations always come right back, because it is the object, not the word, that is creating the problem. The first person I know to point this out was Schopenhauer, 150 years ago (Section 285a in the Parerga and Paralipomena).
All social justice re-naming (including the current jihad against “oriental”) is similarly motivated and will require similar re-naming every cycle.
There’s an amusing anecdote from the Falkland Island War that recaps this: Supposedly the British troops began referring to Falkland Island natives as “Bennies”, which was a way of calling them idiots, and the high command got word of this and commanded that they stop using that word. So they started calling them “NB’s” with the same disparaging tone. A commander asked, “what does NB stand for?” “Not Bennies” replied the soldier.
* Liberal love blacks, browns and Muslims so long as they act just like white liberals. Otherwise, liberals get very frustrated and, most often, move to a less diverse neighborhood. Funny that.
* One of Fox News Channel’s token liberals is one of its celebrity Blacks, Juan Williams. He is actually an immigrant from Panama! Nonetheless, he is usually referred to as “African American”– as are people like Colin Powell, whose parents were from the Caribbean. Juan Williams is actually a Black Hispanic, or an Hispanic Black, but I never have heard anyone refer to him as such.
My problem, however, is not with immigrants who are naturalized, much less the native-born children of immigrants, being called “African American” (i.e., despite their not having any ancestors who were slaves in America). My problem is primarily with people exchanging two words with seven syllables for a single, monosyllabic word– even though they call the majority “White” instead of “European American.” In the words of ‘Judas Iscariot’: “It doesn’t help us if you’re inconsistent!”
Actually, I find “African American” more objectionable than its mere length: It also is inaccurate, in that the natives of northern Africa are not black (negroid), and are (for the moment, at least) classified as “White or Caucasian” by the government itself. Even worse, of course, is the moronic use of “Asian” as a “racial” designator, as if Afghanis and Japanese were of the same race. Sigh….
* During the Winter Olympics a few years back when a Jamaican won a medal in some sport the NBC commentator described her as being “the first African American, from any country, to win a medal”.
* African American is a treadmill euphemism. When a group can’t meet societal norms they simply change their name hoping that will alleviate the stigma of belonging to the group. There is no use examining the term “African American” because it will soon fall out of favor and some other term will take its place. The New York Times now asks people, or blacks at least, how they describe themselves. In one article five people of African descent are described as black, African American, Afro Caribbean, Tunisian and Egyptian, or mother from Barbados. LINK.
The terms idiot, imbecile, and moron changed to mentally retarded which changed to special needs and in many places is now called exceptional.
* RE the group of a thousand names, I think the main thing is connotation. They want to keep the name a moving target, so the negative connotations can be ditched for a while. It’s like if Chipotle (was having much bigger problems and) changed their name and brand. It wouldn’t really promise anything new of substance, but a lot of people would fall for it. Eventually, every name given to blacks becomes a word a certain type of non-black spits. When that type hits a certain critical mass, it’s time for a brand change. African American might have staying power, because it’s long enough to appeal to blacks’ grandiose tendencies.
* Lots of interracial marriage among powerful families in America in the latest generation.
John Boehner’s daughter – black man
John McCain’s son – black woman
Al Gore’s daughter – Asian man
Barbara Bush – brown guy from Panama
Posted inBlacks|Comments Off on The War Over Language
Here is the Twitter account for Jett Goldsmith: “News Editor at Neowin, formerly of @Conflicts. Student of international affairs. Occasional contributor to @Bellingcat. Tweets on Syria, geopolitics, and tech.”
This guy reminds me of Ben Shapiro who said: “Of course there are legitimate racists, and we should target them and we should find them and we should hurt their careers”
Posted inSJW|Comments Off on SJW Jett Goldsmith: ‘Oh my, and you live in the same state as me. Hold on while I capture your tweets and get you fired.’
Rachel Shukert writes: Among other stupid and hateful proclamations, a popular white supremacist blogger said Taylor Swift is an ‘Aryan Goddess’ who is ‘secretly a Nazi’
Have you ever looked at Taylor Swift’s Instagram—her ubiquitous social media feed that’s full of her tall, leggy, impossibly blonde and snub-nosed friends (your Jaime Kings, your Karlie Klosses)—and thought: Hmmm, they certainly look like they are having a lovely, female-centric, wholesome time, but they also don’t look very—how to put this?—Jewish? Well, you’re not the only one! That’s right, Neo-Nazis, too, have eyes for Swift who is apparently… a Nazi?
“Taylor Swift is a pure Aryan goddess,” white supremacist blogger Andre Anglin, of hate-rag The Daily Stormer, told Broadly in a piece titled “Can’t Shake It Off: How Taylor Swift Became a Nazi Goddess.” The article tracks the rise of this peculiar fanfare, which apparently began with a Pinterest meme in which Hitler quotes were pasted onto pics of T. Swift and vice versa. The Internet, how fun!
According to the article in Vice’s Broadly, whose bloggers have stronger stomachs than I do for investigating the murky depths of the Internet, Nazis and others persons with alt-right political leanings are inspired by Swift whom they believe, once upon the throne, could “commands us to go forth and slaughter the subhuman enemies of the Aryan race.”
Said Anglin, a charmer: “[Swift is] like something out of classical Greek poetry. Athena reborn. It is also an established fact that Taylor Swift is secretly a Nazi and is simply waiting for the time when Donald Trump makes it safe for her to come out and announce her Aryan agenda to the world. Probably, she will be betrothed to Trump’s son, and they will be crowned American royalty.
“It’s incredible really that she’s surrounded by these filthy, perverted Jews, and yet she remains capable of exuding 1950s purity, femininity and innocence. She is the anti-Miley. While Miley is out having gang-bangs with colored gentlemen, she is at home with her cat reading Jane Austen.”
Obviously, these kinds of statement leads to some critical questions, to put it mildly. First of all, hasn’t Taylor Swift already been crowned American royalty? Second, go easy on Miley. Sure she’s hanging out with some questionable company, but who says she hasn’t read Jane Austen. Third, which of Donald Trump’s sons? The two older ones are both already married, and while a marriage between the 26-year-old Swift and the 10-year-old Barron Trump might emulate some of the more cynically dynastic marriages of the great European houses for which many white supremacists yearn, it sounds a bit squicky, not to mention weighted, towards reproductive challenges.
And besides, once you get rid of the Jews, who the hell do they think is going to negotiate the nuclear hellscape of that prenup?
Posted inAlt Right|Comments Off on Taylor Swift Is Not a Nazi
…21st-century geneticists discovered what they called the Cohen Modal Haplotype, a set of genes carried on the Y chromosome, which are carried by a majority of Jewish families that self-identify as kohanim. This suggests that the priestly identity was, in many cases, accurately passed down for a hundred generations.
Strong warnings are issued against high-born Jews marrying low-born Jews: According to Rabba bar bar Chana, “Anyone who marries a woman who is not suited for him [due to her lineage], the verse ascribes blame to him as though he plowed the entire world and sowed it with salt.” Such warnings are only necessary, however, because the temptation to marry “below” one’s station was often irresistible. The reason, of course, was money: It would have taken a rare commitment to lineage to reject a potential rich suitor just because he was rumored to have a mamzer or a slave somewhere in his family tree.
Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi hints at this dynamic when he says, “Money purifies mamzerim.” The tone of this statement is hard to parse: Is Yehoshua being cynical or sarcastic about social-climbing mamzerim, or is he acknowledging an inevitable fact of life, or is he possibly even praising the power of money to overcome distinctions of birth? At any rate, it’s clear that the rabbis do not believe in scrutinizing people’s family background too closely. “A family that has become assimilated remains assimilated,” says Rabbi Yitzchak: That is, if a family of flawed lineage manages to marry into a family with pure lineage, their descendants are considered pure. This looks like a contradiction of the stated law on the subject, which says that the children of flawed unions inherit the flaw of their parents.
But for the sake of social peace, the rabbis recognize that it’s better to draw a curtain over such questions. Indeed, the amora Ulla asked rhetorically, “Is that to say that we know where we come from? Perhaps we are from those about whom it is written: ‘They have ravished the women in Zion, the maidens in the city of Judah.’” In other words, even a pious and learned Jew might be descended from a woman raped by gentile invaders. In this way, the Talmud marks a transition from an aristocracy based on birth and lineage to one based on learning and piety.
Posted inJews, Talmud|Comments Off on Jewish Racial Purity
For Bethany Mandel and those who share her feelings, this election is a train wreck. For about half of America, however, this election is unfolding beautifully.
Different groups have different interests. Bethany has chosen the losing side.
I wonder if Ivanka has a future in politics? Or if her brothers are more logical choices?
>What is it about Ivanka Trump? If Donald’s daughter were the one running for president, there would probably be far fewer Republicans declaring “Never Trump” as we watch the election unfold like a slow-motion train wreck. She is, simply, everything her father is not. Soft-spoken, a thoughtful listener, a self-proclaimed feminist, naturally beautiful and gentle — especially in contrast to her father’s brash, bombastic showmanship.
In The Federalist (where I am a senior contributor) Mary Katharine Ham puts it best
: “Ivanka is a natural in the art of Kate Middletoning — being damn near perfect and likable, especially to women, even when her immense beauty and privilege have the potential to make such displays grating.”
Which is why so many fans and admirers of Ivanka, myself included, are increasingly wondering: When is it going to be enough for Ivanka? When will it come to a point where even Donald’s daughter can’t defend him any longer?
In a recent article in The Atlantic, Alex Wagner asks just that
. How can a self-proclaimed feminist stand idly by as her father, a presidential candidate, debases not only women everywhere, but also Ivanka herself? One of Donald’s ultimate “compliments” about Ivanka is that he would date her if she weren’t his own child. If any other father in America made a similar public statement about his teenage daughter, he would (justifiably) be subject to a visit from the local division of Child Protective Services. It’s just not something a father says about his daughter — much like Donald’s compliments about the future breast size of his then-one-year-old daughter Tiffany.
Ivanka’s entire brand revolves around empowering women to be the ultimate multitaskers, taking up the mantle of Sheryl Sandberg and helping women who want to make it in corporate America “lean in.” Wagner writes, “What is undeniably true is that there is no room even in Ivanka’s brand of hyper-efficient, nonconfrontational feminism for the piggish antics and antiquated, un-hashtaggable gender tropes embraced by her father. Put another way: If the tables were turned and Donald Trump worked for his daughter, he would have been fired long, long ago.”
What Wagner wrote of Ivanka’s feminism could just as well be said of her Judaism. How long can Ivanka, herself Jewish and the mother of three beautiful Jewish children, stay silent about the vocal anti-Semitic contingent in her father’s base? Last October, I was one of the first journalists to take note of the phenomenon in these pages, asking, “Why Won’t Donald Trump Stand Up to His Anti-Semitic Fans?”
Seven months later, I’m still asking.
Since that piece was written, Trump has retweeted more blatantly anti-Semitic accounts and selected a delegate with white nationalist ties to represent his campaign in California. In the run-up to the New York primary, Ted Cruz could be found in Brooklyn baking matzo with some Chabadniks (and me), but Trump was nowhere to be seen making similar outreach attempts to the Jewish community. The closest Trump came were his appearances at events like the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual gathering late last year, when he joked that he wasn’t going to get the support of those present because he wasn’t interested in taking their money. A very unamused crowd eventually booed the then-longshot candidate.
Now that more mainstream and liberal reporters are on the receiving end of the same deluge of tweets, messages and even calls that conservative Jews have been experiencing for over seven months, the wider media is finally beginning to pay attention. The New York Times’ Jonathan Weisman was recently subjected to a wave of hate, and before that, Julia Ioffe was targeted for a balanced profile she did of Melania, Donald’s wife, for GQ. Both incidents received a great deal of coverage and finally drew the attention of Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League.
Posted inAnti-Semitism, Donald Trump|Comments Off on Forward: The Outrageous Jewish Hypocrisy of Ivanka Trump — Not To Mention Donald and Melania
Although the American Jewish community is well known for its educational achievements, philanthropy and investments in communal organizations and services, it has mysteriously allowed a significant portion of its own community to grow up undereducated, without the skills to earn a basic living. Why?
Jewish elites and organizations in the United States have long worried about demographics. Intermarriage, assimilation and low birthrates may do what centuries of anti-Semitism and persecution have not: threaten the community’s survival. As such, leaders repeatedly express concern over how to reverse the tide — how to reach out to those unaffiliated with Jewish institutions and how to inspire strong Jewish identity in a country so full of equality, acceptance and material comfort. And yet, in the meantime, another challenge has gone unnoticed or ignored: the education of what will become the majority of the community in a couple of generations.
Many youth in this community, especially the Hasidim, are ill prepared for employment and likely to struggle with poverty. The problem is most acute among boys, because they receive less secular education than girls. On average, Hasidic boys receive only 90 minutes of instruction in English and math four days a week, until the age of 13. After 13 they receive no secular education at all, because they focus on Judaic studies for as many as 14 hours a day. As a result, these students can be well educated in religious studies but unprepared to find jobs in the workforce. They often do not even speak proper English because of their lack of exposure to it (Yiddish predominates within the community). While students finish the equivalent of high school, few have gained enough secular knowledge to pass state exams, which they don’t usually take.
Hasidic leaders have long resisted any change to this regime, because they fear greater exposure to the world. Yet, Jewish teaching is clear on the need for every adult to work. As the medieval sage Maimonides warns: “All Torah that is not accompanied by work will eventually be negated and lead to sin. Ultimately, such a person will steal from others.”
The marked growth of a Haredi community in which students lack basic work skills will mean that within about two generations, a significant portion of the Jewish population — maybe even a third or more — will be unable to earn a decent living, unable to contribute financially or practically to Jewish institutions, and unable to partake in American life as ordinary citizens. The poverty rate will be higher than anytime since the middle of the 20th century; studies commissioned by the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty and the UJA-Federation of New York
already show a rising proportion dating back to at least the 1970s. A significant and growing factor in this upward movement is the fact that a remarkable three-fifths of Hasidic households in the New York City area are poor or near poor.
Posted inEducation, Haredi, Hasidim|Comments Off on Why Do Jewish Leaders Keep Ignoring Ultra-Orthodox Education Crisis?
Another way of framing the same question is asking which U.S. president was strongest on pursuing America’s interests.
As Israel and America are different countries, they often have different interests.
Dennis Ross writes: Have the United States and Israel ever had a relationship as bad as the one between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?
That is a question I am typically asked when speaking about my book “Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship From Truman to Obama.” The answer is yes. Ronald Reagan had a poor relationship with Menachem Begin, saying at one point, “Boy, he is a hard guy to like.” And the only leader in the world who George H.W. Bush dealt with but did not like was Yitzhak Shamir, believing Shamir had misled him in their very first meeting after Bush became president.
Posted inAmerica, Israel|Comments Off on Which one of these presidents was toughest on Israel?
In different contexts, the same people are likely to be warmongers or humanitarians. Sometimes, to be humane to your own people, you have to wage war on your enemies. Israel, if it is to survive as a Jewish state in the middle of a hostile Arab region, must be constantly prepared to go to war. It can’t lose one war or it is over.
JTA: Yes, there’s the Avigdor Lieberman who wants to behead bad guys, mandate loyalty oaths and pay Arabs to leave the country — the one who makes fun of the disabled and who dodged a fraud charge.
But Israel’s onetime foreign minister and maybe-next defense minister is not quite the cartoon he’s made out to be – OK, the cartoon he at times seems determined to make himself out to be.
As defense minister, Lieberman would double to two the Cabinet ministers who have seriously considered a two-state outcome: himself and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is more deferential to the United States- Israel relationship than Netanyahu. And his posture toward Israel’s Arab neighbors is not all threat.
It’s time to review three areas where the once and possibly future member of the security cabinet has served as a voice for moderation – but also to keep in mind how his rhetoric undercuts his apparent restraint.
Two states for two peoples, or transfer and a recipe for unrest?
Lieberman has spoken seriously and extensively about peace, and has in fact embraced two states, even though he rankled disability advocates a year ago when he called two-state advocates “autistic.”
One of his most radical ideas would crack the sequencing that famously helped scuttle the 2000 Camp David peace talks: Yasser Arafat, then the Palestinian leader, was considering embracing then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s proposals, but balked when he toured the Arab and Muslim worlds and was told he would be seen as a quisling if he agreed to Barak’s terms, particularly on Jerusalem.
Lieberman’s solution: negotiate holistically. Make peace with the Arabs and the Palestinians simultaneously. It’s a plan that would allow the Palestinians greater leverage, should they coordinate with other Arab nations to extract concessions. That’s one reason why Netanyahu insists on direct talks, where Israel holds more cards. But, the thinking goes, it also could lead to a more stable and permanent peace in the region. Liberman, looking toward activating this plan, could keep Netanyahu focused on working with moderate Arabs in the region.
“The security advantage means cooperation with moderate nations, exchanging intelligence, joint efforts,” Lieberman told Al Monitor in 2014. “With regard to this facet, our partners could gain very nice inputs. And there’s also the economic sphere. I am convinced that one day, we’ll have embassies in Riyadh, in Kuwait, in the Gulf States and other places. The combination of our initiative, technology and knowledge with their tremendous financial reserves can together change the world.”
His proposal to swap heavily populated areas – Arab-heavy regions of Israel bordering the West Bank with Jewish-heavy portions beyond the Green Line – is what has stirred controversy. Lieberman tries to make it sound like common sense: Jews want to live chez-eux, why wouldn’t Palestinians?
For one thing, not every Israeli Arab wants to live in a Palestinian state – subtle but deep-seated differences have emerged between the populations since 1948. Israeli Arabs have said they resent being considered as pawns.
For another, Lieberman proposes paying Israeli Arabs to leave – a transfer policy that would undercut his hopes that Israel would no longer be an international “punching bag,” as he told Al-Monitor.
Yuli Tamir, a former education minister, wrote in Haaretz in 2015 that Lieberman’s plan sets dangerous precedents, by positing that minorities cannot exist with majorities, and by suggesting that majority Arab areas of Israel should seek sovereignty.
Posted inIsrael|Comments Off on JTA: Warmonger or humanitarian? Getting to know Avigdor Lieberman
One of the first pieces I ever published on VDARE.com, on September 4th 2001, was about Australia’s policy towards illegal immigrants. Titled “Nice Guys Get Illegal Immigrants,” that piece reported on the Tampa incident.
Tampa was a small Norwegian cargo ship that had rescued 438 illegals, mostly Afghans, from an Indonesian fishing boat—owned by people smugglers, of course—that had foundered on its way to Australian territory.
The Australian government took a firm line. An international incident involving Australia, Norway, and Indonesia followed.
As my title indicated, the point of my article was to predict that the Tampa illegals would eventually be allowed to settle in Australia. In fact New Zealand took a third of them. Of the others, many were settled in Australia (I can’t find precise numbers), but others were repatriated to Afghanistan when the Taliban government fell.
The Tampa incident led to implementation of the “Pacific Solution,” under which Australia paid small, poor nearby island nations to accommodate illegals in camps while refugee claims were investigated.
The Pacific Solution has undergone some modifications and name changes, but is still the basis of Australian policy towards illegals today.
Australians seem stubbornly resolved that right of settlement in their country should be determined by them and their representatives, not by people-smuggling criminal gangs.
To their great credit, Australia has continued to apply its immigration laws firmly, refusing settlement rights to illegals except where claims to refugee status meet a high standard of proof.
As Prime Minister John Howard said at the time of the Tampa incident: “We cannot surrender our right as a sovereign country to control our borders. We cannot have a situation where people can come to this country when they choose.”
That approach is very shocking to immigration romantics in Australia and elsewhere. Monday’s New York Times ran an op-ed by Roger Cohen, a stalwart defender of the Indonesian crime cartels huddled masses yearning to breathe free:
SYDNEY, Australia — The Australian treatment of refugees trying to reach this vast, thinly populated country by boat follows textbook rules for the administering of cruelty. It begins with the anodyne name for the procedures — “offshore processing” — as if these desperate human beings were just an accumulation of data.
Note please that Australia is “thinly populated” for a very good reason: most of the place is uninhabitable.
It continues with the secrecy shrouding what goes on “offshore” in the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, where a total of more than 1,350 people languish with no notion of how their limbo will end, where they will go or how to get answers to their predicament. Under the Australian Border Force Act of last year, disclosure by any current or former worker of “protected information” is punishable by up to two years in prison.
It goes further with the progressive dehumanization of people — dubbed “illegals” without cause — who are caught in this Australian web under a policy now dating back almost four years. They are rarely visible. They are often nameless, merely given identification numbers. Women and children are vulnerable in squalid conditions where idleness and violence go hand in hand.
While I’m trawling my archives, I may as well link to a piece I wrote back in October 2000 scoffing at news outlets putting scare quotes around the i-word. [Who Are You Calling “Illegal”? National Review Online, October 17th 2000.] Why don’t they listen?
The refugees are consistently demeaned, as when the conservative immigration minister, Peter Dutton, said this month that they could not read and would somehow contrive at once to steal Australian jobs and “languish in unemployment queues” — a statement that prompted Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to call Dutton “outstanding,” no less.
Turnbull, who came to office with a reputation for being from the more progressive wing of the conservative Liberal Party but has proved beholden to the hard-line right, faces an election in early July. Clearly both he and Dutton reckon casting the marooned of Nauru and Manus Island as threats to Australia will play well with voters.
Beyond electoral calculations, people are dying. Last month, a young Iranian refugee, Omid Masoumali, self-immolated on Nauru and died in a Brisbane hospital. Soon after, a 21-year-old Somali refugee, identified only as Hodan, set herself on fire and was taken in critical condition to Brisbane. Their acts were reflections of the desperation and exhaustion inflicted by Australia under a policy that was supposed to be temporary, has not been thought through, and places people in conditions of hopelessness.
Perhaps “offshore processing” was supposed to afford the government plausible deniability. Australia would pay billions of dollars to poor Nauru and poor Papua New Guinea to take a big problem off its hands. But in reality there can be no plausible deniability. On the contrary, by any ethical standard, the policy engages Australian responsibility for cruelty.
Dutton even suggested that human rights advocates bore responsibility for the self-immolations by giving asylum seekers “false hope.” He said the government was “not going to stand for” people trying to twist its arm. Well, a dead person cannot do that, of course.
True: but when a person tells you, “If you don’t do as I wish, I’ll kill myself,” the choice before you is either to clearly assert your own autonomy or to surrender your will to his.
“We don’t see the boats, we rarely see a human face and there is a black hole of accountability,” said Madeline Gleeson, a human rights lawyer and the author of the recently published book Offshore. She told me, “The international community does not understand how outrageous this policy is, how far from basic human standards and how shot through with violence and sexual abuse.”
The government argues it is keeping the country safe from terrorism, preventing a proliferation of Australia-bound boats that could result in deaths on a scale seen in the Mediterranean, and ensuring its immigration policy remains orderly. In the current fiscal year, the country has offered to take in 13,750 people under its Humanitarian Program, and committed, exceptionally, to a further 12,000 from the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts (a handful of them have been processed). But it has vowed that nobody in Nauru or on Manus Island will gain admission to Australia.
Australia’s “offshore processing” is falling apart and must end. The Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea ruled in April that the Australian-funded detention center on Manus Island was illegal. In Australia, only retroactive legislation enacted after a lawsuit was filed provided legal support for a policy that was in effect pursued illegally since 2012.
This country’s history includes the long and unhappy chapter of its White Australia policy under which a vast land mass was portrayed as under threat of invasion by uncivilized “natives” from across Asia. Politicians like Dutton are playing scurrilously on similar fears.
The White Australia policy was an effort to maintain Australia’s character as a European settler nation. In 1926, when my father went to Australia, the population was 5½ million. China and Imperial Japan at that time had populations of 320 million and 80 million respectively; and “uncivilized” is not an inappropriate descriptor for Warlord China. Was the White Australia policy unreasonable?
A nation of immigrants, short of agricultural labor, Australia has benefited when it has overcome its fears, as with the admission of Vietnamese “boat people” in the 1970s. As Steven Glass, an international lawyer, observed in introducing Eva Orner’s new movie, “Chasing Asylum,” “What, exactly, are we scared of?” Even women raped and impregnated on Nauru have been treated as if they are security threats.
Bring those stranded in Nauru and on Manus Island, many of whose refugee claims have already been deemed legitimate, to Australia. Treat them with humanity as their demands for permanent settlement are assessed. Scrap a policy that shames a nation with its pointless cruelty. [Australia’s Offshore Cruelty by Roger Cohen; NY Times, May 23rd 2016.]
Posted inAustralia|Comments Off on NY TIMES to Australia: Open Those Borders!
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
