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January 2016

Is Europe Giving Up? by Judith Bergman

As a response to a gang of a thousand migrant men sexually assaulting women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, the mayor suggested a “code of conduct” for German girls and women, as a measure to “prevent such things from ever happening again.”

The idea of a “code of conduct” for girls and women to accommodate male predators not only places the blame on the victim but is an inversion of responsibility unseen in Western jurisprudence. The politically correct urge to accommodate the culture of immigrants means that justice is no longer blind.

Each asylum seeker, upon entering Europe, needs to be informed, in the clearest possible manner, that all women, even infidels, must be treated with respect.

“I feel betrayed by Britain. I came here to get away from this and the situation is worse here than in the country I escaped from.” — A Muslim woman, quoted by Baroness Caroline Cox.

The cathedral opposite the main train station used to be the traditional gathering spot for New Year’s Eve revelers in the German city of Cologne.

Michael Connor 2015, the Year the War Began ****

If members of our diverse nation do not share an unqualified revulsion at Islamist crimes and outrages then we have nothing in common. The lights of Western society — justice, equality, truth — are being extinguished one by one. We may never see them lit again in our lifetime.
On Thursday, Monsieur Hulot’s warning was clear: “Tomorrow, millions of climate refugees”. A photo of ecologist Nicolas Hulot, President Hollande’s special envoy “for the protection of the planet”, was featured on the front cover of the fashionable French Left weekly magazine L’Obs (formerly Le Nouvel Observateur). Tomorrow came and that Friday night there were not millions of climate refugees in Paris but 130 dead and 683 wounded in Islamic terror attacks across the capital.

L’Obs is the magazine which many of the dead and injured would have read before the attacks. The pre-massacre edition had articles on the traffic of Kalashnikovs in the suburbs, Muslim voting trends, and immigration: “Xenophobia, A French Tradition”. This last article discussed waves of hatred towards immigrants, in the 1890s and 1930s, while noting that despite resemblances with the past, “France has become more tolerant”—no doubt due to the exalted attitudes of superior L’Obs writers. The author’s conclusion was like a bite into an elitist artisan baguette filled with PC platitudes which ignored the events of January 2015: “historical studies have shown that in no country in the world has a community of immigrants endangered the state which welcomed them”.

In Quadrant (December 2015) Douglas Murray wrote of the refusal to admit the failure of multiculturalism by a powerful and influential intellectual class who reproduce a “wilfully optimistic version of events” in the face of realities which completely “damn the majority beliefs of a whole generation”. The killers, drawn from the “community of immigrants”, had only just been silenced at the Bataclan when a shocked and traumatised young woman spoke into a radio microphone: “Why us? Why us?”

Fiddling While North Korea Gives Global Tutorials on How to Get the Nuclear Bomb By Claudia Rosett

The timing could be straight from a Hollywood thriller. It’s the first Tuesday of the New Year. In Washington, fresh from a holiday on Oahu, President Obama steps to the podium to talk about gun control, wiping away his own tears as he describes the urgency with which he’d like to disencumber Americans of their guns. Meantime, on the far side of the earth, goose-stepping enemies of America are working on bigger weapons. North Korea is counting down to its fourth nuclear test. That evening Pyongyang announces it has just tested a hydrogen bomb — a thermonuclear weapon that carries far more explosive force than the atomic bombs Pyongyang has been testing since 2006.

Unfortunately, these scenarios are not fiction. This is what played out in the real world on Tuesday, though amid the news of the latest White-House-manufactured domestic crisis, it took a while for most of the TV news channels to catch up with the late-evening news out of North Korea — which was genuinely earth-shaking. The U.S. Geological Survey recorded a sizable tremor, 5.1 on the Richter scale, centered near the Punggye-ri site where North Korea has carried out three previous underground nuclear tests. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency released a story headlined “DPRK Proves Successful in H-Bomb test.”

Why Does Germany Condone Mass Rape? By David P. Goldman

Germany’s leaders have nothing of signifcance to say about the worst outbreak of sexual assaults in Germany since the Red Army moved out after World War II. Why won’t they do anything? Answer: for the same reason that the Catholic Church insists that Islam is a religion of peace. The alternative–watching from a distance a civilizational collapse in real time with its attendant horrors–is too terrible for Angela Merkel or Pope Francis I to contemplate. They would rather take casualties than absorb the horror of the situation. The root of the problem is theological. The West is paralyzed by its own notion of the good.

Over at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer quotes Archbishop Bruno Forte’s claim that “Islam teaches ‘non-violence in the name of God,” adding:

How could an organization that claims to speak for God and to be led by the Holy Spirit be so indefatigably committed to a lie? For it isn’t only Bruno Forte: the Pope has said the same thing, and it’s the official policy of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which winks at dissent on any number of actual Church teachings, but moves ruthlessly to suppress voices that dare to suggest that maybe Islam is not a Religion of Peace. It appears as if protecting the image of Islam is more important to Church leaders today than teaching the contents of their own faith.

I predicted that Germany’s leaders would do nothing about mass sexual abuse by Muslim immigrants in an Oct. 14, 2015 essay at Asia Times. Some extracts:

Germany’s elite knows perfectly well that the migrants bring social pathologies, because they have already seen the world’s worst sex crime epidemic unfold in Scandinavia. Sweden now has the highest incidence of reported rape outside of a few African countries, and nearly ten times the rate of its European peers—and all this has happened in the past ten years. Sweden ranks near the top of the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, yet it has become the most dangerous country for women outside of Africa, with an incidence of rape ten times that of its European peers. Sweden’s political leaders not only refuse to take action, but have made it a criminal offense to talk about it.

ANGELO CODEVILLA’S FULL COLUMN ON TED CRUZ ****

Simultaneously, as if signals from a council of sachems had summoned them to the warpath, the Republican establishment’s warriors took after Ted Cruz. Pat Buchanan encapsulated this establishment: “… officeholders past and present, donors, lobbyists, think-tankers angling for jobs, party hacks and talking heads [who] discuss how to frustrate the rising rebellion against what they have done to America.”
Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz

The establishmentarian drumbeat against Cruz has involved but a whiff of argument on policy, and a few twisted or out of context attributions. But it has consisted mostly of attacks on the man’s character. Fox News led the way with characterizations ranging from flip-flopper to “servile.”

Britt Hume, heretofore its resident adult, said that Cruz had “difficulty shaking hands with the truth.” The point in print, in the blogosphere, as well as on TV is: he’s not one of us, not of our kind, and hence unsuited for responsible office. This very vehemence ensures the attacks’ success. For sure, Cruz ain’t no part of the establishment. Whether that convinces voters to vote against Cruz or for him is another matter. What follows here is an overview of the written attacks, which reveal more about the attackers than they do about the target thereof.

The Wall Street Journal is the Republican establishment’s intellectual apex. This is what flows down from that hill.

“Establishment tribes beat drums against Ted Cruz” — the great Angelo Codevilla By David Goldman

Angelo Codevilla is the dean of conservative strategists, a senior member of the Reagan team during the 1980s, and the author of the best recent book on American security strategy. Like Ted Cruz, Prof. Codevilla rejects the false dichotomy of isolationism vs. neo-conservative interventionism: America is not out to remake the world in its own image, but to secure itself from foreign enemies. Sometimes that means using power abroad, and using a lot of it–but the criteria must be America’s self-interest.

In a new essay for Asia Times, Codevilla make short work of the Establishment counter-attack against Sen. Cruz, taking on the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, the Weekly Standard’s Lee Smith, the American Enterprise Institute’s Gary Schmitt, and other luminaries. It’s a must read. Some choice excerpts:

Simultaneously, as if signals from a council of sachems had summoned them to the warpath, the Republican establishment’s warriors took after Ted Cruz. Pat Buchanan encapsulated this establishment: “… officeholders past and present, donors, lobbyists, think-tankers angling for jobs, party hacks and talking heads [who] discuss how to frustrate the rising rebellion against what they have done to America.”

The establishmentarian drumbeat against Cruz has involved but a whiff of argument on policy, and a few twisted or out of context attributions. But it has consisted mostly of attacks on the man’s character. Fox News led the way with characterizations ranging from flip-flopper to “servile.”

State Pollution-Control Employee Busted for Advocating Against Pipeline By Walter Hudson

It’s not often that Minnesota governor Mark Dayton does something that deserves widespread praise. But the Democrat deserves kudos for his handling of a state pollution-control employee who has been caught abusing that position to advocate against a proposed pipeline project.

Scott Lucas works for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. A local paper exposed emails sent by Lucas regarding the pending Sandpiper crude oil pipeline. From the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

In one e-mail, Lucas sent a message including a link to an environmental report regarding another pipeline, saying it “could be a very useful tool for us to use when making our case against Sandpiper in this area of the state.” The e-mails were first reported by the Pioneer Press.

“Somebody in that position who’s playing an advocacy role with advocate organizations has really crossed the line of what their professional responsibilities are,” Dayton said Wednesday. “If they’re going to get into political advocacy, they should resign their position and run for the Legislature or go to work for one of the organizations that oppose the pipeline.”

Obama: Gun Proponents’ Suspicions, ‘Conspiracy’ Theories Just Part of American DNA By Bridget Johnson

President Obama scoffed at CNN host Anderson Cooper for questioning whether it was “fair” for him to brand pro-gun opponents as conspiracy theorists for fearing firearm registration or confiscation.

Obama was surrounded by people on both sides of the gun-control issue at a CNN townhall held at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

Mark Kelly, husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords, asked the president “to explain, with 350 million guns in 65 million places, households from Key West to Alaska — 350 million objects in 65 million places — if the federal government wanted to confiscate those objects, how would they do that?”

Obama noted “this notion of a conspiracy out there, and it gets wrapped up in concerns about the federal government.”

“Now, there’s a long history of that. That’s in our DNA. The United States was born suspicious of some distant authority,” he said.

Cooper jumped in, “Is it fair to call it a conspiracy? I mean, there’s a lot of people who really believe this deeply — that they just don’t trust you.”

Trump, Muslim Immigration, and Terrorism By Raymond L. Richman

Candidate Donald Trump has called for the United States to bar all Muslims from entering the country until the nation’s leaders can “figure out what is going on”. Saying that “hatred” among many Muslims for Americans is “beyond comprehension,” Mr. Trump said in a statement that the United States needed to confront “where this hatred comes from and why…” “Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life,” Mr. Trump said.

According to the New York Times, “Repudiation of Mr. Trump’s remarks was swift and severe among religious groups and politicians from both parties. Mr. Trump is “unhinged,” said one Republican rival, former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, while another, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, called the ban “offensive and outlandish.” Hillary Clinton said the idea was “reprehensible, prejudiced and divisive.” Organizations representing Jews, Christians, and those of other faiths quickly joined Muslims in denouncing Mr. Trump’s proposal. Even Pres. Obama joined in.

All seem to have forgotten that Muslims from many Mideast countries have participated in terrorist attacks in the U.S., attacks on U.S. passenger airplanes, and attacks in friendly countries like the Philippines and France. The Muslim terrorists involved in those attacks came from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait, Pakistan, Chechenia, and others with Muslim populations. America’s leaders ought to have figured out what’s been going on two decades ago.

NYPD to Settle Muslim Surveillance Lawsuits Under agreement, the agency must strengthen oversight of its surveillance practices, including adding a civilian attorney as a monitor By Pervaiz Shallwani

The New York Police Department must strengthen oversight of its surveillance practices as part of a settlement of two civil-rights lawsuits accusing the force of unfairly monitoring Muslims after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Under the settlement, filed in federal court Thursday, the police department agreed to changes that include reinstating an independent attorney to monitor surveillance by the NYPD’s intelligence unit—a role that was eliminated after 9/11.

The NYPD also agreed to several other changes in the surveillance rules, known as the Handschu guidelines, a set of policies initially put in place more than 30 years ago to make sure First Amendment rights aren’t violated during criminal probes.

The new guidelines include setting time limits for active investigations and putting in writing an existing NYPD policy that it is illegal to profile anyone solely on the basis of race or religion. The agreement also requires the NYPD to remove a controversial report on radicalization that has been on its website since 2007.
The long-running controversy illustrates the tension between law-enforcement agencies that say they must take steps to remain vigilant in an age of global terrorism, and civil-rights and other groups that say civil liberties shouldn’t be violated in the name of security.

Both the police department and plaintiffs lauded the settlement for protecting the religious and political rights of people in the city without hampering the ability of authorities to conduct terrorism investigations.

“We hope the NYPD’s reforms help make clear that effective policing can and must be achieved without unconstitutional religious profiling of Muslims or any other communities,” said Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the plaintiffs in the case.