Michael Warren Davis Refugee Advocates’ Unholy Nonsense

Those who argue loudest for open borders seldom resist the temptation to verbal Jesus, preaching that He would want us to take in all who show up. When Tony Abbott can be painted as a hypocrite in the same breath, so much the better.
I’m not going to get into the habit of defending Tony Abbott, but why are his critics so damn trivial? You could blame him for allowing Peta Credlin to terrorize the ministry – or, alternatively, you could blame thirty grown men and women for allowing themselves to be terrorized by Peta Credlin. You could say, as his detractors do, that resurrecting knighthoods was the waste of a day, but there’s no need to waste the next three months saying it. And if God didn’t want us to eat an onion, he wouldn’t have put it there.

Now we have The Guardian dragging out an infamous Abbott quote from Q&A a few years back, which goes: ‘Jesus knew that there was a place for everything and it is not necessarily everyone’s place to come to Australia.’ In response, Josh Bornstein writes, ‘If Christianity helps us understand the federal government, then it is a particularly aggressive and intolerant strain.’ While we’re rightly loathe to dignify Mr. Bornstein’s flogging of a dead monk by acknowledging his doing so, this habit of some to justify open borders with half-baked theology is really quite dangerous.

Mr. Abbott’s wording was, admittedly, clumsy. But you’d have to go rather out of your way to believe he meant that Jesus doesn’t want boat people to land on the shores of the Northern Territory. He meant that Christ was comfortable with the idea that there are nations, and that those nations have an integrity beyond a mere reference to a location. That is to say, ‘Australia’ must mean more than ‘at the end of the street’ or ‘the third parking spot from the left’.

Europe: Suicide by Jihad by Guy Millière

In the last two decades, Belgium has become the hub of jihad in Europe. The district of Molenbeek in Brussels is now a foreign Islamist territory in the heart of Belgium. It is not, however, a lawless zone: sharia law has effectively replaced Belgian law.

One of the organizers of the Paris bombings, Salah Abdeslam, was able to live peacefully in Molenbeek for four months until police decided to arrest him. Belgian police knew exactly where he was, but did nothing until French authorities asked them to. After his arrest, he was treated as a petty criminal. Police did not ask him anything about the jihadist networks with which he worked. Officers who interrogated him were ordered to be gentle. The people who hid him were not indicted.

Europe’s leaders disseminated the idea that the West was guilty of oppressing Muslims. They therefore sowed the seeds of anti-Western resentment among Muslims in Europe.

Hoping to please followers of radical Islam and show them Europe could understand their “grievances,” they placed pressure on Israel. When Europeans were attacked, they did not understand why. They had done their best to please the Muslims. They had not even harassed the jihadists.

The March 22 jihadist attacks in Brussels were predictable. What is surprising is that they did not take place sooner. What is also surprising is that more people were not killed. It seems that the authors of the attacks had larger projects in mind; they wanted to attack a nuclear power plant. Others may succeed in doing just that.

In the last two decades, Belgium has become the hub of jihad in Europe. The district of Molenbeek in Brussels is now a foreign Islamist territory in the heart of Belgium. It is not, however, a lawless zone: sharia law has effectively replaced Belgian law. Almost all the women wear veils or burqas; those who do not take risks. Drug trafficking and radical mosques are everyplace. The police stay outside and intervene only in cases of extreme emergency, using military-like commando operations. Other areas of Belgium, such as Shaerbeek and Anderlecht have the same status as Molenbeek.

Tensions Mount Between Austria and Italy as Migrant Numbers Rise EU sends letter to Vienna demanding explanation for new border post By Manuela Mesco in Milan and Valentina Pop in Brussels

A surge in migrants arriving in Italy via Libya, just weeks after the European Union sealed a deal with Turkey aimed at halting the influx landing in Greece, is raising concerns that a previous front in Europe’s migration crisis is reopening.

Austria is already preparing to close its border with Italy, a move that raises the prospect of tens of thousands of migrants being stuck in Italy, mirroring the situation that has developed in Greece.

According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 6,000 migrants have arrived in Italy in the past five days, compared with fewer than 200 arriving in Greece.

So far this year, 24,000 migrants have arrived in Italy. Arrivals in the first three months surged by 85% compared with last year, with the biggest jump in March.

The recent drop in Greek arrivals followed a deal last month between the EU and Ankara under which all migrants crossing the sea to Greek islands are to be returned to Turkey.

The Italian government now is preparing to ask its EU partners for further support in coping with the new arrivals, who risk languishing in Italy because of the hardening of migration policy among its neighbors.

“We won’t look away if someone is breaking the rules, said Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on Friday. “We are confident they won’t.”

The European Commission, the EU’s executive, has sent a letter to Vienna demanding an explanation for the construction this week of a 250-meter (820-foot) long checkpoint at the Brenner Pass, which connects Italy and Austria. The move could contravene the Schengen accord, which governs passport-free travel between member states. CONTINUE AT SITE

A Short Step to Dictatorship Ronald Syme’s ‘The Roman Revolution,’ written under the cloud of fascism, is a compelling account of the decline of the Roman oligarchy in favor of a principate By Joseph Epstein

In his study of the Roman historian Sallust (86-35 B.C.), Ronald Syme writes that “historians are selective, dramatic, impressionistic.” Later in the same work he notes that “systems and doctrines decay or ossify, whereas poetry and drama live on, also style and narrative.” These words apply to Syme himself, a man generally considered the greatest modern historian of Rome. Syme wrote biographies of Sallust and Tacitus and much else, but his reputation rests on “The Roman Revolution.” Published in 1939 when the specter of fascism clouded Europe, it was soon recognized as the magnificent book it is.

Syme (1903-1989) was a New Zealander who studied at and settled in Oxford. His specialty was prosopography, or the study of collective biographies to find common characteristics of historical social classes or groups. This was invaluable for “The Roman Revolution,” which is a compelling account of the decline of the Roman oligarchy in favor of a principate, or monarchy, quietly but implacably put in place by Augustus, the first of the Roman emperors. If historians had Rolodexes, none could be more complete than Syme’s on the Romans in the last years of the Republic. “In any age in the history of the Roman Republic,” he notes, “about twenty or thirty men, drawn from a dozen dominant families, hold a monopoly of office and power.” An intramural, nearly incestuous, affair was Roman political life; consider alone Servilia, “Cato’s half-sister, Brutus’s mother, Caesar’s mistress.”

A man who sees beneath every surface, demolishing all pretenses, Syme, early in his great book, writes: “The Roman constitution was a screen and a sham.” Of the idealism of the Republic, he notes: “Liberty and law are high-sounding words. They will often be rendered, on a cool estimate, as privilege and vested interest.” No cooler estimator existed than Syme. “The career of Pompeius,” he writes, “opened in fraud and violence. It was prosecuted, in war and peace, through illegality and treachery.”

Once the Triumvirs—Julius Caesar, Pompeius, Lepidus—were in ascendance, the Roman Republic’s day was done. “From a triumvirate it was but a short step to a dictatorship,” Syme writes. Julius Caesar, who emerged as dictator, before his assassination adopted Octavianus, whom Syme regularly refers to as “Caesar’s heir.” Octavianus would subsequently become Augustus, who, after his victories over Caesar’s assassins and later Marcus Antonius, ruled for 40 years. Augustus, Syme writes, possessed “an inborn and Roman distrust of theory, and an acute sense of the difference between words and facts.”

Syme was a master of the brief character sketch, not infrequently followed by a sharp observation. The mixture of good and evil in the same people fascinated him. CONTINUE AT SITE

Climate Crowd Ignores a Scientific Fraud A defective radiation-risk standard holds back our most important low-carbon energy source. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Green activists, some masquerading as attorneys general of New York and California, want to prosecute Exxon as a climate heretic. Its sin? Saying impeccably true things about climate science: The range of uncertainty is high. Climate models are not the climate, and show themselves to be unreliable guides to future warming. There is a cost-benefit test that policy must pass, and it doesn’t.

The AG case is a spinoff of “investigative” journalism by the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News, which we now learn was directly underwritten by climate activists at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rockefeller Family Fund.

“It’s about helping the larger public understand the urgencies of finding climate solutions. It’s not really about Exxon,” explained a Rockefeller official about a January meeting to coordinate the legal and journalistic attack.

The journalists involved in this travesty, we’re sorry to say, are of the dumber sort—confused about what science is. But their clottedness comes at a poignant moment.

Honest greens have always said nuclear power is indispensable for achieving big carbon reduction. James Hansen, the former NASA scientist who has been chaining himself to fences since the first Bush administration, was in Illinois last week lobbying against closure of a nuclear plant. Ditto activist Michael Shellenberger. We might also include Bill McKibben, the Bernie Sanders of the climate movement and shouter of Exxon accusations, who told journalist William Tucker four years ago, “If I came out in favor of nuclear, it would split this movement in half.”

Nuclear (unlike solar) is one low-carbon energy technology that has zero chance without strong government support, yet is left out of renewables mandates. It’s the one non-carbon energy source that has actually been shrinking, losing ground to coal and natural gas.

What keeps nuclear costs high? Why do so many opponents misread the Fukushima meltdown, where 18,000 deaths were due to the earthquake and tsunami, none to radiation exposure, and none are expected from radiation exposure? Why has the U.S. experience of spiraling nuclear construction costs not been matched in South Korea, where normal learning has reduced the cost of construction?

The answer increasingly appears to be a real scientific fraud. In a series of peer-reviewed articles, toxicologist Edward Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts Amherst shows how a cabal of radiation geneticists in the 1940s doctored their results, and even a Nobel Prize acceptance speech, to exaggerate the health risk from low-level radiation exposure. At the time, Hermann Muller, their leader, was militating against above-ground atomic-bomb testing. “I think he got his beliefs and his science confused, and he couldn’t admit that the science was unresolved,” Mr. Calabrese told a UMass publication. CONTINUE AT SITE

To understand what Obama has wrought, a good place to start is with the man running to his left: Sen. Bernie Sanders By Caroline B. Glick

“Hated by the establishment, hated by the Left, Cruz is Obama’s nemesis. If he is elected, he will implement policies that unravel Obama’s legacy.If America opts for a demagogue, it will remain on its current trajectory.”

The US presidential race is President Barack Obama’s political legacy. Depending on who succeeds him, that legacy will either fade or become the new normal.
To understand what he has wrought, a good place to start is with the man running to Obama’s left: Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The socialist from Vermont knows how to play to the crowd. Sanders knows that the people captivated by his tales of avaricious bankers aren’t too keen on Jews either.
And as a Jew, he’s cool with that.

Sanders’s courtship of Jew-haters in a staple of his campaign. The depth of his efforts was made clear at the end of a campaign event at the Apollo Theater in Harlem last Saturday when an audience member got up and began spewing anti-Jewish slanders.

Sanders doesn’t have a problem telling bigots off. He did just that at another event when a questioner asked a question he deemed anti-Muslim. Sanders is an unstinting champion of gay rights and black rights. So if he wanted to tell off a Jew-hater, he could have done so easily.

In the event, the questioner rose and said, “As you know, the Zionist Jews – and I don’t mean to offend anybody – they run the Federal Reserve, they run Wall Street, they run every campaign.”

Weathering a chorus of boos from his fellow audience members, the questioner then asked Sanders, “What is your affiliation to your Jewish community?” Sanders could have told the questioner to take a long walk off a short pier. He could have told him he’d rather win without the support of bigots.

He could have used it as a teaching moment and told his audience that millions of Jews have been murdered because of the lies the questioner just repeated.

Instead, he called him “Brother” and told he needed to hide his hatred better.

Culture Matters 1: Tom McCaffrey

James Fenimore Cooper disliked Yankees. They streamed out of New England in the early decades of the 19th century, invading the staid farming communities of Cooper’s beloved upstate New York. In his novels, Cooper portrayed these descendants of the Puritans as restless, grasping, and mercenary, sharp traders out for a quick buck. Theirs was an alien culture to the Dutch gentry of the Hudson River Valley and thereabouts, and their arrival changed that region forever.

History is one long progression of cultural invasions. England was home to the Celtic Britons. Then came the Romans, then the Angles and Saxons, then the Norsemen, and then the Normans. Each time, the new arrivals intermixed with the people already there, giving birth in the process to a new, hybrid culture.

Probably most cultural invasions throughout history occurred violently. But liberalism-and I use the term in its original sense to mean “freedom”-makes it possible for such invasions to take place peacefully. A liberal world is characterized by the free movement of ideas, of goods, and of persons. And all three can be hard on the cultures they come into contact with.

In a free country, to protect a local or regional culture against ideas or goods or persons that originated elsewhere within the country, there are things one may do and things one may not. One may argue against ideas, or choose not to buy the books or newspapers that propagate them. But one may not burn down the buildings where those books or newspapers are produced, nor induce the government to censor the offending ideas. One may refuse to buy goods produced elsewhere, but one may not cause the government to restrict their importation. And as for persons relocating to one’s neighborhood from elsewhere, one may (or should be free to) refuse to rent or sell them living accommodations, or refuse to serve them or hire them at one’s place of business. But one may not ride about at night in white hoods terrorizing them, and one certainly may not induce the government to prohibit their moving into one’s neighborhood.

In other words, a citizen of a liberal country like the United States should be free to use any non-violent means to protect his culture from ideas, goods, or persons that originated elsewhere. But he may not use physical force to that end, either his own or his government’s. To employ force would violate the rights of individual Americans.

So we, who value individual liberty, are willing to see our local and regional cultures subjected to all manner of assaults emanating from elsewhere within our country, rather than forcibly to restrict the freedom of Americans to traffic in ideas and goods, or to move about freely. This exposing of our cultures to harmful outside influences is an unavoidable cost of living in a free country.

Note that if one is happy living where one lives, among people who share one’s culture, it is not necessarily irrational or immoral to disapprove of new arrivals possessing a different culture who threaten to change what one loves. Liberalism is hard enough on local and regional cultures as it is. To suggest, as the Left do today, that it is racist or bigoted to resist-by non-violent means-the cultural invasion of one’s neighborhood is to add insult to injury.

Many sincere liberals see the free movement of ideas, goods, and persons that prevails within the borders of the U.S. as an ideal, which they aspire to recreate on an international scale. The free movement of ideas across our international borders is well established. The free movement of goods is less well established and is under assault today. To restrict the importation of ideas or of goods would, as I have said, violate the rights-or what should be the rights-of American citizens.

Culture Matters II :Tom McCaffrey

A free country must welcome as many immigrants as want to enter it, no matter the effect they have on its culture or its political institutions. This is the liberal immigration premise. It is sincerely held by Americans all across the political spectrum. And, as I argued in my last piece, it is false.

Another premise underlying the current push toward open borders in the U.S., this one held mostly by the Left, is the idea that a multicultural society is superior to a culturally homogeneous one. It implies that America would be a better country if its once-unified, English-speaking culture were transformed into a polyglot mosaic by the mass infusion of immigrants. This premise is false for the same reason that the liberal immigration premise is false.

In the history of the world, very few cultures have proven capable of sustaining the kind of freedom we enjoy in the United States. We cannot possibly strengthen, or even hope to maintain, the support that our free political institutions enjoy by continually adding to the voting population large numbers of persons from cultures that afford them little or no knowledge of the ideas necessary to sustain those institutions. This is especially true when multiculturalists urge immigrants not to assimilate, which means that they should not shed their old ideas, ideas which, in many cases, issued in poverty, corruption, and tyranny in their countries of origin.

America is the land of individual rights. Immigrants from tribal cultures, from cultures that place the welfare of the family or the clan above that of the individual, cultures that are socially or economically static, that value the pronouncements of religious leaders over those of secular leaders, or that view women as inferior to men-all must learn new values upon arriving in the U.S. Otherwise, if the immigrants come in sufficient numbers, we must resign themselves to seeing our rights eroded and our free political institutions degraded.

No society ever failed because it was too culturally unified. But a great many have dissolved into violence because they were not. Today Basques want to secede from Spain, Kurds from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Serbs, Armenians, Albanians, and many other cultural minorities seek to establish their own, monocultural countries because the multicultural societies of which they are a part do not work. To transform a culturally unified society into a multicultural one is to introduce a potential for conflict that did not exist before. Imagine a completely Catholic Northern Ireland deciding to improve their country by importing Protestants.

Safe Spaces or Free Speech? Intellectual Freedom and the Modern Campus Peter Wood

Editor’s note: Peter Wood gave a version of this talk at the Claremont Institute on April 7, 2016, at the event “Safe Spaces or Free Speech?” with Charles Kesler.

A long time ago—in 1994—the ever-provocative Stanley Fish published a book with the memorable title, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech and It’s a Good Thing, Too. Fish wasn’t then thinking about the censorious left—Melissa Click at the University of Missouri, asking for some muscle over here; or Jerelyn Luther, the Yale undergraduate caught on video shrieking profanities at sociology professor Nicholas Christakis, because his wife had the audacity to suggest that students should feel free to wear Halloween costumes of their own choice. Nor was he thinking about sociology professor Patty Adler at the University of Colorado-Boulder threatened with forfeiture of her retirement benefits after students in her course, “Deviance in US Society,” filed a sexual harassment complaint because Adler staged role-playing exercises in which teaching assistants acted out the parts of characters in the global sex trade. Nor did he have in mind film professor Laura Kipnis, who became subject to a Kafka-esque inquisition at Northwestern University after student activists complained that an article she published in the Chronicle of Higher Education constituted sexual harassment. Kipnis had criticized “students’ sense of vulnerability” as “sexual paranoia.”

No such thing as free speech? As an empirical proposition, Fish’s declaration today could be substantiated at nearly all American colleges and universities. The freedom to say things, even manifestly true things, has been curtailed. And the freedom to argue things—to present claims backed by reason and scrupulous use of evidence—has been even more drastically limited.

Free Speech Hypocrisy

I don’t want to spend too much time establishing that these curtailments have, in fact, occurred. Across the political spectrum, there seems to be a consensus that “free speech” is in a kind of free-fall on campus. I cited the Adler and Kipnis cases because they play prominently in the AAUP’s new report, The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX, which is largely about how the feminist-inspired rule-making of the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education has somehow come back as a tool for more-radical-than-thou feminists to attack their not-radical-enough sisters. But as the AAUP report has garnered headlines in The New York Times and elsewhere in the liberal media, another story is playing out about the students at Emory University who were made to feel unsafe because someone had chalked “Trump 2016” on steps and sidewalks. Some 40 to 50 students assembled in the quad to protest the chalkings, chanting “You are not listening! Come speak to us; we are in pain!” The president of Emory, James Wagner, however, was listening and issued a sympathetic response about the protesters’ “expression of feelings and concern” rooted in “values regarding diversity and respect.” President Wagner attempted to thread the needle, speaking for “free speech” and anti-free speech in one go.

The nature of campus anti-semitism By Abraham H. Miller

When it comes to anti-Semitic incidents on college and university campuses, denial is the first refuge of university administrators. These incidents are often glossed over as isolated and not warranting any meaningful administrative response.

There are a number of obvious reasons for this – obvious, at least, to anyone who has spent any time in the groves of the academy. Campus politics, like American politics generally, is a clash of competing interest groups.

Student politics is dominated by ethnic, gender, and racial divisions and alliances. Students of color are inculcated with the notion that they share a bond in the face of white oppression. They form alliances and voting pacts for campus issues.

Because campus issues are generally issues that affect the larger society, the external groups affected by these same issues will augment and assist their campus proxies. A campus administration dealing with political issues weighs not only the strength of the campus interest group but also that of the community group that might come to its assistance.