(Reuters) — U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s support among Republicans has dropped 12 points in less than a week, marking the real estate mogul’s biggest decline since he vaulted to the top of the field in July, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.
In Erdogan’s usual Sunni supremacist language, he accused the victims of jihad rather than the jihadists.
“New tragedies will be inevitable,” Erdogan said, “if the rising racism in Europe and other countries is not stopped.” Yet Erdogan willingly ignores the rising racism, xenophobia, and anti-western, jihadist sentiments that increasingly command the hearts and minds of his fellow Turks.
How should Erdogan fight Islamic terror — something he does not believe exists? One of Erdogan’s famous remarks is, “there is no Islamic terror.” But he thinks that “just like fascism,” Zionism is a crime against humanity.
It is so funny that the free world cannot see that its ally in fighting the jihadists is another jihadist.
Racism is bad, no doubt. But it cannot be the reason why jihadists kill “infidels,” including fellow Muslims in Muslim lands. Sadly, the free world feels compelled to partner with the wrong country in its fight against Islamic terror.
Obama recently decided to effectively suspend enforcement of immigration law and unilaterally legalize huge numbers of illegal aliens. But one of his minions is sending around letters threatening states who refuse to accept his army of Syrian migrants, at least 13% of which poll as supporting ISIS. That means out of his first 10,000 Syrians, over a thousand would be ISIS supporters.
States are required to provide “assistance and services … to refugees without regard to race, religion, nationality, sex or political position” according to the Refugee Act of 1980, the letter points out.
“States may not deny ORR-funded benefits and services to refugees based on a refugee’s country of origin or religious affiliation,” the letter states. “Accordingly, states may not deny ORR-funded benefits and services to Syrian refugees.” States that do not comply with these terms are subject to “enforcement action, including suspension or termination.”
According to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination based on race or origin is against the law in all programs that receive federally-funded assistance, the letter adds.
Of course immigration policy precisely discriminates against immigrants based on their country of origin or religious affiliation, since the latter is used to determine quotas, while the former is used to verify claims of religious persecution.
Obama is claiming that the Civil Rights Act applies to immigration policy at the State level, but not the Federal level.
This is a new level of lawlessness even for Obama.
A popular meme on some sites is that the Statue of Liberty was “originally a Muslim woman”. Like a lot of viral memes, this is a myth.
The a grain of truth to the story is that the meme picked up on the interesting historical footnote that one of the earlier projects of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was a large woman holding up a torch and symbolizing Egypt’s progress. The giant statue would have been titled, “Egypt or Progress Carrying the Light to Asia”.
Since Egypt’s ruler had no money, the project went nowhere.
Bartholdi at the time was somewhat obsessed with Ancient Egypt. It was ancient Egypt that interested him rather than Islam. The statue was meant to celebrate Egyptian civilization rather than Islam.
In any case the idea that “Egypt” became the Statue of Liberty is a myth. How do we know that?
Here’s what Bartholdi had to say about it, “At that time my Statue of Liberty did not exist, even in my imagination, and the only resemblance between the drawing that I submitted to the Khedive and the statue now in New York’s beautiful harbor is that both held a light aloft. Now how is a sculptor to make a statue which is to serve the purpose of a lighthouse without making it hold the light in the air?”
Spend much time in American colleges and universities and you’ll be become intimately familiar with statements that begin “I support free speech, but . . . ” In other words, schools will proudly proclaim their dedication to free speech and academic freedom often while simultaneously maintaining and enforcing speech codes — policies that unlawfully restrict or prohibit constitutionally protected speech.
To take one example, the University of Michigan — one of the nation’s most prestigious public universities – in one policy condemns “bias-related incidents” such as “making fun” of a “person’s accent” or “insulting . . . someone’s traditional manner of dress or geographic origin.” Yet the university then declares, in an entirely different policy: “Expression of diverse points of view is of the highest importance, not only for those who espouse a cause or position and then defend it, but also for those who hear and pass judgment on that defense. The belief that an opinion is pernicious, false, or in any other way detestable cannot be grounds for its suppression.”
Confused? College students seem to be. Young America’s Foundation — working with the polling company, inc./WomanTrend — surveyed 1,000 college students about their attitudes toward free speech and political correctness. The findings? Students support free speech, until speech gets politically incorrect.
“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia . . . could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.” — Abraham Lincoln
The winning streak enjoyed by campus activists this fall was violently interrupted by the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. Some activists were sufficiently annoyed by their ejection from the limelight that they took to Twitter to complain under the hashtag “F***Paris.”
The most obvious irony stemmed from the fact that some of the same protesters who griped about media coverage of their antics — even declaring First Amendment-free zones — suddenly whined when the cameras turned to bloodshed in the heart of Europe.
But there’s a deeper irony. In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, fueled by a cynical media strategy directed by the president himself, the national conversation turned quickly from Barack Obama’s foreign-policy failures to the bigotry and insensitivity of the Republican party. There’s no denying that Donald Trump made this an easy pivot for the Beltway Brahmins. But left unnoticed in the clamor is the dismaying disconnect between the conversation elite liberals want to have and the one being pushed by their left-wing shock troops on the ground.
The jihad waged by radical Islam rips at France from within. The two mass-murder attacks this year that finally induced President Francois Hollande to concede a state of war are only what we see.
Unbound by any First Amendment, the French government exerts pressure on the media to suppress bad news. We do not hear much about the steady thrum of insurrection in the banlieues: the thousands of torched automobiles, the violence against police and other agents of the state, the pressure in Islamic enclaves to ignore the sovereignty of the Republic and conform to the rule of sharia.
What happens in France happens in Belgium. It happens in Sweden where much of Malmo, the third largest city, is controlled by Muslim immigrant gangs — emergency medical personnel attacked routinely enough that they will not respond to calls without police protection, and the police in turn unwilling to enter without back-up. Not long ago in Britain, a soldier was killed and nearly beheaded in broad daylight by jihadists known to the intelligence services; dozens of sharia courts now operate throughout the country, even as Muslim activists demand more accommodations. And it was in Germany, which green-lighted Europe’s ongoing influx of Muslim migrants, that Turkey’s Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan proclaimed that pressuring Muslims to assimilate in their new Western countries is “a crime against humanity.”
So how many of us look across the ocean at Europe and say, “Yeah, let’s bring some of that here”?
None of us with any sense. Alas, “bring it here” is the order of the day in Washington, under the control of leftists bent on fundamentally transforming America (Muslims in America overwhelmingly support Democrats) and the progressive-lite GOP, which fears the “Islamophobia” smear nearly as much as the “racist” smear.
For the past week, Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis have been competing for headlines with the terror attacks in Paris. If not for the latter, events surrounding the shooting death of another black male suspect during an altercation with police might have attracted the same level of attention as similar incidents around the nation.
The situation in Minneapolis is not ideal for the Black Lives Matter movement. The “victim” in this case isn’t particularly sympathetic, an alleged domestic abuser with prior arrests. Nevertheless, the local Black Lives Matter chapter has proceeded as if he were “executed” in cold blood by a malicious police department.
Joining a bipartisan panel of politicos from the area on the “Wrong About Everything” podcast this past weekend, I sought to understand the cultural context which produces these protests. The panel included Republican lobbyist and rural city council member Mike Franklin, Black Lives Matter activist and nonprofit professional Carin Mrotz, Democratic National Committeeman and local SEIU president Javier-Morillo-Alicea, and yours truly — Republican activist and suburban city council member Walter Hudson.
The attacks against European civilization by Muslim colonizers come from many directions. One of which is the rise in infectious diseases imported with many colonizers.
Including HIV.
Breitbart reports that the World Health Organization (WHO) director for Europe has stated that Europe now has the highest rate of new HIV infections ever seen on the continent. And while infection rates are directly tied to IV drug use and sex between men, the director also noted that newly arrived “migrants” have a particularly high rate of infection. Although “migrants” comprise a fraction of the total population, they (and non-native Europeans) account for one third of all new HIV diagnoses in Europe.
One might be surprised to hear a director from WHO speak truthfully on this matter since the authorities tend to gloss over anything bad about Muslim “refugees.”
The director blamed the high rate of HIV infection among migrants on the “social exclusion” many of them feel – exclusion that increases the likelihood of them engaging in risky behavior.
And there you have it. The rationale for Muslims behaving badly.
Defying logic, a band of anthropologists voted to boycott archeology. On Friday, Nov. 20, at the business meeting of the American Anthropology Association (AAA), they voted to boycott Israeli universities in line with the BDS movement’s goal of punishing Israel for it’s alleged treatment of Palestinians in the so-called “occupied territories”. The text of the resolution is here. (It is not finalized as the vote will have to go to the 10,000-member association in spring.) Should the resolution pass, the full membership vote, the association will not enter into any formal relationships with any Israeli institutions and would bar Israeli institutions from participating in its publications and events. Israeli institutions, and thereby students (Jewish, Christian, and Muslim) would not have access to AnthroSource, the major anthropological database.
I ask not what these anthropologists think they are doing to Israel by weighing in on the complex challenges in the Middle East with a simplistic and biased resolution which demonizes Israel. Nor why an organization representing scholars chooses to ignore the fact that over 11,000 rockets were launched against Israelis after Israel withdrew every living Jew from Gaza. Neither do I ask why academics, who are committed to the understanding of culture and causes, place full blame on Israel and do not factor in evidence of Palestinian government incitement to the murder of Jews. I ask what they are doing to the scholarly pursuits of the archeologists who belong to the AAA.
