RUTHFULLY YOURS

The European Union’s opposition to Israel’s West Bank settlements is well known. Preventing Jews from having homes on the biblical hills of Judea and Samaria is apparently a top foreign-policy priority for Brussels. Of course in attempting to justify their fixation with this matter the Eurocrats generally appeal to international law, making mention of its stipulations in the gravest tones. But now it turns out that the EU has been flouting international law and backing illegal West Bank settlements after all. In fact, it’s been funding and building them directly. Only these West Bank settlements aren’t for Jews, they’re for Palestinians. So apparently the rules don’t apply.

A report by the Israeli NGO Regavim has revealed that in recent years the EU has funneled millions of euros into constructing more than 400 housing units in 17 illegal settlements. Somewhat bizarrely these outposts fly the EU federal flag and are staffed by EU personnel boldly dressed in EU uniform. But unlike Israel’s West Bank settlements which have a disputed legal status, there can be no doubt that these EU settlements are in clear and open breach of international law.

Williamsport is a town of 29,000 in Pennsylvania’s upper Susquehanna Valley. When I decided to stop there in the spring of 2012 on the way to upstate New York, I figured it for a place lost in time—a sleepy burg still guided by small-town values (Williamsport hosts the Little League World Series every summer) but with the sad and deserted appearance you’d expect in an area where the main industry, steelmaking, receded from sight in the 1970s.

That is why I was surprised to find a new mall on its outskirts, as well as construction sites for banks and office buildings. Instead of a boarded-up downtown, there were new restaurants opening. The hotel was also bustling—and expensive. I had had trouble finding parking in a lot jammed with pickup trucks and SUVs. In the hotel elevator were two men in green jumpsuits, both carrying tool bags of a kind I recognized from crews working on offshore oil rigs in the North Sea. They were natural-gas drillers coming back for some sleep after a long night working in the gas field.

The Homeland Security Department has set up hotlines for illegal immigrants who believe their rights under President Obama’s amnesty policy have been violated.

In a memo announcing the customer complaint line, U.S. Customs and Border Protection asked illegal immigrants to “please tell us about your experience” if they believe they were treated “contrary to the new DHS enforcement priorities.”

The department alerted “stakeholders” last week of three complaint hotlines: one for CBP, which oversees the Border Patrol; one for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles immigration laws in the nation’s interior; and one for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is poised to handle the millions of amnesty applications expected to be filed.

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The amnesty policy grants tentative legal status to up to 4 million illegal immigrants and orders Border Patrol agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents not to arrest other illegal immigrants who say they have been hiding in the U.S. for years but don’t meet the criteria for full amnesty.

Border Patrol agents said the complaint lines amount to a slap in the face to those who put their lives on the line to enforce the law.

“Instead of supporting our agents, this administration has decided it is more important to find new ways to solicit complaints and invite ridicule against them,” said Shawn Moran, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, the labor union that represents line agents. “We demand that this administration spend more time defending the men and women defending our nation and less time promoting the extreme agendas of pro-illegal-immigration organizations.”

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He said he would like the Homeland Security Department to set up a complaint line for agents instead, so they could register their concerns over the administration’s failure to enforce laws involving their own pay, the disparity in the firepower they bring to the fight with drug cartels and the administration’s “failure to fully enforce our immigration laws.”

Immigrant rights advocates, meanwhile, are torn over whether complaints have proved effective. Some say they are useful, but others say they rarely produce results and question the department’s ability to investigate complaints against itself.

The Homeland Security Department and CBP issued memos detailing the customer complaint lines last week. CBP’s notice included this invitation: “If you believe you (or a family member) were apprehended and processed by a Customs and Border Protection officer or Border Patrol agent contrary to the new DHS enforcement priorities, please tell us about your experience by contacting the CBP INFO Center.”

The Homeland Security memo says it expects more “questions and feedback” from the amnesty and lists all three complaint lines.

The Obama administration has tried to walk a tight line, insisting it is boosting enforcement even as the president and his political appointees at the Homeland Security Department have carved an ever-widening circle of illegal immigrants for protection in order to appease their advocates.

In the past two years, Mr. Obama has tilted toward the advocates’ position, cutting deportations 20 percent from 2012 to 2014 even as illegal crossings of the U.S.-Mexico border have increased.

In November, Mr. Obama announced an amnesty for illegal immigrant parents whose children are American citizens or legal permanent residents, granting them legal status for three years and work permits entitling them to compete for jobs. He also expanded a 2012 amnesty for illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.

He also had top officials at the Homeland Security Department issue “guidance” ordering agents to generally ignore illegal immigrants who have hidden in the U.S. for some time or who claim other extenuating circumstances.

The guidance indicates that agents should not bother pursuing illegal immigrants who don’t have serious criminal records or aren’t recent illegal immigrants, meaning those who arrived in the U.S. since Jan. 1, 2014. Even immigrants convicted of domestic violence may not be “priorities” for deportation if they were also victims at some point.

The guidance has confused and angered immigration agents.

Mr. Moran, testifying to a Senate committee last week, said agents now have to go through a checklist when they encounter illegal immigrants. Those who give the right answers are likely to be released.

“The messaging on the training from CBP has been inconsistent at best,” he said.

Sen. Ron Johnson, Wisconsin Republican and chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said it sounded as though immigrants only had to say “magic words” to avoid arrest.

During the border surge this summer, Mr. Moran said, agents discovered that some of the illegal crossers had written scripts with them to coach them on what to say to be released into the U.S.

A Homeland Security spokeswoman said the hotline memo was intended to make sure stakeholders knew where to go for information.

“This provides one place for all stakeholders to find out more about the new DHS guidelines, deferred action, eligibility for new initiatives, or to register comment or complaint,” said Ginette Magana, the spokeswoman. “DHS continuously engages with stakeholders, members of Congress and interested individuals to provide the most up-to-date information and answer questions about any new initiatives.”

But the memos go further. The page providing the complaint hotline for Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol, specifically invites complaints from immigrants who believe agents didn’t follow Mr. Obama’s priorities.

Well, friends, have I got a treat for you.

Following his live appearance at Chapters Indigo in downtown Toronto, I had the pleasure of sitting down with the great Mark Steyn for an in-depth conversation on his new, best-selling book, antisemitism, the collapse of Western civilization, hate speech, Official Jews, and the possibility of being sent to the Middle East to sing groovy James Bond songs to soothe the savage ISIS beasts.There is so much hot stuff in this interview, I’d be shocked if your computer was not smoking, as you read.

Please enjoy the transcript of our chat, painstakingly transcribed by yours truly with adoration intermittent hot flashes great affection and admiration.

I hope you enjoy it.

Q: I definitely want to start with the new book, and then talk about something that are specific to Canada. The [Un]documented Mark Steyn-Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned. I was wondering if that feel like the story of your life at this point. Is that going to be inscribed on your tombstone? “I told you so, don’t say you weren’t warned-it’s all in my book”. How does it feel to try to explain in real time what’s going on in the world today?

“It does feel like that and that’s not a good feeling. Apart from the fact that ‘I told you so’ is generally not an attractive quality in a person but also because I find whatever happens in the news, you know you wake up on a Wednesday morning or Thursday morning and something’s happened in paris or brussels or wherever and a radio or tv station asks you to come in and comment about it you sigh wearily because you said exactly the same thing 8 or 9 years ago. At a certain point it becomes very tedious and actually faintly obnoxious to say ‘if you had listened to me in 2005 2002 you wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“And that’s one reason why I assembled this particular book, is because there are different specifics but a lot of the big points that I am more and more convinced of, I wrote about 10-15 years ago, you do it initially in the hope people will change course but if they don’t change course you might as well put a book together saying hey this is what I said in 2007 while you fellows were listening to people who were wrong about everything, people is, “hopelessly optimistic” and “pollyannish”, people who have lived in this sort of post 1950 bubble and can’t actually imagine a scenario in which all the certainties of your world are upended. That is what is objectionable about most commentary, it takes the assumptions of that post-1950 bubble and assumes they are eternal and can’t be overturned. That’s the reason I put that book together basically.

No one cares if Christians, Hindus, Jews, Confucians, Sikhs, Zoroastrians or what-have-you committed foul deeds in the distant past. Islamists are committing them egregiously and everywhere right now, yet the alleged leader of the Free World blubbers about the Crusaders and the Inquisition.

Don’t keep too calm. Be, at least, somewhat alarmed. A feckless post-modernist (at best) is in the White House and medieval barbarians are at the gate. Make no mistake of underestimating the threat.

We face an implacable, religiously-inspired foe. There are Islamic terrorist militias stretching from North Africa, across the Middle East, to Asia and down to South East Asia, with growing fifth columns in all Western countries. Only the United States is capable of bringing to bear the moral authority, the leadership, the resources and the manpower to defeat them. And right now the Commander in Chief is fiddling away while urging us to remember the sins of our ancestors.

Apparently Christians must remember the Crusades and the Inquisition before being critical of ISIS. And, presumably, using the same logic, Churchill should have been mindful of Cromwell’s transgressions before taking on Hitler. FDR should have brought the treatment of American Indians into his calculations before responding to Tojo. If you can’t get to grips with that; if it confounds you, then join the club of the level-headed.

Republicans are making progress, albeit slowly, toward replacing Obamacare. Last year, three Republican senators — Tom Coburn, Richard Burr, and Orrin Hatch — outlined a serious plan to replace it with a set of health-care policies that are much more free-market and limited-government in orientation, and not just compared with Obamacare but compared with what we had before it. Senator Coburn is not, alas, in the new Congress, but the other two senators have offered a slightly revised version of the plan with Representative Fred Upton.

Conservatives who worry that Republicans will come up with “Obamacare Lite” and call it a replacement can rest easy about this plan. It has no individual mandate, no employer mandate, no federally supported exchanges, and no Independent Payment Advisory Board. Obamacare essentially outlaws what conservatives consider true health insurance (protection against the risk of financially devastating health expenses); this plan legalizes it, and allows it to compete on a more level playing field than even the pre-Obamacare system did.

In 2015, Europe faces two major problems. First, across the continent, rebranded Communists are selling the snake-oil of painless utopia, where government provides everything and balance sheets don’t exist. Second, Russia is invading.

Where the first problem threatens the future of millions of young Europeans, the second problem threatens the sovereign peace upon which the European project resides.

This Russian invasion requires American honesty. Today, in the Baltic States, Russia is threatening pro-Western politicians and kidnapping intelligence officers. And in Ukraine, Russia is stealing a nation. In recent weeks, Russia has escalated offensive actions across eastern Ukraine. Arming, mobilizing, and directing Ukrainian separatists against the Kiev government, President Putin has shredded last September’s Minsk agreement. Under this deal, Russia had agreed to cease its support for rebel aggression. Instead, it has done the exact opposite. This was predictable. As I wrote in December, lower oil prices and Putin’s philosophy meant that Russia’s heightened aggression was always likely. Moreover, Western leaders aren’t exactly deterring him.

There may not be too much to add to the commentary of Jonah, Eliana, and others on President Obama’s condescending and offensive remarks on the Crusades and slavery at the National Prayer Breakfast speech last week, but there a few things I haven’t seen folks say.

After six years, it is so tiring to constantly be lectured to, talked down to, by Barack Obama that at some level, the content doesn’t really matter. It’s the principle of the thing. We elected a commander-in-chief, not a scold-in-chief, but the latter is what the progressive Left, embodied by Obama, sees as its primary role today. They just can’t see the rest of the country, outside the Upper East Side salons and Cambridge and San Francisco dining rooms, as adults. We’re all of us, all 300 million of us, the slightly dim children that need to be lectured to constantly. Sit up, don’t slouch, you’re forgetting your racist past, etc., etc.

Something I have asked myself: Does he really believe what he says, or is it all just for political effect, to send conservatives into a tizzy, eat up the airwaves, and keep us off-balance? He must have known how ridiculous, how unintelligent, and how offensive his comments were going to sound, correct? There’s a pause after he delivers the Crusades remark, you can see it below, and I just wonder, did he know that this was a stupid thing to say?

Last week, everywhere I went in Washington it seemed as if the country’s cultural and ideological divisions came down to a debate over the state of Texas and whether or not it was “a crazy state” or the “place that is still most like America.”

Congressman Alcee Hastings, a Florida Democrat, started the rumble during a House committee meeting by saying that Texas’s refusal to join Obamacare’s exchanges made it “a crazy state.” He then refused to apologize to Representative Michael Burgess, a Texas Republican who challenged him.

Those became fighting words. Former governor Rick Perry, a likely 2016 presidential candidate, responded during a speech at the American Principles Project: “He is right! We are crazy!” he enthused. “We’re crazy about jobs, we’re crazy about opportunity, we’re crazy about liberty, we’re crazy about the Constitution!” Charles Murray, the libertarian American Enterprise Institute scholar who hails from Iowa, weighed in by saying, “I’ve always thought of Texas as the place that is still most like America,” pointing to the self-reliant, can-do spirit the state still represents. Florida governor Rick Scott also joined in, noting that he has often cited Texas as a tax-cutting role model; then he joked about out-dueling Perry as a jobs generator.

When Obama burst upon the scene, prescient souls saw through the mask and asserted that, like all alleged utopian dreams, his would only result in inequalities and injustices. As world-renowned Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth, writes in his 2013 Haggada: Collected Essays on Pesach:

In the history of the human mind there have been many utopias, imagined paradises. None has been realized. Indeed the word ‘utopia’ itself means ‘no place.’ Utopias never happen because they come without a realistic map of how to get from here to there. They are discontinuous with the present. They can be brought about only by revolution, and almost without exception, [these utopian] revolutions replace iniquities and inequities with injustices of their own (33).

Consequently Americans have been and continue to be deluded by a man who feels he is entitled to a divine right to rule over his subjects, the very subjects whom he reviles and despises, especially those who still value freedom.

In all of Obama’s executive orders and unconstitutional actions, one characteristic is abundantly clear and that is the “negation of liberty.” Instead he creates an “ongoing despair” as people work harder and earn less, as people strive for success, but are shackled by ObamaCare lies, excessive regulations, and increasing taxes.