IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

E.R. Drabik The Great Immigration Non-debate

Posted By on July 26th, 2017

If the only justification for sky-high immigration is it’s “good for the economy”, it is a policy fundamentally flawed. Judged through the prism of existing citizens’ interests, there is no economic case that can justify the transformative changes current policies are inflicting.

According to recent media reports, President Donald Trump and his team are working with Republican senators on a bill to halve legal immigration – to 500,000 per annum – into the United States. Across the Atlantic, Prime Minister Theresa May has vowed to reduce immigration to less than 100,000 a year. In launching the Tory’s recent election manifesto, May said immigration to the UK needs to be brought down to “sustainable” levels. In 2016, she argued that there was “no case, in the national interest, for immigration of the scale we have experienced over the last decade.”

Immigration has also erupted as a major issue in the lead-up to September’s New Zealand election. The country’s main opposition party, Labour, has pledged to slash the migrant intake, which is presently running at record levels. Perhaps more significant is the recent surge in support for the populist New Zealand First, led by the wily Winston Peters. The great survivor of Kiwi politics and known for his colourful utterances, Peters has slammed the government’s unfocused immigration “merry-go-round” and wants permanent visas restricted to 10,000 per annum. With his party likely to hold the balance of power come September, Peters may very well get his way.

Yet, while other Anglosphere countries look to curb immigration, Australia is moving in the opposite direction, with Canberra firmly planting its foot on the mass-immigration accelerator.

The numbers coming in are, quite frankly, insane. Over the last 12 years, annual average net immigration has tripled from its long-term historical average, to 210,000 people a year. Australia is importing a population equivalent to Hobart each and every year or an Adelaide every six years, with this turbocharged intake expected to continue for decades. By way of comparison, Australia’s annual immigration inflow is roughly equal to that of Britain’s, despite Australia only having around a third of the population.

While the populations of most other developed countries have either stabilised or declined, Australia’s population surged by a staggering 21.5% between 2003 and 2015 on the back of Canberra’s immigration-on-’roids policy. If current trends continue unabated, Australia’s population is projected to nearly double by 2050, to over 40 million. Needless to say, this immigration-fuelled population explosion will have a host of far-reaching social, cultural, demographic, economic and environmental consequences. But practically no effort has been expended by governments considering what Australia will look like in 10, 20, 40 or 80 years under this high immigration scenario. Canberra is rushing at breakneck speed while blindfolded towards a big, ultra-diverse Australia. In the long history of human folly, this must certainly be a stand-out.

Nor has the Turnbull government provided an official rationale as to why it is running the largest per capita immigration programme in the world. The entire sum of its immigration policy appears to be to bring in as many people as quickly as possible while assiduously burying any sort of public discussion on the issue. The government didn’t even mention the 2017-18 permanent intake number in the budget papers. Immigration Minister Peter Dutton made no public statement on the matter. Dutton’s position atop a new super ministry, ostensibly to enhance national security, has been pilloried by pundits on both sides of politics as ministerial overreach. Yet, at the same time it has been reported that Dutton is considering outsourcing vast swaths of Australia’s immigration system to the private sector, effectively surrendering control over our borders. Rorters, dodgy middlemen and fifth columnists will be rubbing their hands in anticipation.

There has been a steady stream of puff pieces in the mainly left-leaning media claiming that mass immigration is both necessary and beneficial. However, the arguments proffered tend to be exasperatingly specious and quickly fall apart under scrutiny. Despite the various claims by some business groups and others, Australia does not have a general skills shortage requiring heavy and sustained inflows. Moreover, current immigration policy is, in fact, largely detached from Australia’s labour market requirements. As a recent report by the Australian Population Research Institute found, any relationship that existed between skills recruited under the points-tested visa subclasses and particular shortages in the labour market has eroded under successive governments. This is resulting in large numbers of ‘skilled’ permanent migrants of dubious professional quality and relevance in fields such as IT and accounting, despite these sectors having a significant surplus of workers. In any case, the annual immigration report by the Australian Productivity Commission made it clear that about half of the skilled migrant steam includes the family members of skilled migrants, with only around 30 percent of Australia’s total permanent migrant intake actually ‘skilled’.

Nor can immigration realistically provide a solution to the ‘problem’ of an ageing population, as is frequently claimed by immigration enthusiasts. Again, the Productivity Commission has stated in numerous reports that immigration is not a feasible countermeasure to an ageing population since migrants themselves also age. As migrants grow old, even larger inflows will be required to support them, and so on ad infinitum. In other words, using immigration in an attempt to counter population ageing is the epitome of an unsustainable Ponzi scheme. Cambridge Professor of Economics Robert Rowthorn has memorably compared it to Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory’s insatiable demand for virginal victims. According to legend, the “Bloody Lady of Csejte” used to regularly bathe in the blood of chaste young women in an effort to preserve her fading youth. To stay young, she needed to constantly replenish the supply of virgins. At some point Australia’s Báthoryian policymakers are going to have to bow to the inevitable and deal with the ageing population, as Japan and other smart countries are already doing, rather than trying to delay the day of reckoning through misguided and ultimately counterproductive immigration policies.

BOOKS Comments turned off

A New Look at the Death of Europe Rael Jean Isaac

Posted By on July 26th, 2017

With the publication of The Strange Death of Europe Douglas Murray has made a significant contribution to a crucially important, if still niche genre: the Islamization of Europe. A small number of writers (given the huge impact of this development) have focused on the issue, among them Bat Yeor, Oriana Fallaci, Mark Steyn, Christopher Caldwell, Bruce Bawer, Soeren Kern, Giulio Meotti, Guy Milliere, Ingrid Carlqvist, Melanie Phillips. This small band is all that confronts the blatant and pervasive coverup by politicians and mainstream media.

Murray’s contribution takes several forms. He brings the story of Europe’s civilizational suicide up to date. He provides a chronological tale of the debacle from the post-World War II importation of what were imagined at the time to be temporary workers from Muslim countries needed to fill labor shortages to the disastrous decision by Angela Merkel in August 2015 to throw open Germany’s borders without limits, with the slogan “We can do it.” He sets forth Muslim terrorist actions in Europe in punctilious sequence, including those targeting individuals, like the murder of Theo van Gogh and the Charlie Hebdo staff; the attacks against Jews, and the terror aimed at the general public, for example, the Bataclan massacre and the mowing down at random of people celebrating Bastille Day at the Nice beach. He describes the broader challenge to European society posed by Muslims who do not resort to terror, but espouse values wholly at variance with those of their host countries. Most important, he seeks to explain Europe’s “strange” behavior, why Europe is committing suicide with its elites leading a reluctant but passive public over the cliff.

In part, Murray’s explanation does not differ much from that advanced by several of those cited above. In Murray’s words, “The world was coming into Europe at precisely the moment that Europe has lost sight of what it is.” It was a Europe that had lost faith in its beliefs, traditions, its very legitimacy. But Murray is especially good in focusing on the importance of guilt, what he calls Europe’s “unique, abiding, and perhaps fatal sense of and obsession with guilt” in shaping its behavior. While not ignored by others, the role of guilt has not been given the attention it deservedly gets here.

To this reviewer, that the Holocaust should shake Europe’s faith in its civilization is only right and fitting. In the current issue of Commentary Terry Teachout points out how Europe’s great orchestras dutifully fired Jewish members and banned music by Jewish composers even as the music-loving Hitler in 1938 declared “Germany has become the guardian of European culture and civilization.” It can be no surprise if Europeans ask, “How could what Hitler conceived himself as zealously guarding be worth preserving?”

But as Murray sees it, guilt has become a “moral intoxicant”–Europeans have become “high” on it. They cannot fall back on their Christian faith because their “foundational story” was fatally weakened in the nineteenth century by the combination of Biblical higher criticism and Darwinism. The replacement beliefs in multiculturalism (and Murray quotes Samuel Huntington’s apt observation that multiculturalism is essentially an anti-Western ideology), tolerance, diversity, and “human rights” (as those who have seized control of the issue define them) are no substitute for the fervent divinely-grounded convictions of Islam.

Murray addresses the puzzling question: why there has been so little pushback from Europeans as they have been inundated by millions committed to ideologies anathema to their own? One reason is that the penalties for speaking out are high. Murray writes that those who have shouted fire over the years have been treated as arsonists. They have been “ignored, defamed, prosecuted or killed.” The media has been swift to silence those among them who dared to so much as raise the issue. Murray cites the fate of Erik Mansson, editor-in-chief of the Swedish paper Expressen, who as far back as 1993 published the results of an opinion poll showing 63% of Swedes wanted immigrants to return to their countries of origin. Noting the difference between those in power and public opinion, Mansson said he thought the subject should be discussed. The only result was that the paper’s owners promptly fired Mansson.

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Lessons from Europe’s Immigrant Wave: Douglas Murray Cautions America by Abigail R. Esman

Posted By on July 26th, 2017

Douglas Murray has long voiced his concern about the growing influence of Muslim culture on the West. The associate editor of Britain’s Spectator, a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and the founder of the Centre for Social Cohesion, a think tank on radical Islam, he has built an international reputation for his opposition to the demographic changes of the West and the threats to its traditions. In his latest book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (Bloomsbury, 2017), he attacks all of these subjects as they relate to the current crisis of migration from the Middle East.

It is a controversial book, particularly for Americans and Jews, but one which also makes important arguments against the multiculturalist ideal. That ideal, which once led much of domestic policy across Europe and the United States, has proven not only a failure, but a threat to the values and national security of Western civilization.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism recently spoke with Murray about his book and the concerns that drove him to write it.

Abigail R. Esman: As an American, a Jew, and an immigrant myself to the Netherlands, there are aspects of your arguments against immigration and asylum that are troublesome to me. I come from a country where we are all immigrants, or our parents or grandparents were likely immigrants. You talk for instance of families where “neither parent speaks English as a first language,” yet my husband is Australian and I am American and neither of us speaks Dutch as a first language. So naturally, I come at these arguments with some concern. Are you saying, basically, close the borders?

Douglas K . Murray: It’s only for me to diagnose what’s happening – to see the truth about what is going on. Policy makers will make their own decisions. I have obviously broad views on it, which is that I think you can’t continue at the rate we have now, and I think you have to be choosy about the people you bring in. But you are right, and there are two groups of people who have had trouble with some of the basic things in this book: one is people of Jewish background, and others who come from nations of immigrants, like America. But Britain isn’t a nation of immigrants – we have been a static society with all the benefits and ills that this brings. And I think it is dishonest to say it is the same thing. I realize people who are predominantly Jewish have a particular sensitivity to it, but I think that that’s a particular issue. And why do we say one migration is just like the other It’s like saying because two vehicles went down the same road they are the same vehicle.

ARE: How is it different?

DKM: In the UK, when Jewish migration happened more than a century ago, the main thing was integration, integration into the society, wanting desperately to be part of British society. Why do synagogues in the UK have a portrait of the Queen? And after services, they often sing the British national anthem. It’s very moving. It’s an effort to demonstrate this is what we are and this is what we want to be. You’d be hard pressed to find a mosque with a picture of the queen who sing the anthem.

ARE: That element of integration is crucial, I agree. In America, in fact, immigrants in the past and often even today are eager to give their children Anglicized names: “Michael,” not “Moishe,” “Henry,” not “Heinrich.” Yet you do not see the name changes in Muslims these days. Why do you think that is?

DKM: Because there is less of a feeling to integrate. They want to stay with the country they’ve left but not deal with its economics. Some people find it flattering – that people want to move to your country – they say well, it shows what a wonderful place we are. No, it shows that your economics work better.

ARE: You also write about Muslim enclaves in Europe where “the women all wear some form of head covering and life goes on much as it would if the people were in Turkey or Morocco.” How is that different than, say, Chinatowns, or Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in America and say, Belgium, where women wear wigs and men have peyas, or sidelocks?

DKM: The example of Chinatown-like places is a good comparison. These are places that are mini-Chinas, they are enjoyed and liked by people because they are a different place. Well, if people want to have a mini-Bangladesh, that’s one vision of a society. It’s not the vision we were sold in Europe. It was not meant to be the case that portions of our cities were meant to become totally different places. In the 1950s the British and other European authorities said we have to bring people into our countries and we will get a benefit in labor. But if they had said that the downside is that large portions of the area would be unrecognizable to their inhabitants, there would have been an outcry.

And the issue of them being different from Hasidic communities – you’re right, they are similar. You can go to Stamford Hill in North London and see most of the men in hats and so on and that’s because that’s an enclave that wants to keep to itself. That raises questions: one, people don’t mind that, for several reasons – one is the recognition that Orthodox men don’t cause troubles. We don’t have cases of Orthodox men going out and cutting off people’s heads. If four Jewish men from Stamford Hill had blown up buses some years back there would be concern about these enclaves.

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WHY ILLINOIS IS IN TROUBLE – 63,000 PUBLIC EMPLOYEES WITH SALARIES $100,000+ COST TAXPAYERS $10 BILLION by Adam Andrzejewski ,

Posted By on July 26th, 2017

‘Adam Andrzejewski, CEO of OpenTheBooks.com, as published at Forbes.’

Illinois is broke and continues to flirt with junk bond status. But the state’s financial woes aren’t stopping 63,000 government employees from bringing home six-figure salaries and higher.

Whenever we open the books, Illinois is consistently one of the worst offenders. Recently, we found auto pound supervisors in Chicago making $144,453; nurses at state corrections earning up to $254,781; junior college presidents making $465,420; university doctors earning $1.6 million; and 84 small-town “managers” out-earning every U.S. governor.

Using our interactive mapping tool, quickly review (by ZIP code) the 63,000 Illinois public employees who earn more than $100,000 and cost taxpayers $10 billion. Just click a pin and scroll down to see the results rendered in the chart beneath the map.

Here are a few examples of what you’ll uncover:

20,295 teachers and school administrators – including superintendents Joyce Carmine ($398,229) at Park Forest School District 63, Troy Paraday ($384,138) at Calumet City School District 155, and Jon Nebor ($377,409) at Indian Springs School District 109. Four of the top five salaries are in the south suburbs – not the affluent north shore.
10,676 rank-and-file workers and managers in Chicago – including $216,200 for embattled Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) and $400,000 for Ginger Evans, Commissioner of Aviation – including a $100,000 bonus. Timothy Walter, a deputy police chief, made $240,917 – that’s $146,860 in overtime on top of his $94,056 base salary. Ramona Perkins, a police communications operator, pulled down $121,318 in overtime while making $196,726!
9,567 college and university employees – including the southern Illinois junior college power couple Dale Chapman ($465,420) and Linda Terrill Chapman ($217,290). The pair combined for a $682,000 income at Lewis and Clark Community College. Fady Toufic Charbel ($1.58 million) and Konstantin Slavin ($1.04 million) are million-dollar doctors at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
8,640 State of Illinois employees – including $258,070 for Marian Frances Cook, a “contractual worker” at the newly created Dept. of Innovation and Technology. Further, there are the “barber” and “teacher of barbering” positions in the state prisons making $100,000+. Loreatha Coleman made $254,781 as a nurse at the Dept. of Corrections.
8,817 small town city and village employees – including 84 municipal managers out-earning every U.S. governor at $180,000. These managers include Lawrence Hileman (Glenview – $297,988); Michael Ellis (Grayslake – $264,486); Robert Kiely (Lake Forest – $255,247); Kevin Bowens (Libertyville – $254,428); and Richard Nahrstadt (Northbrook – $250,248).

In total, there is roughly $12 billion in cash compensation flowing to six-figure government workers when counting the 9,031 federal employees based in Illinois.

So, who are the biggest culprits in conferring six-figure salaries? We ranked the top 15 largest public pay and pension systems in Illinois:

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Obama IRS Abuse Should Unite Trump and Sessions Career Justice Department lawyers are still defending the old administration’s indefensible positions.Obama IRS Abuse Should Unite Trump and Sessions Career Justice Department lawyers are still defending the old administration’s indefensible positions. by Jerome Marcus

Posted By on July 26th, 2017

President Trump has been feuding this week with Attorney General Jeff Sessions over matters related to last year’s campaign. But here’s an issue on which Messrs. Trump and Sessions should be able to find common ground: The Justice Department should stop defending Obama administration corruption.

I’m referring to the cases, still on file today, challenging or seeking to expose Internal Revenue Service policies that delayed applications for tax-exempt status from conservative groups. That’s viewpoint discrimination, a clear First Amendment violation.

The Obama Justice Department fought these cases intensely. It tried to get them thrown out of court before the plaintiffs had the chance to gather evidence. When that failed, Justice lawyers resisted discovery, to prevent disclosure of documents showing what the Obama administration was really doing.

That’s normal behavior for a defendant in a lawsuit. But since Jan. 20, the Justice Department has reported to Mr. Trump, who denounced each of the corrupt policies at issue in these cases.

So why is the department handling the cases as if it were still run by Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch ? Because many of the career lawyers who were put on these cases by Obama Justice Department officials continue working on them, with no supervision from this administration. Those lawyers are still doing now what they have always done: fighting as hard as they can to prevent disclosure of what the Obama IRS, and the rest of the Obama administration, was doing to the country.

In one of these cases I represent the plaintiff. Z Street is a pro-Israel nonprofit that educates on Zionism and how to oppose terror. It applied in 2009 for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. For months, Z Street’s lawyers fielded duplicative IRS requests for information about its board of directors, but after long delays the IRS hadn’t made a decision on the application. In July 2010 Z Street asked why, and an IRS agent revealed that the applications of many organizations connected to Israel “are being sent to a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the [Obama] administration’s public policies.”

We sued to stop and expose this clear violation of Z Street’s First Amendment rights.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Michael Rubin:Will Mattis Betray the Gulf Allies? Has Mattis gone rogue?

Posted By on July 26th, 2017

At the core of the Qatar dispute is the question of Qatar’s support for extremism. While many Gulf states have histories of donating to or promoting radical Islamism, many have made real reforms. Saudi Arabia, for example, became much more serious about the need to curtail support for radical groups after the Kingdom started suffering blowback with terrorists targeting foreigners living in Saudi Arabia and senior Saudi officials. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, meanwhile, has cracked down not only on the Muslim Brotherhood but has also moved to sever the life-line Egypt often provided Hamas leaders in Gaza. Qatar, however, continues to set itself above the rest in its support for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/will-mattis-betray-the-gulf-allies-qatar/

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and other moderate Arab states are rightly confused, if not frustrated, by the muddled U.S. response so far. After all, diplomats and official from these states say, both Democratic and Republican administrations in the United States have both long beseeched them to take a no-nonsense approach to extremism and to operate in a coordinated fashion against regional threats.

When they finally do, the White House flip-flops and the State Department urges compromise and negotiation. Evenhandedness is not a virtue when one side is right and the other wrong. To negotiate with regard to the acceptance of terrorist groups is, however, a very dangerous precedent. If the United States re-engaged in Afghanistan to eliminate al-Qaeda’s bases there or began operations in Syria to counter the Islamic State, Washington would greatly resent outside powers demanding that the United States compromise with either.

In the wake of the Qatar crisis, now in its second month, Turkey set up a military base in Qatar, much to the outrage of the states seeking to pressure Qatar into compliance. That base’s closure remains a key demand among moderate Arab countries.

Now word comes that the U.S. military is planning to conduct military exercises in Qatar with the Qatari and Turkish militaries. Daily Sabah, a once independent paper which was seized by Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government and transferred to his son-in-law, quoted Qatari Defense Minister Khalid bin Mohammed al-Attiyah as saying, “Qatar, Turkey and the U.S. regularly conduct military drills in Qatar. In the near future, a joint drill will begin by the three countries.”

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Responses to The WSJ editorial about “Sessions Abuse”

Posted By on July 26th, 2017

I got many e-mails this morning disputing criticism of Donald Trump regarding Attorney General Session. Here are two with which I tend to agree. Trump’s style may offend but he is not wrong. rsk

1.Wrong, WSJ Editorial Board. Sessions was wrong to recuse himself from a specious Russia collusion charge and allowed swamp rat Rosenstein to set up a get Trump posse by appointing a special prosecutor Mueller without an identification of a crime or crimes to be investigated and without parameters on the investigation — contrary to law. Mueller hires a partisan Democrat staff, proceeds to expand his investigation and allows leaks. So you have an open ended investigation that calls for the observation of Harvard Law Professor Dershowitz, quoting Stalin’s secret police chief Beria: “Show me the man and I will find the crime.” On top of that, Sessions has not pursued investigations of Hillary and the Democrats that are begging for investigation. These are travesties about which President Trump has every right to be disappointed in Sessions. Rosenstein and Mueller should be fired and investigations of Democrat malfeasance are needed. If Sessions needs to be fired, so be it. I might add that President Trump is the head of the Executive Branch and is empowered to make comments that Senator Graham and the WSJ find inappropriate. It is politics, not dispassionate proprietorial discretion, that is protecting Hillary and the Democrats. from Phil Byler

Attorney General Sessions absolutely should not have recused himself from the phony Russia collusion investigation. In his Senatorial office he met with some Russian officials who probably visited a dozen other Senators. Nothing was exchanged and Sessions forgot about it. As a result he has been unable to participate and criticize Comey and Mueller for leaking FBI information and for wasting taxpayer money in widening the scope of an investigations that is without evidence or merit. Furthermore, Hillary Clinton’s sale of uranium to Russia certainly deserves scrutiny as well as the pay to play schemes of the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State. Sessions has willfully ignored this scandal while the administration and the President he ostensibly serves are continually distracted and beleaguered by spurious allegations, leaks and targeted headlines. from Tessa Klein

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UK Terrorism: ‘Enough’ is Not ‘Enough’ by Douglas Murray

Posted By on July 26th, 2017

Were terror attacks like this simply something that the British public would have to get used to, as the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, had suggested? What if the public did not want to get used to them?

That the UK authorities allowed the “Al-Quds Day” march to proceed through the streets of London and for Palestine Expo to assemble such an array of speakers just down the road from one of this year’s terror attacks, suggests that all that has happened this year in Britain is extremely very far from “enough”.

So, rather than expecting resilience, the British people will have to be prepared to accept still more terror — and doubtless more pointless platitudes to follow each attack — as surely as they have followed all the attacks before.

On June 3, Britain underwent its third Islamist terror assault in just ten weeks. Following on from a suicide bombing at Manchester Arena and a car- and knife-attack in Westminster, the London Bridge attacks seemed as if they might finally tip Britain into recognising the full reality of Islamist terror.

The attackers that night on London Bridge behaved as such attackers have before, in France, Germany and Israel. They used a van to ram into pedestrians, and then leapt from the vehicle and began to stab passers-by at random. Chasing across London Bridge and into the popular Borough Market, eye-witnesses recorded that the three men, as they slit the throats of Londoners and tourists, shouted “This is for Allah.”

A day later, British Prime Minister Theresa May made another appearance on the steps of Downing Street, to comment on the latest atrocity. In what appeared to have become a prime ministerial tradition, she stressed that the terrorists were following the “evil ideology of Islamist extremism”, which she described as “a perversion of Islam”. All this was no more than she had said after the Manchester and Westminster attacks, and almost exactly what her predecessor, David Cameron, had said from the same place after the slaughter of Drummer Lee Rigby on the streets of London in 2013, as well as after the countless ISIS executions and atrocities in Syria in the months that followed.

Yet Prime Minister May’s speech did include one new element. She used her speech on June 4 to go slightly farther than she had previously done. There had been “far too much tolerance of extremism” in the UK, she said, before adding, “Enough is enough”.

It was a strong statement, and seemed to sum up an increasingly disturbed public mood. Were attacks like this simply something that the British public would have to get used to, as the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, had suggested? What if the public did not want to get used to them? As with one of Tony Blair’s statements after the July 7, 2005 London transport attacks — “The rules of the game are changing” — Theresa May’s statement seemed full of promise. Perhaps it suggested that finally a British politician was going to get a grip on the problem.

Yet now that we are nearly two months on from her comments, it is worth noting that to date there are no signs that “enough” has been “enough”. Consider just two highly visible signs that what Britain has gone through this year has been, in fact, no wake-up call at all, and that instead, whatever might have been learned has been absorbed into the to-and-fro of political events, passing like any other transient news story.

Nearly two months on from British Prime Minister Theresa May’s comments, following the Westminster terror attack, that there is “far too much tolerance of extremism” in the UK and that “Enough is enough”, it is worth noting that what Britain has gone through this year has been, in fact, no wake-up call at all, and that to date there are no signs that “enough” has been “enough”. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

The first was an event that took place only a fortnight after Theresa May’s claim that something had changed in the UK. This was the annual “Al-Quds Day” march in London, organised by the badly misnamed Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC). Apart from organising an annual “Islamophobe of the Year” award — an award which two years ago they gave to the slaughtered staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo — this Khomeinist group’s main public activity each year is an “Al Quds Day” in London. The day allows a range of anti-Semites and anti-Israel extremists to congregate in central London, wave Hezbollah flags and call for the destruction of the Jewish state, Israel.

As Hezbollah is a terrorist group, and any distinction between a “military” and “diplomatic” wing of the group exists solely in the minds of a few people in the British Foreign Office, waving the flag of Hezbollah in public is waving the flag of a terrorist group. If the rules of the game were indeed changing after the followers of a Hezbollah-like creed had slaughtered citizens on a bridge in London, then the promotion of a terrorist group in the same city only days later would not have gone ahead. Nor would the speeches from the “Al Quds Day” platform have been allowed to be completed without arrests being made. The speeches to the 1,000-strong crowd included the most lurid imaginable claims.

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Silicon Valley Censorship by Samuel Westrop

Posted By on July 26th, 2017

If it is ever “toxic” to deem ISIS a terrorist organization, then — regardless of whether that is the result of human bias or an under-developed algorithm — the potential for abuse, and for widespread censorship, will always exist. The problem lies with the very concept of the idea. Why does Silicon Valley believe it should decide what is valid speech and what is not?

Conservative news, it seems, is considered fake news. Liberals should oppose this dogma before their own news comes under attack. Again, the most serious problem with attempting to eliminate hate speech, fake news or terrorist content by censorship is not about the efficacy of the censorship; it is the very premise that is dangerous.

Under the guidance of faulty algorithms or prejudiced Silicon Valley programmers, when the New York Times starts to delete or automatically hide comments that criticize extremist clerics, or Facebook designates articles by anti-Islamist activists as “fake news,” Islamists will prosper and moderate Muslims will suffer.

Google’s latest project is an application called Perspective, which, as Wired reports, brings the tech company “a step closer to its goal of helping to foster troll-free discussion online, and filtering out the abusive comments that silence vulnerable voices.” In other words, Google is teaching computers how to censor.

If Google’s plans are not quite Orwellian enough for you, the practical results are rather more frightening. Released in February, Perspective’s partners include the New York Times, the Guardian, Wikipedia and the Economist. Google, whose motto is “Do the Right Thing,” is aiming its bowdlerism at public comment sections on newspaper websites, but the potential is far broader.

Perspective works by identifying the “toxicity level” of comments published online. Google states that Perspective will enable companies to “sort comments more effectively, or allow readers to more easily find relevant information.” Perspective’s demonstration website currently allows anyone to measure the “toxicity” of a word or phrase, according to its algorithm. What, then, constitutes a “toxic” comment?

The organization with which I work, the Middle East Forum, studies Islamism. We work to tackle the threat posed by both violent and non-violent Islamism, assisted by our Muslim allies. We believe that radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution.

Perspective does not look fondly at our work:

Google’s Perspective application, which is being used by major media outlets to identify the “toxicity level” of comments published online, has much potential for abuse and widespread censorship.

No reasonable person could claim this is hate speech. But the problem does not just extend to opinions. Even factual statements are deemed to have a high rate of “toxicity.” Google considers the statement “ISIS is a terrorist group” to have an 87% chance of being “perceived as toxic.”

Or 92% “toxicity” for stating the publicly-declared objective of the terrorist group, Hamas:

Google is quick to remind us that we may disagree with the result. It explains that, “It’s still early days and we will get a lot of things wrong.” The Perspective website even offers a “Seem Wrong?” button to provide feedback.

These disclaimers, however, are very much beside the point. If it is ever “toxic” to deem ISIS a terrorist organization, then — regardless of whether that figure is the result of human bias or an under-developed algorithm — the potential for abuse, and for widespread censorship, will always exist.

The problem lies with the very concept of the idea. Why does Silicon Valley believe it should decide what is valid speech and what is not?

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California Imams Caught On Video Preaching Jew-Hatred, Violence And the establishment media’s deafening silence. Ari Lieberman

Posted By on July 26th, 2017

Two disturbing videos have surfaced involving California-based Muslim preachers in which both are heard spewing anti-Semitic vitriol as well as issuing implicit calls for violence against Jews. The videos, which are not dissimilar in content and shrill to those which have emerged from Gaza, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab Mideast, reveal the extent to which anti-Semitism is deeply embedded in large segments of the American Muslim community.

The first video features Egyptian-born preacher Ammar Shahin, who is the imam of the Islamic Center of Davis, northern California. The sermon was delivered on July 21. Shahin, who delivered the sermon in both English and Arabic, is heard invoking an anti-Semitic hadith in which Muslims will do battle with the Jews and the Jews will be forced to take shelter behind rocks and trees. Shahin then says that the trees and rocks will call out to the Muslims and say, “Oh Muslim…come, there is someone behind me – except for the Gharqad tree, which is the tree of the Jews.”

Shahin refers to Jews as “filth” and calls on Allah to, “annihilate them down to the very last one; do not spare any of them.” Not content with merely the annihilation of Jewry, Shahin chillingly beseeches Allah to, “make this happen by our hands.” Apparently, a depraved Shahin wants to feel the knife plunging into his victim and derives perverse satisfaction from that feeing.

When confronted with the video, Shahin, who likened Jews to “filth” and called for their “annihilation,” among other sordid gems, alleged that his words were “taken out of context.” It’s funny how Jew-haters always claim to be “taken out of context” once they’re caught. Louis Farrakhan, Linda Sarsour and Keith Ellison, have all resorted to this same tired excuse, once exposed.

The second video, which was also delivered on July 21, features Sheikh Mahmoud Harmoush. The Friday sermon was delivered to congregants at the Islamic Center of Riverside, California.

Harmoush is heard telling his congregants that the immigrant Jews took advantage of Muslim hospitality and conspired to steal the “beautiful land…with killing, crime and massacres.” More ominously, Harmoush invokes “Jihad” and urges his flock to “wake up; it is time to be a Muslim. Prayer is not the only thing.” He further urges them to “resist and fight back” claiming that in addition to “Palestine” the Jews are seeking to seize “most of the Middle East…even Mecca and Medina.” Harmoush completes his screed with the obligatory, “destroy the [Jews] and render them sunder.”

According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Harmoush “holds educational and leadership positions at several institutions in Southern California, teaches Arabic at UCLA San Bernardino, and is a member of the leadership council of the Syrian American Council.”

In 2010, Harmoush was embroiled in legal battle involving the expansion of his mosque in Temecula, California. Residents opposed to the expansion cited traffic concerns but others pointed to fears of radicalism and terror. At the time, Harmoush was quoted by the New York Times stating that accusations of radicalism “really are not worth responding to.”