Category: Immigration (Page 1 of 2)

Flashback: Bill Whittle articulated clearly after the Jihadist assault on Charlie Hebdo, what the subsequent Jihadist atrocities in Paris and San Bernardino further demonstrated — and what Germany’s Angela Merkel, Australia’s John Howard, and Spain’s Jose Maria Anzar have themselves ceded. (See also here.) Multiculturalism’s anti-assimilationist streak, when combined with a militantly political religion of conquest, produces unassimilated populations that end up violently hostile to their naive and increasingly disarmed host cultures. “Tolerance” of such hostility is not noble; it is nothing short of suicide.

I took to Twitter in the aftermath of November 13th’s horrific, barbaric Jihadist attacks on Paris and her people, rather than posting here. To my resigned dismay, I am at a loss to see what more can be said at this point, or what will change the state of deep denial about such things that we seem to be stuck in. It’s excruciating watching this horror recur so predictably, and I wonder, as I have for so very long now, what it will take for the West to wake up, stop making excuses for Jihadist atrocities, and really and truly stand up for its values.

The Charlie Hebdo massacre, less than a year ago, should have been more than enough to make that happen — as, to be honest, should any of the innumerable prior acts of Jihad against the West. Much of the world briefly united, declaring “Je suis Charlie!” in a sincere but symbolic defiance and resolve that evaporated after a time, ultimately returning us to our slumber. This time around, it was “Cette fois, c’est la guerre.” But that sentiment, too, has already faded, and it’s unclear to me that it will have any lasting consequence for our actions. Before the day was over, the usual suspects in the press were dutifully reinforcing The Narrative, wringing their hands about mythical anti-Muslim backlash that fits their perpetually low opinion of their countrymen, rebranding a deliberate, premeditated atrocity as a “tragedy”, and generally doing the enemy’s propaganda job for them. We’re back to rearranging the deck chairs. We’ve learned (or have we?) that “Holding hands for a feel-good photo opp. gets us nowhere in the fight against terrorism.” “In a month most of Europe will be back to giving cultural sensitivity training and talk of ‘war’ will be forgotten.” Lather, rinse, repeat.

As has been rightly said before: It’s not a wake-up call, if we go back to sleep. Mark Steyn’s reflection on the Paris attacks was among the most apt: The Barbarians are Inside, and There Are No Gates. James Delingpole’s assessment was likewise on target.

Whether or not we are interested in war with Jihadis, they have made quite clear, time and time again, that they are profoundly interested in war with us. Dreamy-eyed insistence on “peace” in the face of acts of war (which the iconic Eifel-Tower-recast-as-peace-sign graphic that circulated in the wake of the attacks seems to ask for) is an act of pure, blind surrender. Honestly, “It must be incredibly frustrating as an Islamic terrorist not to have your views and motives taken seriously by the societies you terrorize, even after you have explicitly and repeatedly stated them. … It’s like a bad Monty Python sketch” — one that would be funny, if the consequences weren’t so grave. It no doubt comes as quite a devastating surprise to ISIS that they are “not Islamic”.

“We in the West have reached such a low in self-esteem that we do the job of defeating ourselves even better than the enemy,” noted Allen West. Make no mistake, that low in self-esteem is by design — the result of dedicated work by many, over a long period of time. It’s been wrought by people who sincerely believe that we are worse than our enemies.

I’ve pleaded for an end to this willful blindness, as have others with far greater eloquence, dedication, and courage. By now, we’ve been shown more than enough to be able to see that shunned and vilified critics of the Islamic world like Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Tarek Fatah, Brigitte Gabriel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and others have been right to sound the alarm. “Tolerance” is all well and good in theory, but “When tolerance becomes a one-way street, it leads to cultural suicide.” You can’t tolerate people whose chief ambition in life is to kill you.

Below was the scene in the Bataclan Theater, where people were gunned down and tortured by having their stomachs slit open, where survivors pleaded for the lives of their loved ones and waited helplessly as tens of minutes went by, wondering whether they and theirs would be next to be systematically murdered by Jihadis who stood there, methodically reloading without any apparent fear of being stopped. It grieves me to have to post something like this. There is a temptation to look away. We mustn’t. This is the face and work of an enemy that will not relent until we decisively confront and unconditionally subdue its murderous, bloodthirsty army. This is utterly barbaric. There is no excuse for it. We must at long last find the moral courage to commit to decisive actions that match our ephemeral and easily uttered words of defiance, or those words will have had no meaning.

Anecdotes such as this should put our domestic self-criticism in perspective, and remind us how very much we have to be grateful for. These are the people who flock to frontiers without hesitation, and build prosperity out of little more than freedom, opportunity, determination, and irrepressible optimism. May we always welcome such appreciative new citizens:

On Constitution Day in Philadelphia, 48 new Americans were naturalized, representing 18 countries from Argentina to Vietnam. The citizenship candidates and their families filled a small auditorium, they sat through welcoming speeches, including one from retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. They understood that it was a big deal.

They were an appreciative, demonstrative audience, if not Emma Lazarus’ “wretched refuse” of a teeming shore. Many are educated, with their eyes fixed on a shiny future as Americans. They might not all succeed, but they know they are free to try, so they are not complaining.

For the small number of you who think that America is bad, or mean, or evil, come convince our new Americans. You’ll die trying.

They don’t measure America by a dreamy, utopian ideal, they judge America against realities of the world in which they had lived. Despite wars and recession, they cast their lot with us because they know that in the totality of liberty, opportunity and equality — even the freedom to fail and try again — America is matchless.

To some of you, this is flag-waving fiction. To our newest Americans, who have lived here for years while qualifying for citizenship, it is fact.

Ample material for ten insightful articles, condensed into one. Don’t miss Victor Davis Hanson’s latest: “Ten Random, Politically Incorrect Thoughts”.

So many interesting events and great podcast episodes lately, so little time to blog about them… Following are notes about and links to a few from this past week that I especially recommend…

Penn Jillette did a real good show last Monday, September 18th, regarding the Pope’s recent comments and the violent fallout from them. Here’s a direct download link from pennradio.com.

As an agnostic, it’s pretty rare that I find myself paying any attention to what the Pope says, or feeling the need to take up his defense. But man have I felt sympathy for the guy in the very tall hat this past week. Though he seemingly did so inadvertently, in the course of quoting a historic work during a lecture to an academic audience, he’s ended up saying something that I think very much needed to be said, in a way that very few in the West have had the courage to do. As I said here before, in an earlier post titled “Wanting to believe”, I don’t know what it is about the apparent corellation between Islam and violent extremism. But there’s apparently something to the connection that we need to better understand and can’t allow ourselves to be intimidated out of talking about openly. The response from radical Islam this week, unfortunately, only served to illustrate the Pope’s point.

I always look forward to Pajamas Media’s consistently good “Blog Week in Review” podcast, adeptly hosted by Austin Bay and with Instapundit Glenn Reynolds as a frequent guest, and this week’s talk with Mark Steyn about Mark’s book “America Alone” was especially good.

Some particularly good moments from Mark:

[@ +19:00] Our whole way of forming the world view of tomorrow’s citizens is by raising them in this rather, kind of fluffy non-judgmental cocoon. You know, I find it very interesting in American schools, I’ve got three young children in grade school. And they go on and on about self-esteem, you know, every individual has to have self-esteem. Self-esteem is very important. I went to an English boys’ school where the object was, on the first day of term, to have every last ounce of self-esteem hammered out of you by the end of the first week. So it’s an entirely different system to me. But my kids, they’re taught all the time self esteem, self esteem’s critically important. Well what about societal self-esteem? You know, what about saying that the society that you live in, the inheritance of that society is actually important and worth valuing too. And I think we don’t do a very good job of that, and I think it poses a great question mark in the end over the long term future of that.

…

[@ +22:00] I think a lot of [that kind of] doom-mongering sells precisely because, in a sense, it is so unreal that it doesn’t require any serious effort from you. You know, Al Gore is going around saying that, because of Earth’s “excessive consumption” at the moment, it’s put Earth “out of balance” with the rest of the universe. Well, you know, I don’t know how he’s measured that. But the fact of the matter is, if you pose that as the problem it is so unreal, that there is almost nothing you could do that would have any effect on it. So it becomes, in effect, a simple way of demonstrating your moral virtue to no purpose whatsoever. And there seems to be a streak in the psyche of kind of post-nationalist, post-modern man that would rather do that than actually attend to the hard practical problems that need dealing with now. The more pie-in-the-sky the problem is, the more universal and intergalactic it is, the more it seems to appeal to a particular disposition these days.

…

[@ +29:00] I think America really needs to think seriously about what allies it has, real allies it has, and do its best to shore them up. I’m immensely heartened whenever you go to Australia, because one of the most heartwarming features about Australia is you don’t just get to talk sense with the right there, but there’s a remarkable number of people who would identify themselves on the left in Australia who talk an awful lot of sense on this issue too. And I think America and Australia both understand … what it is about. It’s not about racism. It’s not about being anti-immigration. But it’s about understanding the importance of assimilating immigrants when they come here, and the only way you can do that is to have something they can assimilate with, which is a large part of the problem in Europe. Even if you wanted to assimilate with modern Dutch identity, what would it be? What would you do? And in America, whatever the problems here, there isn’t the same problem with just huge, millions and millions of alienated immigrants that they have in most of Europe now.

I’m looking forward to reading Mark’s book.

Another very interesting podcast this week was the September 19 Sanity Squad podcast, “A Religion of the Perpetually Paranoid”, hosted as usual by neo-neocon, with commentators Dr. Sanity, Shrinkwrapped, and Siggy. One particular comment by Dr. Sanity at about 18 minutes into the discussion especially caught my attention, as it connected with my own concerns about worrisome alliances of thought that we’ve seen forming:

There is a very interesting intellectual connection. There’s a book now that is apparently a bestseller in Turkey, which is one of the more moderate Muslim states, and it is called “Attack on the Pope”. This is already a bestseller, this was a bestseller and existed before the pope ever made any comments, which predicts that Pope Benedict will be assassinated in Istanbul, which he is apparently scheduled to visit. There is also a movie, as you well know, about President Bush, “Assasination of the President”, that just won an award at a Canadian film festival, that shows the assassination of a sitting United States president. And I think that it is not a coincidence that these two things exist in both … and are celebrated in the intellectual halls of the Left, and in the intellectual (such as it is) aspect of Islam. There is something very strange going on in the world today, and … the underlying thing is a lot of rage, and anger, and hatred that is coming out in this kind of format.

Last but not least, don’t miss the Glenn & Helen’s 9/18 interview with Jim Geraghty, which is chock full of insights that Democrats seeking election would be wise to pay attention to.

I’ve gone and gotten hooked on Penn Jillette’s weekday radio show recently, thanks to the podcast that enables me to catch it out here in the Bay Area at times when I can manage to listen. In addition to being frequently hilarious, Penn very often has interesting things to talk about and insightful things to say about them. To borrow terms in which Penn frequently describes himself: He’s my kind of nutty libertarian atheist wack-job.

Monday’s episode regarding the pro-immigrant / “Day Without Immigrants” rallies held around the U.S. was especially good, and Penn managed to express almost verbatim what I’ve been thinking on the subject.

Open up the borders entirely. Let anyone in. In order to do that — in order to let anyone in — you have to stop running a socialist country.

Given sufficient attention to security concerns, I’m all in favor of there being a reasonable legitimate means for immigrants to enter the U.S. and petition for and obtain citizenship. It’s been said so often as to have become a cliché, but it’s an accurate one: We truly are a nation of immigrants — and who are we, once in the “club”, to shut the doors? Immigrants, on balance, contribute far more to this country than they take, and I think we should welcome anyone who wants to come here and contribute to and be a part of this way of life we’ve defined with open arms (though unlike some advocates of open immigration I think it’s reasonable to expect immigrants to assimilate to some extent). It should come as no surprise, however, that this desire for openness to immigration comes into conflict with the desire many people have for our government to guarantee citizens a growing array of social service provisions. Having the latter only lends fuel to the otherwise specious counter-argument that immigrants are a net drain on resources and here to take more than they give back.

On a related note: Given that there appears to be a fair amount of overlap between those who advocate on behalf of immigrants and the folks who continually insist that the U.S. is such a dreadful place to have to live, I can’t help but wonder how such people proceess the fact that there are so many people who want so desperately to come here and live in this supposed cornucopia of crises that they routinely endure great hardships and take great risks in order to do so. Do they simply think these people have been misled about the promise of America?

Seems like if it was that big a disappointment, word would eventually get around and the immigrants would stop coming in droves. And yet, they keep coming. Fancy that.