The agreement is expected to significantly stem the tide of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan seeking asylum in other countries who are hesitant to let them in their borders. (AP Photo)
Turkey will contain more Middle Eastern refugees within its owns borders so fewer of them flee to other European countries, under a deal it reached Sunday with the European Union.
In return for tightening its border control, Turkey will get several billion dollars from the EU and assistance in its efforts to join the coalition of 28 countries. The agreement is expected to significantly stem the tide of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan seeking asylum in other countries who are hesitant to let them in their borders.
The U.S. has admitted fewer than 2,000 Syrian refugees since 2012, yet the flood of migrants in Europe has incited a fierce political debate over whether they are sufficiently screened before entering the country.
President Obama wants to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees next year, saying that a robust vetting process will be in place. Refugees currently have to wait an average of 18-24 months before entering the U.S., as they’re screened by several different government agencies.
But many Republicans running for president have said they should be blocked until stricter screening measures are put in place and some GOP governors have tried to prohibit them from entering their own states. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who has suggested only refugees who prove they are Christian should be admitted to the U.S., reiterated that position on Sunday, saying on CNN’s “State of the Union” that refugees should be screened for their religion.
And Ben Carson, who is currently polling second in the GOP primary battle, said Middle Eastern countries that are closer geographically to refugees’ home countries should get more financial assistance to help them. Carson spoke with CNN from Jordan, where he has visited Syrian refugee camps.
Carson said instead of focusing on how to let more refugees into the U.S., which is much more difficult for them to travel to, policymakers should figure out how to allow more to settle in countries at closer proximity where they wouldn’t have to experience as big a change in culture. Jordan, for example, should get more money to admit more refugees, Carson said.
“It seems like everybody in the international community is spending more time saying how can we bring refugees here rather than support a facility that is already in place that the refugees are finding perfectly fine — when it’s fully funded,” Carson said.
When these same Muslims have a knife to the throats of these Jews, I will just laugh. Don’t they know what all Muslims think of Jews?
This synagogue is now a mosque
Jewish Press (h/t Liz) The Beth Israel synagogue in Peterborough, Central Ontario, Canada, invited Muslim worshipers at the Masjid al-Salaam mosque to pray in their building, after it had been firebombed on Nov. 14 by arsonists.
On Saturday night, the synagogue’s website published an announcement stating, “Yesterday, Friday November 27, Beth Israel became a house of worship for the local Muslim community.” On Friday, Beth Israel hosted two prayer sessions for local Muslims and a potluck dinner.
Beth Israel Synagogue president Larry Gillman told CBC, “As Canadians we have to stick together. It’s not about religion, it’s not about race. (Oh it’s about religion all right, and yours is the one Muslims hate the most) Canadians do this.” According to CBC, as soon as Gillman heard about the fire at the mosque, he reached out to his synagogue’s board of directors to find out about sharing space with the Muslim congregation. They voted unanimously in favor. “I hope this can be some kind of small example to others,” Gillman said.
Abbas seems intentionally to ignore that he and his Palestinian Authority are responsible for the violence, as a result of their daily incitement against Israel.
A recent poll found that 48% of Palestinians interviewed believe that the real goal of the “intifada” is to “liberate all of Palestine.” In other words, approximately half of Palestinians believe that the “intifada” should lead to the destruction of Israel, which would be replaced with a Palestinian state — one that now would be ruled by Hamas and jihadi organizations such as Islamic State and Al-Qaeda.
It is notable that only 11% of respondents said the goal of the “intifada” should be to “liberate” only those territories captured by Israel in 1967.
The Palestinians do not, according to the poll, have a problem with “settlements” or “poor living conditions.” They have a problem with Israel’s existence. Palestinians do not see a difference between a West Bank “settlement” and cities inside Israel — or differentiate between Jews living there. They are all depicted as “settlers” and “colonialists.”
This contradicts Abbas’s claim that the Palestinians want a “peaceful and popular” uprising. The Palestinians are not, as their leaders claim, seeking a two-state solution.
As the current Palestinian campaign of terrorism against Israel is about to enter its third month, it is still not clear to many what the Palestinians are trying to achieve. The Palestinians cannot even agree on a name for their campaign. Some are referring to it as an “intifada,” while others are describing it as a “Habba Jamahiriya” [“popular puff,” or “flurry”].
The Palestinians also have not been able to agree on the motives behind the stabbing, shooting, firebombing and car-ramming attacks. Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas has repeatedly claimed during the past few weeks that the terrorists are setting out to kill Jews out of “despair and frustration” and the lack of a “political horizon.” But Abbas seems intentionally to be ignoring that it is he and his Palestinian Authority who are responsible — together with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian factions — for the violence, as a result of their daily incitement against Israel.
This is yet another instance in which anyone could have predicted what was going to happen. Throughout the past year, Abbas has been telling his people that Israel was planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and “change the Arab and Islamic character and identity” of Jerusalem. He condemned Jews for “defiling the Aqsa Mosque with their filthy feet.” Abbas, his spokesmen and PA-controlled media outlets also have also repeatedly been telling Palestinians that Israel is committing “war crimes” and “summary executions” of innocent Palestinians.
This is, as Abbas knows, exactly the type of incitement that prompts Palestinian teenagers to grab a knife, run out into the street and murder the first Jew they see. Those young Palestinians are also tragic victims of the poisonous campaign of the inflammatory anti-Israeli language emanating from Palestinian leaders such as Abbas, mosque preachers, news outlets and social media.
Contrary to Abbas’s outrage, no one has yet found even one terrorist who claimed to have attacked a Jew out of “despair and frustration” at the “lack of a political horizon.” If you look through the social media accounts of these young terrorists, many have said that they set out to kill Jews to “defend” Al-Aqsa Mosque. They seem to have been influenced by the romantic notion of Abbas’s repeated fictitious claims that Jews were plotting to destroy the mosque, followed by high-flown fantasies of themselves as heroes charging forth to rescue it.
A public opinion poll published last week refutes Abbas’s claim that Palestinians are committing terrorist attacks out of “despair and frustration.” The poll, conducted by the Watan Center for Studies and Research, found that 48% of the Palestinians interviewed believe that the real goal of the “intifada” is to “liberate all of Palestine.” In other words, approximately half of Palestinians believe that the goal of the “intifada” should lead to the destruction of Israel.
What is notable, is that only 11% of respondents said that the true goal of the “intifada” should be to “liberate” only those territories captured by Israel in 1967. Another 12% of Palestinians said they believe that the goal of the “intifada” was to release prisoners held by Israel.
The results of the poll, which covered 1,167 Palestinians above the age of 18, show that a majority of Palestinians continue to seek the destruction of Israel. The poll shows that only a few Palestinians see only the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem as the future Palestinian state. They want the “intifada” to replace Israel with a Palestinian state — preferably, one that now would be ruled by Hamas and jihadi organizations such as Islamic State and Al-Qaeda.
These Palestinians do not see a difference between, say, Ma’aleh Adumim, a “settlement” on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and any city inside Israel. One only needs to look at reports in the Palestinian media to see that Tel Aviv, Rishon Lezion, Kiryat Gat and Ra’anana are all considered “settlements.” These reports also show that Palestinians do not see a difference between a Jew living in the West Bank and Israel — instead, they are all depicted as “settlers” and “colonialists.”
None of the Palestinians interviewed for the poll complained about “despair and frustration,” or the lack of a “political horizon.” Obviously, they are driven by hatred for Jews and Israel. They do not, however, have a problem with “settlements” or “poor living conditions.” They have a problem with Israel’s existence. A majority believes that Israel can — and should — be destroyed. They are not, as Palestinian leaders claim, seeking a two-state solution.
According to the poll, more than 75% of Palestinians support the use of violence against Israel. More than 44% of respondents support the use of firearms against Israel; 18% are in favor of using knives to kill Jews, and another 14% would like to see Palestinians use stones. This contradicts Abbas’s claim that the Palestinians want a “peaceful and popular” uprising.
Another noteworthy finding of the poll is that 72% of Palestinians want the current “intifada” to continue. In other words, an overwhelming majority of Palestinians would like to see their youths carry out more terror attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers. They want to see more terror attacks because their leaders and journalists are telling them that those who kill Jews are “heroes” and “martyrs” who will have streets, squares, schools and tournaments named after them.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who visited Israel and Ramallah last week in a bid to end the Palestinian terror attacks, was unable to make any progress. Even before he arrived in Ramallah to meet with President Abbas, Kerry was strongly condemned for referring to the Palestinian violence as “terrorism.” Palestinians who demonstrated not far from Abbas’s office shouted slogans condemning the U.S. Administration for its attempt to stop the terror attacks against Israelis and called for boycotting Kerry. The protesters also declared Kerry persona non grata in Ramallah.
Kerry and the U.S. Administration should know by now that the Palestinians are waging war on Israel not because of “despair and frustration,” but because they aspire to destroy Israel, as the results of the recent poll show.
The goal of the Palestinians is the destruction of Israel. This fact is something that other Western parties need to understand — that the Palestinian “struggle” is mainly aimed at eliminating Israel, and not “the establishment of a Palestinian state that would live in peace and security alongside Israel.” The recent poll should be translated into English and distributed among all those “pro-Palestinian” groups that continue to shout about the conflict being the result of Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem.
Today, it is clear that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not really about the “occupation” that began with the creation of Israel in 1948. The last three Palestinian “intifadas” and previous Israeli-Arab wars had (and still have) one goal: to see Israel removed off the map.
In light of the EU’s recent settlement labeling guidelines, PM calls for temporarily suspended diplomatic contact with EU bodies and their representatives until reevaluation is complete.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday instructed the Foreign Ministry to reassess the involvement of European Union institutions in the diplomatic process between Israel and the Palestinians.
Until the reevaluation process is complete, the premier ordered that diplomatic contact with EU bodies and their representatives be suspended.
Netanyahu, who also serves as foreign minister, issued the directive in light of the EU’s recent decision to publish legislation guidelines on labeling Israeli settlement products.
However, the Prime Minister’s Office underlined in a statement that Israel maintains diplomatic ties with individual European countries such as Germany, the UK and France.
In response to Netanyahu’s move, EU Ambassador in Israel Lars Faaborg Andersen expressed “surprise” over the prime minister’s decision.
“We found out about it from the media and we are trying to clarify what it means,” he said.
Earlier in November, Jerusalem decided to suspend diplomatic dialogue with the EU for a few weeks to strongly protest Brussel’s decision to issue the guidelines that allow member states to place consumer labels “Not made in Israel” on products produced over the Green Line.
The EU has consistently downplayed the impact of the guidelines as a technical matter. A EU commission spokesman said they would simply “ensure the uniform application of the rules concerning the indication of origin of Israeli settlement products. The aim is to ensure effective implementation of existing EU legislation.”
Since 2003, the EU has placed a numerical code on Israeli imports to allow customs to distinguish between products made within the Green Line and those that are produced beyond it.
Products produced in east Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the West Bank are excluded from the Israel Free Trade agreement with the EU.
The guidelines extend that process one step further, providing member states legal instructions as to the placement of consumer labels on relevant products to inform European consumers that they are not made in Israel.
Tovah Lazaroff contributed to this report.
(The views expressed in this article may, or may not, be mine. They do not necessarily reflect those of any sane person or entity. — DM)
Our most prestigious universities now require diversity training for everyone coddled by un-Islamic aberrations based on Christian, Jewish, sexist and white privilege. Obama, bravely leading as always from the front, will follow them to combat Islamophobic speech and thought which He recently decreed to be felonies.
This Thanksgiving, President Obama is calling for Americans to lend a helping hand to another group of pilgrims fleeing persecution.
“Nearly four centuries after the Mayflower set sail, the world is still full of pilgrims – men and women who want nothing more than the chance for a safer, better future for themselves and their families,” Obama said in his weekly address Thursday. “What makes America America is that we offer that chance.”
Note: Although much of the following is true, parts are not. For example, even in Obama’s America Islamophobic thought is not yet a felony and the tale about Sally Snookums related toward the end remains the stuff of fantasy. In Muslim and incipient Muslim countries reality is different, so we need to emulate them. That will be change that we Obama can believe in.
With their campuses rocked by social justice protests, anxious Ivy League presidents are trying to appease campus radicals with huge payouts to left-wing identity programs. Peter Salovey, the president of Yale, apologized to protesters (“we failed you”) and wrote a campus-wide letter promising to create a new “university center” for the study of “race ethnicity, and other aspects of social identity.” He also pledged to double the budget for the African American, Native American, Asian American, and Hispanic cultural centers, and to devote new resources to “educating our community about race, ethnicity, diversity, and inclusion.”
Not to be outdone, Brown University President Christina Paxson has answered protests by unveiling a $100 million program for creating “a just and inclusive campus community.” Among the budget items: “expand mentoring resources for students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and first generation college students”; create “workshops” to “foster greater awareness and sensitivity on issues of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity and expression”; and “promote university-wide research and academic programming on Power, Privilege, Identity and Structural Racism.”
The rest of Obama’s America
Since academia is only part of the problem, the wise humanitarian outreach programs undertaken there (with the exception of those to comfort LGBTQ+ students which Muslims consider offensive) must be expanded to reach all problem people and areas. Doing so is Obama’s principal duty as America’s Commander in Chief and Supreme Leader. I have altered the excerpt from the article at The American Interest quoted above to reflect what Obama and His friends would probably try to do if they thought they could get away with it:
With many states rocked by Islamophobia and demands that widows and three year old orphans be banned, President Obama is increasing payouts to such anti-discrimination groups as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Muslim-identity programs. Allegedly “radical” mosques such as those shown below will also be given badly needed infusions of Federal funds.
Obama has (again) apologized to Islamists (“we failed you”) and promised to create new state centers for the study of religious ethnicity and other aspects of social identity. He has also pledged to at least double the budgets for Islamic cultural centers, including those at the mosques indicated above, and to devote new resources to educating our community about religious and racial ethnicity, diversity, and inclusion.
He has also unveiled state-wide programs for creating just and inclusive communities.Among the budget items: expand mosques to provide increased mentoring resources for Muslim youth; create diversity workshops with mandatory attendance by all deemed to be on paths to becoming Islamophobic felons, to foster greater awareness and sensitivity on issues of religion, peace, ethnicity and expression; and to promote state-wide research and academic programming on Power, Privilege, Religious Identity and other types of Structural Racism.
These (along with His historic nuke deal with The Islamic State Republic of Iran) will be His most enduring legacies.
There is also hope in Obama’s America for the few refugees who may be neither widows nor three year old orphans.
Adorable, cuddly Syrian refugees to a good home. Attention liberal millionaires. Do you want your very own gang of Syrian Refugees (TM) to loiter around your home, throw things at you and beat you up?
Here are a whole bunch for you to take home. Yes, I’m looking at you, J.K. Rowling. Or Isaac Herzog. There’s so many that every passionately outraged leftist bigwig can have his own bunch. You just better be ready to cook for them and bring them everything while they throw it in your face.
You’ll notice the shortage of actual women and kids. The media makes a point of focusing on those, but the majority are young men. Just like Obama’s “unaccompanied children” border rush. But those are facts and we don’t need facts. Just outrage and lots of love.
So take them in. Step up for the cause. The Hungarian police will happily ship a dozen angry Syrian refugees to your home. What you do with them or what they do with you, is up to you.
The influx of more than one million asylum seekers from Africa, Asia and the Middle East is placing unprecedented strain on Germany’s healthcare system.
Hospitals, clinics and emergency rooms across Germany are being filled to capacity with migrants suffering maladies of all kinds, and medical personnel, including thousands of volunteers, are increasingly complaining of burnout.
Diseases are also reappearing that have not been seen in Germany for years. German public health officials are now on the lookout for Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever, diphtheria, Ebola, hepatitis, HIV/AIDS, malaria, measles, meningitis, mumps, polio, scabies, tetanus, tuberculosis, typhus and whooping cough. As refugee shelters fill to overflowing, doctors are also on high alert for mass outbreaks of influenza and Norovirus. [Emphasis added.]
Compounding the challenge, tens of thousands of migrants arriving in Germany — particularly migrant children — have not been immunized, and German doctors are finding that needed vaccines are not readily available due to a lack of supply. Some German parents are panicking that there are not enough vaccines to immunize their own children.
. . . .
German hospitals are also being forced to hire a virtual army of interpreters so that doctors can communicate with asylum seekers, who speak dozens of languages, dialects and variants.
At the same time, German hospitals are increasing security to protect doctors and nurses from violent attacks by migrants who are unhappy with the medical treatment they are receiving.
Sweeden, also a haven of happiness for Muslim refugees, has the right idea. Sadly, some object. The Public Service Director of Sweeden’s public television has responded to their Islamophobic nastiness:
The Public Service director, Safa Safiyari, who recently introduced Dirawi to a large press gathering, came to Sweden at the age of 14. In newspaper articles, he has spoken about how he does not feel “fancy” enough for the Swedish archipelago; and how, in 2001, when he got to do current affairs shows for young people about “all the injustices in Sweden,” it felt as if it were revenge for all the injustices he said he has experienced in Sweden and that still characterize his life.
The announcement that a person such as Dirawi, who professes to be of the Islamic faith and who according to Islamic scholars must believe that the celebration of the birth of Christ is a heathen tradition, will be Christmas Host, sparked widespread expressions of anger and disappointment on social media. Comments were posted on Twitter, such as: “Public Television has declared war on Christian Sweden by choosing Muslim Gina Dirawi as Christmas Host! It is shameful!” And, “If things continue down this road, by next Christmas, Christmas ham will be banned.”
Safa Safiyari told the daily Göteborgs-Posten, that Swedish Public Television had been prepared for all kinds of reactions: “We have chosen Gina Dirawi as Christmas Host based on her competence, her comedic talents and experience in large television broadcasts. When we hire our Christmas Hosts, religious belief is not something we inquire about.” [Emphasis added.]
In order to take full advantage of the great opportunities coming to our shores, we need to help Islamophobes by jailing and reeducating them to make them understand that Islam is the true religion of peace; all others just pretend to be and are therefore fake.
Progress is already being made
In Obama’s America, Yes We Can and We Can’t Wait! Here’s just one small but hopeful example of what we have already done and will do again: a young Islamophobe named Sally Snookums was successfully reeducated and learned to apologize for her Islamophobic expressions of displeasure at having been raped by a Muslim. Here are pictures of Sally before and after her reeducation:
Before
After
Just as Sally has been cured of Islamophobia and no longer goes about demanding to be raped, there is hope for all who wish to be true feminists. Don’t forget: Muslims are kind and generous, asking nothing for themselves. They only want to guide and help us to reclaim and restore the best of what has sadly become a decadent civilization.
The future of Obama’s America is bright
Once Obama’s sacred mission has been accomplished, there will be no more talk of “Islamic invasions” and “riots.” We are completely safe and have nothing to fear but fear itself and the Islamophobic FBI.
The FBI has roughly 1,000 active Islamic State probes inside the U.S. and new reports have revealed that at least 48 of those suspects are considered so high-risk that the bureau has deployed elite surveillance teams to track them.
The squads, known as mobile surveillance teams or MST are following the men and women, who are believed to be radicalized, 24 hours a day in case they plan to commit any acts of terrorism, Fox News reported.
With the help of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation — “whose founding charter seeks to propagate ‘legitimate jihad’ and ‘the norms of Islamic Shari’ah,'” our vetting processwill prove to be just as successful and unnecessary as it has been in Europe; all peaceful Muslim widows, their three year old orphans and everyone else will be greeted, not spurned.
Conclusions
Since in Obama’s America the security threats posed by Islamophobia are also well on their way to resolution, we will soon succeed in our quest for the happiness of Eurabia. What a blessing it will be!
Nevertheless, much still remains for Obama’s America to accomplish. We must continue to devote our undivided attention to the perils of climate change — what a powerful rebuke that will be to such perpetrators of senseless, random workplace violence as the Non Islamic State!
We must also continue our putsch push for common sense gun control, while focusing on women’s health as required by Sharia Law and the Holy Quran upon which it is divinely based. Then, and only then, can we be truly proud of our country.
Finally, here is Grandpa Jones’ well deserved tribute to Obama:
An Islamic State victory parade (Photo: Video screenshot)
The downing of a Russian fighter jet on its way back from an Islamic State bombing mission has put Turkey in the crosshairs of scrutiny regarding their role in facilitating the success of the Islamic State.
Turkey’s arms transfers to Al-Qaeda-linked Islamist jihadis in Syria has been long-documented and largely ignored by the Western media. Similarly, the fact the Turkey has been the top financial sponsor of Hamas since 2012, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan arranging for the transfer of $250-300 million to the terrorist group annually, is another inconvenient fact that has been studiously ignored.
This summer, a major raid by the U.S. on an Islamic State safe house in Syria this summer gleaned large amounts of intelligence linking Turkey to the Islamic State. In the words of one senior Western official, the connection is now “undeniable.”
As investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed writes, “In a rare insight into this brazen state-sponsorship of ISIS, a year agoNewsweekreported the testimony of a former ISIS communications technician, who had travelled to Syria to fight the regime of Bashir al-Assad.
“The former ISIS fighter told Newsweek that Turkey was allowing ISIS trucks from Raqqa to cross the ‘border, through Turkey and then back across the border to attack Syrian Kurds in the city of Serekaniye in northern Syria in February.’ ISIS militants would freely travel ‘through Turkey in a convoy of trucks,’ and stop ‘at safehouses along the way.’
“The former ISIS communication technician also admitted that he would routinely ‘connect ISIS field captains and commanders from Syria with people in Turkey on innumerable occasions,’ adding that ‘the people they talked to were Turkish officials… ISIS commanders told us to fear nothing at all because there was full cooperation with the Turks.’”
Trucks, arms and fighters are not the only commodities that are flowing freely between Turkey and the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The life-blood of the Islamic State, crude oil, which serves to finance the terror group’s operation, is being sold in Turkey. Estimates of ISIS oil sales in Turkey to date are as high as $1 billion.
Senior Iraqi politician Mowaffak Baqer al-Rubaie announced yesterday that the Islamic State is selling oil through Turkish black-market channels at $20 per barrel, less than half the current market price.
Rubaie also pointedly commented that Turkey is the recruitment hub for all new Islamic State fighters – both foreign and Arab. “The new recruits meet with ISIS officials in Istanbul and are then transferred over the Turkish borders with Iraq, to Mosul, and over the border with Syria to Raqqa,” he said.
Rubaie also blamed Turkish security forces for “studiously ignoring the transfer of ISIS terrorists from Turkey to north Iraq and Syria. [In addition,] the wounded of the ISIS gangs … are getting treatment and medical care in the hospitals of Turkey.”
Besides their ideological similarities, Erdogan and his ruling AK Islamist party view the Islamic State as an easy ticket to smashing their nemesis, the Kurds, an ethnic group vying for independence from Turkey. As one AK party member said, “They are like us, fighting against seven great powers in the War of Independence.” Another senior party member said, “Rather than the PKK [Kurdistan Working Party] on the other side, I would rather have ISIL as a neighbor.”
Hundreds of flash drives and documents were seized in the summer raid on the Islamic State safe house in Syria last summer. At the time, a senior Western official predicted that “the links [between Turkey and ISIS] are already so clear that they could end up having profound policy implications for the relationship between us and Ankara.”
Yet, this has clearly not been the case. Turkey, a member of NATO, has been flaunting its support of the Islamic State under Western leaders’ noses. After finally agreeing to get involved in the fight between coalition forces and the Islamic State (after years of sitting out the fight militarily), Turkish planes have mainly used the bombing raids to attack Kurdish forces in Syria, Iraq and Turkey.
And the oil keeps flowing, filling Turkey’s coffers. As Professor David Graeber of the London School of Economics notes, “Had Turkey placed the same kind of absolute blockade on ISIS territories as they did on Kurdish-held parts of Syria… that blood-stained ‘caliphate’ would long since have collapsed — and arguably, the Paris attacks may never have happened. And if Turkey were to do the same today, ISIS would probably collapse in a matter of months. Yet, has a single western leader called on Erdoğan to do this?”
Sweden has been forced to announce it can’t take any more of the migrant invasion. Meanwhile an interesting statistic turned up by Ingrid Carlqvist in Gatestone shows that even those whose asylum applications are rejected, and Sweden is fairly liberal in that regard, are not going anywhere.
October 16: Internal police documents were revealed that show 70% of people who have their asylum application rejected ignore the decision and stay illegally in Sweden. Of the 9,000 deportation cases sent to the police by the Immigration Service this year, 70% had vanished from their registered addresses, and had left the police completely nonplussed. Patrik Engström, head of the Swedish border police, told Swedish public radio, “This means we put out an all-points bulletin for these people but then do not actively look for them. We wait for tips and things like that. We do not have the resources to go out and look in a random fashion.” Police now have 21,000 deportation cases piled up.
Now Sweden is one of those countries that has residence registration. This is an alien idea to most Americans. It means that you must register where you live with the government. As the Swedish Tax Agency states, “You are in the register until the day you move abroad or die.”
Now it’s supposed to be technically rather difficult for someone to just live in Sweden without being on the books. Sweden is not the United States. Like a lot of European countries, it has a tightly regimented bureaucracy. And yet, also like a lot of these countries, the influx of migrants has long since made that bureaucracy and its databases meaningless. A change of address is supposed to be reported within one week.
But then again, I doubt that the Swedish authorities want to deal with this. So they don’t. That is how no-go zones form.
And then the activists protest on behalf of the migrants and they somehow no doubt will keep on collecting assorted benefits even while they remain in the country illegally.
TEL AVIV – News reports in the Arab world claim Russia is planning to escalate its military involvement in Syria by sending in ground troops and increasing airstrikes, according to translations provided by the Middle East Research Institute (MEMRI).
Syrian and pro-Syrian Lebanese media have published reports over the past two weeks claiming that Russia is launching a new stage of its offensive in Syria, with December witnessing unprecedented escalation in which a ground operation will be launched. “December will be hot on the ground in Syria,” Lebanese daily Al Akhbar reported.
In a talk with the Russia’s Ministry of Defense on November 20, President Vladimir Putin said that the current offensive in Syria is “not enough to clear Syria of armed and terrorist groups and defend Russia from a possible terrorist attack,” adding his hope that the next stages of the offensive will lead to better results.
According to MEMRI, Russia’s decision to increase its involvement in Syria is likely motivated by the upcoming UN supervised meeting on January 1, 2016, in which Syrian regime and opposition representatives are set to negotiate. Russia and its allies Syria and Iran are hoping that the next stage of the offensive will earn them “bargaining chips” ahead of the meeting.
A spokesperson in Kremlin denied the charge that Russia will deploy ground troops in Syria. However, Arab media recently reported that the situation on the ground in Syria has already escalated, with Russian infantry forces being dispatched and the expansion of Russia’s aerial campaign.
According to a Russian report by the Russia defense ministry, Russia will also deploy new artillery forces in the region. The defense minister further announced that the Russian navy has begun shelling Syrian targets from both the Mediterranean and the Caspian seas.
A columnist at the Syrian government’s daily, Al-Watan, reported that “the statement by President Putin that the current operations in Syria are insufficient means that there are preparations for major future activity, namely dispatching additional ground troops.”
Another article in the same newspaper titled “Russia War: Phase Two” stated:
“The Russians knew from the beginning that airstrikes alone would not be enough to secure a victory and that there is a need for different management of operations and greater coordination… All this indicates that Russia will increase its involvement. We are facing a new stage that does not cancel out what came before it but is part of an open war with clear waypoints… The war will definitely not end quickly, [but] we are facing months that will not be like the months that came before.”
MEMRI documented that a third article in Al-Akhbar reported:
“December will be hot on the ground in Syria. All signs [indicate] that the coming months will see an unprecedented escalation.” The article further asserted that, following the Russian plane incident in Egypt and the Paris attacks, the international atmosphere will promote Russia’s escalation in Syria “without incurring a torrent of global condemnations.”
The bombing of the Turkmen villages near the Turkish border is considered to be a red line of Turkey. Al Akhbar assessed that since the Turkmen conquest is necessary for gaining full control of the Syrian coast, Russia had decided to ignore Turkey’s red lines and two weeks ago began a massive offensive together with the Syrian army in Jabal Turkman.
“Today we can safely say that the Syria war is headed for a new stage, characterized mainly by the Syrian army and its allies escalating their joint military attack to unprecedented levels,” the newspaper reported. “What has happened in the Latakia area in the past two days [i.e. the Syrian/Russian bombing of the Turkmens near the Turkish border] is nothing but a small preamble.”
An editorial in the pro-Syrian Lebanese daily Al-Safir opined that Russian ground operations were highly likely, given that introducing more Iranian troops would anger the Saudis and would not be feasible with the current trend of establishing a military alliance with the West, particularly with France, to combat ISIS.
The Syrian newspaper also said that Russia’s goal was to restabilize the regime in Syria and block other regional forces, including Turkey in particular, from preying on Syria’s current state of weakness. “[Russia’s] main goal in the war, which could require dispatching ground troops and more jets, is perhaps to shape a regional Arab order in the East under Russian patronage and to exclude Russia’s opponents [from the Middle East].”
Additionally, the Kuwaiti daily Al-Rai reported that in the past week and a half the “Russian infantry, aided by tanks and jets, [had] participated for the first time” in fighting against opposition forces in northwest Syria.
Poor Silly Russia! She Doesn’t Realize the West is Surrounding Her for Her Own Good Will Hollande’s outreach to Moscow break the vicious circle of Atlantic geopolitical nihilism?
Symbolized by French President François Hollande’s visit the other day to the Kremlin, one of the most stunning results of IS’s attacks in Paris was the immediate push it gave some members of the Western alliance to reach out to Russia. IS’s blood lust may have created the circumstances for the beginning of a potentially significant rapprochement between leery geopolitical areas.
How far this rapprochement will go, remains to be seen.
Though it wasn’t his intention, former NATO General-Secretary Anders Fogh Rasmussen earlier this month reminded us that, hidden in a squabble over Europe’s post-Cold War history, the obstacles in the way of wide-scale cooperation between Russia and the West—including not just IS and Syria but also Ukraine—are structural and ideological, rather than merely political.
Decrying ‘The Kremlin’s Tragic miscalculation’, Rasmussen lodges the blame for the present impasse with Moscow: Russia ‘fundamentally misjudged the West’s intentions and created an entirely unnecessary confrontation that undermines both sides’ interests.’
By vacuuming up the former Warsaw Pact states of Central and Eastern Europe (and three former Soviet Socialist Republics) in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Rasmussen argues, NATO and the EU meant Russia no harm. On the contrary, they were doing Moscow a favour, creating an arc of peace and prosperity on Russia’s Western borders from which Russia has profited immensely.
Blinded by zero-sum thinking, the Kremlin couldn’t see this. Rather, just as the capstone of the West’s win-win geopolitics was being set in place in the form of the EU’s Association Agreement with Ukraine, the Kremlin inexplicably restarted the Cold War.
The liberal Rasmussen is flabbergasted. How could the Kremlin fail to see that Russia’s future lay in ‘working with Western powers to enhance shared prosperity’ rather than geopolitical confrontation?
The former NATO general-secretary repeats the usual pieties about strengthening democracy and human rights being the only goal of the EU’s Eastern Neighborhood Policy, with its alleged ‘open door’ towards Russia. But his account never ventures an answer to the question: Why did Moscow fail to see the West’s intentions for what they—factually, objectively, empirically—were? Why did it see NATO and, later, EU expansion as a threat?
Lacking an answer, all Rasmussen can do is assure us that. ‘Russia’s interpretation was patently wrong—and I can say so with full authority’, apparently unaware of the solipsism in reference to his role as Danish prime minister and chair of the 2002 EU summit.
‘The truth is that the young democracies of Central and Eastern Europe sought to join the EU and NATO […] because they longed for peace, progress and prosperity. It was those countries’ ambitions, not some vendetta against Russia, that drove EU and NATO expansion.’
But are we really to believe that NATO and EU expansion was an act of charity rather than politics? That decisions about the alliance’s future lay not with leaders in existing NATO capitals but in the hands of supplicants for membership? That Prague, Warsaw and Tallinn were in the driver’s seat rather than Washington and Brussels?
The answer, of course, is no. In fact, Rasmussen perfectly expresses what Chatham House expert Richard Sakwa calls the ‘geopolitical nihilism’ of the West’s “New Atlanticism, the ideological manifestation of a Western alliance both more militant in advancing its interests and more culturally aggressive’ than the old NATO.”
Of course, Rasmussen gets some things right. One of them is that NATO expansion had nothing to do with threatening or encircling Russia. It didn’t. It had everything to do with justifying that organization’s existence after the purpose behind its 1949 creation—deterring a Soviet invasion of Western Europe—had been fulfilled. For NATO to survive, it had to expand—not for the sake of deterring a Russian threat to Europe, since there was none, but in order to preserve the ‘Atlantic Community’, that consensus of interests between the elites (and sometimes the societies) of Western Europe and North America that the Cold War had midwifed, but which myriad forces now threatened to dissolve. (The high-flown rhetoric that surrounded the launch of the Euro about the EU becoming an independent pole in a multipolar world seems quaint today.)
Faced with the prospect of extinction, NATO reneged on the commitments made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989 and set about its expansion plans—not to ‘threaten’ Russia but to save itself and a united North Atlantic community, from extinction. That Moscow (along with many distinguished Western analysts who warned publicly against it, including George Kennan, author of the original 1940s ‘containment theory’) objected, was of no consequence: what mattered was the preservation of the alliance as an end in itself.
Western leaders were telling the truth when they said this had nothing to do with Russia, but the result was no less tragic. By failing to order their priorities, by trying to pursue two incompatible ends (to preserve the North Atlantic security system while proclaiming NATO’s desire to work with Russia as a partner rather than an adversary), US and EU leaders sowed the seeds of the present confrontation.
NATO expanded until expansion itself summoned into existence the threat it originally lacked; the EU shelved its plans for an independent European defence capability and folded its defense and security policy into NATO in the 2007 Lisbon Treaty. This effectively militarized the EU and transformed what were once two discrete and separate organizations—NATO and the EU—into different faces of a single Euro-Atlantic community. European statesmen learned to cultivate that doublespeak we’re so familiar with today, whereby Europe would become ‘stable, peaceful, whole and free’—by excluding Europe’s greatest power.
Rasmussen complains that despite two decades of Western ‘goodwill’ Russia is ‘far from our strategic partner; it is our strategic problem’. Little wonder.
It’s not just that no great power in history has allowed other powers to dictate the scope and nature of its interests. In the Western Hemisphere the United States never has and today, China shows that things will be no different in East Asia.
Rather, the heart of the new Atlanticism is about a certain closing of the North Atlantic (and especially European) mind which, in Sakwa’s words, makes the new Atlantic system ‘increasingly unable to reflect critically on the geopolitical and power implications of its own actions’. Its founding liberal assumptions become an ‘“ideological project’ of universalizing dimensions that effectively denies those excluded from its ranks the capacity to define—and ultimately to possess—their own interests.”
In the end, it was this that provoked the Ukraine crisis. Russia’s longstanding historical, cultural, political, economic and strategic interests were simply not considered worthy of consideration.
Today, the deeply intertwined structures of NATO and the EU have coalesced into an ‘empire by invitation’, where no invitation ever can or will be addressed to the Kremlin, and according to whose norms Russia in its present form not only will always fall short but in fact cut the figure of a scarcely legitimate mendicant at Europe’s door.
The tragedy here, as Rasmussen’s muscular rhetoric makes clear, is that the liberal-universalist logic of the new Atlanticism not only generates conflict with those who don’t share it, but also renders the pursuit of compromise—the basic task of classical diplomacy—conceptually and practically impossible. Diplomacy becomes appeasement and ‘appeasement will not lead to peace; a conciliatory approach will only prolong the conflict’, Rasmussen writes.
‘The sooner the West convinces Russia that it will not back down, the sooner the conflict will be over. Only then will Russia return to the path of constructive cooperation with NATO, the EU and US—and a more prosperous future’.
Thus, the West’s expectations of conformity acquire undertones of threatened force. Relations with countries outside this neo-Atlantic empire of the mind become a trial not only of strength but of armed ideologies—and when the other side’s ideology cannot be discerned, it is invented, as many Western commentators have sought to do by invoking ‘Russian imperialism’ or an exaggerated ‘Eurasianism’ to explain Russian foreign policy. Indeed, when Sakwa writes that ‘sanctions, media campaigns, and covert operations are all part of the comprehensive attack on outsiders and antagonists’, he means those going on in the West—not Russia.
Hollande’s visit to Moscow opens up the possibility of reviving a pragmatic coordination of interests between Russia and France with a long history behind it, and which, depending on French boldness and Russian flexibility, has the real potential to alter the balance of power and influence in Europe. By acting independently of Washington, Brussels and Berlin, Paris’s outreach to the Kremlin has momentarily transcended the logic of the ‘New Atlanticism’.
Yet whatever momentum Hollande’s visit may have created, hopes (or fears) of a ‘grand bargain’ between Russia and the West on Ukraine and Syria would appear premature. For the foreseeable future, real geopolitical cooperation between the two may in fact have become impossible.
The agreement is expected to significantly stem the tide of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan seeking asylum in other countries who are hesitant to let them in their borders. (AP Photo)
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