Sean Hannity Full One-on-One Interview with Donald Trump (2/18/2016), Fox News via You Tube, February 18, 2016
(Trump discusses the Israel – “Palestine” situation and the mess Obama has made beginning at 11:05 during the interview. The rest is very good too. — DM)
Trump, Conservative Ideolgues and Populists, Dan Miller’s Blog, January 24, 2016
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
Conservative ideologues want to keep things essentially as they are, making only marginal and generally ineffective changes. Populists want to change things to be more consistent with what “we the people” want. Often, what we the people want is better than what our “leaders” want or try to provide. Under these definitions, Trump is a populist, not a conservative ideologue. That’s good.
According to Dictionary. com, these are attributes of “conservatives:”
Disposed to preserve existing conditions, restore traditional ones, and to limit change.
According to the same source, “populism” means:
Any of various, often anti-establishment or anti-intellectual political movements or philosophies that offer unorthodox solutions or policies and appeal to the common person rather than according with traditional party or partisan ideologies.
Grass-roots democracy; working class activism; egalitarianism.
National Review recently published an entire special edition devoted to attacking Trump on the ground that he is insufficiently conservative. Whom did National Review support in 2008 and 2012? Guess or go to the link. He did not win.
Writing at PJ Media about National Review’s special issue, Roger L. Simon argued that
Many of their arguments revolve around whether Trump is a “true conservative.” Instead of wading into the definitional weeds on that one — as they say on the Internet, YMMV [Your Milleage May Vary] — allow me to address the macro question of what the purpose of ideology actually is. For me, it is to provide a theoretical basis on which to act, a set of principles. But that’s all it is. It’s not a religion, although it can be mistaken for one (communism). [Insert and Emphasis added.]
Ideology should function as a guide, not a faith, because in the real world you may have to violate it, when the rubber meets the road, as they say. For those of us in the punditocracy, the rubber rarely if ever meets the road. All we have is our theories. They are the road for us. If we’re lucky, we’re paid for them. In that case, we hardly ever vary them. It would be bad for business.
Trump’s perspective was the reverse. The rubber was constantly meeting the road. In fact, it rarely did anything else. He always had to change and adjust. Ideological principles were just background noise, barely audible sounds above the jack hammers. [Emphasis added.]
When National Review takes up arms against Trump, it is men and women of theory against a man of action. The public, if we are to believe the polls, prefers the action. It’s not hard to see why. The theory has failed and become increasingly disconnected from the people. It doesn’t go anywhere and hasn’t for years. I’m guilty of it too. (Our current president is 150% a man of theory.) Too many people — left and right — are drunk on ideology. [Emphasis added.]
Were the “old White men” who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence, and those who fought for the colonies in the Revolutionary War, conservative ideologues? Did they want to preserve existing conditions under the King of England, his governors and military? Or were they pragmatic populists, as well as men of action, who opposed the King’s establishment and offered unorthodox solutions appealing to the “common” people? It took a lot of pushing from such revolutionaries as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, but the pragmatic populists won.
I don’t want to suggest that Donald Trump is this generation’s George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin. Times are now sufficiently different that doing so would be frivolous. Among other differences, there should be no need to go to war now because we still have an electoral process, flawed though it may be. Nor are we ruled by an unelected, hereditary king; we are ruled by an elected president who considers Himself a king, ignores or twists the Constitution to fit His needs, often ideological, and acts by royal executive decree when the Congress declines to do His bidding or goes about it too slowly to suit Him.
Be that as it may, what’s wrong with the populist notion encouraging members of the governed class — the “vulgarians” — to have greater voices in how they are governed than those who govern them, often to their own benefit, while mocking those whom they govern? Sometimes we the people make mistakes and sometimes we get it right. Ditto our dear leaders. Why not give us a chance for a change?
Into which category — conservative ideologue or populist — if either, does Donald Trump fit, do we need him now and, if so, why?
Here’s the 2012 video Whittle referred to in the video above:
Which of the current Republican candidates has taken, or is the most likely to take, positions comparable to those suggested in the above video?
In September of last year, I wrote an article titled To bring America back we need to break some stuff. There, I quoted Daniel Greenfield for the following proposition:
What we have now is not a movement because we have not defined what it is we hope to win. We have built reactive movements to stave off despair. We must do better than that. We must not settle for striving to restore some idealized lost world. Instead we must dream big. We must think of the nation we want and of the civilization we want to live in and what it will take to build it. [Emphasis added.]
Our enemies have set out big goals. We must set out bigger ones. We must become more than conservatives. If we remain conservatives, then all we will have is the America we live in now. And even if our children and grandchildren become conservatives, that is the culture and nation they will fight to conserve. We must become revolutionaries. [Emphasis added.]
I also suggested that if we don’t seek real — even revolutionary — change we might as well try to join the European Union. That would keep things pretty much as they now are and would, therefore, be more the “conservative” than the populist thing to do.
Our unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy could merge with that of the EU and our Congress could merge with the impotent EU Parliament.
Here’s a new Trifecta video about a proposal by the Governor of Texas to amend the Constitution which, he contends, has been broken by those who have improperly increased the power of the Federal Government while diminishing that of the states.
The Constitution is not broken. It’s just been poorly interpreted, twisted and otherwise ignored. In recent years Obama — who claims to be a “constitutional scholar” — has done more to ignore, twist and misinterpret it than any other president I can remember. Depending on what amendments might be adopted and ratified, an Obama clone (Hillary Clinton?) might well do the same; perhaps even worse. A president can personally stop that process by not doing it. A president can halt poor judicial interpretations only by nominating judges unlikely to make them.
Conclusions
Trump is not perfect; nobody is. However, he says what he thinks rather than spew multiculturally correct pablum. Few are sufficiently thick-skinned to do that. A “vulgarian,” he is not politically correct. Others are because they don’t want to offend. Trump recognizes that Islam is the religion of war, death and oppression and does not want the further Islamisation of America, which is already proceeding apace. Few leaders of either party are willing to take that position, mean it and act on it effectively if elected.
We are mad, not insane. We want to give we the people a bigger and stronger voice in how and by whom we are governed. If, by voting to make Trump our President, we make a big mistake so be it. Worse candidates with fewer qualifications have been elected and reelected. During His first and second term as President, Obama has gone far in His quest to transform America fundamentally and in the wrong directions. If Trump does not come sufficiently close to correcting course to meet our expectations during his first term, we won’t vote to reelect him. In the meantime,
Opps. I almost forgot this
Madam Hillary is on the right side of herstory, Dan Miller’s Blog, October 25, 2015
(The views expressed in this article are mine, and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors.– DM)
Lies are good and truth is bad because truth would damage Madam Hillary’s and even Imam Obama’s sterling images. Both, bravely and proudly, try to feed us what is “good.” Their people love it, so what difference does it make?
According to John Hinderaker at Power Line, Madam Hillary
lies…it’s not exactly a news flash. On the contrary, based on the liberal media’s reaction to her Benghazi testimony, her willingness to lie, brazenly, is a positive virtue.
There’s always an excuse for having “misspoke.” It need not be a credible excuse, because an incredible excuse works just fine. Anyway, whatever happened was in the past and therefore doesn’t matter now:
What has Imam Obama lied about? Plenty. Here’s an incomplete list: Islam, the nuke “deal” with Iran, Libya, His strength and Putin’s weakness in the Middle East, Israel, Immigration, Crime, Obamacare, race relations and on and on and on. As with Madam Hillary’s spewings, the “legitimate media” generally love it.
Madam Hillary blamed the video repeatedly
According to an article titled “I didn’t blame the video,” Madam Hillary did just that while also managing to lie about substantially more than that.
Hillary simply adores arguing and lawyering.
She lives for it and has at least since she was fired from the House Judiciary Committee during its investigation of the Watergate scandal that eventually brought down President Richard M. Nixon in 1974. Hillary’s then-supervisor, lifelong Democrat Jerry Zeifman, said he canned the 27-year-old attorney “because she was a liar … an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.” [Emphasis added.]
No lie is too big or too small for Hillary, whether it’s a concocted tale of being under enemy fire at an airport in Bosnia, the existence of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to undermine her husband’s presidency, that she was named after Mt. Everest climber Sir Edmund Hillary even though he rocketed to fame by accomplishing the feat when she was a six-year-old, or that the Clintons were “dead broke” when they exited the White House.
Meanwhile, at the Thursday hearing, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) demolished Clinton’s apparently fresh assertion at the hearing that she didn’t actually claim an obscure anti-Islam movie trailer posted on YouTube prompted the terrorist assault in Benghazi on the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. She now takes a more nuanced, twisted-like-a-pretzel position in which maybe some non-terrorist Muslims were suddenly stirred to violence in Libya by the video, but really at the same time it was a terrorist attack, something she testified Thursday has been her position the whole time. She talked about the video publicly not to point fingers but as a warning, she testified, to those who might attack U.S. interests in the region. In other words, like a good defense lawyer, Hillary was trying to confuse the issues and muddy the waters. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
While she was informing the American public that the anti-Islam video was what caused the attack, at the same time she emailed her daughter Chelsea and the governments of Libya and Egypt to pin the blame on Muslim militants, Jordan explained. Around the same time the White House, in the closing weeks of a heated presidential election campaign, was pushing the line that what transpired in Benghazi was a spontaneous demonstration turned violent, but terrorism was not a factor.
“We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film,” Clinton wrote Egypt’s prime minister the night of the attack. “It was a planned attack, not a protest.” But in public Clinton continued to blame the “offensive” video. The U.S. government acquired $80,000 worth of commercial airtime in Pakistan to apologize for the YouTube clip. [Emphasis added]
Jordan pointed out that there was no video-inspired protest over in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, but there was one in Cairo, Egypt. The same day State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said “Benghazi has been attacked by militants. In Cairo, police have removed demonstrators.”
You want to talk about Madam Hillary’s lies? She didn’t lie, of course, but let’s change the subject to something more important. Right now.
Conclusions
“Her people” not only don’t care, they are delighted with Madam Hillary’s numerous lies. Again, “what difference does it make?” Plenty.
Please think about Madam Hillary’s and Imam Obama’s impunity — and readiness — to lie, violate laws and do pretty much whatever they please. We have become a nation without law enforcement where we need it most and very much where enforcement of Obama’s executive decrees harms us greatly (climate change and immigration for example). Do we want a nation the governance of which is increasingly based on, and perpetuated through, lies to “We the people?” Do we want Madam Hillary or another Obama clone as the next Commander in Chief?
Here’s what “Commander in Chief” Obama has done with his our military:
Do you approve of those and the other things He has done to our military? Want more of the same? Or even worse? If not, what can we do about it? Supporting Donald Trump may or may not be what we should do, but I think the songs in the video are superb. Back in September, I wrote an article titled To bring America back we need to break some stuff. We still do, and if someone other than Trump is ready, willing and able he (or, of course, she) should also be considered, very seriously.;
The Most Dangerous Man In the World, American Thinker, Andrew Logar, October 2, 2015
…is neither Russia’s Vladimir Putin nor China’s Xi Jinping, nor at this time, Ayatollah Khamenei – it’s none other than America’s Barack Hussein Obama. This is not because of any aggressive, risk-laden actions he has taken, far from it. It is because of those he has failed to take at critical times to credibly dissuade strategic competitors and potential aggressors, such as Russia and China, from actions that may suddenly compound into destabilizing confrontations, even war. When the Middle East cauldron spawned the barbaric ISIS, Obama’s indecisive, pusillanimous response allowed this Islamic malignancy to rapidly metastasize, compounding and accelerating an existing refugee problem that will involve America. Additionally, throughout his tenure, overt actions Obama has taken served to steadily and materially, degrade American military capabilities, while enemies grow stronger.
In retrospect, divining Obama’s foreign policy should have been relatively easy given his background – a world seen through the eyes of someone whose father was a Muslim, as was his step-father, whose early education was in a Muslim madrassa, followed by mentoring from the known communist Frank Marshall Davis, associations with Columbia University’s Palestinian activist Edward Said and later, Harvard’s leftist Brazilian socialist Roberto Unger, later close association with admitted communist and Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, then followed by 20 years of anti-American and anti- Semitic sermons by Reverend Jeremiah Wright who, placing much of the world’s ills at America’s doorstep, culminated a post 9-11 sermon sententiously intoning, “…America’s chickens have come home to roost.”
Ironically, other chickens have indeed come home to roost. American liberalism’s pernicious obsession to eradicate the odium of slavery long gone and any vestiges of remaining discrimination in one fell swoop, blindly promoted the candidacy of the first black president, propelling a relatively unknown, unvetted and remarkably unqualified candidate to two electoral victories. That most unfortunate occurrence followed by resultant deleterious fallout at home and abroad, are liberalism’s chickens coming home to roost – in the White House – where they’ll cluck away until January 20, 2017.
After winning the 2008 election, Obama launched his now infamous “Apology Tour,” covering three continents in some 100 days, during which the Heritage Foundation identified 10 major apologies Obama made for America’s past behavior. Mitt Romney, in his book, “No Apology,” correctly criticized Obama’s gratuitous apologies. Indeed, unnecessary apologies by our president projected a weakness in resolve, confidence and appreciation of our nation’s accomplishments, our beliefs and values. While in Europe, when asked if he believed in American “exceptionalism,” he said yes – in the same way that, “ …the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism.”
This was an arresting, if not downright stupefying statement – coming from the head of state of the world’s most powerful nation, with a manifestly unrivaled history. This is a nation which in 239 years since the Declaration of Independence, grew from 13 colonies and 3 million people to 50 states and 320 million people, a nation victorious in its Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and which fought its bloodiest of wars, the Civil War, to expunge slavery; this is a nation victorious in the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, WWI and WWII, that introduced the incontestably successful Marshall Plan critical in European post war recovery, that sent men to the moon and back, 6 times – and the nation that won the Cold War – a nation that has consistently led the world in Nobel prizes in medicine, science and technology. This is unequivocally a nation like none other, a nation of unparalleled achievements and sadly, one whose president does not consider particularly exceptional.
The historical record now shows global competitors and enemies have taken their measure of Obama: the Russians have acted with impunity in Crimea, Ukraine and Syria, the Chinese are establishing a stranglehold on the South China Sea while Russians, Chinese and Iranians are engaged in flagrant cyber-espionage against America, ISIS is growing, while Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are all in play.
Barack Obama’s sophomoric efforts at geopolitics derived from his warped, kaleidoscopic misreading of 20th century history have now spiraled into a veritable tragicomedy of incompetence. Witness his administration’s $500 million program to train Syrian rebels to fight ISIS: not only didn’t that produce the projected 5,000 trained fighters, or even 500, but only, according to General Lloyd Austin, “…four or five.” This is grist for a Marx Brothers movie and attributable to abysmally poor leadership, planning and organization which can only be placed at the doorstep of the White House.
An objective review of the Obama administration’s policies reveals they have consistently posed a direct or indirect threat to national security:
– The unilateral cancellation of the Easter Europe ABM deployment without securing a tangible quid pro quo from Moscow and no counter to Russia’s recent decision to sell the potent S-300 anti-aircraft system to Iran.
– The ill-advised support for the overthrow of long-term ally of the West, Egypt’s Mubarak and the inexplicable enthusiastic White House support of the Muslim Brotherhood.
– The equally ill-advised and ill-planned toppling of Libya’s Gaddafi, resulting in a country without a functional government now overrun with Islamists, where at Benghazi four Americans died needlessly.
– The withholding of vital intelligence from the Senate that Russia had been flagrantly cheating on the existing INF treaty to advance ratification of New START in 2010. Seventy-one Senators voted for ratification without full background knowledge.
– The 2011 withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq by Obama while blaming the Bush administration for inadequacies of the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). This allowed Iraq to descend back into sectarian chaos, giving rise to ISIS and advantage to Iran. A war won at high cost in blood and treasure was thus lost.
– The military drawdown in Afghanistan – mindlessly pre-announced to the enemy – may lose that war as well if continued.
– The release of five dangerous Taliban in exchange for Sgt. Bergdahl is beyond rational justification and/or discussion.
– The manifest dereliction of duty in not taking strong measures to protect America from devastating EMP attack – which can be done at very affordable cost.
– The lack resolute policy has turned Syria into a graveyard of American credibility. Nothing substantive has been achieved to slow, let alone destroy, rapidly metastasizing ISIS, unconscionably leaving a compounding problem to future administrations.
– The opening of our southern border to a tsunami of illegal immigration, arguably to permanently bias future voter demographics toward a one-party (Democratic) state. That many of those gaining easy entry may wish us harm is apparently of no concern to Obama.
– The continuing undermining of America’s military superiority is increasing the likelihood of confrontation with adversaries. According to the Heritage Foundation Index of Military Strength, our Commander-In-Chief has allowed our military power to degrade to “Marginal,” leaving the US Army at its relatively weakest level since the end of WWII, while our antagonists pour money into their armed forces.
– Finally (but Obama is not through yet!) – during recent post-summit remarks, China’s Xi Jinping suggested tough U.S. response to Chinese hacking would bring retaliation; obligingly, Obama affirmed sanctions wouldn’t be directed against governments. Essentially, Xi stepped forward, Obama blinked and stepped back – signaling a major geopolitical sea change. Cyberespionage by Russia and Iran haven’t been addressed.
Before winning the 2008 election and still a senator, during the Bush administration’s then ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran, Obama, in a brazen and historically unprecedented move, secretly sent a personal emissary to Iran, William G. Miller, a former Ambassador to Ukraine, essentially conveying this message: Obama will very likely to be elected president, after which time Iran will find negotiating with him far easier. The Bush negotiations reportedly then reached a stalemate. Fast-forward to 2015, through Obama’s and Kerry’s “hard” bargaining, we’ve reached an agreement with Iran whereby monitoring Iran’s programs will be left to the Iranians as they now have the right to self-inspect” and so as to take the sting away from such an onerous deal, we’ll give them $100 billion of frozen assets – with which to do as they please – while America agrees to protect Iran’s nuclear facilities from cyber warfare.
Though Red China, Russia and Iran increasingly challenge America, the Middle East bloodshed continues and ISIS grows stronger, President Obama has declared “…no challenge–poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” This extraordinarily vacuous statement is from either a hopelessly delusional ideologue, woefully untutored in world history, geopolitics and the unequaled greatness of America, or a brilliant Manchurian Candidate marching to his own drumbeat. In any case, Obama is a president like none other – and may we never see the likes of him again.
To bring America back we need to break some stuff, Dan Miller’s Blog, September 14, 2015
(The article is not immediately pertinent to Israel because the current President will continue to be Obama and his tame Congress will continue to go along to get along. However, the 2016 U.S. presidential elections are very pertinent to Israel’s future, so I am taking the liberty of posting it here. For those not familiar with the acronym “RINO,” it is a term of disparagement referring to Republicans who would probably be happier if they were Democrats. Needless to say, the views expressed in the article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
In December of 2011, I wrote an article titled The U.S. Constitution and Civil War. A remark by Cokie Roberts — that we need to ignore parts of the Constitution to save the rest — inspired my article. To bring America back, we don’t need to, nor should we, ignore or otherwise break the Constitution; it is America’s foundation. We do need to destroy and rebuild much of the mess that has been wrongly erected atop that foundation.
Who should be our next President?
Daniel Greenfield, in an article titled This is the America We Live in Now, wrote,
We are not this culture. We are not our media. We are not our politicians. We are better than that.
We must win, but we must also remember what it is we hope to win. If we forget that, we lose. If we forget that, we will embrace dead end policies that cannot restore hope or bring victory.
What we have now is not a movement because we have not defined what it is we hope to win. We have built reactive movements to stave off despair. We must do better than that. We must not settle for striving to restore some idealized lost world. Instead we must dream big. We must think of the nation we want and of the civilization we want to live in and what it will take to build it. [Emphasis added.]
Our enemies have set out big goals. We must set out bigger ones. We must become more than conservatives. If we remain conservatives, then all we will have is the America we live in now. And even if our children and grandchildren become conservatives, that is the culture and nation they will fight to conserve. We must become revolutionaries. [Emphasis added.]
If we don’t, perhaps we should surrender and petition to join the European Union. Our unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy could merge with that of the EU and our Congress could merge with the impotent EU Parliament.
Joining the EU would not fit well with the U.S. Constitution, but so what? Obama and “pragmatic” judges have twisted and distorted it. They pay but scant attention to its clear language or that of the statutes they misconstrue. Most in the current crop of Republicans in the Congress have been willing to surrender whenever Obama blows His dog whistle and run to Him with hopes that He may offer them small bones.
Our once great nation is itself broken, but not necessarily beyond repair. It needs to be fixed before it gets to the point where it can’t be, and we are rapidly approaching that point. Our Constitution must be revived, and as revived survive, if America herself is to survive. America can’t be fixed with fresh paint and new floral arrangements featuring a “new” Bush.
When Ronald Reagan was first mentioned as a possible Republican presidential candidate, my first thought was that we don’t need a washed-up grade B movie actor/former Democrat leftist as President. I was wrong. He became the best President America has seen in my thus far seventy-four years on Earth. We need another Reagan, but who should it be? There are only a few good candidates and the Republican establishment opposes, with such insipid vigor as it can muster, all of them. It wants Jeb Bush, or in any event a Bush clone, to march stolidly toward a new Amerika.
Donald Trump
The mainstream media cannot understand why Trump continues to lead in the polls. Neither can the RINOs. Trump can’t possibly continue to lead; why, he is not even a politician! On September 12th, Sharyl Attkisson posted an article titled Donald’s Duck: 7 Reasons Why Nothing Sticks to Teflon Trump. In it, she explored seven of the reasons why it is claimed that Trump “can’t win.”
1. Trump doesn’t know the names of terror leaders.
2. Trump doesn’t have a plan.
3. Trump isn’t conservative enough.
4. Trump has flip-flopped.
5. Trump personally insults people.
6. Trump is against immigrants.
7. Trump won’t apologize.
Please read her analysis pointing out the fallacies behind these talking points as seen by Trump supporters; I think they are correct.
On September 13th Sundance, writing at The Last Refuge, posted an article titled The GOPe Roadmap, Status Update and The Event Horizon… There, he pointed out the RINOs’ multifaceted plan to defeat Trump and to install Jeb Bush as “our” next President. Jeb wants to lead us to more of the same namby-pamby nonsense that gave us Obama, the “great healer.” I don’t want to go there and want to stay as far away from there as possible. Please read Sundance’s article in its entirety. It’s excellent and so is this sequel about the upcoming CNN debate and the night of the long knives.
What will Trump do if elected?
I don’t know what Trump will do if elected President. He probably can’t make things worse, will try very hard to make them better and may well succeed. Please watch “lunatic” Trump respond to questions during this interview.
The only thing I am confident that the RINO candidates would do is to continue America’s collective swirl down the toilet. I very much like Ted Cruz (he would also be an excellent Secretary of State) and Ben Carson (Secretary of Health and Human Services?). Carina Fiorina? I like her thus far but need to learn more.
Trump has captured the public attention and, in many cases, its admiration and trust. Apparently many of his supporters feel as I do and are “mad as hell and don’t want to take it anymore.”
Please compare and contrast these Obama and Hillary campaign videos:
Obama won His last two elections by campaigning for change “we” can believe in. Trump has thus far campaigned for change those who think America was great before Obama got to mucking around with her do believe in and want to have implemented.
Much is yet unknown about where and how Trump will lead the nation as her President. One thing seems clear, at least to me: he will discard that which is broken and replace it with what we need. So long as he does not muck around with the Constitution (as Obama has done with abandon), I think we should give him an opportunity to try.
Video: Greek island turns into war zone as Syrian and Afghan migrants clash, Breitbart, Donna Rachel Edmunds, September 8, 2015
The Greek island of Lesbos has been turned into a war zone by rioting migrants, leaving the island’s 85,000 residents in despair. Around 25,000 migrants are currently camped out on the island with hundreds more arriving daily, leading to frequent violent clashes and rioting despite their claim to be fleeing violence.
Located just 6 miles from the Turkish shore, the migrants come over in inflatable boats which they cut up on arrival to prevent being turned back, expecting to be able to quickly travel on by ferry to mainland Europe, German station RTL has reported.
Instead, they are being held on the Island while the police issue emigration documents, a delay which can take days. The wait is causing tension between groups as Afghans accuse Syrians of getting preferential treatment by the authorities, leading to vicious violent clashes.
As rocks, bottles and municipal bins fly, one tearful local woman told RTL “We are in danger, every day, every minute. We need someone to protect us. They come into our houses. I want to go to work, but I can’t. Our children want to go to school, but they can’t. They have stolen our lives!”
Another yells at the migrants flinging rocks as they pass his house: “Go away from here! This is private land! Respect Greece!”
WATCH:
The main town of Lesbos, Mytilene, now resembles a war zone as the migrants rip apart the infrastructure and use the town as a urinal. Mayor Galinos helpless in the face of such an onslaught is out of ideas, and is calling on the European Union to do something.
“This is a ticking time bomb that will go off soon,” he said. “We have managed to avert some catastrophes, but we need help, more ferries. This island is so small, we can’t solve a worldwide humanitarian crisis by ourselves. The European Union needs to act.”
Monday night saw fresh clashes as 2,500 surged towards a government chartered ferry bound for Athens. Just a dozen police and coastguards, armed with batons, struggled to control the crowd by shouting “keep back”.
Junior interior minister Yiannis Mouzalas told local radio “the situation is on the verge of explosion.” It is a scene being replicated on islands all along Greece’s coastline.
Evangelos Meimarakis, leader of Greece’s right wing New Democracy party which could retake power this month, said the country should strengthen its borders to as to dispel “the message that ‘it’s good over here, come over’”.
What to make of the Islamic migration into Europe? Power Line,
It is often said that a country can have a welfare state or it can have open borders, but it cannot have both. In a world in which billions of people live in poverty and oppression, this strikes me as blindingly obvious.
*********************
Many thousands of migrants–some refugees, some not–are making their way from Islamic countries in the Middle East and Asia to Turkey, thence to Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria and finally, for most of them, Germany. The largest number come from Syria, but other Islamic countries are represented from as far away as Afghanistan. It is still not clear to me why this torrent has suddenly broken free.
Germany has promised to take 800,000 migrants, representing 1% of the country’s population. That is an enormous number; for the United States to do the same would require admitting more than 3 million people. On the other hand, the U.S. admits a million immigrants every year, while Germany is only proposing to do this once, so in reality the burden on us (or the benefit, if you will) is far greater. Presumably most Germans recognize, however, that 800,000 is only the beginning.
There is a wide spectrum of reactions to the current migration. A reader writes:
These migrants have a certain arrogance in insisting on, not rescue merely, but comfortable resettlement in the wealthiest societies in the world with access to an exceedingly generous welfare state to boot. Not for them a decent interval being cared for in Italy or Greece; only Germany or Sweden will do, if not the UK, Canada or (shudder) the USA. It’s as though I pity a street bum and offer to buy him vouchers for Burger King or Domino’s Pizza and he is aghast, insisting on steak and lobster at The Palm – along with the proper attire for admission!
How about that? Why is it that countries that don’t have lavish welfare systems are not target destinations? And also–why is it that the migrants are overwhelmingly young men? There are a few women, children and families; but numerically, young men predominate. This is not what one would normally expect from a group of refugees fleeing a war zone.
Our reader continues:
The language and rhetoric of “problem solving” is misplaced. When an event of this scale and enormity occurs and it seems apparent that the forces behind it are huge, a different perspective is required. The current wave is just the beginning and the response just encourages more. Oh, sure, it will stop just as soon as the 14 century old Sunni-Shia conflict and the various middle eastern tribal hatreds and rivalries abate and the entire African continent, soon to have 2 billion people, ceases to be fundamentally dysfunctional.
That means that the situation is utterly intractable. An intractable situation is not a “problem” that can be “solved”: it is a fact which must be reckoned with.
Our reader points to a web site by a guy named Kunstler (related? I don’t know) whom our reader describes as “a leftwing crank, an obsessive apocalyptic Luddite…but often correct on PC matters.” The immigration issue can make odd bedfellows! I think Kunstler is correct here:
I reject the idea that it’s “racist” to want to preserve one’s national culture and character (especially in language), or to favor bona fide citizens for gainful employment…. National boundaries will be defended. Sentimentalists will have to step aside. History is not a bedtime story about bunnies and kittens.
But a lot of damage will be done before the sentimentalists throw in the towel.
Pamela Geller writes:
If these were real refugees, where are the women? Where are the elderly people? Where are the weak and the sick? It is increasingly clear that what I have said is true: this is not a refugee crisis. This is a hijrah, a migration to Islamize a new land.
I hope that is too pessimistic, but this kind of thing doesn’t give one confidence:
Four police officers and 11 asylum seekers were injured in a brawl in the town of Suhl in Thüringen Wednesday evening sparked by a dispute over the Koran.
An Afghan tore out pages from the Koran at a refugee shelter, prompting anger from 20 other residents, said a police spokesman Thursday.
The confrontation escalated into a riot involving some 100 refugees, with 125 police officers sent to the scene to break up the brawl, it was reported.
Police then came under attack from the refugees and were pelted with sticks and stones, with two officers so badly injured that they are currently unable to return to their duties, while seven police vehicles were damaged.
It took four hours to bring the situation under control. The Afghan was taken into police custody for his own safety.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States absorbed a huge number of immigrants relative to our population, although nothing like the number we are taking in today. But in those days, a serious effort was made to assimilate newcomers. Public high schools taught courses in Americanism. I, personally, would be much more willing to contemplate mass immigration if we had the cultural will to resurrect the teaching of Americanism. But that isn’t happening. Still less can we expect the Germans to teach Germanism.
It is often said that a country can have a welfare state or it can have open borders, but it cannot have both. In a world in which billions of people live in poverty and oppression, this strikes me as blindingly obvious. I am not optimistic that the current migration from the Middle East, Asia and North Africa into Europe will end well.
Op-Ed: Europe’s Fate will be that of the Roman Empire, Israel National News, Giulio Meotti, September 7, 2015
In his new book “The Last Refuge”, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize for Literature Imre Kertész criticized the attempt to replace European culture with mass immigration: “Europe will soon go under because of its previous liberalism which has proven childish and suicidal. Europe produced Hitler, and after Hitler there stands a continent with no arguments: the doors are wide open for Islam; no longer does anyone dare talk about race and religion, while at the same time Islam only knows the language of hatred against all foreign races and religions”.
Kertész continues as follows: “I would talk about how Muslims are flooding, occupying, in no uncertain terms, destroying Europe; about how Europe relates to this, about the suicidal liberalism and the stupid democracy… It always ends the same way: civilization reaches a stage of maturation where it is not only unable to defend itself, but where it in a seemingly incomprehensible manner worships its own enemy”.
Of course, the mainstream media is ignoring Kertész’s book while Europe is dealing with its biggest demographic revolution since the Second World War. Europe is finished and being replaced by Islam. The European Union, the entire media spectrum, the Pope, the NGOs, the United Nations and the Western collective emotions are all united these days in proclaiming that Europe must welcome 20 millions of “refugees”.
Der Spiegel’s weekly cover story tells that “the idea of using migrants to help solve the demographic problems of Germany is plausible”. Demographics expert Herwig Birg says that Germany needs 2 million immigrants per year to avoid collapse. The German population will decline by 19 percent by 2060.
In 1910, during the Belle Epoque, two million children were born every year in Germany. A century later, with fifty percent more population, fewer than 700,000 children are born each year, one third of them foreigners. In the book “The Methuselah Conspiracy”, Frank Schirrmacher, former head of the cultural pages at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, writes that “the dynamics of the population will be marked by the death and not by birth, society andculture will be shaken by a silent war”.
A report by the Gatestone Institute, entitled “Germany’s Muslim Demographic Revolution”, speaks about “a demographic shift of epic proportions, one that critics of the country’s open-door immigration policy warn will change the face of Germany forever”. Soon the total number of Muslims in the country will exceed 6 million. In an interview with Tagesspiegel, Aiman Mazyek, head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, said that the number of Muslims attending mosques has doubled in the last month alone. “Islam is the fastest growing religion in post-Christian Germany” writes Soeren Kern of Gatestone.
It is the same scenario everywhere: France, UK, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden ….And the media are all using one tragic photo to sell the immigration’s ideology to the public opinion. The photo of Aylan, the little Syrian boy drowned in the Turkish sea.
The Italian newspaper La Stampa compared that photo to the Jewish child with raising arms in the Warsaw Ghetto. A photograph that illuminates another tragedy: the double standard of humanitarianism. Chiseled, well-written and formatted, the image must always justify the sense of guilt in the West.
Then there are the images that many say they do not want to see.
The images that you go to look at on Internet because the newspapers refuse to publish them. No one shows the bodies launched from the Twin Towers. Nobody reminds us of the images of James Foley’s execution. Nobody saw the photo of Khaled al Asaad, the archaeologist beheaded and hung upside down in Palmyra by IS.
During the Iraqi War, the eyes of the West were all trained on four Americans grinning at Abu Ghraib. Nobody saw the severed head of Daniel Pearl and the remains of the Israeli soldiers displayed by Hamas.
What Europe is witnessing is a deja vu of ancient Rome. The rationalists Voltaire and Gibbon attributed the fall of the Roman Empire to the defeatism inspired by Christianity. Others resorted to administrative sclerosis, detachment of spirit, the connivance with the invaders. A French historian, Michel De Jaeghere, recently wrote six hundred pages for the book “Les Derniers Jours”, The Last Days, to explain that the cause of the fall of the Empire was the demographic implosion, echoing the argument of another Frenchman, Sorbonne professor Pierre Chaunu who in his book “A Futur sans Avenir”, published by Calmann-Levy, analyzed the demographic collapse of the Empire, the transition from 60 million inhabitants at the time of Augustus to 25-30 million.
The bureaucracy that has expanded uncontrollably, the selfish and lazy style of the senators and the growing religious clashes are a constant warning aimed at our apathy, our failure from within. It is once again the time that Cyril Connolly called “the lockup of the gardens of the West”.
Four parties caused Syria’s genocidal calamity. Should Israel get involved? DEBKAfile, September 6, 2015
Refugees flooding into Europe
Chapter by chapter, a long list of the guilty parties must bear responsibility for the Syrian catastrophe hacking the ruined country into bleeding parts.
1. The first culprit is undoubtedly its insensate president Bashar Assad and his close family, who have had no qualms about spilling the blood of some 300,000 men, women, children and old people – some estimate as many as half a million – and making some 11 people homeless, to keep himself in power. No one has ever counted the number of people maimed and crippled by the war, but they are conservatively estimated at one million.
These figures add up to genocide or serial mass murder, which has been allowed to go into its fifth year.
2. Iran warrants second billing for this mass crime.
Tehran has laid out the stupendous sum of some $40 billion to keep the mass marderer Assad in power with total disregard for his methods of survival. The motives behind the ayatollahs’ military and political boost are well recorded. Worth mentioning here is that Tehran not only pressed its Lebanese proxy, the Shiite Hizballah group, into service alongside Assad’s army, but sent its its own generals to orchestrate the war, led by the Al Qods Brigades chief Qassem Soleimeni.
We can reveal here that 22 Iranian generals have died fighting for the Assad cause.
3. The third place belongs to the United States and President Barack Obama. His refusal to put American boots on the ground may have been the correct decision for the US, but it had four direct consequences:
a) The slaughter of the Syrian people continued unchecked. Even after President Obama declared that chemical warfare was a red line, he backed down at the last minute against intervening and ordered the US fleet to draw back from the Syrian coast.
To this day, Assad continues to use chemical weapons to poison his enemies.
b) Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry let Iran use its military backing for Assad as a high card in the negotiations for a nuclear accord. Instead of making it a condition for a deal against the lifting of sanctions, Washington allowed Tehran to come away from the table with US non-intervention in Syria as one of its concessions for buying Iran’s assent to the Vienna deal.
Tehran, in a word, won Washington’s tacit approval for propping up the atrocious Syrian ruler.
c) The rest of the world, including the United Nations and the European Union, followed the Obama administration’s lead and stood aside as at least 11 million Syrians became homeless refugees.
The lifeless body of a three-year old Syrian child washed up from the sea has figured in the Western media as a symbol of the tragic fate of Syria’s refugees. However, his tragedy came after the hair-raising atrocities endured by millions of those refugees for nearly five years.
Many families were forced to sell their daughters as sex slaves to buy food, their young sons to pedophile predators. The slave markets were centered on the Persian Gulf. Young Alan Kurdi died aged three. Many thousands of Syrian refugee children still live in appalling circumstances. No humanitarian organization has started an outcry or a campaign to rescue them.
d) US refusal to intervene in the most savage humanitarian tragedy the world has seen for many decades opened the door to the belligerent branch of al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, to march into the vacuum. The videotaped records of beheadings, the massacre of the Iraqi Yazdi people, the enslavement of its women and the burning alive of “apostates,” followed in quick succession.
The strongest nation in the world fought back with an ineffective trickle of air strikes on ISIS targets, allowing the group to go forward to conquer terrain and gain in strength.
4. Russia bears a heavy weight of guilt – and Israel would do well to watch its cynical conduct and draw the right conclusions. Like the ayatollahs, President Vladimir Putin led the second world power to total commitment for keeping Bashar Assad in power. Among other motivations, Putin pursued this policy to settle a score with Obama for the overthrow of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi.
With one world power on the sidelines and a second jumping in with two feet, the Syrian imbroglio was bound to have devastating historical repercussions.
Throughout the Syrian conflict, Israel refrained from interfering, with only one exception: It supported Syrian rebel groups holding a strip of southern Syria, as a buffer against Iranian, Hizballah and Syrian army encroachment on its northern borders.
More than a thousand injured Syrians were treated and their lives saved in Israeli hospitals after receiving first aid at a field hospital on the Israeli-Syria border.
The esteemed Israeli historian Prof. Shlomo Avinery said Sunday, Sept 6, that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu did the right thing in steadfastly keeping Israel out of the Syrian conflict. He very much doubted that Syrian refugees would seek asylum in a country they regard as the Zionist enemy.
Israel’s opposition leader Isaac Herzog nonetheless urged the government to take in a limited number of Syrian asylum seekers from among those flooding into Europe, and not to forget that “we are Jews.”
One wonders why he never had a word to say about US dereliction when Assad committed his atrocities across Israel’s border.
Herzog’s favorite advice to Netanyahu is to go to Washington right now, beard President Obama in the Oval Office and hammer out an agreed policy on Iran.
Netanyahu referred to the Syrian refugee crisis at the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday: “While Israel is not indifferent to the human tragedy of refugees from Syria and Africa, it is a small country that cannot throw its doors open to them,” he said.
“We have conscientiously treated thousands of wounded from the fighting in Syria, and we have helped them rebuild their lives,” the prime minister recalled. “But Israel is a very small country, with neither demographic nor geographic depth, and therefore we must control our borders.”
Regarding a visit to Washington, the prime minister has a problem: Just as President Obama has not invited any Syrian refugees to come to America, he has not issued Netanyahu with an invitation to come to DC, whether to discuss the Iranian or the Syrian questions.
U.S. and West Victimize Christians Fleeing ISIS, Gatestone Institute, Raymond Ibrahim, September 6, 2015
Not only does the West facilitate the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, but in the West as well.
According to a recent NPR report, the U.S. supported “moderate” coalition fighting both Bashar Assad and the Islamic State in Syria “has extremists in its own ranks who have mistreated Christians and forced them out of their homes” — just as the Islamic State (IS) has done.
Christian minorities forced out of their homes who manage to reach Western nations — including the United States — sometimes encounter more trouble.
Despite having family members to sponsor them, a group of 20 Christians who fled the Islamic State in Iraq have been imprisoned indefinitely, some since February, at the Otay Detention Facility in San Diego, even though they have local family members and Christian leaders who vouch for them (a primary way that the majority of detained foreign nationals are released is to the supervision of American citizens who vouch for them).
Activists say that the men and women in detention have been held for too long, including by the U.S. government’s own standards. Some have been imprisoned for over seven months with no hearing date for release even set.
“They are being held without a real reason…. They’ve escaped hell. Let’s allow them to reunite with their families,” said Mark Arabo, a spokesman for the Chaldean community in San Diego.
The detainees include a woman who had escaped the clutches of IS, and who had pleaded to see her sickly mother. Her mother died before she could see her. “She had been begging to be let out to see her dying mother,” said a priest familiar with the case.
Discussing the ongoing plight of these Iraqi Christians, San Diego’s East County Magazine concluded: “Why the federal government has failed to take steps to expedite such reunification in cases where family and religious leaders are willing to vouch for and help those seeking asylum here, then, remains an unfathomable mystery.”
Such “unfathomable mysteries” are reminiscent of the U.S. State Department’s habit of inviting Muslim representatives but denying visas to Christian representatives. Since the start of 2015, 4,205 Muslims have been admitted into the U.S. from Iraq, but only 727 Christians. For every one Christian the U.S. grants asylum, it grants asylum to five or six Muslims — even though Christians, as persecuted “infidel” minorities, are in much greater need of sanctuary, not to mention more assimilating to American culture than Muslims.
Faith McDonnell, of the Institute on Religion & Democracy, said regarding the detainment of Iraqi Christians in San Diego:
This follows the disturbing pattern that we have seen from the State Department of ignoring the particular targeting of Christians by ISIS while giving preferential treatment for asylum to other groups with expedited processing — like Somalis, Iraqis, and Syrians, some of whom could very well be members of jihadist movements.
The same is happening in the United Kingdom. Church leaders accuse David Cameron of “turning his back” on Christians facing genocide in Syria and Iraq by failing to grant them refuge in the UK — even though thousands of Muslims have been allowed entry.
Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, signed a petition calling on the UK government to “welcome Christian refugees and give them priority as asylum seekers,” emphasizing that “Syrian and Iraqi Christians are being butchered, tortured and enslaved.”
Similarly, Lord Weidenfeld, 95, who fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938 with the help of British Quakers, said:
Why is it that the Poles and the Czechs are taking in Christian families and yet the British government stands idly by?
This mood of indifference is reminiscent of the worst phases of appeasement, and may have catastrophic consequences. Europe must awake and the Conservative British Government should be leading from the front.
Most European governments, especially those that are Christian explicitly or implicitly, are failing in their duty to look after their fellow Christians in their hour of need.
This is not necessarily true of east European nations. Along with countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia, Slovakia recently went so far as to say it will only accept Christians when it takes in Syrian refugees under an EU relocation scheme. The Slavic nation argues that “Muslims would not be accepted because they would not feel at home,” including because there are no mosques in Slovakia.
Meanwhile, many of those Christians who are granted asylum in Western countries arrive there only to be further persecuted by Muslim asylum seekers — indicating, once again, who does and who does not really need asylum; who does and who does not assimilate in Western culture.
Most recently in Sweden, two small families of Christian asylum seekers from Syria were recently harassed and abused by approximately 80 Muslim asylum seekers, also from Syria.
The Christians and Muslims — described by one Swedish newspaper as “fundamentalist Islamists” — resided in the same asylum house. Among other humiliations, the Muslims ordered the Christians not to wear their crosses around their necks and not to use the communal areas when in use by Muslims.
Asylum seekers in the Swedish city of Kalmar, where Christian refugees were forced to move out of public housing after being harassed and threatened by Muslims.
After continuous harassment and threats, these Christian refugees, who had managed to escape the Islamic State, left the Swedish asylum house “fearing for their own safety.” A spokesman for the government migration agency responsible for the center they had been staying in said:
“They dared not stay. The atmosphere became too intimidating. And they got no help… They chose themselves to organize new address and moved away without our participation because they felt a discomfort.”
Western nations are not merely ignoring Muslim persecution of Christians in the Middle East, they are actively supporting it by sponsoring “moderate” rebels who in reality are as “radical” and anti-Western as the Islamic State. And when these persecuted Christian minorities manage to flee the Islamic State and come to the West for asylum, they are imprisoned again. All the while, Muslims — in the Mideast and in the West — are being empowered and welcomed in the West with open arms.
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