Month: November 2009

Swiss vote to ban minarets

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The New York Times reports:

GENEVA — In a vote that displayed a widespread anxiety about Islam and undermined the country’s reputation for religious tolerance, the Swiss on Sunday overwhelmingly imposed a national ban on the construction of minarets, the prayer towers of mosques, in a referendum drawn up by the far right and opposed by the government.

It had to be voted on because two political parties proposed adding the ban to the constitution. But the government doesn’t like it.

The Swiss government said it would respect the vote and sought to reassure the Muslim population — mostly immigrants from other parts of Europe, like Kosovo and Turkey — that the minaret ban was “not a rejection of the Muslim community, religion or culture.”

There might have been other motives besides reassuring the Muslim population.

That debate prompted the government to mount a public relations campaign overseas to try to avoid a backlash like the one Denmark faced in Islamic countries after a newspaper published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, and to avoid damage to lucrative commercial and banking ties with wealthy Muslims.

Switzerland doesn’t appear to have much of a problem with militant Islam at this point.

Of 150 mosques or prayer rooms in Switzerland, only 4 have minarets, and only 2 more minarets are planned. None conduct the call to prayer. There are about 400,000 Muslims in a population of some 7.5 million people. Close to 90 percent of Muslims in Switzerland are from Kosovo and Turkey, and most do not adhere to the codes of dress and conduct associated with conservative Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, said Manon Schick, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International in Switzerland.

But the people see what is happening in other European countries. And they don’t want it. The Swiss are probably the most nationalistic country in Europe, in terms of taking action to keep their country Swiss. They were neutral during WWII, and every other war. They have universal military service (for men) and keep their guns at home. This insularity was not good for the Jews. A Google alert link I got last night (which I can’t open) says:

In total, the Swiss deported more than 30000 Jewish refugees, most of whom were subsequently murdered by the Nazis. Those allowed to remain in Switzerland were held in detention camps so as to keep from taking up permanent residence…

But there are lots of foreigners in Switzerland now; but I doubt if that would be the case had the country’s immigration policies been subject to a vote. As the story makes clear, the government does not represent the feelings of the people. It will be interesting to see how this complex story plays out.

Update: Here is a great post from David Pryce-Jones on the National Review website. It’s far more informative than the New York Times article. Some excerpts:

The ban follows quite a bit of contention which started when the king of Saudi Arabia bought a house on the shore of Lake Geneva. Launching a building program without first obtaining the requisite permits, he was obliged to stop and pull down extensions. Geneva already had a mosque, and when the Saudis wanted to build another one, the city fathers replied that permission would be granted only when the Saudis reciprocated by allowing the building of a church in Saudi Arabia.

Would that every government were as brave and forthright as this. And here’s why it became an issue:

In a population of some seven million there are 400,000 Muslims worshipping in about 150 mosques, half a dozen of them with minarets. In the small town of Wangen, in 2005, the imam of a largely Turkish community applied to add a minaret to his mosque. He was allowed to do so, but the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan, a crypto-Islamist, had been unwise enough to issue a blanket defiance to Western countries: “Mosques are our barracks, domes our helmets, minarets our bayonets.” A politician by the name of Christoph Blocher picked up the challenge and made a national issue of it. A lawyer by training, he is a successful industrialist, the founder of the Swiss People’s Party which has a right-wing platform, and he has been a government minister.

Western countries should all take such actions in response to every Islamist challenge.  And here’s Pryce-Jones’s conclusion:

No country in Europe quite knows what to do about the Muslims who have come to live there. What exactly should be conceded to them, and why? These puzzling questions go to the core of national identity. Defying those who claim the right to set the terms of public debate, the Swiss have tried to draw a line. Whether the opinion-making elite of the entire continent will allow them to keep to it is quite another matter. 

 

White House gate crashers connected to radical Palestinian group

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been switching off Fox News whenever they start one of their silly reports on Tareq and Michaele Salahi, the couple who crashed a state dinner the other day.  They’ve been treating it like gossip, with perhaps some questions about security. But now I’m paying attention after reading a post from Gateway Pundit on various connections of  these gatecrashers. First comes a 2005 photo of the couple at an event for the polo cup, with President Obama at the center of the group.  Then comes a link to American Power, which has this to say:

Tareq Salahi, the polo-playing intruder, is a Palestinian nationalist with ties to the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) , a pro-Palestine lobby demanding the “right of return” for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants. The “right of return” has long been considered the backdoor to Israel’s destruction. But not only that: ATFP President Ziad Asali is an America-basher who blamed 9/11 on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Asali was a lead U.S. official to PLO terrorist Yassir Arafat’s funeral in 2004. And in a position paper in 2007, the ATFP called for a power-sharing agreement at the Palestinian Authority, which would have included the State Department’s designated-terrorist group, Hamas.

Gateway Pundit goes on to cite the Canada Free Press saying that the ATFP has removed references to Salahi’s membership from its website. And Discover the Networks says Rashid Khalidi, Middle East Studies professor at Columbia and a militant Palestinian rights activist was vice president of ATFP. Khalidi is an old friend of Barack Obama’s.

So there are two links to President Obama. It looks as if there is more to this than just a case of uninvited guests crashing a White House dinner. My first thought when I read about the links to radical Palestinian rights people was that perhaps they were testing White House security with an eye to something bigger. But the connections with Obama don’t fit in. Very puzzling, and probably very significant.

Note from Ann:  Here is a post I wrote last fall about that 2003 dinner when Rahshid Khalidi was leaving for Columbia University—you know the dinner that was filmed and the Los Angeles Times is still sitting on the film.  We know that Khalidi and Obama knew each other well and we know that the dinner was put on by the Arab American Action Network.  Someone should check with the Los Angeles Times and see if the Salahis “crashed” that dinner too!

Canadian educators challenged by wave of Roma immigrant children

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is an immigration issue facing Canada that I wanted to bring to your attention.  I find it interesting that educators were caught by surprise.  Is there no way in Canada (or the US for that matter) to alert school systems to expect waves of new immigrants, afterall government agencies must have granted admission to Canada for large numbers of Roma?

They are Europe’s Least Wanted – reviled for their unorthodox ways, hounded by white supremacists. Now the sudden arrival of Roma “gypsies” in Ontario has teachers here grappling to connect with some of the most perplexing students in the world.

With no English, limited education and an often shaky regard for school, the wave of Roma children give fresh urgency to the term “at-risk.” Schools across Toronto and Hamilton, caught largely by surprise, are rushing to educate staff, hire more ESL teachers and find Hungarian and Czech interpreters for everything from report cards to welcome kits.

“We’ve got major problems with this wave of students and we need help – we’ve had more than 100 kids show up this fall and our staff are scrambling,” said Trustee Irene Atkinson at a recent crash course on Roma culture organized by the Toronto District School Board, one of several this fall in Toronto and Hamilton.

See also, Roma in Ireland, here.

Cloward-Piven: Use the poor to bring on the revolution

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

If you are a regular reader, you know one of the themes we have been writing about is what I call “community destabilization,” we have a whole category for those posts, here.  And, you know we write about the Cloward-Piven strategy as part of that discussion.   Cloward and Piven, while professors at Columbia University (Obama’s alma mater), penned a 1966 treatise in Nation magazine in which they outlined a strategy to bring about a revolution in America. I wrote about it most recently, here.  Simply stated the strategy involved flooding the welfare system with so many impoverished people that the system would collapse and that would pave the way for a new form of government—a government that would redistribute the wealth and provide a guaranteed income for everyone.

Below is another shocking segment from that article.  We are often lectured about what is the moral thing to do about refugees, but let me ask all of you, what is moral about this Far Left strategy?   Remember immigrants and refugees are today’s poor.  As unfashionable as the word is, frankly, I call this strategy to place as many people as possible on the welfare system and use them for promotion of a radical political ideology downright evil.*  (Emphasis below mine)

To generate an expressly political movement, cadres of aggressive organizers would have to come from the civil rights movement and the churches, from militant low-income organizations like those formed by the Industrial Areas Foundation (that is, by Saul Alinsky), and from other groups on the Left. These activists should be quick to see the difference between programs to redress individual grievances and a large-scale social-action campaign for national policy reform.

Movements that depend on involving masses of poor people have generally failed in America. Why would the proposed strategy to engage the poor succeed?

First, this plan promises immediate economic benefits. This is a point of some importance because, whereas America’s poor have not been moved in any number by radical political ideologies, they have sometimes been moved by their economic interests. Since radical movements in America have rarely been able to provide visible economic incentives, they have usually failed to secure mass participation of any kind. The conservative “business unionism” of organized labor is explained by this fact, for membership enlarged only as unionism paid off in material benefits. Union leaders have understood that their strength derives almost entirely from their capacity to provide economic rewards to members. Although leaders have increasingly acted in political spheres, their influence has been directed chiefly to matters of governmental policy affecting the well-being of organized workers. The same point is made by the experience of rent strikes in Northern cities. Their organizers were often motivated by radical ideologies, but tenants have been attracted by the promise that housing improvements would quickly be made if they withheld their rent.

Second, for this strategy to succeed, one need not ask more of most of the poor than that they claim lawful benefits. Thus the plan has the extraordinary capability of yielding mass influence without mass participation, at least as the term “participation” is ordinarily understood. Mass influence in this case stems from the consumption of benefits and does not require that large groups of people be involved in regular organizational roles.  [Of course not, the smart people, the elite radicals, would call all the shots!]

Moreover, this kind of mass influence is cumulative because benefits are continuous. Once eligibility for basic food and rent grants is established, the drain on local resources persists indefinitely. Other movements have failed precisely because they could not produce continuous and cumulative influence.

When you read the Nation article, note that Cloward and Piven were very conscious of the concept of the ‘presumption of good intentions.’  In other words, they knew that this political strategy would go undetected for a very long time because it would be hidden from their average do-gooder minions by the presumption that this was all about aiding the downtrodden.

I must say this ‘strategy’ is the only logical explanation for why we are still pouring refugees into the US right now when there is little or no work for them and they are being “warehoused” in decrepit apartment buildings, like those in Bowling Green, KY.  Incidentally, even if refugees have chicken plant jobs they still receive various forms of public assistance because the meatpackers no longer pay a living wage.

I wonder did Cloward and Piven ever anticipate the involvement of big businesses as allies in the revolution?  See this post from August in which I list strange bedfellows on the open borders issue.

* I have to laugh, after I posted this, I see that Ann Coulter also suggested Far Left Liberal strategies were “evil” when she said their motto is:  Speak loudly and carry a small victim!

Israel setting up asylum process for refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’ve posted a couple of stories about refugees from Africa trying to get into Israel, here, here and here.  Africans began heading for Israel after Egypt treated asylum seekers brutally, and Israel is building a border fence to prevent floods of people. A recent article in the Jerusalem Post begins:

For most of Israel’s history, the word refugee has been associated with Jewish communities fleeing persecution or Palestinians stuck for decades in makeshift camps. The few dozen asylum-seekers a year requesting refugee status in Israel were not assessed by the state, but by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), with help from the Joint Distribution Committee.

But in recent years, local and regional events have drawn hundreds of asylum-seekers here every month, flooding the system and underscoring Israel’s need for an independent refugee processing system.

….In July, Israel became one of the last developed countries to launch an asylum claims process – without fanfare and virtually without notice.

There follows an interview with Joel Moss, director of HIAS in Israel, who helped set up the process. I’m not going to go through the whole thing here, but here’s a summary of the numbers:

How many asylum-seekers are in Israel and how have the numbers grown?

There are about 18,000 asylum-seekers in Israel now, mostly from Africa and some from Eastern Europe and the Far East.

Up until around 2003, if there were 100 new asylum-seekers in Israel a year, that was a lot. Now there are often 600-1,000 arriving each month. [These] are large numbers for a country this size and for a country that never dealt with this issue before.

If you do the pro-rata calculation between the population of Israel and the US, it as if the US had seen a rise from 2,000 asylum seekers in 2005 to half a million in 2009. That’s a staggering shift.

Israel needs to get that fence built quickly. It is a tiny country, about the size of New Jersey. It is abiding by UN standards and the Geneva Convention in accepting refugees, and is already getting swamped. Neighboring countries are not so accepting, so there has been and will continue to be more and more pressure on Israel.