Some fresh Saul Alinsky analysis

I’m posting this link to Kyle-Anne Shiver’s piece today at American Thinker because it’s a good analysis of some recent news about the Obama Administration’s political strategy.  Many of the Alinsky (Rules for Radicals) strategies she highlights are ones we discussed throughout our work late last fall and early this year in our Community Destabilization category, so this is a good summary for new readers and a refresher for longtime readers of RRW.

Remember, immigrants are Alinsky’s “have-nots” in the battle with the “haves.”  The more angry, unhappy, and needy people, the more “chaos” will occur and demand for “change” will follow.

American Conservative Union, CPAC, and why they didn’t defend free speech

I know this is getting away somewhat from the subject of refugees, but it’s not entirely so because we questioned way back in December of 2007 why the American Conservative Union’s, David Keene, was so intent on promoting the Kennedy bill which ultimately opened the door for more Iraqis to enter the US.   It didn’t strike us as a particularly conservative position in light of the tanking economy and our national security concerns.

And, we are interested because of our interest in Geert Wilders’ right to speak on issues considered by some to be politically incorrect as Judy just mentioned in her post earlier this morning.

We attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last February (here) to hear Wilders speak, but the speech really wasn’t at the CPAC meeting, it was just in the same hotel.  Now, all these many months later, Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch gives us more details on what actually happened at last year’s CPAC meeting.

I won’t go into what just happened this past weekend at the Western CPAC meeting, you can follow the links in Mr. Spencer’s post for that, but here is how Spencer describes how it came about last year that “conservative” organizers shut out Geert Wilders.

What does this have to do with jihad? Everything. The Ziegler video, with its depiction of Keene’s egregious behavior, gives a good opportunity to spotlight the failure of the conservative mainstream to deal with the jihad issue. David Keene is not only the head of the ACU, but also of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which I criticized at Newsweek last February for its Grover Norquist-mandated refusal to deal with the jihad or Islamic supremacism in any meaningful or effective way.

At the time I was interviewed by Newsweek, Pamela Geller was working tirelessly behind the scenes to secure a speaking slot for Geert Wilders at CPAC, but CPAC was dragging its feet. With that in mind, I told Newsweek that people were afraid to deal with this issue, and added at Jihad Watch that “Keene’s, or someone’s, priorities are seriously out of order. Wilders should be front and center at CPAC, and the defense of free speech its central theme.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but after I was interviewed by Newsweek and before their article appeared, Keene decided to honor Wilders at CPAC and give him an award. But when the Newsweek piece hit, with quotes from me as well as David Horowitz saying, “How is it possible that a conservative conference does not have a single panel on the threat from radical Islam?,” Keene was furious. He was so furious that he canceled the award for Wilders and refused to let him speak at all, saying he wasn’t going to look as if he was being pushed around by Robert Spencer. Suddenly a few remarks in Newsweek by David Horowitz and me were controlling David Keene’s world. Principles? Free speech? Jihad and Islamization? Pah. For Keene, it was just a schoolyard fight, and he was behaving like a schoolyard bully — as he does here with Ziegler.

Spencer also reminds us of the connection Keene’s pal, Grover Norquist, has to the Islamist movement in the US.    Follow Spencer’s links or search RRW for ‘Grover Norquist.’

With friends like these, who needs enemies.

A million refugees are trying to sneak into Israel

For some reason we keep getting hits on a story from last January, Asylum seekers head for Israel. Ann posted an update in July. Both of those stories put the numbers in hundreds or thousands. Now the Jerusalem Post reports IDF: ‘One million African refugees headed for Israel.’ The IDF is the Israeli Defense Force, Israel’s military.

IDF units responsible for guarding Israel’s expansive western border with Egypt said Thursday that there are one million would-be infiltrators from Africa waiting to cross the mostly barrier-less border and enter Israel illegally.

They were  briefing members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, who called on the government to implement a plan called “Hourglass” to significantly reduce the number.

Committee Chairman Ya’acov Katz called upon the defense establishment to begin immediate work on one of the salient features of the proposed project – the erection of an electronic fence along hundreds of kilometers of isolated borderlands with Egypt.

The fence will cost an estimated one million dollars per kilometer.

Although these people flooding Israel are termed refugees they are actually more akin to the illegal aliens we get from Mexico. They are coming for economic reasons, because their countries are a mess and Israel has a good economy. And although most Israelis believe they should be stopped, there is a group pushing for their continued entrance into the country:

Katz has said that according to the data he has received, between 600 and 1000 people infiltrate across the desert border each month. But not all residents of the South are quite so enthusiastic regarding any cuts to the number of foreign workers in the work force. Even as Katz and his committee toured the Negev, farmers in the isolated Arava Valley put the finishing touches on their plans to launch a massive demonstration this coming Sunday to protest cuts to the number of foreign workers that they can employ on their farms.

The farmers complain that as they are located beyond commuting distance from any major cities, if they are not allowed to import hundreds of foreign workers – mostly from Thailand – they will simply not be able to harvest the produce that makes their farms viable.

It’s unclear whether the farmers want the Africans to continue to come, or if they are just afraid all foreign workers will be limited. Israel does depend a great deal on foreign workers, but they are usually from faraway places (like Thailand) where they have families, so they usually return home.

Israel’s population is about 7.4 million. Having a million would-be immigrants trying to sneak across the border is equivalent to having 42 million people at our Mexican border in terms of the percentage of our population.

But I have a question. If Israel is as oppressive as advertised, why do so many people want to get in? Of course, we’ve wondered the same thing about our country, which is now being apologized for around the world by our president.

Hat tip: Mark Krikorian.

Free speech under attack at Temple University

We’ve been following the hate campaign against Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician who speaks out against militant Islam, for a while. Our posts on him are here. David Horowitz reports at FrontPage Magazine here and here on an attempt to stop Wilders speaking at Temple University in Philadelphia. (Temple is my alma mater so I’m especially interested in this.)

As part of its Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, and its campaign to Stop the Campus War Against Israel and the Jews, the David Horowitz Freedom Center is sponsoring  appearances by Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders at Temple and Columbia universities (October 20 and 21). The Muslim Students Association has issued a statement condemning the event and calling on the Temple Administration to close it down.

Here is part of the MSA’s statement:

Temple MSA speaks for the many Muslims and socially conscious students and faculty on campus when we say that the presence of Geert Wilders on our campus is a breech of Temple University’s pledge to ensure the wellbeing and safety of all students and faculty on campus. The Muslim population at Temple feels attacked, threatened, and ultimately unsafe that Mr. Wilders has been invited to voice his hate-driven opinions. The fact alone that backpacks are prohibited for entry to this event reinforces our argument that this creates an unsafe atmosphere where prejudiced, racist and vehemently hateful words will be disguised under the veil of academia.

Got that? Prohibiting backpacks shows that there will be hate speech. The only reason for the ban must be that people hate Muslims, not that any Muslim has ever carried anything dangerous in a backpack. But these Muslim students are lucky: they’ve gotten university administrators to do their work for them:

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the attempts to shut down the Temple speech of Geert Wilders which is being sponsored by a student organization called Temple University Purpose is the role played by three Temple University administrators who run the student activities program and who at a meeting last week pressured the TUP students to close down their event….These administrators told TUP leader Brittany Walsh that Wilders did not have free speech rights at Temple or in America because he was a foreigner.

I’m going to reproduce Brittany Walsh’s reply in full because it is so eloquent. We are fortunate to have students like her standing up for our rights.

“[You} stated in our meeting that Mr. Wilders is not an American citizen and therefore the First Amendment does not apply to him. The American Bill of Rights is not written to confer rights on Americans as to what they can do, but rather these American rights are conceived as limitations on government.  The Bill of Rights says Congress shall make no law abridging free speech and not once claims this only applies to American born citizens, but rather to all of man kind. Freedom of Speech has proved an essential tool in providing a medium for progressive social change in the United States; ie: Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Equal Rights Movement, Vietnam War protests, and even the Equal Human Rights Movement occurring right now in the U.S. advocating on behalf of the LGBT community. Throughout world history, we have witnessed the devastation caused when individuals are deprived of this Right to advocate on behalf of themselves. Many men and women have sacrificed their life or suffered severely to allow you and I to be free; thousands are still doing so today.
Furthermore, I would never dream of telling the Muslim Students Association that they may not practice their religion or espouse their beliefs, but I expect that same respect and consideration to be extended to all individuals and/or groups.  As was stated previously in our meeting, regardless of how I may, or may not, feel about what Mr. Wilders believes, I do believe it is his right to say it. Temple University Purpose will defend Mr. Wilders, and anyone else for that matter, against institutions and communities who attempt to silence them. The Right to Freedom of Speech is a fundamental right upon which this country was founded. Our founding fathers found that tyrants will always seek to silence those in opposition in an effort to squash non compliant beliefs and felt it to be of vital importance that men and women alike are protected from future governments, mob rule, and tyrants who seek to steal their voice. All of this being said, it would be a disservice to the Temple community, hypocritical of TUP’s mission, and a disrespect to all of those who have sacrificed for our right to invite Mr. Wilders to Temple, to rescind his invitation. The Temple community is being provided with a rare opportunity to have an open forum with a highly intelligent, though controversial, politician. Moreover, it is my hope that the community will come together, let their voices be heard, and participate in this educational experience being provided for them. Temple University Purpose plans to go ahead with the event on the 20th of October and hope we may do so with your support.” 

David Horowitz puts the matter in context:

Everywhere you look these days Americans’ most basic freedom is under attack by the jihadists of the international left. The infamous UN Human Rights Commission which includes the worst human rights violators on the planet (now joined by the Obama Administration) has recently passed a resolution against religious defamation — defined as linking Islamists to terrorism. At home Democrats have attached a “hate crimes” amendment which would make thinking a crime to the new defense appropriations bill. Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has been banned from owning a National Football League team on the grounds that he is a conservative and conservatives are hateful.

The speech is scheduled for today. I’ll give you an update when I find out what happened.

Update from Gateway Pundit, 10/21/09:  Radical leftists shouted down Geert Wilders at Temple University last night. The good little indoctrinated leftists chanted, “Hey Hey, HO, HO, this racist bull—-’s got to go.” They forced the university to shut down the event early.

African-Americans vs. African immigrants (again!)

This is a theme we have reported on several times in the past.*  Violence is on the rise in traditional African- American communities where numbers of African (largely Muslim) immigrants are on the increase.   The difference here is that it’s the New York Times publishing the politically incorrect news.   Hat tip:  a friend from Tennessee.

Their fear and frustration are shared by many local West African immigrants, whose fast-growing presence in the neighborhood — and in the city over all — has been accompanied by increasing tensions with the local black American residents.

“They think they’re better than black people,” James Carroll, a retired Army specialist standing in front of a busy convenience store, said of the West African immigrants. “We’re supposed to be one community — we’re supposed to be able to get along — but they don’t give it a chance.”

Some of the tension can be attributed to cultural differences that all immigrants face, though the West Africans in Claremont, as conservative Muslims, have the added challenge of adjusting to a post-9/11 New York. But resentment and mistrust has escalated to actual violence, and, they say, left them feeling under siege.

After reports of nearly two dozen attacks on West African immigrants in the last two years, community leaders reached out to the police, who interviewed 17 Africans in the neighborhood and filed 11 criminal complaints. Two of those were deemed hate crimes, including an attack in June that left a Gambian immigrant hospitalized for eight days.

They have made no arrest in either bias case, but a police mobile truck with a video camera now stands outside the mosque.

The reporter tells us that most of these African immigrants are illegally in the US and points out the rapid increase in population in Bronx neighborhoods.

The African population in the Bronx has grown considerably in recent years: the census reported 12,063 sub-Saharan Africans in 1990, while the most recent census estimate was 61,487.

African-Americans feel their communities are being invaded—no kidding!

Zain Abdullah, an assistant professor of religion, race and ethnicity at Temple University in Philadelphia, says it is common for African immigrants to suffer harassment when they settle in traditionally black neighborhoods in big cities, like Detroit, New York and Philadelphia.

“Many African-Americans feel that the influx of Africans coming in represents a kind of invasion,” he said. “Culturally, African-Americans have always imagined themselves as Africans, or at least of African descent, but they might have never encountered Africans from the continent. The actual encounter is shocking.”

Isn’t diversity beautiful!   Incidentally, it is into this neighborhood that the International Rescue Committee is resettling Bhutanese refugees as well.  It almost seems that stirring up racial and ethnic tension is the game plan!

* If you would like to find more locations in the US where American Blacks have come in conflict with immigrants, use our search function.   You might search for African- Americans and immigrants and you will come up with lots of previous posts on the topic.