The leader of a minor New Zealand political party that has been polling about 10% of the vote warns against Muslim immigration to New Zealand.
Moderate Muslim groups are sheltering fundamentalists who may be plotting terror attacks on New Zealand soil, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters claimed yesterday.
In a speech directly linking "open- door immigration policies" to radical Islam, Mr Peters said the country's history of religious tolerance and free speech was threatened by Muslim migrants who "do not share our traditions".
"We cannot take our tradition of toleration for granted when we are importing fanatics for whom that tradition is alien," he said.
"In New Zealand the Muslim community has been quick to show us their more moderate face, but there is a militant underbelly here as well.
"These two groups, the moderate and militant, fit hand and glove.
"Underneath it all the agenda is to promote fundamentalist Islam - indeed these groups are like the mythical Hydra, a serpent underbelly with multiple heads, capable of striking at any time and in any direction," Mr Peters said.
I do not see why Western nations should let in Muslim immigrants at all. The idea of letting them in always strikes me as "It's being-hit-on-the-head lessons in here." We have no shortage of people. We have huge selection of people who want to come to Western countries for the most part because we have higher living standards. So why not be incredibly choosy and let in only those who will provide a large net benefit?
Peters is a member of the New Zealand parliament and former deputy prime minister. If you are curious about Peters then click on the two Wikipedia links I embedded in the first paragraph of the article.
A nationalistic speech that does not hesitate to represent the people of one's nation as somehow better or deserving of preservation against the influx of others is a rare thing to hear these days and sounds shocking to anyone conditioned to today's leftish political mores. This guy sounds like the late British parliamentarian Enoch Powell. Check out John Derbyshire's aricle on the London bombings entitled "Thinking About 7/7: Enoch Powell’s Revenge?" for an essay on how far nationalism has eroded in Britain and in much of the Western countries.
Nick Hume of the London Times has joined the list of British commentators who think that British self-hatred has helped to create the intellectual environment that terrorists living in Britain use to justify their attacks.
Perhaps it might have something to do with the way that, from the moment they arrive here, asylum-seekers are told that Britain is a racist hellhole that deserves what it gets. And they first receive that message not from some fringe Islamic preacher, but from the heart of our self-flagellatory culture. Those bombing suspects came to a society that seems intent on denying that there is anything good about living here. Britain gave them schooling. But what exactly would they would have been taught?
Think of the miserabilist images of society that we are all subjected to these days. Britain is portrayed as institutionally racist and increasingly Islamophobic at home and abroad, a darkly degenerate place full of violent drunks and drug addicts, disrespectful “hoodies” and child abusers, pregnant teenagers and sexually transmitted diseases, whose people believe in nothing except football and getting fat in front of the television.
If the British were told they had many things to be proud about they'd act in ways more consistent with that pride and the place would be better for it.
Hume's essay is similar in tone to Anothony Browne's longer and excellent article from The Spectator entitled The Left’s war on Britishness (requires free registration which is worth your time).
No, the real answer to why Britain spawned people fuelled with maniacal hate for their country is that Britain hates itself. In hating Britain, these British suicide bombers were as British as a police warning for flying the union flag.
Britain’s self-loathing is deep, pervasive and lethally dangerous. We get bombed, and we say it’s all our own fault. Schools refuse to teach history that risks making pupils proud, and use it instead as a means of instilling liberal guilt. The government and the BBC gush over ‘the other’, but recoil at the merest hint of British culture. The only thing we are licensed to be proud of is London’s internationalism — in other words, that there is little British left about it.
George W. Bush is recruiting big donors for a cheap immigrant labor coalition entitled "Americans for Border and Economic Security". (same article here)
WASHINGTON — Worried that the tone of the immigration debate is pushing Latinos away from the Republican Party, the White House is working with political strategists to create a broad coalition of business groups and immigrant advocates to back a plan President Bush could promote in Congress and to minority voters in the 2006 elections.
The strategists say Bush is planning to make immigration a top priority as soon as this fall, once the focus on a Supreme Court vacancy has passed. The push is being planned to coincide with next year's campaigns for the House and Senate, in which Latino voters could be crucial in several states. It is part of a broader White House strategy to forge a long-lasting majority by drawing more minority voters.
Aiming for an air of bipartisanship, the White House-backed coalition, to be called Americans for Border and Economic Security, will be led by former U.S. Reps. Cal Dooley (D-Hanford) and Dick Armey (R-Texas). The chief organizer is one of the capital's most important White House allies: former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, who has hosted preliminary meetings at his Washington lobbying firm just blocks from the White House and has been advising the RNC on minority outreach.
I'm old enough to remember when it was considered a good thing and a sign of much desired progress when all classes of workers experienced rising salaries. Now a sitting President can organize a massive campaign to import millions of foreign workers to drive down native salaries and especially salaries of the poorest citizens. Times change.
Big money donors are being recruited for the new coalition.
A guest-worker program is favored by many Latinos and by businesses, many of them major GOP donors that depend on a steady flow of workers from Mexico and other countries. The White House effort is aimed at satisfying these groups while promoting tougher border security enforcement. The latter focus is an attempt to mollify a vocal bloc of cultural conservatives in the GOP — some in the House leadership — who argue that undocumented workers present a security threat and take some jobs that could be filled by Americans.
Bush wants the funds to attack the Republican base. Conservative talk radio has turned heavily against Bush's position on immigration. Ditto for some other conservative opinion outlets. Can big corporate donors fund an effort big enough to overwhelm the influence of populist anger? Can the Republican voters be persuaded that they are just there to vote Republican and that the party exists to serve the interests of those employers who use illegals and not the interesets of all Republicans?
Admission into the new coalition costs between $50,000 and $250,000. The proceeds are expected to pay for a political-style campaign for an approach to immigration that combines heightened border security with a guest-worker program of some sort, creating an environment that the White House believes will be more favorable for Bush to step back into the fray.
In an unamazing coincidence that combination just happens to show up in bill introduced into the US Senate by Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ). The Cornyn-Kyl bill combines tougher immigration enforcement with a worker permit program.
The Kyl-Cornyn bill calls for the creation of a machine-readable, tamper-proof Social Security card that would be issued to every American in the workforce. It would also fund the hiring of 10,000 Department of Homeland Security personnel dedicated to weeding illegal immigrants out of the workforce and an additional 1,000 for detecting immigration fraud.
Companies that hired illegal immigrants would face tough fines.
Additionally, the bill would authorize the recruitment of 10,000 new Border Patrol agents over five years and a $2.5 billion investment in unmanned aerial vehicles, cameras, barriers, and sensors along the Mexican border.
Unless the barriers extend the full length of the border and are thick and high the illegals are going to go around them or cut through them.
The other, by Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, would require workers in the United States illegally to return home before being permitted to participate in a new guest worker program. It would also throw enormous new resources at border, interior and workplace enforcement.
Kyl denied that his bill amounted to mass deportation, as many have charged.
Kyl's bill brings out the conflict between the business interests which just want cheap labor and the Hispanic activists who want more Hispanics to stay here permanently to form a larger Hispanic voting bloc. The Hispanic activists want all the illegals to stay without any inconvenience. The businesses want the Hispanics but are relatively less worried about inconveniencing them. Though of course the businesses do not want to be inconvenienced themselves. So their positions are not too far apart.
But the most important witness at the hearing turned out to be Hal Daub, a former congressman who now heads the American Health Care Assn. The industry he represents is clearly alarmed by the Kyl-Cornyn approach. Deporting illegal healthcare workers would be "disruptive to the delivery of quality care. It would cause a deterioration in the quality of that care," he said. By the end of the hearing, Cornyn was in full retreat, saying that maybe an illegal worker's "trip" home could be short enough to ensure no disruption in his employment. So the punishment turns into a vacation?
This all lends credence to the theory that the Kyl-Cornyn bill is a tactical gambit — backed by the White House — to produce a compromise bill that preserves the essence of McCain-Kennedy with a tougher veneer, so that it can be more easily sold to a skeptical House.
Dan Stein calls the cheap labor alliance "the Coalition to Destroy the American Middle Class".
The Bush Administration intends to satisfy the demands of some business interests to gain legal access to low wage foreign workers and to appeal politically to Hispanic voters. In an attempt to overcome staunch public opposition to the president's plan, the goal of the coalition will be to sell the plan as a solution to mass illegal immigration.
"A more accurate name for this association of special interest high-rollers would be the Coalition to Destroy the American Middle Class," said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). "It is a blatant attempt to convince America's embattled middle class that they will be better off if employers can legally bring millions of foreign workers to this country.
"Mass illegal immigration is certainly a problem, but the solution is not amnesty and guest worker programs," Stein continued. "Whether these millions of people enter legally or illegally, the impact on American workers and the nation's vital social institutions is exactly the same."
How to explain Bush's position on immigration? Is it driven more by a desire for Hispanic votes or more for employers of cheap labor? Steve Sailer thinks the Bush family is in a tight relationship with the corrupt Mexican elite. That elite is what America will replicate if we keep letting in the Hispanic flood.
I'm not surprised that a shallow pseudo-conservative president would put the interests of big business donors ahead of the long term best interests of the country. What I find more puzzling is the willingness of the liberal mainstream media to embrace cheap immigrant labor. See, for example, this Boston Globe editorial in favor of cheap immigrant labor. Granted, they don't use the term "cheap immigrant labor" but that is the core of the big worker permit proposal which the Globe apparently supports. Do the Globe's board of directors see cheap labor as in their economic interests? Do big liberal media outfits see themselves as having the same economic interest in cheap labor as do so many restaurant owners, drywall installers, and lawn mower service operators?
But no, Newt was telling me about the danger from illegal aliens coming across our open borders. He talked about the threat this poses to our national security in an era of terrorism, the high costs to U.S. taxpayers, the follies of multiculturalism, and the urgent need for everyone in our country to be able to speak our English language.
The message was skillfully designed to appeal to Americans who are outraged at our government's failure to protect us from the invasion of illegals. But slyly buried in the middle of Newt's message was an endorsement of a "guest worker" plan to invite even more aliens to take U.S. jobs.
The politicians and business executives, who are determined to continue bringing in foreigners to work for lower wages than Americans expect, have gotten smart. The plan to import "willing workers" from other countries is now being packaged in the language of concern about border security.
This strategy is obvious in the new White House-backed coalition called Americans for Border and Economic Security, organized by Republican lobbyist (and former Republican National Committee Chairman) Ed Gillespie. Admission to this coalition costs $50,000 to $250,000, fees that will finance a political-style campaign to sell the American people on a guest-worker program wrapped in a few border-security measures.
The Bush White House is on message with the new pitch.
"The administration is consulting with Congress to discuss realistic and comprehensive immigration reform," White House spokeswoman Maria Tamburri said.
Tamburri said it is "critical" that any immigration reform address border security, enforcement and the economic reality of the demand for willing workers. She said it must do so in a way that does not allow amnesty and establishes greater control of U.S. borders through increased security, domestic enforcement and a temporary-worker program.
The White House's strategy is to put forth a proposal that seems to get tougher on border security while at the same time putting in place a plan to give permits to illegal alien workers. The financed campaign behind it is not a guarantee of success given that conservative talk radio and many other sources of conservative opinion will fight against it. Bush did not succeed with the big bucks he lined up in support of Social Security investment accounts. So big financial backing is not a guarantee of success.
Bush wants a new immigration bill with more legal immigration and cheap temporary worker permits.
President Bush yesterday told House Republicans that he wants them to pass an immigration bill this fall, but members said he may not get a bill he likes.
...
The president did not go into specifics at yesterday's meeting, several Republicans said. But Mr. Bush previously has called for a guest-worker program that matches workers with employers who say they cannot fill those jobs with Americans. He also called for an increase in the level of legal immigration.
Employers want illegal aliens because they can pay them less than they pay Americans. No labor shortage exists in America. Market prices change to make labor demand and supply equal. This is Economics 101.
Cheap labor for employers means higher taxes for everyone at higher income levels. People who earn low wages inevitably turn to governments for medical and other services.
It's easy to understand why Wal-Mart is hostile to unions. Under the current balance of power between the company and its employees--uh, I mean "associates"--the average hourly wage is $9.68. That's substantially lower than the average hourly wage for all retail workers, which is $12.28. (In case you're wondering, the average hourly wage for all nonsupervisory workers in our labor force is $15.90.)
In addition, only about half of Wal-Mart's employees can afford to buy into the company's health-insurance plan. As a result, Wal-Mart employees are turning in droves to government-funded health programs to ensure that their children can see a doctor when they're sick.
Wal-Mart stands in marked contrast to Costco, which has a partly unionized work force (the Teamsters represent about 15,000 workers at Costco stores in California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia). Costco pays an average of $16 an hour, and 82 percent of its employees are covered by company health insurance.
Immigrant labor that is cheap for employers is subsidized by middle and higher income taxpayers.
If you want to understand why Bush's foreign worker permit proposal will not stop the influx of illegal immigrants then read my post "Thinking About Bush's Less Than Half-Baked Worker Permit Proposal".
Medicare rewards high costs and incompetence.
Under Medicare's rules, each time a patient comes back for another treatment, a hospital qualifies for an additional payment. In effect, Palm Beach Gardens was paid a bonus for its mistakes.Medicare's handling of Palm Beach Gardens is an extreme example of a pervasive problem that costs the federal insurance program billions of dollars a year while rewarding doctors, hospitals and health plans for bad medicine. In Medicare's upside-down reimbursement system, hospitals and doctors who order unnecessary tests, provide poor care or even injure patients often receive higher payments than those who provide efficient, high-quality medicine.
"It's the exact opposite of what you would expect," said Mary Brainerd, chief executive officer of HealthPartners, a nonprofit health plan based in Bloomington, Minn. Her Medicare HMO ranked among the top 10 in the nation last year for quality but was paid thousands of dollars less per patient by Medicare than lower-performing plans.
"The way Medicare is set up," Brainerd said, "it actually punishes you for being good."
As Medicare approaches its 40th anniversary on Saturday, much of the debate about the nation's largest health insurance program revolves around whether it will remain solvent for aging baby boomers. Yet another critical question is often overlooked: whether taxpayers and patients get their money's worth from the $300 billion Medicare spends each year -- now about 15 percent of federal spending and projected to grow to nearly a quarter of the budget in a decade.
Read the whole article.
Medicare does little to try to monitor quality of service delivered.
Medicare has difficulty controlling waste because of deficiencies in the way it monitors and enforces quality standards. Its oversight system is fragmented, underfunded and marred by conflicts of interest, records and interviews show. For every $1,000 that it pays to hospitals and doctors, it invests just $1 or $2 to oversee and improve patient care.
Part of Medicare's budget should go toward funding the devleopment of cheaper treatments. Another part of Medicare's budget should go toward tracking and comparing quality of care at different medical institutions. Also, more Medicare outlays should funnel through HMOs that are rewarded for higher quality and more cost effective service.
The United States also needs to reduce the percentage of medical costs paid for by insurance plans. Tax advantaged medical savings accounts would introduce much more accountability by making the payers and the receivers of medical services the same people. Imagine you had a medical insurance plan with a $5000 per year deductible (I have such a plan) and you had, say, at least $20,000 in your medical savings account with which to pay for medical insurance and for all medical expenses that might come up in the course of a few years. Even if you lost your job and went through a major illness for a couple of years you'd still be able to pay all your medical expenses. Since you'd be spending your own money you'd look much harder for lower priced services and services more assured to allow quick recovery times. In short, you'd shop around the way plastic surgery customers do now. Medical savings accounts with large deductibles are one way to bring more competition to medicine.
A lot of medical procedures have costs that run into the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. One way to bring competition to the provision of such services would be to make the tax advantaged nature of medical savings accounts greater for people who put more money into their accounts and buy higher deductible insurance policies. So, for example, a person who agrees to put $50,000.00 into their medical savings account and buy medical insurance with a $20,000.00 per year deductible should get a bigger tax break than someone who puts in only $10,000.00 and buys medical insurance with a $5000.00 per year deductible. People should get a tax advantage for paying larger portions of their own medical expenses.
Currently much of the medical industry is a massive uncompetitive racket. Medical care providers actively lobby Congress to defeat attempts by Medicare to run competitions for provision of major types of services. The article cites some examples of pilot projects which Congress killed after their initial success. But the cost of medical care in general and specifically the cost of medical care paid for by taxpayers has become so great that the same racketeering business as usual has got to come to an end. We need competition and publically available performance data on doctors and hospitals.
What happens when the law goes unenforced? At the risk of stating the obvious and insulting my readers: When the law is not enforced more people break the law. The word has gotten out to an increasing number of "Other Than Mexicans" that if they can cross the border from Mexico into the United States that they will not be deported even if caught.
Already this year, the number of non-Mexican apprehensions has far outpaced last year's total in just eight months. And while they are still a relatively small percentage compared with the number of illegal Mexicans, critics say the federal government's policy in dealing with them is far more dangerous.
Because OTMs, or "Other Than Mexicans" as the Border Patrol classifies them, must be returned to their country of origin, they cannot be simply sent back across the southern border, as most Mexicans are. Under US law, they must be detained (in the US) pending a deportation hearing. The problem is, immigration detention centers are packed, so most OTMs are given a court summons and told to return in three months. A full 85 percent don't.
According to the Border Patrol, some 465,000 OTMs have taken advantage of this "catch and release" policy to settle here in the US. "It's an insane policy which encourages OTMs to come into the country illegally, and we shouldn't be shocked that they are coming in record numbers," says T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, which represents more than 9,000 agents.
I predict that until all OTMs caught on the border get held for deportation the number of OTMs crossing the border will continue to grow at double digit percentage rates each year. The longer the problem goes unaddressed the bigger and more expensive the fix will become. Right now we need the ability to hold perhaps at most a half million OTMs at once in detention. Eventually we will need the ability to hold millions of them.
A border barrier is already the cheapest way to stop the Mexican illegal immigrant flood. As the OTM flood increases a border barrier will also become the cheapest way to stop that as well. Estimates for the cost of Israel's barrier fence with the West Bank range upward toward $2 billion dollars with per mile costs ranging from $3 million to $3.5 million to $4.15 million. The total US-Mexican border runs 1951 miles. Taking the $4.15 million per mile border barrier cost the total cost of a barrier on the full length of the US-Mexican border runs to $8.1 billion dollars. But even if we doubled the cost per mile to make concrete barriers taller with perhaps another fence layer and put more concertina wire on the barrier layers in order to make the barrier even harder to cross the total would be only $16 billion.
Instead of tough enforcement of immigration and border control imagine we go in the opposite direction. The gradually building flood of OTMs with no attempt made to deport most OTMs is pushing America toward de facto open borders. Where will that take us? Steve Sailer says if America adopts total open borders as much as 1.5 billion people would try immigrate to the United States.
What about in the long run? We have two informative examples:
- The U.S. maintains an open border with its territory of Puerto Rico. One-fourth of all Puerto Ricans live on the U.S. mainland, according to Harvard economist George Borjas, and that proportion is kept down only by paying generous benefits to Puerto Ricans who stay home.
- There are currently 106 million people in Mexico and approximately 25 million people of Mexican descent in the United States. In other words, just under 1/5th of all Mexicans in the world now live in America. And they got here without an official open borders plan.
So what does that imply?
There are currently over six billion people who live neither in America nor Mexico. So, if one-fourth of the rest wanted to move to America, as happened with Puerto Ricans, that would be 1.5 additional billion people, compared to the current American population of 296 million.
If we formally gave up enforcing rules on immigration then over a few decade period the United States would grow to have a population of about 1.8 billion people. One has to be a lunatic to want such an outcome. Therefore it is not implausible that Bush and the neocons want exactly that. Why? They have faith in the most foolish ideas and consider embracing such ideas a virtue.
Maybe they want to make America become the most populated country in the world in order to outcompete China. But in order to outcompete China in the long run what we need is more brains, not more dummies. Totally open borders would bring in huge waves of dummies while the smarter people would recoil with horror from the thought of moving to a country with nearly two billion people speaking a "Tower of Babel" of languages. The racial and religious conflicts would lead to a civil war and dictatorship.
If you are not aware of just how dumb Bush's immigration policies and proposals really are I strongly urge you to read my post "Thinking About Bush's Less Than Half-Baked Worker Permit Proposal".
Update: Plans to extend the US-Mexican border barrier at San Diego the final 5 miles to the ocean put the cost at $5 million per mile even with special environmental restoration costs added in.
The project would denude a swath of vegetation about the width of a six-lane freeway. It would cut across a habitat preserve included in the Multiple Species Conservation Program, a system of interconnected open-space areas established by the federal and state governments.
To offset the project's damage to the habitat preserve, the Border Patrol has offered to restore plants to 85 miles of dirt roads – or 145 acres – that will no longer be necessary to patrol the border.
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The final five miles of the project could cost an estimated $25 million, including $11 million to offset the loss of rare wildlife habitat.
With a barrier running the full length of the US-Mexico border there'd be no need for such large efforts at environmental harm abatement on most of its length. Note that the barrier width is similar to that of a 6 lane freeway and the United States has tens of thousands of miles of such freeways in the interstates highway system.
But how secure are these traditions in the first place? Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, a scholar of religion and law at the University of Chicago, has just published a smart – and in the present circumstances, sobering – little book called The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton University Press). Her argument implies we have overestimated the amount of real religious difference that even a tolerant democracy can handle. Freedom of religion can be called a “basic” right, but it is not one that goes without saying.
The Protestant Christian view of religion as a private voluntary affair is not shared by all or even most religions.
Most of the plaintiffs in the case were Catholics, with a scattering of Jews, and the judge was Protestant. That may or may not have been important. What was important was that the entire legal idiom in which cases like these get argued in America is a Protestant one. For the court’s purposes, writes Ms Sullivan, true religion “came to be understood as being private, voluntary, individual, textual, and believed. Public, coercive, communal, oral and enacted religion, on the other hand, was seen to be ‘false’.” Religions with a large role for ritual or community or sacred objects – such as American Catholicism in the 19th century or Islam today – are not always intelligible to this system.
Attorneys on both sides of the Warner case were uncomfortable talking about religion, and preferred to address the issues as if they were the same as those in free speech cases. Ms Sullivan notes that they often spoke of religious “views” and “expression”. But protecting expression or views or opinions cannot be the aspiration the American founding fathers had in mind when they included freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights. It if were, then protecting freedom of speech would have been sufficient. The problem is that not all people understand religious freedom as freedom of speech about holy things. For many, religion is primarily a matter of allegiance and custom.
It is great that Ms. Sullivan has written this book. Far too many Protestants in the West and also non-believers who are descended from Protestants fail to grasp in other religions just how far religious authority is seen as extending into the public sphere and into politics. Even some Protestant denominations take positions that bring them into moral debates in the public sphere over what is a human life (e.g. on abortion and euthanasia) or what is protected speech (e.g. on pornography). But the political claims and demands by religious authorities in other religions go far beyond what we see today in the United States coming from the vast bulk of Protestant Christian sects.
Linked to the desire for increased political power are attempts by some radical Muslims to begin a process of Islamicizing British cities.
Last month, Muslim groups in Glasgow petitioned the City Council to ban an Italian restaurant from serving alcohol to diners seated at outside tables. Hospitals in Leicester considered banning Bibles from hospital wards to avoid offending Muslim patients. In Birmingham, a group called Muslims Against Advertising began a campaign of painting over billboards that they deemed offensive to Islam - targeting ads for Levi's jeans, perfume, and lingerie.
But these small campaigns are polarizing public opinion along ethnic and religious lines - and creating support for Britain's far-right groups, who present themselves as defenders of Britain's hard-won freedoms.
Iraq is serving as yet another demonstration of how religious beliefs can very directly conflict with beliefs in individual rights. The editorial writers of the New York Times are shocked that majority rule in Iraq is creating an atmosphere where religious beliefs about morality are superceding Western ideas about individual rights.
Most chilling of all are the prospects for Iraqi women. As things now stand, their rights are about to be set back by nearly 50 years because of new family law provisions inserted into a draft of the constitution at the behest of the ruling Shiite religious parties. These would make Koranic law, called Shariah, the supreme authority on marriage, divorce and inheritance issues. Even secular women from Shiite families would be stripped of their right to choose their own husbands, inherit property on the same basis as men and seek court protection if their husbands tire of them and decide to declare them divorced.
Less severe laws would be imposed on Sunni women, but only because the draft constitution also embraces the divisive idea of having separate systems of family law in the same country. That is not only offensive, but also impractical in a country where Sunnis and Shiites have been marrying each other for generations.
The elected Iraq Shia leaders are busy stripping many rights from Iraqi women which they had under fairly secular and thoroughly undemocratic dictator Saddam Hussein. The idea that democracy operates to defend individual freedom is obviously false. Whether democracy supports individual rights depends very much on the beliefs and preferences of the majority. In Iraq's case Saddam Hussein was a defender of the individual rights of Iraqi women while effectively by their actions George W. Bush and the neocons have made themselves the enemies of Iraqi women's rights. they can protest that this was not their intent. But the result was predictable.
Perhaps the editorial writers of the New York Times are carping at Bush partly for partisan reasons and partly out of frustrattion. If they think Bush can do anything to stop the decay in rights for women in Iraq they are quite mistaken.
There is a lesson here for Americans and Westerners: Just who is allowed to move to a society and who makes the babies determines what rights will be recognized and protected and whether a society's government will even consider rights protection a top priority. If a society contains enough people who do not recognize, say, a right of women to walk around bareheaded and if the opponents of such a right feel strongly enough about it then women will be forced to cover up or risk rape, kidnapping, beating, and dousing with acid.
The ideological Libertarian Open Borders argument assumes that the vast bulk of immigrants are economic actors but not political actors - or at least not political actors who differ from the existing population in any way that affects rights. However, this assumption is so obviously wrong as shown by empirical evidence in this world that to believe it requires an act of faith even greater than the faith required to believe religions. The belief in political ideologies requires a greater act of faith than the faith required to believe in supernaturally oriented religions because some religious beliefs are not disprovable in this world. Though evidence against many elements of religious beliefs exist in this world as well.
Update: Muslims in Britain To some Muslims Islam is beautiful and violent.
"Some of the people tell you Islam is a religion of peace because they think that then you'll want to convert," says Dublin-born convert Khalid Kelly, who soaks up Abu Osama's sidewalk sermon. "But you cannot possibly say Islam is a religion of peace; jihad is not an internal struggle."
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"All we want to talk about is how beautiful Islam is," says an Iraqi immigrant, who, like others standing here, mingles lyrical spirituality with a blunt advocacy of violence. "Zarqawi is showing the way," he says, referring to the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of the radical faction of foreign fighters in Iraq.
Like many, his dedication to Islam arose from a messy flirtation with a Western lifestyle, including drinking and taking drugs. "When reality hits you, you come back to Islam," he says. "If you read the Koran, you see that Allah gave us the right to terrorize the enemy."
His disillusionment with Britain became complete when he was sacked from his IT job "for telling a kafir [unbeliever, or non-Muslim] woman to cover up." Ironically, only Abu Osama dons religious garb. The others wear jeans and shirts. Kelly would look at home in an Irish pub.
Muslims in Western countries are more likely to become radicalized than Muslims in Muslim countries. There's a lesson there for anyone who wants to see it: Keep Muslims in Muslim countries. Don't let them come to the West.
Update II: You can read the first chapter of Sullivan's book online.
Religious freedom and the legal disestablishment of religion, as political ideas, find their origin in the early modern period in Europe.11 With other markers of modernity identified by scholars--the rise of the nation state, the maturing of an international market, the invention of modern warfare, the advent of printing and literacy, the emergence of a middle class, among others--a new relationship of religion to political governance was created with the breakup of the monopoly of the Roman Church.12 For perhaps the first time since Constantine, religious affiliation in Europe began to be detached again from political identity. National and religious identity no longer necessarily went hand in hand. To be sure, at first, new national religious establishments were created to take the place of the continental monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church, but over the centuries religion was both consciously and unconsciously remodeled to accommodate the new secular political order and new ideas of citizenship. Religion was thereby politically and legally divided into modern and antimodern, long before the reappearance of "fundamentalism" in the 1970s.13 The precondition for political participation by religion increasingly became cooperation with liberal theories and forms of governance.14
As a result, the modern religio-political arrangement has been largely, although not exclusively, indebted, theologically and phenomenologically, to protestant reflection and culture.15 Particularly in its American manifestation. "Protestant" is here spelled with a small "p." I use "protestant" not in a narrow churchy sense, but rather loosely to describe a set of political ideas and cultural practices that emerged in early modern Europe in and after the Reformation; that is, I refer to "protestant," as opposed to "catholic," models of church/state relations. (According to this use, Protestants can be "catholic" and Catholics can be "protestant.") Religion--"true" religion some would say--on this modern protestant reading, came to be understood as being private, voluntary, individual, textual, and believed. Public, coercive, communal, oral, and enacted religion, on the other hand, was seen to be "false." The second kind of religion, iconically represented historically in the United States, for the most part by the Roman Catholic Church (and by Islam today), was, and perhaps still is, the religion of most of the world. Indeed, from a contemporary academic perspective, that religion with which many religion scholars are most concerned has been carefully and systematically excluded, both rhetorically and legally, from modern public space. Crudely speaking, it is the first kind--the modern protestant kind--that is "free." The other kind is closely regulated by law. It is not incidental that most of the plaintiffs in the Warner case, the case considered in this book, are Catholic.
This book, to reiterate, is about the impossibility of religious freedom. Not the impossibility of societies in which persons are free to believe what they want and to associate themselves freely with others who believe in similar ways. Or in which persons are free to speak of religious matters openly and freely. Or in which government is prohibited from disfavoring one group of citizens for invidious reasons. These are rights that belong to all peoples. What is arguably impossible is justly enforcing laws granting persons rights that are defined with respect to their religious beliefs or practices. Forsaking religious freedom as a legally enforced right might enable greater equality among persons and greater clarity and self-determination for religious individuals and communities. Such a change would end discrimination against those who do not self-identify as religious or whose religion is disfavored. It might also force religious groups to fend for themselves politically, economically, and philosophically in a new world of radical normative pluralism.16
If someone has a right to do something because they believe a particular religion then it has to follow that someone else who does not believe that religion then does not have that right. For example, if a certain type of headstone can be placed on a grave only if one is religious then suddenly all the non-believers don't have headstone choices that believers have. Well, how can that be the case in a society where everyone is equal before the law?
Update III: Some people argue that the British Muslim bombers are unrepresentative of British Muslims. But if even a small percentage of British Muslims support terrorism that creates huge security problems and more attacks will take place. 100,000 British Muslims think the London tube and bus bombers are fully justified.
YouGov sought to gauge the character of the Muslim community's response to the events of July 7. As the figures in the chart show, 88 per cent of British Muslims clearly have no intention of trying to justify the bus and Tube murders.
However, six per cent insist that the bombings were, on the contrary, fully justified.
Six per cent may seem a small proportion but in absolute numbers it amounts to about 100,000 individuals who, if not prepared to carry out terrorist acts, are ready to support those who do.
Moreover, the proportion of YouGov's respondents who, while not condoning the London attacks, have some sympathy with the feelings and motives of those who carried them out is considerably larger - 24 per cent.
A fifth of British Muslims feel little or no loyalty toward Britain.
For example, YouGov asked respondents how loyal they feel towards Britain. As the figures in the chart show, the great majority say they feel "very loyal" (46 per cent) or "fairly loyal" (33 per cent) but nearly one British Muslim in five, 18 per cent, feels little loyalty towards this country or none at all.
If these findings are accurate, and they probably are, well over 100,000 British Muslims feel no loyalty whatsoever towards this country.
The proportion of men who say they feel no loyalty to Britain is more than three times the proportion of women saying the same.
A third of British Muslims want to see a collapse of Western civilization.
However, nearly a third of British Muslims, 32 per cent, are far more censorious, believing that "Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end".
The special poll based on a survey of 500 British Muslims found that a clear majority want Islamic law introduced into this country in civil cases relating to their own community. Some 61 per cent wanted Islamic courts - operating on sharia principles – "so long as the penalties did not contravene British law". A major part of civil cases in this country deal with family disputes such as divorce, custody and inheritance.
Of course, Muslims are as entitled to question or criticise the bombing campaign as are Labour MPs such as Paul Marsden or George Galloway. But their opinions call into question their very identification as British citizens. Mohammed Abdullah, a 22-year-old accountant from Luton, told The Times: "We don't perceive ourselves as British Muslims. We are Muslims who live in Britain. All Muslims in Britain view supporting the jihad as a religious duty."
Other Muslims insist these views are unrepresentative. But are they? A Sunday Times survey has found that four out of 10 British Muslims believe Osama Bin Laden is justified in mounting his war against the United States. A similar number say that Britons who choose to fight alongside the Taliban are right to do so. In another opinion poll, conducted for the Asian radio station Sunrise, 98% of London Muslims under 45 said they would not fight for Britain, while 48% said they would take up arms for Bin Laden.
When Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City his actions elicited very little support among the American public. Muslim support for terrorist attacks is orders of magnitude greater than that of other groups in the United States or Britain.
Update IV: For an explanation of why bombers struck Britain and also a great essay on the historical accomplishments of the British people see Anothony Browne's article from The Spectator entitledThe Left’s war on Britishness (requires free registration which is worth your time).
A more pressing question, however, is: why Britain? Not why was Britain attacked, because the list of countries targeted by Islamist terrorism is growing so fast it will soon be quicker to list those unaffected. But rather: why did Britain become the first country in the developed world to produce its own suicide bombers? Why is Britain just about the only country in the world to have produced suicide bombers who sought to kill not another people but their fellow citizens? Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands and Poland were all part of the war on Iraq, and have not produced suicide bombers. The US and Spain had to import their terrorists. For those who think that Muslims in Britain are particularly oppressed and poor, try visiting Muslims in France or Italy.
For all our concern about Islam, Britain is one of the least Islamic countries in Western Europe. There are more Muslims, as a percentage of the population, in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark. It is true that Britain, more cursed with political correctness than most, has shown a joyfully optimistic tolerance of Islamic extremists. The BBC, the Guardian and the Metropolitan Police promote groups like the Muslim Association of Britain, even though it openly supports terrorism (just not in Britain).
No, the real answer to why Britain spawned people fuelled with maniacal hate for their country is that Britain hates itself. In hating Britain, these British suicide bombers were as British as a police warning for flying the union flag.
Britain’s self-loathing is deep, pervasive and lethally dangerous. We get bombed, and we say it’s all our own fault. Schools refuse to teach history that risks making pupils proud, and use it instead as a means of instilling liberal guilt. The government and the BBC gush over ‘the other’, but recoil at the merest hint of British culture. The only thing we are licensed to be proud of is London’s internationalism — in other words, that there is little British left about it.
Read the whole thing.
Update V: Over on the Gene Expression blog see Razib's reaction to Sullivan's argument. Also, on the subject of how problematic it is to define what is part of a particular religion see Razib's The "concept" of a "religion".
Population growth increases stress. Nature reduces stress.
The sight of the sea is the quickest and most effective way to reduce high stress levels for many people, a survey has found.
A poll of 2,000 adults by Hoegaarden found daily stress is a problem for 30% of the population.
However, 84% said being in contact with the natural elements made them feel more relaxed instantly.
Only 19% of rural dwellers found daily strees to be a problem. A sea view was said to be be best stress reducer with 42% of the population saying that looking at the sea reduces stress.
Immigration is the largest cause of population increase in the United States. California's population is projected to reach 60 million by 2040. A decreasing fraction of California's population will have ocean views or views of undeveloped valleys. Developments are spreading out across more deserts and into more valleys. Apartments are packing more people into existing cities. Fewer people will have serenity.
Once upon a time conservationist groups cared about population control. But as non-whites came to represent large fractions of population growth the leftist environmentalists flip-flopped on this issue. Now no population increase is large enough to draw their opposition.
Silence is golden but increasingly rare.
While 30% of the population admit to being seriously stressed on a daily basis, 84% believe that being in contact with the natural elements makes them feel instantly more relaxed. A short walk in a park or the sight of the sea is guaranteed to lower stress instantly.
The survey commissioned by Hoegaarden, is based on a survey of 2000 adults nationwide, who blame a number of factors on their stress levels. These include the morning commute (13%), work itself (32%) and getting up (14%) as the main causes of their daily stress. Just 19% of those who live or work in rural locations say they feel stressed on a daily basis.
Natural antidotes to stress
When it comes to lowering stress levels our senses are key, with 42% of those surveyed, reporting that seeing the sea was the quickest and most effective stress reliever. A third of us benefit most from a walk in the park, 10% cite the smell of cut grass as the best stress buster, and 14% rate hearing a bird as having the biggest impact on reducing stress.
An urban population removed from nature
Although 86% have seen a bird in the last 24 hours, one out of every ten people in the UK haven't seen a sheep or cow for over 6 months. Londoners are almost as likely to have seen a mouse or rat in the last month (22%), as they are a sheep (28%) or cow (28%).
On average city dwellers can expect to spend 73 days without more than 5 minutes of silence at a time, whilst those who live in rural areas go only 14-24 days. Shockingly, almost a quarter (22%) of all Londoners haven't experienced silence for over 6 months.
Housing prices are skyrocketing near coasts. Decades ago ocean front acreage was not so valuable because there was so much of it. But as the population has grown suddenly everyone has realized that relaxing views are in short supply and the prices for the relaxing views has shot up. Unless you make a lot of money expect to live in more stressed environments in the future. In the United States we could reduce the extent of the future decay in quality of life by keeping out immigrants.
The Border Police are heavily infiltrated by insurgents.
A report issued Thursday by the U.S. Defense Department says Iraqi security forces are improving, but that border control units remain weak, with a high level of infiltration by insurgent groups. Overall, according to a senior U.S. general, just over half the Iraqi forces are actually operating against insurgents, but only a small number can operate independently.
The report issued to Congress says the severe problems of desertion and failure to perform, that afflicted Iraqi forces early last year, have largely been solved. The document blames the poor performance on the rush to put newly trained Iraqi forces into battle almost immediately during the coalition assault on insurgent strongholds in Fallujah.
The report says the Special Police Commandos are among Iraq's most effective new fighting forces. It assesses the Commandos' chain of command as "highly effective." Still the report says the 8,000-strong Commandos have an absentee rate of "below 10 percent," although some units are as low as one percent. It describes the level of insurgent infiltration in the Special Police Commandos as "low" because of a special vetting process for applicants, most of whom are experienced soldiers.The report also gives high marks to the Iraqi army's Special Forces Brigade. It says the Brigade has been operating for a year, taking what it calls "crucial roles in major combat operations," sometimes independent of coalition forces.
By contrast, the U.S. Defense Department report says Iraq's new Border Police have "a high level of insurgent infiltration" and "a significant rate of attrition," along with what it calls "moderate to low" effectiveness in its chain of command. The report says there is a "continuing stream of foreign terrorists entering Iraq" across the borders this unit is supposed to help control.
Apparently an absentee rate of below 10% is something to brag about with Iraqi soldiers. But when the units are ordered into battle what happens to their absentee rates?
The Pentagon considers the foreign fighters to be minor players.
In describing the insurgency, the report differed in emphasis from recent portrayals by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
The report played down the importance of foreign fighters, saying that the radical Muslims who have been crossing Iraq's border accounted for only a fraction of the violence, though the "dramatic and symbolic nature, and lethality" of their attacks produced a "disproportionate psychological impact, relative to their numbers."
It said that Sunni Arabs "make up the largest proportion of the insurgency and present the most significant threat to stability in Iraq."
Local Sunni Arabs make up the bulk of the insurgency. No, foreigners do not play a big role. No, Shia Iraqis do not play a big role. The problem is that the Shias also do not play a big role in putting down the Sunni insurgency.
The Pentagon refuses to break down readiness levels of Iraqi units in detail
U.S. officers have developed a method of calculating the combat readiness of the approximately 76,700 Iraqi Army troops, but the Pentagon said it "should not and must not" publicly disclose specific data.
"The enemy's knowledge of such details would put both Iraqi and coalition forces at increased risk," the report said.
But you can guess how ready these units are. Look at US casualty rates. I'll believe that the Iraqi units are ready when they do the bulk of the fighting and US casualty rates fall.
Infrastructure attacks are down.
The general said attacks on Iraqi forces are up slightly, but noted that should be expected because their numbers and involvement have steadily increased.
Attacks on infrastructure, however, are down. From June to November 2004, Iraq averaged 41 insurgent attacks on infrastructure targets per month. Since February, that number has been an average of seven per month. "The Iraqis are working very hard to help protect their infrastructure out there," Sharp said.
But the downturn on infrastructure attacks might indicate that the insurgents think killing government officials, soldiers, police, and others produces greater benefit than blowing up infrastructure.
The downturn in infrastructure attacks is not helping the economy. If conditions in Iraq are getting better then why has unemployment gone up 5.5 percentage points since December 2004?
Unemployment still plagues the Iraqi economy, retarding economic progress and feeding frustration with the pace of reconstruction. About 28 percent of Iraqi workers are unemployed, the report says, up from 22.5 percent in December.
Okay you eternal optimists on Iraq (and you know who you are): What quantitative measures can you point to for progress in the Iraq war? I want real measures that affect outcomes. For example, rates of IED bombings by insurgents or improvement in economic output or other more bottom line measures. Number of Iraqi troops trained just doesn't cut it as a measure of progress unless we see those troops fighting effectively in ways that are quantitatively measurable. How about a big decline in US troop casualties and deaths? When is that going to happen?
You can read the full July 2005 Pentagon Iraq report "Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq" (PDF format).
INDEM, the independent and highly respected think-tank, released its annual report on corruption in Russia this week.
Its findings are hardly encouraging, but not unexpected either. Corruption in Russia has grown ten-fold over the last 4 years. Instead of making a commitment to deal with this grave social malady, the authorities have accepted the institutionalization of corruption as part of Russian economic expansion.
INDEM's "Corruption in Russia: Dynamics and Perspectives" report claims the average bribe in 2001 was $10,200 and has increased to $135,000 in 2005. The report claims bribes increased 10-fold since 2001 and equal to two and a half times the current federal budget.
The authorities have recognized the damage corruption inflicts upon the economy. To counter the temptation to accept bribes for political favors, 35,000 state officials in the federal bureaucracy, representing 10% of all state employees, were given a five-fold pay increase roughly a year ago. These employees are now paid $500 a month, instead of $100. Most observers applauded the government's move as a good first step to fight corruption, but paying some state employees more has not stemmed Russia's oldest social malady called "rent-seeking."
Some Western observers hailed Putin's coming to power. They figured even if he decreased democracy he'd at least cut back on corruption so that the Russian economy would grow faster. Well, Putin has been a total failure by that measure. The biggest economic plus for Russia in recent years has been the rise in oil prices.
Not only are prices up but quality is down too.
However, as the INDEM report points out, the "corruption equilibrium" may now no longer serve its purpose. In the past, the effectiveness of a bribe was a near certainty; today paying a bribe does not assure the "service" will be provided.
What is causing the rise in corruption? Did Putin renationalize assets and thereby cause access to those access to become sellable by government officials? Or has an increase in oil revenue brought in more money with which to pay bribes?
The increase in bribery is the result of growing predatory behavior by bureaucrats.
“The general tendency of growing corruption is not new, but the Yukos affair has completely untied the hand of bureaucracy in their pursuit of bribes,” Mr Satarov said.
But he said the underlying reason for the rise in corruption was the lack of political or civil society control over bureaucrats, who had become the dominant force under Mr Putin.
“Putin is the hostage of the system because he depends on political support from the bureaucrats,” Mr Satarov said.
Putin is portrayed as a strong man. But if he can't control the bribery then he's even even weaker than Yeltsin. Yeltsin's government was better than Putin's.
Some estimates put Muslims at 10% of France's population. Muslim overrepresentation in French prisons show what fools the government leaders were to let in some many Muslim immigrants.
Iranian-French researcher Farhad Khosrokhavar said in his recently published book Islam in Prisons that Muslims make up some 70 percent of a total of 60,775 prisoners in France.
As ethnicity-based censuses are banned in France, he said complexion, names and religious traditions like prohibition of pork indicate that Muslims constitute an overwhelming majority in prisons.
In the United States the figures I see for cost of imprisonment run to $20,000 per prisoner and higher. Prisoners are expensive. But criminals loose in society are even more expensive. They cause lots of damage and loss of people and property and also necessitate more money spent on security measures. Combine the lower rates of economic achievement of Muslims in France and seems very unlikely that French Muslims are a net econominc benefit to the rest of the people of France.
Hillary Clinton has talked tough on illegal immigration. But Hillary has since taken positions opposing measures to crack down on illegal immigration. Once again Hillary refuses to put our money where she pretends to be on immigration.
The Senate voted yesterday against fulfilling its pledge from last year to hire 2,000 more Border Patrol agents and fund 8,000 new detention beds for illegal aliens in fiscal 2006, as some potential presidential candidates weighed in on border security and illegal immigration.
Hillary voted against both amendments that would have increased the number of Border Patrol agents and also that would have allowed all the non-Mexican illegal immigrants who are captured crossing the border to be held for deportation.
The major Democratic Party contenders for the 2008 Presidential election all voted against tighter border security.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat, who had made a splash recently with comments about cracking down on illegal immigration, voted against both amendments, as did Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the 2004 Democratic nominee, and Democratic Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who has said he plans to run.
Just last week the former first lady blasted President Bush on border security in a statement posted to her official Senate Web site.
"This administration has failed to provide the resources to protect our borders, or a better system to keep track of entrants to this country," she complained, adding, "I welcome the addition of more border security."
Who is a bigger liar? George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton? I figure Bush is because he's had more opportunity to craft big lies to implement policies. During her husband's administration Bill and not Hillary was the architect of the biggest lies.
She also touched on several education issues, including her support of legislation known as the DREAM Act, which would allow illegal immigrant children who finish high school in the United States to avoid deportation, earn a path to citizenship, and possibly receive in-state college tuition rates. The National Council of La Raza held a rally in support of the measure on Sunday.
"We want to make it possible for the 65,000 undocumented young people who graduate from our high schools each year to receive in-state tuition rates and pursue their own dreams," she said. "I hope, with your help, we will make that Dream Act a reality this year."
One wonders what she advocates for illegal alien high school drop-outs. Does she draw a distinction between the desirability of those smart enough to go to college and those who aren't even smart enough to graduate from high school? The average Hispanic 12th grader knows about as much as the average white 8th grader. Would Hillary Clinton publically acknowledge this fact if confronted with it? Would she agree that sending people with 8th or 9th grade levels of education on to college with racial preferences works against the best interests of the nation? Or does she think that higher achieving white, East Asian, and South Asian students should be discriminated against for the benefit of a growing Democratic Party voting block that is a source of cheap labor for businesses that donate to both parties?
I think it is clear at this point that Hillary Clinton is not serious about cutting back on illegal immigration. The only hope for immigration restrictionists in the 2008 Presidential election is Tom Tancredo.
Shia politicians in Iraq call for the return of Shia militias.
Shiite parliamentarian Khudayr al-Khuzai called on the government Sunday to "bring back popular militias" to protect vulnerable Shiite communities. "The plans of the interior and defense ministries to impose security in Iraq have failed to stop the terrorists," he told the National Assembly.
But the Shia militias never entirely disbanded. They control parts of Baghdad and certainly control Basra (see below).
The Shias see civil war between Sunnis and Shias in the offing. (same article here)
“What is truly happening, and what shall happen, is clear: a war against the Shias,” Sheikh Jalal al-Din al-Saghir, a prominent Shia cleric and MP, told the Iraqi parliament.
Sheikh al-Saghir is close to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the supreme Shia spiritual leader and moderate who has so far managed to restrain powerful Shia militias from undertaking any outright attack on Sunni insurgents. His warning suggests that the Shia leadership may be losing its grip over Shias who in private often call for an armed backlash against their Sunni assailants.
If the US withdrew then the Shia militias would quickly explode in size and take on the Sunni groups.
The Shias are reacting to the continued killing of Shias by Sunni bombers. Perhaps the bombers in Iraq decided to have a weekend bomb contest to see who could blow up the most people.
Some 15 suicide bombers have struck within just over 48 hours in the capital and along the main road south in what al Qaeda's Iraq wing has declared is a campaign to seize Baghdad.
In Saturday's attack a suicide bomber blew up a fuel truck near a crowded vegetable market outside a Shi'ite mosque in Musayyib, in a lawless area U.S. troops call "the triangle of death." In addition to the 98 killed, hospital sources said 75 people had been wounded, 19 of whom were in serious condition.
In southern Iraq Basra has been spared the Sunni bombings because it is under control of oppressive Shia fundamentalist Islamic militias.
For a visitor from Baghdad the contrast is striking: there are none of the blast walls that surround the capital's government buildings and at the night the markets and streets throng with people.
But the calm has come at a price and offers an object lesson to strategists in western capitals that bringing democracy to the Middle East can easily usher into power religious forces at odds with the west.
In January's historic Iraq election a majority of religion-inspired leaders were elected in Basra, but they have struck a deal with the militias which have been influential since 2003 and effectively have free rein in the city.
The militias help impose order and warn of any Sunni infiltrators but only while working to transform the city into a miniature theocracy reminiscent of that found across the Shatt al Arab waterway in Iran.
Pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 Iranian revolution, have become a common sight on street corners. Shops selling musical instruments have been bombed after warnings that musicians were the "servants of Satan".
Stores selling DVDs report that groups of men inspect their wares to ensure it contains no items considered too provocative.
American soldiers have fought for Iraqi freedom. The freedom to create a stifling oppressive religous state.
Iran looks to be the big winner in Iraq.
Iran hopes that the United States can crush the insurgency and that free elections will keep its allies in power. If Iraq eventually breaks apart into Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite countries, Iranian officials think they will have strong influence in Kurdistan and the Shiite state.
Asked if it's ironic that when the United States eventually withdraws, Iran could have greater influence than the United States, Asefi said, "That is true, but that's not our fault. When Americans are working for us, we'll let them do it."
America is running out of allies to make the war in Iraq multinational on the American side. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi says 10% of Italy's 3000 troops in Iraq will go home in September 2005.
'As far as our troop withdrawal goes, the situation has not changed. We will begin, as I have already announced, a partial withdrawal of around 300 troops in September,' he said at the end of a summit of world leaders.
He added that Britain does not want to be tied to what he called an "immutable time scale" for withdrawal.
"That will be a process. I believe it is a process that could start - no more than that - over the next 12 months," Mr. Reid says.
The war will go on for years if the US remains.
Update: I have a big question: Is civil war between the Shias and Sunnis more likely if the United States leaves soon or stays longer? If the US leaves now then the Sunnis could decide that the central government is so weak that they can capture control of the government and restore the Sunni supremacy. That would lead to a civil war. On the other hand the very presence of US troops is a big lure for non-Iraqi Arabs to heed the call to Jihad and to go into Iraq and conduct bombings. Shia Arabs bear the brunt of those attaccks. Therefore the US presence brings in bombers who drive Shias toward retaliatory attacks against Iraqi Sunnis which then make the Sunnis want to retaliate in kind. So the US presence helps to create the conditions for civil war.
My guess: Iraq would be calmer and at less risk of civil war if US troops left.
The war in Iraq radicalized many Arabs. Most of the bombers in Iraq would not have become terrorists had the United States not invaded Iraq.
However, interrogations of nearly 300 Saudis captured while trying to sneak into Iraq and case studies of more than three dozen others who blew themselves up in suicide attacks show that most were heeding the calls from clerics and activists to drive infidels out of Arab land, according to a study by Saudi investigator Nawaf Obaid, a US-trained analyst who was commissioned by the Saudi government and given access to Saudi officials and intelligence.
A separate Israeli analysis of 154 foreign fighters compiled by a leading terrorism researcher found that despite the presence of some senior Al Qaeda operatives who are organizing the volunteers, ''the vast majority of [non-Iraqi] Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part in any terrorist activity prior to their arrival in Iraq."
President Bush sure knows how to push the buttons of the Arabs.
''The president is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on terrorism, but this is a front we created," said Peter Bergen, a terrorism specialist at the nonpartisan New America Foundation, a Washington think tank
The bull is going to remain in the china shop until January 2009.
What I see is the silver lining in this gray cloud: The Arabs are helping to sell the European public on the idea that immigration is not a solution to their aging populations.
Tom Tancredo is my top choice for the next President of the United States.
The four-term House member met Thursday evening with members of the Christian Coalition of Iowa in Davenport before making similar stops in Cedar Rapids and Cedar Falls on Friday. He planned to leave Iowa today after a morning event in Dubuque.
"I'm here to get people to ask the question: What are you going to do about illegal immigration?" Tancredo told The Des Moines Register in a telephone interview Friday. "And if I can help elevate this issue to where it really does command the debate, I will have done my job. If no one else will take up this issue in the presidential campaign, then I will."
My guess is he will run. If he runs then he will have many very motivated supporters. So he has a fair shot at getting the Republican nomination. He'd be a huge turn-about from George W. Bush.
A grass roots national movement to enforce immigration law is spreading across the United States.
At least 40 anti-immigration groups have popped up nationally, inspired by the Minuteman Project that rallied hundreds this year to patrol the Mexican border in Arizona.
"It's like O'Leary's cow has kicked over the lantern. The fire has just started now," said Carl "Two Feathers" Whitaker, an American Indian activist and perennial gubernatorial candidate who runs the Tennessee Volunteer Minutemen, aimed at exposing those who employ illegals.
Some local governments are looking for ways to enforce immigration law as well. The government of Canyon County Idaho is planning to bring RICO suits against local businesses which hire illegal aliens to recover costs of providing services to illegals.
"Their presence lowers the labor wage for American citizens and removes employment opportunities," county Commissioner Robert Vasquez, an ambitious politician who just started a bid for Congress, said of the illegal workers. "Certainly it uses tax dollars to provide them with educational services, medical care, unemployment compensation for those that are injured on the job. They are a drain on the taxpayers of Canyon County, the state of Idaho and the U.S. in general."
The county's attempt to recoup its expenses would be filed under the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly called the RICO Act, which has been used against targets ranging from organized crime to Internet spammers.
Canyon County believes it can prove economic damages in court.
Though Vasquez has talked about the possibility of filing suit for several weeks, the commissioners signed a contract Tuesday hiring the Chicago-based law firm Johnson-Bell and lawyer Howard Foster. The contract instructs Foster to file the lawsuit.
The county alleges the businesses, which Vasquez declined to identify until the lawsuit is filed, are hurting the county by taking jobs from U.S. citizens and giving them to illegal immigrants, who then use county resources such as indigent medical care, schools and jails
Should these lawsuits succeed many other county governments could copy Canyon County and use RICO as a tool to intimidate businesses to stop employing illegals. Also, if RICO can be used against the employers of illegals then the desire for big money will bring trial lawyers looking for big scores. The triple damages available under RICO could bring a large change in incentives when it comes to immigration law enforcement.
Efforts to enforce immigration law at the local level will continue to grow as long as the federal government refuses to enforce immigration law. Don't expect the growth of the grassroots movement to change policy in Washington DC. I expect America's treasonous elites to try to get an amnesty through Congress in 2006 as a way to make all the illegals legal and thereby undermine local immigration law enforcement efforts.
The The US Public Broadcasting System Frontline TV show had an excellent segment last week entitled "Al Qaeda's New Front" (and if you get a chance to watch a rerun it would be worth your while). The episode's web site pages have a lot of additional information and I suggest going to that previous link and clicking through and reading some of the articles. One of the people interviewed for the show was psychiatrist and researcher on terrorists Marc Sageman. Among Sageman's points: Terrorists do not need elaborate training.
The violent videos unearthed and broadcast after 9/11 featuring multinationals in fatigues honing their skills in remote training camps may largely be a thing of the past. "While the movement was under the control of Al Qaeda, they could go to Afghanistan to train, but now they don't have that luxury," Sageman says. "Training is no longer necessary. The guys in Casablanca and Istanbul were not trained. There is no evidence the guys from Madrid ever went to a training camp. But yet they are still able to conduct operations."
It turns out making "sophisticated" cell phone detonators is not that sophisticated, Sageman says. "Anyone who knows anything about a cell phone can hook it up to a detonator." He argues that the over 1,000 Web sites coming out of Iraq showing beheadings via video files are actually "far more sophisticated than rigging a bomb up."
Sageman says the devices used by many terrorists are remarkably primitive. "It's pretty amateurish. The real threat today are attacks like Madrid, Casablanca, Istanbul -- it's not [sophisticated attacks like] 9/11 because these guys can't coordinate."
I've previously posted excerpts summarizing some of Marc Sageman's statistical analyses on terrorists in my previous post "Former CIA Case Officer Provides Terrorist Profiles". The Frontline episode includes more details from from Sageman's work. For example, Muslims are more likely to become jihadists if they move to live in a society which has what is to them a foreign culture.
At the time they joined jihad, the terrorists were not very religious. They only became religious once they joined the jihad. 70 percent of his sample joined the jihad while they were living in another country from where they grew up: someone from country A is living in country B and going after country C. This is very different from the usual terrorist of the past, someone from country A, living in country A, going after country A's government.
For an example of the A to B to C pattern look at Mohammed Atta from Egypt who moved to Germany and then decided to attack the United States. If Germany had not allowed Atta and his Middle Eastern co-conspirators to immgrate to Germany then the 9/11 attack probably would have happened. Muslim immigration to Europe (and to Canada for that matter) therefore heightens the risk of terrorist attacks in the Unietd States.
A more general statement perhaps is that people who join the jihad tend to feel like outsiders. The native born British Muslims who join the jihad do not see themselves as British. They see themselves as Muslims living in Britain. There's an obvious lesson here for Western societies: Don't let in people whose religion gives them a belief system which is incompatible with Western cultures. Do not let in people who will see themselves as outsiders. Only let in people who have cultural and religious beliefs that are fully compatible with the existing culture.
Of course, to recognize that some cultures are incompatible with each other requires a rejection of muliticulturalist ideology. One must see differences between peoples. One must give up the illusion that the majority of people in every country of the world are, deep down, secular liberal democrats. To reject myths which are part of one's secular or religious faith in humanity is more than many people can manage. But unless Western intellectuals adopt a more realistic and empirical view of human nature Western democracies are going to become less free and less safe.
The potential for terrorism and conflict is heightened when the immigrants are from a sufficiently different ethnic or racial group that they see themselves an the larger society also see them as foreign. Human beings identify more closely with those who look more like them, act more like them, think more like them. This tendency toward seeing people as belonging to in-groups and out-groups is part of human nature. Policies based a rejection of deep human tendencies lead to foolish immigration policies and foolish foreign adventures such as the debacle in Iraq.
If Western countries will stop allowing Muslim immigration and if Western countries will deport all the Muslim illegal aliens then the future growth of the threat of terrorist attacks can be decreased. Why not make these changes to immigration law and immigration law enforcement? Yes, to make the change requires adoption of a less idealistic view of human nature and a less utopian expectation for the future of humanity. But the result will be more freedom in Western societies and less risk of terrorist attacks or of political fights centered around ethnic conflicts.
The attack by the Pakistani British citizens who apparently engaged in suicide bombing on the trains and the bus works against the argument that better integration will eliminate or greatly reduce the Western Muslim terrorist threat. The Frontline "Al Qaeda's New Front" has a Frequently Asked Questions" (FAQ) list which includes the observation that Britain has been an especially friendly place for Muslims. Yet 4
Are some European countries faring better than others in integrating their Muslim communities?
Florida State University Professor Alec Hargreaves, author of numerous books on the North African immigrant community in France and currently a visiting professor of immigration and integration at the Sorbonne in Paris, gives high marks to the U.K. "British policy has generally been more accommodating than that of France or Germany," he says. "Given the large geographical distances separating the U.K. from Pakistan and Bangladesh (the two main Muslim states among the countries supplying Britain with migrant labor), it was unrealistic to think of those migrants as temporary residents. Instead, family settlement was more obviously the norm." Britain also led the way among Western European states in the 1960s and 1970s in developing anti-discrimination policies, which other European Union countries, such as France, are only just beginning to catch up with, he says.
The British home secretary's professed shock that the London bombers were born in Britain demonstrates the folly of embracing a mythical view of human nature in place of a more realistic and biological view.
Charles Clarke, the British home secretary, is 'shocked'. According to the latest police updates, the London bombers were not some Johnny Foreigner threat to our 'way of life': they were four young Britons brought up in our way of life; four men aged between 19 and 30 who were born in Britain to normal, and by all accounts perfectly respectable, Pakistani families.
But why is Clarke shocked? The harsh reality is that these young Brits would appear to be pretty typical al-Qaeda types. For al-Qaeda is not, as many have claimed since 9/11, a bunch of foreigners brought up on the dusty backstreets of Cairo or Ramallah and hell-bent on launching war against a faraway West; they tend to be young, respectable, often middle-class and sometimes naive men, many of whom were born or educated - and even radicalised - in the West. For all the talk of a 'clash of civilisations', al-Qaeda is a largely Western phenomenon.
There was absolutely no reason to be shocked that Pakistani Muslims born in Britain chose to kill dozens of people as suicide bombers.
None of the bombers had criminal records or were known to the police in advance.
Shehzad Tanweer, 22, Mohammed Sadique Khan, 30, and a 19-year-old, Hasib Mir Hussain, have been named as the suspected suicide bombers. The fourth bomber has yet to be named.
All three came from respectable Pakistani families and were born in Britain, and lived in Leeds. None of them had previous criminal records.
Police officials said privately that the suspects were not known to police as Islamic extremists, fitting the profile of 'sleepers' who were chosen for the mission because they had not previously attracted police attention.
This is nature's way of telling Westerners that our immigration policy is the height of folly.
One of the London bombers had a father who owns several businesses.
The second alleged terrorist, Shehzad Tanweer, 20, came from Colwyn Road, Leeds, and is believed to have been responsible for the Aldgate bomb. Shehzad came from a close-knit Muslim family, with four British-born children. His father owned several businesses in the Leeds area. The family lived in a large detached house in the Beeston area in Leeds, with two Mercedes parked outside their home. Shehzad attended Leeds University, were he studied Sport Science. He sometimes helped at his father fish and chip restaurant, South Leeds Fisheries. He was a regular at the Bangali Mosque at Dewsbury Road.
The man responsible for the No. 30 Bus bombing at Tavistock Place was 19-year-old Hasib Hussain, from Colenso Mount, Leeds. Hasib, who knew Shehzad, had been wild until eighteen months ago when he became increasingly religious after visiting relatives in Pakistan. The fourth bomber, believed to be from Luton has yet to be identified, and his remains are still in the Piccadilly line train.
Sports science is not a major for the most brilliant. My suspicion is that while a lot of the terrorists have technical and scientific degrees their minds are marginal for the kind of work they set out to do. Plenty of second rate and third rate universities grant degrees in a variety of scientific and technical subjects. Are these the sorts of universities that the educated terrorists have been earning their degrees? If so then it is plausible that they end up feeling intellectually inferior and resentful of the more successful members of the majority population. I'd love to see IQ tests administered to captured terrorists who have college degrees. I'd also like to see the academic standings for the universities where they earned their degrees and their grade point averages at those universities. Anyone out there reading this a terrorism researcher? This cries out for study.
Think about this. Someone living in one country has a hard time comparing himself to someone else doing a superficially similar job in another country. But put them close together in the same office and suddenly their relative abilities become apparent. Differences in raises and promotions drive home the point that some guy has been judged less capable than some other guys in his same office. If a guy refuses to accept the idea that other people in his environment really are more capable and more productive then he's going to blame his superiors for his own inadequacy. If he happens to believe in a religion that tells him he can get a huge reward in heaven by killing these other people then for some small but significant portion of those boiling with resentment suddenly that resentment and that blame gets channelled toward flying a jumbo jet into a skyscraper or blowing up a bomb on a subway.
Also see my previous post Islamic Terrorists Recruiting At British Universities and Razib's corresponding post and