2,000 Muslim Immigration Child Marriage Cases in 10 Years

Naila Amin was only thirteen years old when she was married off to her Pakistani first cousin twice her age who beat and raped her. “He dragged me about twenty feet - the whole length of the house - by my hair,” she relates. “He began kicking me in the head and it was so hard I saw stars.”

She described how, “My mother would watch my husband and my father kick me together in the head.”

Even though Nalia was a United States citizen, she was engaged to be married when she was eight years old. And at thirteen, her application to bring her rapist to the United States was approved by USCIS.

By the age of fifteen, she was being raped and beaten in Pakistan.

While Nalia is the youngest of the “child brides” in the Senate report, “How the U.S. Immigration System Encourages Child Marriages”, the young abused American citizen is one of thousands of young girls who are either trafficked into this country or who are used to bring their older “husbands” to America.

Between 2007 and 2017, there were 8,686 petitions for spousal or fiancé visas for or on behalf of minors. And during that same period, 4,749 minors on spousal or fiancé visas got green cards. Even while the United States was claiming to fight sex trafficking in underage girls, our own immigration system was rewarding and promoting the sexual trafficking of girls as young as thirteen.

While the Senate report reveals that is the leading child marriage trafficking country, with 3,297 spousal visa petitions filed and 3,123 approved is Mexico, most of the countries in the top 10 list are Muslim.

580 petitions were filed and 554 approved from Nalia's Pakistan. Another 541 filed and 509 approved from Jordan, 277 filed and 233 approved from Yemen, and 227 filed and 207 approved from Iraq.

Mexico once again tops the list of fiancé petitions with 444 filed and 338 approved, but Pakistan is once again in second place with 237 filed and 189 approved. Yemen accounts for 97 filed and 51 approved, Iraq had 94 filed and 72 approved, Jordan had 78 filed and 63 approved, Lebanon had 69 filed and 49 approved, Syria had 67 filed and 50 approved, and Afghanistan had 66 filed and 49 approved.

2,152 spousal and fiancé petitions for or on behalf of minors from Muslim countries were approved.

These numbers are extremely incomplete. No country is listed for over 3,000 of the petitions. But Muslim countries still make up 13 of the top 20 destination countries for child marriage trafficking.

The Senate report also reveals a more disturbing statistic. While Mexico had the highest number of underage petitions, that’s because it has a high rate of immigration to the United States. When the report evaluated the percentage of child marriage petitions among visa petitions in general, Muslim countries entirely dominated the list with 3% of Jordanian petitions, 2.8% of Iraqi petitions, 1.6% of Yemeni petitions, 1.4% of Lebanese petitions and 1.2% of Pakistani spousal petitions involving minors.

No non-Muslim country was ranked higher than Muslim countries.

4.1% of Yemeni fiancé petitions, 3.2% of Jordanian petitions, 3.2% of Iraqi petitions, 2.6% of Pakistani petitions, 2.2% of Lebanese petitions, 2.1% of Syrian petitions and 1.8% of Afghan petitions involved minors.

These numbers show how prevalent child marriage is in Muslim countries and how much of a role our immigration system plays in importing child sexual abuse under the guise of marriage into America.

As Muslim immigration to America increases, the rate of child marriage trafficking will rise along with it.

Nalia’s case is unique because there were only two 13-year-olds who had spousal and fiancé petitions approved by our immigration system. The other 13-year-old was due to marry a 55-year-old man.

38 more petitions were approved for 14-year-olds. And 269 petitions were approved for 15-year-olds.

The overwhelming majority of minors featured on these child marriage petitions were girls.

But that’s not the most disturbing statistic in the report. While USCIS limited itself to approving child sex trafficking visa petitions for children as young as thirteen, no age was too young for the petition filers.

63 petitions had been filed for thirteen-year-olds, 44 petitions for twelve-year-olds, 60 petitions for eleven-year-olds, and 71 petitions had been filed for ten-year-olds.

69 petitions had been filed for nine-year-olds.

In a truly disturbing trend, there were more spousal and fiancé petitions filed for nine-year-olds than thirteen-year-olds. The number of petitions sometimes increased as the ages of the children dropped.

61 petitions were filed for eight-year-olds, 45 petitions for seven-year-olds, 31 for six-year-olds, 43 for five-year-olds, and 40 petitions were filed for four-year- olds.

27 petitions were filed for three- year-olds, 37 petitions for two-year-olds, and 17 petitions for one-year-olds.

A total of 545 petitions were filed to sexually abuse girls under the age of thirteen.

378 petitions were filed to marry 10-year-old girls and younger.

While none of these petitions were approved, it’s important to remember that all of them represent at least one person in the United States petitioning the government to permit the sexual abuse of a child.

These statistics represent 1,102 cases of attempted child rape in which the child was either in the United States or abroad. Since these cases could not be happening without the parents, thousands of adults were involved in these proposed efforts to use the immigration system to rape children.

And yet these numbers are the inevitable outcome of our immigration system.

Pakistan has a 21% child marriage rate. In Iraq, it’s 15%. In Jordan, it’s 8%. In Afghanistan, it’s 57%. In Yemen, it’s more than two-thirds.

These numbers invariably bleed over into immigration from countries where child marriage is normal.

Child marriage is an inescapable part of Islam.

Mohammed married Aisha when she was six years old. While Mohammed had many wives and sex slaves, his sexual abuse of that young girl is the pillar on which the empire of Islam was built.

In a tribal culture, Mohammed’s marriage to Aisha created a new familial alliance and expanded his power base. With his daughter’s sexual abuse, Aisha’s father was able to become the first caliph, succeeding Mohammed, and he ordered the assembly of the book that we know today as the Koran.

As long as child marriage remains a part of Islam, Islamic immigration will continue to be a vector for the sexual abuse of children in the United States.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

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California's Environmentalists Endangered the Environment

Jerry Brown, California’s outgoing governor, wants environmentalism to be his legacy. It’s certainly a better legacy than the 3 people murdered in his final month in office by illegal alien criminals whom his sanctuary state law protected from ICE detainers. But Brown’s environmental legacy is equally terrible.

Governor Brown earned the nickname ‘Governor Moonbeam’ for his soliloquies about Spaceship Earth.

"My own belief is that California has a unique place on the planet. It's been a place of dreams. We can pursue a path of benign energy," he rhapsodized, early in his political career.

Brown’s environmental fanaticism has wrecked California’s agriculture and helped cause a drought by diverting water supplies and failing to make any serious provisions for water preservation and reclamation. As a pseudoscientific notion about carbon causing global warming took hold, he vowed a carbon crackdown. California, he ordered last year, would go “carbon neutral” by 2045.

Doing so would require eliminating California’s oil and gas, outlawing cars, plastic cups and what’s left of its manufacturing and agriculture. Electricity would become unaffordable to all except the very wealthy.

And it wouldn’t matter because Brown’s forest fires and droughts would raise carbon numbers more than all the cars on all the freeways or the air conditioning in the homes of the people he had targeted.

The Department of the Interior estimated that the 2018 wildfire season produced 68 million tons of carbon dioxide. “This number equates to about 15 percent of all California emissions, and it is on par with the annual emissions produced by generating enough electricity to power the entire state for a year,” the press release noted.

The environment, as usual, ‘pollutes’ itself far more than the entire human race ever could. But the fires that devastated California had a little help from environmentalists and their tree-hugging cult.

"There's too much dead and dying timber in the forest, which fuels these catastrophic fires. Proper management of our forests, to include small prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, and other techniques, will improve forest health and reduce the risk of wildfires, while also helping curb the carbon emissions," Secretary Zinke had warned.

The sanctity of the tree is a fundamental tenet of the environmentalist creed. Saving the planet, they believed, required fighting loggers who wanted to chop down the trees and harm the environment. But trees, like every other lifeform, will either have their numbers managed naturally or by humanity. When people don’t harvest trees, forest fires naturally burn through and stimulate new forest growth.

California’s efforts to protect trees led to massive forest fires that claimed the lives of men, women and children, that destroyed thousands of homes, and also burned countless numbers of trees.

While natural wildfires regenerate forests, the lack of forestry management caused a rebound effect leading to severe fires that not only destroyed massive numbers of trees, but limited tree regrowth.

Environmentalism has its roots in a romanticist cult that arose in opposition to industrialization which refuses to understand that the environment operates in cycles, rather than existing in a fixed utopian state until human industry disrupts its natural functioning. Political influence has vested the cult with the trappings of pseudoscience fed by researchers willing to say anything for government grants.

Placing ideology ahead of science proved as debilitating to California’s environment as it did in the USSR.

California’s Air Resources Board however remains committed to ignoring the impact of its policies in much the same way that Soviet officials ignored their impact of their environmental catastrophes.

The ARB has chosen to score only carbon emissions produced by industry and direct human activities, not those produced by environmental policies. That allows the ARB to claim victory over carbon while ignoring the actual amounts of carbon emissions in California.

ARB’s spokesman insisted that it “can only regulate what can be controlled.”

The wildfires turned so historically devastating as a result of California’s environmental regulations. Brown and his environmental allies however blamed the wildfires on “climate change”. But if global warming really caused the wildfires, then why not count the carbon emissions from the fires?

The answer is that the environmentalist policies are a political hoax. And imaginary carbon targets have to be met through fake numbers for fighting a fake problem by ignoring environmental catastrophes.

California won’t actually reduce its carbon emissions. Instead it will go on raising electricity rates, gas prices and outlawing basic necessities, such as plastic bags, while declaring victory over carbon. The actual emission numbers will be buried in a wave of carbon trading scams, in which African countries will be paid to reduce their industrial output to atone for California’s industrial sins.

Carbon trading, when legitimate, impoverishes the Third World, eliminating jobs and industry, causing famines and crushing social mobility, putting money in the bank accounts of governments and not in the hands of the people, but mostly it’s a scam that can’t be meaningfully verified or confirmed. There will be more carbon than ever and Californians will be taxed more than ever, while the profits will go to, the green tycoons handling the carbon transactions while donating to Democrats, and to African warlords.

And when environmentalists admit the existence of the carbon spike, they falsely blame it on industry.

The Peoples Climate Movement claimed that a national 3.4% carbon rise proved "we can’t trust unregulated market forces to save us from climate change". Its solution is "federal, state, and local level" government intervention and a "Green New Deal".

But it’s federal, state and local level government intervention that caused rising carbon numbers. Market forces would have prevented the wildfires and lowered those dreaded carbon emissions.

And not just in California.

National Geographic reported that climate researchers found that the western drought had led to an extra 100 megatons in carbon emissions or the equivalent of adding 1.4 million cars every year.

California had become more dependent on hydroelectric power, which is far more reliable than the trendy, but erratic solar and wind, and is loathed by environmentalists. As the artificial drought worsened, California had to revert back to fossil fuels, raising carbon numbers.

The artificial droughts, caused by the diversion of water for environmental purposes and a failure to construct dams and harvest water resources, had reduced the use of hydroelectric power. Instead of building dams and reservoirs, Brown, Obama and other Democrats, had exploited the crisis to impose drastic rationing and increase environmentalist spending. But water mismanagement for environmental reasons led to higher fossil fuel use and higher rates of carbon emissions.

And there’s no sign that this cycle of environmental catastrophes caused by environmental regulations is about to change. California wildfires are projected to increase as the environmental cult continues obstructing realistic forestry management and viable timber industries. And the failure to maintain and expand water resources will go on causing droughts. These will increase carbon emission rates.

Environmentalists have made fossil fuels into carbon villains, but the latest national numbers show that even as coal plants closed, carbon rose anyway because of a cold winter, leading people in New England to heat their homes. Even as the war on coal was working, “emissions from residential and commercial buildings… for heating and cooking) increased by 10% in 2018 to their highest level since 2004.”

Once again, the environment had defeated the environmentalists.

Environmentalists spend a great deal of time claiming to study the human impact on the environment, but have a very poor grasp of how the environment works on its own terms, and how it impacts people.

Obama and Brown’s carbon cutting goals are impossible, not just because they would destroy the income and quality of life of ordinary Americans, but because their tactics obstruct their goals.

Environmentalists can’t fix the environment because they don’t understand how it works. Environmental policies cause environmental catastrophes making environmentalists the biggest threat to the environment.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

The ADL is a Threat to Jews

Jonathan Greenblatt introduced the ADL’s Never is Now 2018 conference with a full-throated defense of George Soros. It was a strange decision for an organization that had once criticized the radical anti-Israel billionaire’s defenses of anti-Semitism. But under Greenblatt, a former Obama official, the ADL had turned sharply to the left and Never is Now, the ADL’s big shindig, was a disturbing demonstration.

Greenblatt’s opening remarks at the December conference mentioned Soros twice and Israel only once.

And he did not mention Israel to defend it, but to sell out the Jewish State in defense of Soros.

“If your favorite politician is attacking George Soros,” the ADL boss warned, “you must stand up and tell them to stop. And do so even if they profess love for Israel up and down.”

Israel was less important than Soros. And that’s not surprising coming from Greenblatt, who had formerly headed the Aspen Institute, which had received funding from Soros. Instead of standing up for Israel, Greenblatt was encouraging Jews to pick fights with pro-Israel politicians if they insulted Soros.

The ADL had once condemned Soros for using Israel to justify anti-Semitism, now it was all in on Soros and out on Israel.

And it got worse.

The ADL chose to invite Senator Cory Booker to hand out an award. Booker had not only betrayed Jewish voters by backing Iran’s nuclear program, but just that summer had been caught posing with members of an anti-Israel and pro-terrorist BDS hate group while holding up an anti-Israel sign.

In September, Booker favorably quoted Stokely Carmichael at a Senate hearing. Carmichael had infamously said, "The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist we must take a lesson from Hitler.”

The ADL could have chosen to invite any number of pro-Israel senators, including those who had voted against Iran. Instead it chose to invite a pro-Iran politico who palled around with BDS activists and found inspiration in the words of a black nationalist anti-Semite who praised Adolf Hitler.

So much for Never is Now.

The ADL had not only betrayed the message of Never Again, it put up on its stage a politician who had voted to protect a nuclear program meant to kill millions of Jews and who favorably quoted a racist who advocated another Holocaust.

The ADL couldn’t have betrayed the memory of the Holocaust any more thoroughly if Greenblatt had goosestepped onto the stage while singing the Horst Wessel Lied.

Never is Now 2018 sold out Jews and Israel.

The list of speakers did not include a single official from a major pro-Israel organization. Not even AIPAC. However Jill Jacobs, the head of the militantly anti-Israel T’ruah, was a featured speaker. T’ruah had rallied efforts to force Jewish charities to stop helping Jews living in areas claimed by Islamic terrorists.

While the Never is Now 2018 agenda featured an unambiguous condemnation of any efforts to combat illegal immigration, its only Israel panel asked, “When is Criticism of Israel anti-Semitism?” while suggesting that there are "some in the Jewish community who label almost all expressions that are deemed 'anti-Israel' as anti-Semitic".

While the ADL was ruthlessly unequivocal on a variety of lefty issues, such as illegal migration or the reputation of George Soros, it was willing to equivocate when it came to attacking the Jewish State.

There was no room for debate on lefty issues. But there was room for debate on hating Israel.

The panel discussing whether hatred of the Jewish State was anti-Semitic featured Jill Jacobs, a hateful opponent of Israel, and Alyza Lewin of the Brandeis Center, the token pro-Israel organization at NIN. Jacobs, along with top T’ruah leaders, had previously signed a letter urging the United States to “to take a cautious stand concerning Hamas” and called for “constructive engagement with the new Palestinian government”.

Some months after T’ruah’s leadership advocated working with Hamas, the Islamic terror group had put out its own proposal for the Jewish people, “My message to the loathed Jews is that there is no god but Allah, we will chase you everywhere! We are a nation that drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews.”

Never is Now is meant to be a reference to the Holocaust. Not only wasn’t the ADL fighting a second Holocaust, it was welcoming in apologists for Islamist monsters who want to drink Jewish blood.

And apologists for anti-Semites of all sorts.

Appearing on an anti-Semitism panel was Jane Eisner, The Forward boss, whose social justice tabloid not only routinely spewed hate toward Israel, but toward Jews in general. On her watch, the formerly Jewish paper had defended the leaders of the Women’s March, Jeremy Corbyn, Farrakhan and a lefty politician who claimed that Jews control the weather.

The ADL had invited a radical bigot whose paper featured pieces with titles worthy of Stormfront such as, "3 Jewish Moguls Among Eight Who Own as Much as Half the Human Race" and "Why We Should Applaud The Politician Who Said Jews Control The Weather" to discuss anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism, like Israel, was also a pro and con issue at the ADL.

Also on the ADL’s list of speakers was Yehuda Webster, a black nationalist activist, the son of a pastor from Guyana, who had declared, “I am very much against state-sponsored oppression in any context in America, in Israel, or in Palestine. I must stand on the side of the people who fight for liberation.”

Webster is an activist with the radical JFREJ hate group which has fought to cover up anti-Semitism on the Left. The foster son of a JFREJ funder had even been caught setting fires in Jewish schools.

“It’s important for white Jews and Israelis to recognize, yes, the Palestinian-Israeli situation is unique, but still it does play into this global system of white supremacy,” he had argued.

Webster wasn’t the only ADL speaker with a history of accusing Jews of being white supremacists. Joining him was Yavillah McCoy who had declared, “When Jews accepted a white identity in America, they participated in sustaining white supremacy.”

McCoy is associated with Bend the Arc, a radical group headed by Stosh Cotler, an anti-Israel activist. She has also become the public face of a whitewashing effort by the anti-Semitic Women's March leadership.

Instead of inviting activists fighting anti-Semitism, the ADL had instead chosen two leftists associated with anti-Israel groups, who have a history of libeling Jews.

And yet the most obvious thing about Never is Now wasn’t its growing tolerance for anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views. It was how little Jewish content there was in a conference referencing the Holocaust.

There were few representatives of the Jewish community on stage. Instead the ADL brought out obscure lefty activists who, even when they weren’t openly anti-Israel or anti-Semitic, were obscure at best.

Instead of inviting activists who could discuss the rash of anti-Semitic violent attacks against Orthodox Jews in New York City or the Islamic terrorist attacks against Jewish families in Israel, the ADL invited Steph Loehr, a transgender gamer, who fights against integrating voice chat in online video games.

"In my world, the inclusivity-cost of voice chat is very real. The addition of voice chat will push many marginalized players out of the base," Loer claimed.

The ADL doesn’t have the time and the space to confront anti-Semitism, because it’s too busy with more important things. And those things are not the threats to Jews; they are the agendas of the radical Left.

That’s why Greenblatt puts George Soros ahead of Israel.

Once upon a time, the ADL was a Jewish civil rights organization. Now it’s just another generic lefty group that pretends to care about Jewish causes only long enough to fleece some of its donors.

As the Left goes anti-Semitic, the ADL is becoming a threat to Jews.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

The Democrats Can't Escape Their Farrakhan Problem

Like a preacher tiptoeing out of a brothel, the Democrat Party quietly dropped its sponsorship of the Women’s March. Like most of the other lefty establishment groups slowly backing away from its pro-Farrakhan leadership, the DNC offered a non-denial and no condemnation of the group’s anti-Semitism.

Instead of condemning the March’s anti-Semitism, the Southern Poverty Law Center explained that it wasn’t going to sponsor it because “other projects were a priority.” Even though HRC and GLAAD’s names had vanished from the Women’s March partner page, the spokespeople for both gay rights groups claimed that they were waiting for clarification from their respective organizations.

That’s typical.

No one wants to be associated with the Women’s March and no one wants to be disassociated from it. The lefty establishment knows perfectly well that their activist base hates Trump far more than it opposes anti-Semitism. Much of that activist base, including the ones with Jewish last names, would turn out to protest Trump even if they had to do it side by side with Farrakhan, Hamas and Hitler.

But those same groups are wary of offending a handful of wealthy Jewish donors, and so have done their best to square the circle, making a symbolic covert gesture of support for the Jewish activists campaigning against the Women’s March while offering symbolic support for anti-Trump protests.

The Women’s March leadership was threatened enough by these pullouts to parade a few Jewish or Jewface wearing members of the anti-Israel Left to rubber stamp a fake makeover even as Tamika Mallory kept on defending Farrakhan during her media tour of The View and Elle Magazine.

But the Farrakhan problem goes well beyond the Women’s March. And it isn’t going anywhere.

In 1984, Jesse Jackson used an anti-Semitic slur in a conversation with Milton Coleman, an African-American reporter for the Washington Post.

"Let's talk black talk," Jackson had told Coleman.

For Jackson, who was running for president, that meant dropping casual anti-Semitism into the conversation, combining attacks on Israel with calling Jews, “hymies”.

When Coleman wrote about it, Farrakhan, a Jackson supporter who had campaigned with him, warned, “'We're going to make an example of Milton Coleman, we’re going to punish the traitor” and “one day soon we will punish you with death”.

Considering the Nation of Islam’s history of violence, this was no idle threat. Nor would Coleman be the last African-American journalist targeted by the NOI. A decade later, Chauncey Bailey, the editor of the Oakland Post, was murdered by a Nation of Islam splinter group supported by Rep. Barbara Lee.

Media outrage, not over Jackson’s anti-Semitism, but over Farrakhan’s death threat to a reporter, forced the Democrat presidential candidate to condemn Farrakhan, though the two men continued associating. Leftist supporters of Jackson, including Jewish ones, like Bernie Sanders, stood by him despite his anti-Semitic slur. Criticism of Jackson’s anti-Semitism was attributed to his opposition to Israel.

Jackson, like every single leftist anti-Semite, wasn’t an anti-Semite, but an anti-Zionist.

The Jackson-Farrakhan scandal was the template for the same debate that is still taking place a generation later in which Democrats defend their affiliations with Farrakhan as black empowerment, distinct from his bigotry, in which anti-Semitism by leftist racial nationalists is passed off as a critique of Israel, with Jewish anti-Israel lefties providing cover, and, finally, in which Democrats engage in a complicated tango with Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.

Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez and Linda Sarsour are in the eye of the storm because they refused to do what previous lefties had done in the same situation, condemn Farrakhan.

Under pressure, Barack Obama had awkwardly disavowed the racist on the campaign trail while making sure to refer to him by the honorific, “Minister Farrakhan”. Recently, a photo of the two men together at a Congressional Black Caucus event went viral, though few media outlets were willing to report on it.

Keith Ellison also disavowed Farrakhan, despite spending as much as a decade, and beginning his career in politics, in the Nation of Islam. Despite that, he seems to have continued associating with Farrakhan.

Obama and Ellison both adopted a ‘Jacksonian’ strategy, publicly rejecting Farrakhan while embracing him on the down-low. Lesser known members of the Congressional Black Caucus have gone on meeting with Farrakhan and even praising him, only condemning him in response to political pressure.

Most never have.

Tamika Mallory tested whether it was possible for a Farrakhan fan to become a national leader without condemning him. The Women’s March controversy is the litmus test, not over whether Farrakhan will continue to be an influential figure on the left, that’s been an inescapable reality since the eighties, but if that support can be public.

And the results are mixed.

Rep. Maxine Waters, who embraced Farrakhan, will head the House Financial Services Committee, without ever condemning him. That’s true across much of the Congressional Black Caucus.

It took over a year of hard work by Jewish activists to get to the point where the DNC no longer wants to be publicly associated with the Women’s March, but still won’t condemn it. Other lefty groups continue supporting the Women’s March and to much of the #resistance, the whole debate is a non-issue.

Louis Farrakhan is 85 years old, but the problem that he poses will easily outlive him.

Tamika Mallory clarified the central issue in her View appearance when, after defending the NOI and Farrakhan, she jibed, “Other people are obsessed with my relationship with Minister Farrakhan. I am obsessed with empowerment in the black community.”

It’s a familiar defense and it goes to the heart of the intersectionality fraud, which is not actually a movement of mutually supportive identity politics groups defending each other, but a loose alliance of identity politics groups prioritizing their own narrow agendas at the expense of everyone else.

Black nationalists want to continue working with Farrakhan, despite his hatred of Jews, feminism, gays, white people, and pretty much everyone, because he stands for black empowerment.

And bigotry is more often an inspiration, rather than an impediment to tribal empowerment.

It’s not just Farrakhan.

Black nationalism is shot through with anti-Semitic and racist figures who not only engaged in garden variety bigotry, but who viewed Hitler as a role model: (Farrakhan, Stokely Carmichael, Elijah Muhammad, Amiri Baraka, Marcus Garvey, and Eugene Brown, who actually went by “Black Hitler”). During his Nation of Islam days, Malcolm X could be seen palling around with the head of the American Nazi Party and would later boast, "I sat at the table myself with the heads of the Ku Klux Klan."

This history isn’t taught for the same reason that Obama’s Farrakhan photo was buried. It reveals everything that went wrong with the civil rights movement and the fight against racism.

Intersectionality inherited the old sins of black nationalism and created new ones. After decades of insisting that they had chosen Martin, not Malcolm, the Democrats made peace with political reality.

The Women’s March is the horrible consequence of that political reality.

The Jews are the odd man out in the ‘Jacksonian’ rainbow coalition of identity politics nationalists because the Jewish leftists who participate in such movements loathe any kind of Jewish nationalism. The only Jewish exceptionalism that they will occasionally admit to, in their militant commitment to universalism, is anti-Semitism. And hard lefties will deny even the existence of lefty anti-Semitism.

Intersectionalists claim that Jews are hated as white people or as Zionists, not as Jews. That has been the leading defense of anti-Semitism in the ranks of the Women’s March.

But that’s only half the story.

Beyond the depiction of Jews as the white oppressors of minorities or the Zionist oppressors of Muslims, are the raw tribal hatreds of the individual identity politics groups within the movement.

Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour both hate Jews. But their individual hatreds are the products of different racial and religious belief systems.

Mallory tweeted in response to Jewish criticism of her Farrakhan ties, “If your leader does not have the same enemies as Jesus, they may not be THE leader! Study the Bible and u will find the similarities”.

The Women’s March leader was invoking a particular strain of classical anti-Semitism alien to the generally secular white leftist women who make up of the ranks of her movement. And to Linda Sarsour’s own religious inspiration for hating Jews. It’s also a form of ancient anti-Semitism completely distinct from Zionism or intersectionality, but that by invoking Christianity speaks to more traditional elements within the black community.

"The fag's death they gave us on a cross,” Amiri Baraka, a popular black nationalist poet, savagely wrote, indicting Jews for inventing Christianity and alienating black people from black nationalism’s Hitlerian worship of the race. “They give us to worship a dead jew and not ourselves."

The Nation of Islam meanwhile believes that the Biblical patriarch Jacob was actually a Jewish mad scientist who created white people through genetic engineering thousands of years ago.

Even within the black nationalist movement, anti-Semitism takes a variety of racial, religious and anti-religious forms. That’s even truer of the intersectional spectrum where Zionism becomes an excuse for black nationalists, lefty atheists and Islamists to agree on a justification for their individual hatreds.

When the Democrats chose black nationalism, they also picked a tribal model over an integrated one. The anti-Semitism problem of the Women’s March is one of the many manifestations of that original sin. The tribal attacks on white privilege, on toxic masculinity and heterosexuality are different expressions of the same problem.

Identity politics killed tolerance and liberalism. All that’s left is tribal intolerance with intersectional coalitions building movements not around mutual love, but common enemies they can agree to hate.

The debate about the Women’s March centers around the question of whether Jews will be one of those enemies. History and the trends in current affairs, from the media to the streets, tell us they will.

There’s no new anti-Semitism. Only a very old one.

Intersectionality isn’t a new progressive movement, it’s an alliance of old grievances and older bigotries.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

How the Wall Became America's Dividing Line

America is full of visible and invisible walls. In the first half of the last century, our politics had been dedicated to tearing down the walls between classes, races and genders. And then in the second half of the century, radicals terrified of what that meant for their plans, began building them up again while adding new divisions until every city, workplace and even family is divided by many invisible walls.

Walls represent divisions. Whether you support or oppose a particular wall depends on whether you believe a division is legally, morally or philosophically legitimate. The walls that the radicals want to tear down are the walls distinguishing and defining concepts that they don’t believe in, such as nations and genders, while building walls of segregation to separate races and classes.

When Speaker Pelosi calls a border wall immoral, it’s not because she believes that physical structures of steel and stone are immoral, but that the concept that a wall protects, that of the nation and its citizenry, is immoral to the radical mind.

That's an important debate worth having because the rejection of America as a distinct nation, as opposed to a distinct idea, gets at the heart of the opposition to so much of Trump's agenda from both parties.

Unfortunately neither Pelosi nor her media allies are willing to honestly put forward their views and debate them. Instead they make false claims of supporting border security in principle, while opposing it at every turn in practice.

Politicians who claim to support a popular idea in principle while resolutely opposing every attempt to implement it are actually its unprincipled opponents. And the best way to expose them is by forcing them to live up to the principles that they don't have.

That's what President Trump did by moving the embassy to Jerusalem. And then all the politicians who had voted countless times to move the embassy, pundits who had composed countless essays in support of the principle, argued loudly that now was not the time. Nor was any time in the future going to be the time.

The wall shutdown tests the truth of the same principles, forcing the Democrats who shut down the government to stop a border wall into a confrontation that outs their opposition to border security, to walls and to the nations behind them.

The border, like the truth of the border, has become a nebulous place. Illegal migrants and drug dealers, terrorists and traffickers, cross it where there is no wall and no definitive way to maintain a barrier between law and lawlessness, between nations, and between civilization and anarchy. And the truth of the border has also become nebulous with opponents of border security claiming to be its defenders, with the profiteers in trafficking children claiming to be their protectors, and with judges declaring that fighting illegal migration is illegal.

When there is no wall, then physical and moral security both become precarious. Walls don’t just lock in physical geography, but also moral geography by maintaining definitions, separating fact from fiction, and preventing the slippage of moral and physical territories into states of physical and factual anarchy.

A breakdown in border security is not only a physical breakdown, it’s a moral collapse. We aren’t lacking in the physical resources that are needed to construct a wall and to secure the border. America was able to secure the border in lower tech times with fewer resources and less money. And we regularly waste far more money on useless things than the cost of that “immoral” wall.

What we lack are the moral resources to secure the border. The struggle over the shutdown is not a battle over resources, but a struggle over morals. President Trump understands that and has fought it that way for a reason. He has already made the case for self-interest. But the inconveniences of the shutdown require being able to tolerate immediate pain for the eventual relief of greater suffering. Only a moral argument can be used to sell delayed gratification.

A nation offers obvious advantages of self-interest, but its survival requires more than that. In times of crisis, it demands self-sacrifice that transcends self-interest. The everyday governance of a free nation may be rooted in the self-interest of ordinary democracy, but if its citizens cannot sacrifice their temporary interests for something higher than their momentary needs, the nation is lost.

Radicals pretend to make moral arguments, but their morality actually rationalizes selfishness, immediate gratification, theft, hatred and a host of evils. They lie about the consequences of their policies while cultivating an electorate that is incapable or unwilling to see past the emotive messaging of the moment.

A wall is an absurd abstraction to much of the electorate. Those who aren’t near the border don’t see how it will benefit them personally. And many in the suburbs who turned on Trump and the GOP see how cutting off the flow of cheap labor could hurt them economically. Much like the trade war with China, millions no longer have any sense of a national interest, only a personal one. But a nation with no national interests, only personal ones, will ultimately see even those lost.

The radicals have deliberately cultivated a loss of faith in national institutions because an electorate that operates in purely selfish modes is easier to divide along the lines of special privileges, welfare, subsidies and giveaways. And an electorate corrupted by unequal treatment is quick to assume that its opponents are motivated by corrupt agendas and are benefiting even more than they are.

That’s human nature.

Like the lack of a wall, these divisions have torn apart the country by withholding unity and definition. The radicals claim that the concept of a wall is divisive, but it’s actually unifying. Walls encompass what is within and thereby create unity. Without a wall, there can never be unity, only endless divisions. Where there is no wall that we can agree on, it is inevitable that we will build our own walls. And when there is no single principle worth fighting for, we will fight over everything.

The opponents of a wall are also opponents of truth. Not just any specific fact, but the very notion of objective truths. Radicals prefer their facts, like their borders, to be diffuse and subjective. They want ideas to travel across it based on emotional appeals, special pleading and ad hominem attacks rather than by forcing them to abide by the barrier of some fixed and unchanging standard.

The battle over a wall is at its heart a battle over truth in both the general and the specific senses. The supporters of a wall have repeatedly laid out their motives and reasons, while the opponents of a wall paradoxically claim that they support border security and oppose illegal migration, but want to abolish ICE and will shut down the government to stop a wall from ending illegal migration.

The opponents of a wall believe in telling any lie that gets them closer to their true goals. Walls and objective truths are inherently alienating because they are fixed moral structures. And, even as radical wall opponents offer up a torrent of moral pleas, they lack the most essential basis of morality, which is neither outrage, nor perpetual victimhood, but consistency of principle and action.

That is why the wall became the country’s dividing line. It is a line that not only divides borders, but concepts. It separates truth from lies and fact from fiction. It embodies the larger struggle not only over what legally makes one an American, but what morally makes one an American.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Journalism Doesn't Exist

Scrolling through my feed, I see the title of a New Yorker piece, "Does Journalism Have a Future?" And then I keep on going, knowing exactly what's in it without having to read it.

That's true of most media products.

Journalism doesn't have a future. It doesn't even have a present. 

Journalism isn't the opposition research, hit pieces, narcissistic blogging, conspiracy theories and viral scandal manufacturing, with its satellites of hot takes, that passes for journalism these days.

Those are the eviscerated lifeless organs of journalism.

There are still individual journalists, but there's no profession. And there hasn't been one in a while. It's hard to know exactly when the line was crossed. Was it Woodward and Bernstein, the Pentagon Papers, Bill Clinton, Dan Rather, Obama's media entourage?

It's hard to know and it doesn't really matter. You don't need to know exactly when Rome fell when you're standing in the rubble.

Why Rome fell is equally obvious.

It isn't just politics. Though that's a big part of the answer. 

Biased people can be journalists. Liars can be journalists. Con artists, extremists and otherwise unhinged people can be journalists.

What happened though was that the different functions that journalism performed were subdivided, and those that were useful were diverted to serve private causes and agendas, while those that weren't died.

Imagine a police department that only protected the homes of powerful politicians while ignoring everyone else. There would eventually be no difference between them and hired goons except their insistence that they have noble principles and serve an important function.

It's not just the corruption. Journalists have often been corrupt. It's the loss of professional functionality. 

Journalists, like those hired goons, no longer occupy a distinct professional class. They're a subset of political operations. And the ones that don't occupy even worse roles or are dying out.

Technology, cultural changes and political extremism have all played a role in creating that reality. And it's the future.  

It's also the present.

Why No One Likes Elizabeth Warren

"Is ‘Likability’ in Politics Sexist? Yes. It’s Also Outdated," the New York Times blared. "The issue with Elizabeth Warren isn't likability. It's sexism," The Guardian bleated. "Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and the sexist hypocrisy of the 'likability' media narrative," NBC wailed. "Talking About Elizabeth Warren’s Likability is a Way to Tell Women to Sit Down and Shut Up," the Daily Beast ranted.

Lefties like to believe that the essential elements of human nature, economics, aspiration and biology are outdated, having been disproven by some professor in an obscure TED talk or Marxist tract. Likability was apparently discredited in a panel discussion, but we went on liking people and never realized it.

There’s no surer sign that Warren is walking down Hillary Clinton Boulevard to the ditch of history than that a mere 3 days after she announced her run, her defenders are already accusing critics of sexism.

And it’s even sillier for Warren’s warriors to make the claim than it was when Hillary’s hellions tried to attribute all criticism to sexism. Hillary Clinton was the only major female candidate in the 2016 election. Warren is likely to go up against two other women. And no one is complaining about the likability indexes of Kamala Harris or Kirsten Gillibrand. Nor is anyone comparing either woman to Hillary Clinton.

Likability isn’t sexist. John Kasich and Martin O’Malley are examples of 2016 candidates on both sides of the party line whom no one actually liked. Warren’s likability deficit has nothing to do with her gender. It might have something to do with her role in ripping off asbestos victims while pocketing a tidy sum.

But not really.

The ‘Hillariness’ of Warren doesn’t lie in their shared fabulism or lack of ethics. There isn’t a Dem front runner in this race who can be counted on to tell the truth for more than 3 seconds at a time. Joe Biden could lie Elizabeth Warren under the table and still dissemble Hillary Clinton to a draw.

Nor is the issue a double standard that discriminates against women who obviously seek power. Warren had been playing it coy until just now, while Gillibrand spent years broadcasting that she wants to run, despite a complete lack of qualifications for the White House, her current job or a job at Starbucks. But no one compares her to Hillary Clinton, even though she actually holds Hillary Clinton’s old job.

A politician, male or female, who doesn’t want power has something important in common with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. He or she is a mythical legend that no one over the age of five believes in.

Elizabeth Warren is Hillary Clinton reborn, and they’re both unlikable, because they’re both inauthentic scolds who suffer from hall monitor syndrome. They spent their entire lives breaking every rule they could find while awkwardly fantasizing about running every tiny detail of everyone else’s lives.

Warren and Clinton are both unlikable because you can’t picture either one having any fun. When they boast about carrying hot sauce in their purses or drink beers on livestream, you roll your eyes.

An inability to have fun is a forgivable sin. Joyless people power professions from TSA night shifts to laundromat sock inspectors. But combine that with an obsessive need to monitor, regulate and eradicate other people’s fun, and you have the miserable essence of the progressive movement.

A scold.

Scolds come in both sexes. America’s greatest scold is the eight-richest man in America who spends half his time trying to force people to drink smaller sodas. That’s why nobody liked Michael Bloomberg when he was trying to ban salt and jaywalking in New York City. It’s why not even Elizabeth Warren voters will vote for him even if he drops his threatened $100 million to come in 32nd in the 2020 Dem primaries.

Scolds are awkward and arrogant. They’ve spent a lifetime navigating the system, but never learned to fake plausible human emotions. They stay up nights afraid that somebody, somewhere is having fun. The only game they know is bureaucracy, and they play it to get the nicest office chairs and ruin the most people’s lives. In Colonial America, scolds burned witches. In modern times, they wipe out lives.

They are convinced that humanity’s problems could be solved by eliminating its bad habit of happiness.

President Trump has been whacking away at Warren because he would love to run against her. All he has to do is brush off the 2016 playbook and swap out email gags with DNA test jokes. And they would connect because nobody really likes her.

Likability, like economics and biology, isn’t actually going anywhere no matter what a New York Times op-ed says.

Likability has nothing to do with gender. We view people as likable when we think they like us. Even when we might not agree with them politically, we like to think that we could shoot the breeze.

Can you picture anyone shooting the breeze with Hillary Clinton for under six figures?

Likable people are people we might enjoy having fun with. Unlikable people ruin other people’s fun.

Elizabeth Warren has a likability problem because it’s hard to imagine her liking anyone. It’s all too easy to imagine her turning that look, which owes nothing to the Cherokee, but much to some dour Swedish ancestors hardened by centuries of exposure to freezing winds and colorless skies, upon us.

Warren, like the authentic hard-core progressive, doesn’t like people. She sees them as problems to be solved. Unlike Hillary, she isn’t animated by a free-floating bitterness and resentment. And probably doesn’t have a flow chart of enemies or voodoo dolls of everyone who ever thwarted her on a shelf.

But hating the human race less than your 2016 candidate does not a 2020 candidate make.

Lefties succeed when they pretend to like people. The best of them, like Obama and Hillary’s better half, are narcissists who thrived on the adulation of the campaign trail. But Warren doesn’t like people. Until recently, she avoided doing interviews. Her campaign debut had the frenzied desperation of careful planning. Unlike her rivals, she avoided people, until she had to grit her teeth and dive in all the way.

There’s never a politician so bad at politics that he or she won’t attract an admirer somewhere. But Warren’s ceiling is of her own making. Enough people told her that she could one day sit in the Oval Office that she came to believe it. And, like Hillary Clinton, she laboriously planned out a political campaign with the methodical relentlessness of a position paper, but with no grasp of people.

Three days in, Elizabeth Warren’s media shadow guard was already accusing critics of sexism.

Playing the identity politics card is a cheap way of suppressing dissent. But it doesn’t overcome the inherent flaws of a candidate. No amount of sexism accusations made Hillary Clinton a better candidate.

Identity politics works best when practiced by likable politicians who make voters want to reassure them of their own likability. That’s why Obama played the identity politics game and won big. Hillary Clinton didn’t make voters want to reassure her that they weren’t sexist pigs. Nor will Elizabeth Warren.

Warren’s resources and organization mean that she will be at this for over a year. When running against two other women, Warren’s constant cries of sexism will seem sillier than Hillary’s. But Democrats will still have to listen to them for over a year. It won’t make Warren any more likable, just more losable.












Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

The Man Who Banned Guns in Chicago Had 23 of Them

"Bullets and booze don't mix," Alderman Edward Burke growled.

Then the Chairman of the Finance Committee vowed to fight the NRA. He had spent much of his 50 years in power fighting for gun control. And the man dubbed “Alderman-for-Life”, whose wife who sat on the Illinois Supreme Court, had the heft.

Five years ago, Chicago had lost yet another of its serial gun control battles. But Burke and the
Democrat machine were vowing to go on fighting with more laws attempting to restrict the Second Amendment.

Burke, an Obama and Blagojevich ally, and the godfather of Chicago politics (dubbed its real mayor), hated and loved guns at the same time. He had nearly as many guns as he had gun control bills. When the FBI raided the offices of the powerful Chicago Democrat, they found 23 guns. That’s a lot of guns for one man. Especially for a man who had worked hard to ban handguns in Chicago.

"What it does do hopefully is put a freeze on the number of handguns that are presently owned by the people in the city of Chicago,” he had said of Chicago’s 1982 handgun ban.

The freeze however didn’t apply to all the guns in his office.

The unconstitutional gun ban had been proposed by Alderman Burke. Burke’s ordinance became a national first and a model for future efforts to deprive citizens of their Second Amendment rights.

It wasn’t just guns. Alderman Burke had never met anything that he didn’t want to ban.

This year the Chicago Sun-Times had dubbed him the “Ban Man”. Burke had banned or tried to ban laundry detergent, spray paint, smoking, trans fats, plastic knives, caffeine drinks, horse-drawn carriages, Uber, chewing tobacco and e-cigarettes.

If you liked it, Burke would ban it. And probably stockpile 23 boxes of detergent, caffeine drinks, e-cigarettes, food full of delicious trans fats, chewing tobacco and horse-drawn carriages in his office.

But while Alderman Burke banned ordinary Chicago residents from owning guns, he had a legal loophole for owning as many guns as he wanted and even being able to legally carry semi-automatic weapons.

The same pol who had fought to ban handguns, expand the gun registry and pressured banks to use their monopolistic power to impose gun control, was doing exactly what he banned others from doing.

How did he do it? Tune in Wednesday night at 9 PM for episodes of Ed Burke, PI.

The crooked Chicago pol, who has been charged with extortion, was also a private detective. When the Firearm Control Card application asked him what agency he worked for, he answered, “Edward Burke”.

And Burke wasn’t the only gun control politician to pull this scam.

Back in 2012, State Senator Donne Trotter was busted at O’Hare International Airport with a gun in his bag. Trotter was an impassioned gun control advocate who had co-sponsored 31 gun control bills and opposed concealed carry, claimed that he needed the gun because he moonlighted as a detective.

Burke was not only a law unto himself, but a law unto the people of Chicago. He not only had a PI license, but three other active state licenses, some meant for people that “need a weapon on the job.”

Chicago is a pretty violent city, but its political leaders don’t need 23 guns to do their jobs. Unless their job is extorting businesses. That’s why the Finance Committee chair and occasional PI has been charged with one count of attempted extortion for trying to shake down fast food restaurants.

Here’s how the alleged scam worked.

In addition to being one of Chicago’s top bosses and a private investigator, Burke also had a law firm. And the Chairman of the Finance Committee’s law firm specialized in, what else, property tax appeals.

A humble hack would have been satisfied with that degree of corruption, but Ed Burke was not as ordinary politicians are. Humble men don’t try to ban all the guns in Chicago while having enough guns in their office to outfit a small gang. And even in his seventies, Burke wasn’t just going to wait for suckers to come to his law firm on their own and get some help with their property tax issues.

Burke has been charged with threatening to block driveway permits for fast food restaurants unless they gave his law firm a taste. That was apart from trying to fine fast food places $1,000 a day for cooking with trans fats. You can see why he needed weapons on the job.

The Chicago Dem is also accused of soliciting a campaign contribution for another politician.

Alderman Burke came by his job honestly. He inherited it from his father, Alderman Joseph Burke. And he lived in a Democrat world in which the laws don’t apply to aldermen, only to the little people.

Chicago’s aldermen had banned guns for everyone, except themselves. And even during the heyday of the gun ban, they benefited from a special law giving aldermen and other officials the power to carry.

Democrat pols believe that they can be trusted with guns when no one else can. But the track records of Ed Burke, Senator Trotter or Alderman Dorothy Tillman, who during a ward redistricting meeting, settled the debate by pulling out her “38-caliber,snub-nosed, nickel-plated pistol”, say otherwise.

Both Burke and Tillman had to take a backseat to Senator Leland Yee, a California Democrat and rabid gun control enthusiast, who was caught trying to sell rocket launchers.

“Does the NRA oppose common sense safety measures in the home?” Burke had demanded of an NRA representative.

“No we don’t. We just think that decision should be left up to the individual,” the NRA's Vandermyde had answered.

Alderman Burke didn’t believe that individuals had any right to make decisions. Unless they were politicians in good standing with the Democrat Party and the Chicago machine.

Gun control isn’t based on the belief that guns are evil, but that people are. It’s championed by celebrities with armed details (Burke used to be the only alderman with his own police security detail) and politicians who fill their offices with guns while trying to confiscate them from everyone else.

While Burke wanted to deny guns, detergent, caffeine drinks and fatty foods to others, there’s never been any reason to believe that the powerful politico ever denied his appetites anything he craved.

Alderman Burke is on the loose for now. And he’s got at least $12 million to spend on his defense.

But, in a tragic irony, the condition of his release is that he give up all his guns. The politician who had spent so much time using the law to take away other people’s guns, had his own guns taken away by the law.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

A New National Security Strategy for America

After the Cold War, what is the biggest threat to America? The debate between Obama and Romney famously bogged down over the question of whether Russia was our biggest geopolitical foe. While Obama slammed Romney’s answer as a Cold War relic, after losing the next election, his party defines its foreign policy and domestic opposition around the fear that Russia is now more of a threat than ever.

Answers by other politicians have ranged from the structural, the national debt and internal divisions, to the inanimate and absurd; Bernie Sanders’ claim that global warming is our top national security threat. But assessments that name conditions rather than threat vectors are unhelpful because even when they are right, they tell us to address a weakness or failure, rather than meeting an external threat.

Being able to name and define external threats is vital for reaching informed national security decisions.

The debates over border security, Syria, Afghanistan, and Russian informational warfare have been taking place in a chaotic environment of rapid fire talking points backed by ideological agendas, but with no framework for understanding the larger threat environment and how to achieve national security.

Our national security framework dates back to the Cold War. The doctrines we employed during the Cold War quickly became dated even while the Soviet Union was around. They’re so old now that the vast majority of Americans weren’t even born when they were hatched. And yet in the generation since the Cold War ended, we haven’t found anything new to replace them with. And that is the problem.

The Clinton administration ignored national security and put the military at the disposal of the UN on exercises in nation building that helped revive Russia as a serious threat while ignoring the threat of Al Qaeda. The Bush administration rolled out nation building as a response to Islamic terrorism. This was a misguided approach that failed to understand the nature of the threat and how to address it.

The Obama administration combined the follies of both of its predecessors and added more of its own, by harnessing Clinton style nation building to Bush style interventions with the aim of defusing Islamic terrorism by helping the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists come to power in the Middle East.

The result was genocide, ethnic cleansing, beheadings, sex slavery and more terrorism than ever.

To build a realistic national security strategy, we have to discard the Cold War framework under which every administration beginning with Truman and Eisenhower had operated under. We are no longer dealing with a global struggle against an ideological movement based out of a global superpower.

And it’s the global part that is the problem.

Successive administrations have thought of national security as a global issue. But it’s not a global issue. It’s a national one. That doesn’t mean that we should abandon support for NATO or our allies. But we should stop trying to envision national security as something that emerges from global alliances. That worldview may have been relevant during the Cold War, but it’s no longer meaningful today.

Instead we need to think of national security as inside out, coming not from outside America, but from inside it. We don’t face a serious risk of invasion by a military superpower. It may be a generation until China has the military capabilities to embark on such a venture. And while we shouldn’t neglect exploring what a Chinese Pearl Harbor might look like, we first need to get our own house in order.

Our domestic threats in this century have all involved infiltration, whether it was the Islamic colonists who carried out the 9/11 attacks and succeeding acts of terror, and the Chinese and Russian hacks and espionage operations that exposed our military secrets, wrecked the NSA and weakened our defenses.

These catastrophes make it clear that there can be no national security without securing the nation.

That includes border security. Regardless of how many terrorists may have come across the unguarded border (even one is too many), efforts by the Trump administration to reduce travel from terror states and refugee admissions will lead terrorists and future terrorists to seek alternative means of entering this country. And securing the border closes a major vulnerability in our national security.

Furthermore, while Iran’s nuclear program remains a major national security threat, a nuclear attack on America is likeliest to come through a nuclear device smuggled by terrorists across the border. It may never happen, and hopefully never will, but failing to prepare could be a disaster that would make the national security failures that allowed the 9/11 attack to take place seem almost inconsequential.

If we examine the American conflicts of this century, it’s easy to see that they had their roots in immigration, migration and open borders, both physical and virtual. We’ve lost over 10,000 Americans in wars caused by a failure of immigration security. And the national gun violence rate is largely fed by gang violence. Much of that gang violence is caused by legal and illegal immigration to the United States.

National security threats can be most clearly measured by the violent deaths of Americans inflicted on us by organized movements and groups. It’s undeniable that these have originate with immigration.

China and Russia remain geopolitical threats. But their attacks depend on infiltrating our country through the internet or immigration. Informational security is vital to any future conflict. A Chinese Pearl Harbor would likely begin on the internet. And so is immigration security. Chinese and Russian operatives, like their Islamic counterparts, have to enter the United States. If we can secure immigration and secure information, we will have effectively neutralized their attacks for the time being.

The leading geopolitical threat isn’t posed by China or Russia. Instead it comes from Islamic terrorism. While China poses a military threat to its neighbors in Asia and Russia poses a military threat to Europe, Islamic terrorists piggyback on Islamic colonies in America to pose a military threat inside our borders.

Aside from the loss of life, Islamic terrorists have inflicted trillions of dollars in economic losses on the United States, second only to the People’s Republic of China. And as the Islamic colonies increase in size, they begin to pose an increasingly greater threat. Islamic colonies in France and Sweden have shown behavior resembling the early stages of guerilla warfare. The same thing will happen in America.

That is why immigration security must be the first priority of any national security strategy. The second priority should focus on weakening terrorist groups and their state sponsors abroad, but without the extensive nation building commitments that have bogged down previous administrations.

We should also avoid the Cold War’s sociological preoccupation with root causes abroad. Sociological philosophizing failed miserably in the Great Society. There is no reason to believe that the same approach that failed at home will work any better when applied to other societies and cultures.

It isn’t difficult to identify malaises in the Muslim world, but we should be wary of facile solutions, such as democracy, feminism or microfinance, for solving them. The United States did not fix the social problems of Communism. Instead it sought to contain Communist states, limiting their influence, preventing their expansionism, and allowing their own social problems to destroy them.

Instead of nation building in Muslim countries, we should aid non-Muslim or secular countries under siege by Islamists, containing and limiting the spread of Islamic ideology abroad and at home through economic, informational and military means, when appropriate, without extended occupations.

The interregnum between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the fall of the British Empire marked a period of Islamic military, cultural and political decline. The Cold War era revived Islamic fortunes as the United States and the Soviet Union invested extensive wealth, information and training into Muslim countries. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Muslim terrorists backed by Muslim states emerged as the leading antagonists of the United States, Europe, Russia, China and other non-Muslim world states.

While a global alliance against Islamism, similar to the one against Communism, might be ideal, it is more likely that America’s geopolitical antagonists, Russia and China, will instead back Muslim factions in proxy wars against us. We must stop doing the same thing no matter how appealing it may seem.

Political and military engagement with Islamic forces badly weakened both America and Russia. After two generations of arming, aiding and collaborating with Islamic terrorists under the Soviet Union, and then another generation of Putin’s Eurasian experiment aimed at integrating Islam into a new Russian empire, our old antagonist has doomed itself. We should learn the urgent lessons of Russia’s folly.

Because they are also our own.

America’s Cold War alliances with Islamic countries helped create the wave of terror. Our openness to Islamic immigration was once seen as a means of building Cold War alliances. Instead it has killed over ten thousand Americans and put us on a path to a religious civil war similar to that of Europe.

Cold War divisions have deeply divided Americans. The collapse of religion and traditional values, accompanied by mass migration, and the disruptive qualities of the internet, have fragmented any notion of national unity. The firehose of mass migration is hitting all of our fracture points, ideological, economic, social and cultural, at the same time. It’s also the essential vector for Islamic terrorism.

America needs time to recover from the economic, social, cultural and technological disruptions of the last hundred years. And it needs breathing room to prepare for the geopolitical conflicts to come.

American elites continue focusing on a global order while ignoring the decline of the United States. A broken America will be unable to meet any geopolitical threats abroad. Any national security strategy that does not begin with securing our own national security at home will be doomed to fail.

Democrat opposition at the state and judicial level has prevented President Trump from exercising control over immigration, protected terrorists and gangs, while leaving our borders unsecured. States and cities openly defy immigration authorities and Democrat judges sabotage any effort at controlling the flow of legal and illegal aliens into our country. This thoroughly cripples our national security.

America’s national security depends on restoring the control of the executive branch over our borders.

The President of the United States has been robbed of the ability to fulfill his sworn duty to see to the national security of the United States. This isn’t just political opposition. It’s treason. And it must end.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

How the Border Crisis Caused a Crisis 2,500 Miles Away in Maine

When Americans think about border security, they usually imagine the floods of migrants crossing the border and showing up in Texas and Arizona. The illegal migrant crisis is at its worst in places like El Paso where gang members released by a broken immigration system swarm the streets. Limited border fencing had previously helped sharply cut crime rates in El Paso, but it doesn’t end in El Paso.

2,500 miles away, Portland, Maine is experiencing a crisis that redefines the nature of the problem and whom it impacts. Illegal border invaders aren’t just from this continent. Anyone who can fly into South America and make their way up to Mexico has a shot at crossing the border and invading America.

Portland shelters, 2,500 miles away, are overloaded by illegal migrants from sub-Saharan Africa who crossed the border and then kept right on going to one of the coldest, but most profitable parts of the country. Portland, like many areas in Maine, attracted migrants because of the generous social safety net that had been set up to help the local population deal with turbulent economic times.

Hundreds of African migrants who illegally crossed the border are now crowding Portland’s homeless shelters which are meant to protect local residents from the cold, but have instead been overrun by foreign migrants who have taken over the system and pushed the progressive city to the edge.

Portland, Maine, a city where the temperature this April had hit a balmy 28 degrees, is not a natural homeless hotspot. But refugee resettlement had diverted resources away from helping Maine’s poor, putting more people on the street, and the migrants began crowding into homeless shelters. Not only were Maine’s poor having trouble finding housing, but they were even being pushed out of homeless shelters by aggressive foreign migrants coming out of Africa through Mexico and Texas to Maine.

And so Maine, an unlikely place to host a homeless crisis, is in the throes of one anyway.

Portland, a city of 67,000, hit a new homeless record in October with 500 people in its shelters. That’s 0.74% of the population. The flood of illegal migrants has hopelessly overloaded shelter resources leading to people sleeping on the floor in offices and gyms. When all the shelters were full, hotel rooms had to be rented at a much higher cost to taxpayers, while poisoning the well for future tourism. Now an entire building has been leased just to find space for the endless tide of economic migrants.

There are an estimated 3,000 asylum seekers in Maine. Most of them are occupying Portland.

In early December alone, 199 foreigners wanted to get into the shelter system in Portland. 126 of them had come through the southern border, either by illegally invading it or by falsely claiming to be “refugees”.

While the media emphasizes hard luck stories by homeless Americans, the ugly secret is that the huge increase in Portland is not caused by local economics, but by legal and illegal migrants.

A 2013 survey found that 50% of the individuals in the shelter system were refugees, immigrants, asylum seekers or other foreigners. Of the 509 residents, 128 were Iraqis, 89 were Somalis, 47 were Sudanese. And then there were the Afghans and Eritreans. That’s Portland’s “homeless” problem.

Since then, the migrants have comprehensively displaced Maine homeless place from the system.

In 2018, 86% of the people in the shelter system were immigrants. By the end of the year, the number had climbed to a horrifying 90% with Maine families almost crowded out entirely.

Portland’s Democrat leaders have refused to maintain eligibility criteria for general assistance and spending has shot up to $10 million. The second biggest expense for GA is shelter beds.

1/3rd of Portland’s general assistance caseload consists of immigrants, many of them refugees.

Instead of prioritizing Mainers, the Democrat government has doubled down on putting migrants first. Mayor Ethan Strimling is urging $10 million in spending on affordable housing. A 2015 effort to go on using GA for migrants was backed 5-4 by the Portland City Council after testimony from Fatuma Hussein, the head of United Somali Women of Maine, even though state education money was being diverted.

The aid to Somali and other migrants was also paid for by a 3.1% property tax increase. Rising property taxes have contributed to a shortage of affordable housing in Portland, putting Mainers on the street and in the homeless shelters, if they can get in, past the foreign migrants who made them homeless.

Maine’s 16.5% increase and Portland’s staggering 70% rise in homelessness defies the overall economic recovery. The Oxford Street Shelter used to have beds. Then it switched to cots and finally to mats on the floor. The two blocks between Oxford and the Preble Street Center, another homeless magnet, are part of a diverse area populated by “recent immigrants”. The Islamic Society of Portland is less than ten blocks away and many of the migrants filling up Portland are Somali Muslims. MAIN, the Maine Immigrant Access Network, a vector for the social problems plaguing Maine, sits on Oxford.

MAIN is mostly oriented toward Somalis. Its team is entirely Muslim and almost entirely Somali. It’s typical of the vast social services infrastructure that has been set up to care for the migrant population. The social services sector employs a growing number of migrants who get profitable government jobs caring for migrants. And there’s every possible incentive for them to continue increasing their numbers.

Even if it means that native Mainers are left out in the cold. Sometimes literally.

There are more mosques in Portland than any other city in Maine. That includes the controversial Afghan Mosque. Deqa Dhalac, a Somali immigrant, defeated a local to represent District 5 in the City Council. Like so many employed members of her community, Dhalac was working as a social worker.

When the City Council appointed a Maine firefighter to the Civil Service Commission instead of her, she filed a complaint with the Maine Human Rights Commission and the City Council was forced to undergo diversity training. That’s how Democrats hope to create a permanent Dem majority in Maine.

Mayor Strimling has even suggested allowing non-citizen foreigners to vote.

The catastrophic disaster in Portland, Maine has robbed the native population of needed social services while diverting them to foreign migrants. While President Trump has moved to reduce the number of refugees bleeding communities like Portland of their resources and their future, there is a new threat.

Three or four African families are now arriving in Portland’s shelter system every week after crossing the border. Many more, according to Portland’s social services director, are waiting in Texas in detention centers, eager to come to Portland. “We can’t sustain what is happening,” he was quoted as saying.

“We’re at a crisis situation now in the city of Portland,” City Manager Jon Jennings declared.

“Our issue isn’t that too many people are coming here – it’s we don’t have the housing to put them in,” Mayor Strimling bafflingly insisted.

Portland’s only plan for managing the problem is to pass the buck to the Maine and United States governments. Multiply all the “Portlands”, lefty cities that go deep into debt to attract illegal aliens in order to expand the political power of the Democrats, and it easily surpasses the $5 billion wall.

The crisis in Portland shows once again why building a wall to keep out a horde of migrants is a smart, sensible and cost-effective solution. Even the biggest proponents of open borders can’t actually pay the tab for illegal migration, even when they’re 2,500 miles away from the border in a cold state.

If they can’t do it, how can anyone else?

Open borders are unsustainable in Texas, California, New Mexico and Arizona, and even in Maine. Building a wall will not only protect the states that share a border with Mexico, it will even protect a state that shares a border with Canada.

And all of America.







Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Escape from Portland

It was a big year in Portland where the murder rate rose 18.6%. That was the perfect time for Portland’s progressive politburo to spend over $1 million on unarmed cops armed only with pepper spray.

There was a little bit of excitement when it was learned that their 200 hours of training would include “Taser Orientation” suggesting that they might be allowed to carry tasers. But Mayor Wheeler’s office explained that the weaponless cops weren’t being trained to use tasers, but “how to avoid being tased”.

Portlanders aren’t waiting for officers to show up and shout, “Don’t tase me, bro”. Instead in a city overrun with crime, they’re increasingly taking matters and guns into their hands.

Of the 32 violent deaths in Portland last year, 5 were found to have been carried out in self-defense. That tops the 4 deaths that occurred as a result of shootings by those cops who still have their guns.

Richard R. Hanley showed up in the parking lot outside Timeless Tattoo. The California homeless bum had previously made the news when he was arrested for attacking his ex-girlfriend and her new beau with a metal chain. Hanley, already on probation for a domestic abuse and strangulation conviction, with six felony and seven misdemeanor priors, also pulled out huge clumps of a female deputy’s hair.

The repeat offender began setting up his tent in the parking lot. When a female catering manager asked him to stop, he attacked her. Joseph D. Vinci, a tattoo artist, intervened. Hanley pulled a knife and Vinci pulled a gun. And Hanley’s long reign of terror ended to the outcry of local pro-crime activists.

Portland's other homeless death had a much darker ending.

Dallas Boyd, a 29-year-old mother of a two-year-old, was strangled to death by a homeless man and her body was left to rot in his van. Like Hanley, the homeless killer had racked up nine felonies, six misdemeanors and 15 parole violations, including third-degree assault, and first-degree robbery.

Homeless crime has become both routine and terrifying. One Portlander described being threatened with a machete on a children’s playground, and it’s taken the city’s crime problem to new levels.

15% of Portland’s violent deaths in 2018 involved the homeless in some way.

Portland property crimes rose 15% in 2017. Its property crime rates easily outpace Boston and Denver, and put it on a par with dangerous cities like Atlanta. Its homeless blight has put Portland on the same path as San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. Portland’s Downtown Clean and Safe had picked up less than 9,897 used needles in 2015. This year it's 39,000. Garbage and biohazards have also increased.

Car thefts are up 45% in two years. In Mayor Wheeler’s State of the City address this year, he mentioned a “97 percent increase in stolen vehicle calls” in 5 years. There was also a "64 percent increase in unwanted persons calls and a 32 percent increase in disorder calls."

But Mayor Wheeler emphasized Portland was working on a more “inclusive” and diverse” police force, even as he admitted that the city was caught in a crime wave where, “assaults, homicides, sex offenses, etc. – have increased and are rising at a higher rate than last year; property crimes have also increased and are rising at a higher rate than last year.”

“Chief Outlaw leads a bureau with fewer officers today than a decade ago, despite a 10 percent increase in Portland’s population,” Wheeler whined.

Mayor Wheeler had picked Danielle Outlaw as the first African-American police chief. Outlaw was meant to be the face of Portland’s new inclusive and diverse force. She inherited the thankless job of trying to control homeless crime, without offending homeless advocates, and reining in political street violence without offending Antifa. And soon white hipsters were outraged at Chief Outlaw’s contemptuous dismissal of Antifa as schoolyard brats who, “come with the intention to fight. And then you get mad because I kicked your butt. And then you go back and you wail off and whine and complain.”

Chief Outlaw had also cleared the Occupy ICE encampment without the mayor’s approval, after he had insisted that the police should do nothing to interfere with the harassment of ICE employees.

Portland’s white radicals soon began accusing the city’s first African-American police chief of being a white supremacist while campaigning to get her fired.

“The fact that I, as a very obvious African American female police chief, have been accused by those within that group or those who support that group, as being a supporter and protector of those who are believed to be white supremacists—if that's even the case—is ridiculous. Right?” she asked.

Ridiculous is the only way that anything works in Portland.

Mayor Wheeler’s virtue signaling is being ignored by his own police chief while citizens are taking the law into their own hands. The tattoo parlor was only one of five self-defense killings in Portland.

Self-defense killings made up a sixth of deaths by violence in the past year. These included a U-Haul employee shooting an armed robber, a transgender man shot by a homeless woman after he tried to stab her with a knife, and a FedEx driver who killed a man in a fight over racial slurs.

The U-Haul robber had 9 previous convictions, including robbery, burglary and rape.

These are the warning signs of a dysfunctional city spinning out of control.

Mayor Hale, Wheeler’s predecessor, who turned Portland into a homeless encampment zone by refusing to enforce laws against bums setting up tents on public streets, decided not to run for reelection. His predecessor, Mayor Adams, is enmeshed in a sex scandal which involved an underage boy, sexual harassment, blackmail, and allegations of using an employee for sexual procurement.

Mayor Wheeler won’t go out with a sex scandal, but like his predecessor, he’s unable to reconcile the demands of virtue signaling in a leftist city with the practical problems caused by its implementation. The leftist solutions he’s tried, spending more on homeless services, demilitarizing and diversifying the police, have only backfired.

Portland, like countless other Democrat urban strongholds, proved that the more money is spent on homeless services, the worse homelessness becomes. Disarming police officers leads to more people taking the law into their own hands. And black cops will enforce the law just like white cops. They’re also less cowed by political correctness and more willing to speak their minds than their white counterparts.

The city government has turned Portland into a miserable hellhole, but individuals are stepping up.

In the Montavilla area, the Montavilla Initiative has been organizing neighborhood watches, foot patrols and monitoring area crime. Pro-crime and homeless advocates have accused them of being "vigilantes", but area residents see them as filling a vital need. It’s one of eight patrol groups in the area.

The Initiative describes a neighborhood needle exchange program degenerating into “human waste in neighbors’ yards, a large vehicle hosting drug deals in the parking lot of the exchange, heroin users shooting up and passing out and then driving off intoxicated, people urinating and defecating in public, clients shooting up in neighbors’ yards, even having sex on a neighbor’s front porch.”

It’s no wonder that Portland’s formerly hot housing market is cooling off and home values are falling. As housing prices increase, not everyone wants to pay record prices to live next to a needle exchange.

The escape from Portland has begun.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.