thisisbabylon.net

I'm going to give the nutshell version of the Jerusalem Post's "Road to the White House" blog's redacting of some of the presidential candidates' responses to the question, "Which Assad do you believe? The one who threatens war or the one who says he wants to make peace?"

The candidates all gave responses which alluded to their future plans on how to deal with Syria's Hezbollah links, and with Syrian President Assad in general.

First, the Democrats:
Obama: "I would engage Syria in direct bilateral talks."
Clinton: "I have long argued that diplomatic discussions with Syria can aid our efforts..."
Edwards: "We must reengage Damascus today with tough diplomacy..."
Biden: "There could be real benefits to hard-headed diplomacy..."

McCain on the other hand does not use the word "diplomacy" (or any variant thereof) in his statement. He said "the US and the international community must face Syria from a position of strength". McCain being a known warmonger hell-bent on not bringing American troops home, I can only hope that he doesn't mean "position of strength" as being the military opposite of "diplomacy."

McCain said that Hezbollah must be disarmed "one way or another" - I fear that his "or another" means deploying more American troops or American weaponry.

Then again, maybe America does need McCain -- how else are we supposed to spend a whole $2 trillion on Iraq by 2016?

Posted by Y-Love at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With a hat tip to the indefatigable Islamophobia Watch blog:

Dutch far-right Parliament Member Geert Wilders (Freedom Party) today called for a ban on the Qur'an, calling it "fascist" and likening it to Hitler's Mein Kampf, and saying it encourages its followers to "kill...non-believers, beat and rape women, and to establish an Islamic state by force."

Wilders, who heads the far-right Freedom Party, which holds nine of the 150 seats in parliament, argued for the ban in a letter published in the De Volkskrant newspaper.

Wilders compared the Koran to Adolf Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf and said that it has "no place in our constitutional state."

"I have been saying this for years: there is no such thing as a moderate Islam," he wrote, arguing that several chapters in the Koran called on Muslims "to oppress, persecute, or kill Christians, Jews, dissidents, and non-believers, to beat and rape women, and to establish an Islamic state by force."

Wilders wrote the letter after a weekend attack on young local politician Eshan Jami who founded a group to support people who have renounced Islam.

Jami, who was not visibly injured in the attack, is now under constant police protection like Wilders.

"Ban this wretched book like Mein Kampf is banned! Send a signal to Jami's attackers and other Islamic radicals that the Koran cannot be used in the Netherlands as an inspiration or an excuse for violence," Wilders said...

"I am fed up with Islam in the Netherlands: no more Muslim immigrants allowed. I am fed up with the worship of Allah and Mohammed in the Netherlands: no more mosques," he finished his letter.

And that's it: no more mosques. This man is fed up with the worship of All-h (blatantly ignoring the fact that, by definition, all monotheistic faiths must be worshiping the same entity, as there is, after all, only one G-d).

The ban Mr. Wilders is calling for actually goes further than the ban on Mein Kampf, as Wilders would like to see possession of the Qur'an criminalized (whereas it is only illegal to sell Mein Kampf).

This is not the first time Wilders has come out against Islam: he called for a burqa ban in 2005 (and a "face-covering garment" ban -- i.e., niqab AND burqas -- in 2006) , which sought to make the wearing of a burqa punishable by 12 days in prison or a 3,350 euro fine. Wilders also called for a ban on Islamic banking (i.e., banking which complies with Islamic law). [Would he ban heter iska and Jewish Law-compliant banking?]

Attorney Els Lucas brought a lawsuit against the Islamophobic MP, calling his actions "very sad" and calling it "unseemly that a member of Parliament is expressing himself in this manner." Lucas accused Wilders of "insulting a section of the community," an offense punishable with a maximum sentence of two years in prison and a fine of up to €16,750 ($23,065). Wilders retorted, saying:

"I do not want to incite hate; I want the Koran to be banned. That is a political opinion. I am in Parliament in order to express my political opinion," Wilders said.

Integration Minister Ella Vogelaar called banning the Qur'an "out of the question" and called his statements "damaging" to community relations. Vogelaar said recently she expects the Netherlands "to eventually adopt some of the traditions of Islam."

The original Volkskrant article (in Dutch) is here.

Things like this are beyond counter-productive, they are blatantly Islamophobic, blatantly xenophobic and bear more of a resemblance to Hitler than any text ever could. This man "was warned by the Dutch anti-terrorism chief that his anti-Islam statements had stoked anger in the Middle East, and that he was going too far" -- but when prejudice is at the forefront, all else takes a backseat.

Someone needs to hand him his brown shirt. This man should not be in Parliament. To give this man any less than an official sanction -- maybe the fine, maybe the prison term, maybe censure -- would be very insulting to the community and would be damaging to the Dutch image of openness and understanding.

The Netherlands deserves better. Hate-mongering politicians are never assets; they are only liabilities for the nations in which they hold office.

Posted by Y-Love at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Israel offered Holocaust survivors a $20-a-month stipend.

I don't think any more really needs to be said.

Save for, perhaps, "WTF!"

Posted by Y-Love at 05:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Female applicants are no longer allowed to take university entrance exams in Tajikistan wearing hijab, Tajikistan’s State Teacher Training Institute stated Friday.

The statement came after three applicants wearing hijab were prevented from taking entrance exams at the National University on July 31. Tajikistan's Ministry of Education has banned the hijab for school and university students.

This is hijab -- no face covering, not a burqa, not an abaya. In other words, something that presents much less security risk (if any).

In absence of security risk, is this stam just a curtailing of religious expression?

Posted by Y-Love at 02:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From EastBayRI.com:

Meg Natale, owner of the House of Little People on Maple Avenue, didn't mind that an agent from the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth & Families visited her childcare center last month to investigate a complaint made against one of her employees.

What infuriated her was that it seemed as though the only thing the employee was guilty of was being black.

"I wouldn't have a problem if they had a good reason," she said. "But it was because he was African that they were concerned."

Apparently the -- of course, anonymous -- complainant was worried that the employee, Musa Saine, a new bookkeeper and a native of Gambia, West Africa, did not have "proper documentation".

Mr. Saine has been living in America for 12 years, and has long held American citizenship.

This is not the first time Mr. Saine has been victimized by racism:

Though Mr. Saine said that he has had a "very nice experience" overall in Barrington, he is not unfamiliar with prejudice.

While working at a bank prior to joining the House of Little People this summer, Mr. Saine recalled the time a southern white man questioned how he had even gotten his position as a black man.

"Right to my face," he said. "It offends me, but I try to seize to the opportunity to educate more people."

Mr. Saine said he made it a point to treat the customer nicely despite the insult, but even then the man would only concede that "he had more respect for people" because he was an African.

Oh you mean they let you people WORK HERE?

And of course, Mr. Saine was "respectful" because he's African...as opposed to African-American. (The sad thing is, were a pollster to ask this man after his exchange with Mr. Saine, "are you a racist?", his answer would probably be a resounding "no".)

One would be well-served to bear in mind that the entire "immigration debate" is not going on in a vacuum: the far majority of these self-styled good Samaritans (watching out for the "poor American worker") are not raising the banners of nativism over the heads of Russians, Germans, or Canadians -- but rather over the heads of non-white people with accents.

Posted by Y-Love at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

David Frum of the horribly right-wing National Review lamented this week about "kids" and the Republican Party. Apparently the right isn't doing so well with those of us who are under-30: Democrats have a full 19-percentage point lead among young voters, and this is even more sharply pronounced when broken down by race and ethnicity.

David Frum suggests that this explains the whole Democratic lead:

Maybe you've heard about the recent polls showing a huge Democratic advantage among young voters. The latest , conducted by Stanley Greenberg for the Democracy Project, shows (among other dismal tidings) a 19-point party identification lead for Democrats among voters younger than 30...

Read the report in full, however, and you come across an interesting nugget on page 6: White young people continue to favor Republicans by a thin but real margin of 2 points. The Democrats owe their advantage among youth to a huge lead among young African-Americans (78 points) - and a very large lead (43 points) among Hispanics.

It's when David Frum tries to bring in the historical analysis that this piece begins to take a turn for the worst:

In the past, Republicans could win elections despite their unpopularity among ethnic minorities. But with the huge surge of immigration since 1980 - and especially since 2000 - the voting map of the United States has been redrawn in ways inherently deeply unfavorable to the GOP...

Like Prometheus6, I believe that that sentence begs us to ask the question: why is the "voting map"'s new "redrawing" so "inherently deeply unfavorable to the GOP"?

Frum says explicitly, "[the] legacy that will damage [Bush's] party is the legacy of immigration non-enforcement." As Frum says, the growing Latino population is being enlarged by "[a] large new community of people who are both economically struggling...but who lack deep attachment to the American nation." (As Rick Perlstein notes, once upon a time, this exact same thing would have been said about Jews.)

Not to mention, as Digby's Hullabaloo points out, this was a partisan voter survey. Illegal immigrants can't vote and therefore were not surveyed. So the whole "immigration non-enforcement" line is really a moot point, this survey only surveyed people who could vote. However they got here, they're here legally now with voting rights (after a median wait of eight years from immigration to citizenship).

This is not about immigration or even psychographics per se. This is no more than yet another cloaking of the same old racism. Indeed, as Digby continues:

The sheer numbers of non-whites are changing things, and that has the rightwingers working themselves into a full blown panic. The Bushies were right on this one. They needed to cool the racist ardor of their base, but they couldn't get it done. And now you see neocons like Frum trying to join the wingnut populist bandwagon with thinly veiled racist appeals to solidarity...

(His conflation of "illegal immigrants" who allegedly have no stake in the country with the large numbers of young Hispanic Americans who were born here gives the game away.)

Digby quotes Harvard University Sociology Professor Nathan Glazer, who shows the racist undertones of the social welfare-based arguments in his paper, "Why Americans don’t care about income inequality" by contrasting America with Western Europe on key idealistic points:

AGS [Alesina, Glazear and Sacerdote] report, using the World Values Survey, that "opinions and beliefs about the poor differ sharply between the United States and Europe. In Europe the poor are generally thought to be unfortunate, but not personally responsible for their own condition. For example, according to the World Values Survey, whereas 70 % of West Germans express the belief that people are poor because of imperfections in society, not their own laziness, 70 % of Americans hold the opposite view.... 71 % of Americans but only 40% of Europeans said ...poor people could work their way out of poverty."

Our bottom line is that Americans redistribute less than Europeans for three reasons:
[1] because the majority of Americans believe that redistribution favors racial minorities,
[2] because Americans believe that they live in an open and fair society, and that if someone is poor it is his or her own fault, and
[3] because the political system is geared toward preventing redistribution.

Anti-illegal immigrant legislation is often derided as racist and divisive but when a poll of Hispanic-American voters (who were largely born here, and were all citizens) is said to be reflective of "immigration non-enforcement" this shows: already "Latino" and immigrant are beginning to be interchangeable in some neo-con minds, a fact that more people should take note of.

Posted by Y-Love at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)