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In this mailing:
- Philip Carl Salzman: Mass Migration:
Uninvited Guests
- Uzay Bulut: Turkish Twitter
Explodes with Genocidal Jew-Hatred
- Amir Taheri: The Year of The
Rohingya
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by Philip Carl Salzman • December
31, 2017 at 5:00 am
- Refugees and
immigrants bring their own cultures, their own assumptions,
beliefs, values, fears and hopes from their homelands. One
cannot just assume that they wish to integrate or assimilate
into the Western culture. Willingness to assimilate might well
vary from individual to individual, and from culture to culture.
- A society can only
function smoothly if there is a large degree of agreement and
commonality regarding to what language people shall speak, what
rules they should follow in dealing with one another, and how
government is to be established. Where is it written that all cultures
are necessarily compatible with one another?
- The success of
immigrants in North America is a result of immigrants
assimilating to Western culture and society, not due to
immigrants clinging to the laws and practices of the lands they
have left behind. We welcome them to become Americans and
Canadians; we welcome to them to the West.
Immigrants
built Canada and the United States by joining in with others to build
a common culture, a unified government and legal system, and a
vibrant economy. Pictured: Newly naturalized U.S. citizens recite the
Pledge of Allegiance during a naturalization ceremony November 23,
2016, on Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. (U.S. Air Force photo/Staff
Sgt. Benjamin Gonsier)
In our desire to insure an inclusive, humane, and
tolerant society, we seem to have constructed a simplistic and
inadequate picture of refugees and illegal immigrants.
Perhaps the majority of Americans and Canadians do not
approach the question of refugees and immigrants with an open mind,
but with a set of "progressive" assumptions:
- The
idea that all cultures are equally good and equally valuable,
sometimes known as "cultural relativism." When faced
with an uninvited influx of outsiders, we do not worry about what
culture the incomers are bringing, because, whatever it is, it
supposedly must be fine.
- That
multiculturalism, the coexistence of a variety of cultures, is
desirable. The more cultures in a multicultural society, the
more cultural diversity, the better.
by Uzay Bulut • December 31, 2017
at 4:30 am
- The statements of
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan -- and those of Turks
who share his worldview – are further evidence that
fundamentalist Muslims oppose Israel's very existence as a
sovereign Jewish state. Their ire over Trump's Jerusalem
declaration has nothing to do with U.S. or Israeli policies.
- Their fury stems from
Jews existing in Israel as a powerful nation – not as dhimmis
(second-class and persecuted people). Fanatic Muslims cannot
get over the fact that Jews still live in, and are in charge
of, supposedly their Muslim holy land.
- To justify their
rage, these radicals rewrite history. Their claims that
Jerusalem is a Muslim holy city, for example, are false. While
Jerusalem is mentioned 850 times in the Old Testament, it is
not mentioned once in the Koran.
Although U.S. President Donald
Trump's December 6 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital drew
condemnation from much of the Muslim world, one reaction stood out --
that of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. (Photo by Elif
Sogut/Getty Images)
Although
U.S. President Donald Trump's December 6 recognition of Jerusalem as
Israel's capital drew condemnation from much of the Muslim world, one
reaction stood out -- that of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
"Those
who think they are the owners of Jerusalem today will not even be
able to find trees to hide behind tomorrow," he said, during a
Human Rights Day event in Ankara on December 10.
Erdoğan
was referring to a hadith (a reported saying by Islam's
prophet, Mohammed) about Judgement Day:
"Abu
Huraira reported Allaah's Messenger (sall Allaahua layhiwa sallam) as
saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight
against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would
hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would
say: Muslim, or the servant of Allaah, there is a Jew behind me; come
and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree
of the Jews."
by Amir Taheri • December 31, 2017
at 4:00 am
Rohingya refugees from Burma arrive
in Bangladesh, on September 17, 2017. (Photo by Allison Joyce/Getty
Images)
Medieval
historians in the Middle East often used the memory of particularly
great disasters as a label for a year or even a whole epoch under study.
The original model came from pre-Islamic Arabia with such well known
examples as "The Year of the Elephant" remembering the year
in which the Abyssinians invaded the Tihama, or the Year of the
Locust in which swarms of famished insects wiped out crops across a
vast arc spanning from the Peninsula to the Mediterranean.
Last
year we used the formula by designating 2016 as The Year of Aleppo to
mark the destruction through carpet-bombing of a great Islamic city
by the Russian Air Force, pushing the Syrian tragedy further down the
abyss of inhumanity.
At
the time we couldn't imagine that 2017 will witness an even greater
crime against humanity in the shape of what the UN Secretary General
Antonio Guterres has dubbed "the genocide" of the Rohingya
people in Burma (Myanmar).
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