After 9/11, I expected the government and all Western governments to quietly shut down immigration from Muslim countries. I assumed they would have be subtle about it as they would not want to piss off the various barbarian governments with which the West does business. At the same time, no president would want to be on the hook for letting another attack happen by letting them walk right on through the front door.
I was, of course, completely wrong about that. Instead of locking down the flow of Muslims into the country, the US government ramped up its recruitment. According to this report, there have been over 1.6 million green cards issued to people from Muslim countries. Amazingly, number one on the hit parade is Pakistan, having sent 200,000 migrants our way. Iran, of all places, is number two, having contributed 160,000 “new Americans.”
Unsurprisingly, the Feds say they need to monitor all of us to make sure we are not terrorists. They are also running some sort of secret domestic spying program that no one can explain. When they’re using shell companies to hide their actions, it is safe to assume the FBI is up to no good. It may be nothing, but in the custodial state, we’ll never know even if it is malice so we’re better off not looking up. Keep your head down folks. Nothing to see here.
The more suspicious sorts like libertarians think it is part of the government’s attempts to control us. That ship sailed a long time ago. Just look how fast the people in charge have turned the culture on things like homosexual marriage. It has moved so quickly that even the most committed fanatics are struggling to keep up with the faith. Even the folks who are supposed to defend traditional America have throw in the towel, posting 7,000 word odes to buggery and sexual deviance.
I think the paranoids have it wrong. The governments bizarre response to Muslim terrorism is not about control or an authoritarian takeover. Frankly, the people allegedly at the tip of the spear of this takeover are blithering idiots incapable of doing basic things. If the TSA is part of the government’s plan to make us slaves, we’re at no risk of a coup. The performance of the CIA and NSA has not been much better as they are routinely outfoxed by retards like the Tsarnaev brothers.
What’s going on here, in part, is a big jobs program for the security sector. The 9/11 attacks triggered what has become the New Deal for the security and defense industry. Around DC, every company offering security services, surveillance equipment and so forth has experienced a boom like nothing seen in living memory. I know a firm that offers security guards that has quadrupled its business in ten years, all on the tit of terrorism.
It’s also a great program for the political classes. One side gets to sell their egalitarian and multicultural ideas about how to pacify the jihadis. The other side gets to tub-thump about being butch with the jihadis. At the same time, both sides are importing as many Muslims as possible to make sure there’s a steady supply of state-side baddies to follow around with drones and wiretaps.
Again, I don’t think a secret cabal in Washington or Tel Aviv is deliberately putting Muslims in the West in order to frighten the public. In fact, I don’t think anyone puts much thought into it at all. The two sides of the political elite are too focused on their feud with the other side to notice the absurdity of their actions. Red Team deeply believes Islam is an existential threat like communism or Nazism. Blue Team thinks Islamic terrorism is blow-back for centuries of racism and colonialism.
That’s why both sides freak out when a guy like Rand Paul protests the War of Terror. One side sees him as an apostate and the other side sees him as a racist. The real issue is that he doubts the premise. The Muslims are way over there with no ability to project power beyond their village. If we stay here and leave them over there, then we don’t need to spend a trillion a year on security.
Of course, that money spent on security, no matter how foolishly spent, buys a lot of support so the politicians will never question the paradigm now. Like every other aspect of the welfare state, this one turns even the most independent minded citizen into a fan of the Leviathan. It’s not an accident that most people in the military-industrial complex are big fans of the GOP.
Good Morning Z,
I was with you until the second to last paragraph concerning Rand Paul.
Paul strikes me, like his dad, as an old school isolationist.
As you say, he thinks if we leave them alone, they’ll leave us alone.
I go along with Mark Steyn on this issue – “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
I think the problem is that Islam is a political movement with a religious component,
or vice versa. Stir in hundreds of billions of dollars of oil revenues, plus the lure of 72 virgins, and you have a recipe for expansionist disaster.
I think Paul frere & fils are naive about this.
On the other hand, you’re 100% correct about the utter looniness of actively
importing future jihadis (and other various third worlders) into the West and
the creation of the make-work security state.
Here’s a little clip of the head of our Federal Prisons testifying before the Senate:
http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4485219/big-solitary-confinement-cell
…
I’m no Rand Paul fan, but I like that he raises the issue of how we are addressing the Muslims. I think a huge part of the problem is our insistence that they join the materialist world of the West. They hate that and that’s a big part of their brief against the West. Leaving them to enjoy the fifth century lifestyle they prefer is a good place to start. Build a wall between them and us and shoot everyone of them that climbs over the wall. if they do the same to any of ours that climb over into their side, so be it.
If the issue is our insistence that Muslims join our materialist world, why are they leaving their simple, pure, Medieval world, in droves, for the West? If your theory is correct, we wouldn’t have a problem with Muslim immigration, because no one would be emigrating. It’s not as if we are putting them on boats and in planes at gunpoint.
Rather, it’s that the Islamists seek to destroy the West as a temptation, as a counter-civilizational example, one that is significantly more successful than their dusty, moribund model. It’s a form of reverse colonialism, or, more specifically, Islamic imperialism.
Islam is the imperialistic religion par excellance, much more so than Christianity. Outside of the Arabian peninsula, it is the outsider, the invader, the conqueror. Arabs and other Muslims have no more business dominating Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, or any other so-called Muslim nation outside of Arabia than the English had in India. This quality may have been in abeyance over the last few hundred years due to internal weakness and the arrival of, and tensions with, modernity, but it will never go away. It is not a matter of leaving them alone; it is a matter of penning them in (so our conclusion is the same). Quite honestly, I’d like to see them driven back, but a new Crusade is, shall we say, politically unpalatable in this day and age.
Islam isn’t a political movement as much as they are a criminal organization, i.e. The Sopranos or the Corleone Families. Similar that the higher up the organizational ladder the member the more the religion is just a veneer. The members or recruits at the bottom are the ones asked to sacrifice themselves; in one case human bombs, the other long jail terms.
Neither is interested in jobs programs (unless they get to control the money), using farm equipment or manufacturing machinery personally and as for going into outer space? Please!
Islam is organized paganism. It’s everything that the Christian West drove out of civilization, glorified.
I predict fun future for several groups which overwhelmingly vote for Democrats: women, LGBTQWERTY, Jews…you wanted it, now you’re going to get it good and hard.
The progressive, through his malice and incompetence, brings his Utopian dreams to life and the conservative builds the features necessary to keep those things from killing everybody and then congratulates himself for his heroic efforts.
What would even the progressive do if there were no NSA, CIA, and FIB? He’d put Muslims in detainment centers, following the example of St. FDR, although it should be noticed that FDR clearly wouldn’t have admitted Muslims in the first place.
The progressive imagines himself living in a perfectly free world and does not stop to think he requires a police state to do so, the conservative does not have imagination enough to see where the progressive has taken him.
It is curious, and seems never to be addressed by the lefties or their lovers in the media, that the vast majority of muslims are not fleeing oppression from non-muslims but are eager to get away from muslim countries. Now, I accept that they may be fleeing barbarity in some form, or even hypocrisy — after all, any nation that despises gays enough to hang them but loves to play with the younger of the same sex probably qualifies for hypocrites of the year award. Anyway, whatever the reason the muslims flock to the west where they adamantly dig their sandals in and proclaim they aren’t going to change one little bit.
On this latter topic a relative, who teaches, had two students from Afghanistan who loathed in the depths of an English winter having to wear sandals just because that was what the good folk back home wore. The other day at a mall I saw one young man in full desert costume, but then it was Friday and as all muslims adore the desert lifestyle especially on their holy day I wasn’t sure what he was doing at a mall where they sell stuff like denim jeans and Victoria’s Secret lingerie. I was tempted to point out that there probably wasn’t anything at the place for him, but as he may not have spoken English there was no point.
The left thinks that all the pronouncements of muslims who are angry about what they find and see over here are simply noises and they really don’t mean it when they demand beheading because they are offended. That’s the problem right there: ‘they don’t mean it when they say they don’t like it’ only allows the noise to get louder and louder.
Integration isn’t down to them: as David Camoron said once it was down to us Brits to integrate with them. I presume this is because western governments know it isa lost cause trying to get the newcomers to change.
UKer- many of the Muslims who flee from their own dysfunctional countries are not poor “refugees” seeking shelter & safety, BUT a warlike gangs that lost out in a civil war to even more unsavory gangs. To them meek, unarmed Westerners become easy prey. Last week, a Pakistani was arrested in NYC for 29th time. Arrests included those for drug possession, fondling, molestation, trying to kiss a 4-year boy, groping of women on the subway etc. Just doing the Pakistani thing. His mother told media, he was just looking for a girlfriend.
I agree with most of it, but…
” The Muslims are way over there with no ability to project power beyond their village,”
is where I diverge. Seems to me that a few Muslims with a couple of box cutters and plane tickets managed to “project” a significant amount of power. Ignoring the issue that they feel that it’s their duty to proselytize by the sword and that God’s on THEIR side doesn’t make it go away.
I’m with Pournelle on this one; a Marine division, a battalion of Abrams and all the Warthogs. Stop when they quit twitching.
The problem with that is there’s zero support for that option in the political class and not much support for it with the public. The choices are not between “beating them” and something else. The choice is between spending trillions trying to civilize them and something else.
True for now. Let there be some serious and sustained terror attacks and all bets are off.
It is the prime directive of Islam to convert the entire world to Dar-al-Islam. They are culture annihilators. By sword or the Trojan Horse of immigration.
Also, the importation of these Moslems isn’t just a jobs program for this country’s version of Security Theatre. The Refugee Resettlement Program means big time dollars for the groups willing to sell out the American people to embed these “refugees” in various communities throughout the country. And one of the most galling things is that the UN gets to tell us how many, say Syrians, we have to accept for resettlement in any given year.
People rail, and rightly so, about the political elites who no longer even make a good show of doing the Peoples’ business, but it is the unelected Fourth Branch of government, responsible for so many of this country’s woes, that is proving itself to be intractable and untouchable in the power it wields: the Bureaucracy.
Check out Ann Corcoran’s site, Refugee Resettlement Watch. It’s a real eye-opener.
https://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/author/acorcoran/