Bomb Attacks in New York Metropolitan Area: Allahu Akbar

Stephen Kershnar

New York City Bomb Attack: Allahu Akbar

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

September 20, 2016

            The debate over Muslim immigration and terrorism highlights the yawning gap between the American people and the political elite.

This past weekend, it appears that a Muslim immigrant, citing Islam, set off bombs in the New York metropolitan area. On the morning of September 17, one of the pipe bomb exploded along the route of a Marine Corps charity run in Seaside Park, New Jersey. Later that day, a homemade pressure cooker bomb went off in Chelsea, Manhattan, injuring twenty-nine people. Shortly thereafter, another pressure cooker bomb was found four blocks away. More bombs were later discovered in a New Jersey train station.

The suspect, Ahmad Khan Rahami, was captured, but only after he shot a police officer. He is an Afghan immigrant who allegedly picked up radical Muslim views when travelling to Afghanistan and Pakistan. NPR reports that there is some evidence that he was inspired by the Muslim immigrants who bombed the Boston marathon (Tsarnaev brothers).

On a side note, the pictures of the Tsarnaev-bombing amputees give you a nice feel for what these attackers wanted.

            On the same day as the above attack, another Muslim immigrant, Dahir A. Adan, stabbed eight people at a shopping mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Adan was a Somali immigrant who shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the attack and asked one person if he was Muslim. An off-duty police officer shot him dead.

These attacks follow the attack by the son of a Muslim immigrant, Omar Mateen, who slaughtered 49 people and wounded 53 people at a gay nightclub (Pulse) in Orlando, Florida while predictably shouting “Allahu Akbar.” In the middle of the slaughter he called 9-11 three times to explain how he was acting on behalf of ISIS and was also inspired by the Muslim immigrants who bombed the Boston marathon (Tsarnaev brothers). Reading about this slaughter had a similar feel to the Muslim slaughters in Boston, Brussels, Chattanooga, Fort Hood, Paris (Charlie Hebdo and later more bloody attack), San Bernadino, and so on.

These attacks are, of course, different from Muslims immigrants and their children’s misogyny. In a 20016 New Year’s celebration of the New Year roughly 1,900 women in Germany were sexually attacked by mostly Muslim immigrants in seven cities, most famously Cologne. This misogyny was less horrific than that Muslim Brits in Rotherham who from 1997-2013 abducted, raped, and trafficked roughly 1,400 white (non-Muslim) teenage girls.

 

Caroline May writing for Breitbart last year reports that more than two million lawful permanent residents, asylees, and refugees from majority Muslim nations have been come to the U.S. since radical Islamic terrorist attack on 9-11. Center for Immigration Studies’ Steve Camarota points out that under President Hillary Clinton, there will be another massive wave of Muslim immigration. He notes that Clinton could add roughly 860,000 Muslim immigrants, assuming current Obama administration immigration patterns continue and her announced refugee plan is implemented and repeated.

So far the Muslim refugees have been an economic drain. Senator Jeff Session (R-AL) reports that more than 90% of recent Middle Eastern (read Muslim) refugees are on food stamps and almost 70% on cash welfare.

May notes that if the current rate of immigration continues, the U.S. is on schedule to add the population of Los Angeles every three years — on top of the all-time high 42 million foreign-born residents already here. Camarota reports the U.S. currently has 61 million immigrants and their American-born children under age 18. He observes President Clinton could add another 10 million new immigrants to the U.S. during her first term alone.

Did anyone ask the American people whether, following 9-11, they wanted two million Muslim immigrants? Do you want another million? None of the presidential candidates George W. Bush, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, John McCain, or Mitt Romney offered to stop the torrent of Muslim immigration or even significantly reduce it. Hillary Clinton certainly won’t do so. Yet this is clearly what Americans want.  

What’s more, no reasonable person thinks the country would be better off with two million Muslim immigrants than it would have been with two million immigrants from non-Muslim countries in Europe and Asia. This is especially true if the immigrants were chosen for their talent, education, or money. Not only would the latter easily assimilate, but such immigrants would clearly benefit the American people.

There is a debate whether the Islamist supremacy, misogyny, and homophobia are central to the Islam and many virtuous Muslims ignore it or whether it is a perversion of Islam that is mistakenly adopted by a significant minority of Muslims. From the perspective of people choosing their neighbors and co-workers, this doesn’t matter. The fact is that a significant minority of Muslims have beliefs and practices that are abhorrent. The fact that the Islamic religion is at odds with any reasonable philosophical or scientific worldview is yet another reason to choose other people to be our neighbors.  

It is also time to replace the political elite in this country. American mandarins, such as the Clintons and Bushes, have made it clear that they will fight to their political death to flood the country with unskilled third world immigrants. They couldn’t care less about lowering taxes, reducing the debt, respecting the Constitution, or ending military adventures around the globe. They need fainting couches when Donald Trump or other politicians speak about immigration in blunt terms, but then avert their eyes at the cost of keeping the immigration spigot open. It’s time for them to go. 

Racialize the Presidential Election: Amnesty, Affirmative Action, and Racial Grievances

Stephen Kershnar

The Presidential Election and Affirmative Action

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

September 5, 2016

            Charges of racism and xenophobia are being thrown at Donald Trump as part of the attempt to energize minority voting and create a wedge between Trump and the Republican elite (for example, Jeb Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney). Trump and his supporters should welcome this attempt to racialize the election.  

            Consider Barack Obama’s attempt to amnesty five million illegal aliens and then smear opponents as xenophobes or racists. Relative to the current American populations, these aliens and their offspring are poorer, less well-educated, less intelligent, and impose net costs on society via their use of welfare and other government benefits. As a result, amnesty is not good for current Americans. It is even worse when one considers that the country could instead be importing high quality immigrants from countries like Great Britain, Germany, and Japan. If Hillary wants to make the election about amnesty, she will be throwing the Republicans into the briar patch.

            Consider next Obama’s push on affirmative action. His administration backed race and ethnic preferences in the recent Supreme Court decision. It also pushed through many pro-affirmative-action regulations and instructed universities that they may, and implicitly should, consider diversity in admissions. An odd feature of this is that the intellectual case for affirmative action has collapsed.  

            Rice University professor George Sher recently argued that universities are not really interested in diversity because it promotes various ideas or perspectives. There are a lot of different ideas universities could promote via preferential admission. They could promote conservative ideas by favoring people from conservative parts of the country or religious ideas by favoring people from parts of the country with concentrations of evangelicals, Mormons, or Catholics. They could favor a parental perspective by favoring parents in admission. The choice to largely favor two minority groups (blacks and Hispanics) and sometimes women is not about ideas or perspectives, he notes, but rather about making up for past injustice. The problem is that lowered standards for university positions or jobs is not an appropriate response to past injustice.  

            First, the notion that current blacks were harmed by injustices in the distant past (consider slavery and early Jim Crow laws) depends on their being worse off than they would have been had these events not occurred. But these events caused current black people to exist by affecting the reproduction pattern that eventually led to their creation. That is, were these events to not have occurred, the specific black people who live in America would not exist, although others might, and hence current blacks were not harmed by these injustices.

Second, even if current blacks were to exist in the absence of these injustices, the amount of compensation they are owed is nearly impossible to discover. Just compensation would make current blacks indifferent between (a) living with slavery and subsequent oppression and compensation and (b) living without either. A difference in wealth and opportunity would depend on where they live: America or Africa and it is unclear which should be the baseline for discovering what blacks are owed.  

Also, on average, American blacks are roughly 19% white. If physical origin or original genetics are an essential feature of who someone is, there would be no world in which the current blacks did not have white ancestors. An imaginary world in which blacks have white ancestors but no history of racial oppression is so different from the actual world as to be practically impossible to use as a way of determining just compensation.

Third, even if compensation were owed and the amount discoverable, it is fairer and efficient to pay it via money than affirmative action. It is fairer because many blacks and Hispanics do not go to universities or apply for jobs that have affirmative action and it is unfair that they get little, if any, compensation. It is more efficient because selecting less talented people is costly.   

One cost is the harm that occurs to third parties. Consider that medical error is one of the leading causes of death in the country. Because medical admission tests correlate strongly with medical school grades, medical board scores, and physician performance and affirmative-action beneficiaries score much lower on them, there is good reason to believe that affirmative action brings with it a serious loss of life and health. Just as lower round draft picks in the NFL are on average less talented than first round draft picks, the same is true for physicians.  

A second cost is the harm done to the beneficiaries of affirmative action. UCLA law professor Richard Sander argues that mismatching minority students to universities by putting them into schools where the average student is far better makes them perform worse than they would were they correctly matched to universities. For example, he found that about half of black law students rank in the bottom 10% of their classes. He also found that black law school graduates are four times as likely to fail bar exams as are whites and that mismatch explains half of this gap.

Similarly, Sander notes, about half of black college students rank in the bottom 20% of their classes. He further points out, black college freshmen are more likely to aspire to science or engineering careers than are white freshmen, but mismatch causes blacks to abandon these fields at twice the rate of whites.

Third, there is a cost to other applicants who would have attended various universities and programs were their position not given away. This is especially true for the two groups that are likely the biggest victims of affirmative action: non-Jewish whites and Asians.  

Proponents of affirmative action cite the various benefits of affirmative action: more role models, less stereotyping, improved group decision-making, and less homogeneity, but there is little reason to think that these benefits outweigh the cost in merit-based efficiency.

If Hillary, Democrats, and the media want to racialize the election, Trump should welcome their doing so. Let’s make the election about amnestying illegal aliens, affirmative action, and whether the country should redouble its focus on racial grievances and then let the average voter weigh in.