What’s Wrong with Going into Syria?

A very interesting post from www.Jihadwatch.org about some of the dangers about the U.S. being involved in Syria. This follows this post about the detrimental policy of Lindsey Graham and Barack Obama towards Egypt. This follows this article about American energy independence and preventing money from going to hostile countries such as Iran . For more about what you can do to get more involved click here and you can read two very interesting books HERE.

Robert Spencer in FrontPageMag: What’s Wrong with Going into Syria

In FrontPage this morning I explain that what is wrong with going into Syria is just about everything.

American military intervention in Syria is likely to begin this week, and one thing we know amid the general confusion is that the objective is not to oust Bashar Assad: White House spokesman Jay Carney said Tuesday: “I want to make clear that the options that we are considering are not about regime change. They are about responding to a clear violation of international standard that prohibits the use of chemical weapons.” How the Obama Administration plans to deal with Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons without challenging his grip on power is unclear, but then again, so is everything else about this misadventure.
Epitomizing the muddle surrounding the likely attack on Syria was former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In endorsing his country’s likely participation in a strike on Syria, Blair said that it was necessary to prevent the country from becoming a “breeding ground for extremism.”
Blair is several months too late. Syria is already a breeding ground for “extremism.” The New York Times reported no less than four months ago, on April 28, that “nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.” And a month ago, Israeli Major General Aviv Kochavi said that Syria now “attracts thousands of global jihad activists and Muslim extremists from the region and around the world, who base themselves in the country, not only to bring down Assad, but to promote the vision of a state based on Islamic law.”
Kochavi added that “before our very eyes, at our doorstep, a large-scale center of the global jihad is developing, which may affect not only Syria and not just the borders of Israel, but Lebanon, Jordan, Sinai, and can radiate onto the entire region.”
And this week, the United States and Great Britain are about to intervene militarily on the same side as those “global jihad activists and Muslim extremists.” They’re poised to do so because they assume that Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, although there is no proof that it was actually Assad, and not the jihadi rebels we are going to aid, who unleashed the chemical attacks. And UN inspectors in Syria have no mandate to determine exactly who used the chemical weapons, but only the fact that they were used – despite the fact that the key question is who used them, and no one has a clear or definite answer, least of all Barack Obama.
Then again, Barack Obama has aided jihadists and Islamic supremacists before, in Libya and Egypt – and that is exactly what he is about to do again. Bill Roggio reported in the Long War Journal on June 29 that the Al Nusrah Front for the People of the Levant, which is “al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria,” is “willing to work with Syrian rebel groups such as the Free Syrian Army, and in its official statements has admitted to doing so.” What’s more, “the Al Nusrah Front has also cooperated with Free Syrian Army units to establish sharia, or Islamic law, in Aleppo and in eastern Syria.” Nonetheless, “the US government is backing the Free Syrian Army despite the group’s known ties to the Al Nusrah Front.”
Blair complained that Syria is “mired in carnage between the brutality of Assad and various affiliates of al Qaida.” That is indeed true. But he did not explain how American and British intervention would change that fact, or aid in the establishment of a secular fighting force that after Assad’s fall might establish a secular, pluralistic republic that guaranteed equality of rights for all its citizens.
Given the fact that both the American and the British governments are dedicated to denying the reality of Islamic jihad and ignoring how Islamic jihadis use core texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that U.S. or British forces will be able to tell the difference between Sharia supremacists and secularists, or act effectively in favor of the latter, if indeed there are any significant secularist forces left in Syria.

There is more.

Your Next Campus Initiative: Celebrate Ronald Reagan!

A timely post about from www.YAF.org about Ronald Reagan, who was smeared in the movie Lee Daniels’ The Butler. This follows this post about Virginia Dare, an interesting historic figure. In the meantime, you can get more involved if you like here and read an interesting book HERE

·         Your Next Campus Initiative: Celebrate Ronald Reagan

Posted by Patrick Coyle

Ronald Reagan is considered one of America’s greatest presidents. Sadly, college and high school faculty and administrators rarely share an optimistic or uplifting view of Ronald Reagan. Furthermore, many assigned text books attack Ronald Reagan and his presidency. One widely distributed text book, A History of the U.S., describes Reagan’s presidency as "budget-busting, criminal-ridden, [and] trigger-happy." A leading national guide for teachers calls Reagan "a cheerleader for selfishness."

President Reagan, in many of his speeches, often touched on the importance of individual freedom, limited government, and free markets and even warned against political correctness.

Now, you can easily post fliers or distribute leaflets featuring quotes by President Reagan. You may want to obtain one of the following books: In the Words of Ronald Reagan by his son, Michael Reagan, or The Quotable Ronald Reagan by Peter Hannaford. In addition to posting flyers, your club may choose to:

·         Show a screening of YAF's film, Still Point in a Turning World: Ronald Reagan and his Ranch

·         Host a table in the student union to distribute literature on President Reagan

·         Schedule a film festival showcasing President Reagan’s most popular speeches

·         Celebrate him with a party for your club members

 You can also  download  free fliers to distribute! Students, contact us to receive your free copy of our movie, Still Point in a Turning World and your free Reagan posters as well. 

Check out the Campus Conservative Battleplan for more activism ideas!

Virginia Dare’s Birthday And The New Colonizers

A timely post about from www.Vdare.com about Virginia Dare. This follows this post about PEMEX, when a foreign nation STOLE U.S. Assets! In the meantime, you can get more involved if you like here and read an interesting book HERE.

Go to YouTubePlay video This is video illustration for song "They Coming To America". I used my own video which I have done at the Battery park of New York City and on the Ellis island and at the Museum of Immigration of… 00:04:16 Added on 6/10/09 215,766 views

Virginia Dare’s Birthday And The New Colonizers

Virginia Dare, after whom this webzine is named, was born on this date, August 18th, in 1587, the first English child born in the New World. Her date of death is unknown, since she, and the whole Roanoke colony, went missing, presumed massacred or enslaved, by local Indians.

Every American school kid once knew who Virginia Dare was. But this year, except for a couple of Today In History posts, the only thing I could find in the news that mentions Virginia Dare was Dare to do the impossible, By Richard Olivastro,[Email him] The Daily Caller, August 18, 2010.

Olivastro's slightly off-key column manages to associate the Virginia Dare story with sentimentalized mass immigration clichés, the kind of thing Steve Sailer calls “Ellis Island Kitsch”. Olivastro wrote:

"For centuries following our country’s founding 235 years ago, America has been freedom’s beacon.

“The Statue of Liberty has long symbolized our welcoming shores. Many popular patriotic songs recognize and celebrate this reality.

“One that comes to mind is ‘They’re Coming to America”.

“How does the opening line in the Neil Diamond song go?

“‘On the boats… and on the planes… they’re coming to America.’

“Yes, ‘They’re coming to America.’

“That’s been true for years, decades, indeed centuries.

“Long before the Declaration of Independence, ‘they came’ to the New World primarily for religious freedom.

“Way back – this upcoming fact deserves a ‘way, way back’ – on August 18th in 1587 Virginia Dare was born.

“She was the first child of English parents born in North America.

“Virginia was the daughter of Ananias and Elenor Dare, members of Sir Walter Raleigh’s ill-fated colony that settled Roanoke Island on the North Carolina coast. (Yes, in case you’re wondering, the cookie cake company still bears her name.)

“Today, a statue of Virginia Dare stands on the Outer Banks of North Carolina honoring her and all those who came to our shores seeking freedom." [Links added by VDARE.com]

Now there are several things wrong with that.  He doesn’t mention what happened to colony. But the main thing is that the Roanoke Colony and the settlement of Virginia, like the settlement of the West, were not what we now call “immigration”.

They were colonization.

There was this mostly empty country, populated by heathen savages, and the English came to settle there, whether the natives liked it or not. (Descendants of the Indians  will claim in court that they owned the land. The formulation I prefer is that they didn't own it—ownership of land being a civilized invention—they were just wandering around on the top of it.)

It's supposed to be different today. America is, as Ernest Van Den Haag wrote in 1965, (!) a "settled territory"—full of American, and not open for colonization. Americans are in a position to decide for themselves whether they want to be a colony of Mexico and/or the world.

Virginia Dare represents the beginning of what we call the “historical American nation”—a beginning largely forgotten today. Peter Brimelow wrote when he started this site that

“Today, Virginia Dare seems to be vanishing from American education too. But she was a fixture for earlier generations. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt felt free to give a speech commemorating the 350th anniversary of her birth. At one point, I planned to pay homage by bestowing her name on the heroine of a projected fictional concluding chapter in Alien Nation, about the flight of the last white family in Los Angeles. It seemed . . . symmetrical.

“I was dissuaded.”

Stuff like Olivastro’s Ellis Island cheerleading is what we hear from the kind of people who say "America isn't a nation like the other nations—it's an idea." But, once again, they have it wrong—America is more than an idea, it is a nation, with traditions and a political culture that go back to 1587.

On this anniversary, let’s remember that.

Previous Virginia Dare Pieces, and External Links

The Fulford File | Virginia Dare, White Minority?
The Fulford File | Happy Birthday, Virginia Dare!
Emotion At Reason
(Nick Gillespie, editor at Reason magazine, doesn't get it.)
The New World, Virginia Dare, And The Historical American Nation
(Steve Sailer explains what Hollywood did to Pocahontas; and to the colonists who would be the heroes of the movie if Hollywood weren't so PC.)
Boy Scout Version of the Indian Legend: The White Deer named Virginia Dare
The Virginia Dare food company's explanation of why they picked her: Virginia Dare, A Legendary Symbol Of Purity
Fort Raleigh National Historic Site: this is where FDR saw the play, The Lost Colony, still performed there every year.
The Lost Colony": A Cure for Depression? (The National Park service's take on its play)
A statue of Virginia Dare, in the Elizabethan Gardens on the North Carolina Coast.
Marcus Epstein atop a fortunate coincidence.

Oil Companies Aren’t Evil–Except PEMEX Which STOLE U.S. Assets!

A timely post about from www.Vdare.com about PEMEX, when a foreign nation STOLE U.S. Assets! This follows this post about energy independence items you can participate in now. In the meantime, you can get more involved if you like here and read an interesting book HERE.

Oil Companies Aren’t Evil–Except PEMEX
[James Fulford]
Thomas Sowell has an article saying that oil companies aren’t necessarily evil, in which he says, among other comments:
“Now that oil prices have dropped big time, does that mean that oil companies have lost their ‘greed’? Or could it all be supply and demand – a cause and effect explanation that seems to be harder for some people to understand than emotions like ‘greed’?”The “Greed” Fallacy,
But Mark In Mexico has a post about one company that doesn’t really underestand supply and demand–the only oil company in North America that may be running out of oil: PEMEX.He writes that
Pemex was formed after 1938 when President Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized Mexico’s oil industry. When a government nationalizes its oil industry, that means that the government steps in and confiscates all of the equipment, drills, pumps, buildings, refineries, vehicles, ships, airplanes, offices, records, bank accounts etc. of the private companies to which that same government had previously sold leases and other rights.In other words, the government sells licenses to various foreign investors to attract them to invest billions of dollars, then steps in and steals it all. In almost all cases, the government blames the foreign companies, and often the foreign governments, for “robbing” the people’s energy inheritance. Except, of course, when a US company is involved, in which case the local government always blames the US government.And, frequently, America gets blamed even when there are no US companies involved at all.
In Bolivia, the Bolivian Gas War was brought on by a minority group’s charge that the United States was absconding with the Bolivian people’s natural gas inheritnce. But the companies that had extraction rights are all European companies. If an American energy company wanted Bolivian gas, it had to buy that gas from and pay market prices to a European energy company that was extracting that gas. Oh well.The problem is, in essence, that while the corrupt governments, and corrupt governments, that control the company are greedy, the company itself, as a government-run monopoly, isn’t greedy.
So the Mexican government and a whole slew of Mexican governments since 1938 have had control of the Mexican oil industry through a government controlled company called Pemex. You know how that had to go. Badly. And it has.These governments have, year after year and decade after decade, used Pemex as a private funding source. It is estimated that Pemex loses a cool billion dollars a year just to internal corruption.All of that corruption has little to do with oil extraction or oil availability or oil reserves. What it does do however, is cause gasoline at Pemex gas stations — the only ones allowed here — to cost the Mexican consumer about $1.00 per gallon more than that same oil costs once it is shipped to the United States. At an Exxon station in Laredo, Texas, you pay $1 per gallon less for gasoline than you do at a Pemex station just a couple of miles to the south. And that’s for gasoline produced from oil from the same Mexican well.What that corruption also does is bleed money away from Pemex that should have been reinvested in the company. That loss, along with the Mexican government’s skimming off 60% of all Pemex revenue to pay for all the sub-standard public services that the bloated Mexican constitution guarantees to the Mexican citizens, leaves no money for exploration or drilling for new sources or the technology development necessary to tap those new sources nor even enough to maintain its existing facilities.
I’ve noted that earlier that Mexico has a public holiday celebrating
the biggest armed robbery of the twentieth century. It left all the oil in Mexico in the hands of corrupt Mexican governments, who couldn’t even get most of it out of the ground; a lot of it is just sitting there, because they won’t allow foreigners to touch it.
See Businessweek’s article Pemex: Still in the Dark Ages, for a discussion of how Mexico doesn’t want to have Americans exploit Mexicans by drilling wells, which means fewer jobs for Mexicans, who go north illegally and exploit Americans.

VDARE.com: Blog Articles — proudly powered by WordPressThe articles on VDARE.com are brought to you by the VDare Foundation.We are supported by generous donations from our readers. Contributions are tax deductible and appreciated. Contribute

Eric Holder Vs. Texas—Standing In The Courthouse Door Crying “Voter Fraud Forever!”

A timely post about from www.Vdare.com about Texas being in the crosshairs of the President. This follows this post about the GOP backing down on Obamacare. In the meantime, you can read an interesting take on society's problems HERE and aninteresting book HERE.

Memo From Middle America | Eric Holder Vs. Texas—Standing In The Courthouse Door Crying “Voter Fraud Forever!”

http://www.vdare.com/articles/memo-from-middle-america-eric-holder-vs-texas-standing-in-the-courthouse-door

By Allan Wall     

Attorney General Eric “My People” Holder demonstrates once again that the Obama administration will continue its war against the historic American nation by any means necessary.
In the latest outrage, AG Holder, who didn’t like a Supreme Court decision, has announced he’ll fight it by using a lower court to make an end run around it.
Now just let that sink in a minute. The Obama/Holder regime has no problem with overreaching judicial tyranny from the Supreme Court, as long as the court is upholding Obamacare or same-sex marriage or such. But when the court rules against something the administration supports, that just can’t stand. So Holder is off to get a lower court to stymie the Supreme Court decision.
On the other hand, it’s not surprising. After all, the goal here is not to uphold the rule of law, but to further the Agenda. And the Agenda does not respect the historic American nation and its traditions.
The issue here: the 1965 Voting Rights Act, passed at the height of the Civil Rights era. It included “preclearance” provisions, restricting seven southern states, Arizona and Alaska, plus some smaller entities in other states (see map) in regards to future changes to their election laws.
What it means is that these states can’t change election laws without the permission of the U.S. Department of Justice (how convenient for Holder) or the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. These provisions were last renewed in 2006, during the Bush administration.
That situation, though, has just been altered by Shelby County v. Holder, a Supreme Court decision handed down June 25^th, 2013. The Court struck down Section 4(b) and made Section 5 inoperable. (Shelby County is in Alabama).
Shelby County v. Holder was yet another of these 5-4 decisions, supported by Chief Justice Roberts, and by Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy and opposed by Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan and Wise Latina Sotomayor. (Thomas however, wanted to take it even farther and completely strike down Section 5).
Disparate treatment of states, ruled the majority, was “based on 40 year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day. ” The United States, said the court, “has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”
I like that—“current conditions”. Not living in the past like today’s Civil Rights movement. For the activists, it’s always Selma, Alabama, 1965, forever and ever, amen.
Where though, is the evidence that black voters, or any citizens, for that matter, are being denied the vote today, in 2013?
Wouldn’t any such action be immediately noised abroad by the MSM?
In 2012, five southern states had higher voting percentages among blacks than whites, and much-maligned Mississippi had higher black turnout than Massachusetts.
By the way, I’m not a Neo-Confederate. My ancestors lived in the Midwest during the Civil War. One of my relatives was in the Union Army and received a Congressional Medal of Honor for capturing a Confederate general.
However, as an American I’m tired of the Southerner-bashing which is being used as a tool to delegitimize and deconstruct the historical American nation.
Obviously, the goal of those who want to maintain “preclearance” is to keep the South, especially Southern whites, restricted, as if it were still 1965. Bashing white Southerners is still in fashion and is a powerful tool to further the left-wing multicultural Agenda.
It even makes it hard to oppose illegal immigration in southern states because the open border supporters bring up their knee-jerk “it’s like Jim Crow” response. It’s not just Democrats either. Plenty of Republicans do it too. For just one example, click here to read how Governor (and now professional pundit) Hucksterbee used the past treatment of black Americans to justify coddling today’s illegal aliens.
When the Supreme Court handed down Shelby County v. Holder , President Obama was “deeply disappointed” and called on Congress to basically revive preclearance with legislation. AG Eric “My People” Holder called it “a serious setback for voting rights”. (You mean like having the Black Panthers intimidate white voters?)
Georgia Democratic Representative John Lewis was “shocked, dismayed and disappointed” at the decision.
John Lewis has a lot invested in this issue. As a young man he was a major civil rights leader who was physically attacked and jailed several times. Lewis still has the scars on his head from a beating by Alabama state troopers on a bridge in Selma, Alabama, and was personally present when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.
Certainly, Lewis did exhibit courage and leadership in fighting for his cause as a young man. But in 2013, he seems to be still living in 1965. Why, for example, does he have such an abysmal record on immigration and why does he oppose voter ID, as both positions harm grassroots black Americans?
On July 25^th, speaking to the Urban League, Eric “My People” Holder announced his plan to go after the state of Texas. [Transcript: Attorney General Eric Holder Delivers Remarks at the National Urban League Annual Conference] Hmm, that wouldn’t’ have anything to do with the Democrats’ plan to “turn Texas blue” now, would it?
Holder’s supposed legal basis for going after Texas is Section 3 of the Voting Rights act, which provides for a state to be returned to pre-clearance status if “violations of the fourteenth or fifteenth amendment justifying equitable relief have occurred within the territory of such State or political subdivision.” BREAKING: Justice Department Will Ask Court To Reinstate Voting Rights Act In Texas, By Ian Millhiser, ThinkProgress, July 25, 2013
Holder’s plan has two parts:
(1) Get the federal government mixed up in the ongoing Texas dispute over redistricting, in a federal court in San Antonio, and
(2) Prevent the enactment of a Texas voter ID law heretofore blocked by the DOJ, but which Texas AG Greg Abbott thought would be legitimate after the Shelby v. Holder decision.
Voter ID utilizing photographs has been strongly attacked by Democrats, under the argument that it disenfranchises poor/minority voters, some of whom don’t have photo ID. I really find that hard to believe, given the current inexpensive photo technology. But, for the sake of quelling that argument, states could just issue photo ID at government expense—which is what the Texas law did.
The Texas voter ID law only calls for ID checks at polling stations, utilizing a driver’s license or other form of photo ID. But if any voter doesn’t have such identification, he will be issued one by the state of Texas, specifically by the DPS (Department of Public Safety). Furthermore, the law is similar to one in Indiana which was upheld by the Supreme Court.
Well, the naysayers say that Texas is so big and there aren’t DPS offices in every part of the state.
So there you go, there’s always some excuse for those who don’t want secure voter ID.
As longtime readers of VDARE.COM may know, for years I have held up the example of Mexico’s voter registration system, as an example of how states could run their own voter registration system. (See archive here).
Every registered Mexican voter has a Voter ID card complete with photograph, fingerprint, and a holographic image to prevent counterfeiting. Furthermore, at the Mexican polling station there is a book containing the photograph of every voter in the precinct. This book is available to the poll workers and observers from various parties. If there's a doubt as to someone’s identity, the poll workers can simply look up the person's name and see if the photo matches up.
Also, the Mexican voter's thumb is smudged with ink. That way, if he shows up at another polling site to vote, they know he's already voted elsewhere. (The ink wears off after a few days.)
It's a good system. Sure, Mexico has many problems. But they solved that one!
Local and state elections were held July 7^th in about half of Mexico, and while there were other sorts of problems with the elections, voter registration wasn’t one of them. (See here, here and here).
One problem we have here in the U.S. is the Motor Voter regime, established twenty years ago during the Clinton administration, which makes it hard to have serious verification of citizenship and even identity. (See How Come Mexico Can Require Voters to Prove Citizenship and Arizona Can’t?)
Ted Cruz, the junior Texas senator, has filed a bill, S. 1336, that would amend Motor Voter to permit States to require proof of citizenship to vote in Federal elections.
Now wouldn’t that be something? Actually permitting states to require proof of citizenship!
Is that discriminatory? Well, yes, it’s discriminatory against noncitizens. Is that bad?
To put it another way, in Holder’s 2013 America, do even Southern states have the right to stop noncitizens from voting?
American citizen Allan Wall (email him) moved back to the U.S.A. after many years residing in Mexico. Allan's wife is Mexican, and their two sons are bilingual. In 2005, Allan served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his Mexidata.info articles are archived here; his News With Views columns are archived here; and his website is here.