Hanna Saigo

Here’s an interview with Geert Wilders on Australian TV.

Near the end, the broadcaster asks if Wilders would ask every immigrant whether he’s a Muslim or not.  The Dutch politician responds that he only says that there should be no immigration from Muslim countries.  The Australian asks specifically if that means a Jew from Egypt or Christian from Lebanon can’t come to the Netherlands.  Wilders says they would be banned.  This doesn’t make sense and indicates the PVV leader isn’t just worried about Muslim immigration, but non-Westerners in general.  He just can’t say that and uses Muslims as his boogeymen, which practically makes a lot of sense.

There are 47 majority-Muslim countries in the world, which means that a Wilders program would effectively ban half of the third world, including just about all poor non-Westerners in closest proximity to Europe (the entire Middle East, the top half of Africa, and the Stans). Those worried about third world immigration but somewhat turned off by his constant harping on Islam and over-the-top support of Israel should thus support Wilders, as ending Muslim immigration basically means doing away with the vast majority of total immigration.

It’s interesting that Wilders is himself partly of Indonesian descent, since his program would not allow anybody from that country into the Netherlands.  From Wikipedia,

In a biography, Wilders himself seems to play down his Indo heritage. Anthropologist Lizzy van Leeuwen analyses Wilders' Eastern heritage with the concept of displacedness, and classifies his standpoints as "post-colonial revanchism". This analysis is met with agreement in Indo communities. However, in an interview, Wilders denied van Leeuwens' speculations.

Ignoring the post-colonial gibberish, could trying to cover up his Indo heritage be the motivation for Wilders’s absurd dye job? Wilders's hair has always made me suspicious of him, as there's just something not right about an originally dark-haired (I think) but now graying 50 year-old man wanting to be a blond.  Now I think I understand.

It seems that James Edwards and most others have missed the best part of Glenn Beck’s MLK rally.  Those who watch the Glenn Beck Show will have noticed that one of his favorite regulars is Alveda King, the civil rights leader’s niece.  Here is ABC News on her appearance last Saturday.

On the 47th anniversary of her uncle's historic "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, politician and activist Alveda King has joined conservative commentator Glenn Beck at the same spot to bring people together in paying tribute to America's soldiers and "restoring honor" to America...

While speaking in front of tens of thousands today in DC, King said that she hopes that white privilege will become human privilege and that America will soon repent of the sin of racism and return itself to honor.

King also mentioned “white privilege”, and even claimed to have invented the term, in a 2005 interview with Newsweek.

William Saletan at Slate sees the Beck rally as the final conservative surrender to multi-cultural orthodoxy.

Did these portrayals whitewash the sins against which King campaigned? No. In fact, the rally was full of apologies. "It was you, Lord God, who called us to account when we broke the treaties with the first peoples," the Rev. Paul Jehle confessed in the opening prayer. "You called us to repentance. And you, O God, called us to repentance when we did not live up to our creed, and we did not treat everyone as equal." Palin followed Jehle to the podium, calling slavery "our greatest shame." Beck told the crowd, "Let's be honest: If you look at history, America has been both terribly good and terribly bad." He conceded: "Countries make mistakes. We have made more than our fair share." A video reviewed the ugly era of segregation and concluded that King "awoke our nation's collective consciousness." Awoke our consciousness! That's a line straight out of the 1960s...

The rally organizers didn't pretend that all our sins were behind us. "We as citizens must all carry Martin Luther King's dream in all of our hearts today," said the rally video. "The dream is not completed. It's an ongoing struggle, one that all Americans should always be willing to undertake." Borrowing a favorite progressive buzzword, the video affirmed King's recognition in 1963 that "this was the day to inspire change."..

Christianity helps. Its message of repentance helps people admit their mistakes, inviting them to surrender to God rather than to their political enemies. But pride is still hard to swallow. Conservatives need a way to distinguish their apologies from the apologies of progressives. Hence their contrast between looking forward and "wallowing.”..

Crying "socialism" is what conservatives do before they yield to change. It's a stage in the process of defeat. But the process doesn't end with defeat. It ends with absorption. It ends with the political descendants of George Wallace embracing the legacy of Martin Luther King. Beck today is just catching up to where King was 50 years ago. That's because King was in the front of the civil rights bus, and Beck is in the back. And it's a really slow bus. 

Let’s not pretend that the Fox host “had to” do all this in order to remain on TV.  I understand that politics is a game of inches, but you hope for people that move you towards your goal, not away from it.  There are plenty of constitutional, legal and moral arguments against affirmative action, enforced diversity and third world immigration which don’t brush up against white nationalism which Beck could use.  Instead, whether for career reasons, out of personal conviction or both, he's chosen to take white self-flagellation to a completely unheard of level.  One can only pity those regular Americans who thought they may have found a spokesman; I can’t help but believe that all but the dimmest of bulbs are going to start tuning this huckster out.

David Frum looks back and still thinks the Iraq War was a good idea. He asks us to imagine a world where the invasion never took place.  Fair enough. 

As president, George Bush assessed his options in 2002, oil prices averaged less than $23 a barrel. These low prices had squeezed Iraq’s income and therefore Saddam Hussein’s power.

But war or no war, the price of oil would zoom upward in the 2000s. China had more than 90 times as many cars on the road in 2010 as in 1990. Chinese oil imports grew 7.5% a year, Indian oil imports only slightly less fast. Soaring oil demand from China and India pushed prices higher and higher: averaging $28 a barrel in 2003, $38 in 2004, $50 in 2005, $64 in 2007 and $91 in 2008. A surviving Saddam would have been a wealthy Saddam.

Not only wealthy, but empowered. The international sanctions regime had collapsed in the late 1990s, freeing Saddam to import more or less what he wished, potentially including the instrumentalities of war...

It seems incredible that a Saddam still in power in the 2000s, unconstrained by sanctions and enriched by Chinese and Indian oil money, would not have tried a third time. Even if Saddam had not sought to build a nuclear bomb, an additional $100 billion or so in annual oil revenues would still have paid for a lot of mischief in the Middle East.

Would Saddam have competed with Iran to fund Hamas? Would he have made common cause with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to support anti-government insurgents in Colombia? Would Iraq have offered haven to al-Qaeda terrorists escaping Afghanistan? 

Why on earth would Saddam team up with Hugo Chavez against Colombia (and why would we care if he did)?  Just because everyone who Frum classifies as “undemocratic” must be best buddies?  And al-Qaeda “terrorists” escaping Afghanistan into Iraq have to get through Iran first, which can be used as an excuse to occupy that country too, or anywhere else on earth for that matter.  Notice the circular logic.  The US goes into Afghanistan because there are terrorists there.  The terrorists may escape into Iraq, so regime change is necessary there too.  Anyone resisting in Iraq is now a terrorist, who may flee to and get funding from Syria and Iran (remember that McCain was prompted to sing "bomb, bomb Iran" by a question about Iranians helping Iraqi insurgents).  Repeat until the American people wake up or the country goes bankrupt.  

Saddam would’ve probably funded Hamas though, and it’s not a coincidence that Frum only becomes cogent when writing about what he truly cares about.

A Saddam-ruled Iraq would not have been a quiet or comfortable place. And when the regime finally did end, it would have ended violently. When the U.S.-led coalition overthrew Saddam, violence erupted between Sunni and Shiite Iraqis, leading to an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths. Does anybody imagine that things would have gone better if the regime had ended instead with a Saddam assassination or heart attack?

Yes, because if Saddam had a heart attack Iraq would still have an army, police and intelligence agencies keeping religious maniacs of all sides from killing each other.  As John Basil Utley writes “we destroyed [Iraq’s] civil structure—its police, civil service, most of its functions of government, even schoolteachers were fired en masse.”  Saddam may have been a mass murderer, but when the US invaded there wasn’t anything resembling the civil strife that we’ve seen since 2003.  The clearest measure of “success” is how Iraqis have voted with their feet.  Over 5 percent of the population, including 40 percent of the middle class, has fled Frum’s democracy, running to such “evil rogue states” like Iran and Syria.  Many more would leave if they were able to.  Neo-cons may tell us that 60 or 70 percent of the middle class may have ended up fleeing if the US had minded its own businesses, but there’s no rational basis for such calculations.  Had the US invaded Syria, Libya or Iran in 2003, Frum could today tell us that no matter how bad things look in 2010, they surly would’ve been much worse if Qaddafi or Al-Assad had had a heart attack.

Most ideological dictatorships don't end in an inferno.  Instead, the ruling class eventually realizes that whatever ideology propelled the first generation of the regime to power-socialism, Maoism, Baathism, pan-Arabism, whatever-was a failure and their people want to be wealthy, and the way to become wealthy is by being non-belligerent and opening up markets.  That's probably the path Iraq would've taken.  Such regimes aren't guaranteed to be democracies or friends of Israel, but these shouldn't be American concerns.

Most readers of this site are probably going to become very jealous when hearing about the focus of the far eastern equivalent of the Tea Party.

KYOTO, Japan — The demonstrators appeared one day in December, just as children at an elementary school for ethnic Koreans were cleaning up for lunch. The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the school gate, using bullhorns to call the students cockroaches and Korean spies.

Inside, the panicked students and teachers huddled in their classrooms, singing loudly to drown out the insults, as parents and eventually police officers blocked the protesters’ entry.

The December episode was the first in a series of demonstrations at the Kyoto No. 1 Korean Elementary School that shocked conflict-adverse Japan, where even political protesters on the radical fringes are expected to avoid embroiling regular citizens, much less children. Responding to public outrage, the police arrested four of the protesters this month on charges of damaging the school’s reputation.

More significantly, the protests also signaled the emergence here of a new type of ultranationalist group. The groups are openly anti-foreign in their message, and unafraid to win attention by holding unruly street demonstrations.

Since first appearing last year, their protests have been directed at not only Japan’s half million ethnic Koreans, but also Chinese and other Asian workers, Christian churchgoers and even Westerners in Halloween costumes. In the latter case, a few dozen angrily shouting demonstrators followed around revelers waving placards that said, “This is not a white country.”

And it never shall be!

No one civilized supports publicly berating school children, but every movement has its wackos.  A goal of politics is to get the lunatics on your side to be seen as decent people with legitimate grievances pushed too far and their equivalents on the other side as the epitome of evil.  The American Left has done this beautifully.

They are also different from Japan’s existing ultranationalist groups, which are a common sight even today in Tokyo, wearing paramilitary uniforms and riding around in ominous black trucks with loudspeakers that blare martial music.

This traditional far right, which has roots going back to at least the 1930s rise of militarism in Japan, is now a tacitly accepted part of the conservative political establishment here. Sociologists describe them as serving as a sort of unofficial mechanism for enforcing conformity in postwar Japan, singling out Japanese who were seen as straying too far to the left, or other groups that anger them, such as embassies of countries with whom Japan has territorial disputes.

They sound like a right-wing SPLC.

Mr. Sakurai says the group is not racist, and rejected the comparison with neo-Nazis. Instead, he said he had modeled his group after another overseas political movement, the Tea Party in the United States. He said he had studied videos of Tea Party protests, and shared with the Tea Party an angry sense that his nation had gone in the wrong direction because it had fallen into the hands of leftist politicians, liberal media as well as foreigners.

Japan's population is 98.5% Japanese and other indigenous groups, with Chinese and Korean residents making up most of the other 1.5%.  Whether her population be 50 or 100 million in 50 years is of comparatively little importance, as she will be Japanese.  That's more than one can say for the United States or Europe.

I woke up today to find that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was being charged in Sweden with one count of rape and one count of molestation (they’re not the same thing?).  I checked the news an hour later, and the more serious charge (rape, I guess) was rescinded. 

STOCKHOLM — Swedish prosecutors withdrew an arrest warrant for the founder of WikiLeaks on Saturday, saying less than a day after the document was issued that it was based on an unfounded accusation of rape.

The accusation had been labeled a dirty trick by Julian Assange and his group, who are preparing to release a fresh batch of classified U.S. documents from the Afghan war.

Swedish prosecutors had urged Assange — a nomadic 39-year-old Australian whose whereabouts were unclear — to turn himself in to police to face questioning in one case involving suspicions of rape and another based on an accusation of molestation.

"I don't think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape," chief prosecutor Eva Finne said, in announcing the withdrawal of the warrant. She did not address the status of the molestation case, a less serious charge that would not lead to an arrest warrant.

The Pentagon has been taking the position that Assange had blood on his hands, an absolutely jaw dropping allegation coming from those killing innocent people because Obama can’t afford to look like a wimp in front of Fox News.

I give this “molestation” charge another 24 hours.

The housing bust hasn’t been bad for everybody, as the Wall Street Journal tells us.

HENDERSON, Nev.—When Shawnetta Newburn left her drug-infested St. Louis neighborhood in search of a better life for her family in Las Vegas, she didn't expect to live in a house with frills worthy of a McMansion.

But Paradise awaited.

That's the name of the gated community where Ms. Newburn, a single mother who makes $10.50 an hour as a pawn-shop cashier, rents a three-bedroom townhouse with soaring ceilings, a gas-fueled fireplace and an oversize walk-in closet in the largest bedroom. The master bath even includes an enclosed toilet room, a feature popular in mini-mansions.

"The only time I ever saw that was on TV or something," she says during a tour of the approximately 2,000-square-foot home. "I never thought I'd have anything like this." The development has a kidney-shaped swimming pool.

Her previous apartment in St. Louis resembled public housing, she says, and her three sons were crammed into one bedroom. After her refrigerator caught fire, her landlord replaced it with an outdated brown model. She now has gleaming-white appliances.

Ms. Newburn can thank the housing bust. She participates in a government program for low-income families that subsidizes about half of her $1,400 monthly rent. The program, known as Section 8, has for decades put families in functional but basic homes and apartments, sometimes in less-than-desirable communities.

But overbuilding during the housing boom has left so many homes available that landlords, desperate for renters, are wooing Section 8 recipients, whose government subsidies, delivered electronically, guarantee the landlord gets paid. As a result, Section 8 recipients suddenly have a housing smorgasbord...

The change marks one of the most dramatic shifts since the 1974 creation of Section 8, nicknamed after its location in the U.S. Housing and Community Development Act. The $18.1 billion Housing and Urban Development program offers more than 2 million families the chance to live outside of housing projects. Recipients pay a certain percentage of their income, typically no more than 30%, each month.

What’s most dangerous about this development is that it could lead to Section 8 housing being an attractive option for white people.  The main reason whites don’t take advantage of government programs for the poor as much as they could is because living off the government has usually meant you had to dwell amongst blacks. If it becomes possible to use your voucher to move into a decent area one of the biggest disincentives to going on Section 8 is removed.  Theodore Dalrymple in his articles and books has shown what happens to lower class whites when welfare becomes a realistic option.  

It must be said that these programs are a drop in the bucket when it comes to the national budget.  As much as these stories may anger us, we have to remember that what government spends on “defense,” over fifty times that thrown at Section 8, makes this program seem like pocket change. The Journal has no problem with that.  

The last few weeks have provided two media reports which shed light on why the health care system is broke.  The first is Dr. Atul Gawande’s compassionate and humane piece in The New Yorker on the need to move away from the survival at all costs mentality and focus on easing suffering and quality of life as one’s time on this earth is winding down.

The issue has become pressing, in recent years, for reasons of expense. The soaring cost of health care is the greatest threat to the country’s long-term solvency, and the terminally ill account for a lot of it. Twenty-five per cent of all Medicare spending is for the five per cent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months which is of little apparent benefit.

Spending on a disease like cancer tends to follow a particular pattern. There are high initial costs as the cancer is treated, and then, if all goes well, these costs taper off. Medical spending for a breast-cancer survivor, for instance, averaged an estimated fifty-four thousand dollars in 2003, the vast majority of it for the initial diagnostic testing, surgery, and, where necessary, radiation and chemotherapy. For a patient with a fatal version of the disease, though, the cost curve is U-shaped, rising again toward the end—to an average of sixty-three thousand dollars during the last six months of life with an incurable breast cancer. Our medical system is excellent at trying to stave off death with eight-thousand-dollar-a-month chemotherapy, three-thousand-dollar-a-day intensive care, five-thousand-dollar-an-hour surgery. But, ultimately, death comes, and no one is good at knowing when to stop.

The second is a 60 Minutes Report that deals with many of the same topics.  Here we find that 85% of medical care in the US is paid for by insurance companies or the government.  Under such a system, it’s little wonder that people don’t use such services prudently.

Government, through Medicare and Medicade alone, pays for nearly a third of medical expenses.  This doesn’t include the health benefits which public service employees receive.  For all the talk about “socialized medicine,” the current system, even before Obama care kicks in, is a sick joke.  Imagine that half the population got to eat whatever they wanted for free.  Of course this privileged class would save tons of money and become very fat while everybody left to buy their food on the market would be shocked at how expensive bread, beverages and fruit had become.  Whether a total socialization of the system would be better or worse is hard to say, though what is certain is the current high costs are a government, rather than a market, failure.  

Former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg has written an assessment in The Atlantic on the odds of Israel or the US bombing Iran.  The most interesting part is the discussion about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s father and the influence that the old man has over the son.

To understand why Netanyahu possesses this deep sense—and why his understanding of Jewish history might lead him to attack Iran, even over Obama’s objections—it is necessary to understand Ben-Zion Netanyahu, his 100-year-old father.

BEN-ZION NETANYAHU—his first name means “son of Zion”—is the world’s foremost historian of the Spanish Inquisition and a onetime secretary to Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of the intractable, “revisionist” branch of Zionism. He is father to a tragic Israeli hero, Yonatan Netanyahu, who died while freeing the Jewish hostages at Entebbe in 1976; and also father to Benjamin, who strives for greatness in his father’s eyes but has, on occasion, disappointed him, notably when he acquiesced, in his first term as prime minister in the late 1990s, to American pressure and withdrew Israeli forces from much of the West Bank city of Hebron, Judaism’s second-holiest city. Benjamin Netanyahu is not known in most quarters for his pliability on matters concerning Palestinians, though he has been trying lately to meet at least some of Barack Obama’s demands that he move the peace process forward.

“Always in the back of Bibi’s mind is Ben-Zion,” one of the prime minister’s friends told me. “He worries that his father will think he is weak.”Ben-Zion Netanyahu’s most important work, The Origins of the Inquisition in 15th-Century Spain, upended the scholarly consensus on the roots of that bleak chapter in Jewish history. He argued that Spanish hatred of Jews was spurred by the principle of limpieza de sangre, or the purity of blood; it was proto-Nazi thought, in other words, not mere theology, that motivated the Inquisition. Ben-Zion also argued that the Inquisition corresponds to the axiom that anti-Semitic persecution is preceded, in all cases, by carefully scripted and lengthy dehumanization campaigns meant to ensure the efficient eventual elimination of Jews. To him, the lessons of Jewish history are plain and insistent.

Ben-Zion, by all accounts, was worshipped by his sons in their childhood, and today, the 60-year-old Benjamin, who has been known to act in charmless ways, conspicuously upholds the Fifth Commandment when discussing his father. At a party marking Ben-Zion’s 100th birthday, held this past March at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, before an assembly that included the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, Benjamin credited his father with forecasting the Shoah and, in the early 1990s, predicting that “Muslim extremists would try to bring down the Twin Towers in New York.” But he also told stories in a warmer and more personal vein, describing a loving father who, though a grim and forbidding figure to outsiders, enjoys cowboy movies and played soccer with his sons.

After a brief debate between Ben-Zion and another prominent academic about competing interpretations of the Inquisition—“It is an unusual 100th-birthday commemoration when a debate about the Inquisition breaks out,” said Menachem Begin’s son, Benny, who is a minister-without-portfolio in Netanyahu’s cabinet—Ben-Zion rose to make valedictory remarks. His speech, unlike his son’s, was succinct, devoid of sentiment, and strikingly unambiguous.

“Our party this evening compels me to speak of recent comments made about the continued existence of the nation of Israel and the new threats by its enemies depicting its upcoming destruction,” Ben-Zion began. “From the Iranian side, we hear pledges that soon—in a matter of days, even—the Zionist movement will be put to an end and there will be no more Zionists in the world. One is supposed to conclude from this that the Jews of the Land of Israel will be annihilated, while the Jews of America, whose leaders refuse to pressure Iran, are being told in a hinted fashion that the annihilation of the Jews will not include them.”

He went on, “The Jewish people are making their position clear and putting faith in their military power. The nation of Israel is showing the world today how a state should behave when it stands before an existential threat: by looking danger in the eye and calmly considering what should be done and what can be done. And to be ready to enter the fray at the moment there is a reasonable chance of success.”

Many people in Likud Party circles have told me that those who discount Ben-Zion’s influence on his son do so at their peril. “This was the father giving his son history’s marching orders,” one of the attendees told me. “I watched Bibi while his father spoke. He was completely absorbed.” (One of Netanyahu’s Knesset allies told me, indelicately, though perhaps not inaccurately, that the chance for movement toward the creation of an independent Palestinian state will come only after Ben-Zion’s death. “Bibi could not withdraw from more of Judea and Samaria”—the biblical names for the West Bank—“and still look into his father’s eyes.”)

Of course, many of us are frightened when we hear that Muslims see geo-politics from a religious perspective, and rightfully so.  Israel, on the other hand, is presented to us as a secular, modern state which only desires peace.  The more one reads about it, the more we see that this is not the case.

I don’t have Ben-Zion’s historical background, but looking at the rampant miscegenation that went on in Latin America makes it hard for me to believe that 15th century Spaniards decided to oppress the Jews because they were worried about “purity of blood.”  Like the nefarious and irrational motives assigned to Muslims, is this simply another case of projection?