Day 442.
As the government shutdown drags into its third day, there is still a lot of talk about immigration being at the heart of the shutdown. And, of course, Slimy Donny wants you to believe that it is all the Democrats fault because “they don’t want immigration reform”.
Of course that is total bullshit. It was under the last administration, a Democrat, that a major Immigration Reform Bill passed the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support. But, the wackos in the House, namely the Freedom From Poor People caucus got leadership to put that bill in a drawer and it never saw the light of day again.
Slimy Donny is trying to make it sound like only he has the answers to immigration reform. Only his idea of immigration reform is to shut down the borders so only he can choose who gets in and who does not. And, from all indications, he only wants white people. Especially when you consider his comments of “why can’t we get more people from places like Norway?” Maybe it is because people from places like Norway see through his supremacists viewpoint.
In an effort to turn his base in favor of his plans, and that isn’t hard since most of his base are white supremacists anyway, he has gone out of his way to ensure that Muslims are blamed for terrorist activity in this country, and no one else.
The first step was the report that came out last week saying that 73 percent of international terrorism was committed by “foreign-born” people. That was a clear attempt to show why his travel ban is so important. There were 549 convicted international terrorism convictions and 73 percent of them were by “foreign-born” according to the report.
Except, the numbers were skewed, and the report was not complete, and as it turns out the department who Slimy Donny claims made up the report, didn’t make up the report. Slimy Donny said the report came from DHS. Only, reports are indicating that the report came from DOJ. About the only thing that DHS did was Secretary Nielsen signing off on it without any analysis from her own analysts.
The first indication of this report being phony is that DHS does not keep the kinds of stats that are listed in the report. They do not cross-reference the stats by citizenship, either. That is the type of information that DOJ does, not DHS.
Secondly, the report only talks about “convictions” but does not tell you that many of those convictions were against people extradited to the U.S. and were not necessarily attacks within the U.S. What that means is if an attack was committed in another country against Americans, then the suspects were extradited to the U.S. for trial. If they were convicted, those numbers were included in this report.
Then, a month later after Slimy Donny’s first Muslim Ban, a DHS draft analysis was leaked to the Associated Press. That document criticized the methodology and implication of the travel ban. It noted that few people from the original seven countries covered by the travel ban were involved in terrorism on U.S. soil. And it was titled “Citizenship Likely an Unreliable Indicator Of Terrorist Threat to the United States.”
On March 2, MSNBC’S Rachel Maddow published a different DHS analysis that went further. Most foreign-born terrorists who came to the U.S. “likely radicalized several years after their entry to the United States,” it found, “limiting the ability of screening and vetting officials to prevent their radicalization.” It also referenced another DHS analysis of recent foreign-born terrorists that found they “began radicalizing, on average, 13 years after their entry to the United States.”
That is an implication that undermines the rationale for the so-called Muslim ban, in that immigrants don’t come to the United States to commit terrorism; most of those who become terrorists do so long after they become Americans.
To show just how slanted this report is intended to be, it only includes convictions for “international terrorism”. It does not include “domestic terrorism” in its findings.
For example, the Anti-Defamation League released its own report on terrorism inside the U.S. during 2017 on Wednesday. Their report shows that 59 percent of extremist-related deaths in the U.S. in 2017 were caused by white supremacists and far-right extremists.
Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina, where he tracks Muslim-American involvement in terrorism published his annual index of Muslim-American involvement in terrorism. Like the ADL report, its focus in different than the DOJ-DHS offering. It found “no attacks in 2017 by Muslim-American extremists with family backgrounds in travel-ban countries.” Since 9/11, terrorists from ban countries “have caused zero fatalities and 32 injuries” domestically.
For good measure, Kurzman’s report noted, “almost twice as many people were killed in the United States by mass shootings in 2017 as have been killed by Muslim-American extremists in the past 16 years.”
Then there is the report that the FBI which normally conducts such analysis of such data was not involved in the report at all. When asked for comment, an FBI spokesman said to talk to DHS.
Finally, there is another report that shows murders of LGBTQ has skyrocketed since Slimy Donny took office. The New York City Anti-Violence Project releases reports specifically aimed at attacks against the LGBTQ community. According to their report, an 86 percent increase in hate violence homicides has occurred in that last year. That makes 2017 the deadliest year yet for the LGBTQ community.
While the impact of hate crimes transcend all state borders, the report finds that more than half of the homicides occurred in Florida, Georgia, New York, Louisiana and Texas.
Other key findings are that 67 percent of the victims were age 35 and under; 59 percent of the victims were killed with guns; 45 percent of the homicides were related to hookup violence, typically related to ads placed on personal websites and apps.
What all of this is showing us is that the DOJ-DHS report is specifically targeting a select group of people and not giving us a real account of how much actual terrorism is taking place in the country and by whom. It is targeting Muslims in an effort to show “proof” that we need Slimy Donny’s Muslim Ban that he called for during the campaign.
Slimy Donny seems to have a real problem with people of color. He seems to have a real problem with racism, in general. I will not hesitate to call him a racist, because he has been all of his life. If you want any more proof, we had his “shithole” comment backlash a couple of weeks ago.
After that backlash, he claimed that he “loves Haitians” and has nothing against Haitians. Then just a couple of days later, without any explanation as to why, his administration stopped issuing all visas to Haitians. I guess he only “loves Haitians” if they stay out of America.
This is all why Slimy Donny’s attempts to pin the shutdown on immigration and the Democrats is falling on deaf ears. Everyone, including his supporters, knows that he is after a near complete shutdown of immigration to this country. His so-called “merit” immigration policy is nothing short of a “whites only” immigration policy. And it is very thinly veiled to anyone with a working brain.
Let’s face facts. Terrorism is a real threat to our citizens. But, all of these reports show that the biggest threat to our citizens is from “domestic terrorists” and not foreign-born terrorists. That is simply a game that Slimy Donny is playing to get his way.
As I said before, if he and people like Tom Cotton really believed in “merit” immigration, the Dreamers would be at the top of the list for legal pathway to citizenship. They have met all of the so-called requirements, except one. They aren’t white.
Republican leadership in Congress are now saying that if the Democrats help keep the government open, they “promise” to hold votes on immigration, and specifically the Dreamers, “next month”. But, after the debacle of the last major Immigration Reform Bill was passed with bipartisan support in the Senate and that a small minority of the House Republican Caucus was able to kill it, why should Democrats believe Republican leadership? Why should anyone believe Republican leadership?
This fight is not just over Dreamers as Republicans want you to believe. This fight is over our immigration system as a whole and what kind of country we are going to be. Are we going to be a “white supremacist” nation or are we going to be what Reagan called us, “that shining city on a hill” offering opportunity and freedom to everyone?
Sorry, but if Slimy Donny and his cronies get their way, we will be a white supremacist nation. That will be the death of our democracy, and probably our country.
And, the shirts keep marching along.
Lean Left World 