One of the first things to abandon when accepting Islam is your nationality and race. This means Islam is above your country and your race, there should be no boundaries or divisions among Muslims.
"He who exalts his people or his nation's flag is not a Muslim but a Kaffir (infidel)".
A true Muslim will burn his own country's flag and will only be loyal to the Koran and God.
Conservatives need to make this another “Miers Moment” for George W. Bush. Just as we did to stop the risible Supreme Court nomination of Hapless Harriett, conservatives must band together to stop the new Senate illegal immigration “reform” bill. Let us all stand, respectfully, in President Bush’s path with our right hands raised signaling “halt.” We’ve done it before. We can do it again.
President Bush is not solely to blame for this travesty. There’s blame aplenty to go around to Sen. McCain and others. We have to remember that it was only because of strong Republican opposition in the House that a similar blow wasn’t dealt to our national security last year. The Republican majority in the House is gone, and though the Senate may yet stop this particular bill, the President is the key. If he demanded that conservative principles be the foundation of immigration reform, they could be. As he stands now, the President is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Those conservative principles are no mystery. We believe – and Human Events will continue to insist – that our borders be secured before there is any consideration of any other aspect of the illegal immigration problem. Unless we secure our borders, all the rest is merely blue smoke and mirrors. Which the Senate bill, being unveiled today, is.
The Senate’s announced “compromise” compromises our national security and creates an economic and bureaucratic nightmare. Congress seems to be able to deal with illegal immigration only every twenty years or so. We cannot live with this legislation for one year, far less twenty: it would be far better to have no legislation this year (or next) than the Senate bill.
Border security is the sine qua non of immigration reform: without it, nothing else can have a serious effect on the problem. The Senate bill isn’t at all serious. It proposes hiring more Border Patrolmen, adding 70 ground-based radar towers on the Mexican border and deployment of four (yes, four) unmanned aerial vehicles. It’s tokenism of the most lethal sort. (Human Events will give you the specifics, later this week, on what real border security looks like. Start with one fact: the Senate bill ain’t it.)
Having made a small contribution to border security, the Senate bill does its worst: it creates the “guest worker” program immediately, without requiring objective proof that the border has been secured. This is the “solution” pushed by some faux-conservatives who think it more important to legalize the immigrants they need to run their horse shows, pick their grapes and artichokes cheaply enough than to enforce our borders. It is a disaster because it will be an insurmountable obstacle to real border security.
It’s nonsensical to equate the price of grapes to the danger of having more Kosovars sneak across the border to shoot soldiers at Fort Dix. There is no tradeoff to be made here. Let us hear no more of “guest worker” programs until we can see – by objective standards – that the borders have been secured. We will not compromise on the order in which these things must be done.
The only good news in the Senate bill is that it’s so complicated and such a political house of cards, that it may die of its own defects before it gets to the President. The legislative hubris written into this bill is so great it nearly surpasses describability. Anyone who believes that its “solutions” can be accomplished quickly – including Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff who said it can all be done in eighteen months -- is, well, nuts.
When you look at the Senate bill, full of supposed disincentives in the form of economic penalties, think of how effective taxes are in changing human behavior. No matter how high cigarette taxes rise, people will smoke because some like to. No matter how high gasoline taxes go, people will still drive because they need to. And no matter how high you set the price for legal status here, illegals will still come across our porous borders. Most will still get jobs, education, medical benefits and function comfortably without taking on the burdens this unworkable bill would impose. Or the burdens citizens shoulder every day. (And those who are terrorists are so well-bankrolled as to make the “fines” a joke.) The real economic disincentive is to us, not to them.
The costs of illegal immigrants gaining legal status will bankrupt Social Security, Medicare and the rest of the “safety net” on which so many elderly legal Americans rely. It will accelerate the closing of hospitals and overcrowding of prisons and schools. It will be an immigration equivalent of the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill which was one of the main causes of the 1930s Great Depression.
Which brings us back to President Bush. He’s been a big spender like no Republican in memory. The fact that the Senate bill will cause the federal budget to explode seems beyond his concern. But this is our president, and we have to get him to understand that we cannot – under any circumstances – accept this bill, or anything like it, which fails to secure the borders as a precondition to other “reforms.”
President Bush believes that a guest worker program is essential to deal fairly with the people who have lived here for years, providing a below-market cost work force. But that is not, necessarily, inconsistent with what we believe. We do not pronounce anathema upon some sort of guest worker program for the future. But we believe, and will insist, that it cannot be discussed far less enacted unless and until we secure the borders, and then give the border security measures time to prove that they work. The President must hear from us -- loudly, clearly and consistently until he changes his mind – that he is comprehensively wrong in supporting this bill or anything like it.
And while we say that to the President, we have to say it – with equal vehemence and frequency – to our congressmen and senators. It’s entirely possible that the good conservatives in the Senate (yes, there are still a goodly number) may be able to block the cloture motion Harry Reid will propose to gain quick passage of this bill. Reid wants to get this passed without giving people the time to really understand what it says or to study its effects. It’s not just those such as the President, whose position we oppose, that need to hear from us. Those in the Senate and House who are standing up for border security first need to hear our praise as loudly as those who don’t hear our opposition.
We reacted, strongly and with appropriate outrage, to the nomination of Harriett Miers. We won that fight. We must do the same now.
The Immigration Bill: Comprehensive or Incomprehensible?Read more,
By Fred Thompson
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Most Americans know that we have an illegal immigration problem in this country, with perhaps as many as 20 million people residing here unlawfully. And I think most Americans have a pretty good idea about how to at least start solving the problem – secure our nation’s borders.
But there’s an old saying in Washington that, in dealing with any tough issue, half the politicians hope that citizens don’t understand it while the other half fear that people actually do. This kind of thinking was apparent with the “comprehensive” immigration reform bill that the U.S. Senate and the White House negotiated yesterday. I’d tell you what was in the legislation, but 24 hours after the politicians agreed the bill looked good, the Senate lawyers were still writing what may turn out to be a one thousand page document. In fact, a final version of the bill most likely will not be made available to the public until after the legislation is passed. That may come five days from now.
That’s like trying to digest an eight-course meal on a fifteen-minute lunch break.
We’ve tried the “comprehensive” route before to solve the illegal immigration problem with a bit more care and deliberation, and the results haven’t been good. Back in May 1985, Congress promised us that it would come up with a comprehensive plan to solve the problem of illegal immigration and our porous borders. Eighteen months later, in November 1986, that comprehensive plan was signed into law.
Twenty-two years and millions of illegal immigrants later, that comprehensive plan hasn’t done what most Americans wanted it to do -- secure America’s borders. Now Washington says the new “comprehensive” plan will solve the problem that the last comprehensive plan didn’t.
The last proposed amnesty bill was set aside and George Bush made promises to secure the border. Sadly we see that these were empty promises. Congress has also played its part in this charade and we have come to learn that Washington has had no intention of following through on what the public declared as a prerequisite to comprehensive immigration reform; a secure border with controlled immigration. Sadly also, for the country, we have become aware that "higher powers" have a different agenda. Big business wishes to maintain a low wage work force and the political parties see potential voters. Other nefarious groups are pushing a shadowy agenda to implement a North American union.
America has reached a sad state of affairs. Republicans in Congress have joined the Democrats in profligate spending. George Bush has become the lamest of ducks and it appears rightly so. He can no longer protect his associates. Rumsfeld and now Wolfowitz have been "done in" by the relentless forces of opposition and his Attorney General is on the bubble. With his political capital at an all time low, Bush has once again turned to his "good friend and ally", Teddy Kennedy in an attempt to push through yet another ill-conceived bipartisan "Immigration reform" plan. We are at a cross roads in American politics and it appears that our elites would prefer a European system where we apathetically let our leaders decide what is best for us. We'll soon know whether the country has taken another wrong turn.
U.S. officials say the terrorist network's command base is increasingly being funded by cash coming out of Iraq.
WASHINGTON — A major CIA effort launched last year to hunt down Osama bin Laden has produced no significant leads on his whereabouts, but has helped track an alarming increase in the movement of Al Qaeda operatives and money into Pakistan's tribal territories, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the operation.
In one of the most troubling trends, U.S. officials said that Al Qaeda's command base in Pakistan is increasingly being funded by cash coming out of Iraq, where the terrorist network's operatives are raising substantial sums from donations to the anti-American insurgency as well as kidnappings of wealthy Iraqis and other criminal activity.
The influx of money has bolstered Al Qaeda's leadership ranks at a time when the core command is regrouping and reasserting influence over its far-flung network. The trend also signals a reversal in the traditional flow of Al Qaeda funds, with the network's leadership surviving to a large extent on money coming in from its most profitable franchise, rather than distributing funds from headquarters to distant cells.
Al Qaeda's efforts were aided, intelligence officials said, by Pakistan's withdrawal in September of tens of thousands of troops from the tribal areas along the Afghanistan border where Bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, are believed to be hiding.
Little more than a year ago, Al Qaeda's core command was thought to be in a financial crunch. But U.S. officials said cash shipped from Iraq has eased those troubles.
"Iraq is a big moneymaker for them," said a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official.
[...]
We need some common sense on the immigration bill. There is no urgency that it be done this week. There is no reason that it should apply to all countries of origin equally. Serious security issues need to be considered. Along with security concerns, there needs to be some serious discussions about the economic impact to US social services at all levels of governments. There needs to be honest debate. This is but one more reason for caution:'We are Muslims. I am Hezbollah.'
Mustafa Khalil Meri, a Hezbollah militiaman in Paraguay, says the militant Islamist group would take violent revenge inside the United States if it were to attack Iran.
Telemundo & msnbc.com
CIUDAD DEL ESTE, Paraguay - The Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia has taken root in South America, fostering a well-financed force of Islamist radicals boiling with hatred for the United States and ready to die to prove it, according to militia members, U.S. officials and police agencies across the continent.
From its Western base in a remote region divided by the borders of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina known as the Tri-border, or the Triple Frontier, Hezbollah has mined the frustrations of many Muslims among about 25,000 Arab residents whose families immigrated mainly from Lebanon in two waves, after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and after the 1985 Lebanese civil war.
An investigation by Telemundo and NBC News has uncovered details of an extensive smuggling network run by Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim group founded in Lebanon in 1982 that the United States has labeled an international terrorist organization. The operation funnels large sums of money to militia leaders in the Middle East and finances training camps, propaganda operations and bomb attacks in South America, according to U.S. and South American officials.
U.S. officials fear that poorly patrolled borders and rampant corruption in the Tri-border region could make it easy for Hezbollah terrorists to infiltrate the southern U.S. border. From the largely lawless region, it is easy for potential terrorists, without detection, to book passage to the United States through Brazil and then Mexico simply by posing as tourists.
They are men like Mustafa Khalil Meri, a young Arab Muslim whom Telemundo interviewed in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay’s second-largest city and the center of the Tri-border region. There is nothing particularly distinctive about him, but beneath the everyday T-shirt he wears beats the heart of a devoted Hezbollah militiaman.
“If he attacks Iran, in two minutes Bush is dead,” Meri said. “We are Muslims. I am Hezbollah. We are Muslims, and we will defend our countries at any time they are attacked.”
Four people have been arrested in connection with the "honor killing" last month of a Kurdish teen that was captured on cellphone video, authorities tell CNN. Two of those arrested are relatives and police are also searching for the victim's cousin. Dua Khalil, 17, was dragged into a crowd in a headlock and stoned to death in Iraq's Nineveh province. The killing was videoed and broadcast around the world -- throwing 'honor killings' into the public eye.
