Monthly Archives: July 2014

Amnesty and Rights

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Attorney General Eric Holder now is claiming amnesty to be both a civil and a human right. In his rambling way, he makes says this [emphasis in the cite]:

Creating a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in this country is essential. The way we treat our friends and neighbors who are undocumented—by creating a mechanism for them to earn citizenship and move out of the shadows—transcends the issue of immigration status. This is a matter of civil and human rights.

I’ll leave aside the distinction and lack of overlap between civil rights and human rights, except to note that a distinguished lawyer such as our Mr Holder should know better.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL) has a response in a larger speech on the Senate floor. The part relevant to this subject begins at around 0+50.

The Obama administration officials have gone so far as to describe amnesty as a civil right. That’s an argument against the very idea of a nation state and the idea of a nation’s borders. Of course, there can be no civil right to enter a country unlawfully and then to demand lawful status and even citizenship. Of course, there’s not. How can this possibly be that the Attorney General of the United States would assert that people have a Constitutional right to enter unlawfully and be given amnesty? That’s the kind of thinking that’s got us into this fix, and it’s encouraged the unlawful flow of immigration. The actual legal rights that are being violated here, today, I suggest are the rights of the American citizens, and as Civil Rights Commission Member of the US Commission on Civil Rights, Peter Kirsanow, warned, our African American citizens often are the ones that are hurt the most and also recent immigrant arrivals and working Americans. So what about their rights? … What about the right of every citizen to the protection of immigration laws that we have in America today?

One small part of this larger question, as an aside: the Attorney General asserts that people have a Constitutional right to break the law? Well, that is consistent with this President’s cavalier attitude toward American law, even toward the supreme Law of our Land.

A Thought from the Border Crisis and Immigration Generally

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…it’s not limited to those topics, but it was triggered by a quote by Dr Manny Alvarez in his piece about the bias of the Latino press in its coverage of the current children border crisis. What Alvarez said was this:

The crisis reminds me of that old saying: “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.”

Alvarez offered this aphorism in the context of needing to address the root cause of the crisis, not merely treat the symptom that is what the crisis is.

Let me modify the aphorism slightly; it’ll illustrate another part of the root cause.

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime and deny the donor man the opportunity to maintain the dependency of the recipient on him.

UN Involvement in the Israeli/Palestinian Authority War

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The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a UN organization “providing humanitarian relief” in Gaza, said they found rockets hidden by PA terrorists inside a “vacant” school earlier in the week. This is the second time the UNRWA has been found to have PA’s rockets stored in UNRWA facilities.

This time the rockets were found in an “unused” UNRWA building situated

between two other UNRWA schools that are being used to host 1,500 displaced people.

Also this time, instead of returning the rockets to the PA, as the UNRWA did with that prior cache,

UNRWA staff withdrew from the area.

And abandoned those 1,500 refugees the UN was pretending to shelter.

More Moral Equivalence Nonsense

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President Obama and John Kerry have adopted this ostensibly even-handed trope [that both Israel and the Palestinian Authority must agree to a cease fire], and on Tuesday the European Union went further and deplored Israel and Hamas as if they were equal perpetrators. Hamas should stop its “criminal and unjustifiable acts,” the EU said, but it added that it was “particularly appalled” at the human cost of the Israel ground offensive.

No. There is no equivalence between a nation that is protecting its citizens from terrorist assault and an entity that only rains rockets on that nation for the purpose of killing as many civilians, including children, as it can; there is no equivalence between a nation that is protecting its citizens and an entity that shoots rockets at a nuclear power plant in that nation for the purpose of destroying the plant and scattering as much radioactivity as widely as possible; there is no equivalence between a nation that is protecting its citizens and an entity that uses its own civilians, including its own children, as shields for the purpose of running up the Palestinian body count for PR purposes.

The US and the EU each must put aside this despicable assumption of an equivalence of morality between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (“particularly appalled!?” Maybe the EU isn’t assuming so much equivalence…) and exert such pressure as they have left on the PA to stop its assault and to forswear terrorism.

If there is to be a legitimate cease fire, it can come about in one of only two ways. The PA must stop its attacks on Israel and allow verification of that cessation. Alternatively, Israel must continue in Gaza until the PA’s ability to continue its attacks is destroyed completely and the PA terrorists are dead or captured. Given the integrity of the PA, though, the former alternative is likely only to provide a brief respite before the PA resumes its terrorism.

The Kerfuffle in the Middle East

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Regarding the current Israeli/Palestinian Authority war over the latter’s terrorist attacks on Israeli cities and nuclear facilities, Secretary of State John Kerry is in Cairo to work with his Egyptian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri, to try to bring about an end to the war, or at least a lull in the current outbreak of the larger, on-going war.

To Kerry’s credit, he also says he wants to find “a way to deal with the underlying issues.” Success here would, indeed, go a long way toward reducing the likelihood of further hostilities.

Unfortunately, he continues to lack any understanding of the situation. He also thinks the underlying issues are “very complicated.”

No, they’re really quite simple. Israel wants the terrorist attacks to stop; the PA refuses. Israel wants its right to exist explicitly recognized and that recognition acted on; the PA refuses on both counts. Israel wants a peaceful relationship within a two-state outcome that contains Israel and a Palestinian state; the PA refuses.