Rod Dreher writes:

Here’s a link to the video that’s roiling Pakistan. Cretinous Muslim savages publicly flog a 17-year-old woman who is alleged to have committed adultery. This is tough to watch. As longtime readers will remember, I had lunch a few years back here in Dallas with a local Muslim leader, a prosperous, well-spoken businessman who dresses like a Westerner, who defended this kind of primitive punishment as “pro-family.” It is important to watch this video and to realize that this is the kind of thing many Islamists, even those who aren’t Swat Valley tribesmen, believe in.

The businessman he’s talking about is Mohamed Elmougy,[Email him] of Pyramids Hospitality. See a Dallas business journal profile here, which doesn’t mention this story:

Two years ago, the editor-in-chief of my newspaper, a very fair-minded man, put together a working lunch in which Mohamed Elmougy, for years the leader of CAIR in Dallas, and I could meet to discuss our differences. Mr. Elmougy, who is no longer with CAIR but who had been for some time the leading public voice of Dallas-area Muslims, brought with him two associates. The editor-in-chief and the editorial page editor of the News accompanied me. Mr. Elmougy and I did most of the talking. It wasa long meeting, but a cordial one. As we waited for the check, Mr. Elmougy said he didn’t understand why I considered Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the popular satellite TV evangelist and spiritual advisor of the Muslim Brotherhood, to be violent. I responded by pointing out that Qaradawi has advocated executing homosexuals, and that he gave advice on his website about how a Muslim man can beat his wife in an Islamically correct way.

“That’s violent,”I told Mr. Elmougy. He slammed his hand on the table and said he agreed with the Shaykh, and that he wouldn’t apologize for it. He went on to tell a story about an adulteress who came to the Prophet asking for release from her sins. The Prophet ordered her stoned to death, said Mr. Elmougy, and declared that he could see her rejoicing in paradise. Mr. Elmougy finished his account by saying that things we Westerners consider to be unacceptable violence are considered by Muslims like him to be pro-family “deterrence.”

I thanked him for his candor, for admitting that he favors executing gays, wife-beating, stoning adulteresses, and chopping the hands off of thieves. I could tell, though, that my colleagues from the paper were shocked by what they had heard.

American journalists simply aren’t used to hearing Islamic leaders in this country talk like that. And Islamic leaders in this country, I’d wager, are not used to being questioned sharply about their views. It’s also the case that Mr. Elmougy fits no Westerner’s idea of what a radical Muslim looks like. He is smart, well-dressed, professional,and to all appearances, Westernized. You simply don’t expect to be sitting in a fancy steakhouse and to hear a man who looks like the manager of a luxury hotel—which is what he was at the time—advocating medieval tortures. The cognitive dissonance can be overwhelming. [Reporting The Muslim Brotherhood » Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World, February 01, 2008]

The great majority of Americans don’t want dangerous incarcerated terrorists turned loose in the country, according to the Rasmussen pollsters. Citizens don’t believe terrorism should be the newest visa category.

Job #1 of the federal government is national security and protecting us from enemies abroad. Washington is failing miserably, to the point of seriously considering the welcome of foreign enemies into our communities.

President Obama’s intelligence chief said last week that some inmates at the Guantanamo terrorist prison camp may be released in the United States, but just 13% of U.S. voters think that should be allowed.

Seventy-five percent (75%) say Guantanamo inmates should not be released in this country, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Twelve percent (12%) are not sure.

For 75% of voters, safety is more important than fairness in determining where terrorist suspects are released. Only 17% say fairness is more important.
[75% Oppose Release of Guantanamo Inmates in the United States, Rasmussen Reports, April 3, 2009]

Gitmo 1-b? No way!

Warren Gunnels(Senior Aide to Sen. Sanders) asks:

“Why would the supporters of increasing H-1B visas be so concerned about our amendment? At a time when the unemployment rate is soaring, do you really think there aren’t enough intelligent Americans to fill these jobs?” [Work-Visa Numbers Get Squishy -- and Get Played, March 31, 2009]

US immigration policies often had very different effects than advocates promised.

Theoretically, we could look at the effects of corporate sponsored immigration on companies. Advocates of corporate sponsored immigration constructed policies with such poor reporting that isn’t possible. We just don’t know precisely how many guest worker visas are in use in many companies–or the cumulative impact of related chain migration. Corporate immigration advocates want investors and customers to have the illusion they are the same companies they always were-even when they replace their American workforce.

Guest worker visas aren’t just cheaper. Corporate management perceives guest workers as far more easily controlled than Americans. Criminal corporations like Enron prefer guest workers. Heavy guest worker use is sometimes motivated by ethnic nepotism in companies managed by co-nationals of guest workers.

Guest worker use can be very addictive. Although guest workers may be a small portion of overall employment, they are often used in for jobs utterly essential for day to day operations–and security. Many companies have lost the trust of US tech workers–and even their foreign workers with an option to work elsewhere.

They depend utterly on a constant flow of indentured workers. These guest workers actually have a knife at the throat of their supposed corporate masters. America can clearly thrive without guest worker visas, but many managers and major companies cannot. America may well be far better off without those companies and managers.

The Associated Press reports:

The man who police say killed 13 people in a shooting rampage inside an immigrant community center was depressed and angry over losing his job and about his poor English skills, the Binghamton mayor and police said Saturday.

Police Chief Joseph Zikuski told NBC’s “Today” that people “degraded and disrespected” the gunman over his poor English. Mayor Matthew Ryan, speaking on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” said the man, believed to be 42-year-old Vietnamese immigrant Jiverly Voong, was angry about his language issues and his lack of employment.

You know, you gotta give credit where it’s due: this one was a real challenge to give the proper anti-anti-immigration spin to, but let them have a day to work on it, and they’re now starting to get some English on the ball.

P.S. The LA Times reports that the 42-year-old shooter worked for nearly seven years as a sushi deliveryman in the LA area, and by the end of his sushi delivery career in 2007, he’d worked himself all the way up to $9 per hour.

It’s just swell to be an unskilled laborer in LA.

From the NY Times’s Freakonomist blog:

Last week, we solicited your questions for award-winning Oxford University economist Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion
and the just-published Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places
.

In his answers below, Collier talks about why the impact of colonialism on Africa is exaggerated, how African countries are “too big to be nations, yet too small to be states,” and his belief that the I.Q. of a country’s citizens is “not closely related to the performance of an economy.”

Collier received one unwelcome question:

Q. What do you think of Richard Lynn’s findings about race differences in intelligence and their relatedness to Africa’s continuing state of underdevelopment? In his work, Mr. Lynn compiled the results of numerous studies which appear to show fairly unambiguously that average I.Q.’s in sub-Saharan Africa are below 70. Studies furthermore show that this disadvantage is almost certainly inherited genetically. — Denis Bider

A. I don’t know this stuff and don’t want to. But I am just about prepared to believe that the average Chinese person is smarter than the average Englishman. Despite this, the average Englishman is more than 10 times richer than the average Chinese person — so intelligence is manifestly not closely related to the performance of an economy.

In other words, “Please don’t Watson me! I’ll be however stupid I have to be in order to keep my nice job at Oxford.”

Ironically, the very low average IQs found in Africa can’t all be genetic in origin because the gap between Africans (mean IQ of 70 according to dozens of studies) and African-Americans (mean IQ of 85 according to hundreds of studies) is as large as the gap between African-Americans and white Americans (100). Yet, African-Americans are no more than 20% white by genealogy.
Richard Lynn himself has repeatedly pointed to poor nutrition as one cause of low average IQs in some poor countries. We know of two micronutrients–iodine and iron–that can lower your IQ when not in sufficient supply in your diet. That’s why in America salt is fortified with iodine and flour with iron. Extending these fortification programs to the Third World as a way to raise average IQ would probably give more bang for the buck than anything else.

Cop-killer and child rapist, Lovelle Mixon, has quickly become a cult hero among many Bay Area blacks.  On Saturday afternoon, March 21^st, Mixon shot two policemen who had just pulled him over in downtown Oakland.  As both officers were lying on the street, Mixon then stood over them and fired again, just for good measure.  Mixon then fled to his sister’s apartment where, hours later, he shot three more officers who were trying to apprehend him, killing two.

Nixon was black and all of the policemen were white, including one half-Asian officer.

Within hours a group of blacks appeared and taunted the officers who put up police tape around the crime scene.  Next, they assembled a small shrine to Mixon outside the apartment where he died, and many blacks continue to go there to pay their respects to the greatest cop-killer in Oakland’s history.

A few days after the shooting, a large group of blacks protested Mixon’s death in downtown Oakland chanting “OPD you can’t hide – we charge you with genocide.” Mixon’s funeral, held the following week, was attended by over 500 mourners.

A Bay Area policeman sent me this pro-Mixon flyer that was recently left on the windshield of a police car in nearby Martinez, CA. It looks like someone wanted to “send a message” (however incoherent) that Mixon’s rampage was “payback” for the fatal New Year’s Day shooting of Oscar Grant by BART police.  Click here to view the flyer.

Many politicians, like Sens. Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer and Gov. Schwarznegger, all turned out for the officers’ funeral, and praised them as heroes. President and Mrs. Obama also sent condolences.

However, is it not an insult to the memory of these officers, as well as those who still serve, that not one of them has condemned the hero status this killer is receiving from much of the black community?

Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch posts this:

American Civic Association: Tragic shooting at refugee resettlement agency

Posted by acorcoran on April 3, 2009

By now you know more details (see our earliest report) on the terrible shooting at a refugee agency, American Civic Association, in Binghamton, NY today.  The lone gunman who killed 13 people before taking his own life is tentatively identified as a former Vietnamese refugee, Linh Phat Vung (AP is still referring to him as Jiverly Voong).   As the evening progresses and in the days ahead we will find out who he is and what made this man snap.  Right now the speculation is that he was recently fired from his job and that might have pushed him over the edge.  But, why shoot other refugees and volunteers?

The American Civic Association is a refugee resettlement office (a volag) that says its purpose is to “aid new immigrant assimililation.”    According to this article originally published in 2007, but reprinted today, the agency supplies caseworkers for resettlement and offers legal services to immigrants among many other services.

Although, Fred Trzcinski, a former director says the organization was founded in 1939, its Guidestar report says 1941.    Trzcinski says of the mission:

The mission of the American Civic Association is to encourage the spirit of brotherhood among nations and peoples; to sponsor citizenship education; to promote racial, religious and political understanding; to cultivate fellowship between native and naturalized citizens; and to safeguard and defend the Constitution of the United States.

[More]

The “fellowship between native and naturalized citizens” isn’t looking so hot right at the moment.