Today is the fifth anniversary of the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by hostile Muslim Mohammed Bouyeri because he perceived the artist’s message was anti-Islam. What fueled the killer’s fury was how the film Submission showed Islam’s inherent brutality toward women. (Watch Part 1 of Submission on YouTube.)

The anniversary of the attack prompted foreign journalists to check on the multicultural tensions and Muslim radicalisation in the Dutch capital. The Netherlands’ immigration issues have remained high on the agenda, fuelled by populist politician Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV). But no attacks, home grown or from outside, have taken place since November 2, 2004.

That was the morning Mohammed B. followed Theo van Gogh on his bicycle before he shot him eight times with a handgun. The 47-year-old filmmaker fell to the ground, where his assassin slit his throat and pinned a note to his body with a knife. The note was a death threat to Ayaan Hirsi Ali with whom Van Gogh had made the short film Submission, about the abuse of women under Islam, and called for jihad.

B., son of Moroccan immigrants, was born and raised in Amsterdam. “The turnaround in his behaviour happened in this building”, Achmed Marcouch told reporters on a tour of the Amsterdam immigrant neighbourhood Slotervaart last week. Marcouch has been Slotervaart’s borough chairman since 2006 and the building he showed the journalists was the community centre Eigenwijks, where B. was a volunteer. He is now serving a life sentence for the murder. [Immigrant tensions remain five years after Van Gogh killing 11/02/09]

(It’s kind of bizarre that this Dutch news site [NRC Handelsblad] doesn’t use the killer’s name, since he is in the slammer and is not entitled to any deference.)

At a time when Lou Dobbs reports a shot fired at his home, the physical security of people who insist that immigration be legal remains a matter for concern.

The Dutch Defence League put up this video remembering Van Gogh a couple days ago.

This was easy to see coming, with the billions of dollars the cartels have to spread around.

But chillingly, there are signs that one of the worst features of Mexico’s war on drugs—law enforcement officials on the take from drug lords—is becoming an American problem as well. Most press accounts focus on the drug-related violence that has migrated north into the United States. Far less widely reported is the infiltration and corruption of American law enforcement, according to Robert Killebrew, a retired U.S. Army colonel and senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for a New American Security. “This is a national security problem that does not yet have a name,” he wrote last fall in The National Strategy Forum Review. The drug lords, he tells me, are seeking to “hollow out our institutions, just as they have in Mexico.”

Corruption indictments and convictions linked to drug-trafficking organizations, known in police parlance as DTOs, are popping up in FBI press releases with disturbing frequency. In April, for instance, the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of Texas announced that Sergio Lopez Hernandez, a 40-year-old Customs and Border Protection inspector, had been convicted of drug trafficking, alien smuggling, and bribery. Hernandez pleaded guilty to accepting over $150,000 in bribes and to conspiring to sell cocaine and bring illegal aliens into the country. [The Mexicanization of American Law Enforcement, By Judith Miller, City Journal, October 28, 2009 ]

Life just got easier for illegal aliens residing in San Francisco. No license? No problema with the car.

Call it sanctuary on wheels: San Francisco is about to give a big break to people, many of them illegal immigrants, who are caught driving without a license.

Beginning Sunday, cops will no longer impound cars the first time drivers are pulled over without a license.

The reason: Many such drivers are in the United States illegally - and thus unable to get a license - and the officials pushing the change think that impounding their cars is an unfair hardship.

Instead, unlicensed drivers will be given 20 minutes to phone a relative or other acquaintance with a valid license and insurance to pick up the car. If the driver doesn’t have a cell phone, police will help him contact someone.

If no one shows up, then the cop is to call a supervisor to approve the tow.

A second offense within six months means an automatic tow. But, for those who stay clean for half a year, the clock starts over.

The change means San Francisco will be far more accommodating to unlicensed drivers than police in Oakland, San Jose and even lefty Berkeley. Cops in all those cities impound the cars of people driving illegally.

Recently installed Police Chief George Gascón said San Francisco is “trying to be sensitive to all of the communities we serve.”

“We recognize that this is a problem within the Hispanic community, where people working here can’t get a driver’s license because of their immigration status,” Gascón said.

The 30-day car impounds have long been a sore point with the city’s Latino politicos and activists, who feel the practice is unfair.

Some police officers we spoke with, however, said people without licenses are often lousy drivers - and that the change means more dangerous streets for everyone else.

“These are the same people who are sailing through stop signs and injuring people,” said one traffic cop who asked not to be named for fear of retribution.[S.F. to ease up on unlicensed drivers, By Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross, San Francisco Chronicle, October 26, 2009]

Great! San Francisco will become an even more unsafe city because the leftist cadre who run the place want to coddle illegals even more than they already do.

This is a damning indictment of liberal values and the silly infatuation of lib pols with diversity against the common good. However, it must be said that Britain was already quite diverse by 2001. For example, that year saw intense summer riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley between local Britons and immigrant young men.

Of course, such behavior should have been a hint to the ruling class that multiculturalism is a failed ideology, since it runs counter to human nature.

The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”, according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

He said Labour’s relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to “open up the UK to mass migration” but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its “core working class vote”.

As a result, the public argument for immigration concentrated instead on the economic benefits and need for more migrants.

Critics said the revelations showed a “conspiracy” within Government to impose mass immigration for “cynical” political reasons.

Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s.

Writing in the Evening Standard, he revealed the “major shift” in immigration policy came after the publication of a policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think tank based in the Cabinet Office, in 2001. [Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser, October 23, 2009]

Here’s the article in question: Don’t listen to the whingers - London needs immigrants.

Here’s a recent diversity moment from today’s Islamified Denmark. Ouch!

Danish police said on Thursday that a Palestinian father had hit a primary school teacher and bitten his ear after he had shaken the hand of the man’s daughter.

The 47-year-old Danish teacher of Moroccan origin had invited the father and daughter for a meeting at the school in the town of Vollsmose on Wednesday when he had been “repeatedly hit and bitten in the ear”, the police said.

“The father, a Palestinian, apparently became furious that the teacher had greeted his daughter just before a meeting,” said Joergen Andersen, the police superintendent in the nearby city of Odense.

The 33-year-old father, a Muslim, said the teacher had “gone too far and offended his honour”, Andersen said.

“The man is apparently not a fundamentalist,” Andersen said. But he “could not accept this handshake between the teacher and his daughter”. [Man bites teacher for shaking daughter's hand, Agence France PresseOctober 24, 2009 ]

Well, how fortunate that the chomper was not a fundamentalist. Who knows what he might have done in that case?

Just when you think diversity can’t become any more complicated, it does. Imagine the heartbreak of Cantonese-speaking immigrants who can’t understand the newbies who converse in Mandarin. How cruel to live in Chinatown and feel isolated because you can’t speak the majority language.

He grew up playing in the narrow, crowded streets of Manhattan’s Chinatown. He has lived and worked there for all his 61 years. But as Wee Wong walks the neighborhood these days, he cannot understand half the Chinese conversations he hears.

(more…)

The fear of “backlash” — not even the real thing — among immigrants is a continuing interest of the dinosaur media. Whenever there is a horrific crime or terror attempt committed by a diverse person, the MSM visits the “affected community” (members of the immigrant tribe) to record every worry about the nation they joined voluntarily.

Dallas-area Muslims fear backlash from arrests tied to terror plot, Dallas Morning News, October 19, 2009

North Texans were both angry and relieved last month when federal agents arrested a Jordanian teenager in a failed plot to blow up a Dallas skyscraper.

But for area Muslims, the arrest of 19-year-old Hosam “Sam” Smadi evoked yet another emotion - fear.

“Being a Muslim in America today is not easy,” said Hadi Jawad, a longtime Dallas business owner and a volunteer at the Dallas Peace Center. “We feel under siege. There is open season on our faith. Muslims are painted with a broad brush.”

So why live in a society where you are so disliked? Islam touts the worldwide ummah as a universally welcoming community to those of the faith. Seriously, if America is so hateful, why not leave?

Reporters never ask that question.

Jawad and other Muslims praise the work of law enforcement in arresting Smadi, as well as two other terrorism suspects in New York and Illinois. But because of all three suspects’ Islamic faith, they say the arrests cast aspersions on Islam that hearken back to the atmosphere that existed immediately after 9/11.

Though most area Muslims are quick to say the mood of the country has not returned to that bitter level, most add that their lives here would be practically unbearable if any Muslim terrorist were to carry out another attack on American soil

“We have to work toward a common yardstick of justice, but we are just one catastrophic incident away from the post-9/11 atmosphere and even worse,” said Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Washington, a Muslim civil rights organization. “We have to accept the double standards, as bad as they are. That’s just the fact, unfortunately.”

So if Osama nuked Houston, say, Muslims residing in Texas would be concerned about how the “backlash” would affect their comfy lives, not the fact that presumably thousands of citizens in their adopted home would be killed.

“The average American thinks it must be the religion” that pushes Muslim extremists, Elibiary said. “There must be something about them. That sentiment has been there since 9/11, and it hasn’t gone anywhere.”

Muslims read the Koran and other Islamic scriptures, which urge the faithful to murder non-believers. The Koran has at least 109 verses advocating war with infidels. If Americans don’t trust Muslims, they have good reason.

A Dutch poll last year found a majority of citizens agreed that admitting large groups of Muslim immigrants was “the biggest mistake in Dutch history”. Every non-Muslim country that has permitted Islamic immigration regrets it.

And if there is “backlash,” the Sons of Allah have only their behavior to blame.

Mexican women like the new women-only taxi service, free of obnoxious Mexican males.

Mexico’s pink taxis cater to fed-up females, By Catherine E. Shoichet, AP, October 19, 2009

The new fleet of 35 cabs in Mexico’s colonial city of Puebla are driven exclusively by women and don’t stop for men. The cabs cater especially to those tired of leering male drivers.

“Some of the woman who have been on board tell us how male taxi drivers cross the line and try to flirt with them and make inappropriate propositions,” said taxi driver Aida Santos, who drives one of the compact, four-door taxis with a tracking device and an alarm button that notifies emergency services. “In the Pink Taxi they won’t have that feeling of insecurity, and they feel more relaxed.”

This follows the enthusiastic reception of women-only buses in Mexico City. See Mexico Lechery-Free Transportation Update for details.

The Moochicans aren’t leaving in any substantial numbers–no real surprise there given the full refrigerator of goodies that America offers, like the “food donations from local church groups” mentioned in the article.

Furthermore the “crackdown” they face from the Obama administration exists in the complaints of open-borders extremists only.

Many Mexican migrants stay put in U.S. despite crisis

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican workers in the United States have lost jobs and faced a crackdown on illegal immigration but are not heading home in droves despite the worst recession in decades, officials and researchers say.

There is no record of those leaving the United States by land but anecdotal reports suggest some families have packed their belongings into trucks and crossed back into Mexico as construction, food and as farm jobs have evaporated.

A record 12.7 million Mexican immigrants lived and worked in the United States in 2008, more than half of them illegally, according to a study by the Pew Hispanic Center.

The vast majority have chosen to stay and weather the crisis. Rights groups say Washington needs to pass an overhaul of immigration policies because Mexicans are not going home.

“There is no evidence of a massive return,” said Adriana Valdes at the Mexican consulate in Denver. “People may move because of the crisis, but they are not moving to Mexico where the situation is no better.”

Mexico has also suffered its worst recession since the 1930s and illegal Mexican workers living and working in the shadows say they can still earn more in the United States.

“If things are bad here, they’re worse in our country,” said Christian Dominguez, 21, who has worked in Phoenix since crossing illegally to Arizona 15 months ago from Mexico.

Dominguez earns just $80 in a bad week, shares an apartment with seven other migrants and relies on food donations from local church groups to get by. But he says it is still better than in his home state of Chiapas in southern Mexico

“Drifters” — that’s a new item for the euphemism file, and from the PC LA Times, of all sources.

Plus there is a dose of unintended hilarity of the role reversal sort, where Mexicans are the townspeople calling for troublesome foreigners to be repatriated.

Mexico town split over Central American drifters

By Tracy Wilkinson

October 15, 2009

Migrants fall prey to kidnappers and worse while the Mexican government does little to protect them, rights groups say. But others say the migrants are forming criminal bands and should be deported.

Gathered below an overpass on Independence Avenue, dressed in the multiple layers typical of homeless travelers, the migrants watched for the next northbound freight train through Tultitlan.

Many of them, mostly young men and boys, prepared to hop aboard, hobo-style, on an ever-more-precarious trip that might get them as far as the United States.

But fewer migrants are achieving that goal. Central Americans who for years have passed through Mexico en route to the U.S. are increasingly cutting their trips short as they run out of cash or become discouraged by fewer opportunities farther away from home. [...]

A new city administration that took office in August, however, feels differently. Mayor Marco Calzada said he wants the federal government to deport the migrants. When they were just passing through, it was a manageable problem, he said, but now large numbers are staying and forming criminal bands.

Officials say the Tultitlan municipality, with a population of more than 432,000, sees hundreds of immigrants arriving each week.

“The numbers are over the top,” Calzada said. “They have invaded neighborhoods. They steal, they kidnap, they rape.”

When large numbers of illegal aliens congregate, they tend to form criminal gangs–what a concept! I’m trying to wrap my mind around it.