Necessary Immigration Reform Unlikely

The entirety of immigration laws and policies are in need of an overhaul. Much of the difficulties and problems with illegal immigration stem either directly or indirectly from the outmoded and obsolete laws, policies, regulations and procedures we currently are operating under. Unfortunately, what we need will be the last thing that the Congress and White House will enact. What we are most likely going to get thanks in part to the Democrats seeking new voters and the Republicans supporting a pool of below minimum wage workers who have no legal recourse. My bet is that what Congress will enact and the President will pass will be something along the Wimpy character reforms stating, “We will gladly enforce the border next Tuesday for an Amnesty today.” And just like the Wimpy character in the Popeye cartoons, they will gobble up the amnesty granting the eleven -million-plus illegal immigrants permanent work status soon followed by Green Cards which leads straight to citizenship all without stopping the influx of new illegals necessitating the next illegal immigrations debate for seventy-five-million additional undocumented workers in fifteen or so years. We had supposedly solved this problem under President Ronald Reagan’s Administration when a Democrat controlled Congress passed immigration reform which gave blanket amnesty and an expedited path to citizenship for three- million illegal immigrants with a promise to enact reforms and tough and strict enforcement laws soon thereafter. Surprise of all surprises, the reforms and enforcement somehow never quite materialized and now here we are again with reportedly quadruple the problem.

In 1986, with President Ronald Reagan, it was the Congress which enacted the empty promise which never was fulfilled. This time, with President Barack Obama, it is the President who is threatening to veto any legislation which does not allow for immediate amnesty and some viable path to citizenship and who is not all that demanding for any enforcement requirements to be included. There is a small core of Senators and Representatives who are demanding the inclusion of enforcements enacted as part of the legislation and that complete amnesty is withheld until the enforcement phase has been totally implemented. The problem I foresee is whoever is tasked with the responsibility of determining the completion of the enforcement phase has the power and option to acquiesce to those demanding the amnesty be granted with haste even without the completion of enforcement requirements. The basic problem is there are only a minority of people in Washington who truly wish to fix the problem. The forces and money is mostly supporting leaving everything just the way it is as extending the status quo provides everybody with something they desire with little if any downside. Those who desire the cheap labor, be it farming, manufacturing, food processing or domestic workers enjoy the convenience of a ready pool of illegals willing to work for less and who are often paid under the table. Those politicians whose election to office is heavily reliant on voters who do not want the illegals deported or denied the ability to collect a salary or benefits keep those voters happy, and those who stand for enforcement of our borders retain their soapbox on which to pontificate and either continue to hold office, be paid as a lobbyist or be paid as an activist. That has been the problem all along. Continuing the problem by never quite fixing what is wrong in the system serves to extend a great number of moneyed special interests, and we all know that money talks very loudly in Washington.

Even should the Congress pass and the President sign strong legislation that demands the actual physical closing of our borders, with time the enforcement funding will be cut in order to facilitate more entitlement spending. The United States as a country will be unable to implement or even maintain much of its operations if a solution is not found to the illegal immigration problems and the ballooning entitlement payments. For this article there is a special subset of the entitlement problem which also needs to be addressed. There are a fair number of illegal immigrants who are receiving entitlements from the government. This is a double problem as many, but not all, illegal immigrants work off the grid being paid under the table in cash and therefore not paying any taxes, income, FICA, or any of the numerous other taxes. Yet, on the other hand, there are those illegal immigrants who have found their way onto the entitlement roles such as Welfare, Food Stamps, even Social Security Disability as well as others. This is a double drain on the government funds as little if any is coming in while full payments are going out.

This alone should make it everybody’s concern that we put an end to the flood of illegal immigrants entering the United States. Of course there is the question of exactly how. There has long been those who simply claim that it would be impossible to implement or against the law to place the military on our borders to guard them. My response to that has been a simple, “Why?” There is no reason or law which would prevent having the military guard the borders. As far as the logistics, it might prove easier than many think. Imagine if as part of any Combat Arms training cycle, each unit upon completion of training was stationed guarding a sector of our borders for six months before being attached to their permanent duty station. There you have it, instant manpower to guard the border thus minimizing the number of units being deployed for that duty. There will be those who will decry that using the military is too harsh and endangers anybody who might try to illegally enter the country. Isn’t it the whole idea of guarding the border to make crossing the border difficult if not impossible and if it is made life-threatening, then far less people will be foolish enough to risk such a blatant breaking of our laws. Having the military enforcing the border would provide all the foot soldiers, mobile armored infantry, helicopter deployed air infantry, and all the support anybody could ask for. This would also give these soldiers real life active training with a missions statement and actual experience in guarding against active attempts of infiltration. This would very probably produce better soldiers entering the ranks of our military forces as it would give some seasoned training for the newly trained soldiers while providing the country with extremely secure borders. This is the only duty tasked to the military in numerous countries and is the rule and not the exception which many try to make it out to be. All there is to add might be, try it, you might like it and it could not turn out to be any worse than the current mess that is border enforcement.

Beyond the Cusp

Abbas Announces Death of the Peace Process, Blames Israel

Palestinian Authority President Abbas announced in a conference in Ramallah, “The peace process is clinically dead and the Israeli side is definitely the one responsible. The ball is in their court.” Just days before his meeting with United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and putting further emphasis on this not so surprising announcement, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat added the following speaking to AFP on Sunday, “I was assigned by President Abbas to inform US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of our position on resuming negotiations once Israel commits to stopping settlement activity and release of prisoners, among other obligations. These are not preconditions but obligations and Israel must abide by them. We hope the American administration compels the Israeli government to fulfill its obligations in order to get the peace process back on track.”

Before anybody starts digging a grave for the obviously moribund peace process, shall we look a little deeper at exactly what was said, what was omitted, and what it is exactly that Mahmoud Abbas and his fellow conspirators are attempting to achieve by all this bluster. The first thing of note is that these grand statements and high drama come immediately before a meeting with Secretary of State Clinton. So, the first possibility is this was all setting the table for guiding the talks with Secretary Clinton in a desired direction. The crucial phrase was given to Saeb Erakat to relay and were, “…resuming negotiations once Israel commits to stopping settlement activity and release of prisoners, among other obligations. These are not preconditions but obligations and Israel must abide by them.” There are two items to note in this excerpt from Mr. Erakat. The demand that these are not “preconditions” but rather are “obligations” and as such Israel is bound to meet these requirements before anybody can even start to talk of the two sides meeting and negotiations restarting. That begs a few questions starting with where does this set of obligations derive from? Were these parts and parcel of any agreement between the two sides? Was this a binding resolution of the Security Council of the United Nations or similar decree from any other body holding the power to make these demands upon Israel? The answer is no. These are an ever lengthening set of demands that appear to sprout from the furtive imagination of one Mahmoud Abbas. Israel not only has never agreed to these stipulations, they have never discussed such things in all of their negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. And that leads us to the second consideration of what exactly is meant by “…Israel commits to stopping settlement activity and release of prisoners, among other obligations.” The idea of stopping settlement activity was a misstep, intentional or out of pure ignorance, made by the President of the United States Barack Obama which did lead to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu actually committing to place a one-time moratorium on settlement construction for ten months. During that period, Mahmoud Abbas twittered away the first nine months and only in the final three weeks made any appearance of an effort to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu. The end result was President Abbas demanding that the American President force the Israelis to extend the settlement freeze for an indeterminate amount of time until Abbas judged that the negotiations were completed. That demand never had any chance in the world and President Obama did not even back that demand.

About the rest where it adds, “…release of prisoners, among other obligations.” The release of prisoners is ridiculous as Israel recently released a large number of prisoners, over one thousand in total. But, needless to say, in the world of Mahmoud Abbas such does not count and Israel must release hundreds of prisoners each and every time he requests or they are obstructing the negotiations. The best part is the open ended “among other obligations.” This wonderful catch-all phrase fits the Mahmoud Abbas negotiation method perfectly and defines his approach for the past years explicitly. This allows Mr. Abbas to add item after item after item just in the case where Israel might decide to call his bluff and meet the stated demands. These other obligations inevitably will lead to the one deal breaker Mr. Abbas keeps in his back pocket for those emergencies when he is caught without a new demand, that is the “Right of return” where he insists that Israel absorb four and a half million or more so-called Palestinian refugees. We will get into the unique definition of Palestinian refugee in a moment. Other standard demands that he currently has been including in this list include but are not limited to the following; release of all Palestinian prisoners who have been incarcerated from before the year 2000 (this consists almost exclusively of prisoners who have murdered multiple Israeli civilians and are serving multiple life sentences, or put another way, the worst of the worst), surrender of all of the Old City of Jerusalem including the Temple Mount and the Western Wall (which then would be made off limits in practice if not in fact through violence such as is often seen when Jews visit Jacobs Tomb in Hevron), usage of the 1949 Armistice Lines as the starting point for the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, and others. The latest and most mind boggling of President Mahmoud Abbas demands was introduced in the last week or so when he now demands that the Palestinian Authority, fresh off being recognized by UNESCO as a member country, have the right to import weapons. Be assured, he will claim to the press that he intends only to upgrade the pitiful weapons his security forces and police are forced to use currently and nothing really serious. The Palestinian police and security forces are armed with two year old M-16s, a commensurate number equipped with M-209 grenade launchers, M-60 30 caliber belt-fed machine guns, 9MM side arms, and whatever older weapons they have from unofficial sources which include many Kalashnikov assault rifles, Russian and other RPGs, and when including the terror arm of Mahmoud Abbas’s PLO, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, very likely anti-tank launchers and other and various crew served weapons including small and medium range mortars, Grad rockets, Katyusha rockets, enhanced Katyusha rockets, Qassam rockets, and other various mines, explosives grenades and indirect fire weapons. Yet, Mr. Abbas sees the need to enhance their armory with whatever he can drag across the border with assistance from Iran, Russia, possibly some European countries, and whomever else might be willing to trust him to take the weapons now and pay them some time in the future. And this is also an obligation he requires of Israel despite their never having agreed to anything even remotely resembling such.

Now for the promised definition of a Palestinian Refugee. Where in the real world, that is anywhere not part of the Palestinian influence and support groups, the refugees are cared for by the UNHCR which is tasked with caring for refugees and making every possible attempt to arrange for the refugees to return to their homes after any crisis has ended or be absorbed into an accepting country in cases where the refugees are the result of a war or agreement which changes state boundaries. One example were the hundreds of millions of Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu refugees who found themselves on the opposite side of the formation of India and Pakistan and desired to be relocated to their respective states. Oddly enough, today all of those refugees have been relocated and are living as citizens within one or the other country. Pakistan was founded approximately one year earlier than was Israel and due to much the same problems of religiously motivated warfare between Muslim and Hindu people as compared to Muslim and Jews in the founding of Israel. The main responsibility for UNHCR is to resettle and resolve all refugee situations. This was totally unacceptable to the Arab and Muslim states which desired to retain as many refugees as possible to use as a political bludgeon against Israel. They desired a way to actually increase the numbers of refugees. Within a decade of the founding of Israel, approximately six-hundred and fifty-thousand to seven-thousand Arabs were displaced from their homes within Israel by the Israeli War for survival after Israel was attacked by more than five Arab neighbors the day after her founding. The vast majority of these refugees had willingly abandoned their homes believing the promises of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Muhammad Amin al-Husayni who promised them a quick war where the Jews would be massacred and they could return to their homes and take of the spoils of victory. During the same period many Arab and Muslim countries either forced their Jewish population to leave or the Jews fled extreme violence and pogroms leaving behind their homes, businesses, and any wealth they were unable to carry. These Jews numbered over seven-hundred-fifty-thousand and some estimates place the number near to nine-hundred-thousand. Today there are no Jewish refugees left from that time and even millions of Russian Jewish refugees have been absorbed by Israel and Israel is in the process of absorbing hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian and Indian Jews currently. Today the number of Palestinian Refugees is estimated at somewhere over four-and-a-half-million. The United Nations went so far as to have an agency just for the Palestinian refugees separate from all other refugees. This organization is UNRWA and has the charge to increase the number of those considered Palestinian refugees by any method possible. Unlike other refugees who had to actually have been alive and lost their homes at the time of whatever event caused their refugee status, Palestinian refugees are not so tasked. If either parent is a Palestinian refugee, then the child is a Palestinian refugee, and their children will be refugees and their children will also be Palestinian refugees. Under the care of UNRWA there exist millions of second, third, fourth, and possible starting to be fifth generation Palestinian refugees. The sole solution the world has been conditioned to allow for these refugees is their incorporation into Israeli society in order to overwhelm the Jewish population of Israel and thus conquer Israel through sheer numbers. This is the intent of the demand for the “Right of Return” for Palestinian refugees. It is simply another imitation of the Jewish laws for the return from the Diaspora of Jews to Israel which is the “Law of Right of Return”. The Palestinians have even now begun to refer to the Palestinian refugees as being the Palestinian Diaspora in order to make them appear to have the same heritage to return to their ancient homeland. To initially qualify as a Palestinian refugee one need not even have been living within the Middle East and definitely not within what became Israel to qualify. All one need claim is that they resided in the British Mandate area for two years between 1940 and 1949 and they became Palestinian refugees. Even if they lived in Palo Alto, California in the United States during the 1948-1949 Israeli Arab War but had lived in the British Mandate from 1941 to 1944 they became Palestinian refugees as have their children and grand-children on and on. This is just the tip of the iceberg that is the scandal that is the Palestinian refugees. There are no Palestinian refugee camps within Israel; they all exist either in Palestinian autonomous areas or in Arab countries such as Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon etc. President Assad has numerous times shelled some of the Palestinian refugee camps in Syria during the civil war that is ongoing. In Lebanon the Palestinians are forbidden from most forms of employment and are not allowed to own land or even rent an apartment and their camps are guarded to keep them within, not to protect them. Jordan was the sole country to grant Palestinian refugees citizenship. Many of those citizens were stripped of that privilege after the Black September uprising by Yasser Arafat when he attempted a coup in Jordan against the King. The Palestinians remain as refugees multiple generations after their original loss of their homes in a war they did not start and neither did the Israelis start, but that was propagated in the Palestinians’ names by their brother Arabs and Muslims. That is an introduction to the reality that is the Palestinian refugee problem. Even under Mahmoud Abbas in the Palestinian Authority areas of autonomy the Palestinian refugees are contained in squalor of their refugee camps in greater poverty than their brethren who feel nothing for them and only wish to use them to destroy Israel.

Beyond the Cusp

Easy Way to End Rioting Against Housing Destructions

There was once again the horror of the youths demonstrating on the Ephraim Brigade IDF Base in the West Bank turned violent with burning tires, rock throwing, and allegations that fire-bombs were also employed by the youths. Reports have varied on the numbers of demonstrators, the severity of damages, numbers and severity of injuries, and number of arrests leaving much up to interpretation as initially concrete facts changed with the source of the news. Whatever the extent and scope of these attacks, these actions are unconscionable and a direct violation of Torah as well as counter-productive, which are hurting relations between residents in Judea and Samaria with the IDF and other authorities. On the other side, the fact that mere rumor of impending destructions of peoples residences, community buildings and even synagogues are believable as valid despite standing promises from high ranking cabinet members and even the Defense Minister and Prime Minister that such actions were on hold, are held with such skepticism that displays the delicate balance that is easily tipped. Such events and situations paint a poor picture of the current relations between Israelis living in Judea, Samaria, and Benyamin with the Central Government, IDF and related enforcement agents with whom they must deal daily.

There is another facet of other difficulties such as lack of response to requests for assistance and protection from attacks and destructions of Jews and their properties by Arabs from neighboring towns which occur seemingly on a regular basis. This has been further exacerbated by many examples of the Police arresting the Jews who called reporting crimes against their properties and selves by Arabs who then accused the Jews of initiating the attack upon them claiming they were drawn out of their village by the Jews’ attacks. One such occurrence included Women in Green founders Nadia Matar and Yehudit Katsover were detained for six hours by Israeli police when they called for aid and sought to file a complaint. One of the reasons that some residents from these areas have become so disenchanted, disagreeable and turning to violence is due to having all other manner of recourse denied them and even having their efforts often answered by punishing acts against them and their neighbors when they file grievance with authorities. So, what is the answer which will result in an end to these confrontations and the growing tensions between these segments of Israeli society and the government and law enforcement authorities?

Fortunately, there are some very straight forward and simple solutions to this standoff and conflict that has grown ever since the Gush Katif expulsions in 2005. The easiest step would be for Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak to guarantee that all demolitions of residences beyond the Green Line will be suspended indefinitely in order to find a resolution which is more ordered and has valid criteria. The current situation with Defense Minister Ehud Barak saying one thing and doing the opposite and Supreme Court President Dorit Beinish ruling that virtually every Jewish residence, even those built under Governmental plans and with Government funding, existing in the West Bank challenged by any person, group, NGO, or activist is ordered to be razed adds to the suspicions and leads some to take radical actions. Dorit Beinish with her “Raise a question, Raze a residence” stance has alienated entire segments of Israeli society. This needs to be put to rest and procedures need to be enacted that will allow for reason to be introduced into the madness that has ruled the demolitions thus far. The erroneous claims that the settlements are the sole impediment to making peace with the Palestinians is ridiculous and simply is an excuse with which the secular anti-Zionists and anti-Religious Jews use in an attempt to make the lives of those living, many since soon after the 1967 Six Day War, in the West Bank. If one were to actually stand for removing Jews from the lands claimed by the Palestinians and the Arabs in general, then after removing all Jews from the “Occupied Territories,” they had best be ready for the claims on the rest of Israel, even north Tel Aviv. Eventually, the discussion will reach a point, should the Arab extremists get their wish, where Jews would have to be removed from New Jersey and eventually even anywhere on planet Earth.

When the claims of the Arabs are given critical inspection simply by reading the PLO Charter, the Hamas Charter, the founding documents that define Hezballah’s desires, all the way back to the decrees set forth by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who called for the eradication of all Jews living within the British Mandate lands in the 1920s and again in the 1930s, or even back to the decrees of Mohammed who called for the eradication of all Jews from anywhere they are to be found, it should be obvious from where the animosity originates. I do not believe Mohammed limited the destruction and killing of every single Jew to those on Earth as should Jews ever make it into space, I am sure Mohammed’s decrees would follow them to the far corners of the Universe if necessitated. So, for those who wish to appease by uprooting the Jews living in Judea, Samaria and Benyamin, I have one simple question, “Exactly where do we draw the line and hold the line and land despite the fact that the Arabs, Palestinians, Muslims or whoever demands our removal, please, where is it you would draw the line. Might you take a moment and try to see the other side of this argument that has some degree of merit. We did not draw the line in Gaza and we see how well that worked. We did not draw the line in southern Lebanon and that was equally lacking in wonderfulness. So, where so we draw the line? Instead of drawing the line to retain the least amount of land before making peace as possible, may I suggest we keep as much land as possible and if peace comes, then make the necessary minimal sacrifices. Until then, maybe we should keep every inch we can even if it is solely to use as a bargaining chip. Personally, I say we keep it all and for those who wish to try to kill us and commit acts of terror, we simply expel them and their entire family. Those who wish to keep the peace and work for the betterment of all Israel, we share equally.

Beyond the Cusp