Update: CIS has published a backgrounder on this agreement. 

Whatever adjectives can be used to describe our new President, ‘diplomatic’ is not one which springs readily to mind. His phone conversation with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull merely serves to reinforce a reputation for bluntness that was already solidified within the public imagination. In this case, however, I think his impolitic speech is actually beneficial for American citizens. For the refugee resettlement swap cooked up by his predecessor, which involves the exchange of non-Muslim Central American refugees for Muslim boat people currently being detained at the behest of the Australian government, is another disastrous scheme to further erase our borders.

The ordinary refugee resettlement process is almost completely insulated from the democratic process. Seemingly benefiting everyone from United Nations functionaries, to bureaucrats in the federal government, but especially VOLAGs whose survival depends upon a constant stream of clients, refugee resettlement takes no account of the feelings of ordinary American citizens. The people whose lives could be ruined by the decisions made hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away by unelected officials.

The last-minute decision of President Obama to craft a backroom deal with his Australian counterpart, in large part as a means of papering over his own catastrophic failure to enforce this nation’s immigration laws, merely highlights the lack of accountability and fundamentally anti-democratic nature of this entire process. Naturally, open borders fanatics are using this incident to parade their virtue before the benighted American public, condemning the philistinism of the Australian and American governments, as well as the people who insist that their representatives protect the internal security of their nations.

Nevertheless, this is a reminder that who lives in our country is not a matter for international plebiscites or social justice campaigns. Thousands of Muslim foreigners being transferred to the heart of this country as part of a sleazy quid pro quo is not what what Americans voted for in November, and simply because it has the stamp of approval from our outgoing President and Australia’s current Prime Minister-the sixth in less than a decade-doesn’t mean the American public should sit back and accept it. It is the current year, and the powers that be should get used to it.

Update: I’m not saying it’s an inside job, but…

Erdogan reaches out. 

The assassin was a member of the riot police, according to Turkey’s interior minister. 

Syrian opposition celebrates the assassination. 

The assailant-now deceased-appears to have been a Turkish policeman. Heckuva job, Erdogan! 

Footage of what appears to be the assassination. 

As if we needed another reason to halt our country’s disastrous involvement in Syria, the Russian ambassador to Turkey was just shot and killed in that nation’s capital. Syria, like Lebanon from 1975-1990, is an irresolvable tinderbox with too many warring factions to enumerate, all of whom-even the Kurds-are committing atrocities. Instead of sending more troops to this charnel house, we should be withdrawing every soldier on the ground and cutting off all military supplies to the jihadist rebels. Instead of following this sensible policy, the lunatics serving in Congress have decided that it would be a swell idea to arm these same Sunni terrorists with weaponry capable of downing civilian aircraft.

Just like in Star Wars, there are no good guys in this conflict. Whether it’s the Russian air force indiscriminately bombing Syrian cities and towns, Iranian proxy Hezbollah attempting to ethnically cleanse Sunni villages, American-backed moderate rebels beheading children, or Syrian Christians facing complete extinction at the hands of emboldened Sunnis, there are no parties to this conflict with clean hands. This country has no strategic interests in Syria, other than thwarting the spread of ISIS-which humanitarian, liberal interventionists have facilitated-and preventing jihadist sleeper cells from establishing roots in American soil through refugee resettlement.

Update: A thoughtful leftist analyzes the 1st round of France’s election. 

The first round of primary voting for Les Républicains is complete and it looks like Nicolas Sarkozy’s bid to return to the Élysée Palace is over. For those of you who are Marine Le Pen fans, this might appear to be bad news, although the coronation of her presumptive opponent by European media seems a bit premature. The truth is that this result makes her path to victory more difficult, since it eliminates a scenario which diversity-enamored, Islam-friendly socialists would have found untenable. Namely, allow someone who promises to take a sledgehammer to their multiculturalist paradise to become president of France, or vote for a man whom the left has spent the past decade demonizing, despite his French-like qualities.

The prospect of facing a socially conservative, economically liberal opponent with none of the political baggage of the former president, nor the anchor of paternalistic Europhile liberalism, is a daunting prospect for Le Pen. Whether or not she’ll be able to overcome the obstacles in her path-should she face Fillon later this year, remains to be seen. What is beyond dispute, however, is that France-like much of Europe and North America-has grown tired of the left’s solutions to problems that it had a hand in creating.

Update: Yes, I realize that this image macro has a typo, but there’s only so much proper grammar you can expect from people on the Internet. 

One of the more  arresting scenes in Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s memoir takes place when she visits her dying father in a London hospital. A man that despised the West, who tried to force his daughter into an arranged marriage which would have enslaved her to purdah for the rest of her natural life, yet exploited its generosity and technological prowess in order to prolong his existence, the dialogue between father and daughter vividly illustrates the problem of Muslim integration.

An even starker, more immediate contrast between these two irreconcilable civilizations occurred earlier in that chapter, when Ayaan was walking towards her father’s deathbed and came across a group of women-presumably-enshrouded in niqabs. Women who proudly  embraced a symbol of 7th century Arab-Muslim hegemony and hatred of Western values were now defiantly walking through Europe’s commercial capital. The shock evinced by Ayaan, who was born into the Hawiye tribe in the Horn of Africa, merely served to demonstrate the journey-not only in distance, but in mentality-which she had made over the 4 decades of her life, and the emotional and intellectual stagnancy so many others who came there remain mired in.

I was reminded of these scenes while reading about the latest atrocity perpetrated by a Somali refugee, or a Norwegian-Somali, in the bizarre parlance of the UK press, on the streets of London. It’s difficult to say whether the political leaders who have brought this dystopian hell-scape to our shores fully understand the implications of what they’re doing, or if they even care. As others have pointed out, the woman who once (correctly) branded multiculturalism a failure has now come around to the conclusion that the people who she rules need to fuck off. It’s entirely possible that our current political class simply believes that the periodic bloodlettings of infidels, systemic rape and sexual dehumanization of Western women, and psychic terror inflicted upon the indigenous population is the cost for vibrant diversity. The enormous powers they’ve accumulated in the process, including encroachments upon the speech and free assembly of their most prominent critics, simply being a fringe benefit.

However, it’s worth contemplating what the end game of these catastrophically stupid politicians looks like. After all, it’s hard to see how you preserve your cherished modern nostrums of LGBTQ rights whilst importing millions of people who would like nothing more than to throw gay men and gender non-conformists off of the highest rooftop. Just ask the residents of Europe’s former gay Mecca, Amsterdam, if  you can catch them when they’re not fleeing from their country’s newest additions. Enlightened liberals rightly condemn the shameful treatment of scientific visionary Alan Turing, yet the fact is that he would have probably been hung from a crane if he lived in a nation whose cultural peculiarities these same progressives demand we understand and even accept.

But what if the nastier byproducts of Islamic, third world immigration, e.g. honor killings, Taharrush, and attempting to assassinate people who draw things, could be magically eliminated before these folks crossed customs? Wouldn’t the ineluctable pull of diversity convince you to embrace the importation of millions from Somalia, Bangladesh, and the like? Well, no, I don’t think it would. Even if I were to accept the somewhat implausible story that the latest murder spree in the heart of Europe had nothing to do with Islamic dogma, I’m still not certain how this is a justification for completely effacing the historic American nation and European continent.

Perhaps this truly was an instance of a mentally unstable young man going postal, and not a carefully plotted jihadist plot. But even if that’s the case, I fail to find that reassuring. As numerous international bodies have documented over the past 3 decades, the rate of untreated mental illness in Somalia is astronomical. I described a case of one such disturbed young woman several years ago, but that portrait is by no means an aberration. The idea that we’re helping mentally unbalanced individuals by transporting them into a wholly alien culture, putting them on the dole, and asking them to integrate-much less enhancing the quality of life in our nations-is so absurd as a proposition that it could only be accepted by someone completely divorced from reality.

We’re being asked to accept the notion that the deracination of millions from the third world, who have a completely different value system and religious ethic than the people they’ll be forced to interact with for the rest of their lives, is somehow a brilliant idea. This is why cultural Marxism is a mental illness.

Rather than sit through the inevitable anticlimax which is Sir Hillary’s acceptance speech, why not watch the documentary which crystallizes just how nakedly corrupt the would-be First Family is? BTW, isn’t it funny how none of the critics of this ground-breaking documentary and book have taken up its author’s challenge to debate the merits of his well-documented dissection of Clinton family corruption? I wonder why that is.

Although not bearing directly upon the subject central to this website’s mission, the U.S. Senate’s decision this weekend to revive the heretofore deceased Export-Import Bank illuminates both the rancid nature of Congress and its inability to exercise anything approaching oversight upon an administration flagrantly abusing its authority. The confirmation by Senator Ted Cruz that Majority Leader McConnell lied in order to resurrect this exemplar of corporate welfare is simply the icing on the cake.

David Harsanyi breaks down this inexplicable decision by Republican leaders-as well as other leadership deficits-in a post for The Federalist which I would urge you all to read, if only to understand what conservatives-including those arguing for a rational immigration policy-are up against on Capitol Hill.

If you needed another reason why endowing Iran with nuclear weapons is a colossally bad idea, look no further than the latest manifestation of the Religion of Peace. The massacre at Garissa University in Kenya has taken the lives of nearly 150 Christians. Less than half a dozen well-trained Muslim terrorists armed with semi-automatic weapons and improvised explosive devices were able to murder the civilian equivalent of a company of soldiers with ease. And yet the notion of a genocidal Islamic state with ballistic missile capability being accepted into the nuclear club is something the global community greets with a shrug, at best.

How many more slayings of helpless infidels are necessary before we collectively abandon this increasingly macabre version of Groundhog Day? Only time will tell, but I’m not looking forward to the answer.

It would appear that the federal government is close to charging the senior Senator from the Soprano State with corruption charges stemming from his relationship to Democratic Party ATM Salomon Melgen. Unlike the arrest of a criminal alien sex offender which Mr. Menendez once employed, this decision doesn’t seem to be directly tied to the political calendar. Although at least one of his colleagues is suggesting that it might be politically inspired, considering the Senator’s vocal opposition to President Obama’s recent foreign policy choices.

Questionable optics aside, it’s worth noting that this will be the second major Democratic officeholder of national consequence within the past month to be brought low by his lax approach to ethics. If only the fourth estate spent as much time and effort chronicling the damage inflicted upon ordinary citizens by our government’s approach to immigration enforcement as it did reporting the pedestrian news of yet another corrupt public official.

Update: The Editor-in-Chief of Al Arabiya English weighs in.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint session of Congress today. Watch it live. 

The graphic above is taken from the brilliant Cognitive Bias Parade, which is one of many online venues that have chosen to show their solidarity with the 12 martyrs of Charlie Hebdo by embracing the satirical defiance which so aggrieves the soldiers of Allah. The insincere protestations of America’s intellectual gatekeepers notwithstanding, the reaction of the American press corps has been depressingly familiar. Of particular note was the petulant, disingenuous, and yet not altogether surprising outburst from New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet. You can read the very illuminating-as well as entertaining-Facebook thread which sparked this contretemps here. 

For an analysis of the choices made by the Canadian counterparts of  chickenshit American editors like Mr. Baquet, check out the superb interview of Jen Gerson on the Canadaland podcast. Even as editorial cartoonists in the Arab Middle East, a region filled with homicidal Islamic lunatics, have expressed sympathy for the latest victims of the The Religion of Peace, and those living in a brutal Islamic theocracy have engaged in the journalism the Daily News eschews, the most appropriate response to the events of this horrific week has come from one of the surviving members of Charlie Hebdo’s staff.

For an index of artistic depictions-ranging from reverent to blasphemous-of the media’s favorite bloodthirsty warlord, I recommend Zombietime’s Mohammed Image Archive, which is an invaluable resource in a time when even the images we see must come with a halal certification.