Genuine Refugees Will Be Helped but It’s Dangerous Not to Keep Out Bogus Ones

We keep hearing about tragedies involving immigrants, often hundreds of them, dying in the attempt to reach Europe and the UK.

Only a few hours ago came the news that the Italian Coast Guard has just rescued from the Mediterranean in only 24 hours nearly 1,000 Libyan migrants heading for Europe. At least 10 people died when their vessel capsized in freezing waters.

The rescue occurred off Porto Empedocle, in the Sicilian Channel, the stretch of water between Sicily and the North coast of Africa. You can see the video of the rescue operation above.

Less than a month ago, we heard about the 300 migrants who presumably “drowned in the Mediterranean Sea after three rubber boats carrying refugees from North Africa to the Italian island of Lampedusa were reported missing, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.”

In reporting that news, the Leftist newspaper The Independent implies that not enough is being done to save lives, and some people, shocked by such headlines, may also think that more efforts should be made to help these immigrants.

Many of these criticisms come from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as can be seen in this video:

But the UN is not always right in its approach to European and UK’s immigration policies. For example, Francois Crépeau, the Canadian who is the UN’s special rapporteur on migrants’ rights, claims that Britain and other EU countries should provide free access to health care, education and housing to not just legal but also illegal immigrants and find homes for a million asylum seekers.

Add to this that the UN has a former Marxist as a special rapporteur on housing, the Brazilian Raquel Rolnik, and a radical feminist as special rapporteur on violence against women, South African Rashida Manjoo - who claimed that “sexism in Britain was the worst she had seen in the world despite her visits to dangerously repressive countries such as Bangladesh, Somalia and Algeria” -, and you get the impression that the UN is not always to be trusted and that many UN tsars “are promoting their own bizarre Leftist agendas”, as The Express put it.

Crépeau (mind you, not “Crapeau”) told The Independent: “The fantasy is that there is a core British culture that was created probably 2,000 years ago and carried on, and now it’s being threatened by all those barbarians that are coming to our gate.”

UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage was quick to respond: "More people came to Britain in 2013 than came between 1066 and 1950. That gives you a sense of perspective of where we are with this, so he is talking utter baloney.”

UKIP MEP David Coburn added: "It is the usual tosh. He has no understanding of the economic problems that this is causing the United Kingdom. And as for the cultural aspect, quite frankly he knows nothing of our country and it's not for him to decide what we feel."

And UKIP’s migration spokesman Steven Woolfe reiterated: “Mr Crepeau epitomises why so many people in Britain dislike interfering international bureaucrats. He is an unknown and unrecognisable bureaucrat.”

The UK, as revealed by the latest official figures earlier this month, remains Europe’s biggest ”magnet for migrants”.

Just to get an idea of the astonishing demands placed on Britain by its massive immigration, consider that at the UK's biggest primary school, Gascoigne Primary School in Barking, East London, only one in 10 pupils speaks English as first language - down from nine out of 10 in 1999. Now they speak no fewer than – wait for it - 60 different languages.

The UN’s various commissars obviously don’t care if British culture is going to be totally buried under this avalanche of foreign influx. But we do.

The genuine asylum claimants among the immigrants are only a minority and there is already a legal procedure for refugees and asylum-seekers to apply for entry to the UK:

Asylum applicants or 'asylum seekers' are individuals who come to the UK and apply for protection as refugees. A refugee is someone who has fled his or her own country, and cannot return for well-founded fear of persecution there. The UK adheres to UN and European agreements on refugees and human rights and therefore must not return asylum applicants to a place where they are likely to face torture or persecution.

Asylum adds to the UK resident population in several ways. First, it adds to the legal, permanent ('settled'), population. A minority of applicants gain permission to stay in the UK ('leave to remain'), and may remain long enough to settle in the UK. Leave to remain might mean official recognition as a refugee or permission to stay for 'humanitarian protection' (HP) or through 'discretionary leave to remain' (DL). In each case, the protected individual can stay in the UK for five years and then has the opportunity to apply for indefinite leave to remain.

Second, asylum adds to the temporary population. Applicants who are unsuccessful and eventually leave the UK nonetheless will live in the UK for some time as they await a decision. Any such applicant who lives in the UK for at least 12 months is classified as a 'long-term international migrant'.

A third group is more difficult to count – individuals whose applications for asylum have been rejected, but who have not departed the country. Some of this group applies for 'hard case support' (aka Section 4) while awaiting departure, and are tracked in Home Office data. Others may have departed outside of official removal or voluntary departure schemes; still others may remain illegally in the UK out of contact with immigration control, and thus uncounted.

The Home Office counts applications, decisions (initially and on appeal), and grants of leave to remain for asylum applicants. This includes dependents that arrived with the main applicant as part of the initial application. These data provide good estimates of the first two routes into the population for asylum seekers: 1) those who gain leave to remain in the UK, and 2) those that live in the UK temporarily while their cases are in process. The challenges in understanding the make-up of the third group, those whose application have been rejected but still remain here without legal permission, are discussed in the Evidence gaps and limitations section.

So the UK is not barring asylum seekers, but needs to deal firmly with those queue jumpers who prefer to use "refugee" status to justify their illegal immigration into their destinations of choice.

We are not selfish and inhumane in our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, but at the same time we must protect our borders and our culture if we want to survive as a race and a civilisation from these invasions.

Recent news shows that now more than ever Britain needs to be careful about whom it lets in.

ISIS is now controlling Libya's coasts and decides who is going to Italy by the immigrant boats. ISIS wants to send its own operative cells and jihadists to the island of Lampedusa, off Sicily - and then on to the rest of Europe, including the UK.

White Britons Oppose Jews and Muslims over Animal Slaughter

Published on The Occidental Observer

By Enza Ferreri


Thanks to the British brilliant organisation Animal Aid (AA) which has secretly made the above film, the assertion that animals are pre-stunned in many halal abattoirs is exposed as a deception in graphically traumatising images.

The scene is Bowood Yorkshire Lamb halal slaughterhouse in Thirsk, in the north of England, the tenth abattoir in which Animal Aid’s hidden cameras have filmed undercover since the charity’s ongoing investigation into UK slaughter practices started in January 2009.

What is significant is that Bowood is also the first halal slaughterhouse filmed by AA, which – as always – didn’t know what it would find. It didn’t know, for example, that it was halal. And so, the first halal abattoir investigated happens by sheer chance to be one of the few – so it is claimed – that don’t stun animals before the killing.

The UK’s law, like many other Western countries’, requires slaughterhouses to stun animals before they are killed to minimise suffering, but it allows exemptions for Muslim and Jewish producers due to their religious prescriptions. For meat to be considered permissible, namely kosher under Jewish law or halal under Islamic law, the animal must be fully conscious when slaughtered.

Barbaric ritual slaughter is regrettably something else on the long list of what Judaism and Islam have in common.

So Muslims and Jews once again are united in cruelty, to defend their ancient (“primitive” would be better) practices against the Western civilising influence, which owes a lot to Christianity.

Modern ritual slaughter in Judaism and Islam is closely related to animal sacrifice.

Many religions practice animal sacrifice even today, including Hinduism. Christianity exceptionally doesn’t.

This is because, while in ancient times, as well as in many contemporary non-Western cultures, people believed that the death of a sacrificial (in some cases human) animal was necessary in order to approach God or the gods, Christians think differently. They believe that, since Jesus had shed his own blood and offered a perfect sacrifice, there is no more need of animal sacrifice, because the door is now open to access God. After Jesus' sacrifice, Christians rejected animal sacrifices, and this has created in the Christian West a culture averse to them.

If we don't associate the ending of animal sacrifices with Christianity, in the other parts of the globe they do.

On the subject of offerings of animals, Judaism and Christianity are so entirely different that we cannot even talk of a Judaeo-Christian tradition. There are two distinct traditions, going in opposite directions. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then it is highly significant that on animal sacrifices the Old Testament and the New have led to antithetical practices.

Today Jews and Muslims want to force advanced White countries to accept practices that our animal welfare laws, reflecting a more humane culture, forbid. And so far, with some exceptions (Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Denmark), they have generally succeeded.

A case of such capitulation has been the Netherlands in 2012, when the country’s Lower House of Parliament passed with 116 votes to 30 a bill banning all ritual slaughter, introduced by the Animal Rights Party. The bill had the support of Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party.

Guess what happened next. Haaretz reported at the time:

Israel's leading rabbi has warned Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders that his party's support for a ban of ritual slaughter of animals in the Netherlands is "anti-Semitic" and could drive away the country's Jewish community.

The Upper House of Parliament, the Senate, then rejected the bill. "Anti-Semitic" is the magic word to end all arguments.

What is particularly harrowing is that Western non-Muslims and non-Jews unknowingly eat meat and consume other products of such cruel methods of slaughter.

Going back to the video recently released by Animal Aid (which comes with the warning that it contains images some viewers may find distressing), among other things it shows slaughtermen hacking away and sawing at the throats of still-conscious sheep, belying the claims often made by ritual slaughter supporters, both Jewish and Muslim, that the animal doesn't suffer because death is inflicted through "a single cut made with a surgically sharp knife".

AA says:

With fly-on-the-wall cameras, it [Animal Aid] captured the horrifying yet routine abuse and taunting of thousands of sheep, and the shambolic set-up that guarantees animals will suffer...

Additionally, many of the sheep in our film are not dispatched with a single clean cut but have their throats hacked at repeatedly with a knife that is either blunt or being used ineptly…

In one instance it took five attempts to sever blood vessels.

During the course of our investigation, we discovered a remarkable weakness in the application of the law that requires all animals to be stunned prior to being killed unless the meat is intended for Muslim or Jewish consumers. The regulatory body, the Food Standards Agency, acknowledged to Animal Aid that any slaughterhouse can practise non-stun slaughter without demonstrating that the meat is destined for religious communities. [Emphasis added]

Translation: if you eat meat in Britain or in any other country with a Muslim and/or Jewish community, you will very likely eat meat from animals slaughtered in the same way as in the video above, too horrific even to watch.

The British halal market may be worth as much as £2billion a year, with more than 100 million animals killed in this way annually. It is calculated that the halal share of the meat market in the UK is about 5 times the percentage of Muslims in the country’s population, which means that kafirs are bound to buy halal or have it served on their plate.

Jewish and Muslim religious authorities assert that death by the shechita or halal methods, without pre-stunning, is instantaneous and painless. A body of evidence demonstrates that this is not a credible position, and our new footage removes any remaining doubt.

Rather than animals being treated with compassion and being uninjured prior to the fatal cut, we see them routinely treated with gratuitous violence and contempt.

Halal is probably one of the most, if not the most, sensitive issue in many European countries, including Britain, which is capable of mobilising native Whites against Islamic invasion.

Due to the antagonistic pressure from a large and growing number of people, Muslim associations have started claiming that many halal abattoirs pre-stun animals. Whether this is true or not is difficult to say. A sure problem is that, even when stunning is applied, the stunning is light and ineffective, so as not to compromise the Islamic requirements of keeping the animal alive: for example, the voltage used in electric stunning may be too low.

In the UK, there has been a sharp 60% rise last year in the number of sheep and goats killed without stunning, due to stronger campaigning by Muslims who believe that stunning killed animals.

A revealing incident showed how little importance Muslim lobbies give to animal welfare when compared to protection of Islamic practices. Last summer, research was published indicating that many chickens are still conscious and suffer pain when they are slaughtered, but that higher levels of shock would guarantee they were insensible.

As a result, European Union laws were introduced forcing many abattoirs to use a more powerful electric shock.

In the UK, the implementation of such new rules was put on hold due to Muslim leaders’ complaints that the new levels could kill birds before they could be slaughtered, meaning they would no longer be halal.

British Veterinary Association president Robin Hargreaves said: “Failure to implement the new regulations risks a percentage of chickens being ineffectively stunned, thus compromising animal welfare.”

The video footage released by Animal Aid in early February and given wide publicity in the British press has increased pressure and intensified demands for a complete ban on ritual slaughter.

A petition championed by the British Veterinary Association demanding that slaughter without pre-stunning be outlawed has crossed the threshold of 100,000 signatures, which means that it had to be debated by the House of Commons. A debate took place on the 23 February, eagerly followed in the Israeli and Jewish media with the predictable accusations of anti-Semitism.

The British Veterinary Association (BVA), along with the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare, are UK scientific bodies which have always maintained that ritual slaughter causes great unnecessary suffering to animals and must be banned.

The BVA has now warned ministers that they “simply cannot ignore the strength of public feeling” over this issue.

A concurrent petition organised by Animal Aid to make CCTV mandatory for all slaughterhouses has also passed the 100,000 mark.

No slaughter is cruelty free, and earlier films by AA at slaughterhouses that did use stunning had nevertheless shown animals being punched in the head, burnt with cigarettes, beaten with sticks, given electric shocks with stunning tongs, thrown and kicked.

Kate Fowler, AA’s head of campaigns, said:

All four conveyor operators we filmed over three days [at Bowood] abused animals to varying degrees, while the slaughterers looked on unmoved.

This is the 10th slaughterhouse in which we have filmed undercover, and it is the ninth to be caught breaking animal welfare laws.

None of the abuses we uncovered would have come to light without our cameras being in place, even though there is a Government-appointed vet at each slaughterhouse.

There is now in the UK a wide mobilisation against Muslim and Jewish methods of slaughter, with the British Veterinary Association (part of the Establishment, certainly not a fringe group) heading it.

Even the moderate Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals – the world’s oldest animal welfare organisation, founded in the 19th century with the blessing of Queen Victoria – calls for an end to Muslim and Jewish slaughter methods.

The British Government repeatedly said it has no intention of banning religious slaughter as it wants to respect the rights of Jewish and Muslim communities to eat meat in accordance with their beliefs, a line that Prime Minister David Cameron maintained during a recent visit to Israel.

It's not surprising that the Government doesn't want to change the law, given the strength of the Jewish lobby in Britain. Indeed, a documentary made by the TV network Channel 4 a few years ago provided evidence of the extent of power over politicians and media held by this interest group, called in the film "the most effective lobby" in the country. You can see it here:

Extreme Centre: People Doing Nothing when Action Is Necessary

I have read the novel expression "the extreme centre".

The context (it was the title of the book The Extreme Centre: A Warning by horrid UK-Pakistani neo-Marxist Islamophile, anti-Western, anti-White Tariq Ali) doesn't matter. These words struck me because we are in a situation in which not to take sides is - paradoxically - extreme.

If your civilisation and race and the religion of your forefathers are on the brink of extinction and you prefer to stand aside and do nothing, you are extreme, no matter how many more people are doing the same.

"Extreme" here is used not in the statistical sense of far-from-average but in the sense of describing an action or omission whose consequences are going to be momentous.

Israel Is for Jew-Friendly Free Speech Only

And I thought that Israel was all for free speech!

Didn't Netanyahu attend the Paris demonstration of the world leaders in support of freedom of expression, even to the point of physically pushing his way to the front?

From "Israel Demands UN Condemn Iran's Holocaust-Themed Cartoon Contest":

Israel’s top representative to the United Nations is demanding that the world body condemn the Iranian government for hosting a contest featuring Holocaust-themed cartoons.

Ron Prosor wrote a letter over the weekend to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and global delegates urging them to publicly censure the contest, which is scheduled to take place this coming April.

The contest organizers said the event is a response to the massacre of journalists at the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo last month. The magazine was targeted due to controversial cartoons it had published depicting Islam’s prophet, Mohammed, in humorous situations.

The organizers argued that the event is in line with Western values that preserve humans’ right to freedom of expression.

The contest winners will receive awards, while one cartoon will be chosen for exhibition at a museum featuring Palestinian works of art in Tehran.

Israel: Modesty Patrols, Orthodox Power

Did you know that in certain neighbourhoods in Israeli cities women are welcomed by signs inviting them not to enter the area unless they are dressed "modestly"?

How much do Gentiles in the West know regarding Israel - beyond the headline news about bombings of Gaza - and Judaism generally?

So-called "modesty signs", like the one pictured above, for years have been a common sight in ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods of Jerusalem.

They usually say: “Please do not pass through our neighborhood in immodest clothes” followed by a rather detailed description of the permissible clothing, for example "closed blouse, with long sleeves, long skirt, no trousers, no tight-fitting clothes."

Women are asked to obey the imposed dress code in wordings such as this: “Please do not disturb [or offend or violate] the sanctity of our neighborhood and our way of life as Jews committed to G-d and His Torah."

I wonder how many women dress according to the above description but, apart from Muslim women, my guess is that they are not numerous. To see what Jewish Orthodox women look like, see the photo above the post.

That's probably why Judge David Gideoni, who ruled in favour of a group of women who started a legal battle to have the signs removed, wrote: "The signs were meant to limit the use of the public domain by all women. This could create an expectation or understanding that the area in which the sign was posted belongs in practice to a certain population."

But what aggravates the problem is that Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods are not in remote areas: they are central parts of a big city. Many of these districts contain or are next to public buildings, offices or institutions, like health clinics and government departments. Jerusalem women need to travel to such places and, when they do, they shouldn’t be left with the choice of changing their clothes or being verbally or even physically harassed.

NBC News reports:

In Israel's ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, where the rule of law sometimes takes a back seat to the rule of God, zealots are on a campaign to stamp out behavior they consider unchaste. They hurl stones at women for such "sins" as wearing a red blouse and attack stores selling devices that can access the Internet.

In recent weeks, self-styled "modesty patrols" have been accused of breaking into the apartment of a Jerusalem woman and beating her for allegedly consorting with men. They have torched a store that sells MP4 players, fearing devout Jews would use them to download pornography.

"These breaches of purity and modesty endanger our community," said 38-year-old Elchanan Blau, defending the bearded, black-robed zealots. "If it takes fire to get them to stop, then so be it."

Many ultra-Orthodox Jews are dismayed by the violence, but the enforcers often enjoy quiet approval from rabbis eager to protect their own reputations as guardians of the faith, community members say. And while some welcome anything that keeps secular culture out of their cloistered world, others feel terrorized, knowing that the mere perception of impropriety could ruin their lives.

"There are eyes and ears all over the place, very similar to what you hear about in countries like Iran," says Israeli-American novelist Naomi Ragen, an observant Jew who has chronicled the troubles that confront some women living in the ultra-Orthodox world.

The violence has already deepened the antagonism between the 600,000 haredim, or God-fearing, and the secular majority, which resents having religious rules dictated to them.

Religious vigilantes operate in a society that has granted their community influence well beyond its numbers — partly out of a commitment to revive the great centers of Jewish scholarship destroyed in the Holocaust, but also because the Orthodox are perennial king-makers in Israeli coalition politics.

Thus public transport is grounded for the Jewish Sabbath each Saturday, and the rabbis control all Jewish marriage and divorce in Israel.

In recent years, however, the haredim have eased up on their long campaign to impose their rules on secular areas, and nowadays many restaurants and suburban shopping centers are open on the Sabbath.

These days, most vigilante attacks take place in the zealots' own neighborhoods.

...The unidentified, 31-year-old woman had left the ultra-Orthodox fold after getting divorced, according to the indictment filed by the Jerusalem district attorney's office. The indictment said her assailant tried to get her to leave her apartment in a haredi neighborhood in Jerusalem by gagging, beating and threatening to kill her. He was paid $2,000 for the attack, it said.

A 17-year-old who moved to Israel from New York five years ago said she was hospitalized after being attacked with pepper spray by a crowd of men outraged that she was walking down a Jerusalem street with boys.

"They can burn in hell," said the girl, who would identify herself only as Rivka.

She lives in Beit Shemesh, a town outside Jerusalem where the vigilantism has been particularly violent. Zealots there have thrown rocks and spat at women, and set fire to trash bins to protest impiety. Walls of the neighborhood are plastered with signs exhorting women to dress modestly — spelled out as closed-necked, long-sleeved blouses and long skirts.

'Stupid troublemakers'
The state, catering to religious sensitivities, subsidizes gender-segregated bus routes that service religious neighborhoods. Ragen and several other women challenged the practice in Israel's Supreme Court after an Orthodox Canadian woman in her 50s told police she was kicked, slapped, pushed to the floor and spat upon by men for refusing to move to the back of the bus.

Another Beit Shemesh girl, who asked to be identified only as Esther, said zealots threw rocks, cursed and spat at a friend for wearing a red blouse — taboo because the color attracts attention.

...But the rabbis are afraid to condemn them, says Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, another community member.

"They can't come out against zealots who champion modesty. Here and there they write against violence, but the militants ultimately set the tone," he said.

Stores are targeted too.

'This store burns souls'
In August, a Jerusalem man was placed under house arrest on suspicion he set fire to a store in a haredi district of the city that sold MP4 players.

"It started about six months ago. They would come into the store, about 15 of them at a time, screaming, 'This store burns souls!' and they would throw merchandise on the floor and threaten customers," said 31-year-old Aaron Gold, a haredi worker at the Space electronic store.

One Friday night, just before the Sabbath was about to begin, "they smashed a window, doused the place with gasoline and lit a match," Gold said.

Now, a big sign behind the counter says, "All products sold in this store are under rabbinical supervision. By order of the rabbis, no MP4s are sold here."

Clothing stores that sell clothes regarded as provocative have been vandalized, and bleach thrown at merchandise.

Suspicion sparks attack
Girls have been expelled from school after being seen talking to boys, a punishment that ruins their marriage prospects.

"It could be very innocent; she could be talking to her brother," Ragen said. But once thrown out of school, "no one — NO ONE — will take you in," she added.

In one case, the violence reached the highest levels of haredi society.

Three years ago, a son of Israel's Sephardi chief rabbi, Shlomo Amar, was accused of kidnapping a 17-year-old boy, beating him at knifepoint and terrorizing him with snarling dogs because he had sought the attentions of the accused's unchaperoned sister.

The son was sentenced to two years and eight months in jail.

His sister married a different suitor the following year. [All emphases added]

Reading all this, I can't help being reminded of the Islamic world in so many ways.

The Muslim Invasion of England

I know it's not new but I've just heard it.

A British Naval Destroyer stops four Muslims in a row boat, rowing towards Brighton. The captain gets on the loud hailer and shouts:

"Ahoy, small craft, where are you heading?"

One of the Muslims stands up and shouts:

"We are invading England!"

The crew of the Destroyer all start laughing and, when the captain finally stops laughing, he gets back on the loud hailer and says:

"Just the four of you?"

The Muslim stands up again and shouts:

"No, we're the last four. The rest are already there!"

Harf: ISIS Is All about Lack of Jobs

We have all seen the video of ISIS's recent horrific beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya.

Mr Obama, how many Christian terrorists have beheaded Muslims? How can you compare violence in Islam with violence in Christianity?

US State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf was interviewed by Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball about the atrocity.

She mantained that “we cannot win this war by killing them [ISIS], we cannot kill our way out of this war”.

I don't know if it's possible to respond to an enemy that kills, beheads and burns people alive without the spilling of blood.

Harf went on to argue:

[The video of ISIS] underscores to people that it isn’t just a fight in Iraq and in Syria and that it’s not just a fight about dropping bombs on terrorists. It’s really how we stop the causes that lead to extremism in a place like Libya, the fact that there’s no governance, and there’s no opportunity for young people, it lets groups like ISIL grow there and flourish there, which is what you saw with this awful situation with these Egyptians that you just mentioned, but this is a longer fight, it’s fighting them on social media…they’re using social media to get converts to their cause and to spread their hatred all over the world. This week, we’re going to have over 60 countries here in Washington to talk about how do we combat this violent extremism together in the long-term, not just in the short-term fight.

Right now, what we’re doing is trying to take their leaders and their fighters off the battlefield in Iraq and in Syria, that’s really where they flourish…we’re killing a lot of them and we’re going to keep killing more of them, so are the Egyptians, so are the Jordanians they’re in this fight with us. But we cannot win this war by killing them, we cannot kill our way out of this war. We need, in the longer term, medium and longer term, to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs…

[W]e can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance, we can help them build their economies, so they can have job opportunities for these people. You’re right, there is no easy solution in the long-term to preventing and combating violent extremism, but if we can help countries work at the root causes of this, what makes these 17-year-old kids pick up an AK-47, instead of try to start a business? Maybe we can try– try to chip away at this problem, while at the same time going after the threat, taking on ISIL in Iraq, in Syria, and helping our partners around the world.”

This is a particularly absurd version of the old socialist position: it's the economy, stupid!

From Karl Marx to Bill Clinton, socio-communists believe that everything in human society is governed by the economy and every problem can be solved by trowing money at it.

"What makes these 17-year-old kids pick up an AK-47, instead of try to start a business?" is an especially ridiculous way of putting the question, in the context of Muslim jihadists. Materialists don't attach any importance to what people believe in, what doctrines and ideals inspire and motivate their behaviour.

That's why they're so badly equipped to deal with the Islamic threat, deriving as it does from a faith and frame of mind.

Harf's half-baked theory about how to address the big problem posed by ISIS echoes the "liberal" proposed elimination of crime in Western societies by getting rid of poverty and unemployment as its "root causes".

I'm not so sure that the US really wants to defeat ISIS. But this is not the first time that Ms Harf is out of her depth when trying to defend the indefensible: American strategy in the Middle East.