Is there an onslaught of American immigrants coming to Mexico? The story isn’t new. For decades Americans have been moving to Tijuana where the rent is cheaper. For local Tijuanese, this means Americans drive up their housing prices and create housing shortages.
How many Americans live in Tijuana, and in Mexico at large? The number is unknown. Guesstimates run the gamut from 5,000 to 500,000 Americans (in Tijuana alone). That’s a pretty big spread. Why don’t we know? [Read more…]
by Deirdre Fulton / CommonDreams
Less than a week after Russia’s foreign minister warned that NATO’s military build-up near Russia’s borders is “counterproductive and dangerous,” the United States is ramping up the deployment of heavy weapons and armored vehicles to NATO member countries in Central and Eastern Europe, the New York Times reported Tuesday.
Administration officials told the Times “the additional NATO forces were calculated to send a signal to President Vladimir V. Putin that the West remained deeply suspicious of his motives in the region,” referring to Russia’s ongoing presence in eastern Ukraine. [Read more…]
By Nat Krieger
When you tire of the televised prescriptions of funereal amnesiacs, and you’re feeling nauseated by generalizations repeated so often they become shorthand for not thinking, you could do worse than listen to voices from a Muslim land where the hatreds and the loves produced by the encounter with the West—specifically La France—have been cooking and periodically exploding for a long time. [Read more…]
I suspect there might be more than one sore shoulder in local political circles after all the back-slapping going down after the San Diego City Council unanimously (with Scott Sherman absent) passed a Climate Action Plan on Tuesday.
The council vote was preceded by a mayoral press conference, an environmentalist rally (a half hour later, same basic location, many overlapping participants) and more than seventy speakers testifying in favor of the plan.
Never has a slam dunk been guided by so many hands. [Read more…]
On Dec. 8, a man identified as Piro Kolvani reportedly walked into the Fatima Food Mart, in Queens, New York, yelled that he was going to kill Muslims, and began punching the store’s owner, 53-year-old Sarker Haque. A customer restrained Kolvani until police arrived.
The attack is being investigated as a hate crime and, in the wake of terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, there has been a surge of similar assaults on Muslims. [Read more…]
Hundreds of people gathered along San Diego’s Waterfront Park yesterday to mark International Human Rights Day and to make their voices heard on the subject of refugees and support for the local Muslim community.
The San Diego area has long been a prime resettlement area for refugees, taking in as many as 3,000 annually. Successive waves of people from Southeast Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East have created new lives here in recent decades.
Fear-mongering over Syrian refugees following terrorist attacks in Paris has led to increasingly strident rhetoric from prominent political figures. Now a ban keeping all people of the Muslim faith from entering the US has gained some traction. Hate crimes have soared, including attacks on places of worship. [Read more…]
When bullets
fly back into guns
blasts
implode into casings
bombs
ascend into planes
missiles return
to grain silos [Read more…]
American politicians, including George W Bush and Barack Obama, have failed to deal with the fact of Sunnis and Shiites hating each other and have been fighting for 1383 years. Their lack of knowledge and/or acceptance of that fact has led to their bungling and botching of Middle East policy. There are effectively two religions: Sunni Islam and Shiite Islam.
Understanding the religious composition of countries in the Middle East goes a long way toward explaining why certain countries are fighting other countries or are standing by doing nothing in the fight against terrorism. For instance, why won’t Saudi Arabia fight ISIS? The answer is simple. They are both Sunnis. For the most part Sunnis won’t fight Sunnis and Shiites won’t fight Shiites. But they sure as hell will fight each other. Americans and the western world in general have just been snookered into getting involved in this mess, which has been going on for over 1000 years, starting with George W Bush’s ill-conceived and immoral invasion of Iraq. [Read more…]
There has been much to be dismayed about in the wake of the horrible Paris (and Beirut) attacks, from the carnage itself to the ugly xenophobia it aroused in American politics to the sheer stupidity of the eternal return of the same that is the bipartisan hegemony on foreign policy. The answer for everything is always an eye for an eye until the whole world is blind with little to no intelligent reflection on the blunders that got us here—that might mean a fundamental rethinking of our role in the world rather than yet another knee-jerk response.
Perhaps the best piece I’ve seen on the phenomenon of ISIS came out months before the Paris attacks in The Guardian. In “Iraq Blowback: ISIS Rise Manufactured by Insatiable Oil Addiction,” Nafeez Ahmed gives a nice pocket history of how ISIS, the “Islamist Frankenstein,” is the product of the West’s “co-optation of Gulf states’ jihadists.”
More specifically, Ahmed starts by going back to the Bush administration where senior officials decided, “to pursue hair-brained ambitions to re-engineer the region through the de facto ethno-sectarian” conflict. Thus began years of ill-conceived covert operations amidst the chaos of post-war Iraq, none of them working particularly well. [Read more…]
Congressman Scott Peters joined with Republicans yesterday to vote yes on hastily drafted legislation creating a micromanaged immigration process essentially barring refugees from Syria and Iraq, including those who served alongside U.S. troops. The bill is H.R. 4038, the so-called “American Security Against Foreign Enemies (SAFE) Act.
If there’s a bright side to this dark moment in American history, it’s that this vote was largely symbolic. Despite the lopsided number of ayes in the House, this act of political cowardice isn’t likely to make it through the Senate with enough votes to overcome the President’s veto.
The rationale for Democrats who supported this legislation was two-fold; it was moderate in that it didn’t include a religious test for entering the US demanded by right-wing extremists and a fear (that’s the operative word here) they’d be branded as soft on terrorism in the 2016 elections. [Read more…]
Hillary Clinton has abandoned the Democratic Party’s foreign policy for her own. She’s left behind the notion that the Middle Eastern conflict could be contained to that region and joined Republicans in their calls to expand our warfare.
“It cannot be contained; it must be defeated,” she recently said.
On November 19, she told The American Council on Foreign Relations, “(t)he United States has been conducting this fight for more than a year; it’s time to begin a new phase and intensify and broaden our efforts … if we press forward on both sides of the border, in the air, on the ground, and as well as diplomatically, I do believe we can crush ISIS’s enclave of terror.” [Read more…]
Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson was in San Diego yesterday, ostensibly appearing at campaign fundraisers in La Jolla and Rancho Santa Fe.
The big news, however, continues to be Republican cooperation with the idea of spreading fear and loathing outside the Caliphate, as Carson and other candidates have wasted no time in exploiting the Paris attacks as a way to prove who’s “tougher” on terrorism.
In doing so, they’ve fallen right into ISIS’ trap. They might as well open terrorist recruiting offices in major cities. [Read more…]
