Several terrorist suspects were collecting Belgian welfare benefits while plotting attacks in Paris and Brussels, according to investigators.
Belgian authorities concluded that at least five of the suspected conspirators in the Brussels and Paris terrorist attacks were partly financed by the nation’s social-welfare system, receiving in total about $56,000, the Wall Street Journalreported Friday.
Surviving Paris attack suspect Salah Abdeslam collected about $21,000 in unemployment benefits until three weeks before the November assaults. Abdeslam, who was a manager and part owner of a Belgian bar at the time, should have been ineligible for public assistance, officials said.
Numerous suspected terrorists involved in a thwarted Belgian attack had also received welfare benefits, according to a judge who sentenced more than a dozen people who were part of an Islamic State cell to prison last month.
Tom Keatinge, director of the Center for Financial Crime and Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said the European benefit system was “vulnerable to abuse for terrorist financing purposes.”
Keatinge suggested that European governments offer benefits as vouchers or take a closer look at how people are spending their benefits.
“If you’re paying benefit to people in certain parts of Brussels, maybe you need to be a little more observant about who you’re paying to, and what they might be doing with it,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
The Paris and Brussels terrorist suspects who collected welfare were citizens of the European Union. Current Belgian law prohibits benefits from being suspended until an individual is convicted of terrorism or the suspect leaves the country.
ISIS issued a 2015 manual called “How to Survive in the West: A Mujahid Guide” that included a section advising jihadists,“If you can claim extra benefits from a government, then do so.”
While Belgium, France, Netherlands, and Denmark have collectively severed hundreds of people from welfare who traveled to Syria to fight with ISIS, European countries have struggled to find a longstanding solution because of generous social-welfare systems.
This is interesting:
Fred Cauderlier, the Belgian prime minister’s spokesman, defended the nation’s welfare system.
“This is a democracy,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “We have no tools to check how people spend their benefits.”
No, that’s not democracy, that a socialist welfare state – the kind favored by our own Democrat party. And the Democrat party actively resists attaching any kind of accountability or work requirement to welfare payments. After all, this is how they buy the votes of their favored groups, and they need those votes. They need those votes bad enough to import them, too. And so what if a few of you taxpayers have to die in terrorist attacks so that our Democrat betters can get the votes they need to seize power? The important thing is that they are seen as generous and they get to tell you how to live your life.
Richard Dawkins says faith is evil and hard to eradicate, but some atheists have tried
One way to decide whether to be concerned or not, is to look at famous atheist leaders of the past, and to see whether they did a good job of protecting basic human rights.
One of the most famous atheists who ran a country was Mao Zedong, who ran China from 1958 to 1962. His reign was called
“The Great Leap Forward”.
The far-left Washington Post recently had a news article about Mao:
Who was the biggest mass murderer in the history of the world? Most people probably assume that the answer is Adolf Hitler, architect of the Holocaust. Others might guess Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who may indeed have managed to kill even more innocent people than Hitler did, many of them as part of a terror famine that likely took more lives than the Holocaust. But both Hitler and Stalin were outdone by Mao Zedong. From 1958 to 1962, his Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of up to 45 million people – easily making it the biggest episode of mass murder ever recorded.
Historian Frank Dikötter, author of the important book Mao’s Great Famine recently published an article in History Today, summarizing what happened:
[…]It is not merely the extent of the catastrophe that dwarfs earlier estimates, but also the manner in which many people died: between two and three million victims were tortured to death or summarily killed, often for the slightest infraction. When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, local boss Xiong Dechang forced his father to bury him alive. The father died of grief a few days later. The case of Wang Ziyou was reported to the central leadership: one of his ears was chopped off, his legs were tied with iron wire, a ten kilogram stone was dropped on his back and then he was branded with a sizzling tool – punishment for digging up a potato.
The basic facts of the Great Leap Forward have long been known to scholars. Dikötter’s work is noteworthy for demonstrating that the number of victims may have been even greater than previously thought, and that the mass murder was more clearly intentional on Mao’s part, and included large numbers of victims who were executed or tortured, as opposed to “merely” starved to death. Even the previously standard estimates of 30 million or more, would still make this the greatest mass murder in history.
Some may say that the root of this mass murder is communism, but you can’t do these mass murders if you expect to encounter a God on the other side of death whose design for each of his human creatures was for them to love God, and love their neighbor as themselves.
In any case, opposition to religion is a cornerstone of communism, as this article by professor of political science Paul Kengor explains:
As Mikhail Gorbachev aptly stated, the Soviet communist state carried out a comprehensive “war on religion.” 1 He lamented that the Bolsheviks, his predecessors, even after the civil war ended in the early 1920s, during a time of “peace,” had “continued to tear down churches, arrest clergymen, and destroy them. This was no longer understandable or justifiable. Atheism took rather savage forms in our country at that time.” 2
The Soviet Union, reflective of the communist world as a whole, was openly hostile to religion and officially atheist; it was not irreligious or unreligious, with no stance on religion, but took the position that there was no God. Moreover, that atheism translated into a form of vicious anti-religion that included a systematic, often brutal campaign to eliminate belief. This began from the outset of the Soviet communist state and still continues in various forms in communist countries to this day, from China to North Korea to Cuba.
The roots of this hatred and intolerance of religion lie in the essence of communist ideology. Marx dubbed religion the “opiate of the masses,” and opined that, “Communism begins where atheism begins.” 3Speaking on behalf of the Bolsheviks in his famous October 2, 1920 speech, Lenin stated matter-of-factly: “We do not believe in God.” Lenin insisted that “all worship of a divinity is a necrophilia.” 4 He wrote in a November 1913 letter that “any religious idea, any idea of any God at all, any flirtation even with a God is the most inexpressible foulness … the most dangerous foulness, the most shameful ‘infection.’” James Thrower of the University of Virginia (a Russia scholar and also a translator) says that in this letter the type of “infection” Lenin was referring to was venereal disease. 5
“There can be nothing more abominable than religion,” wrote Lenin in a letter to Maxim Gorky in January 1913. 6 On December 25, 1919, Christmas Day, Comrade Lenin issued the following order, in his own writing: “To put up with ‘Nikola’ [the religious holiday] would be stupid—the entire Cheka must be on the alert to see to it that those who do not show up for work because of ‘Nikola’ are shot.” 7 Under Lenin, this was not an isolated occurrence.
Along with Trotsky, Lenin became involved in the creation of groups with names like the Society of the Godless, also known as the League of the Militant Godless, which was responsible for the dissemination of anti-religious propaganda in the USSR. 8 This institutionalized bigotry continued to thrive under Lenin’s disciples, most notably Stalin, and even under more benign leaders like Nikita Khrushchev.
This atheism was endemic to the communist experiment. Even those communists unable to secure political power—and thus lacking the ability to persecute believers—still did their best to persecute the teachings of organized religion and ridicule the idea of the existence of God. Even in America, it was no surprise to stroll by a city newsstand and catch bold front-page headlines like this in the Daily Worker, the communist organ published by CPUSA: “THERE IS NO GOD.” 9 Communists were proud of their atheism, and militant about it.
[…]“Religion is poison,” as Mao Tse-Tung was said to have stated.
The ideas expressed in these quotations of atheist leaders are pretty much every atheist will sign off on, as long as you don’t tell them who said it. These are normal atheist views of religion, and the hatred is especially strong against Christianity.
Richard Dawkins on atheism, morality, free will and human rights
Let’s take a look at what atheist leader Josef Stalin did during his rule of Russia in the 1920s and 1930s.
The Soviet Union was the first state to have as an ideological objective the elimination of religion. Toward that end, the Communist regime confiscated church property, ridiculed religion, harassed believers, and propagated atheism in the schools. Actions toward particular religions, however, were determined by State interests, and most organized religions were never outlawed.
The main target of the anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and 1930s was the Russian Orthodox Church, which had the largest number of faithful. Nearly all of its clergy, and many of its believers, were shot or sent to labor camps. Theological schools were closed, and church publications were prohibited. By 1939 only about 500 of over 50,000 churches remained open.
Atheist propaganda and the struggle against religion began immediately after the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917. While social change would, under Marxist theory, bring religion to disappear, Leninists argued that the Party should actively help to eradicate religion as a vital step in creating ‘New Soviet Man’. The energy with which the Party struggled against religion, though, varied considerably from time to time and from place to place, as did its hostility to particular faith groups. The 1920s saw the closure of innumerable churches and synagogues (and to a lesser extent mosques) and the active persecution of clergy and harassment of believers.
An article from the pro-communism Marxist.com web site says this about Stalin:
During the ultra-left period of forcible collectivisation and the Five Year Plan in Four an attempt was made to liquidate the Church and its influence by government decree. Starting in 1929 churches were forcibly closed and priests arrested and exiled all over the Soviet Union. The celebrated Shrine of the Iberian Virgin in Moscow – esteemed by believers to be the “holiest” in all Russia was demolished – Stalin and his Government were not afraid of strengthening religious fanaticism by wounding the feelings of believers as Lenin and Trotsky had been! Religion, they believed, could be liquidated, like the kulak, by a stroke of the pen. The Society of Militant Atheists, under Stalin’s orders, issued on May 15th 1932, the “Five Year Plan of Atheism” – by May 1st 1937, such as the “Plan”, “not a single house of prayer shall remain in the territory of the USSR, and the very concept of God must be banished from the Soviet Union as a survival of the Middle Ages and an instrument for the oppression of the working masses.”!
If atheism is true, there is no objective morality out there to make anything you do objectively wrong, and no one to judge you when you die. Humans are just accidental machines produced by random, undirected evolution in a random, undesigned universe. You won’t be able to ground human rights and objective moral obligations in a universe like that.
Socialism in action: Youth unemployment rate in European countries
I lamented the election of an outright socialist (Zapatero) as leader of Spain when it happened (in 2004, and again in 2008), and indeed he did nothing to fix the problems with unfunded entitlement liabilities in Spain.
Spain is dangling on the edge of a very dangerous fiscal precipice. Not only is its government budget still deep in the red, but its social security fund is about to completely run out of money. Once that happens, the real fun begins.
As recent reports note, Spain’s social security fund will run out of money sometime in 2018. The reason? “Bonus payments” to pensioners, similar to expansions in Social Security benefits for current retirees and women that Hillary Clinton seeks to put in place in the U.S. Unless the Spanish government finds the money to patch the coming social security blowout, deep cuts in benefits or steep rises in taxes will have to be made.
And this is a problem that won’t just go away with improvement in the business cycle. “The financial problems are not a temporary problem,” noted Spain’s El Confidencial newspaper, as translated by financial advisor and blogger Michael Shedlock. “Revenue from social security contributions is not sufficient to meet payment obligations.”
How bad is it? Well, so far this year there’s a 12.24% deficit in social security contributions vs. the forecast. That gap will likely worsen in coming years, as more workers opt for retirement and fewer people enter the workforce. Payments to some people already deep in retirement may have to be cut — adding to the already disruptive fiscal chaos that has roiled Spain, despite its rebound from the financial crisis.
We have a similar problem in the United States, thanks to the Democrats. A long time ago, the Democrats created a Ponzi scheme called Social Security in order to buy votes of retirees today with money to be paid by younger American workers tomorrow. There is no Social Security fund, just buying the votes of one group of voters with the votes of a much less politically-aware group of voters (young people).
The same IBD article assessed the American system, as well:
By 2034, the U.S. Social Security program, too, will be bankrupt. We have one edge on Spain: We can print our own money. But as we’ve found over the past eight years of quantitative easing, that doesn’t exactly solve the problem. And anyway, while inflation is virtually zero today, there’s no guarantee it will be the same in 18 years.
[…]Today, the total unfunded liability of the U.S. Social Security program is in excess of $25 trillion. There are already 60 million Social Security recipients, with some 10,000 baby boomers retiring each and every day. Three out of five current retirees depend on Social Security for their income. Knowing this reckoning is coming and doing nothing is malfeasance of the worst sort.
In Spain, there is so little free market capitalism that young people cannot even find jobs. The unemployment rate for youth in Spain is second only to Greece – the same Greece that elected the socialists for decades. So young people cannot find work in either Greece or Spain. If the young people cannot pay into these systems at the same rate that people did in the past, that just makes them go bankrupt faster.
Millennials, take note. When you vote Democrat, you are voting to pay some of what you earn into a system that will not be there for you when you retire. I have paid into it, and it will be bankrupt long before I retire. And the Democrats are importing more takers (unskilled illegal immigrants, Syrian refugees, elderly family members, etc.) who will be taking more out of the system than they pay into the system. You are making yourselves into slaves because of your gullibility, listening to the lies that your teachers and professors tell you about who to vote for. Think for yourself.
The wonderful thing about having other countries is that you can look at them and see what happens when they implement different laws and policies. Socialism – of the sort championed by the Democrat party in America – has already been tried. It’s been tried in Greece, it’s been tried in North Korea, it’s been tried in Cuba, and in Spain. It’s not working anywhere. It’s not working here, either.
