So, there was another terrorist attack in Belgium, and before I have a stab at explaining what caused it, I want to hear from 5 prominent Democrats about what they think about terrorism.
Here’s Bernie Sanders explaining his view:
And here’s Hillary Clinton explaining her view:
And here’s Obama and John Kerry explaining their view:
And Obama’s attorney general Loretta Lynch explaining her view:
Well, that’s what Democrats think about radical Islamic terrorism.
But what is the real cause of the frequent terrorist attacks in Europe that are committed by radicalized Muslims?
The left-leaning The Atlantic has an article that talks about radical Islamic terrorism in Belgium:
French authorities say they believe Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a 27-year-old Belgian man, masterminded the November 13 attacks in Paris.
The focus on Abaaoud helps emphasize how tiny Belgium has taken on an oversized role in the European theater of jihad. The country has provided a steady flow of fighters to ISIS in the Middle East—including Abaaoud—and has been the site of planning of attacks in Europe. (The Daily Beast has a good timeline of incidents involving Belgian militants.)
Abaaoud was already suspected of planning a prior attack that was foiled by Belgian authorities in the days after January’s Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris. Two suspects were killed in the operation. At the time, Slate’s Joshua Keating warned: “The Belgian police may claim today to have ‘averted a Belgian Charlie Hebdo,’ but it’s clear that the country’s radicalization problem is much larger, and will take more than police raids to address.” Those words proved prophetic.
Belgium has just 11 million people, and Pew estimated that about 6 percent of the population was Muslim as of 2010. But Belgian and French nationals make up around a quarter of the Europeans who went to fight in Iraq in the mid-2000s. While the government has acknowledged that hundreds of Belgians have gone to fight with ISIS or for other groups in the Syrian civil war, Pieter Van Ostaeyen, an independent researcher, calculated in October that 516 Belgians had fought in Iraq or Syria, far higher than the government’s figures. Based on his numbers, Belgium has contributed more fighters per capita to the fight in the Levant than any other European country.
[…]Belgian jihadism seems to mimic French Islamist militancy, only more concentrated—as befits the smaller country. Both have large numbers of immigrants who are poorer and isolated from the dominant culture.
So, it’s not just that the generous European socialists in Belgium took in lots and lots of Muslim immigrants, it’s that they took in lots and lots of unskilled Muslim immigrants, who struggle to integrate because they struggle to find work. Belgium, like other socialist countries in Europe, offers generous welfare programs to those who do not work. That’s a big draw to people in Middle Eastern countries.
The problem with offering generous welfare programs and welcoming in millions of illegal immigrants who cannot easily assimilate is twofold. First, eventually, socialists run out of other people’s money with which to bribe their unskilled immigrants. Second, everyone knows that making your own way through your own work is what makes people happiest. No one who is dependent on others (via social welfare programs) can truly be content. All of us deep down have a desire to be the author of our own success – to eat the food that we have earned with our own productive labor. Skilled immigrants can make their own way, but unskilled immigrants cannot.
It is good to have a system of legal immigration, in order to attract the a few of the best and brightest from other countries. If we take in a few at a time, then there is time for them to assimilate. And they can earn their own pay because they are skilled immigrants who came into the country to work. But it’s a mistake to let in millions and millions of unskilled immigrants who often cannot even speak the languages of Western nations.
So why did so many European countries import so many unskilled immigrants? The answer is simple.
Consider this article from the UK Daily Mail.
Excerpt:
Ministers today faced calls for an inquiry into claims that their open-door immigration policy was designed to make Britain more multicultural and allow Labour to portray the Tories as racists.
A former Labour adviser alleged that the Government opened up Britain’s borders in part to try to humiliate Right-wing opponents of immigration…
The Daily Mail reported on Saturday the controversial claims by Andrew Neather, who worked for Tony Blair and Jack Straw.
He said Labour’s relaxation of immigration controls in 2000 was a deliberate attempt to engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country and plug gaps in the jobs market.
He said the ‘major shift’ in immigration policy was inspired by a 2001 policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think-tank based in the Cabinet Office…
Ministers were reluctant to discuss the move publicly for fear that it would alienate Labour’s core working-class vote, Mr Neather said. But they hoped it would allow them to paint the Conservatives as xenophobic and out of touch.
‘I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date,’ Mr Neather added.
The parties of the left in Europe viewed mass immigration of unskilled immigrants as a way of creating a voting bloc that could be counted on to vote for bigger government, higher taxes, and more spending. The frequent terrorist attacks that we are seeing now are nothing but the outworking of this policy of deliberately bringing in millions of unskilled immigrants in order to get their votes for more welfare spending when they could not find jobs and pay their own way. We should be very careful about doing the same here. We must learn from the mistakes of leftist policies that have been tried in other places, in other times. We have to look beyond the compassionate rhetoric and ask “then what happened next?”.
