Thread: The New York Times’ Featured Syrian Refugee of The Week

On Christmas Day — three weeks after the son of a Pakistani immigrant and his Pakistani immigrant bride murdered 14 people in San Bernardino, California — The New York Times told the heartwarming story of “Kamal,” a Syrian refugee who resettled into Houston, Texas, earlier this year and immediately started shopping at Walmart.

The Times considers it tacky when actual Americans go to Walmart, but Muslim immigrants seem to live there, buying nothing but American flags and Christmas trees.

Thus, we’re told Kamal has an outdoor Christmas tree from Walmart, and we find him carrying two trays of cupcakes from Kroger’s for his children’s elementary school holiday party.

Kamal — like the Times — was “angered” by Texans’ reluctance to accept more Syrian refugees. He says of Americans: “Why did you bring me here and why then you let the people hate us?”

We brought you here, Kamal, because the Democrats need voters and the rich need cheap servants.

As for letting “the people” hate refugees, they don’t, but if they did they’d have a right to do so. It goes back to that whole thing with John Locke, John Milton and the English Bill of Rights in 1689. (Of course, in Syria, it’s always the year 400, so this is merely pedagogical.)

The reasons Americans might hate Muslims — although, again, they don’t — include: San Bernardino, the Boston Marathon, Fort Hood, the Chattanooga military recruiting center, 9/11 and the 1993 World Trade Center attacks, and on and on and on.

The Times article itself provides additional clues as to why Texans might not want more Syrian refugees.

According to the Times:

– Kamal refused to let the Times use his last name “because he feared for the safety of his relatives in Syria.”

– In 2011, Kamal was arrested and imprisoned by the Syrian military for protesting against the government. Over the next 14 months, he says, he was tortured with electric shocks and beatings — and the removal of his kidney “as a punishment.”
– He says he didn’t want to relocate to another part of Syria because the Syrians there would “slaughter” him and his family because he drinks alcohol and his wife doesn’t always wear a hijab.

But he’s baffled that Texans are not yelping with joy at the prospect of bringing another 100,000 Syrians here. Why would any country not jump at the chance to admit masses of people who administer electric shocks and remove organs as punishment for protesting the government? We must be crazy!

If anyone hates Syrians, it’s Kamal. He left his home to get 7,000 miles away from Syrians — whom he now wants to bring to the U.S.

By contrast, these are the horrors Kamal has suffered at the hands of Texans, which he shared with the Times: The Texas agriculture commissioner posted pictures of refugees and rattlesnakes on Facebook with the caption: “Can you tell me which of these rattlers won’t bite you?”

Well, can you? Kamal can’t. He voted with his feet by getting the hell out of his entire country, which — again — he now wants to import to Texas, at least according to the Times.

I’m going to give Kamal the benefit of the doubt. (The guy does have a Christmas tree.) Maybe it’s the Ramadan spirit, but I don’t think he does want any more Syrian refugees. Maybe Kamal is only worried about Texans suspecting him, in which case, he ought to be “angered” by the Muslim immigrants who do things that create suspicion, and the U.S. government that insists on bringing in hundreds of thousands more like them.

Only in fiscal years 2009 to 2013, the Obama administration has imported 680,000 immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. In that same time period, the government accepted approximately 12 immigrants from the British Isles.
The media’s persistent attempts to paint sympathetic portraits of the Third-Worlders pouring into America are always exercises in self-contradiction.

On one hand, the Times loves to provide lavishly detailed accounts of the atrocities committed on a daily basis in backward countries in order to pull at readers’ heartstrings. But then they’re shocked when readers don’t respond to descriptions of these medieval cultures by saying, What this country needs is more electric shock torture and organ harvesting of prisoners. How about we bring in some more Syrians?

The day after the Times’ story about Kamal and his trays of cupcakes and rafts of grievances, the paper ran a front-page story about the “flawed justice” — that was in the title — involving a homicidal mob in Afghanistan.

First, the good news: No police officers shot any unarmed black teens. Now, the bad news: A 27-year-old woman, Farkhunda Malikzada, was beaten to death by an enraged mob in Kabul after being falsely accused of burning a Koran.

The Times reports:

“In the videos, Farkhunda seems at first to be screaming in pain from the kicks, but then her body convulses under the blows, and soon she stops moving at all. Even when the mob pulls her into the street and gets a car to run over her, and she is dragged 300 feet, the police stand by.

“By then, she was little more than a clothed mass of blood and bones. Yet still more people came to beat her. One of the most fervent was a young man, Mohammad Yaqoub, who worked at an eyeglasses shop. He heard the crowd as Farkhunda was dragged behind the car and rushed out, eager to join.”

Let’s get Yaqoub here. He can work at Lens Crafters!

But the Times is scratching its head, incredulous that Americans aren’t leaping with ecstasy at the government’s plan to continue dumping these sick, sadistic cultures on us.

The New York Times' Featured Syrian Refugee of The Week | Human Events

NY Times Correlates Trump Support With Racism — Based on Decade-Old Google Searches

On Wednesday, Nate Cohn at the New York Times, who by some accounts is being anointed the next Nate Silver of polling, made a clumsy and despicable attempt to inject race into his political "analysis" of the Donald Trump phenomenon. Cohn's tediously long writeup, which made Page A3 in the New York version of the Old Gray Lady's print edition on Thursday, attempted to identify and characterize Donald Trump supporters.

Apparently troubled by finding that Trump's support crosses into a number of groups with whom Republican presidential candidates have usually fared poorly, he felt the need to go far afield for evidence of something sinister. Thus, he attempted to correlate the level of current support for Trump's presidential candidacy to regional levels of racism as seen in Google searches. That's right, Google searches — from 9-12 years ago.

The basis for Cohn's writeup is a pile of rubbish disguised as a scholarly paper by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz at Harvard. Stephens-Davidowitz claims that one can estimate an area's relative degree of "racial animus" by determining "the percent of Google search queries that include racially charged language."

Stephens-Davidowitz's analysis is a one-way street with no pull-offs, as the only search terms he deemed to be "racially charged" were variations on the N-word (excluding the version that ends in "-ga," because rappers use that).

Google's worldwide search volume in 2013 was 1.216 trillion, with about 220 billion searches coming from the U.S. Stephens-Davidowitz's work from that year reported that variations on that "racial epithet ... (are) now (i.e., in 2013)included in more than 7 million searches annually."

That's a whopping 0.0006 percent of all worldwide searches (i.e., 6 out of every million) and .0032 percent of all U.S. searches (3 out of every 100,000). As far as I could tell, Stephens-Davidowitz did not make it clear whether his "7 million" searches were U.S.-based only — but even if they were, it's quite clear that the nation is far less obsessed with the N-word than he is. Stephens-Davidowitz's work analyzed N-word searches from 2004-2007.

On that basis, he tarred entire areas as having enough "racial animus" to affect voting patterns — especially if those voting patterns ended up showing less-than-predicted support in 2008 for Barack Obama's general-election candidacy in comparison to notoriously inaccurate pre-election polls.

The end result of his work is a ridiculous conclusion that Obama lost more votes than he gained in 2008 because of his race (which really isn't African-American, but managed perception is reality in our brave new word). Never mind the over 2 million additional African-American votes Obama got than John Kerry did in 2004, or that period's intense, media-driven "it's time we had a black President" sentiment.

Now let's get to Cohn's further abuse of an already flawed study in his Trump "analysis" (bolds are mine; HT to an emailer):



Got it? Trump's biggest bloc of support comes from dumb, old, white racists. Cohn's memo to America: You don't want to be associated with "those people," do you? Cohn noted that "Mr. Trump’s best state is West Virginia."

In his fevered mind, that of course has to be because Stephens-Davidowitz's work tells us that West Virginia was the nation's worst hotbed of N-word search — 9-12 years ago. Horse manure.

The real "anti-black" sentiment is in Washington. Have any of you in Manhattan ever heard of the left's eight-year war on coal, that black fuel which still provides 39 percent of the nation's electricity, aimed straight at the heart of the Mountain State? Good heavens, 2016 is going to be a very trying year.

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