May 27, 2007

The Fulford File, By James Fulford

Fort Dix, Memorial Day, And Immigration

Fort Dix, New Jersey, was site of a planned terrorist attack. The terrorist attack was planned, as usual, by immigrants. And, as is even more usual, by Muslims.

05-08-07 -- CAMDEN, N.J. -- Five radical Islamists - three of them brothers - have been arrested and charged with plotting to kill as many soldiers as possible in an armed assault at the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey. A sixth defendant is charged with aiding and abetting the illegal possession of firearms by three of the members of the group. Duka News Release [PDF]  Criminal Complaints: Shnewer, Mohamad Ibrahim [PDF] , Duka, Eljvir [PDF], Duka, Shain [PDF], Duka, Dritan [PDF], Tatar, Serdar [PDF], Abdullahu, Agron [PDF],

It's in the nature of these thwarted attacks that they look pretty stupid when they've been thwarted. Of course, the terrorists who succeed aren't much brighter, just luckier. The Fort Dix terrorists could certainly have killed many more people than Cho Seung-hui, the Virginia Tech killer.

The Federal Government likes to claim that they have security in place. But Army bases are basically unprotected. Self-defense trainer John Farnam points out that soldiers on and off base are as unarmed as the students at Virginia Tech.

The soldiers may have a "Culture of Self-Defense," but the Army's fanatical insistence that guns be kept unloaded (even in parts of Iraq and Afghanistan) means that an attacker would have a lot of unarmed people to shoot at before he was overwhelmed.

The important thing about this is not the potential for lethal violence, but what it reveals about the attitudes of some of the "New Americans," whether they're legal immigrants, illegal immigrants, or second-generation colonists in America. Previous refugees have displayed an amazing amount of affection and loyalty for the United States, but not these men.

Michelle Malkin titled her column on the Fort Dix plotters Jihadists Exploit Our Hospitality and Open Borders . . . Again. They've come to America, but they haven't left their old animosities behind. And it turns out that one of those animosities is hatred of America.

Civilizations don't collapse as a result of terrorism. They collapse because of internal decay. The decision to accept mass immigration, not in the form of individuals and families who can assimilate, but in the form of whole colonies of various nations, is part of the same internal decay that prevents the schools from trying to get kids to speak English, or trying to make them feel any loyalty to the United States.

Some of the men who were planning to commit an armed assault Fort Dix and “kill as many soldiers as possible" were from Kosovo. The United States government accepted many refugees from Kosovo who were the presumed victims of the civil war there, or to put it another way, victims of failure of Clinton-era foreign policy. (It's also noteworthy that some of these men were illegals who could have been deported. That's not Clinton's fault, it's George Bush's fault.)

Accepting refugees is an American tradition, although not as big a tradition as some people think.

The United States has sheltered refugees from Eastern Bloc Communist countries, from the late Republic of Vietnam, from Cambodia, from former Yugoslavia, and from Cuba.

Much of this was driven by the imperatives of US foreign policy, and some of it, of course, by massive foreign policy failures.

For example, if the Bay Of Pigs operation had succeeded, and had been backed up by the US military, there wouldn't have been the massive Cuban immigration that has transformed Miami. The US might have missed out on George Borjas, Humberto Fontova, Celia Cruz, and that guy who was CEO of Coca-Cola. But it would also have missed out on a lot of crime, and it would have kept Miami. And all those Cubans would have kept their country.

Same with Vietnam—if the Democrats hadn't bailed out on the Vietnamese, there wouldn't be the massive Vietnamese immigration which has led to a number of both benefits and problems.

I wrote in 2001 that

The Vietnamese loved their country. Their ancestors were buried there, and they didn’t want to leave, but when Ford and the House Democrats abandoned them, they had little choice about leaving.

Again you get good hard-working patriotic immigrants, but you also get Vietnamese gangs. And you get the Hmong.

The Vietnam-era refugees included Hmong tribesmen who fought beside Special Forces in Vietnam. The Hmong fought well because they were still a premodern tribe of hunters, similar to American Indians, who frequently make very good soldiers. That's what was at the root of the Chai Vang case, where a Hmong hunter killed six white hunters in the Wisconsin woods

Both American Indians and Hmong tend to make bad citizens, though, and the Hmong have not had nearly as much time too adapt to modern life as Indians have.

With the current war there is already a trickle of Iraqi refugees trying to get out, some of them young men of military age, trying to avoid combat—on either side.

John Derbyshire recently wondered why:

“Still, even in the context of a dubious and dysfunctional refugee-resettlement program, the matter of Iraqi refugees in the USA raises awkward moral questions. Don’t these people love their country? If they do, why don’t they fight alongside us to restore that country to stability? If they don’t, what kind of American patriots will they and their children make?

“And that is only to speak of the current situation, in which we are fighting vigorously to help the Iraqis get their country in order, under a US administration that believes this can actually be done. If our national will collapses and we pull out—not an improbable event—will there then be a real moral case, as there is not now, for offering asylum to the million or so Iraqis we will have let down? Or will it be they who have let us down?”

Please Go Fight for My Country So I Can Take Your Job, New English Review, (March 2007)

We already know that, for example, a former Taliban spokesman from Afghanistan has been admitted to Yale on student visa. There's no reason to believe that any mass exodus from Iraq wouldn't include former "insurgents." And they'd be welcomed by some percentage of the Muslim population, and also by anti-American Americans. That’s' a recipe for disaster.

Changing foreign policy isn't easy—and some of it can't be changed, because it happens as a reaction to the acts of America's enemies.

Immigration policy, on the other hand, is totally internal. The US doesn't have to take Iraqi refugees.

John Derbyshire pointed out in his article that there are plenty of Muslim countries that might want Iraqi refugees. I've suggested that there's a country just south of the Rio Grande which must be suffering a crying shortage of refugees—see Dear Mr. Fox: Please Find Attached our Poor/ Tired/ Dispossessed, Etc., [August 3, 2001]

In the meantime, American troops are not allowed to defend America on the southern border, where they are badly needed. As we've said before, the Posse Comitatus Act, intended to keep the Army from being used on Americans, does not apply to guarding the border from a Mexican invasion. This is what armies are for.

So here's the question for Memorial Day: