Tomorrow's Civilizational Cringe Today

By Mark Steyn

http://www.steynonline.com/

March 22, 2016

A picture released by the Belgian Federal Police shows a screengrab of the airport CCTV camera showing suspects of Tuesday's attacks at Brussels Airport, in Zaventem. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

The bloodbath in Brussels? As I said to Hugh Hewitt on a previous occasion, all the stories are different, and yet they're all the same. And, alas, it becomes harder to mourn the dead when we never avenge them. No doubt that narcissist wanker who plays "Imagine" is already dragging his piano to the airport or the metro.*

A decade ago, I cited a Tim Blair reader's unimproveable parody of all those dreary navel-gazing warnings that the actual deceased don't matter except insofar as they portend a hypothetical attack against the real victims here:

British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow's Train Bombing

But the old jokes don't play when everyone who matters in our world does them for real. 

This time round the government official with direct responsibility for dealing with today's slaughter, a slice of ham with the absurdly Tintinesque name of Jan Jambon, issued the usual halfwit apologia the day before the atrocity. As M Jambon, the Belgian Interior Minister, told CNN on Monday:

Jambon says the majority of young Muslims are well integrated into Belgian society, but admits his government has more to do to make some feel "at home" in their own country, given that a sense of alienation can leave them open to the threat of radicalization. 

"We're talking about third- and fourth-generation [immigrants]; these youngsters are born in Belgium, even their fathers and mothers are born in Belgium, and still they are open for these kind of messages. This is not normal -- in the U.S., the second generation was the President; here, the fourth generation is an IS fighter -- so that is really something we have to work on."

So "British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow's Train Bombing" is now joined by "Belgian Cabinet Minister Says Tomorrow's Train Bombing Is All Our Fault".

So "we" have to work on it. That means you, the Flemish frequent flyer, poking your head up from the rubble at the airport concourse. And you, the Walloon strap-hanger blinking into the dust and chaos and wondering where the lower part of your left leg went. You are going to "have to work on" it, harder and harder and harder.

Just how are they going to work on it? In Brussels, the terrorists blew up the area outside the secure zone. Which was entirely predictable. As I wrote six years ago:

The second thought that strikes you is that the ever-longer lines to get into the "secure" area are now the least secure area in America. Why not blow up the security line? You could kill as many people as on an airplane, and inflict more long-term economic damage. But don't worry. The TSA has plans to expand the "secure" area, so the insecure perimeter will be somewhere else, with even more vulnerable people standing around waiting to get into it.

Clearly we need a secure zone outside the secure zone - maybe, say, outside the concourse. So everyone has to crowd on the sidewalk. And then when they blow that up we can move it back to the perimeter of the airport. And then...

Where's the "safe space" against an enemy that wants to blow up everything? One year ago, after Copenhagen, I wrote:

I would like to ask Mr Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt what's their happy ending here? What's their roadmap for fewer "acts of violence" in the years ahead? Or are they riding on a wing and a prayer that they can manage the situation and hold it down to what cynical British civil servants used to call during the Irish "Troubles" "an acceptable level of violence"? In Pakistan and Nigeria, the citizenry are expected to live with the reality that every so often Boko Haram will kick open the door of the schoolhouse and kidnap your daughters for sex-slavery or the Taliban will gun down your kids and behead their teacher in front of the class. And it's all entirely "random", as President Obama would say, so you just have to put up with it once in a while, and it's tough if it's your kid, but that's just the way it is. If we're being honest here, isn't that all Mr Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt are offering their citizens? Spasms of violence as a routine feature of life, but don't worry, we'll do our best to contain it - and you can help mitigate it by not going to "controversial" art events, or synagogues, or gay bars, or...

...or sports stadia and restaurants and rock concerts. Or railways stations and airports.

As I've said so often now, I'm Islamed out. I happen to be semi-Belgian, although my family is from Sint-Niklaas rather than Brussels, an ancient city in a minor kingdom hideously transformed into the "capital city" of "Europe" and brutalized by the Eurocrats' reach-for-the-sky monuments to their own visionary genius. On my last visit, the totalitarian skyscrapers towering over the mere mortals in the vast empty plazas below were decorated with giant billboards dangling down 30 stories of rain-streaked concrete bearing the inspiring slogan "Strengthening Europe Through Governance."

No, sir. Killing Europe Through Demographic Transformation. As I wrote after Paris:

So I say again: What's the happy ending here? Because if M Hollande isn't prepared to end mass Muslim immigration to France and Europe, then his "pitiless war" isn't serious.

That's the only thing that will make a difference - recognizing that, as "vibrant" and "diverse" and "multicultural" as we are, we cannot assimilate Islam on the scale Frau Merkel and others are demanding. This isn't Belfast. It can't be held down to "an acceptable level of violence". In the long-term, there's no assimilation, only civilizational suicide.

I regret having to begin every other paragraph with "As I wrote...", but the fact is this problem was in plain sight a decade ago - and all M Jambon and the rest of the European political class did was sit back and accelerate the rate of Islamization. As I wrote (last time, I promise) in my book America Alone:

In June 2006, a 54-year old Flemish train conductor called Guido Demoor got on the Number 23 bus in Antwerp to go to work. Six – what's that word again? – "youths" boarded the bus and commenced intimidating the other riders. There were some 40 passengers aboard. But the "youths" were youthful and the other passengers less so. Nonetheless, Mr Demoor asked the lads to cut it out and so they turned on him, thumping and kicking him. Of those 40 other passengers, none intervened to help the man under attack. Instead, at the next stop, 30 of the 40 scrammed, leaving Mr Demoor to be beaten to death. Three "youths" were arrested, and proved to be – quelle surprise! - of Moroccan origin. The ringleader escaped and, despite police assurances of complete confidentiality, of those 40 passengers only four came forward to speak to investigators. "You see what happens if you intervene," a fellow rail worker told the Belgian newspaper De Morgen. "If Guido had not opened his mouth he would still be alive." 

No, he wouldn't. He would be as dead as those 40 passengers are, as the Belgian state is, keeping his head down, trying not to make eye contact, cowering behind his newspaper in the corner seat and hoping just to be left alone. What future in "their" country do Mr Demoor's two children have? My mother and grandparents came from Sint-Niklaas, a town I remember well from many childhood visits. When we stayed with great-aunts and other relatives, the upstairs floors of the row houses had no bathrooms, just chamber pots. My sister and I were left to mooch around cobbled streets with our little cousin for hours on end, wandering aimlessly past smoke-wreathed bars and cafes, occasionally buying frites with mayonnaise. With hindsight it seemed as parochially Flemish as could be imagined. Not anymore. The week before Mr Demoor was murdered in plain sight, bus drivers in Sint-Niklaas walked off the job to protest the thuggery of the – here it comes again - "youths". In little more than a generation, a town has been transformed. 

Of the ethnic Belgian population, some 17 per cent are under 18 years old. Of the country's Turkish and Moroccan population, 35 per cent are under 18 years old. The "youths" get ever more numerous, the non-youths get older.

M Jambon can demand all he wants that aging Flemings and Walloons re-double their efforts to make these alienated third-generation Belgians feel "at home". But on that remorseless arithmetic it will be their home, and you'll be the ones having to "work harder" at "integrating" with them.

As for M le Ministre's regret - that in America a second-generation immigrant can be president while in Belgium he's a jihadist - oh, don't worry: a second-generation Euro-Muslim will be prime minister of Belgium soon enough. As I wrote (okay, one more) in 2007, a decade ago Muslims were already ten out of seventeen members of the ruling party on Brussels city council - or 59 per cent. What will it take to make them feel "at home"? Eighty-nine per cent? Well, then, we have to work on it!

~When America Alone came out in 2005, I was interviewed by Michelle Malkin about this very subject. Today she's re-posted that interview:

Today's bloody jihad attacks in Brussels are yet another stark reminder that the Islamization of Europe didn't happen overnight... 

Ten years ago, I sat down with the incomparable Mark Steyn for an interview about Europe, Islam, demographics, and his trenchant and timeless book, America Alone.

Click below for Part One:

For parts two, three and four of my interview with Michelle, please see here.

*UPDATE: Re "Imagine", looks like these guys beat him to it. God Almighty. As I write (look, honestly, it's really the final one) last time round:

'Imagine there's no countries...'

Keep this up and there won't be.

Brussels and Willful Blindness

By Andrew C. McCarthy — March 22, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

A soldier waves off a cameraman in the aftermath of the Brussels, Belgium, terror attack

Defense Secretary Ash Carter happened to be scheduled to testify before Congress today. Thus, he provided the government’s first reaction to the jihadist atrocity in Brussels, in which 31 are dead (the toll is expected to rise) and scores of others have been wounded. Secretary Carter called the attacks a “tragedy.”

The mass murder obviously has tragic effects for those killed and wounded, and for their families, but this is not a tragedy. It is a war crime targeting a civilian population in the course of an ongoing war, which — notwithstanding the reckless posturing by the commander-in-chief — is not close to “winding down,” much less being over. It was simply shocking this morning to watch split screens. On one, we saw President Obama spend fleeting seconds on a peremptory acknowledgement of the attacks before moving on to his long, celebratory speech about how he has put the Cold War to rest in Cuba by working with “President Castro.” On the other screen, Belgians chaotically fled fire and debris while emergency personnel rushed the wounded to ambulances and carried out the dead.

Our enemies are at war with us. They continue to execute acts of war, not tragedies, against us. We cannot “end” the war by withdrawing from it; we can only lose that way. We cannot prevail, or even adequately protect ourselves, without seeing the enemy plain: radical Islam — Islamic supremacists determined to impose sharia on the world, with jihadists as the pointy end of the spear, and ideological sympathizers as their support system.

Because the latest round of war crimes occurs in the context of our momentous decision about who will be the next commander-in-chief, it is worth observing that Ted Cruz, whom I support (and on whose advisory team I serve), has stressed a recognition that the enemy is radical Islam. 

This is not just campaign rhetoric. We know, nearly a quarter century after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, that jihadist cells arise and thrive in ideological enclaves; that is where the radicalization, recruitment, fundraising, plotting, and injection and protection of jihadist immigrants occurs. We cannot deny reality by rationalizing that if we admit the truth we will be misunderstood as being “at war with Islam” — as in all Muslims.

What we like to think of as “radical Islam” is actually a legitimate and rabidly anti-Western interpretation of Islam that is followed by millions of Muslims. It is irrelevant to non-Muslims in the West whether theirs is a correct or incorrect construction of Muslim scripture. The remorseless fact remains that its adherents believe it — with a fervor that inspires the kinds of attacks we’ve seen today and have seen over and over again. Those adherents include Muslims who lack the commitment to carry out attacks themselves but nevertheless provide moral (and other) support to those who do, and who populate the Western immigrant enclaves in which the ideology thrives.

It’s a welcome fact that there are other ways of interpreting Islam that do not endorse war and hostility against the West; those who offer these interpretations are our allies, and we should be encouraging them rather than turning to enemies such as the Muslim Brotherhood to help us conduct “community outreach.” Still, the fact that there are pro-Western Muslims and authentically tolerant interpretations of Islam does not — and cannot be allowed to — obscure the fact that Islamic supremacism is a mainstream construction of Islam. It is not “false” Islam, or “anti-Islam.” It is Islam that competes, violently, with other constructions of Islam.

It is not our job to broker the claims these competitors make regarding what is the “true Islam.” It is our job to protect ourselves and our allies, and to crush the jihadist armies and cells that are prosecuting the war against us. If we do not acknowledge what the threat is and where it is coming from, we will continue to embrace the policies that empower the enemy. In a time of war, we cannot indulge a policy of mass immigration from countries where sharia supremacism is a significant presence.

With respect to Muslim immigrant communities that are already here, we must have sensible surveillance policies that identify and focus police attention on mosques and community centers that endorse anti-Western Islamic supremacism. That is not a dragnet against all Muslims; it is the arena where pro-American Muslims can step up and help us. No law-enforcement or intelligence agency wants to waste its time and resources investigating innocent people. But we have to be clear that Muslims who endorse Islamic supremacism, who want our Constitution supplanted by sharia, are on the wrong side of this war, regardless of whether they cross the line into violence.

Finally, we cannot tolerate jihadist safe havens anyplace on earth. The administration recently conceded that it has no strategy to deny the Islamic State — which has claimed responsibility for today’s attack — their sanctuary in Raqqa (to say nothing of their other strongholds). Let’s be clear: If ISIS is orchestrating attacks on the West from Syria and Iraq, that is an American national-security challenge, not just a civil war in a faraway place. American national-security problems cannot responsibly be delegated to other forces who will carry out our defense and war-fighting responsibilities for us. This is our problem.

There has not yet been a serious bombing campaign against ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria and Iraq, and it is fair enough to say that the number of troops we may have to commit hinges on how committed we are to an intense air campaign. We should not delude ourselves, however: The jihadists are planning to attack the United States as well as Europe, and it is going to take American military commitment to destroy them — not to carry out an experiment in democracy-building, but to eradicate the threat to our nation and our allies.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is as senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

RELATED: In the Aftermath of Brussels, There Is a Mistake We Shouldn’t Make

RELATED: Charlie Hebdo, One Year Later

War in Europe

After Brussels, it’s time for the governments of Europe to fall.

Robert Spencer

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

March 22, 2016

Zaventem Bruxelles International Airport after terrorist attacks (Getty Images)

At least 28 are dead in Tuesday morning’s jihad attacks in Brussels. Enough.

It’s time for votes of no-confidence. Parliamentary systems generally allow for votes of no-confidence that trigger new elections. It’s time for the governments of Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and more to fall. I’m not talking about violent revolution. There are mechanisms for the peaceful replacement of governments in most European nations at times when the existing government is seen widely to be inadequate for the task at hand. It is time to put those mechanisms to use. The existing governments are responsible for policies that have turned Europe into a war zone, and that war is just beginning. The political and media elites have failed Europe and the free world, and put Europe on a course toward civil war and bloodshed unseen on the continent since the days of Hitler.

A new Hitler is in Europe. It is not Donald Trump. It is not the “right-wing.” The new Hitler is very much like the old Hitler: he hates Jews. He has contempt for the historical patrimony of Western civilization. He means to rule by an iron fist and subordinate every other power to his will. He respects only strength, and despises weakness. The new Hitler is not just one man, but millions — millions who believe in an ideology that teaches warfare against and subjugation of free people under its heel. 

Historically, Europe saw the threat that the men who held to this ideology posed, and shed blood to resist their advance. Now, the sons and heirs of those who gave their lives to make sure their children and their children’s children would live free have flung open the gates and invited in those who would enslave them. They have invited them into their countries in massive numbers, and vilified and ostracized anyone who dared note the lessons of history and the content of the invaders’ ideology.

This morning, as a result of these policies, Brussels is engulfed in chaos and the grief of blood shed in war. There will be much, much more to come of this.

It is time to sweep them out. All of them: the multiculturalists, the cultural relativists, the internationalists, the levellers, the elites who have brought this death and destruction upon Brussels today, and Paris yesterday, and the rest of Europe tomorrow. Europe, if it is to survive as a home of free people, must turn out its entire political and media establishment. This can still be done peacefully, and must be done quickly. If Europe is to survive as a home of free people, it needs governments who recognize that the “refugees” storming into their countries now include an untold number of jihad murderers who mean to kill their people and destroy their societies, and who have the courage to stand up and stop that refugee flow, and turn it back. Saudi Arabia has tens of thousands of air-conditioned tents for hajj pilgrims, and not one refugee. Why? Because they have noted, correctly, that there are jihad terrorists among the refugees. 

Can Saudi Arabia protect itself and Europe cannot?

This is a war. It is a war for survival. It is a war that will determine whether Europe (and North America is not far behind) will live in freedom or slavery. The present European political and media elites are inviting the slavery of their people. They must be soundly repudiated. Too much is at stake to continue to countenance their self-delusion and fantasy. Those who are struggling to survive cannot afford to be unrealistic about what they’re facing. In the United States also, we need leaders who will speak honestly about the nature and magnitude of the war we’re in. Surely there are some people in Europe who are both able to lead and willing to tell the truth. It is time for them to be peacefully installed in power — before it’s too late, as it very soon will be.

 Tags: Brussels, ISIS, Islamic Terrorism

OBAMA IN CUBA: EMBRACING THE OPPRESSORS

Looking the other way as dissidents are rounded up by the Castro brothers.

Joseph Klein

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

March 22, 2016

President Obama listens to the U.S. national anthem during a ceremony at the Jose Marti Monument in Havana, on March 21. Dennis Rivera / AP

President Barack Obama shook hands with Cuban President Raul Castro in Havana's Palace of the Revolution on the second day of his three-day trip to Cuba and held what Obama called “frank” discussions with the Cuban dictator. Upon his arrival on Sunday, Obama declared that his visit was a “historic opportunity to engage directly with the Cuban people.” Obama was accompanied by 40 members of Congress and a large delegation of administration officials and business leaders from the private sector. The president continued to remove restrictions getting in the way of freer trade and exchanges with Cuba, but is asking little in return.

Obama sounded almost like the Cuban guide who had led the “people-to-people” tour in which I participated last month. We too were to “engage directly with the Cuban people.” Just like Obama, some even posed for pictures in front of a giant sculpture of Ernesto Che Guevara in Havana's Revolution Square. However, posing in front of the sculpture of a bloodthirsty killer, who once threatened to kill millions of Americans with nuclear armed missiles, sends far more of a troubling symbolic message when the president of the United States and leader of the free world does it than a group of ordinary American tourists. Obama should have declined the photo-op and stuck to pictures in front of memorials to Cuba’s 19th century poet and essayist, and patriotic hero, José Julián Martí.

Obama must have known before he landed on Cuban soil that 526 critics of the Castro regime had been detained during the first two weeks of March alone. There were dozens of arrests, just hours before he arrived, of members of the dissident group, Ladies in White, who march in protest every Sunday. When Obama was asked about this at a joint press conference following his meeting with President Castro, he avoided a direct answer. While President Obama is planning to meet with some dissidents, the Cuban regime has engaged in what one dissenter called “preventive repression, so it does not occur to anyone to say anything to Obama while he is here.”

As for Castro, he appeared perplexed when questioned about political prisoners during the joint news conference. It was like the scene from the movie Casablanca, when Captain Renault, explaining his closing of Rick’s Café, exclaimed, “I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here” as he was grabbing his winnings. Castro’s response to the question was “what political prisoners? Give me a list.” Obama looked on, showing not the slightest bit of emotion. 

President Obama did talk generally about the importance of human rights and said that he would continue to speak out in support of the “universal” rights of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of religion. He said that he had “frank” discussions with Castro regarding human rights, but did not indicate any real progress on that front. In fact, in another of Obama’s displays of moral equivalence and apologies for alleged shortcomings of the United States, Obama said that he welcomed criticisms from Castro regarding areas where he thinks we are “falling short,” such as income inequality and racism. And Obama lauded the Cuban regime’s record on advancing the right of all Cubans to free health care and education, which he agreed were human rights.

The average Cuban, however, does not live in the style to which Cuban leaders have become accustomed. Even with a modest introduction of private enterprise under Raul Castro’s rule, obtaining high-end goods is more of an exercise of political access than free market economics. Internet access follows a similar pattern. Monthly ration coupons for food provide for a substandard level of nutrition. Basics like the availability of clean water for drinking is a luxury. And while racial segregation in employment that had prevailed in pre-revolutionary Cuba was largely ended, blacks in Cuba cannot organize to press for policies long existing in the United States to deal with the remnants of segregation, such as affirmative action. 

Nothing at all was said about the high profile fugitives from the U.S. criminal justice system harbored by the Cuban regime, most notably Joanne Chesimard, a.k.a. Assata Shakur. She was convicted for murdering a New Jersey state trooper in 1973 and received a life sentence. She escaped to Cuba and was granted “asylum” there in 1984. Evidently, a convicted murderer who killed a policeman in the United States is the Castro regime’s idea of a “political” prisoner deserving of the Castro regime’s protection.

President Obama acknowledged that we have “two different systems,” but said that “we are moving forward, not looking backwards.”  He mentioned several examples of administrative changes he has made to make it easier for Cubans and Americans to do business together, promote educational exchanges and partnerships in health, science, the environment, and development of the Internet in Cuba.

So far, it appears that business between the two countries will be primarily on Cuba’s terms. That should be no surprise, since the Obama administration is accustomed to making bad deals in which it makes many concessions and gets much less in return. Cuba is looking for more foreign investment, particularly in its tourism industry. But it will be foreign investment with strings attached. Foreign managers do not get to make major human resource decisions and continue to be limited to holding minority ownership interests.

Starwood, for example, just announced that it will be operating hotels in Cuba. Under the deal, Starwood will refurbish and manage the hotels under one of its brand names, but ownership will remain with Cuban state enterprises. And in the software industry some American jobs may be outsourced to Cuba. “Were the government to improve Internet connectivity and telecommunications, Cuba could develop a competitive outsourcing sector, either state-run or independent, experts said,” according to an article published by the New York Times last June. With help promised by President Obama to develop Cuba’s Internet connectivity, telecommunications and online commerce, the loss of U.S. jobs to Cuba is in the offing.

President Obama continues to urge Congress to lift its economic embargo completely as soon as possible. He believes that the changes already taking place as a result of his administrative actions, easing trade, investment, travel and other exchanges between the two countries, will set an irreversible course toward the lifting of all restrictions. However, it is reasonable to pause and ask why the changes President Obama has set in motion are not reciprocated equally. Why does he look the other way as dissidents are rounded up on the eve of his visit? Why does he not insist on the return of all criminal fugitives whom have escaped to Cuba rather than face American justice? 

Perhaps most importantly, why does President Obama feel it necessary during his foreign visits to give credence to the criticisms from authoritarian leaders about conditions in the United States? Instead of welcoming Raul Castro’s criticism of the United States’ human rights record, he should have turned to the dictator and asked him these questions: Why are the only Americans seeking protection in Cuba convicted criminals on the run, while over 700,000 Cubans fled their homeland to come to the United States during the first two decades following the 1959 Cuban Revolution?  Why did 250,000 Cuban immigrants arrive in the United States during the first year following the revolution alone? And why are Cubans still flocking to the United States looking for a better life than they had in Cuba? The Pew Research Center reported that “43,159 Cubans entered the U.S. via ports of entry in fiscal year 2015, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.”

The answer is that the Cuban people are continuing to vote with their feet.

 

 Tags: Barack Obama, Communist Cuba, tyranny

President Obama’s Che Moment

By Rich Lowry — March 22, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

(Getty Images)

President Barack Obama inadvertently found the perfect photo-op for his Cuba visit at a wreath-laying ceremony at the Jose Marti Memorial in Havana.

A news photo at Revolution Square caught Obama standing together with American and Cuban officials, with an enormous mural of the iconic revolutionary Che Guevara looming over his shoulder on the adjacent Ministry of the Interior building.

Che is, of course, ubiquitous on dorm-room walls and T-shirts in the United States, and a hero of the Cuban revolution. He also was a cold-blooded killer who set up the Cuban gulag and presided over summary executions of political prisoners (trials were, per Che, “an archaic bourgeois detail”). No doubt, he would have been astonished at the Yanqui president coming to Revolution Square to pay his respects — and exceedingly pleased.

President Obama’s trip is self-consciously historic. As the president’s introducer at an event at the U.S. Embassy put it, Obama often said, “Yes, we can,” and now we can say, “Yes, we did.”

But did what? The trip ensures that the first visit to Cuba by an American president in almost 90 years will be part of Obama’s legacy, and it seeks to make his opening to Cuba, announced in December 2014, irreversible. If that means extending credibility and a financial lifeline to a Castro regime that has no intention of reforming, so be it.

The regime made it clear that it wouldn’t bother with maintaining a pretense of relaxing its grip, with the arrest of protesters at a march of the dissident group Ladies in White while President Obama was en route to the country. A reporter with a government news outlet told the New York Times that he and colleagues had been warned not even to discuss Obama’s visit with friends.

At a press conference with President Raúl Castro on Monday, Obama spoke in euphemistic terms of our “two different systems,” eliding the fact that one system is open, democratic, and prosperous, while the other is closed, dictatorial, and economically ruinous. Castro railed against alleged human-rights abuses in the United States — Obama obligingly said he welcomed the dialogue — and El Presidente denied holding any political prisoners when reporters dared ask about it.

There is no sign of greater openness in Cuba since President Obama forged his break with long-standing U.S. policy. Political arrests have accelerated. There were more than 8,000 in 2015, four times as many as in 2010. The exodus of desperate Cubans to the United States has picked up. And the country still ranks below Zimbabwe and Iran on Internet connectivity.

But Obama’s opening has produced a financial windfall for the regime. The Cuban military occupies the commanding heights of the economy and controls the tourism business, which has been thriving with the influx of American tourists. Starwood Hotels and Resorts just got special permission from the U.S. Treasury to operate three hotels in Havana, in a boost, not for the free market, but for the Cuban government.

If Cuba were a repressive, small-minded military dictatorship of the right, Obama’s visit and accommodationist attitude wouldn’t be considered so broad-minded. But a patina of revolutionary romance, embodied by that image of Che looking down on President Obama, still hangs over Cuba. It makes its human-rights abuses, theft, and lies an afterthought, or even excusable, for the American Left.

After the Cuban missile crisis, Che said that in the event of a U.S. attack, “if the rockets had remained, we would have used them all and directed them against the very heart of the United States, including New York, in our defense against aggression.” It would have been beyond his imagining that so many decades later, with the revolutionary regime cash-strapped and decrepit, the imperialist Goliath would come bearing gifts and asking for nothing substantial in return, except a line in President Obama’s Wikipedia entry.

—Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2016 King Features Syndicate

EDITORIAL: Obama, Cuba, and Us

RELATED: Impromptus: Obama in Cuba

Obama in Cuba brings the pain of loss to a Miami exile family

By Dan Le Batard
http://www.miamiherald.com/
March 21. 2016


Cubans watch from their homes as the motorcade of President Barack Obama arrives in a section of Old Havana, Sunday, March 20, 2016 in Havana, Cuba. PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS AP

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/dan-le-batard/article67292347.html#storylink=cpy

Another loss. That's what this already feels like to so much of Miami, before the “historic” baseball game has even been played. As if the Cubans who fled to this country haven't already felt enough of those losses over the decades. Lost childhoods. Lost roots. Lost families. Lost land. Lost freedoms. Lost lives in the ocean that divides Cuba and America like the million miles of distance between desperation and hope.

So much happy coverage on the television this week. Historic visit! America and Baseball celebrating themselves. Obama and Jeter and ESPN head toward communism like it is another cruise port, so many symbols of Americana descending on a rotting island stuck in the 1950s, and it doesn't feel quite right back in Miami, like watching a funeral morph into a party. The history of my own people feels like it is either being ignored or trampled here, and I'm not quite sure which of those feels worse.

I'm not too emotional. I don't do a lot of down. But I cry just about every time I write about Cuba. My pain is very much borrowed. My grandparents and parents endured it so that my brother and I never would. But it stings just the same. The fear and desperation of my grandparents combine with the suffering and sacrifices of my parents to produce on odd combination of sorrow and guilt and gratitude that won't stay down.

I've never known anything but freedom. My grandparents and parents made sure that was so. But now my grandparents are dead, and my parents are old, and the Cuban regime that strangled them somehow lives on … lives on to play a baseball game with our country this week. America extends its hand toward a dictator who has the blood of my people on his own. And now my parents, old exiles, have to watch Obama and Jeter and ESPN throw a happy party on land that was stolen from my family … as the rest of America celebrates it, no less. That's going to hurt, no matter how you feel about the politics.

The embargo didn't work. I get it. America does a lot of business with dictators. I get it. And my parents aren't close-minded, heartless or blinded by unreasonable rage. They'd be all for normalized relations with Cuba if it meant helping, you know, the citizens of Cuba. And maybe this will. Or maybe it won't. But why would my parents trust a communist government built atop a lifetimes of lies?

My parents were put on planes as teenagers by their parents, not knowing if they'd ever see each other again. How desperate would you have to be to send your not-ready-for-the-real-world 16-year-old away to a foreign country without knowing if you'd ever be reunited? A lot of things have happened to Cuba since my parents fled it. But change doesn't appear to be one of them.

The ocean between our countries is filled with the Cuban bodies that tell the story, lives literally thrown to the wind in desperation, hoping to reach America's possibility-soaked shores on boats made of old tires and wood and poverty's debris. No free press. No elections. No freedom. That's the Cuba that still surrounds the baseball diamond where we play this game. That's the Cuba people still get on makeshift boats to flee today.

My mother? All this happy news coverage has brought the bad memories back. She has some post-traumatic stress disorder from the communism. She feels it in her heart whenever she is shipping medicine to her brother stuck back in Cuba. She feels it in an esophagus that hasn't worked right since she was put on that plane, the communism literally choking her a little bit with every breath she has taken since.

She had her phones tapped back home. She endured neighborhood spies coming into her home whenever they pleased. She attended services for students and intellectuals killed for fighting for elections and a Constitution. She was chased through the streets by police dragging chains for attending those services. Her brother was a political prisoner. Whenever she visited him, she wondered if the fresh blood on the firing-squad walls might be his. He spent almost 10 years in that prison for his politics. Why the hell would she trust any of that today?

Understand something please: My parents are exiles, not immigrants. It is an enormous difference. They didn't come to this country looking for money. They left money behind and came here to risk poverty. They did so because they were exiled from a land they didn't want to leave and still miss, a land they will not visit until this regime is ousted or they see real change that can be trusted.

My grandmother put my mother on a plane believing that they might see each other again in three months. It took 12 years. Grandma put her on a plane because she couldn't stomach the idea of both of her children being in jail at once, her son for his politics, her daughter for trying to go to church to remember the dead. Three militia members with machine guns broke into her house at 3 a.m. looking for my mother days after she had fled. Grandma is dead.

Our pain is not particularly unique in these parts. Miami has so many stories like this. You'll find one in every barrio or bodega. So you'll forgive us if we aren't much in the mood to play ball with a dictator who still has the blood of our people on his hands, no matter how much ESPN and Obama and Jeter dress it up.

Fidel Castro outlived my grandparents. His regime continues to haunt my old-exile parents. My pain might be borrowed. But, damn, as that sting returns to my eyes, I can assure you that it is real.

http://www.miamiherald.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/dan-le-batard/article67292347.html

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Generations of Baking Traditions at Beiler's Bakery in Reading Terminal Market

FEBRUARY 5, 2015 / 

WRITTEN BY MICHAEL Y. PARK

http://www.bonappetit.com/

Credit: Alex Lau

Welcome to Out of the Kitchen, our ongoing exploration of the relationships that build and sustain the food industry. This year, we’re traveling the country to look at the changing landscape of food markets. Hyper-local markets—filled with myriad grocery, retail, and restaurant options like the ones found in Europe—are on the rise. These markets benefit from their interconnected buying power but operate like small, independent businesses, allowing them to focus on quality ingredients, culinary innovation, and intimate, personal customer service. Through quality, personal touches, and exceptional product, these new food halls are revolutionizing retail one transaction at a time.

The great thing about having a bakery that’s staffed mostly by Pennsylvania Dutch women? “All the girls already started out knowing how to do everything,” Keith Beiler says, gesturing to the commercial double ovens behind the sticky-bun station at Beiler’s Bakery, then to the bonneted women making and selling rolls, bread, apple and blueberry fritters, and doughnuts all around him. “It’s not like baking is a foreign language to them.”

Keith Beiler, is the 20-year-old son of bakery owner Alvin Beiler, an Amish-raised farmer from Lancaster County who married the Mennonite daughter of the first Pennsylvania Dutch merchant in the Reading Terminal Market. (After he converted to the Mennonite branch, Alvin Beiler learned to drive; he uses his van to ferry all his Amish employees from and to their farms back in Lancaster County every day.) Alvin Beiler took over the business when his in-laws retired after five years in the market, in 1985.

“Back then, the trains still ran overhead, and the whole place would shake,” Beiler says.

He expanded the business, adding a salad stall 10 years ago. A doughnut stand came two years ago, after customer response to the ones Beiler’s made for the market’s annual Pennsylvania Dutch festival was so great. Now Beiler’s dominates an entire corner of the market, and sells six or seven thousand doughnuts on an average day.

“The Bismarks go fast, but I like the salted caramel,” says Lizzie Riehl, the Amish woman manning the doughnut counter.

Riehl’s dressed in a black-striped grey frock, black apron, and an almost transparent white bonnet. She politely breaks off an interview to step up to the counter to help a gaggle of young tourists navigate the rainbow array of pastry options before them. Generations of baking tradition kick in as she guides them to the snack they’ll be talking about for the rest of the day: cinnamon-apple doughnuts.

“Apple fritters, blueberry fritters—people like those a lot too,” says Sadie Lapp, a Mennonite second cousin to the Beilers who’s pulling out a tray of chocolate-glazed doughnuts around the corner. Like the rest of her family, she’s dressed casually and comfortably, in this case in a bright red t-shirt, with her hair in a ponytail. “And the salted caramels.”

But when Keith Beiler started helping out with the business, back when he was only 12, his first job was across the way, by the double ovens to the right of the doors leading out of the market. He was on sticky buns.

“It’s the easiest thing to do,” he explains.

Beiler’s sticky buns start off the exact same way as the doughnuts, as a small boulder of cream-colored sweet dough in an industrial-sized mixing bowl, a tacky blend of spring wheat flour, sugar, yeast, butter, milk, and eggs. After the rise, the baker rolls it out on the counter, drizzles on the syrup—think butter, Karo syrup, and lots and lots of brown sugar—and generously sprinkles on a layer of whatever add-ons are called for—chopped walnuts or raisins, usually. Then it’s simply a matter of rolling it up, cutting it into slices, and sliding the tray of raw sticky buns into the oven at 300 degrees for 20 minutes. The result: a chewy, gooey, crunchy explosion of sweetness.

“You can’t mess them up,” Keith Beiler says.

His dad shrugs it all off, too. Sure, folks rave about Beiler’s baked goods in and out of Philadelphia—Keith even had a group of Australians come in a couple weeks ago who said they’d heard about Beiler’s doughnuts, and longtime regulars jump at Alvin Beiler’s invites to a summer barbecue at the family farm in Lancaster—but to Alvin Beiler, it’s just old-fashioned Plain Folk baking, not some magic formula.

“We got the recipes from a neighbor lady, 60 or 70 years old, down the street back home,” he says. “She didn’t have it written down or anything, she just knew them, had them in her head. So we asked her, and she gave it to us. We all share recipes, it’s how we do it.”

Paralegal Adrienne Sheree, who stops by a few times a week for a Boston crème, or a carrot cake with whipped icing, on her way from the nearby courthouse, likes to think that “we” extends to non-Amish and non-Mennonites like herself.

“This is part of our culture, in our market, in our city, and the Pennsylvania Dutch are part of it, part of us,” she says.

Over her shoulder, Alvin Beiler shrugs: They’re just doughnuts.

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BEILER'S BAKERY OUT OF THE KITCHEN PENNSYLVANIA PHILADELPHIAREADING TERMINAL MARKET

OBAMA’S POLICY INSPIRES CHANGES IN CUBA—FOR THE WORSE

Humberto Fontova

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

March 21, 2016

U.S. President Barack Obama, right, smiles as he looks over towards Cuban President Raul Castro, left, during their historic meeting, at the Summit of the Americas in Panama City, Panama last MayPhoto: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Let this be a lesson to all the naysayers who claimed Obama’s “engagement” or rapprochement with the Castro-Family-Crime-Syndicate (euphemized as “Cuba” by the media and State Department) was pointless and idiotic —who claimed that the Castros would not budge from any of their policies.

Your humble and hard-working servant himself must now eat crow.  Exactly a year ago he went on John Stossell’s Fox Business show to hysterically berate Stossell and a CATO Institute scholar. These dogmatic libertarians claimed Obama’s policy was very wise and sound—and would shrewdly and magically beget modifications in the Castro regime’s modus-operandi. 

OK, so there’s absolutely nothing in the actual 57 year history of the Castro regime to support such claims. Nonetheless, such miracles --they calmly explained-- are forecast in the holy texts of all their economic gurus, who shame both Nostradamus and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in their transcendental wisdom and clairvoyance. 

I argued otherwise, as seen here (WARNING! Graphically shows typical Crazy-Cuban shouting and arm-waving!) 

Well, it turns out that the Castro regime has indeed modified some of its more recent policies. Over the past year, for instance: 

*Cubans are suffering a wave of terror –involving everything from thousands, upon thousands of arbitrary arrests by KGB-trained secret police to machete attacks by regime-paid mobs against peaceful women dissidents—surpassing anything seen in decades.

*Cubans are risking their lives to flee Cuba at a rate unseen for decades.

*The teenzy-tiny number of Cubans who Cuba’s Stalinist rulers graciously tolerated as self-employed in such lucrative fields as shoe-shine boys, street mimes and corner fruit and vegetable peddlers, etc. has declined drastically.     

“Who cares?!” Some readers retort. “Obama is President of the U.S.—not Cuba!  And anyway, those Latin-American banana republics are always hopelessly screwed up. Their people are always trying to sneak into the U.S. !”  

In fact, prior to Castro-- when all Cubans were perfectly free to emigrate with all family, and property and U.S. visas were issued to them for the asking, and flights and ferries ran daily from Cuba to Florida—during this entire period slightly more Americans lived in Cuba than did Cubans in the U.S.  In 1953, for instance, more Cubans vacationed (then voluntarily went home) from the U.S. than Americans vacationed in Cuba. Alas, none of this features in The Godfather II. So it’s mostly unknown.

But good point anyway.  So let’s see how Obama’s Cuba policy has affected U.S. interests: 

*Sales of U.S. agricultural products to Cuba (legal since 2001 to the deadbeat Castros—but only for cash-on-the-barrel) have dive-bombed to a 15 year low. In 2015 they plummeted by nearly 40%.

Not a penny of the $7 billion Castro stole at gunpoint from Americans (while torturing and murdering a few Americans who resisted) has been compensated—or even acknowledged.

Everything above was fully documented in Congressional testimony just this week.

Adding insult to Castro’s injury of the U.S., some of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists and cop-killers continue living in his fiefdom as celebrities. These fugitives from U.S. justice murdered a total 17 police officers, five American civilians, two servicemen and planned 159 bombings in the U.S. (Perhaps Obama can visit them next week?)

“No—he will voluntarily come to me.” In this quote from mid  September 1945 Gen. Douglas McArthur was in his new Tokyo headquarters responding to his aides who were demanding that the conqueror of Japan make himself clear and finally demand a meeting with the Emperor of Japan.  

McArthur, as usual, was proven correct. He perfectly plumbed the nuances of etiquette between conqueror and conquered. Emperor Hirohito, bowing and hat in hand, visited him on September 27, 1945, accepting full responsibility for the war and expecting to be tried as a war criminal.

“General” (a laughably bogus official title as recognized by anyone familiar with Cuban history) Raul Castro shares exactly zero traits with General Douglas Mc Arthur.  But given the lunacy and perversion that passes for current U.S. foreign policy, next week Raul Castro will be acting much as Mc Arthur did on September 27, 1945--as a gracious conqueror over an abject and groveling foe.

We won the war!” Raul Castro yelled on Dec. 20, 2014--immediately upon hearing President Obama’s announcement of his “opening” to Cuba.             

 Tags: Barack Obama, Castro, Communist Cuba