Long Stephen Steinlight essay: 12,800 words. The average New York Times or Washington Post article is around 1,200 words.

Quotes from the essay below.

The white "Christian" supremacists who have historically opposed either all immigration or all non-European immigration (Europeans being defined as Nordic or Anglo-Saxon), a position re-asserted by Peter Brimelow, must not be permitted to play a prominent role in the debate over the way America responds to unprecedented demographic change.

I'll confess it, at least: like thousands of other typical [American] Jewish kids of my generation, I was reared as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist. Every summer for two months for 10 formative years during my childhood and adolescence I attended Jewish summer camp. There, each morning, I saluted a foreign flag, dressed in a uniform reflecting its colors, sang a foreign national anthem, learned a foreign language, learned foreign folk songs and dances, and was taught that Israel was the true homeland. Emigration to Israel was considered the highest virtue, and, like many other Jewish teens of my generation, I spent two summers working in Israel on a collective farm while I contemplated that possibility. More tacitly and subconsciously, I was taught the superiority of my people to the gentiles who had oppressed us. We were taught to view non-Jews as untrustworthy outsiders, people from whom sudden gusts of hatred might be anticipated, people less sensitive, intelligent, and moral than ourselves. We were also taught that the lesson of our dark history is that we could rely on no one.

What are some of those large vexing questions we would prefer not to speak aloud? Let's throw out a few and see how many sleepers we can awaken. The big one for starters: is the emerging new multicultural American nation good for the Jews? Will a country in which enormous demographic and cultural change, fueled by unceasing large-scale non-European immigration, remain one in which Jewish life will continue to flourish as nowhere else in the history of the Diaspora? In an America in which people of color form the plurality, as has already happened in California, most with little or no historical experience with or knowledge of Jews, will Jewish sensitivities continue to enjoy extraordinarily high levels of deference and will Jewish interests continue to receive special protection? Does it matter that the majority non-European immigrants have no historical experience of the Holocaust or knowledge of the persecution of Jews over the ages and see Jews only as the most privileged and powerful of white Americans?

Center for Immigration Studies

October 2001

by Stephen Steinlight

Dr. Stephen Steinlight was for more than five years Director of National Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Jewish Committee. For the past two and a half years he has been a Senior Fellow at AJC. He is co-editor of the forthcoming Fractious Nation: Race, Class and Culture in America at the End of the Twentieth Century (UC-Berkeley Press), and he has recently been appointed editor of South Asia: In Review. The views expressed in this essay do not reflect the current policy position of AJC with regard to immigration.

Preface: Challenging A Crumbling Consensus
This piece is the fruit of an authentic and deeply felt conversion experience, but much as one hankers to grab the reader's attention with a dramatic retelling of a great and sudden epiphany, it didn't happen that way. My change of heart, of thought, came gradually, even reluctantly. It was the product of a long evolution, one that occurred incrementally and unevenly over the years I spent as an advocate in the immigration debate who came increasingly to doubt and now, finally, to disown his own case and cause. The conversion is also the result of the consumption of many books and monographs on many aspects of the issue, as well as my own reflections on the innumerable (and often interminable) coalition meetings and conferences I attended on the subject. Writing in the immediate wake of the nightmare America has experienced (I live in Manhattan and watched the second plane strike the World Trade Center), it must be added that the enormities committed by Islamist terrorists in my city, Washington, and Pennsylvania have given these thoughts greatly increased emotional urgency. But they developed unremarkably, slowly, steadily.

Most of all, my conversion is the consequence of my contact over the years with Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies, and the Center's work. We dialogued and formally debated on several occasions, and I moderated public forums in which Mark took part. If dialogue has any meaning, if speakers actually listen to each other rather than close their ears and merely wait impatiently to say their say, then the possibility that one can change as a result of what one hears must be acknowledged. The Socratic method was alive and well in our exchanges, and I did. But, as I've noted, the change came slowly, the process recalling not St. Paul on the road to Damascus but the Latin proverb Stillicidi casus lapidem cavat, "constant dripping hollows out a stone." My thought was also significantly influenced by a superb conference on immigration, "Thy People Shall Be My People: Immigration and Citizenship in America," sponsored by the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation in July of 2000. Perhaps its principal contribution to challenging my point of view was having the opportunity to listen to my own side's thesis articulated by those willing to take it to its extreme, and their reductio ad absurdum made plain the very great dangers within it.

Read more . . . (pdf)

Links:

Book Review of 'The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography' by Stephen Steinlight Review by Joseph Fallon (Spring 2002)

Single value that ties Jews together more than any other: They're anti-Christ [USA Today] Their anti-Christianity unites them more by far than the country of Israel does.

For most American Jews, the core of their Jewish identity isn’t solidarity with Israel; it’s rejection of Christianity. [Commentary.com]

2012 Jewish Values Survey [Public Religion]

Jews write about Jesus Christ [Jew or Not Jew] Oct 17, 2006

Fox News

by Todd Starnes

April 30, 2013

Religious liberty groups have grave concerns after they learned the Pentagon is vetting its guide on religious tolerance with a group that compared Christian evangelism to “rape” and advocated that military personnel who proselytize should be court martialed.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is calling on the Air Force to enforce a regulation that they believe calls for the court martial of any service member caught proselytizing.

President Mikey Weinstein and others from his organization met privately with Pentagon officials on April 23. He said U.S. troops who proselytize are guilty of sedition and treason and should be punished – by the hundreds if necessary – to stave off what he called a “tidal wave of fundamentalists.”

Read more . . .

Links:

An Interview with Michael Weinstein [The Philadelphia Jewish Voice]

Single value that ties Jews together more than any other: They're anti-Christ [USA Today] Their anti-Christianity unites them more by far than the country of Israel does.

For most American Jews, the core of their Jewish identity isn’t solidarity with Israel; it’s rejection of Christianity. [Commentary.com]

2012 Jewish Values Survey [Public Religion]

Jews write about Jesus Christ [Jew or Not Jew] Oct 17, 2006

Netanyahu wants the U.S. to fight Iran for Israel by Patrick Buchanan [LewRockwell.com] Mar 2, 2012

Benjamin Freedman: Jewish Causes of WWI and WWII [Hawaii Political Info] Mar 26, 2013

USS Liberty—Israeli Pilot Speaks Up [Rense.com]

MI figures out what went wrong in Lavon affair - 55 years later [Haaretz] (Israel) Israel's plan was to bomb Western targets, make it seem as though Egypt was behind the attacks. Nov 11, 2009

A newly published report from the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Interior sheds light on an illegitimate bureaucratic procedure used in 2011 to recognize a California Indian tribe. That same sort of procedure is probably being considered to get federal recognition for "Native Hawaiians."

The Akaka bill would grant federal recognition to "Native Hawaiians" as though they are an Indian tribe. The bill has had a chaotic history in Congress since July 20, 2000. In 13 years it has had numerous major revisions. Perhaps the height of the schizophrenia was in 2009 when three radically different versions of the bill were each introduced in both the House and Senate simultaneously as paired companions in February, March, and May! The Akaka bill passed the House in three different years but died in the Senate. In August/September 2005 Hurricane Katrina blew it off the Senate calendar, and in June 2006 a two-day filibuster killed it.

During 2010, 2011, and 2012 Senator Inouye repeatedly tried to use a stealth procedure to get the job done. He inserted a sentence into appropriations bills for the Department of Interior that would have authorized DOI to simply add "Native Hawaiians" to the list of federally recognized tribes, thereby immediately granting the Akaka tribe all the same powers and exemptions from state and local law as genuine tribes such as Navajo, Cherokee, Apache, etc. On each occasion Inouye's maneuver was discovered and his sentence was surgically removed from the appropriations bills.

But the idea of implementing the Akaka bill by some sort of bureaucratic process, without approval from Congress, lives on.

During 2010-2013 there have been vague but persistent rumors that the Hawaii Senators and Representatives are working with the Obama administration to create some sort of executive order or administrative decision to give federal recognition to the Akaka tribe, even in the absence of any action from Congress. Such a possibility seems quite plausible in view of President Obama's repeated use of executive orders and administrative rule-making to usurp the powers of Congress.

Now consider what actually happened in the Department of Interior in 2011 regarding a California tribe, which could very well happen during the remaining years of the Obama administration regarding the Akaka tribe.

Suppose a group of Indians has been trying to get federal recognition as an Indian tribe, which would allow them to eventually get reservation lands where they could operate businesses (including gas stations, liquor stores, and gambling casinos) exempt from state and local taxation, zoning laws, labor laws, etc. Suppose a government official abuses his authority and gives that Indian group federal recognition arbitrarily and capriciously, without requiring the Indian group to go through the usual process for proving it meets the seven mandatory requirements to be federally recognized (see 25 C.F.R., Section 83.7). Who would have standing to complain? Could the newly proclaimed "tribe" be stripped of federal recognition? Could the "tribe" then be retroactively stripped of the special rights which recognized tribes enjoy, even after already implementing some of those rights during the time when it was illegitimately recognized?

That's the scenario which seems to be unfolding regarding a California Indian group which was given federal recognition in December, 2011 by Larry Echo Hawk, who was then Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs.

The Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of the Interior has publicly released what it calls an "investigative report" severely criticizing Larry Echo Hawk, former Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, for improperly granting federal recognition to the "Tejon Indian Tribe." (California). The original report was dated January 9, 2013. Some juicy details were apparently removed; as the report was rewritten and released for public consumption on April 30, 2013.

Here's the official summary, as can be seen on the Department of Interior's website at
http://www.doi.gov/oig/news/investigative-report-of-the-tejon-indian-tri...

Hawaii now has two Senators and two Representatives who are all very inexperienced in Congress and have very low seniority. It is now May of 2013, and the Akaka bill has not yet been introduced in the 113th Congress. In the past 13 years there has never been such a long delay. Either our delegation has no idea what to do, or else they are participating in a stealth maneuver involving bureaucrats in the Obama administration, probably similar to what was done by Larry Echo Hawk to give recognition arbitrarily and improperly to the Tejon Indian Tribe.

On January 6, 2013 newly sworn-in Rep Tulsi Gabbard wrote in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser "I would immediately work with the delegation to pass a bill or administrative regulation acknowledging this status, without the government building components that would be difficult to pass at this time."

Toward the end of 2012 Senator Akaka, as chair of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, held a hearing on the Bureau of Indian Affairs process for granting tribal recognition, perhaps in response to concerns over what Echo Hawk had done. On March 19, 2013 the House Subcommittee on Indian and Alaska Native Affairs held an oversight hearing on "Authorization, standards, and procedures for whether, how, and when Indian tribes should be newly recognized by the federal government: Perspective of the Department of the Interior." The chair of that committee is Alaska Rep. Don Young, who has always favored the Akaka bill, and the ranking member is Hawaii Rep. Colleen Hanabusa. Testimony by the Office of Federal Recognition is available at
http://naturalresources.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=323343
On April 24, 2013, Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz said on Hawaii News Now TV stations "Support from Kevin Washburn, a top policy advisor in President Obama's administration, is very encouraging. He has a keen understanding of federal Indian law and the history of this nation's treatment of its indigenous people. His view that Native Hawaiians deserve to have the same government-to-government relationship as Native Alaskans and American Indians on the mainland is very welcomed and appreciated. I will continue to work with the Obama administration to find ways to pass the long awaited Akaka Bill and make equal treatment for Native Hawaiians a reality."

Let's hope the Inspector General's report sets in motion a process leading to revocation of the Tejon Tribe's recognition. And let's hope this puts an end to efforts to create a phony Akaka tribe by bureaucratic fiat.

Wired

May 2, 2013

A secretive federal court last year approved all of the 1,856 requests to search or electronically surveil people within the United States “for foreign intelligence purposes,” the Justice Department reported this week.

The report (.pdf), released Tuesday to Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader from Nevada, provides a brief glimpse into the caseload of what is known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. None of its decisions are public.

The 2012 figures represent a 5 percent bump from the prior year, when no requests were denied either.

Read more . . .

60 Minutes' first interview ever with a serial killer.

Nurse Charles Cullen has admitted killing up to 40 people. Some suspect it was many more.

Part 2 of the interview

Transcript

Published on YouTube Apr 30, 2013

Russia Today YouTube introduction: Top Afghan officials have been on the CIA's payroll for over a decade, receiving tens of millions of US dollars in cash. Afghan President Hamid Karzai admitted to receiving the clandestine financial support, but dismissed the sum as a "small amount." READ MORE: http://on.rt.com/56whxm