The 19% Job Approval US Congress flexes its Human Rights Muscle?

Armenian Genocide Resolution Advances Despite Obama Push - WSJ.com: "The House panel's resolution, approved on a 23-22 vote, faces an uncertain future in Congress. But it nonetheless could damage U.S. relations with Turkey, a vital ally in the Middle East and Central Asia. Within minutes of the vote, Ankara said it was recalling its ambassador from Washington for consultations. Turkey took the same step in 2007, when the committee passed a similar resolution."

President Obama's administration tried to derail this decision, partly because of concerns from the Weapon Industry, and Hilary Clinton warned that it could derange the sensitive negotiations between Turkey and Armenia. The decision means that the US is closing in on the 20 nations so far claiming that Turkey committed a genocide. The NGO? European Parliament also does. The 20 countries are: Argentina, Armenia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lituania, Lebanon, The Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, Uruguay, Vatican City, and Venezuela.

Genocide scholars generally think it was a genocide and it would be interesting to know why Obama hesitates. He claimed genocide during his campaign. Maybe he has to please people to get his Healthcare bill through? The House Committee on Foreign Affairs did the right thing though. There will never be any meaningful discussion with Turkey if such a historic facts is not visible on the table. This is even more important when Turkey is a NATO ally. Procuring help from Turkey with Iran and Afghanistan also benefits from this clarity.

One wonders why Israel and the UK does not use the word "genocide" to describe what happened in 1915. In 2007 Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates wrote an open letter to Congress where they warned for increased risks for US troops in the field if Turkey was antagonized. WSJ.com also writes that there will now be a probable increase of anti-Americanism in Turkey, something that is a problem already. DN.se writes that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish premier, also have written on the official Turkish web site that the incident might damage the American-Turkish relations and jeopardize the negotiations with Armenia.

Eurabia?

Blond bombshell Geert Wilders returns to Britain, looking for a fight - Times Online: "On February 20 the Dutch centrist coalition Government collapsed, deeply divided over keeping troops in Afghanistan, paving the way for a general election in June in which the Freedom Party is expected to do extremely well. Polls suggest that the party will triple its tally of seats, becoming at least the second-biggest parliamentary party and quite possibly the overall winner. Mr Wilders is likely to be a key player in any coalition, with a profound impact on the political agenda."

Last time Wilders was not allowed to enter the UK. This time he is back and more popular at home. I must say I have problems with a person that wants to ban the holy book, the Quran, of a world religion. This is not serious. Furthermore he wants to slam head-scarf wearing Muslim women with a €1,000/year tax. "A head-rag tax". Not very serious either.

He is a person that equals Islamofascism with Nazism. That is not so far out, since the Israel prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu compares Ahmadinejad's Iran with the Nazi Germany of the area. Wilders is getting good press in The Jerusalem Post. However, what is such a person capable of executing and with what public support once he would be elected? There is definitely a whiff of future racist persecution over what I just wrote. On top of this we are one minaret ban vote in Switzerland and a call against Switzerland for Jihad from Muammar Gadhafi later at this point.

In other words this looks like a problem that is not going away by itself. What can be done about it? Personally I don't feel threatened by Islam and I am for freedom of religion but I intensely dislike the habit some of Islam's practitioners have to field these death threats. This is fascist methods. And it apparently works on people. There was a recent apology by the journal Politiken in Denmark for the Muhammad cartoons. Many disliked the apology though. I would not have apologized. Freedom of the press is one of the corner stones of our civilization.

The James Watson debacle

"There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."
Says James Watson, the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix and the 50 year chief of the prestigeous Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a job he left after the debacle. It so happened, I said something similar earlier today, because most people with my background probably would.

Watson defends himself in an article two days later October 19, 2oo7: To question genetic intelligence is not racism.

Because what Watson also said was that Africans were not as intelligent as Westerners. This is of course politically very difficult to say. He also said that there had been tests that confirmed this. It does not say what tests this was but one might guess that it should be possible to formally test this with regular intelligence tests. Personally, I have no information as to the accurracy of this claim but people are not contradicting Watson with facts but rather with harsh words. However, Watson said that he did not claim that Africa as a continent was genetically inferior.

"Science is no stranger to controversy. The pursuit of discovery, of knowledge, is often uncomfortable and disconcerting." These words of James Watson are interesting from the point of view of Religious Humanism that claims that scientific pursuit is equivalent with the search for God.

Another hot question that especially religious people seemingly hate to discuss is that of the possibility that not only intelligence but also spirituality is genetically determined and normally distributed. Religious people seem to prefer a nonbiological approach to spirituality. A supernatural approach.

Watson argues that before long the nature versus nurture debate will be settled more firmly. It is possible that this debate is so sensitive that its pursuit will be blocked.

SvD.se wrote this on October 18, 2007
USAbloggen wrote this on October 25, 2007
I don't find anything in Dagens Nyheter which surprises me.

Dagens Citat

Sverigedemokraterna - www.sverigedemokraterna.se: "Brottsligheten är hög, antalet missbrukare bli större och sjukskrivningarna är snart flest i världen. Sverige är ett sjukt samhälle, därför att medborgarna inte trivs. Bara en nationalistisk politik kan ge den trygghet och den omtanke som minskar kriminaliteten, får bort drogerna och ger de sjuka livslusten åter"
The question is what this party would do as a leading government party. Send all non-aryan people back (not home)? Apparently Sweden is a sick society due to immigrants.

Well, Europe is polarizing with Turkish, Arabic and Persian immigration. It is to be expected that SD is going to grow more in Sweden. My conclusion is that we have to get used to this and learn to coexist. I believe in multiculturalism. The question is if we are going to learn anything from the US where they have a black President and a latina Supreme Court Justice. Turks are faring very badly in Germany, for example. There are many third generation Turks that are not citizens yet. Anti-semitism is back in most European countries as well.

So what can be done to prevent further sympathies for SD? A good advise is probably for immigrants to integrate as much as possible. Acceptance for non-identical race immigrants comes one outstanding person at the time, like with Obama and Sotomayor. It is a slow process. I was an immigrant in the US myself once. Assimilation of values is perhaps most important. However, it is also important to recognize that a country and its values change with immigration. Hopefully in the end we reach homogeneity to a greater extent in Europe even if the cultural mix is quite extraordinary.

Sonia Sotomayor

Census Projections: U.S. Will Be Half Minority By 2042: "Some amazing projections were released by the U.S. Census Bureau this morning: by the year 2042, more than half of America's population will be made up of minority groups. ... Minority children, meanwhile, will hit 50 percent of the youth population by 2023."

The Hispanics are spearheading this population dynamic, they will triple between 2008 to 2050, and it is therefore highly appropriate for President Obama to nominate Sonia Sotomayor as a Supreme Court Justice. It is unifying the US more at the same time as it is causing a divide, at least according to some columns.

From our standpoint here in Sweden it is interesting to see how quickly race has become an issue and how it seems to play out in the US which have larger minorities than we have. Apparently there is quite an affinity among people of the same race. As Maureen Dowd points out today in The New York Times, post-racial did not quite work for Obama. However, people have racial affinities but they can coexist as well.

Further Cell Divisions?

Fatah leader hints at party split Middle East Jerusalem Post: "As more than 2,000 delegates gathered in Bethlehem for the long-delayed Sixth Fatah Congress, the leader of Fatah in Bethlehem warned of a split in the party if the leadership denies a role to the younger generation who launched a wave of violence against Israel in the second intifada."

The article discusses the possibility of a third Intifada and they give another illustrative citation:

"We can't say that the old people are expired," he said. "We can't say this because we are still in need, you know, for their wisdom and their experience. However, we will like also to see the young people participate in this movement and have their role, their active role."

Mona Sahlin is apparently vising the congress held in Bethlehem. It would be interesting to read about her assessment.

The "Birther" Movement

Eugene Robinson - Obama, Clearly Born in the U.S.A. - washingtonpost.com: "The 'birthers' wouldn't be, either, unless you believe a poll released last week by Research 2000 revealing that an astounding 28 percent of Republicans actually think that Obama was not born in the United States and a separate 30 percent are 'not sure.' GOP officials need to order more tinfoil."

Apart from the health care debate, the absurd movement, the birthers, also seem to divide the US according to the poll cited. I remember a talk given by a Chinese descendant, it was the Democrat response to George W. Bush's State of the Union Address, where he claimed that it takes a 100 years for an immigrant family person to reach a point where he is allowed to give such a talk. Then came President Obama. No wonder there is a birther movement.

For those who by chance don't know this, it necessary to be born on American soil to be a president. Robinson asks whether or not this is an orchestrated campaign to legitimize Obama's presidency perhaps in the same way that the Jeremiah 'God Damn America' Wright story unfolded. And now the latest Obama-gates story that seemed to not want to disappear from the media despite a "Beer Summit". Not to forget the Sotomayor appointment.

The American dream?

Op-Ed Columnist - White Man’s Last Stand - NYTimes.com: "A wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not know that a gaggle of white Republican men afraid of extinction are out to trip her up."

Maureen Dowd has a way with words. The democrats have, as I pointed out in a post the other day, become the smartest party and apparently Dowd sees the Republicans as dinosaurs. I agree, in Obama's world they indeed have become extinct.

Sweden is quickly becoming a country with a significant fraction of immigrants and the reverse racism introduced by Sonia Sotomayor, and thus endorsed by President Obama, has great importance. I commented earlier on her "wise Latina" comment and gave the reference to that talk in which she mentioned it. She defended herself with a comment that meant she wanted to entice young Latinas into the trade. Thus it is possible to defend her on this by claiming she supports and herself embodies the American Dream.

In other words, it has become more important to defend all races possibility for achieving the American Dream than upholding race neutrality. This was new to me when I wrote my last post about Sotomayor but Obama also speak race when in Ghana the other day. It was certainly not the same talk he gave at the Russian elite school in Moscow. Race is returning now as a power talk against the white blue eyed men that created the financial crisis according to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil.

I think I prefer race neutrality in this world but after being reminded of the history of racism in a TV program yesterday it is clear that we probably have a few miles left on that road. It was not that long ago that we exterminated people of different descent. Let's hope the Democrats are not going to exterminate the Republicans. We might be entering a new era where racial neutrality is actually going to be countered by the Asians, Indians, Africans, Muslims and the Latinos. This will worry the blue eyed whites, for sure, who are not in the majority.

I think I understand why President Obama is promoting the American Dream over racial neutrality. The US is highly dependent on being the magnet of talent from all over the world and clearly making this point will ensure immigration from Asia, India, Africa, and South America. He might alienate himself a little from Europe, the traditional source of talent, but they will probably want to retain their talent these days anyhow.

In any case, I believe Sonia Sotomayor will become an excellent Supreme Court Justice.