Not the Onion: "Refugees in Germany go on ‘vacation’ to war-torn homelands"

"The information was unveiled by the outlet Die Welt am Sonntag, citing its own investigation. The inquiry included testimonies from registered asylum seekers in Germany who are entitled to so-called HARTZ-IV social benefits. Some of them confirmed to the newspaper that they “traveled for a short period of time back to countries like Syria, Afghanistan or Lebanon.”"

There are such cases,” an unnamed spokesperson for the German Federal Employment Office (BA) confirmed to the publication. The representative, however, stressed that no official numbers are available.

“We do not conduct any analysis or statistics on this subject and therefore we do not have any information,” the source added. The body is now trying to figure out the number of refugees opting for such a “vacation” in their homeland.

According to the current rules applying to asylum seekers claiming social benefits in Germany, they are eligible to leave the country for a total of 21 days per year. Migrants however are not obliged to report to authorities where they are traveling, but merely when and for how long.

“There is no legal ground to demand that information from him,” BA said, as quoted by Die Welt am Sonntag. Should authorities still get aware of a refugee heading back to states like Syria or Iraq, they are “not allowed to pass that information to other authorities due to the data privacy.”

"What if “radicalization” doesn’t look anything like we think it does?"

Foreign Policy:  Among scholars, “radicalization” is commonly understood as a gradual process in which people adopt ever more extreme postures and beliefs. It is widely thought that this process begins with a dramatic event or personal crisis, paving the way for a “cognitive opening” — a receptivity to alternative views and perspectives — and a period of religious seeking, often mediated by an extremist mentor and a wider social network.

The assumption is that while not all radicals become terrorists, all terrorists are radicals.

The Abdeslam brothers, with their sudden escalation from dancing in nightclubs to killing in them over the course of a few months, seem to challenge this picture. They also raise a deeper and more troubling question for those seeking to understand the genesis of terrorist acts: What if they were not “radicalized” and underwent no dramatic metamorphosis at all? What if their violence had only the most tenuous connection to what they believed, whatever that was? What if the story of how they came to be involved in terrorism had no real coherent narrative arc? What if the script of terrorism doesn’t always feature the drama of radicalization?

This article reminded me of a New Yorker piece (which I posted but can't locate) by Malcolm Gladwell of Tipping Point fame called Thresholds of Violence, How school shootings catch on.  Excerpt...

In a famous essay published four decades ago, the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter set out to explain a paradox: “situations where outcomes do not seem intuitively consistent with the underlying individual preferences.” What explains a person or a group of people doing things that seem at odds with who they are or what they think is right?...

Most previous explanations had focussed on explaining how someone’s beliefs might be altered in the moment. An early theory was that a crowd cast a kind of intoxicating spell over its participants. Then the argument shifted to the idea that rioters might be rational actors: maybe at the moment a riot was beginning people changed their beliefs. They saw what was at stake and recalculated their estimations of the costs and benefits of taking part.

But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

Granovetter was most taken by the situations in which people did things for social reasons that went against everything they believed as individuals. “Most did not think it ‘right’ to commit illegal acts or even particularly want to do so,” he wrote, about the findings of a study of delinquent boys. “But group interaction was such that none could admit this without loss of status; in our terms, their threshold for stealing cars is low because daring masculine acts bring status, and reluctance to join, once others have, carries the high cost of being labeled a sissy.” You can’t just look at an individual’s norms and motives. You need to look at the group.

Meanwhile... State seeks to pick up pace on bringing Syrian refugees to US

[T]he settlement has provoked a significant backlash, mostly from Republicans, who argue it puts the U.S. at risk from terrorism.

“It's clear that ISIS wants to, has planned on attempting to infiltrate refugee populations. This is a problem. If one person gets through who is planning a terrorist attack in our country, that's a problem,” House Speaker Paul Ryan, who recently returned from a trip to the region, said Thursday.

“The administration — whether it's Homeland Security or the FBI, cannot tell us that they can adequately screen people. There isn't really a Syria to talk to on that end of the equation to vet people, so it is a problem,” Ryan told reporters.

The State Department says it has fallen behind schedule in meting Obama’s goal partly due to a lack of personnel available to interview refugees.

Canadians calling for more Syrian refugees

Canada will take in an additional 10,000 Syrian refugees, adding to the more than 25,000 already received in the last few months, said immigration minister John McCallum.

McCallum told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp he was responding to complaints from Canadian groups who want to sponsor Syrian refugees but did not have their applications processed quickly enough to be among the government’s initial target of 25,000.

“We are doing everything we can to accommodate the very welcomed desire on the part of Canadians to sponsor refugees,” McCallum said in a phone interview with CBC News from Berlin, where he is meeting with the German interior minister.

The Liberal government won election in October 2015 pledging to bring in more Syrian refugees more quickly than the previous Conservative government. Private groups including church, family and community organizations had lined up to sponsor Syrian families.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/31/canada-10000-syria-refugees-john-mccallum

"German leisure centre ban all migrants..."

"...after a schoolgirl was sexually assaulted in a public swimming pool by Syrian teenagers"

Three Syrian boys were arrested earlier this month over the attack at a leisure centre in Munich...

The ban also follows an attack by an 18-year-old refugee on a 54-year-old woman in Bornheim, where he had grabbed her by the private parts and tried to kiss her...

Bornheim currently has 300 refugees living in accommodation who have been told that the ban will be lifted when the message has been received that women need to be respected.

In the Munich attack, the three boys are alleged to have surrounded the 17-year-old girl in the pool before one of them groped her underneath her swimming costume in an offence deemed rape under local law.

When the girl's sister, 14, tried to make them stop, she too was groped by the trio of teenagers, who were all aged under 15.

The girls managed to flee and raise the alarm with the lifeguard at the swimming pool, who called police.

It comes after more than three hundred women reported being sexually assaulted by groups of mostly Arab or North African men in Cologne during New Year celebrations.

Hundreds of criminal complaints have been filed by police, with about 45 per cent involving allegations of sexual offences, and most of the suspects identified so far are foreign nationals.

The attack have been seized by right-wing groups as evidence that chancellor Angela Merkel's open door policy is a failure.

"Reports: asylum seekers among Cologne attacks suspects"

"According to the newspapers' reports, citing officers on duty on New Year's Eve, officials checked the IDs of at least 100 people present at Cologne's central station on December 31 after their behavior became conspicuous. Seventy-one people were identified, 11 people were remanded into custody and 32 criminal complaints were registered, according to the Welt am Sonntag (WamS) report."

"There were, quite to the contrary of what was said publicly, identity checks on numerous people," the WamS quoted an unnamed officer as saying. "Most of them were recently-arrived asylum seekers."

"For the mostly Arabic offenders, sexual assault was the priority, or, to express it from their point of view, their sexual amusement was the priority. A group of men would encircle a female victim, close the loop, and then start groping the woman," WamS quoted the officer as saying.

Meanwhile, the German government, in charge of protecting their citizens, (I'm assuming) most of all the physically less capable, like the women, is cracking down on "anti-immigration speech."

Prosecutors are charging people who are “inciting hatred” in Germany by speaking out against immigrants and their impact on German society. Prosecutors and judges are determining what criticism will be allowed and what will be treated as criminal. In the meantime, the government has reached a deal with Facebook, Google and Twitter to crackdown on Internet speech. It is an effort to create the artificial appearance of agreement and tolerance by denying free speech to critics. While it is still not clear how many of the Cologne attackers were immigrants (two of the suspects have been identified as Moroccan citizens), the incident has been a flashpoint as numerous stories of women and girls being harassed about their clothing or assaulted by immigrants. For example, a 26-year-old Berlin man’s home was raided by police, who confiscated his computer and phones after he had posted the image of a dead 3-year-old Syrian boy on a Turkish beach and wrote “We are not mourning, we are celebrating!” A disgusting comment and one that is worthy public condemnation. However, it is also an act of free speech.

Nevertheless, many citizens are celebrating the denial of their own free speech rights. So long as they disagree with the speakers, there appears little concern over the rising tide of censorship and criminalization of speech. People are now unsure what they can say about immigration, which is precisely the chilling effect that governments seek in such measure. The result is a forced silence . . . which is golden for governments like Merkel’s that do not like what they are hearing.

David Frum: America's Immigration Challenge

"However one assesses that chain and its consequences, it seems clear that the large majority of legal immigrants choose to come—or, more exactly, are chosen by their relatives—for their own reasons. They are not selected by the United States to advance some national interest. Illegal immigrants are of course entirely self-selected, as are asylum seekers. Even the refugee process, reportedly the most tightly screened, operates to a considerable extent outside national control...."

Donald Trump’s noisy complaints that immigration is out of control are literally true. Nobody is making conscious decisions about who is wanted and who is not, about how much immigration to accept and what kind to prioritize—not even for the portion of U.S. migration conducted according to law, much less for the larger portion that is not.

Nor is there much understanding of what has happened after it has happened. A simple question like, “How many immigrants are in prison?” turns out to be extraordinarily hard to answer. Poor information invites excessive fears, which are then answered with false assurances and angry accusations.

Nervous about Syrian refugees in the wake of the Paris massacre? How dare you! Would you turn away Jews fleeing Hitler? Oh, you think that analogy is hyperbolic? Tell it to the mayor of New York City.

This frequent invocation of the refugee trauma of the 1930s shuts down all discussion of anything that has happened since....

Meantime "More Than 10,000 Unaccompanied Minors Apprehended on U.S. Border in Last Two Months"

While the world has been focused on Europe's migrant crisis, apprehensions of unaccompanied minors along America's own border have exploded...

Sessions: Current plan gives Obama "blank check" on immigration, Syrian refugees

"As currently written, this year's appropriations bills – which will be combined into a catch-all 'omnibus' by December 11th – amount to a blank check for the president to carry out his refugee resettlement plans," he said in a statement.

"Not only will the president be allowed to bring in the 85,000 refugees he has announced on top of current record immigration levels, but this will include at least 10,000 refugees from Syria who will subsequently be able to bring in their foreign relatives. All refugees are eligible for lifetime government assistance and can draw funds from Social Security and Medicare at Americans' expense. More than 90 percent of recent Middle Eastern refugees are on welfare. And they are on a fast-track to becoming voting U.S. citizens," added the senator.

The immigration and Syrian refugee plan have faced criticism from lawmakers and GOP governors and could become a flashpoint during voting. As a result, it could result in a government shutdown if the funding isn't cut, according to congressional sources.

Speaker Ryan: "It's better to be safe than to be sorry"

"A total of 30 governors, including one Democrat, so far have expressed opposition to the plan [to bring into the US tens of thousands of Syrian refugees] in the wake of Friday's attacks, executed by at least one suspected Syrian refugee with ties to the Islamic State terror group and who perhaps slipped through Europe’s vetting process."

However, scholars and legal experts acknowledge that governors have little if any power to stop refugees from entering their states, citing the Refugee Act of 1980 which gives the federal government the authority.

“Immigration is a federal responsibility,” James Carafano, a national security and foreign policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., said Tuesday...

Administration officials also reiterated that President Obama's top priority is "the safety of the American people."

"Even as the United States accepts more refugees-including Syrians-we do so only after they undergo the most rigorous screening and security vetting of any category of traveler to the United States," the White House said.

Speaking of "rigorous screening and security"... "Undercover DHS Tests Find Security Failures at US Airports" reported as recent as June of this year.

According to officials briefed on the results of a recent Homeland Security Inspector General’s report, TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 tests, with Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints.

I know, apples and oranges some might say, it will probably be a different agency doing the Syrian refugee screening. But, do we really want to take the chance they wont miss any ISIS sympathizers? People who didn't notice Hillary was handling national secrets from a home brew server, for four years?  

By the way, remember the downed plane the press was focusing on before the Paris attacks?.. Russia says bomb brought down jet in Sinai.