Canada Terrorism: Trump Silent As Quebec Mosque Terrorist Is White Christian Pro-Trump Fanatic - by Colin Taylor

Canadian police have just identified the lone gunman who attacked a Quebec mosque during prayers last night, killing five praying Muslims and injuring eight. Alexandre Bissonnettte, a Quebec native, has been taken into police custody.

Not surprisingly, Bissonnette’s Facebook page  (since taken down) shows that he “likes” Donald Trump and far-right, Islamophobic French politician Marine Le Pen. He also likes the Christian site Reasonable Faith. Here’s a screenshot from Bassinet’s Facebook page, taken before it was deleted, according to Heavy.com:

Bissonnettte is ardently pro-Trump and anti-Islam, according to a former classmate of his from Université Laval, who told Heavy.com that Bissonnettte “has right-wing political ideas, pro-Israel, anti-immigration. I had many debates with him about Trump. He was obviously pro-Trump.”

Furthermore, a Facebook group called “Welcome to Refugees – Quebec City” posted that it was familiar with Bissonnettte, and that he is “unfortunately known to several activists in Quebec City for his pro-Le Pen and anti-feminist identity positions at Université Laval and on social networks.” Le Pen is an ardent anti-Muslim French politician who has been closely linked to Trump in the past.

So let’s recap: one day after Donald Trump bans Muslims from several countries because, he claims, they pose a threat to the West, one of HIS deranged followers shoots up a crowd of Muslims whose only crime was peacefully practicing their faith.

Obviously, religions do not create terrorism, only terrorists do. But will Donald Trump now ban Canadian Christians from entering the United States? This tragic incident perfectly illustrates why blaming entire religions for violence is not only hateful and bigoted, but stupid and counterproductive.

Donald Trump’s Twitter has been uncharacteristically silent since the identity of the gunman was revealed. Hypocrisy, thy name is Donald Trump!
 
Read more: Trump Silent As Quebec Mosque Terrorist Is White Christian Pro-Trump Fanatic

Terrorism and Refugees: Records show that no refugees carried out in the United States

Trump’s executive order bans travel from seven countries — Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq and Iran — but it does not ban travel from residents of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. In addition, the K-1 fiancee program remains in place.

New York and New Jersey explosions

Ahmad Khan Rahimi faces an array of bombing, weapons and attempted murder charges in two on September 17, 2016, incidents. He is accused of detonating bombs in New Jersey and in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. The explosion in Chelsea injured 29 people.

Rahimi was born in Afghanistan and first came to the United States in 1995, following several years after his father arrived seeking asylum. Rahimi became a naturalized US citizen in 2011. He had recently spent time in Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials said.

Neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan is on Trump’s list of banned countries.

Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting

Omar Mateen, the man who shot and killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, was an American citizen living in Fort Pierce, Florida. He was born in New York, and his parents were from Afghanistan.

His widow, Noor Salman, was arrested earlier this month on charges of obstruction of justice and aiding and abetting her husband’s material support to ISIS. She grew up in Rodeo, California, and her parents immigrated to the United States from the West Bank in 1985, according to The New York Times.

Neither Afghanistan nor the West Bank is included on the list of banned countries.

Boston Marathon bombings

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, were born in Kyrgyzstan to parents originally from war-torn Chechnya.

The Tsarnaev family arrived in the United States when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was 8 years old, and they applied for and were granted political asylum. The process for applying for political asylum is different from the process of arriving as a refugee.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger brother, became a naturalized citizen in September 2012.

Chechnya and Kyrgyzstan are not included on the list of banned countries.

World Trade Center, September 11, 2001

Read more: How many terror attacks have refugees carried out in the United States? | fox13now.com

EU-US Relations: The EU is urged to "stand firm against Trump"

Europe is being urged to stand firm in the face of rhetoric coming from the new US president.

The French President says EU member states should remain steadfast whenever Donald Trump urges them to follow the UK’s decision to split with Brussels.

This, Francois Hollande says, is Trump trying to undermine the integrity of the EU.

“Whenever there are statements coming from the president of the United States on Europe and whenever he talks of Brexit as a model for other countries, I believe we should respond,” Hollande said on the sidelines of a summit in Portugal.

Note EU-Digest: Of course Europe must respond - specially following remarks by an ego-maniac like Trump

Read more: The EU is urged to "stand firm against Trump" | Euronews

EU-Digest and Almere-Digest Poll resuls show skepticism in Europe about Trump election

The combined results of the EU-Digest and Almere-Digest Poll on the question : Is the election of Donald Trump good for the EU  which ran from the day Donald Trump was declared the winner of the US Presidential Election was closed on January 27 showed skepticism in Europe about Donald Trumps election as it relates to the EU..

Only 2 % of those polled considered his election favorable for the EU, while 78 % polled considered it unfavorable,. 10 % had no opinion either way and another 10% had a variety of opinions ranging from extremely critical to neutral -"wait and see".

Almere-Digest

Mexico-US Relations: Mexican president cancels meeting with Trump (after being insulted) - by David Jackson

President Trump's proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico drove a diplomatic divide between the two countries Thursday, as Mexican counterpart Enrique Peña Nieto canceled a scheduled meeting with the new American president.

Trump, speaking to a congressional Republican retreat in Philadelphia, said he and Peña Nieto "agreed" to the cancellation; the president said he has made it clear to Mexico that it will finance the proposed wall and that the U.S. will seek changes to trade agreement with its southern neighbor.

“Unless Mexico is going to treat the United States fairly, with respect, such a meeting would be fruitless and I want to go a different route," Trump said. "We have no choice.”

Read more: Mexican president cancels meeting with Trump

Refugees - USA:- EU: Trump Blocks Syrian Refugees and Orders Mexican Border Wall to Be Built- by J.H. Davis

President Trump on Wednesday began a sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration, ordering the immediate construction of a border wall with Mexico and aggressive efforts to find and deport unauthorized immigrants. He planned additional actions to cut back on legal immigration, including barring Syrian refugees from entering the United States.

At the headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security, Mr. Trump signed a pair of executive orders that paved the way for a border wall and called for a newly expanded force to sweep up immigrants who are in the country illegally. He revived programs that allow the federal government to work with local and state law enforcement agencies to arrest and detain unauthorized immigrants with criminal records and to share information to help track and deport them.

He also planned to clamp down on legal immigration in another action expected as early as Thursday. An eight-page draft of that executive order, obtained by The New York Times, would indefinitely block Syrian refugees from entering the United States.

Also bar all refugees from the rest of the world for at least 120 days.

When the refugee program resumes, it would be much smaller, with the total number of refugees resettled in the United States this year more than halved, to 50,000 from 110,000.

t would also suspend any immigration for at least 30 days from a number of predominantly Muslim countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — while the government toughened its already stringent screening procedures to weed out potential terrorists.

White House officials declined to comment on the coming plan, but in a wide-ranging interview that aired Wednesday on ABC, Mr. Trump acknowledged that it aimed to erect formidable barriers for those seeking refuge in the United States.

He also said his administration would “absolutely do safe zones in Syria” to discourage refugees from seeking safety in other countries, and chided Europe and Germany in particular for accepting millions of immigrants. “It’s a disaster, what’s happening there,” Mr. Trump said.

Taken together, the moves would turn the full weight of the federal government to fortifying the United States border, rounding up some of the 11 million people who are in the country illegally and targeting refugees, who are often among the world’s most vulnerable people. It is an aggressive use of presidential power that follows through on the nationalistic vision Mr. Trump presented during his presidential campaign.

“A nation without borders is not a nation,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday at the Department of Homeland Security, where he signed the orders alongside the newly sworn-in secretary, John F. Kelly. “Beginning today, the United States of America gets back control of its borders.”

The plans are a sharp break with former President Barack Obama’s approach and what was once a bipartisan consensus to devise a path to citizenship for some of the nation’s illegal immigrants. Mr. Obama, however, angered many immigrant groups by deporting millions of unauthorized workers, largely during his first term.

“It’s going to be very hard to come in,” Mr. Trump said. “Right now, it’s very easy to come in.”

Note E-Digest:  Since Mr. Trump brought up his thoughts on refugees and immigrants entering the US it might also be appropriate, in that same context, to bring up Europe's refugee problems. 

So here we go again in bringing the Refugee Crises in Europe and its causes to the attention of the Public at Large, the EU Commission, the EU Parliament, EU member states government, and last but not least President Trump, who even admitted during his presidential campaign that the US. should never have started the war against Iraq, because it did so under under a false pretext. 

Fact is that the large number of Refugees we are dealing with in the EU and Turkey today, are the direct result of the US invasion of Iraq some 14 years ago. 

This war had a 'snowball' effect  on the Middle East and North Africa and turned the whole area  into a war-zone.  The result of all this today, millions of refugees fleeing to the EU and Turkey..

Hopefully Mr. Trump  will not only apologize to the victims of thye war crimes committed by his fellow Republican President  George Bush, but also compensate the EU for the costs they are incurring as a result of the large inflow of refugees from the Middle East into the EU. 

As the saying goes "if you do the crime you have to do the time." or in this case - please pay up for those costs incurred by the EU on behalf of your country's failed Middle East policies Mr. Trump..  

 Read mor4e: Trump Blocks Syrian Refugees and Orders Mexican Border Wall to Be Built - The New York Times

USA: It was always 'America First,' President Trump. What's new?

As if it has ever been anything but America First!

Either President Trump lacks the intelligence and the education needed to appreciate the dynamics of the modern world or he has cynical contempt for the intelligence and education of his voters.

In either case, the inaugural address of America’s 45th president trumpeted an obtuse self-interest, whose only moral compass is the conviction that might is right, a self-interest so near-sighted as to be self-defeating, one that panders to ill-informed prejudice at home and promises to cede more elbow room to rising powers hitherto hemmed in by overarching American presence. Hide that smirk, President Xi!

Politicians who come to power feeding and feeding off a majority’s imagined sense of victimhood have to genuflect, once in a while, to the bogey they rode but would, if they have sense, concentrate their energiesBSE 9.03 %, having assumed power, on building up an alternative, real agenda — say, development .

Some do not.

Hitler chose to persist with the Jews, pursuing their extermination to the Holocaust and associated politics by other means across the globe. Trump told Americans they were the victims of elite selfishness and grandiose altruism that saw America sacrifice its own security and prosperity for the benefit of others.

His inaugural speech promises to reverse that selfishness and altruism, to bring back to America jobs, prosperity, greatness, and, implicitly, a way of life in which men were men, brought home the bacon for the wife to cook, cheerfully looking up recipes from Good Housekeeping and other such trusted guides of the homemaker.

Lying is not a term that should be used to describe the exalted office Trump occupies. So, let us say Trump’s commitment to liberty extends to snapping the the restraining bonds of truth and mere facts.

The reality is that American policy has always put, surprise, America first

True, America funded the Marshall plan, to rebuild Europe. But that, too, furthered American prosperity and security. American entrepreneurs thrived, American factories hummed and gave Baby Boomers their day jobs as America supplied the wherewithal for rebuilding a bombed out Europe.

European nations rebuilt themselves as loyal members of the anti-Soviet alliance led by the US. Keeping the communist menace at bay was not just a virtue in itself but also a handy excuse for toppling the liberal democratic government of Iran, supporting the authoritarian governments in Arab lands, including in Israel, and imposing American hegemony over the most plentiful source of oil of those times.

True, China runs up a huge trade surplus with the US. But the bulk of the value added in the production of iPhones shipped from China to the US accrues to Apple and its investors.

 Read the complete report "It was always 'America First,' President Trump. What's new? - The Economic Times