U.S. Humanitarian Relief for Ukrainians in the Wake of Russian Invasion

A Ukrainian woman reacts after arriving at the Medyka border crossing, in Poland, Sunday, Feb. 27, 2022.  Since Russia launched its offensive on Ukraine, more than 200,000 people have been forced to flee the Country to bordering nations like Romania, Poland, Hungary, Moldova, and the Czech Republic — in what the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, said will have “devastating humanitarian consequences” on civilians. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu) (Fair Use)

Most of the World has been horrified by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign nation that posed no threat whatsoever to the Russian Federation.  The U.N. estimates that two million refugees have already fled Ukraine.  While preliminary reports suggested that the total number of refugees could be as high as five million, I believe the number will be much, much higher as the fighting continues and Russian forces target civilians. U.S. sees 'very credible reports' of deliberate attacks on civilians in Ukraine.

The United States has helped organize a strong, united response to this Russian aggression. Still, it has only begun to consider what steps it will take to protect the countless citizens of Ukraine fleeing the violence or who have found themselves stranded overseas when the invasion started.

This post will discuss the most recent aid developments and the options that Ukrainians have, depending on where they are and what their current U.S. immigration "status" is.

For the Record: D'Souza as academic historian, Shapiro as historical hallucinogen

I know everybody's seen this picture, but I can't get over it: the evil, violent criminals invading our country, as Trump sees them, fleeing from tear gas. Photo by Kim Kyung-hoon/Reuters, via NBC.

One of the more fun D'Souza owns, short and sweet:

Woodward clearly never read more than 10 pages of Illiberal Education. He endorsed it on purely ideological grounds, and as John Hope Franklin said it was reprehensible. When Eugene Genovese turned right he also crossed the line from history to propaganda https://t.co/kccrD38bXR

— Yasterisk (@Yastreblyansky) November 26, 2018

And what George Fredrickson said about you? That he hasn't read your book but probably disagrees with one of the points. https://t.co/1NdLy9ReVp Kindly explain how that constitutes praise. pic.twitter.com/0tDCtNSDgj

— Yasterisk (@Yastreblyansky) November 26, 2018

Finally, nobody criticizes you for not being an academic historian, but for doing terrible, shoddy, ideologically distorted, historically illiterate work and being completely unaware of the rules academic and gifted amateur historians follow.

— Yasterisk (@Yastreblyansky) November 26, 2018

And below the fold, an exhausting encounter with a troll and with reference to this:

West of Eden: Mission Accomplished

Mission Accomplished banner, Arrested Development, via Arrested Development Wiki.

Screenshot just in case somebody tells Trump what he just did and the thing gets deleted. 

George W, in an undisclosed location, chuckles, remembering he's not the worst president in US history any more.

Meanwhile, special thanks from most of the world to Defense Secretary James Mattis and, I think, President Emmanuel Macron for satisfying our emperor's need to display his manly firmness and compassion at so little cost, taking no lives (apparently no casualties at all among Syrian troops or civilians, though hardly anybody seems to be asking, thanks BBC), and not making the Syrian situation markedly worse than it was before. Maybe even making it a little better, if it's true that facilities for making chemical weapons have really been damaged or destroyed.

I really do think there's something brilliant about Macron and the ability he's shown to mediate the behavior of the two emperors, Putin and Trump, with whom he's cultivated something like friendship, and I'm sure he deserves some credit for talking Trump down from demanding more war.

It was a scary moment last night when Trump (or the text written for him) suggested this might be the start of something big—

Cheap shots: Daily Caller trying to terrorize us

This movie exists! Though it was a pretty pathetic flop. I bet it's great. It's an adaptation originally by Arthur Miller of Henrik Ibsen's great play, in which McQueen's character is a scientist who exposes the bourgeoisie of a Norwegian town profiting from water pollution. making him the enemy of the title. Let's all be #EnemiesOfThePeople.

Almost as many as the Republicans being checked out for collusion with Russian agents https://t.co/UuH9MpmCnu via @dailycaller

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 6, 2017

Seriously, .@DailyCaller, did your anonymous source explain discrepancy with official DHS report 2 weeks ago saying refugees are no threat? pic.twitter.com/pDrDrIFJmn

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 6, 2017

The citation is from AP story in USA Today.

.@DailyCaller Also, I thought Mr. Trump told you not to use anonymous sources. Are you the enemy of the people now?

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 6, 2017

Incompetent malevolence and its friends

Marion Davies and William Haines in King Vidor's Show People (1928). 

So the Ninth Circuit Court has upheld the temporary restraining order on the imperial decree to Not Order a Complete and Total Ban on Muslims Entering This Country Until We Figure Out Just What in the Hell Is Going On but Something That Reminds People of That.

Conservative Trumposceptics are having a hard time processing it. On the one hand, because it's Trump, they've given themselves permission to see one aspect or another of how bad the decree was, its terrible drafting, its incompetent execution, even some of its hideous consequences; but on the other hand, the court decision is an example of dread JUDICIAL ACTIVISM, or a violation of the sacred constitutional principle that judicial review applies only to the actions of Democrats, and thus ipso facto bad in its own right. So how is a true conservative to respond to a dilemma like that? What would Cato the Censor do?

Jonah Goldberg on NPR offered some dizzying footwork trying to manage the problem, which I may get to after the transcript comes up, but the funniest thing of the morning is a piece by Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare, which Trump thought, embarrassingly enough, was on his side. The piece acknowledged that

Lie like a Trump: Update

February 2016—he's a brand-new freshman, which makes me wonder why NPR went to him as an authority (update: maybe the senior members are getting more and more reluctant to defend the Trump). Also wonder what lie he was telling when he made this weasel face?

The transcript of that interview with Mike Johnson (R-LA) is up:

INSKEEP: One other thing, Congressman, before I let you go, the president made a statement the other day. He was talking at Central Command - United States Central Command. And he said that the media were hiding terrorist attacks, not reporting terrorist attacks. It was a false claim. The White House was asked for evidence that there were hidden terrorist attacks. They came up with a list of many attacks, like the attack on Paris or Nice, France, that we've covered extensively, that other people have covered extensively. It's just a false claim.

But that leads to my question. If the president's policies are right, why does he have to make false statements to defend them? Why can't the truth suffice?

JOHNSON: Well, listen, I think the truth is out there. I think NPR does a fair job in objectively covering that. But, you know, I would point out Fordham Law School's Center on National Security. Their new report - they released a report on ISIS prosecutions in the U.S. They determined that nearly 20 percent of alleged facilitators in ISIS prosecutions, in our country, do involve refugees and asylees. I mean, those kinds of facts are not as widely publicized, but they should be. I think the American people have a right to know that.

"The American people" have a right to not be abused by this kind of bald prevarication. Note the particular gesture by which he sidesteps Inskeep's question by suggesting the president's mendacity doesn't do any harm: "the truth is out there." It's OK to him that the president lies, because NPR is there and you can always listen to them instead if you want. Everybody playing her or his own part.

And further evidence that this is a Republican phenomenon, not a uniquely Trumpian thing, when he proceeds to dump a falsehood (see previous post) on NPR, one that makes the president's falsehood sound more plausible. Inskeep is perfectly likely to come up with a correction on this sooner or later, but the damage will have been done. It really enrages me.

Lie like a Trump

Syrian refugees in Lebanon, July 2013, via CNN.

Listening to Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) on NPR, who argues how the #MuslimBan isn't a Muslim ban because there are 40 Muslim-majority countries that aren't on it, and wishing as usual that somebody would explain: just because it will fail to ban most Muslims doesn't mean it's not a Muslim ban; it's just an ineffective one—it's aimed more at gratifying Trump's fans and giving the false impression that Trump has kept a campaign promise than anything else. It is a fake Muslim ban; a con, like everything Trump does. Nevertheless it plainly discriminates against Muslims. Just not all Muslims (and not any Muslims with whom President Trump has business dealings, as has been pointed out).

Anyway, Inskeep woke me by asking Johnson, to my surprise, why it is that Trump feels he needs to use untrue statements—I'll get the exact wording when they put up a transcript—and Johnson replied not with an answer to the question or a denial of its premises (why bother?) but some whataboutism, proffered with Kellyanne swiftness and aplomb; well, there are a lot of facts out there, and they don't get publicized, for instance this Fordham University study where they found that most 20% of people in the US charged as ISIS supporters were in fact refugees.

A little Googling revealed what he was talking about:

Note on the Oz refugees

Photo via Green Left Weekly.

An ironic thing about the Trump-Turnbull dustup where poor old Trump sent his intemperate foolery halfway around the world and hung up on the Oz prime minister—apparently tired and cranky after a long napless day, because as you know he's all about stamina for other people but not so much himself—

Wait, so the WH is admitting @realDonaldTrump is physically unable to handle the stress of the job? https://t.co/QjbimWa9ub

— John Aravosis (@aravosis) February 2, 2017

—an ironic thing, I was saying, is that the Australian policy he's objecting to is fundamentally Trumpian: a selfish and radically un–Judeo-Christian-Muslim refusal to lift a finger in aid of desperate refugees and determination that somebody else should deal with them.

For Australia's conservative Liberal-National coalition (the liberals are Labor), when it came into power in 2013, was determined to cut down the number of refugees of color appearing on their shores all the way to zero, and that's what they did, denying resettlement to any asylum seeker arriving by boat. They took to escorting refugee boats to Indonesia, or paying the governments of Papua New Guinea and Nauru to hold refugees (mostly, The Times tells us, from Iran and Iraq) in island detention centers, prison camps really, horrible places, as Amnesty International noted:

Annotation

Of course I would, if I felt like having some Skittles. Why on earth would I believe anything that silly, especially coming from an idiot like you? You don't even go to the daily briefing.

Trump statement in defense of the indefensible, via PoliticusUSA:

“America is a proud nation of immigrants and we will continue¹ to show compassion to those fleeing oppression, but we will do so while protecting our own citizens² and border. America has always been the land of the free and home of the brave.³ We will keep it free and keep it safe, as the media knows,⁴ but refuses to say. My policy is similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months.⁵ The seven countries named in the Executive Order are the same countries previously identified by the Obama administration as sources of terror.⁶ To be clear, this is not a Muslim ban, as the media is falsely reporting.⁷ This is not about religion – this is about terror and keeping our country safe. There are over 40 different countries worldwide that are majority Muslim that are not affected⁸ by this order. We will again be issuing visas to all countries once we are sure we have reviewed and implemented the most secure policies over the next 90 days. I have tremendous feeling⁹ for the people involved in this horrific humanitarian crisis in Syria. My first priority will always be to protect and serve our country, but as President I will find ways to help all those who are suffering.”

¹ Not to be too nitpicky, what compassion-demonstrating activities do you intend to "continue"? If these fleeing oppression are refugees, all you've done as president so far is yesterday's action slamming the door in their faces. Not to mention remorselessly destroying the careers of students, medical professionals, scientists, teachers, and entrepreneurs and violently separating families among the non-refugees as well. You can't "continue" doing something you haven't started yet.

Dancing in the hurricane

Image via.

That's Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Archmustache of Cloudberry, taking a new provisional book title out for a test drive, perhaps.

He was in Sulaimaniya, Iraqi Kurdistan, guest-of-honoring the annual Sulaimani Forum at the American University of Iraq (he doesn't mention it, but it's not hidden, and Dr. Google and I got there in under a minute), and offering them some Friedmaniacal gnomic advice:

he pointed out how the world is changing ever faster, mainly as a result of the dominance of The Internet in all aspects of life, comparing this rapid change to a hurricane. “You can dance in a hurricane when you stand in the eye,” he told his audience, “but then you need an anchor of good governance and good communities” -- then wishing his “good friend Barham Salih [MP and former prime minister in the Kurdistan regional government, founder of the American University of Iraq in 2006] good luck in building an eye to the hurricane.” (via rudaw.net)

I think part of the problem is that if the hurricane is Internet-driven socioeconomic change, then the eye is either where you can't get online or change isn't occurring or both, so if you focus on dancing in it, you're going to be missing a lot. Also, you need to be aware that the eye of a hurricane is moving, and if you just stand there dancing, you'll be back in the wind in a couple of hours.

Oh no de Cologne

Photo by Bernd Rosenbaum.Kölnische Rundschau.

Merkel muß raus! Yep, Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, is demanding the resignation of the German chancellor:

Angela Merkel must go — so that her country, and the continent it bestrides, can avoid paying too high a price for her high-minded folly.

Does that count as a diplomatic incident?

What it's about, of course, is the awful fracas of Silvesterabend in Cologne and some other German cities:

ON New Year’s Eve, in the shadow of Cologne’s cathedral, crowds of North African and Middle Eastern men accosted women out for the night’s festivities. They surrounded them, groped them, robbed them. Two women were reportedly raped.

Though there were similar incidents from Hamburg to Helsinki, the authorities at first played down the assaults, lest they prove inconvenient for Angela Merkel’s policy of mass asylum for refugees.

Thus the Monsignor aligns himself with what Die Welt memorably calls "ein Shitstorm" of demands for Merkel to step down—

Cheap shot: Worst Brooks in the world

Mo Brooks, via The Last of the Millenniums.

Really, while I yield to none in my contempt for David Brooks of the New York Times and Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) is the worst Brooks we have:

Instead of viewing refugees as people fleeing the violence that has claimed more than 200,000 lives, Brooks saw a host of incoming welfare queens intent on taking advantage of Americans’ generosity.

“We’re paying them about $15,000 a year in free health care, free food, free shelter, free clothing, free transportation,” Brooks said. “That answers very quickly why so many of them want to come to the United States of America.”

“We’re paying them to come here,” the Alabama congressman concluded. “It’s a paid vacation!” (Think Progress)

"Shut up, kids," says father as shrapnel from another barrel bomb blows in the window, severing Abdul's left leg, "we'll have dinner when we get to America. Get a tourniquet, Rukmini! In fact with that $15K we may well get breakfast too, once in a while. It's a paid vacation! Those Americans are such saps, it's just there for the taking. If you can hold out till 2017."

Brooks also went on to accuse Democrats who support giving shelter to Syrian refugees and protecting the rights of Muslims of only doing so in order to win their votes.

Because that 0.8% of the population is enough to sway any election.* Explains everything. Tell me about your so-called compassion, you panderer. You'll just do anything to win.

*An Ipsos poll of November 2014 found Americans think the percentage is around 15%.

Profiles in Courage

Updated 11/22/2015

How can you be sure they're not Belgian terrorists? Their passports could be fake too! Image via LifelineSyria.

Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY), in a position of unofficial leadership as former head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, joined 46 other Democrats in support of the American Security Against Foreign Enemies SAFE Act to stop screening refugees for admission to the United States while regulations are written to lengthen the two-year period it already takes.

Because there may be a massive refugee crisis radiating out from destroyed Syria to the rest of the world, and it may have been caused by the terrible social and physical destruction brought on in the Iraq-Syria region in the ten-year war fought by the United States against, well, whoever they were fighting against, it kept changing from month to month, as the new Salafist forces that had never been in the region before began to establish themselves in the chaos outside the zone the US forces were able to control, and we may now regret our refusal to admit refugee Jews to the US in 1938-42 making us directly responsible for as much as a third of Hitler's six million, but—

Why do they hate religious freedom?

Umayyad troops retreating from Narbonne in 753. Via Wikipedia.

New rightwing meme on the European refugee crisis: It's a replay of the 8th century! Paynim hordes conquering a continent!

If you think the map looks like part of an ISIS battle plan, you would be correct. This is exactly what ISIS promised earlier this year: to flood Europe with 500,000 African Muslims, sent by boat across the Mediterranean Sea. What is now unfolding is at a level far and beyond ISIS’s wildest dreams. Hijrah in action.

(Sorry? If it's beyond ISIS's dreams, how come it's exactly the same?) Sure, dead kids on the beach are cute, but it's just a distraction:

Friedman apologizes!

Image via EdgeOfSpace.

Well, not quite:

the [countries] disintegrating first are those that are the most artificial: their borders are mostly straight lines that correspond to no ethnic, tribal or religious realities and their leaders, rather than creating citizens with equal rights, wasted the last 60 years by plundering their national resources. So when their iron fists come off (in Libya and Iraq with our help), there is nothing to hold these unnatural polygons together.

Note how he can't even bring himself to list the deadly destabilizations of Iraq and Libya in chronological order, let alone make it clear that "our help" means "the help of Tom Friedman and some of his highly placed friends". But as so often in recent years, the Mystax Ineluctabilis is showing these increasing signs of a disturbed awareness that there is some reality out there in the churning tide of molecules outside his head, and that's all to the good.

For one thing, that concept of artificial countries. Back before the Iraq War began, he sort of knew about them, but thought it was an interesting experimental question whether it might make a difference:

Better Catholics than Ross Douthat

Pierre Montailler, Works of Mercy, 1680 (via Wikipedia).

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, on why the US has relatively little moral obligation to take in Syrian refugees:

One answer is that nations that are directly implicated in Syria’s agony have more responsibility to accept refugees than nations that are not. The strongest obligation would belong to those countries — the Gulf States and Iran, above all — who have fed arms and money into the Syrian conflict. A weaker-but-still-meaningful responsibility would attach to the United States, because we too have sent arms and because of the links between our Iraq intervention and the region’s current chaos. Other countries would have more attenuated obligations, or none at all.

West of Eden, and hopefully on the way north

Aylan Kurdi alive, apparently threatening the cultural integrity of Mr. Orbán's continent, though I don't quite see that. Photo via The Independent.

I've heard of governments hating foreign refugees so much they'd seal the border with a razor-wire fence, or a Great Wall as the case may be, so they can't get in, but I've never heard of one like the Hungarian Fidesz regime that won't let them out either.

Why are there 500 Syrians stuck on a train in the town of Bicske, and thousands more haunting the central station in Budapest? When crypto-fascist* prime minister Viktor Orbán says,

“Those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims,” he said. “This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity.

“Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? There is no alternative, and we have no option but to defend our borders.”

Not because the migrants want to be the guests of such a narrow-minded and unwelcoming government. They're just passing through on their way to Germany, which has agreed to take on 800,000 refugees. Hungary is holding them under the theory that they are legally required to herd them into camps.

Cheap shots and white Walkers

Scratch the northern wall plan https://t.co/jnVuDK9fKF the white Walkers are already here. And running for president. pic.twitter.com/maa5oKDQQM

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 31, 2015

Whatever happened to Scott?

Lectiones

Julian Bond (1940-2015) organizing sometime in the early 1960s, via Georgia Encylopedia.

R.I.P. Julian Bond. NPR had a beautiful interview on the civil rights titan with his dear friend and sometime political opponent Congressman John Lewis.

Syria

Also important on NPR this morning, two pieces on the European refugee crisis, one heartbreaking interview with a Médecins Sans Frontières emergency rescue coordinator, one breakdown of the numbers and what they mean. The latter was drier, but more shocking as you consider what they represent, the extraordinary callousness of the international community: in Calais, there are 3000 refugees mostly from Syria trying to make their way into the UK, to howls of aggrieved protest from Prime Minister Cameron and the nativist British right, but the rest of Europe is holding 250,000 refugees—Britain really can't help out with approximately 1% of the total? And then Europe moans over its 250,000, but comparatively impoverished Turkey is taking care of two million all by itself, or four times the total for the world's richest continent.

Then again, in Syria itself there are now, according to the latest USAID report, 7.6 million internally displaced persons, almost a third of the population (of course the population would be larger if not for the four million refugees outside the country). The US is the largest single donor of cash assistance, having spent $4,110,566,565 since the conflict began in March 2011, but had actually taken in fewer than 1000 refugees by last May (compared to 6000 in Brazil), because why? Because we're too scared, as explained by

#JeSuisRwandais? Maybe not exactly.

Thanks for the shoutouts, Drifty and Constant Weader!

Clemantine Wamariya. Photo by Andrew White.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Courage of Small Things", New York Times, July 7 2015:

We're all just like refugees from the Rwandan genocide. At least I am.

No, seriously. Verbatim,