Donald Trump and the Republican maga cult are making innocent migrants disappear!

Trump Is Building a Machine to Disappear People

Intentional Cruelty❗ Opinion published in the The New York Times by Jeff Crisp*

In May, the United States flew a group of eight migrants to Djibouti, a small state in the Horn of Africa. For weeks, the men — who are from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan — were detained in a converted shipping container on a U.S. military base. More than a month later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the men, who had all been convicted of serious crimes, could be transferred to their final destination: South Sudan, a country on the brink of famine and civil war. Tom Homan, the border czar, acknowledged that he didn’t know what happened to them once they were released from U.S. custody. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said, “they’re free.”

Deporting foreign nationals to countries other than their homeland has quickly become a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Thousands of people have been sent to countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Panama. At a recent summit of West African leaders, President Trump pressed them to admit deportees from the United States, reportedly emphasizing that assisting in migration was essential to improving commercial ties with the United States. All told, administration officials have reached out to dozens of states to try to strike deals to accept deportees. The administration is making progress: Last week, it sent five men to the tiny, landlocked country of Eswatini in southern Africa after their home countries allegedly “refused to take them back,” according to an assistant homeland security secretary, Tricia McLaughlin. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In some ways, this is nothing new. It has become increasingly common for the world’s most prosperous countries to relocate immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees to places with which they have little or no prior connection. Previous U.S. administrations from both parties have sought third-country detentions as easy fixes. In the 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both sent thousands of Haitian refugees to detention camps in Guantánamo Bay before forcibly repatriating most of them to Haiti.

What is new about the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, unlike previous European or even past U.S. attempts, is their breadth and scale, effectively transforming migrant expulsions into a tool for international leverage. By deporting foreign nationals to often unstable third countries, the Trump administration is not only creating a novel class of exiles with little hope of returning to either the United States or their country of origin,😟😢 but, also, explicitly using these vulnerable populations as bargaining chips in a wider strategy of diplomatic and geopolitical deal making.

This strategy marks a significant evolution in a practice that has been gaining traction throughout the developed world. In the early 2000s, Australia devised the so-called Pacific Solution, an arrangement that diverted asylum seekers arriving by boat or intercepted at sea to holding centers in the island states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea in exchange for benefits, including development aid and financial support. In 2016, amid what was then the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II, the European Union struck a deal that allowed it to send migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey through irregular means back to Turkey — to the tune of six billion euros.

Some of these efforts have faced legal challenges. Starting in 2022, for example, the United Kingdom attempted to establish a program that would have automatically deported some asylum seekers and migrants entering the U.K. illegally to Rwanda, costing over half a billion pounds — more than 200 million of which were paid upfront. The British Supreme Court ruled that the policy was unlawful, and Britain’s prime minister scrapped the plan last year.

But many countries remain undeterred. In 2023, Italy signed a deal that allowed it to send certain migrants rescued by Italian ships in international waters to detention centers in Albania, and is persisting with the effort even in the face of legal setbacks. This spring, the European Union proposed establishing “return hubs” in third countries for rejected asylum seekers.

Although these deals take various forms, states that enter them are motivated by similar concerns. The world’s richer states wish to retain control of their borders and are particularly aggrieved by the arrival of people who enter by irregular means, especially when they are coming from low-income countries that many associate with crime, violence and terrorism. Governments in destination countries are attracted to such deals by the promise of financial, diplomatic and military support.

Throughout much of the West, as public sentiment has turned against newcomers, policymakers and pundits alike have portrayed migrants as a threat to national security and social stability. 

These innocent migrants, they argue, impose an unsustainable burden on government budgets and public services and deprive citizens of jobs. (Maine Writer: These desperate migrants carry a lable being "migrant", as though they are somehow not really human beings!)

Racism and xenophobia, fueled by populist politicians and right-wing media outlets, have also played an important part in creating a toxic environment in which the expulsion of migrants to arbitrary destinations is increasingly considered legitimate.

But how legitimate is it? Third-country deportations often sidestep due process and violate international law, under which it is forbidden for states to deport such people to any place where their life or liberty would be at risk. It is also plainly unethical, imposing additional stress on people who have undergone traumatic journeys and who are then dumped in far-off, unfamiliar places.

Several of the countries slated as deportation destinations have bleak human rights records and are unsafe for all civilians, let alone foreign deportees, who are likely to be targets of abuse and exploitation. In the worst instances, as with U.S. deportees in El Salvador, they can find themselves in jails where the authorities routinely inflict physical and psychological violence on inmates.

These deportation deals also have corrosive consequences for international politics. They encourage smaller, weaker countries to engage in transactional behavior, commodifying human life by trading immigrant bodies for cash, development aid, diplomatic support and international impunity. They may even strengthen the impunity of authoritarian regimes that violate the human rights of their own citizens. In the case of El Salvador, for example, deportees from the United States reportedly included some leaders of the criminal gang MS-13, who were thought to be in a position to expose links between President Nayib Bukele and the gang.

For nearly three-quarters of a century, a network of international instruments, institutions and norms have acted as guardrails, if imperfect ones, to ensure that refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants are treated humanely. Now it seems as though the president is looking to rewrite the rules of this system to one in which people are pawns.

By expanding the practice of forced relocation, Trump is using migrants as currency in a global network of geopolitical negotiation. His administration is normalizing the use of vulnerable people as bargaining chips to extract better deals with friends and foes alike. He is setting a dangerous precedent for other democratic countries by ignoring the moral and reputational cost of shipping desperate people into terrible conditions. 

As Trump works to bring this evil 👺👿new paradigm to life, leaders the world over will be watching closely. If he can pull it off, so can they.

*Mr. Crisp is an expert on migration and humanitarian issues.

Antisemitism in global athletics cannot be hidden under seemingly obscure sporting events

An echo report published in Commentary/Europe:*

December 31, 2024 Europe

The Lawn Bowling Scandal Is Much More Important Than It Sounds
by Seth Mandel

Sometimes the events most worthy of our outrage can go woefully under-protested simply because they sound silly.

The latest example comes to us from the wide sporting world of bowls. Americans are likely most familiar with Bocce, except for Franco-Americans who play pétanque. But all are versions of the same idea that boils down to a form of lawn bowling: Roll (or toss) the ball as close to the target as you can.

The World Bowls Tour is what it sounds like: a global league for both indoor and outdoor lawn bowling. The WBT has disinvited qualifying Israeli players from the World Indoor Championship based solely on their nationality. Pressure groups bullied the bowls.

Again, from a sporting perspective, Americans may find this more obscure than Cricket. But as an indication of European society’s blithe submission to delirious anti-Semitism, it is deeply worrying. And when Europe succumbs to its Jew-baiting instincts—well, it tends to be bad for everyone.

So, I recommend quickly getting past one’s discomfort with publicly registering outrage over lawn-bowling competitions. The widespread attempts to establish de facto Jew-bans in global athletics and other leisure activities is ominous; we should acknowledge that they have only come for bowls because they’ve already come for soccer, hockey, rugby, and even Ultimate Frisbee.

This isn’t about bowls; it’s about an attempt to have Western social life mimic the ethnic exclusivity of 20th century country clubs.

The WBT was surprisingly forthright about its choice: “as a result of the intensity of the situation, the WBT board, in consultation with our event partners and other relevant stakeholders, has made the difficult decision to withdraw the invitation for Israel to participate in the forthcoming World Indoor Championships. This decision affects Daniel Alonim in the World Singles, as well as Amnon Amar and Itai Rigbi in the World Open Pairs.”

Well, forthright at first, anyway. The next part of the statement is hilariously Orwellian: “This decision was not taken lightly and has been made in the best interests of the event’s success and integrity. Bowls is, and always has been, a sport that unites people and this choice reflects our commitment to protecting the championships and ensuring they run smoothly for everyone involved.”

The sport “unites people,” therefore it must exclude people. The event’s “integrity” was at stake, therefore players who earned their place will no longer be allowed to participate in the competition.

I don’t fully blame them for the phrasing, though: Anyone who would apply a nationality ban to a sport in the year 2024, cannot possibly know what “integrity” means.

The Telegraph reports that the WBT decision was likely influenced by a ramped-up campaign of anti-Semitism aimed at disrupting last month’s Scottish International Open. The anti-Semites were very angry and noisy, and there is no similar constituency in Europe for non-anti-Semitism, so here we are.

In fact, that Scottish campaign seems to have found some success as well, forcing an Israeli competitor out of the Scottish International Open. Scottish Sport for Palestine rejoiced: “Scotland can be proud once again.” (Once again?)

If for no other reason, these leagues should (must❗) refuse to submit to such pressure campaigns because of the campaigns’ sheer dirtbaggery alone. Scottish Sport for Palestine made a poster featuring a now-disinvited Israeli competitor’s name and picture and a description of him as someone who “runs a landscaping business clearing Palestinian land for the occupation.”

In other words, because he is a Jew who lives in the Levant, his existence is illegitimate and his rights are automatically limited. That European sporting leagues are susceptible to overt blood-and-soil Palestinian nationalism is unfortunate. Additionally, I don’t know much about this group Scottish Sport for Palestine, but if it is a coalition of Scottish athletes then I question how much pressure they could possibly put on the WBT.

Last month, a youth Maccabi Berlin soccer team was chased home from the field by attackers wielding knives and clubs. As I noted at the time, Maccabi Berlin is a legacy organization: Prior to the Holocaust, Jews established clubs like Maccabi precisely because they were excluded from mainstream national sports leagues.

So although it may sound unimportant, especially to an American ear, the fuss over lawn bowling is significant. The intent of these campaigners is to sweep Jews out of every corner of nonpolitical social life in Europe, and beyond.

*About Commentary: COMMENTARY is a highly acclaimed monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life. Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970s, the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened by totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States, and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards.Many of COMMENTARY’s articles have been controversial, and more than a few have been hugely influential—touchstones for debate and discussion in universities, among policy analysts in and out of government, within the ranks of professionals and community activists, and in circles of serious thought worldwide. A large number of articles can be counted as landmarks of American letters and intellectual life. Agree with it or disagree with it, COMMENTARY cannot be ignored. To read it is to take part in the great American discussion.

Trumpzism is a euphemism for racism of all kinds including the rise of antisemitism

A Worldwide ‘Jew Hunt’

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Bret Stephens.

If any doubts remained about the motives of the Amsterdam thugs who last week terrorized and assaulted Israeli soccer fans in droves, an investigation in The Wall Street Journal should settle the questions.

It wasn’t merely a reaction to provocative behavior by some of those fans. It wasn’t just overflowing anger over the war in Gaza. It was something altogether darker.

“Maccabi supporters had traveled to the Dutch capital for a match with local team Ajax on Thursday night,” the newspaper reported, referring to the Tel Aviv club. “Little did they know that, earlier in the day, they had become a topic of discussion on popular messaging apps, where users were calling for a Jodenjacht, or ‘Jew Hunt.’”

Jew hunt:✡️ Grotesque as the phrase is, it can no longer surprise.

• It is what the graffiti on a wall in an Oslo metro station promises: “Hitler started it. We finis[h]ed it.”
• It is a wave of antisemitic hate crimes in Chicago, including “anti-Semitic flyers with rat-poison like pellets” found in Lincoln Park, in April, 
• A Jewish man shot while walking to his synagogue in West Rogers Park, in October;
• And two Jewish students at DePaul University assaulted by masked men last Wednesday.

It is a long succession of assaults — sometimes with sucker punches, other times with cars, more recently with an attempted child abduction — against Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn.

It is the alleged gang rape near Paris in June of a 12-year-old Jewish girl by teenage boys “uttering death threats and antisemitic remarks,” according to a report from Agence France-Presse.

It is the arson attack on Monday on an Amsterdam tram — a follow-up to last week’s mayhem — with rioters in black yelling “Kanker Joden” — “cancer Jews.”

It is what a Hamas terrorist was doing on Oct. 7, 2023: “Dad, I’m calling you from the phone of a Jew. I just killed her and her husband, with my own hands I killed 10.”

Notice what these attackers aren’t saying. They aren’t expressing themselves in the faddish language of anti-Zionism. They aren’t denouncing Israeli policy or speaking up for Palestinian rights. They aren’t trying to make careful distinctions between Jews and Israelis. They are, like generations of pogromists before them, simply out to get the Jews — a reminder, if one was needed, of the truth often attributed to Maya Angelou: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Which makes it even more remarkable how strenuously some people initially tried to obscure the nature of the Amsterdam pogrom. The media are rarely shy about calling out certain kinds of hate crimes as racist. Yet for days the word “antisemitic” was either put inside quotation marks or attributed to Dutch officials when talking about the violence. The identity of the attackers has been treated as a mystery, or a secret, beyond delicate references to people with “a migration background,” in the words of Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof.

A great deal of attention has also been paid to some Israeli fans who pulled down a Palestinian flag, vandalized a taxi and, in Hebrew, chanted ugly anti-Arab phrases. There’s no excuse for any of that. But rowdy English soccer fans in Germany have been known to celebrate German war casualties. Somehow it doesn’t lead to a frenzy of organized violence.

Nor does it add any light to provide the “context” of the war in Gaza as a way of trying to understand what happened in Amsterdam. No decent person would explain anti-Asian attacks in the United States by observing that attackers might be angry about, say, China’s human-rights abuses or its biosafety standards.

Yet so many supposedly decent people are quick to try to account for the evil that is done to Jews through reference to the evil (as they see it) that Jews do to others. As Leon Wieseltier pointed out years ago, this type of reasoning is not an explanation for antisemitism. It’s the essence of antisemitism.

Antisemitism in Europe has reached the point where the future of many of its Jewish communities is seriously in doubt. I’m not sure most Europeans understand what a civilizational catastrophe this represents — albeit less for Europe’s Jews, most of whom will find other places to go and thrive, than for Europe itself. The fate of societies that become “Judenfrei” — free of Jews — has not, historically, been a happy one.

The United States is still a long way from this point, thanks to a larger and more politically confident Jewish community, along with a national culture that traditionally has generally admired Jews. But that culture is also under growing threat today, whether from Hamas’s fellow travelers in the Ivy League and the publishing world; Louis Farrakhan’s admirers in the Black community; or the alt-right inveighing, with a sinister wink, against “globalists” and “neocons.”

Americans (and not just Jews) should beware: If we stay on this path, the Jew hunt of Amsterdam may be upon us, too, and sooner than we think.

Biogenetic "biosimilars" are drugs that will bring cost relief to pharmaceutical expenses

Profit is the motivator driving the huge pharmaceutical industry.

Now biogenetic drugs can finally help bring prices down.

"Lower-priced copies of biotech drugs are estimated to save the U.S. $47 billion over the next 10 years..."

Biosimilars have grabbed more than a 50% market share in the U.K. and Germany, and less than 40% in France.

Affluent people who can afford the best medicines have access to any drugs, without regard for costs. On the other hand, middle class and poor people often trade off essentials to find the money to pay for needed curative drugs.

Finally, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the sale of at least one biogenetic drug, named Zarxio. It's a drug like the high priced Neupogen, prescribed to help cancer patients who are receiving chemotherapy to resist deadly infections.  

Although this development is very good news moving forward, the down side is to wonder how many people died prematurely because they were unable to afford the drug Neupogen.

The biotech drug is a rival version of Neupogen, an Amgen Inc. treatment prescribed to chemotherapy patients. The copycat medicine, Zarxio from Novartis AG , is the first approved under a new regulatory framework designed to introduce competition for costly biotech drugs. Biotech drugs are produced in living cells and typically administered by infusion or injection.

Lower-priced copies of biotech drugs are estimated to save the U.S. $47 billion over the next 10 years, according to consulting firm Avalere Health LLC. 

Unlike regular pills, biotechnology drugs haven’t faced generic competition when their patents expire because they are much harder to copy, and because regulators until now couldn’t figure out how to approve knockoffs that were highly similar but not exact replicas. 

The knockoffs are known as “biosimilars.”

Dr. Kimberly Blackwell, director of the breast-cancer program at the Duke Cancer Institute, said she expects to begin putting most of her new patients on the biosimilar once it becomes available, so long as their health insurance will cover the drug. 

Dr. Blackwell, who received funding from Novartis to help study Zarxio, said a third of her patients have been unable to afford the out-of-pocket cost of Neupogen when they pick the drug up at the pharmacy, forcing them to make regular trips to get it at the hospital, where they don’t have to pay a copay.

Aline Charabaty, a gastroenterologist and associate professor of medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine, said biosimilars could be a welcome tool for reducing health-care costs.

“It will save money for the overall health system and it will probably make [drugs] more accessible to more patients,” she said.

Biosimilars have been on sale in Europe since 2006, where their use has grown slowly, according to Michael Kleinrock, research director at the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. 

Biosimilars have grabbed more than a 50% market share in the U.K. and Germany, and less than 40% in France.

Clearly, untold thousands of Americans have likely suffered and died as a result of being unable to access biosimilar drugs, when the original brand wasn't affordable for them to purchase.

A similarly slow buildup of biosimilar use is anticipated in the U.S., with the drugs eventually securing as much as 70% of prescriptions.

Biosimilar drugs will likely extend the lives of many untold thousands of people, who will finally have access to these biogenetic drugs when they're affordable.  

Europeans obviously had access to these biogenetic drugs for quite some time......finally, the US drug companies will give up their cash cow profits and sell these drugs at affordable prices to American patients. Patients will be able to share in the profits, by having affordable access to more life supporting drugs.