Herbert W Armstrong

Troubles for U.S., U.K. Mount: Trials are mounting for the descendants of Jacob, especially modern-day Ephraim and Manasseh. Nothing seems to turn out right in the end. Case in point: Americans cheered when the U.S. finally won a battle in the war against terrorism. When U.S. jets intercepted a plane carrying the four Achille Lauro cruise-ship terrorist-hijackers, it looked as if justice was at last being served. But then the roof began to cave in for Washington. Italy, which received the intercepted plane, refused to hold a fifth suspect, the apparent ringleader. It turns out that Italy long ago signed a deal with the PLO to return most PLO suspects in return for the PLO not shooting up Italy or giving aid to the fanatical Red Brigades. Italy is in an exposed position, entirely dependent upon three Arab nations for all its oil. Washington was now painfully aware that a key NATO ally could not be relied on for support, even in the face of a brutal murder of a U.S. passenger aboard an Italian vessel.

Then, too, the incident proved how weak reed Egypt was — an old problem for those relying on Egypt's support (Isa. 36:6). President Mubarak lives in constant fear of Islamic extremists and wants to keep the PLO at arm's length. He initially gave questionable information about the whereabouts of the hijackers, who were taken off the ship in Alexandria. Mubarak then demanded that President Reagan apologize for Intercepting the EgyptAir flight, which the latter refused to do. Americans now wonder: What good is it to pump thousands of millions of dollars of aid into Egypt, only to get a rebuke at the first inkling of a dispute? Especially galling was the sight of Egyptian university students burning the American flag, hoisting pictures of PLO's Arafat. Egypt is not proving to be a very faithful lover — lovers rarely are (Jer. 30:14: Lam. 1:2).

And while Americans felt that at last some forceful action had been under taken to counteract terrorism, columnist George F. Will (LOS ANGELES TIMES, Oct. 18) showed it was done very late in the game, and that the lonely war on terrorism has a foreboding parallel to Vietnam.

In the aftermath, three nations — one a member of NATO, another counted an ally, the third considered an example of "civilized communism" [Yugoslavia, to whom Italy dispatched the alleged terrorist ringleader] — showed that they value good relations with the PLO than with the United States. Or perhaps the point should be put this way: The three nations' fear of PLO anger is palpable, but their fear of U.S. anger is negligible....

The message of the interception was supposed to be "you can run but you can't hide." But terrorists routinely do both. Low-level terrorists with blood on their hands have little to fear, and their leaders have nothing to fear, from a U.S. government that brings to anti-terrorism a self-defeating desire to assign direct, individual culpability for particular acts of violence sponsored by organizations. This is A policy of striking only at the fingers rather than the brain of terrorism. [The U.S. declined to veto a U.N. vote condemning an Israeli raid on the P.L.O. "brain" in Tunisia.] We are bringing to the war against terrorism the same war­losing restraint that, 15 years ago, had U.S. fighter planes chasing trucks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, while North Vietnam's dikes were spared. Soon the U.S. government will utter the usual lubricating pleasantries, and Egypt's president and other fellow-travelers of terrorism will grudgingly, and for a profit, forgive us for the injuries that they have done to us. [The U.S. has already dispatched an envoy to Rome and Cairo on a "fence-mending mission."]

Britain, too, is taking her lumps. It has been a very uncomfortable week in the usually balmy Bahamas for British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She has had to sit through one stormy session after another at the 47-nation Commonwealth conference, listening to demands that Britain cut its formidable trade and investment links ($15 billion worth) with South Africa. Scores of thousands of British jobs depend on this relationship. Early on in the conference India's Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had called upon all members to enact "comprehensive and mandatory sanctions."

In the end, the will of the "Iron Lady," which is set in principle against the use of sanctions, prevailed. A final communique read that "some of us (members) would consider" imposing in the future along list of "severe economic measures". Mrs. Thatcher pointedly told reporters that “I'm not one of the some." Nevertheless, the mood in the Bahamas revealed that Britain is being isolated in the house of her own creation. The Commonwealth is now overwhelmingly gentile in membership, adding new meaning to Deuteronomy 28:43 — "The alien who is among you shall rise higher and higher above you, and you shall come down lower and lower" (RAV). It is probably only because the other Commonwealth nations realize the grouping makes no sense without Britain that they felt they couldn’t pressure the Thatcher government any further. Better a sense of fragile unity than total disruption, with Britain forced to take leave. Unanimity on South Africa probably awaits a Labour government in London in the future.

At home, too, "the alien" is bedeviling Britain. Around Feast-time, rampaging violence erupted in the several racially mixed inner-city areas, notably the Peckham, Brixton and Tottenham areas of greater London (Brixton was the scene of the grim 1981 violence), as well as parts of Birmingham and Liverpool. In the Tottenham outbreak, rioters used firearms for the first time. Liberals, of course, blame the turmoil on unemployment and police and government “insensitivity." Thatcher government spokesmen attributed it to “plain, unadulterated lawlessness and criminality." In some of the earlier rioting, the targets of rampaging black youths were Asian merchants — bringing the phenomenon of black -brown violence, common in Africa (recently in the Durban area) to Britain's home soil.

Australia's Peril Another slice of modern Ephraim, Australia, faces an uncertain future too. The racial makeup of Australian society is changing rapidly: long gone are the days of a European-only immigration policy. And as the nation’s defense planners chart the future, the one neighbor that troubles them the most is Indonesia, a nation that has expanded steadily in its own region and whose rapidly growing population is of growing concern in Canberra. Here are key excerpts of a report by Seymour Topping of THE NEW YORK TIMES News Service, reprinted in the October 9 SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE:

In the three weeks I took to make a 7,400-mile circuit of Australia... I sensed a faltering of national confidence. According to one economist, living standards have declined over the last century from first rank in the world to 16th. The leisure-loving Australians still enjoy a very comfortable life but their leaders question whether such style can endure unless the nation becomes more competitive in the scramble for world markets. While they concede the urgency of expanding trade with Asia, most Australians still suffer from an overweening fear — described by some high government officials as paranoia — of being swamped by the brown and yellow peoples to the north.

In the remote, vast continent, the 15 million Australians are assuming a new identity: Asian immigration is transforming a white Australia into a multiracial society and, as the Commonwealth ties to Britain wither, there is a growing affinity with the United States. A unique society of the Pacific basin is emerging....

Privately, Australians in and out of government talk of a possible threat from Indonesia, to the north. Australian relations with the Suhar to government are, for the most part, cordial, but some worry that expansionistic impulses may develop as Indonesia's population grows to 200 million by the end of the century. [Defense Minister Kirn] Beazley promises a ring of air bases around Australia and an electronic network to monitor against clandestine landings on the coast. This does not dispel a nightmare commonly shared by the Australians of massive influxes of boat people seeking refuge if an ecological disaster should strike Indonesia or another Southeast Asian nation.

And it is not only military invasion that worries 46-year-old sheep farmer Tony Moore and others like him. The Australian policy that encouraged the immigration of Europeans and restricted the entry of Asians has been changing since the early 1970s. In the last few years, Australia has admitted 88,000 Indochinese refugees and some of their families are now following. Asians now account for 12 percent of the population. Moore, who works a 13,000-acre American-owned farm on the southern coast, says his children may have a different view, but he is concerned about Australia's being "led away from European base."...

The Changing Face of America In the United States, a somewhat similar "racial time bomb" is ticking away. A radically altered post-war immigration pattern is changing the complexion (no pun intended) of American society. The United States is becoming, like Australia, more Asian in its ethnic composition due to waves of Asian immigrants, mostly legal, during the last decade. These have come from Taiwan, South Korea and the Philippines. They also include ethnic Chinese expellees from Indochina, and new entrants from all over the Pacific Island region. Between 1970 and 1980 the Asian-American population soared 141 percent.

At the same time, Hispanic Americans are rapidly multiplying (the Mexican-American population nearly doubled between 1970 and 1980) due to both legal and illegal inflows. Liberal congressmen have repeatedly stymied attempts to seal off America's nearly open border, the joke of the world. While the illegal problem is an acute one, by far the greatest numbers of immigrants have arrived by legal means, the result of far-ranging decisions made on immigration policy after World War II. Here are excerpts from an article entitled "America's Post-War Immigration Policy," published in the fall 1984 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES. It was written by Richard F. Batterson.

It is doubtful that an American, leaving this country in 1940 and subsequently returning in 1984, would discover much similarity between the [country] of forty-odd years ago and the present nation. Not only has the geographical face of the land been changed by those minions of Progress, the builder and the bulldozer, but more significantly the composition of the populace has also under gone a remarkable transformation....

President Truman [in 1948]...dismissed as "absurd and cruel" the "outdated notion" that immigration should bear any resemblance to the ethnic composition of a country. Rather, he inferred that it should be an instrument with which government would be able to realign the racial proportions of a nation to imitate a global configuration. Such a redistributive vision...required a far greater infusion of non-European immigrants into the United States.... [Nevertheless, for a number of years the country was guided by the Immigration and Naturalization (McCarran-Walter) Act of 1952 which continued to stress the concept of "national origins" and gave preferential quotas to immigrants of European origin. Yet, increasing numbers of non-European immigrants entered by means of non-quota loopholes in the law.]

In an effort to "realize humanitarian objectives," [President John F. Kennedy] proposed abolition of the national-origins system. "In an age of interdependence among nations," he wrote, "such a system is an anachronism, for it discriminates among applicants...on the basis of birth."... John Kennedy [was] vehemently opposed to immigration laws that accorded — in theory at least — preference to northern and western Europeans.... Mr. Kennedy specifically favored increases in the numbers of Asian and West Indian immigrants....

In 1965, during a special message to Congress,...President [Lyndon B.] Johnson demanded the elimination of national quotas. With bipartisan support in both Houses, the President...succeeded in ending 145 years of continuity in immigration law.... Clearly, the philosophy that immigration should be "a mirror held up before the nation, reflecting the peoples who composed it," had expired. The politically astute Texan sensed the monumental social transformation that was being engineered within the United States, and took advantage of it.... He was appealing to all of the non­Northwestern European immigrant communities of the nation. He was courting the recently politicized urban Negroes.... One of the prime movers behind the new immigration legislation was Senator Edward Kennedy....

The movement within Congress received unqualified support from the nation's press. Popular periodicals such as LIFE, SCIENTIFIC AMERICA, THE NEW REPUBLIC, and TIME featured articles and editorials enthusiastically supporting the President's initiative.... Taking exception to the new immigration law, Professor Ernest van den Haag wrote: "The wish to preserve one's identity and the identity of one's nation requires no justification — and no belief in superiority — any more than the wish to have one's own children, and to continue one's family through them need be justified or rationalized by a belief that they are superior to the children of others.... One identifies with one's family, because it is one's family — not because they are better people than other's. For no other reason one identifies with one's national group than with others. Else there would be no nations."...

During the past thirty-five years successive governments have worked from the premise that the United States has moral duty to mirror the ethnic conformation of world's population, and to provide an economic haven for the destitute and the oppressed of the Third World. Only recently have the scope and the magnitude of the problems resulting from unrestricted and undifferentiated immigration begun to be realized. Former proponents of open, non­ European, immigration are now cautious or even pessimistic about the future of the "new" America. In his recently published America in Search of Itself, Theodore White lauded Lyndon Johnson's 1965 Immigration Act as "noble" and "revolutionary, " designed to "wipe out statutory discrimination." Yet, he considered that the legislation was "probably the most thoughtless of the many acts of the Great Society." And, in a reflective mood, White soberly admitted that the Kennedy-Johns on laws may well have been implements of national destruction: "What could become a catastrophe — the tide of immigration, legal and illegal, pouring into this country."...

As much as 83.3 percent of the legal, and all of the illegal newcomers of non-European origin — a fact which could retard their assimilation and heighten ethnic tensions.... [Ben J.J Wattenberg...observes that "we are well on our way to becoming the first truly universalist nation."... [Wattenberg lists] the astonishing increases in legal Third World immigration since the enactment of the Johnson law (Philippines, 1,542 [percent]; India, 7,050 [percent]; Korea, 3,833 [percent]; Vietnam, 4,300 [percent]; Cuba, 281 [percent]; Ecuador, 340 [percent]; Haiti, 1,150 [per cent]; Mexico, 94 [percent]; and China and Hong Kong, 689 [percent])....

I recently read — but cannot locate at the moment — a statistic to the effect that by approximately 100 years from now, people of European origin would be in the minority (about 48 percent) in the United States. When I find the stat, I will reproduce it. Meanwhile, one contemplates the prophecy in Lamentations 5:1-2: "Remember, O Lord, what has come upon us; look and behold our reproach! Our inheritance has been turned over to aliens, and our houses to foreigners."

Meanwhile, in the Ghetto...

It is no secret that many of the Asian immigrants to the United States have made the most of the opportunities afforded them in America. Hard work, thrift and sacrifice by the family for the next generation all are paying off. In the ghettos of America's inner cities, however, the story is grimly different, as recounted in the remarkable account in the September 16 issue of TIME entitled "When Brother Kills Brother":

The leading cause of death among black males ages 15 to 24 in the U.S. is not heart disease, not cancer, not any natural cause. It is murder by other blacks. More than 1 out of every 3 blacks who die in that age group is the victim of a homicide. Across America, particularly among the underclass in the nation's urban ghettos, brother is killing brother in a kind of racial fratricide. More than 40 percent of all the nation's murder victims are black, and 94 percent of those who commit these murders are black.... In America today, a white female has 1 chance in 606 of becoming a murder victim. A white male has 1 chance in 186. A black female has 1 chance in 124. A black male has 1 chance in 29....

The issue of black on black violence is a disquieting and sensitive subject... says Glenn Loury, a professor of public policy at Harvard: "The bottom stratum of the black community has compelling problems that can no longer be blamed solely on white racism, and which force us to confront fundamental failures in black society."... Social scientists see [among some of the] reasons: high unemployment, drugs, gangs, and the rise in female-headed households and births out of wedlock. The rate of black teenage unemployment in the nation's cities is more than 50 percent in some areas.... In those same cities, more than half the black children are born out of wedlock. [In some locations, Dr. Loury maintains elsewhere, 75 percent of the births are illegitimate!] All of this breeds a shadow society where traditional values are scarce and violence is promiscuous.... "To admit these failures is likely to be personally costly for black leaders," says Harvard Professor Loury.... "Not to admit them, however, is to forestall their resolution and to allow the racial polarization of the country to worsen."

Black academicians such as Dr. Loury maintain that the accepted civil rights leaders have maintained a "code of silence" about the fundamental social problems afflicting the people they claim to lead, preferring to continue to pin the blame on alleged discrimination, maintaining the route of legal remedies and government grants. (For those further interested in this subject, read "Breaking the Code" in the October 21 NEWSWEEK, "Beyond Civil Rights" (by Dr. Loury) in the October 7 NEW REPUBLIC and "Rumors of Inferiority: Barriers to Black Success in America" in the September 9 issue of THE NEW REPUBLIC.)

Because the traditional black leaders are locked in their strategies — which aren't working — they are losing influence. And as life in the ghetto worsens, more blacks are turning to the one man who seems to offer a way out and up — firebrand Louis Farrakhan. Reports the November 1 issue of NATIONAL REVIEW: "Farrakhan now is the black leadership — the cutting edge, the storm center, the presence against which others are measured."

— Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau