Sunday, February 19, 2017

Chelsea Clinton Takes Daughter Charlotte, 2, to Her ‘First Protest’ in Support of Muslims





BY STEPHANIE PETIT





Among the protesters filling Time Square in New York City for the “Today, I Am a Muslim Too” event on Sunday was a first-time protester: Chelsea Clinton’s 2-year-old daughter, Charlotte.


The former First Daughter and only child of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton took to Twitter to post a photo of the scene and share that Charlotte was also participating in the rally held in response to the executive order President Donald Trump signed that put a temporary ban on travelers from seven countries with predominantly Muslim populations and refugees from all nations.
“Thank you to all who organized #IAmAMuslimToo today – Charlotte’s 1st protest rally. #NoBanNoWallNoRaids,” Chelsea captioned a snap featuring a popular protest sign that shows a woman wearing an American flag hijab.
Among the protesters filling Time Square in New York City for the “Today, I Am a Muslim Too” event on Sunday was a first-time protester: Chelsea Clinton’s 2-year-old daughter, Charlotte.
The former First Daughter and only child of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton took to Twitter to post a photo of the scene and share that Charlotte was also participating in the rally held in response to the executive order President Donald Trump signed that put a temporary ban on travelers from seven countries with predominantly Muslim populations and refugees from all nations.
“Thank you to all who organized #IAmAMuslimToo today – Charlotte’s 1st protest rally. #NoBanNoWallNoRaids,” Chelsea captioned a snap featuring a popular protest sign that shows a woman wearing an American flag hijab.

The protest was organized in part by hip hop mogul Russell Simmons, who spoke to the crowd with an American flag backdrop.
“We are here today to show middle America our beautiful signs and, through our beautiful actions and intention, that they have been misled,” Simmons told the crowd on the warm February afternoon.
“We are here unified because of Donald Trump,” he said. “We want to thank him for bringing us together.”
Celebrities such as Susan Sarandon also participated in the event.




Chelsea Clinton 
✔@ChelseaClinton
Thank you to all who organized  today - Charlotte's 1st protest rally. 
1:49 PM - 19 Feb 2017
 Chelsea, 36, also posted on Twitter early Sunday to join in the growing chorus of people who were mocking a false claim Trump made about an attack on Sweden during a rally in Florida on Saturday.
“You look at what’s happening in Germany. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden — Sweden — who would believe this? Sweden, they took in large numbers, they are having problems like they never thought possible,” Trump said, pointing to the non-existent event as rationale for his executive order on immigration and refugees.


Chelsea Clinton 
✔@ChelseaClinton
What happened in Sweden Friday night? Did they catch the Bowling Green Massacre perpetrators?
7:50 AM - 19 Feb 2017

“What happened in Sweden Friday night? Did they catch the Bowling Green Massacre perpetrators?” Chelsea quipped on Twitter, referencing comments by Trump’s senior adviser, Kellyanne Conway, who described a supposed terrorist attack committed by two Iraqi refugees that never occurred.
Although no incident occurred in Sweden on Friday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson ran a segment interviewing a documentary filmmaker who claimed that crime increases in Sweden were linked to immigrants, many of whom are refugees.
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#LastNightInSweden - Swedes baffled by Trump’s 'last night in Sweden' comment



In a speech on Saturday, US President Donald Trump suggested that something had happened ‘last night in Sweden” – prompting baffled Swedes to take to Twitter and other social media wondering what on earth the American leader might have been referring to.
The Swedish twittersphere went nuts on Saturday, with #LastNightInSweden quickly becoming one of the most popular hashtags after Trump appeared to justify the controversial US travel ban targeting seven Muslim countries by claiming some sort of incident had happened in Sweden.
“When you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden – Sweden! Who would believe this? Sweden!,” the American leader told a Florida rally.
Only nothing had happened in Sweden.
While Sweden’s former prime minister Carl Bildt wondered what Trump might have been smoking, others asked whether he might have referred to a massive meatball theft, someone having opened a tin of fermented herring in public, or the fact that it had snowed overnight.
Others went on to crack jokes about the incident perhaps involving the traumatic experience of trying to assemble IKEA furniture.
The curator of Sweden’s official Twitter account @sweden – an account that is handed over to a regular Swede every week in a show of democracy – was kept busy reassuring people that all was fine in Sweden. In just four hours, more than 800 people had mentioned the @sweden handle, she said.
Several media outlets speculated Trump might have made the comment after Fox aired an interview with documentary film-maker Ami Horowitz on Friday and who claims Sweden is trying to cover up the problems linked to immigration. 
If Trump referred to a supposed terror attack, the president and his entourage have now alleged three non-existent terror attacks since he took office. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has, on several occasions, spoken of an attack in Atlanta that never happened, while the president’s senior advisor Kellyanne Conway was mocked after referring to the Bowling Green massacre – which also never occurred.


http://www.thelocal.se/20170219/swedes-baffled-by-trumps-last-night-in-sweden-comment
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#LastNightInSweden - Swedes Disliked Donald Trump Even Before His ‘Last Night In Sweden’ Remarks

By Nick Robins-Early
President Donald Trump seemed to suggest to his supporters at a rally on Saturday that something horrible had happened the previous night in Sweden, when no such incident had occurred.
“You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden,” Trump told the crowd, after saying that “we need to keep our country safe.” He then listed a number of European cities where terror attacks have taken place.
Swedish media, along with many online, mocked Trump’s misleading statement. Former Prime Minister Carl Bildt asked “What has he been smoking?” in a post on Twitter, while others ridiculed the speech using the hashtag “#LastNightInSweden.”
But even before the president made a vague reference to an awful event in Sweden, the Nordic country had an avid dislike for Trump. A Pew Research Center survey released during the U.S. presidential election campaign last year showed that 92 percent of Swedes had little to no confidence in Trump to “do the right thing regarding world affairs,” a higher number than in any other nation polled.
The June 2016 survey looked at attitudes toward the presidential candidates in 10 countries across Europe, as well as four Asia-Pacific nations and Canada. Although support for Trump was low across the board, Sweden edged out other countries, including the Netherlands and Germany, to hold the highest percentage of “no confidence” respondents.
Pew’s poll doesn’t give a reason for why Swedes had such an unfavorable opinion of Trump’s world affairs acumen. Sweden does have a number of policies that are ideologically opposite to Trump’s, however, especially when it comes to refugees.
Sweden took in almost 200,000 asylum seekers amid the mass migration of people to Europe from conflict zones such as Syria, including 163,000 refugee claimants in 2015 alone. The surge in migration led to Sweden putting in place stricter rules for asylum claims last year, and reluctantly giving up some of its status as one of the world’s most accepting nations for refugees.
A common narrative among anti-refugee and right-wing groups is that Sweden’s acceptance of immigration has led to a surge in crimes, notably sexual assault. False stories of refugees committing rape have been circulated on social media and subsequently been debunked. Swedish criminologists have also disputed the link between immigration and sex crimes.
Trump previously described Sweden’s experience with refugees in hyperbolic ways to make his case for temporarily banning Muslim immigrants from entering the United States. In an interview last May with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Trump used a line extremely similar to the one said during his Saturday night rally. “Look at what’s happening in Europe. Look what’s happening in Germany. Look at what’s happening to Sweden. They have a small section of Sweden which is beyond out of control, all right?” Trump told Stephanopoulos. In other instances, Trump has said it “wasn’t people from Sweden who blew up the World Trade Center.” Trump also claimed in his book The Art of the Deal that his grandfather was Swedish, but this was later proven to be untrue. The Trump administration put an incident in the city of Malmo, Sweden, on its list of terror attacks it said the media did not sufficiently report. The so-called attack was actually a minor case of arson at an Iraqi community center that authorities did not describe as terrorism.
Earlier this month, however, Swedish police did arrest three neo-Nazis who were planning a bomb attack on an asylum center.
UPDATE: Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters on Sunday that Trump was “talking about rising crime and recent incidents in general, and not referring to a specific incident.” Sanders added that the president had been “referring to a report he had seen the previous night.”
Trump himself weighed in shortly thereafter to clarify that he was indeed referring to the Fox News segment about immigration in Sweden:
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U.S - Breaking the Anti-Immigrant Fever






Americans have been watching the Trump administration unfold for almost a month now, in all its malevolent incompetence. From morning tweets to daytime news to late-night comedy, many watch and fret and mock, and then sleep, sometimes fitfully.
Others, a large minority, lie awake, thinking about losing their families, jobs and homes. They have been vilified by the president as criminals, though they are not. They have tried to build honest lives here and suddenly are as fearful as fugitives. They await the fists pounding on the door, the agents in black, the cuffs, the van ride, the cell. They are terrified that the United States government will find them, or their parents or their children, demand their papers, and take them away.
About 11 million people are living in this country outside the law. Suddenly, by presidential decree, all are deportation priorities, all are supposed criminals, all are threatened with broken lives, along with members of their families. The end could come for them any time.
This is not an abstract or fanciful depiction. It is not fake news. It’s the United States of today, this month, this morning.
In El Paso, a woman is picked up at a courthouse where she had been seeking an order of protection; immigration agents were apparently tipped off by the man she said abused her. Near Seattle, a 23-year-old man who was protected from deportation and allowed to work lawfully under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is picked up anyway, accused of being a gang member. He furiously denies this, and his lawyer presents paperwork suggesting that agents altered his words to falsely implicate him.
Another DACA recipient, Daniela Vargas of Jackson, Miss., barricades herself in her home after agents detain her father and brother. A mother of four, Jeanette Vizguerra, seeks refuge, alone, in a Denver church basement. A group of Latino men leaving a church-run homeless shelter near Alexandria, Va., are surrounded by a dozen immigration agents who question them, scan their fingerprints and arrest at least two of them. President Trump’s defenders say the arrest numbers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement are comparable to those under President Barack Obama, an energetic deporter-in-chief. That may be true, for the moment, but the context is vastly different. Mr. Trump’s campaign pledges, his flurry of immigration-related executive orders, including his ban on certain travelers from Muslim countries, have a common thread. They reflect his abandonment of discretion, of common sense, his rejection of sound law-enforcement priorities that stress public safety and respect for the Constitution.
They prioritize fear instead.
ICE and the Border Patrol under Mr. Obama were ordered to focus on arresting serious criminals and national-security risks. Mr. Trump has removed those restraints in the name of bolstering his “deportation force.” He wants to triple the number of ICE agents. He wants to revive federal agreements to deputize state and local police officers as immigration officers. He wants to increase the number of detention beds and spur the boom in private prisons.
This vision is the one Donald Trump began outlining at the start of his campaign, when he slandered an entire country, Mexico, as an exporter of rapists and drug criminals, and an entire faith, Islam, as a global nest of murderers. This is the currency of the Trump aides Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller, who have brought the world of the alt-right, with its white nationalist strain, into the White House.
Where could the demonizing and dehumanizing of the foreign born lead but to a whiter America? You have heard the lies from Mr. Trump: that immigrants pose a threat, when they are a boon. That murders are up, when they are down. That refugees flow unimpeded into the country, when they are the most meticulously vetted people to cross our borders. That immigrants and refugees are terrorists, when they are the ones being terrorized.
For those who would resist the administration, there is much to do, and not a lot of time. Congress is not a check. Democrats there are outnumbered, speaking out but waging symbolic resistance for now. Republicans are mostly split between avoiding the subject and cheering on Mr. Trump.
States and cities are freer to act. Many recognize the dangerously anti-American mood and are striving to protect their immigrant populations. They are refusing to allow their police officers to join deportation dragnets, and are readying legal representation and other aid for immigrants. The Trump administration falsely calls these places “sanctuary city” lawbreakers and threatens to withhold federal funding as punishment. It’s not yet clear what actions the administration can take, or who will win the legal battles that are bound to ensue.
And anti-sanctuary, anti-immigrant, anti-refugee sentiment is hardly confined to the federal executive branch. Governors and legislatures in red states will be blocking money to blue, pro-immigrant cities, rolling back in-state tuition and other immigrant-friendly policies, and jumping onto Mr. Trump’s all-out-enforcement bandwagon. This battle has many fronts. The other best lever available, besides the courts and the Constitution, is people power. Protesting and public actions will embolden others to join in, and hearten the vulnerable. If senators and representatives can’t show courage, then churches, universities, schools, philanthropies, health systems, corporations, farmers and artists can.
The days of protests at airports over the Muslim ban were a magnificent surprise, a spontaneous uprising of Americans who said: This is not who we are. Think of the power in that. Think of the message sent if the “day without immigrants,” in which foreign-born workers stayed home, became a week or a month. Then there is the secretary of homeland security, John Kelly, who — based on his testimony in confirmation hearings — understands Latin America and recognizes the folly of militarized, indiscriminate immigration enforcement. It is not yet clear where he is on the Trump-Bannon-Miller axis. But Mr. Kelly could use his power for good.
An alliance of those who recognize the threat Mr. Trump poses to the American identity can push against him, to hasten the day that the fever breaks.
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