Month: December 2008

The FBI is paying attention to Somalis in U.S.

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

A few days ago Ann expressed her hope that the FBI was looking into activity in Somali mosques, especially among youth.  It looks like they’re doing that. Sara Carter in the Washington Times reports today:

The FBI is expanding contacts with Somali immigrant communities in the U.S., especially in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, fearing that terrorists are recruiting young men for suicide missions in their homeland.

FBI Special Agent E.K. Wilson, spokesman for the Twin Cities FBI field office, described the effort as community outreach. Many members of the Somali community are concerned over disappearances, he said.

Ireland: Burqa-wearing immigrants have health problems

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We have written previously that Ireland is taking refugees from Islamic countries and now comes news that Ireland’s gloomy climate is bad for burqa-wearing Muslim women. (Hat tip: The Religion of Peace)

From the Times:

MUSLIM women who wear the burqa in Ireland are at increased risk of pelvic fractures during childbirth because of vitamin D deficiency due to a lack of sunlight, a consultant warns.

Babies born to women with vitamin D deficiency are also more prone to seizures in their first week of life, according to Dr Miriam Casey, of the Osteoporosis Unit in St James’s hospital in Dublin.

A burqa is an enveloping outer garment worn by some Muslim women. In hot countries, enough sunlight gets through to give them sufficient vitamin D, but this may not happen in countries where there is limited sunshine, such as Ireland and Britain.

[….]
 
 
 

 

Casey said: “As we see a rise in the number of Muslims in Ireland, it’s going to become a massive problem. It’s worse in England whose Muslim community is older. There are already problems in the Rotunda [a maternity hospital in Dublin] and the paediatric hospitals.”

 

Having had some personal experience with the “troubles” that plagued Ireland for centuries between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, I’m wondering  how the Irish are handling the Muslim influx.

Keep Iraqi refugees from becoming radicalized: help them go home

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Ken Bacon, who last appeared on Refugee Resettlement Watch in November, ridiculously urging President-Elect Obama to bring in more than 100,000 Iraqi refugees in one year, seems to have come to his senses since then.  On December 22 he posted a good entry on his organization’s blog titled “The Risk of Radicalized Refugees.”  Bacon is the head of Refugees International, the lobbying arm of the refugee industry.

Bacon cites a New York Times article about angry youths in refugee camps in Darfur who have become more radical than their elders, the tribal sheikhs. They are bored, with nothing to do, uprooted from their lives and traditions, and receiving a little education — about enough to be dangerous, it seems.   

Education in the camps, which often stops at the eighth grade, has to a degree expanded the horizons of men like Mr. Ismael. English was not taught in their now-razed villages, for instance. But their heightened awareness has also stoked their outrage about the wrongs committed against them and about their lack of opportunity.

“You cannot call them a unified group with one political ideology, but they are all angry,” said Mr. Khater, the writer. “That is the factor unifying them.”

The article concludes:

“The government has created a powder keg that it doesn’t know how to defuse,” said a Western diplomat in Khartoum with wide experience in the camps.

Bacon relates this story to the Iraqi refugees:

The story caught my eye because it highlights a serious problem:  long stays in camps—either as refugees out of their countries or displaced within their own countries—can radicalize youth.  We have seen this over the years with Palestinians and with Afghan refugees, and we could well see it with displaced Iraqi youths who are living in increasingly desperate conditions.

Although most of the nearly five million displaced Iraqis don’t live in camps, they endure many of the same problems—economic hardship, limited educational opportunities, and long, boring days with little reason to hope that they will return home soon or have an opportunity to work.   While girls are often busy helping their mothers, young men have less to do, making them susceptible to recruitment by political or militia movements.

Heading off the potential radicalization of Iraqi youth should be a top priority for the government of Iraq and for the U.S.  This means resolving the displacement crisis—one out of every five Iraqis is either a refugee or internally displaced—as quickly as possible.

I think that’s right. And to his credit, Bacon doesn’t even bring up third-country resettlement. He goes straight to the point:

But neither Iraq nor the region will be safe and stable if five million Iraqis are still displaced, with 2.7 million in Iraq and the rest living as refugees in Jordan, Syria and other nearby countries.  The only sensible, durable solution is to create conditions for safe return, something that is going to require coordination by the U.S. and Iraq.  The government of Iraq has only started to deal with a host of complex legal and property issues necessary to encourage return.  But most important, Iraq will have to demonstrate that it can keep its cities safe and provide the services, including schools, that returning Iraqis need.

If the refugee agencies are really concentrating on helping to create the conditions for the safe return of the refugees, that would be welcome news indeed. I have a feeling it’s not that simple. But perhaps with Bush-hatred no longer clouding their minds, they can see more clearly what needs to be done, and work to help make it happen.

Hat tip: Matthew Hay Brown at the Baltimore Sun

Alinskyism (Day 14)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Note to readers:  This is another of the sporadic posts which I have categorized as “community destabilization.”   Immigrants and refugees offer a continuous supply of ‘Have-nots’ for whom radicals can wage a war against the ‘Haves.’    Community instability is necessary to bring about “change.”

 

To Saul Alinsky the world breaks down along clean lines of  ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-nots.’   Radicals are always on the side of the ‘Have-nots’ and never let conscience or morality get in the way of fighting the ‘Haves.’ 

He says you don’t love humanity enough and you are too concerned for your personal salvation, if you stop short of doing everything possible for the ‘Have-nots’—-no matter how many dirty tricks must be employed!

Certainly one of the major differences (maybe even the biggest difference from the standpoint of strategy) between Leftists and Conservatives is how the issue of ‘means and ends’ are treated.   Conservatives I know personally are concerned that they wage their battles large and small trying at least to maintain their integrity and behave ethically (I thought of John McCain here).  Alinsky thinks this is complete B.S. and that one should use any means necessary to wage a war against the “Haves.”

Look at this paragraph from Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals:”

The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe’s “conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action”; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind.  The choice must always be for the latter.  Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual’s personal salvation.  He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of “personal salvation”;  he doesn’t care enough for people to be “corrupted” for them.

He has no patience for those he calls the “means-and-ends” moralists.   Other little nuggets:   “Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times.”  “….consistency is not a virtue.”  “….in war [on behalf of Have-nots] the end justifies almost any means.”   There is more where those came from in “Rules…..”

Now go back to what I said at the end of the previous post here.  If it turns out that Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s memoirs they will not lose a minutes sleep over any ethical breach, because the ends justify any means.    They got Obama elected for the good of the ‘Have-nots’ and that is all that matters!

Did Bill Ayers write Obama’s memoir?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update October 7th, 2009:  Did Bill Ayers just admit he wrote “Dreams,” here?

Update September 24, 2009:  Did Michelle ask Ayers to do it, here?

Judy just sent me this fascinating analysis of Obama’s “Dreams from my Father,” and I couldn’t resist telling you about it.    I had just last week listened to the audio version of the book while driving to New Jersey, occasionally laughing out loud at passages I  concluded could not have been written by Obama.

What does this have to do with refugees, probably not much, but since I have been writing about the world view that both Obama and Bill Ayers  appear to share in the category called ‘community destabilization,’  I wanted readers to know about this hypothesis.

Jack Cashill writing today at American Thinker begins:

There is no science to validate the thesis that follows, no academy to adjudicate it, and little hope of convincing the Obama faithful even to consider it, let alone concede its validity. That much said, the evidence is self-evident, accessible to all, and overwhelming.

The thesis is simple enough: Bill Ayers served as Barack Obama’s muse in the creation of Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father. Ayers breathed creative life into this ungifted amateur, who had written nothing of note before, and reconceived him as a literary prodigy.

“I was astonished by his ability to write, to think, to reflect, to learn and turn a good phrase,” said Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison of the Dreams’ author. “I was very impressed. This was not a normal political biography.” Agreed, it was not normal at all.

Read it all! 

If I recall there were some so-called conservatives who came around to support Obama in the Presidential campaign simply because this book showed what a gifted writer he supposedly is.    It just occured to me though that even if it were to be revealed that Ayers was the literary genius behind the book, Ayers and Obama would dismiss the fuss, because as they learned from their ideological mentor Saul Alinsky, the means don’t matter, only the ends.  (I’ve been meaning to tell you about that—later today—here it is.)