Month: February 2008

Muslim Iraqis to Albany, where are the Christians?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is another of those refugee template stories, this time from the Albany Times-Union.   The difference between the Iraqi refugee stories and the refugees-in-camps stories is that the reporter always puts in a little extra effort to say how dangerous Iraq is thanks to us. 

To set the scene, the reporter begins his heartwarming story by describing a nice little family gathering where widowed mother serves her sons a meal of Baghdad style pita wraps as they chat in Arabic in the safety of their nice little apartment in the capital of the great state of NY–Albany.    What is wrong with this picture?

Jenan Salman had prepared a favorite dish for her sons, Bakr Najm, 27, Omar Najm, 22, and Othman Najm, 17. They were sharing it with 35-year-old Yaser Almahdawi, also an Iraqi refugee, one who lives nearby and has become like one of the family.

Here is what I want to know?  Why are we bringing fighting aged young Muslim men to America?  Why are our men of the same age fighting and dying for freedom in Iraq while their men gobble down taxpayer funded pitas in the nice little apartment in upstate New York?

Here comes Lavinia Limon of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (the mothership to the CT volag I’ve been writing about) to explain the terrible circumstances these young men left behind.

“We are seeing in Iraqi refugees a heightened level of trauma compared to other refugees,” said USCRI president Lavinia Limon. “Most refugees come here from some war situation, but in the case of Iraq their young people have seen things that will never leave them. Some have seen family, neighbors blown apart.

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“There are still millions of Iraqis over there in dire circumstances, many living under direct death threats and it’s getting progressively worse.”

It’s getting progressively worse!  Where is she getting that information?  Or, is that just what the mainstream reporters want to hear? 

Then Almahdawi jumps in because he speaks perfect English (he was an interpreter) to tell us more.

Almahdawi said neither he nor Salman and her sons did anything that would mark them for death by the Iraq government, but all of them said they would not feel safe if they returned to Baghdad.

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“It is dangerous there, too many gangs in the streets,” said Almahdawi, the interpreter, who left behind four brothers and three sisters.

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The violence is steeped in centuries of unrest between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Salman and her family are Sunnis, and Almahdawi said he isn’t affiliated with either.

Yeh, well so do our young fighting men and women feel “unsafe” there too.   These refugees have already said they are not targets.  Fearful of gangs?  Well, I hate to break it to you but you will find those in Albany as well.

So, we have learned that the Salman family are Sunni’s who weren’t personally in any danger, were not personally persecuted.  The interpreter doesn’t say he was a target and won’t even say whether he is Sunni or Shia, or what he is.  

How come every story I see these days about the Iraqi refugees never has any truly persecuted Christian refugees in them?  Where are the Christians?

And, by the way, here is Lavinia Limon’s testimony to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus at the end of last year, not a word about persecuted Christians, or any other persecuted minority either.

Distrust building in Waterbury, CT

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is an update of the post I did the other day where the International Institute of Connecticut has come under fire from the refugees it is supposed to serve.  The mostly Burmese refugees feel the agency is not doing its job and so a meeting was arranged between the director and the refugees.    Much to the surprise of local American advocates (church members and a teacher), they were closed out of the meeting.

A local church was thwarted Saturday from attending a meeting between Waterbury’s Burmese refugees and their resettlement agency, when the agency sent a bus to get the refugees and bring them to its headquarters in Bridgeport.

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Two volunteers from Living Faith Christian Church and a local teacher gathered at the refugees apartments Saturday, ready to help them pose questions about their rent and medical appointments. Many of the 60-plus refugees had asked church members to be at the meeting to help them articulate their concerns. But the director of the International Institute of Connecticut, which resettled the refugees last summer, insisted that the meeting was confidential and closed to the church and the press.

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“They went to great lengths to keep us from going and that makes me more suspicious,” said Cheryl Newland, of Living Faith Christian Church. “We were just going to observe what was going on so we could hear at least what the institute told them.”

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Kate Lockwood, a West Side Middle School teacher, was at the refugees’ apartment Saturday morning, asked to accompany the refugees. But after case worker Anthony Zurowski called his sister, Angela Zurowski, director for resettlement at the institute, Lockwood was told the meeting was private.

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“I could tell the families were upset,” said Lockwood. “I’m doing this because I care about them. I don’t think they get that same sense from the institute.”

I laughed out loud when I saw this last line in the story from the Republican American.  Way to go Ya Za!

One refugee, Ya Za, has become so distrustful of Zurowski and the institute that he purchased a tape recorder and took it with him to the meeting.

Somalis disappoint some Emporians, others angered

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The Somali era for Emporia, KS came to an end this past Saturday night when the last Somali refugees in that city didn’t show up for a farewell dinner planned in their honor.   Granted the whole Somali saga in Emporia was fraught with controversy from the very beginning when hundreds of refugees arrived in this prairie city to work for a Tyson’s meat packing plant, so the saga’s end is not unexpected.   We have an entire category that covers the conflict that evolved over months.

Tyson’s recently closed the plant with little notice putting hundreds of workers, not just the Somalis, out of a job.

What was apparently intended as a gesture of goodwill by Christians turned into another source of hard feelings when the Somalis became a no-show due to the sudden illness of the group’s leader.   Somalis are hardcore believers in the prohibition in Islam to not become too friendly with Christians, and the church setting itself might have caused them to stay away.  Who knows?

Tables full of hot food and desserts brought in by organizers and friends lined tables outside the church kitchen, while hosts waited for the guests to arrive. Eventually, the call came that the Somali organizer was too sick to come to Sacred Heart.

The article in the Emporia Gazette yesterday stirred up more hard feelings when commenters began to question why others fired from Tyson’s weren’t given a special dinner; nor was there a request made for citizens to volunteer to clean rental units vacated by those who lost their jobs as there was for the Somalis.

Here is a comment from someone named Tosie:

Are you serious? People are needed to help the Somalians pack up? They got here easy enough didn’t they? They can pack up and leave just the same. I don’t see anyone saying, “Hey, Emporias, let’s pitch in and help EVERYONE that is going to have to leave Emporia to get another job pack up and clean.” Once again, poor Somalians, let’s give them special treatment. No thanks…..

Read the whole article here.

British Blogger Lionheart seeks asylum in the US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Last month we told you about Lionheart, the blogger from the UK, who was in the United States and feared returning to his homeland because the authorities there threatened to arrest him over words he used on his blog.  See our earlier post here in which we made the important point that we all must stick together if we are to preserve perhaps the strongest pillar of western society—free speech.

We learned from the Center for Vigilant Freedom that Lionheart has decided to seek asylum in the United States.  Imagine that, an Englishman seeking political asylum in America!  What is the world coming to!

“I am applying for political asylum on the grounds of political persecution and human rights issues.

——

“All I’ve done is written words on a blog. That doesn’t befit a prison sentence.”

Chris Coen of Friends of Refugees on Nashville

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This morning we received this letter from Chris Coen, Director of Friends of Refugees  in response to our post on Nashville yesterday.  He tells us more that the Tennessean reporter should have known about the downside of multiculturalism in Nashville.

Dear Refugee Resettlement Watch,

The reporter ‘forgot’ to mention a few other incidents with refugees in Nashville,  one of which had been reported in her own paper just a few years earlier.

What the State Department needs to consider when deciding where in the U.S. to resettle refugees is the appropriateness of communities for the various groups of refugees. In 2001 the State Department with its 10 voluntary agency partners placed thousands of Lost Boys of Sudan refugees in inner city neighborhoods of many of our largest cities. These young men were resettled without parents or extended families, and were often placed in cities that did not have members of their ethnic groups. As a result, many of the young men were preyed upon by street thugs and other criminals while the State Department and its partner agencies sat by offering little assistance.

In 2001 ‘Lost Boy’ Ring Paulino Deng died at age 19 with a knife in his chest outside the Nashville apartment where he had settled, the victim of an argument over a parking dispute. In May of 2003 the Lost Boy refugee Moses Pieny, 25, also of Nashville, was murdered after being lured to a house, tied up and robbed. He was later shot several times and his body was dumped in a vacant lot. In Nashville in May of 2006 the 34-year-old Eritrean mother refugee Freweini Gebremicael was shot in the head and her corpse lit on fire. In Chicago we counted 23  ‘Lost Boys’ refugees brutalized on the streets – three were stabbed, many were beaten and had teeth knocked out, and one sustained brain injuries after being kicked down the concrete steps of an L-platform.  The State Department dismissed the refugees’ fear of the neighborhoods in which they had been placed in Chicago as “perceived” safety of the neighborhoods.

Sincerely,

Christopher Coen

Director

Friends of Refugees

FORefugees@hotmail.com

See our last post on Chris Coen and the tireless work he does to bring the plight of refugees in America to the authorities attention only to be rebuffed.  And, shame on the lazy and incompetant mainstream media for aiding and abetting this travesty by their silence.

I reiterate, we can debate all day long about how many refugees we should take and from where they should come but there is no excuse for the neglect many suffer when they have come to live among us.  Every refugee or refugee family unit must have a church or group sponsor/advocate as was the case in early refugee resettlement before these volags completely ran the show.