Month: June 2008

Islamic sharia law creates gay and lesbian refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’ve read about this before, but yesterday I came across this account of two Iranian men, one a successful  businessman and the other a university student, now living in destitution in Turkey and trying to get refugee status from the United Nations in order to be resettled in the West.   Islamic sharia law in some countries prescribes the death penalty for gays and lesbians.  

Just two years ago, Arash and Javad (not their real names), two young Iranian men were building their future together. Arash was pursuing a successful career in Iran’s financial sector and Javad was a university student in Tehran. Now the men live in abject poverty in a remote area of Turkey. They have no income and are frequently forced to scavenge for food in their neighbors’ trashcans. Javad, a diabetic, needs regular monitoring and medication, which he cannot afford. His health has deteriorated to the point where he regularly suffers diabetic comas.

How did two young, upwardly mobile Iranians end up in such dire circumstances? The answer to this question is simple. Arash and Javad are gay men forced to flee their country as refugees. According to the Iranian penal code, homosexual conduct is a crime that is punishable by death.

Read the rest of the story here.

This is what I don’t get, why aren’t national and international organizations which defend gay and lesbian rights speaking out more forcefully about Islam’s persecution of people for their sexual orientation.   It’s just like the women’s groups, such as NOW, remaining silent on the abuses of women and girls.   The silence about Islamic honor killings, female genital mutilation and forced marriages of young girls to old men is deafening.

There are only two possible answers.  Either the groups are chicken to speak out or somehow they have it in their collective heads that criticism of anything relating to Islam is somehow racist and something that right-wingers do and so they let terrible abuses continue without comment.   Shame on you!

Volunteers are good for refugees, while volag lets them down

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is a story I missed from earlier in the month.   It’s a touching story from North Carolina about how a couple of women have been a Godsend to Burmese Karen Christian refugees who felt abandoned.   Read the whole story here.

There is a single sentence near the end of the article that caught the eye of one of our readers.

Paw Yeh shared how deserted her family felt when a refugee caseworker dropped them off at their Carrboro apartment with two days of rice and not even so much as a blanket.

Which volag left these poor scared people with some rice and nothing else?    Was it Lutheran Family Services, World Relief, or possibly the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, all paid government contractors operating in North Carolina?

Reforms needed

We see over and over again in differant parts of the country where the volags are actually discouraging citizen volunteer help with refugees while one of the important reforms we have advocated is increased involvement by the public with the care and assimilation of refugees, not less.    Had a church or other group been lined up to greet and care for this family they would never have been “dropped off” to an empty apartment.

 

Catholic volag helps immigrant girl get an abortion

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This shocking story was reported in the Washington Times earlier this week:

Federal authorities are investigating the actions of a Catholic charity in Richmond which helped a 16-year-old Guatemalan girl to receive an abortion in January, in possible violation of Virginia law.

Officials have called the matter to the attention of US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) headquarters in Washington, urging it to prevent any repetition of the incident.

Four employees of Commonwealth Catholic Charities Richmond, (CCR) have been fired and one supervisor with the bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services agency has been suspended, according to federal sources and a secret April 29 letter written by three bishops to 350 bishops nationwide. 

The USCCB is one of the top 10 volags in the US receiving federal money to resettle refugees and also apparently to care for minors who are in this country illegally but without their parents.  

The girl, whose parents are missing, was a ward of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

HHS provides $7.6 million a year in contracts with the USCCB for foster care of immigrant children. The bishops group subcontracts services through agencies like Commonwealth Catholic Charities.

“These federal funds are awarded with the clear purpose of caring for unaccompanied minors here from other countries,” said HHS spokesman Kenneth Wolfe. “To that end, we were surprised and disappointed to learn of a chapter of Catholic Charities using this funding to facilitate a minor procuring an abortion.”

 […]

In a three-page letter dated April 23, David Siegel, acting director of the HHS Refugee Resettlement Office, criticized the Catholic bishops group.

“USCCB’s inability to direct the actions of its sub-grantee was a failure of management, oversight and monitoring,” he said in the letter to Johnny Young, executive director of the USCCB Migration and Refugee Services (MRS) agency.

This case further demonstrates why we need to have increased scrutiny of the volags (supposedly voluntary but actually well-paid agencies) that are contracted by the federal government to take care of minor immigrants and refugees.     These agencies have long been immune from scrutiny because the public assumes they are doing good work.

More evidence we have already brought Rohingya to US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

According to this article, Malaysia is dealing with illegal immigrants too (join the crowd) and although this is a bit confusing it appears that the Burmese Muslim Rohingyas are entering Malaysia illegally.    We’ve been wondering if we are already admitting Rohingya refugees to the US and here is a line from this news letter for a Rohingya human rights group that would suggest we are:

“Previously we discussed with the United States who accepted a few thousand Rohingya to their country,” he said, adding that Malaysia hoped to discuss with other countries to help take in the stateless people.

See our whole category called Rohingya Reports here.

Assertive Somalis not assimilating in Minnesota, so what else is new

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is a story I missed while I was in the wilderness this week with no computer, it is entitled ‘Some Muslims face cultural clash in workplace.’    The article discusses the recent lawsuit filed by Muslim workers at a Tortilla factory who were told they must wear the company’s uniform, see our post here for more on that.

Here are some interesting bits from this article: 

Over nearly 20 years, thousands of Somali refugees have come to the Twin Cities to escape a violent civil war in their homeland. Yet they are not assimilating as fast as some other immigrant populations.

Many who maintain Muslim prayer times during the workday and wear modest clothing have been fired from manufacturers across the state. And Minnesota courts have seen an increase in religious discrimination complaints.

“For the average Minnesotan, this is entirely new,” said Bruce Corrie, an economist at Concordia University who specializes in immigration research. “The Somali community is highly assertive and politically engaged. … It’s part of who they are as a people.”

“We have a saying in Somalia that ‘he who approaches the lion does not know what a lion is,'” said Abdi Sheikhosman, an Islamic law professor at the University of Minnesota. “Many Somalis arrive here not knowing the history of racial divide in this country. They don’t know the lion they are up against.”

Excuse me Mr. Sheikhosman, this is not about race, it is about culture and a refusal by some immigrants to be a part of our culture.  Our so-called “lion”, the race issue, has effectively been killed by the nomination of a black man as a candidate for President.  The race issue is only kept alive by people like Mr.S. keeping it alive and this reporter throwing it in in the middle of an article about culture.   Oh, and I will remind readers that it is black Americans who have been clashing with African immigrants in some of our cities.

Back to the article at hand: 

Nationally, religious discrimination complaints have nearly doubled since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In Minnesota, Muslims filed 45 such cases with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2007, up from eight in 2004.

For Abdisalam Adam, director of the Dar Al-Hijrah Cultural Center in Minneapolis and an imam at an area mosque, the issue comes down to cultural differences.

“You would think this would have been more of an issue in 1993 or 1994,” when Somalis started arriving in the Twin Cities in large numbers, he said. “But now, Somalis and employers have gotten to know each other, and the situation is only getting worse.”

So, things are getting worse as more and more Somalis arrive and refuse to assimilate.

Mr. S. then makes an interesting admission. 

Sheikhosman says Somalis are also different from other immigrants because many hope to return to their home after the civil war, so they see assimilation as less of a priority.

What!   We are spending all this taxpayer money to bring Somalis here, so that employers can have cheap laborers who refuse to assimilate and who are planning to go home to Africa anyway?