Month: August 2008

Waterbury Burmese helped by volunteers not government contractor

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is an update on the series of articles we reported on earlier in the year from Waterbury, CT.    Yesterday’s article in the Republican American shows how refugee resettlement could work and should work—communities and individual churches working closely with immigrants such as these Burmese Karen (Christians).   The present refugee resettlement system is run almost exclusively by government contracted volags (supposedly voluntary groups) who, like the International Institute of CT, frequently drop the ball and don’t care for the refugees.  At least in the case of Waterbury, the US State Department took action and suspended the Institute.

This article tells how private citizens have stepped in and this particular group of refugees is on the way to becoming American—-with summer camp for the kids (arranged by volunteers).

Ideally, this is the way the U.S. State Department would like refugee resettlement to work — the community and non-profits helping refugees assimilate. In Waterbury, however, friction developed early between volunteers and the International Institute, the non-profit agency that brought the refugees to Waterbury last fall, and volunteers responded by doing more. The Institute has subsequently been reprimanded by the U.S. State Department and has been forbidden from processing more refugees, but a degree of frustration — and anger — remains.

“If these people didn’t have us, where would they go?” said Caren Smith, the Living Faith volunteer who has spearheaded physical and dental appointments, meaning she is in these clinics up to four times a week. “These kids were running around with six to eight teeth rotting in their mouth. I mean rotting.” Smith has been helping Karen refugees since November and estimates she, or a member of her family, is in the refugees’ homes three to four times a week. She says during all that time she has not seen an institute staff member.

“[Jo Ann’s] fear is that if she and the other volunteers don’t do something, there’s no other safety net available,” said James Robertson, a Waterbury lawyer. “Who will help these people if not them? If there were a superstructure, a well-developed network that took care of them, maybe these volunteers would not be as energized.”

“The International Institute has really been a disappointment,” concedes Mike Monti, assistant pastor at Living Faith. “Fortunately, there’s a group of folks trying to help these people in spite of the lack [of attention] on the International side….[The refugees]just left to the mercy of someone who would knock on their door and say, ‘Can I help you?'”

Be sure to read what Lavinia Limon (head of USCRI, the mothership of the International Institute) had to say about Waterbury here.  

Reform needed:  We must go back to the old system of resettling refugees one family at a time with the help of private groups and churches.  Presently we are paying multi-million dollar non-profit groups to do this work and they are failing on many levels—refugees are not being assimilated (Somalis!), refugees are left in the lurch,  and the tax payer is footing the bill (including for salaries topping $100,000 for these groups’ staffers).  Cut out the middlemen!

Church World Service bringing Iraqis to Amish country

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is some news from Lancaster, PA.  Church World Service is bringing 50 Iraqi refugees such as the Sunni Muslim in this article to the hometown of the plain folk.  Church World Service is one of the top ten volags contracted by the US State Department to resettle refugees.

Previously the Virginia Council of Churches, a government subcontractor of Church World Service, had brought Meshketian Turks (Muslims who had been living in Russia) to Lancaster, something went wrong there and the resettlement was stopped.  We think it was some crime issue, but we never did find out. That failed resettlement resulted in our receiving the Meshketians in Hagerstown.

Here then is the news from Lancaster today:

“[Omar] is one of the first Iraqis we’ve resettled,” McGeehan [Church World Service employee] said. “Many more are going to be coming.”

CWS is a cooperative Christian ministry that provides relief with mentorships, living arrangements and English education courses to refugees in more than 80 countries.

About 50 more Iraqi refugees will be resettled by the group in the Lancaster area by the end of 2008, McGeehan said.

From now until September 30th you will see one story after another about hundreds of refugees arriving in the US.   The Presidential Determination for this fiscal year set the ceiling at 80,000 refugees and the agencies will scramble from now until the end of September to bring in as many as possible.   As a matter of fact, in Hagerstown at this time last summer I attended a meeting in which some of the county agency heads (such as the health department) expressed how difficult it was to process refugees in large groups at this time of year when school was starting and everyone was swamped.   It fell on deaf ears.

Always on Watch explains the Muslim ‘religious’ holiday–Eid

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Blogger Always on Watch has an explanation here about the Muslim religious holiday Eid al-Fitr that is the center of all the controversy at Tyson’s Food in Shelbyville, Tennessee.  Labor Day was going to be swapped as a paid holiday to celebrate Mohammed’s turning to violent means to spread his Islamic ‘religion’. 

Eid al-Fitr marks the end of Ramadan. The last day of Ramadan celebrates the Battle of Badr, the first significant military victory by the forces of Muhammad.

From the day of the Battle of Badr on, the tone of the verses in the Qur’an changed. According to many Islamic scholars, the more recent revelations, sometimes referred to as the Medinan verses, abrogated the earlier and peaceful Meccan ones. Because preaching and tolerance had not brought Muhammad the following which he needed in order to establish himself and Islam as political forces to be reckoned with, Allah, via a military victory, showed the prophet a more effective way to spread Islam. Therefore, Muhammad’s victory at the Battle of Badr and the celebration of Eid al-Fitr symbolize, for at least some Moslems, both the way to bring about the will of Allah and the will of Allah itself.

Somebody, please tell the Tysons Plant in Shelbyville what they are really recognizing and celebrating! Moslems yearning for the caliphate won’t miss the symbolism, even if the union at Tysons doesn’t understand the connection.

Shame on me for not thinking about this important piece of information —-I wonder if the Tyson’s management knows or cares.   Interesting too, in all the mainstream media coverage I don’t recall reading any description of what Eid celebrates.

CAIR calls critics of initial Tyson’s Labor Day dumping “Islamophobes!”

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update:  Thanks to reader Jim here is more today on CAIR—Michael Savage vows to take them all the way to the Supreme Court.

Yes, indeed!  It was only a matter of time before the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) got in on the Tyson’s Labor Day debacle and said hate websites stirred things up and that you, who called and wrote to Tysons and posted many comments all over the world wide web, are Islamophobes!  Remember what I said the other day:

Next thing you know he will say we are all “Islamophobes”…

Wear the label proudly.   

This is from Business Week, where CAIR whacks Tyson’s Food for changing its mind and responding to the majority of workers wishes to reinstate the Labor Day holiday:

Muslim civil rights advocates criticized Tyson Foods, and a union official said the company’s response was disingenuous.

“This wasn’t something imposed. It seems that this backtracking would be the result of the backlash from anti-Muslim hate (Web) sites and Islamophobes on the Internet,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for Washington D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Stuart Appelbaum, president of the union headquartered in New York, said he was surprised by the reaction to the holiday change.

“I would have thought that people would have been more sensitive and sympathetic to the concern to the members of our community, who want to celebrate their religious faith,” he said. “It’s a little disingenuous to say that they (Tyson) were responding to employee concerns. The proposal came from workers themselves.”

Calling names is how groups like CAIR operate and they find it works for them in Washington among the politically correct uber-educated, but it won’t work out among real Americans!  What CAIR doesn’t get yet is that Americans see this for what it is and are willing to speak up nonetheless!   Afterall, we aren’t Europe!

Endnote: I wonder if CAIR is looking into that Shelbyville Somali rampage as a hate crime—after leaving mosque Muslim attacks a woman in a Baptist Church—gotta be some hate there.