Day: September 28, 2008

British Tories reject sharia courts

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Hurray for the Conservative Party of Britain — the Tories.  The Telegraph (UK) reports:

A Conservative government would ban sharia courts and impose a tough crackdown on Islamic extremism, the shadow security minister has said.  [A shadow minister is the person in the party out of power who will take that position if the party gains power.] Pauline Neville-Jones, a former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, said: “We are not going to have any status for sharia courts. Absolutely not.”  

Earlier this month it emerged that the Government had quietly allowed rulings of five sharia courts across Britain to be enforceable through the county courts or High Court.

We reported on September 15 that the  Labour government is now allowing Muslims their own courts that use sharia law for civil cases. The Conservative Party is out of power, so its policies have no official standing. They’re already way up in the polls; I’ll bet this will put them farther ahead.  The article continues:

Speaking the day after Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, said Britain had “done something terrible to ourselves” by encouraging multiculturalism, Lady Neville-Jones said that the Conservatives would make the case for more “integration” among all British people, whatever their backgrounds.

She said: “We want unity and opportunity, despite difference, through integration.”

She accused the Government of leading the country down the “blind alley of multiculturalism, which has deliberately gone down the road of separation for its own sake.”

Lady Neville-Jones said there was also a clear divide between the Tories and Labour on the question of how to deal with the spread of extremism among some young Muslims.

There sure is. The Tories would extend the list of banned extremist groups and try to reform the European Convention on Human Rights so they could deport preachers who incite violence against Britain. (Love those tolerant Europeans — of course it’s a human right to incite violence.) Labour would keep going down the road to dhimmitude.

This is a terrific development. Britain’s multiculturalism is far more stifling than ours, and ours is bad enough. There are many more Muslims and they are more militant, and the insane version of multiculturalism has been festering for a longer time there. I remember three decades ago a news story that a borough of London had banned black garbage bags because that would offend black people by implying they were like garbage. If the Tories can mobilize the sensible portion of the British people, who I understand still exist, especially in the north, this will be an important blow for western civilization.

Calling the State Department: You have another volag screwing up

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update October 2nd:  Lutheran Social Services gets defensive.

 

 ….and, another Iraqi refugee family angry.    In the last 15 months, since we began writing Refugee Resettlement Watch, I have lost track of the number of stories I’ve read about the volags (supposedly voluntary agencies) that are contracted by the US State Department to resettle refugees and are not fulfilling their contracts.  

Like it or not, these agencies, many of them church groups such as this Lutheran outfit in New Hampshire are paid by you to take care of refugees for the first few months they are in the US.   They are required to supply the refugees with basic needs to set up their new homes, and over and over again they are screwing up (sorry to use that language but it infuriates me!).   If we are going to bring refugees by the tens of thousands to the US, then we better be prepared to take care of them. 

And, on top of it all, this story of refugee abuse from the Concord Monitor involves Iraqis—those very same people that every bleeding heart on the left in the US has been hollering about, “Bring more Iraqis now, you bad Bush Administration!”

Yes, bring them so they can get the things they need from a dumpster!

Rasim Mueen and Sendes Abd Zead watch the Dumpster outside their Parkview Place apartment for things they can use. The couple, both 32, have collected a stained pillow and faded blankets that they’ve washed in the bathtub and hung to dry on a cord strung across the apartment’s one bedroom. They’ve found stuffed animals for their 6-year-old son, Dear Rasim, to play with, and a shower curtain cut into a circle to serve as a tablecloth.

The Iraqi family has lived in New Hampshire for nearly a month. They came to Concord as refugees, settled here by Lutheran Social Services, a federal refugee resettlement contractor. But they feel they have had little help.

“We are human, and we come here to get a better life, not to pull the things we need from the trash,” Abd Zead, 32, said through a translator.

The Iraqi family is very unhappy and their story goes on. 

Earlier this month, Mueen and Abd Zead saw a woman at the 7-Eleven near their home wearing a headscarf like Abd Zead. They asked her if she spoke Arabic and if she could help them. The woman was Mona Ibrahim, who came to Concord as a refugee in late 2006 with her husband, Tirhaga Gobara. The Sudanese couple understood how the Iraqi family felt. They too had felt lost and, at times, abandoned, after arriving. They went weeks without food stamps and had to rely on other refugees for help, they said.

It doesn’t make Mueen feel better to know that others have been through what they are going through, or to know that other Iraqi families recently settled here are struggling along with them. The way refugees are treated is wrong, he said.

“Lutheran Social Services, they think we are not human,” Mueen said.

Mueen said the couple have seen little of Lutheran staff and, while they have food stamps, they have received no money or guidance on obtaining a job.

“Twenty-five days, they don’t have $1 in 25 days,” Gobara said, translating for Mueen. 

I’m sure many of our readers are saying, they shouldn’t get any money, our grandparents didn’t when they came.  However, Lutheran Social Services has signed a contract with the government to provide them with some cash and expenses for the first few months until they find a job or go on some other forms of welfare in this highly touted public/private partnership!

Then it turns out that these do-gooder groups are squabbling with each other.

Some groups have had a history of tense relations as they compete over grant money, volunteers’ time or dueling philosophies of how to help. Volunteers with the Concord Multicultural Project and some refugees complain about Lutheran Social Services not adequately preparing refugees for life in the United States or being unwilling to work with outside groups. However, many also say that simply pointing fingers at Lutheran, which is limited by its federal funding and specific mission, is unfair.

Well if the federal funding is limited, go out and raise money privately or stop bringing refugees.

Remember what that wise boy in Arizona said a couple of weeks ago—it’s better to have 10 satisfied Iraqi refugees then 100 angry ones.    The Concord Iraqi summed up, just as the Long Island Iraqi did the other day:

“United States is like a dream,” Abd Zead said. “We come here to get a good education, good health . . . but all of that dream is broken now.”

By the way,  where is AP reporter Matthew Lee now?   Every month like clockwork he, at the behest of his handlers in the NGO lobbyist world, yapped about how we needed to bring more Iraqis to the US, how about a little follow-up Mr. Lee?

Immigrant voting strategy in key swing state of Virginia

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is a post I wrote back on July 6th, but because I’ve just been hearing so much on the news today about the swing state of Virginia, I thought it might be timely to repost the whole thing here now.

Somalis, Ethiopians and Kenyans,  many having entered the US as refugees which puts them on the fast track to citizenship, are organizing for Democratic candidate for President, Barack Obama.  Wow!  Can you believe it!  Here is what the Washington Post had to say:

From coast to coast, Somali, Ethiopian, Nigerian and Kenyan Americans are knocking on the doors of their fellow African immigrants, registering new citizens to vote, raising money and preaching Obama’s mantra of hope and change. They hope that his prominence will change their status as one of the nation’s least-recognized immigrant groups, and that he will one day provide aid to help ease the turmoil and poverty in countries such as Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan.

One Somali said Obama is like a son, one of them.

“Obama is one generation away from Africa,” said Eyow, who immigrated to the United States nearly 30 years ago. “I have nothing against my brothers and sisters, black people who were born here, but his father is like me. His father was an immigrant….”

Although Eyow says he has nothing against his black brothers who were born here, we have been chronicaling the tensions that are building in the black community partially resulting from the growing realization on the part of native-born black Americans that immigrants are taking their jobs (among other brewing conflicts).

The Post goes on to report that the Migration Policy Institute (in the right hand column you can check for the number of foreign born voters in your state) says the numbers of African immigrants aren’t high enough to swing the election, but organizers have figured out how to have influence in key states like Virginia.

Endale said that in the District, Ethiopians for Obama will not try to influence the national race between Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). Instead, the group will target Ethiopian households in the Northern Virginia suburbs.

“There’s a possibility of getting 10,000 Ethiopians in Virginia,” Endale said. “That could be a game-changer.”

Is anyone checking to make sure they are all citizens and eligible to vote?

My blogging pitch again! We need more focused blogs!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Every so often, and as our readership increases (dramatically by the way in the last month), I make a pitch for more people to get into blogging.   I am not talking about one more gadfly blog where you write about what is going on in the news across a wide spectrum of issues, give your opinion and people come and yak and yak about the deeper meaning.  

We need blogs that will examine in detail a particular subject area and provide people with hard facts and information that they can then use—especially now that the mainstream media seems to have completely abandoned any concept of investigative journalism if it doesn’t fit their political world view.  

We, at RRW, aren’t perfect (I admit, it is fun to yak) and are hardly experts, but we have been trying to provide useful information on the subject of Refugee Resettlement and we hope we are succeeding.  

To make my point, nothing makes me angrier than to see bright people wasting what must be hours hashing around some fine point about who is “racist” and who isn’t.   Makes me want to shout—GET TO WORK!

Yes, please please get to work and help research needed areas in this war to save our country.  Pick a topic that interests you and begin to be an expert— likely you will, in short order, be THE expert and your brain power won’t have been wasted yakking and playing a game of one-upsmanship with other commenters all trying to say the most clever and insightful things.

And, take it from me, you don’t need to be some sort of computer techy genius to get the words on the screen.  Don’t be deterred by insecurity and talk yourself out of doing it by saying—oh, I couldn’t make a blog look nice.   The important thing is to get the information out to the world, not how fancy the site is!

P.S.  If you feel you aren’t that out-front sort of person, then become a behind-the-scenes helper to another blog you support and help provide needed research, but get to work!