Month: September 2008

Two Somali Jihadists arrested boarding plane in Germany today

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update October 10th:   Suspects released for lack of evidence.

Update September 28th:  A few more details on what these two might have been up to here.

German authorities believe they have thwarted a terrorist attack by arresting two Somalis who had been living in Germany.  According to reports they had left suicide notes in their apartment before boarding a plane to Amsterdam.   I am impressed that German police were keeping such a close eye on these poor Somali refugees.   Go to Jihad Watch (here) for the full story.

Another unhappy Iraqi refugee (sigh)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This story comes today from Long Island (East Hampton, NY) and is another in a long line of stories about Iraqi refugees arriving in America and finding it disappointing—not all they thought it would be.   They are lonely and unable to find work for which they can use their education and training.    I recently told you about a high school student in Tucson who said the same thing of newly arrived Iraqis in Arizona.

He doesn’t exactly have a choice [about a job teaching Arabic].  Mr. Taresh is a 32-year-old Iraqi refugee who resettled in the United States on Aug. 21 with his mother, Malkia, and younger brother, Ali. He trusts that he’s in the land of opportunity, but so far, his experience has been one of immobility and discouragement.

“When I first got here, it was disappointing,” he said. “It wasn’t like how I had dreamed it. I was thinking I’m going to find a job easily, especially with my qualifications in my field. I thought I was going to get a scholarship to complete my studies.”

He was a civil and environmental engineer working for Bechtel in Iraq.   Here he is living on welfare at the moment.

In America, he expected to find the opportunity to continue his studies, if not work as a civil engineer.

“But all my dreams turned to nightmares,” he said. “There is no public transportation, there are no people to mingle with — no Arab community at all, and we are feeling very isolated.” In Baghdad and Damascus, Syria, “we were surrounded by our people. It didn’t pass your mind that you’re going to miss something like this.”

Above he makes a point we have stressed before.   People want to live with people like themselves.  It is understandable that Iraqis want fellow Iraqis nearby, or that Somalis stay segregated in their own neighborhood or apartment complexes, but somehow only Americans of European background are called racist xenophobes for expressing that same desire.

Back to Mr. Taresh…  In a couple of months his taxpayer funded welfare will begin to run out (some welfare lasts longer than 3 months though) so the volag workers, caseworkers (also paid by you) are coming calling to get him off the dime and get to work.

Last week, Mr. Taresh met with a representative from Catholic Charities, a local partner of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is contracted by the government to help handle refugee aid. They discussed concerns such as health insurance, food stamps, employment authorization documents, and finding a job.

Even Mom will have to work.

The transition has been hardest for Mr. Taresh’s mother. “She wants to go back,” he said. Mrs. Taresh found a job baby-sitting an 8-month-old on Shelter Island. “It’s kind of a shame for me to allow my mom to have a job. We are from a different culture. Back home, our mothers don’t have to work. They depend on us 100 percent.”

We have said this before.  Wouldn’t it have made more sense (and cost us far less) for the US and the Iraqi government to take care of valuable workers like Mr. Taresh somewhere in the region until it is safe to go home and rebuild Iraq.  It might even be safe enough now.    But, then these volags wouldn’t have warm bodies to resettle and collect their government contracts and the leftist NGO’s wouldn’t be able to continue to bash the War in Iraq for their own political ends.

So what did that teenager in Tucson say:

It is better to have 10 Iraqi refugees who are satisfied with their lives than having 100 angry ones with no life at all.

Some Ft. Morgan residents uneasy about Somalis flocking to town

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Additional Update:   See our lead story today about Somali gang murders in Minneapolis here.

Update September 27th:   Part II of this story at the Fort Morgan Times about Somalis in that Colorado town is simply a recitation of refugee resettlement agency spin.   However, it ends with the following lines.  The Somalis have given Ft. Morgan a thumbs up: 

Agencies receive feedback from Somalis and other refugees and federal monitors review it in order to make sure they are self-sufficient, Stein said.

Most of the feedback about Fort Morgan has been positive, he said.

“Fort Morgan has done a lot of good work,” Stein said.  [More Somalis will soon be on the way.  Did you know that Lewiston, ME has around 7000?]

 

Here we go again!   Another American city struggling with the flow of refugees to their neighborhoods.  This article, thanks to Blulitespecial for sending it, could be from Emporia, KS, Shelbyville, TN, Fort Wayne, IN, Grand Island, NE, nearby Greeley, CO,  or even our county seat Hagerstown, MD.

There is so much in this article that this will be a long dissection, and I won’t even scratch the surface so read it all here.

There was a forum this week in Ft. Morgan, CO to discuss rumors about refugees coming to town in a big way.  The article begins jokingly:   

A rumor that 1,000 Somali refugees and 1,000 Iraqi refugees would descend on Fort Morgan is not true.

This tone, probably used by the advocates of resettlement, is to tell the reader that even by suggesting such large numbers those doing it are alarmists and nuts.

I am here to tell you that is not a joke!  You will have thousands of refugees in the next few years unless the residents of Ft. Morgan and the elected leadership in that city say right now they want it stopped or controlled.  You, the citizens and elected officials can decide how much you can handle.   There are over 5000 refugees in Ft. Wayne, IN because that city never said NO!  We first heard about Ft. Wayne last September because the health department couldn’t handle the large numbers of refugees with HIV, TB and other health problems.

This is not true!

When they are selected for resettlement in the U.S., they go to major cities which are chosen for the ability to house them and offer services, he said to a crowd of representatives from local agencies.

The large gateway cities do still get some refugees, but there is a concerted effort by the US State Department and the volags (supposedly voluntary organizations) contracted to resettle refugees to get them spread across America.  What the volags do is sit around a table in Washington and pick cities, literally in a hit or miss fashion, looking for “welcoming” cities that offer low-skilled employment opportunities.   They bring in a couple hundred refugees quietly and see how the city reacts.

In our Maryland county, the residents demanded to know what was going on.  A year ago in September, we had a “forum” for the whole community and the State Department representatives and the volags did not answer peoples’ questions adequately, citizens were still angry, and the resettlement was shut down within two weeks after the forum.

Then this statement requires a response:

It can be a lot tougher when refugees show up without those kinds of support systems, which has meant that Fort Morgan had to react rather than be prepared, Horan [director Lutheran Family Services] said.

Yes, we can’t control where people go when they get to America.  These resettlement agencies don’t even have to know where anyone they resettle is after only three months.    However,  in the case of Greeley and Ft. Morgan, the federal government knew in advance that they were going to be resettling more refugees in this part of Colorado to supply Cargill and Swift with meatpacking labor.  Incidentally, some of the flow to Ft. Morgan now is the Somalis fired in Greeley.

I first discussed this back in July of 2007.   Here is the article from the Greeley Tribune announcing the arrival of the Lutheran Family Services office.  They shouldn’t have been “unprepared” because someone at the state level and at the federal level knew it (the flood of refugees) was coming because the federal government funded the volag (Lutheran Family Services) office which opened last summer.  Here is more of what I said about the collusion between the meatpackers and the feds.

Then this outfit, One Morgan County, funded by the Colorado taxpayer, has been in the soup for awhile:

One of the reasons for the forum was to educate people on the culture and situation of Somalis and other Africans who are in Fort Morgan, said Brenda Zion, coordinator of OneMorgan County.

I wrote about a meeting they had this past August with federal officials from the Office of Refugee Resettlement who came to Ft. Morgan to mediate,  and it sure sounded like problems were brewing.

Below is the sort of thing the volags promoting more refugees will say to guilt-trip other cities.  If the city should balk, then the residents are labelled “unwelcoming.”  My city of Hagerstown, MD was labelled “unwelcoming” as the Virginia Council of Churches packed up and left.  Emporia, KS where Tyson’s closed its plant and moved its Somalis elsewhere, is also an “unwelcoming” city.

 If you are a “welcoming” city you will be used to guilt-trip other cities.

Nonetheless, Morgan County has been open, welcoming and willing to work to receive the newcomers — a fact Horan cites to other communities he works with, he said.

This is turning into an opus.   Bottomline, the citizens of Ft. Morgan can make the decision about more refugees or not.   But, if you decide to let the federal government send more to your “Mayberry like streets” at least know what you are getting into.  

Learn about Shelbyville, TN, Emporia, KS, Ft. Wayne, IN, Greeley, CO and Grand Island, NE and go into this with eyes wide open.    Bt the way, in Grand Island violence is on the rise between the Somalis and the Sudanese refugees in that city.

Just one more thing.  The reason you are not hearing about these on-going refugee hot spots in the mainstream media is that they don’t want Americans to know that everything in their multicultural dream world is not going so beautifully.

There are a few media bright spots however in the smaller papers.  In Tennessee, reporter Brian Mosely, won his state’s top investigative reporting prize for his series on Somali refugees in Shelbyville, TN and the struggle the citizens there are having.

Iraqi Red Crescent is in trouble

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The Red Crescent is the Muslim equivalent of the Red Cross. I posted in May, here, about Said I. Hakki, its president. I liked him because when an interviewer asked him if the United States owes it to Iraq to take in refugees, he replied: “If we allow Iraqis to go somewhere else, then who is going to build Iraq?” He said the Red Crescent should be taking care of Iraq’s internal refugees, and was doing that as far as it could.

Today comes a report in the Washington Post titled Iraqi Red Crescent Paralyzed by Allegations. It begins: 

BAGHDAD — The Iraqi Red Crescent, the country’s leading humanitarian organization, has been crippled by allegations of embezzlement and mismanagement, including what Iraqi officials call the inappropriate expenditure of more than $1 million on Washington lobbying firms in an unsuccessful effort to win U.S. funding.

The group’s former president, Said I. Hakki, an Iraqi American urologist recruited by Bush administration officials to resuscitate Iraq’s health-care system, left the country this summer after the issuance of arrest warrants for him and his deputies. He and his aides deny the allegations and call them politically motivated.

Then follows the usual complicated tale of corruption, with denials and counter-accusations. It’s impossible to know the truth, except that money has disappeared and the organization has ceased nearly all its humanitarian work.  Hakki has been controversial for several years; in 2005 there was an arrest warrant against him for corruption charges, though it was later rescinded. The Red Crescent grew rapidly under his leadership, but other humanitarian organizations claimed there was a lack of transparency with funds.

How sad. Iraq badly needs more humanitarian help for its internally displaced people.

It’s not race, it’s culture that matters

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

A reader called Bob sent a comment about immigration and race to one of our posts. I’m not going to post his comment where he sent it, but I want to respond to what he says, so I’m putting it right here:

“Send ALL immigrants back where they came from NOW. Not tomorrow NOW! I do not want any more NON-WHITE people in my country! I am ready and willing for a civil war or a revolution, if that is what it takes! If my government will not protect me, my race and my culture, then I don’t have a use for that government, and I WILL NOT pay taxes to that government.”

We’ve been getting a lot of readers from a white-supremacist website on which someone linked to one of our posts. That’s probably where Bob found RRW. So in case anyone thinks that our views on refugees reflect any racial animosity on our part, let me set the record straight.

We have posted a great deal on Somali refugees. The reason is that wherever Somalis go trouble seems to follow. This is not because they have black skin. It is because of two other characteristics of theirs: One, they come from a primitive culture that has difficulty fitting into our society, made worse because one of their cultural characteristics seems to be arrogance.  And two, they are Muslims, and many of them have been radicalized either in their country of origin or during their sojourns in other countries.

As Ann has pointed out time and again, Sudanese blacks and American blacks come into frequent conflict with Somalis. Somalis don’t seem to get along with anyone. Yet they are one of the largest recent refugee groups in the United States. We object to the way refugee agencies and the U.S. government bring people here without any thought to the effect they will have on the communities in which they settle — that was the original reason for our setting up this blog. The Somalis are the poster children for this problem, but other refugees, black, brown and white, cause problems too when they are not properly settled, which very few refugees are today.

Bob seems to confuse immigration and race when he calls for sending all immigrants back now.  Does he think all immigrants are non-white, or does he just consider everyone besides Americans to be non-white? And his call for civil war or revolution reveals either his personal inner turmoil or his complete lack of historical knowledge. Neither one ever leads to the result its initiators wish for, but they do lead to a lot of destruction and misery.

Ann and I have slightly different opinions on immigration. She is more restrictionist than I am. But we agree that we prefer people who fit into our society, who are eager to assimilate, and who contribute something to America.  Neither one of us has any animus against immigrants or anyone else based on skin color. After all, which immigrants have contributed more to this country, the Indian parents of Bobby Jindal, the brilliant governor of Louisiana, or the white Bosnian gang members in Fort Wayne, Indiana? And who is better helping to preserve our culture, the white homosexual activist and Episcopalian bishop Vicky Gene Robinson or the black African Anglican bishops who are providing a way for Episcopal parishes and dioceses around the United States to find a more traditional home.

Addendum: See our Diversity page for more on this subject.