We told you yesterday that fired Somali workers in Grand Island, NE were meeting to discuss their options.  It seems they have decided to seek a compromise with Swift management, but they still want to pray.

GRAND ISLAND, Neb. – Local Muslim leaders will seek a compromise with officials at a Grand Island meatpacking plant in hopes of resolving a prayer dispute.

More than two dozen representatives from the local Somali community and a Muslim group from Omaha met Sunday to discuss the protests and firings that stemmed from an ongoing confrontation at the JBS Swift & Co. plant.

“The company is asking people to be loyal to God or their employer,” said Mohamed Rage, who leads the Omaha Somali-American Community Organization. “That is not a position (the workers) should be put in.”

I don’t know where the link is now (maybe Blulitespecial knows), but one news account I read said that readers comments to several newspapers were coming in at about 100 to one saying generally that if their religion was more important then their job, they needed to find another job.   So, Rage’s argument doesn’t seem like it will get much traction.

However, Rage and fellow big city organizers are now making a threat or two.   First, they are saying that if they don’t get satisfaction they will bring in the EEOC (CAIRS handmaiden in Washington).  This isn’t a veiled threat, it’s real and they have done it before.

The Muslim group that gathered Sunday decided that their first course of action is to negotiate with company officials to ensure workers’ constitutional rights aren’t violated. If that doesn’t work, they’ll seek help from the Nebraska Equal Opportunity Commission and its federal counterpart.

But, in case the general public and their co-workers didn’t get how big a deal this is to Somali Muslim fundamentalists and to hammer home the point about how multicultural opposition to them could get ugly, here is what one Omaha Somali community organizer said (veiled threat?):

Khadar Ducaale of the Omaha Somali-American Community Organization said Sunday that tension has been building between the Muslim employees and their co-workers.

“This is a place where people are holding knives, and they can kill each other. They can finish each other, and at the end of the day it would be up to the plant to pay for whatever happened,” he said.

Wait, I thought these were peace-loving folks who just want to work?

New readers, I know this may be getting hard to follow, but check our archives here and see all of our posts on this topic spanning over two weeks now.  They are arranged in chronological order from the newest to the oldest.

The Somalis (in large numbers) got to the US through the State Department’s Refugee Resettlement Program.

Update September 24th:  CAIR files FEC complaint about distribution of “Obsession”, see Jihad Watch here.

Update from Grand Island:  Somalis making threats?

Wow!   You must see this lengthy report in the Greeley Tribune today by reporter Chris Casey.  It is the kind of indepth reporting we should be seeing in the big city papers, but rarely do.   (Hat tip to Blulitespecial who finally finished watching his races and found me all sorts of stories on the Swift/Somali brouhaha, including this one).  

Apparently the Tribune is one of the papers that recently received “Obsession” to distribute to readers along with their paper and it, and the Somalis, are the talk of the town.   You can see the trailer at this link.    However, try to view the whole hour-long DVD.  It is powerful.

In Greeley, the dispute continues on prayer breaks for Muslim workers at the meatpacking plant. Sentiment has spread among some in the community that the newcomers are pushing too much, exhibiting a desire not to assimilate but rather impose their religion on others.

Nationally, the DVD arrived on 28 million doorsteps as rhetoric on homeland security heats up in the presidential race.

The confluence of recent events — the Muslim workers’ dispute and, on its heels, the “Obsession” DVD — is the talk of the town. Many Greeley residents have noticed the 400 mostly Somali refugees who’ve arrived in the past 18 months to take jobs at JBS Swift. The workers say they are here to escape the oppression of their war-torn homeland, build a new life and peacefully practice their religion.

What to make of these newcomers and their religion, which is indelibly linked to 9/11 and other violent acts across the globe, has sparked a variety of views. The DVD alone prompts widely different opinions.

A Greeley woman calls the disc “neo-con propaganda,” while a history professor at Colorado State University says the film is factually accurate and shows it in his classes.

By the way, if this lady calling the film “neo-con propaganda” is the same one the reporter discusses later, she didn’t even bother to watch the film before running her mouth.

A Weld County Commissioner had already watched the film and read Mark Steyn’s America Alone which is on our recommended reading list.

Bill Jerke, a Weld County commissioner, said he worries that if a large percentage of workers walk off an assembly line at once, it can lead to an over-stressed and potentially dangerous situation for the remaining workers.

Jerke has watched “Obsession” — he bought the DVD a couple of years ago at a Republican function — and read a book called “America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It.” Those sources, which he deems well-researched, as well as worldwide bombings by radical Muslims over the past 15 years, make him circumspect of Muslims in America.

You can go read all the critics of “Obsession” in Casey’s story, I’m skipping to the good part!

For all of us who have been fighting an uphill battle to bring the threat of radical Islamic activity to the forefront comes some validation of that work by a professor of Middle Eastern History at Colorado State University.

James Lindsay, an associate professor of Middle Eastern history at CSU, takes an opposite view on “Obsession.” He believes it’s a straightforward look at radical Islam.

He said the producers are explicit that film is about the radical ideology within Islam, which is advanced by the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaida and other groups. The film’s introduction states that most Muslims are peaceful and don’t support terror.

The militant Islamic branch — which the film says makes up about 10 percent to 15 percent of a worldwide Muslim population of 1.2 billion, the world’s second-largest religion behind Christianity — has a conquest ideology, Lindsay said.

“It’s one of subjugating the world to their ideology. There is not room for another ideology, according to the radical Muslim ideology, and it’s frightening,” he said. “But it’s part and parcel of the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and the al-Qaida types that they want to impose their will on everyone.”

Conflicts between the West and Islam are inevitable, Lindsay said, because the demands of Islamic law are in conflict with the West’s approach to law and religion. The Quran speaks of creating a society that’s obedient to God’s law, not obedient to men’s model, he said.

He concludes:

Lindsay doesn’t expect to see an end to the conflict between radical Islam and the West in his lifetime.

“If we value who we say we are, we have to be vigilant against this ideology, which is hell-bent on our destruction,” he said.

In light of what has gone on in Greeley and in Grand Island, NE, in the last two weeks with people standing up to demands of Islamic fundamentalists, I’m a bit more hopeful than the good professor— at least for America.

For everything that has gone on in Greeley and Grand Island, visit our archives here.