Month: November 2008

The attack in India and our refugee/immigration policies

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I was just about to post this when I saw Ann already posted on the same article (different titles, same article). Well, it’s worth two posts, so here’s mine.

Mark Steyn’s commentary, It’s Not the Cold War,  stands out among the mountains of words written about the Bombay attack, especially for us at RRW.   He points out that those who carried out the attack are not  a known group, they do not take orders from al-Qaeda, and they did not target one particular kind of victim.

The Islamic imperialist project is a totalitarian ideology: It is at war with Hindus, Jews, Americans, Britons, everything that is other.

The attackers caused devastation, both in the number of victims and in the chaos and economic damage they caused. And here’s what’s important for us:

What’s relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin’s New Orleans. All you need is the manpower.

What is common to jihadist attacks is a combination of “local lads and wily outsiders.” The jihadist ideology is worldwide, and ubiquitous wherever there are mosques. Any would-be Islamist mastermind anywhere in the world can easily find the angry young guys eager for their shot at glory and put together a plot. Here’s Steyn’s key paragraph:

It’s missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the “Deccan Mujahideen” or the ISI or al-Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That’s a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them. The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways. It’s not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no membership cards, only an ideology. That’s what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the Central Asian stans to Yorkshire, and coopted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.

This shows why it’s so absurd to treat the jihad as a law-enforcement matter. It’s an ideological fight, and we haven’t engaged the enemy on that level. President Bush thought he was getting into the battle by sending Karen Hughes to tell Arabs how nice Americans are. Our government information agencies, which effectively  brought information, hope and inspiration to people behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, now create radio stations to bring American music and other culture to the Muslim masses. Great. America’s corrupt culture is what has helped recruit countless Muslims to the cause. And Obama certainly isn’t prepared for this ideological fight.

So Bush is history, and we have a new president who promises to heal the planet, and yet the jihadists don’t seem to have got the Obama message that there are no enemies, just friends we haven’t yet held talks without preconditions with. This isn’t about repudiating the Bush years, or withdrawing from Iraq, or even liquidating Israel. It’s bigger than that. And if you don’t have a strategy for beating back the ideology, you’ll lose.

All the things Ann has been reporting about the missing Somalis fit nicely into this scenario, doesn’t it? They’re part of the worldwide jihad, one of the tentacles reaching out somewhere or other. Will it be Minneapolis that is subject to an attack similar to Bombay’s? Or have they been recruited into an operation that will surface somewhere else in the world?

It is insane that we let any Somalis into this country, given what is now known. It’s insane that seven years after 9/11 we have not stopped the Wahhabi Saudis from funding mosques, organizations, Middle East studies programs, and God knows what else throughout our country. It’s insane that radical Muslims carry out the stealth jihad under our noses, telling us what they’re doing while we watch them do it.  If all of this went on and got worse during the Bush administration, what will happen during the next four years?

The hypnotic spell of “tolerance” has got to be broken.

Mumbai massacre, and why we should halt Muslim immigration to the West

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Mark Steyn had a very important column on Friday entitled, “Mumbai could happen just about anywhere.”  Hat tip:  The Unbeliever.   There is no sense in my trying to analyze it for you, because I can’t write like Mark Steyn anyway.   Please read it.    Here are a few lines from near the end.

This isn’t law enforcement but an ideological assault – and we’re fighting the symptoms not the cause. Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideology’s advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim population’s demographic advance among everybody else.

And now, go read, Atlas Shrugs.  It will break your heart.  The Islamic terrorists tortured their hostages before executing them.

I don’t need to be politically correct, and I am angry!    We must stop all Muslim immigration to the West.  That’s it plain and simple.

And now, I’ll leave you with this one thought, do you know where those missing Minneapolis Somali men are tonight?

Connecticut, another state where Iraqis are having a tough time

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is an article from Connecticut.   Although the Iraqi refugee who is the subject of this piece seems to be making out o.k. (he has a job!), it sounds like the reporter is dancing around reporting on problems with other Iraqis.

“Watching and imitating is for animals. We are people of ideas and thoughts.”

Those are the words of Mr. Hussain [referring to his young son in school]-his first name and place of residence cannot be used for security reasons-a refugee from Iraq whose family relocated to Connecticut with the help of Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, or IRIS, in New Haven and contributions from Cornwall residents.

Some refugees must be struggling to find work just as we reported recently in nine* other states.

According to Mr. George (Director of IRIS), employment is another stumbling block. Language dictates the kind of work refugees can secure, as well as the fact that their job history no longer matters. The résumés, no matter how impressive in their home countries, do not translate. Many families from professional backgrounds find they are suddenly fighting to get manual labor jobs or housekeeping work, a jarring and a significant part of the adjustment process. Mr. George cited an example of an oncologist who ran his own clinic in Iraq but in America worked in the meat department at Stew Leonard’s.

Now this part makes no sense. 

IRIS receives a paltry $50 for each refugee from the government which must be spent on food, clothing or rent. While Mr. George said the status of government funding pulls in more private donations, the organization relies heavily on volunteers, in kind donations and contributions from people like those in Cornwall.

Either someone is lying or the reporter misunderstood.  The volags (non-profits like IRIS) receive $850 per head for each refugee initially from the US State Department and the volag keeps half of that for their overhead and the remainder is used for each family to get them settled.   Then 30 days later other funds begin flowing to the family through the Federal Dept. of Health and Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement.

But, we are happy to hear that private funds and needed items are being solicited, because that’s how we think most of this program should be run—through private charity not taxpayer handouts.   Believe it or not, under existing law,  those “inkind contributions” that are being collected are matched with cold hard cash from the taxpayer.

* Lets see so far we have unhappy jobless Iraqis in Arizona, Maryland, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, Idaho, and now Connecticut makes ten.

See our Iraqi refugee category here (with 270 posts to date).

More Muslim immigrants guilty of food stamp fraud in Michigan

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Debbie Schlussel has the latest case here.

It never ends because we continue to let thousands of these people in and then to pander and bend over backward and forward to them once they’re here. Fortunately, the Michigan State Police has a special unit for this kind of fraud, headed by Det. Lt. Marty Bugbee, that is cracking down on this kind of stuff.

A Dearborn couple has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit food stamp fraud in a scheme that netted more than $1 million.

See our growing list of food stamp fraud cases here.

Big city paper finally catches on to African immigration fraud story

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Well, can you believe it!  The Minneapolis Star Tribune, the hometown paper of the Somali capital of the USA, has finally written about the worldwide suspension of the State Department’s P-3 family reunification program—suspended due to widespread fraud in Africa.  We told you about this bombshell story two weeks ago.   Our very first mention was back in July here, but we didn’t know the full extent of the fraud until recently.

A day late and a dollar short, the Star Tribune published a report yesterday, November 28th, a full 12 days after the little Shelbyville, TN Times Gazette had the scoop.   Wouldn’t you think that the Minneapolis paper, in light of the Somali terrorist investigation going on, might have been right on top of this story.

The Star Tribune doesn’t add much more than we already know, but our now favorite Somali mouthpiece is all over this story too.  What, don’t you reporters have anyone else you can go to than a Somali guy who was convicted of lying to get into the US?  Any chance he might not be straight with you now?  Nah!  Oh, yes, I forgot, the Star Tribune thinks this is the modern day West Side Story.

Omar Jamal with lots of column inches:

Immigrant groups in the Twin Cities acknowledge that there is occasional fraud — in some cases, money changes hands to claim sponsorship of supposed family members. But they say it is unfair to keep out those who can document they aren’t lying.

“You have a huge number of desperate refugees who are stuck in the middle of nowhere,” said Omar Jamal, president of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in the Twin Cities. “They’re looking for assistance from the United States. It’s very sad.”

Cry me a river!

State Department officials, meanwhile, say they can’t reopen the program until they ensure that it works. No date has been set.

“We have to figure out what the next step is,” said Todd Pierce, a spokesman for the department’s Bureau of Populations, Refugees and Migration. “We’re obligated to make sure it works the way it was supposed to work.”

The State Department and Department of Homeland Security are working together to devise new verification procedures. One proposal would involve more widespread DNA testing. But some officials worry that it could add significantly to the program’s cost. [Edit:  so let me understand, it’s cheaper to have the illegals here than to do some advance DNA testing?]

Jamal, who has faced his own legal problems with immigration officials — he was once found guilty of making false statements to enter the U.S. — says that the government’s concerns are overblown.

“I cannot deny there may be some fraud,” he said. “But the policy of shutting the whole program down will hurt huge numbers of innocent, law-abiding people who are in desperate conditions in refugee camps.”

Jamal understands that some of the government’s concern derives from Somalia’s status as a state without a functioning government, riven by warring groups of clans and Islamic militias, some with ties to Al-Qaida.

He, too, has heard of sponsorships being sold to fictitious family members, sometimes for as much as $10,000. But for most, he said, “they are innocent people falling victim.”

So, I’ll ask the same question as one of the commenters asked in the juicy comments section to this story:  How many of those fraud cases did you turn in Mr. Jamal?

More on spinmeister Omar Jamal here and here (Denver Somali Cyanide death).