Day: December 30, 2008

Malta: Somali would-be rapists cause firestorm of comment

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update Dec. 31st:  More on Malta here today.

The story is tiny, only 149 words in the Times of Malta.   A couple of drunk Somali refugees attempted to rape a girl on Christmas Day.

Two Somalis allegedly caught trying to rape a 17-year-old girl on the Birzebbuga promenade on Christmas day were so drunk they did not know what happened.

But, check out the comments!  There are thousands and thousands of words of comment, mostly very angry comments, about the plight this little island nation is in with boatloads of refugees arriving daily in the good seasons of the year.

We have reported on Malta on several previous occasions mostly because the US must take some of the blame for Malta’s predicament.    We are taking some of Malta’s Somali illegal aliens as refugees, a practice that will only serve to encourage more Somalis and other Africans to try to reach Malta.

If shipping them off to America is not incentive enough consider the fact that the US Ambassador to Malta gave a tea-party send-off to one group of Somalis as they headed for Colorado, here!

Iraqi official lists three things hindering the return of Iraqis to their country

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Baltimore Sun reporter Matthew Hay Brown has been doing some good reporting these days on the Iraqi refugee issue.  I would like to see AP reporter Matthew Lee write something other than ‘bring more Iraqis to the US now!’ and ‘Bush is bad.’ 

According to Mr. Brown, an Iraqi official at the Iraq’s Embassy in Syria lists three things delaying the return of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to their country.

DAMASCUS, Syria – Adnan al-Sharafy sees a few obstacles holding up the return of Iraqi refugees to their home country: the U.S. military, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the news media.

Sharify, an official at the Iraqi Embassy here in Syria, helped to organize government-sponsored bus trips at the end of last year that he says carried 420 Iraqi families back to Baghdad. (The United Nations estimates the Iraqi population here at 1.2 million.)

More free rides home are planned, Sharify says. But finding takers is likely to remain a challenge.

Sharify blames the U.S. military for making it difficult to enter Iraq, causing waits at the border that he says can last days. He blames the United Nations refugee agency for raising the hopes of Iraqis seeking resettlement to North America or Europe. And the news media, for reporting every violent incident that occurs in Iraq.

“About 90 percent of Iraq is safe now,” Sharify says.

I can’t speak to the veracity of the point about the military checkpoints holding up people for days, but I sure can see the other two things as impediments to progress.  Heck we have NGO’s here in the US calling for 60,000 (or 100,000!) refugees to be brought to the US ASAP.    Those same NGO’s are beating the drum that it isn’t safe to return to Iraq.  

Meanwhile the Iraqis who are arriving in the US are extremely frustrated at not finding any suitable work and we have only resettled about 13,000 this past year.  Imagine if the number should grow to 60,000 or 100,000.  We don’t know why the UN and the NGO’s aren’t telling Iraqis the straight story about the job situation here.

We have maintained from the outset that the solution is for us to help Iraqis in the region to return home.

As for the media, as long as Bush is President Iraq will be a dangerous place, but as Judy remarked earlier, just watch when it’s President Obama in charge, Iraq will be transformed, as if by magic, into a more peaceful welcoming land.

Free speech is in bad shape in the west

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

As a counterbalance to my previous post about the Dutch’s new confidence in their culture, here’s an article from the Australian called Talk About Surrender. It’s already New Year’s Eve in Australia, so it’s kind of a roundup of the state of free speech in 2008.

If 2006 will be remembered as the year the West rolled over when tested on free speech – think the Danish cartoons, which large swaths of the media refused to publish for fear of causing offence – two years on, things are worse.

The year 2008 deserves to be seen as a year of anticipatory surrender, a year when the West decided to roll over on free speech of its own accord. Just in case. No threats. No demands. Just suppress controversial speech in advance, just in case it causes offence. You understand, we don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. In fact, such a trashing of core Western values is difficult to understand.

The author, Janet Albrechtsen, gives a brief rundown of events, beginning with “the the comments of Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC, who announced in October that Islam deserved different coverage in the media compared to other religions because Muslims were an ethnic minority.”  A comedian commented that the BBC would let vicar gags pass, but not imam gags, and the BBC agreed. Then:

The same rank capitulation occurred in the private sector when, in August, Random House pulled the publication of The Jewel of Medina, a book by Sherry Jones that told the tale of Aisha, the child bride of Mohammed.

The publisher had received no threats, just “cautionary advice” that publishing the book “might cause offence to some in the community (and) incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment”.

She goes on to mention Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders, who are heroes because they will not be silenced. She also mentions a Dutch cartoonist who was arrested and interrogated for his cartoons that mocked Islam.

And in Canada, Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant were hauled before that country’s Human Rights Commissions for being critical of Islam. (Steyn’s case was especially bizarre because he was cited for saying something which was actually a quote by a Muslim.) These two are also heroes.

But her point isn’t to highlight the heroes. It’s this:

If large sections of the media – normally devotees of free speech – cave into what the BBC’s Thompson called the “growing nervousness about discussion about Islam”, that self-censorship ripples out to all corners of society.

After the Danish cartoons fiasco, the onus was on the West to show its spine, to reassert its faith in freedom of expression. So far it has failed on that score. Let’s hope 2009 is a better year for free speech and the West’s confidence in itself.

Amen. Let’s hope indeed. Perhaps the Dutch will now lead the way.

Dutch party makes hard-hitting demand for Muslims to integrate

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Who thought this would happen in the most tolerant country in the world? But it looks as if the Dutch have had enough. The International Herald Tribune reports from Amsterdam:

Two weeks ago, the country’s biggest left-wing political grouping, the Labor Party, which has responsibility for integration as a member of the coalition government led by the Christian Democrats, issued a position paper calling for the end of the failed model of Dutch “tolerance.”

Got that? These are leftists who are realizing their much praised “tolerance” is destroying the society they love.

If judged on the standard scale of caution in dealing with cultural clashes and Muslims’ obligations to their new homes in Europe, the language of the Dutch position paper and Lilianne Ploumen, Labor’s chairperson, was  exceptional.

The paper said: “The mistake we can never repeat is stifling criticism of cultures and religions for reasons of tolerance.”

Government and politicians had too long failed to acknowledge the feelings of “loss and estrangement” felt by Dutch society facing parallel communities that disregard its language, laws and customs.

Newcomers, according to Ploumen, must avoid “self-designated victimization.”

She asserted, “the grip of the homeland has to disappear” for these immigrants who, news reports indicate, also retain their original nationality at a rate of about 80 percent once becoming Dutch citizens.

It’s worth reading the whole thing. But here’s a little more:

Not clear enough? Ploumen insists, “The success of the integration process is hindered by the disproportionate number of non-natives involved in criminality and trouble-making, by men who refuse to shake hands with women, by burqas and separate courses for women on citizenship.

“We have to stop the existence of parallel societies within our society.”

Our politicians and professional do-gooders need to read this and pay close attention. Our leftists and our elites take their cues from the European left. The rest of Europe has not gotten as far as the Dutch; let’s hope they will, and let’s hope our elites follow suit. We need a powerful reaction to multiculturalism in favor of proclaiming our western values superior — freedom of speech, equality of the sexes (not sameness, but equal treatment), freedom of religion, personal responsibility in place of playing the victim, and tolerance that goes both ways, from the majority to the minority and vice-versa. We need to demand that people who choose to come to our country then become part of our country and not set up parallel societies.

In other words, we need to adopt this Dutch manifesto, or one very like it, for ourselves.

Somali missing youths story makes the front page in Washington, DC

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday’s Washington Times placed the Somali missing youths story on the front page above the fold!    For new readers of RRW, we have been following this story for weeks here.

American-raised, possibly some American born, Somali refugees are packing up and are believed to be headed to terrorist training camps in Somalia to join the Jihad.   The Washington Times story doesn’t add much new information but I found this interesting.

Ahmed Elmi, chairman of the Washington-based Somali-American Community Association (SACA), said he knew of no one in the Washington area’s relatively tiny Somali community who had disappeared or of any recruitment here of would-be Islamist fighters.

“I want to have my antennae out,” Mr. Elmi said. “If there is a practice like that, I need to know.”

He said about 10,000 Somalis live in the Washington area, spread out over Maryland, Virginia and the District, among the estimated 200,000 nationwide.

I will bet you a buck that the number of Somalis in the US is much higher then 200,000.   We know we admitted 80.000 over 25 years in the Refugee Resettlement Program and an average Somali family size is six.   The Times missed a perfect opportunity here to report on the fact that the State Department has suspended all family reunification because of the widespread fraud discovered largely among Somali immigrants.

The article ends with a dhimmi college professor downplaying the seriousness of the missing youth case.   

Mr. Grossman, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., said that during the Balkan war many young Albanian- and Croatian-Americans returned to their homeland to fight.

“For the Somalian people, there is a great tie to their homeland and a deep interest in war and peace,” said Mr. Grossman, who has done extensive research on the Somali community in Minnesota.

He added that “war in Somalia isn’t necessarily based on radical Islam,” adding that there is a “real danger in identifying the Somali community with terrorism.”

First, his comparison stinks.  I will wager those who returned for Bill Clinton’s Bosnian war were likely also Muslims.   A fairer comparison would be to tell us how many first generation American Germans went back and joined Hitler. (Readers, I am open for correction here!)

The war in Somalia is most certainly about which branch of Islam will control Somalia (see Jihad Watch here for the proof).

And finally, as a taxpayer I’m offended that we paid the airfare for these Somali families to get here, we subsidized their apartments, we took care of their health and fed the children.  We educated them and found jobs through caseworkers for them.  We made it possible for these youths to survive healthy and educated to manhood and they go off to fight jihad.   It just proves again that the imperative of Islam trumps a good life in America!