Day: January 18, 2009

LA Times gives us more information on the Somali missing men story

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Only a few months behind on the story of the Minneapolis missing Somali men (former refugees) who are believed to have returned to Somalia for terrorist training, the Los Angeles Times does have some further details. 

For instance we learned this really important nugget—one of the would-be Islamic fighters wanted to go to Harvard.  Ho hum, guess that’s out now.

“He wanted to go to Harvard,” said his uncle Osman Ahmed. “That was his dream.”

The LA Times has a quote that firms up the number missing from Minneapolis but still no word on how many are missing from other US cities where we resettled them at taxpayer expense and gave them an opportunity for a good life.

The youths, who have U.S. passports, followed a well-trod trail from Minneapolis to Mogadishu. Another group took off in August. The FBI believes that over the last two years, 12 to 20 Minnesotans have gone to Somalia.

As a result, a joint terrorism task force led by the FBI is scrambling to determine if extremist Islamic groups are seeking recruits here in the nation’s largest Somali community — as well as in San Diego, Seattle, Boston and other cities. [Hint to FBI:  be sure you add Lewiston, ME to your list of possible recruitment cities]

More details on Shirwa Ahmed, the 27-year-old Somali suicide bomber we gave a decent burial to back in December were revealed.  We now know that he was definitely a suicide bomber and he killed UN aid workers among the 30 or so people he blew up. 

Officials believe the naturalized American was on a terrorist team that detonated five car bombs in two northern Somali cities on Oct. 29, killing at least 30 people, including U.N. aid workers.

Ahmed phoned his sister in Minneapolis a day before the bombings to say he would not see her again, according to a family friend. “She thought he was sick,” the friend said. The next day, someone else called from Somalia to say he had “gone to paradise” as a martyr for Islam.

I still would like to know how much the return of Ahmed’s remains cost the US taxpayer.

The FBI brought back bone fragments and other remains found in Bosaso, one of the blast sites, Wilson said. DNA tests established Ahmed’s identity.

He was buried in a Muslim funeral in Burnsville, south of Minneapolis, on Dec. 3.

Ahmed had not been on the FBI’s radar before the bombings. And his death raised fears that someone trained in Somalia might import terrorist tactics to America.

“There is always a concern about spillover, bleed-out, call it what you will,” said a U.S. official tracking the case who requested anonymity when discussing U.S. intelligence matters. “Especially if they were to return on a U.S. passport.”

How about that, the FBI didn’t have Ahmed or these other guys on their radar screen.  Guess they didn’t see any need to keep an eye on radical MOSQUES!

We had heard about one mosque being watched since the men went missing, but this LA Times article adds a second mosque now under scrutiny in the Minneapolis area.

The leader of another mosque under scrutiny, the Darul Da’wah center in St. Paul, Minn., denied rumors in the Somali community that the alleged suicide bomber and several other missing men were among his followers.

Looks to me like someone at these mosques has friends in al Shabab.

In declaring Shabab a terrorist organization last February, the State Department called it “a violent and brutal extremist group with a number of individuals affiliated with Al Qaeda” — including the terrorists who bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

It’s not clear that the still-missing Minnesotans have joined Shabab or were radicalized at local mosques to join the jihad. But many family members and community activists believe they have.

Oh come on, Mommy, Daddy and Grandpa too know what they were learning at the mosque.

The baby-faced senior at Harding High School in St. Paul had attended both the Abubakar As-Saddique and the Darul Da’wah mosques, Yusuf said. Last summer, the youth embraced the extremist Saudi style of Islam known as Wahhabism, and praised Shabab as the “liberators” of Somalia.

“I told him, ‘This is wrong — your father and your grandfather don’t believe this,’ ” Yusuf recalled in an interview. “He told me they were ignorant. He called me an unbeliever.”

[…..]

Who could imagine such a thing?”

Who indeed!

The comic relief:

It’s getting really funny, but Omar Jamal, formerly convicted of immigration fraud, is in every story about Somalis from sea to shining sea.  Maybe that’s a slight exageration, but only slight.  He even got involved in the Somali cyanide death in Denver last summer.   Here are all the posts in which we mention him.  Does every reporter have to talk to this guy?

In this LA Times article he tells us it’s all about the warlords.  Huh?

“They each support a particular warlord back in Somalia,” Omar Jamal, head of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center, explained as he puffed on a huge hookah at the crowded Pyramids Cafe and Shisha Lounge.

Economist: Large immigrant population responsible for infrastructure repair and expansion

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Well known economist, Edwin Rubenstein, in a report just released blames the crumbling infrastructure that Obama will spend billions to repair on a “massive” immigrant population.  

 From World Net Daily:

The United States will need $1.6 trillion to repair damage to its infrastructure from a massive influx of immigrants, a new report reveals.

In his report titled, “The Twin Crisis:  Immigration and Infrastructure,” prominent researcher Edwin S. Rubenstein examines 15 categories of  infrastructure:   airports, border security, bridges, dams and levees, electricity (the power grids), hazardous waste removal, hospitals, mass transit, parks and recreation facilities, ports and navigable waterways, public schools, railroads, roads and highways, solid waste and trash, and water and sewer systems.

Rubenstein, a financial analyst and former contributing editor of Forbes and economics editor of National Review, claims the nation is facing a crisis – with immigration responsible for at least 80 percent of spending needed to expand the U.S. infrastructure before the middle of this century.

“If the infrastructure crisis could be fixed by spending money, there would be no crisis,” Mr. Rubenstein explained in a statement. “Since 1987, capital spending on transportation infrastructure has increased by 2.1 percent per year above the inflation rate. At $233 billion (2004 dollars), infrastructure is already one of the largest categories of government spending. Our infrastructure is ‘crumbling’ because population growth has overwhelmed the ability of even these vast sums to expand capacity.”

While immigration policy has been hotly debated for a number of years, Rubenstein writes that its impact on infrastructure is rarely discussed.

Here is one of the statistics from the report that I found interesting:

In his research, Rubenstein finds that the average immigrant household generates a fiscal debt of $3,408 after federal benefits and taxes are considered. At the state and local level, the fiscal debt amounts to $4.398 per immigrant household.

In light of compelling statistics saying otherwise, I really don’t know how Newsweek can report that Lewiston, ME is now a boom town because of  its large refugee population.   It might ‘boom” from government (taxpayer) funds flowing to the area through grants and welfare, but that is still a cost to the economy as Rubenstein suggests.

Alinskyism (Day 18)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This has little to do with refugees, but it is just another in my continuing series on community organizing which ultimately has a lot to do with immigrants.

Good (more than good) communication skills are the key to the kingdom for a community organizer according to Saul Alinsky in “Rules for Radicals.”   To be a successful  community organizer one must be able to lure people in—people who might be dissatisfied but don’t really know why.   The organizer will eventually bring them to the answer,  not tell them the answer, by listening and asking leading questions.

In order to suck people in (really that is what it is) the organizer must be a great actor and take himself (or herself) into the EXPERIENCE of the targets—the people who need organizing.   Thus for example the white Jewish guy organizing in Chicago’s black neighborhoods sought out someone like Barack Obama to be the point person knowing full well that he himself couldn’t make a credible case for for being black and poor.   Although one could argue that Obama didn’t know what that was like either.

Well, Saul Alinsky gives us a little example of how one can’t succeed when one talks about large sums of money that are outside of people’s experience.    Regular people tune out and go away.    I’m mentioning this here because conservatives might take this lesson and attempt to communicate  on the bailout to conservative grassroots by putting the huge sums of taxpayer money that will be used for the bailout into terms people can more readily understand. 

In fact, Obama knows full well that by using such large figures most people will just go away.

Here is what Alinsky said in 1971:

This is the problem of trying to communicate on the issue of the H bomb.  It is too big. It involves too many casualties.  It is beyond the experience of the people and they just react with, “Yeah it’s a terrible thing,” but it really does not grip them.  It is the same with figures.  The moment one gets into the area of $25 million and above, let alone a billion, the listener is completely out of touch, no longer really interested, because the figures have gone above his experience and almost are meaningless.  Millions of Americans do not know how many million dollars make up a billion.

One more thought on this business of getting into someone else’s experience.  I think Obama is going to have a really hard time communicating and getting ‘into the experience’ of military men and women.   Did you notice at Christmastime how uncomfortable he looked visiting troops stationed in Hawaii?  And, how about last summer when he skipped visiting the troops althogether in Germany?  Perhaps military service  is one experience he can’t act his way into.

To illustrate my point, Time magazine, in an article about Jim Jones, Obama’s National Security Adviser and lifetime member of the military, quoted Jones as saying of Obama, he is “a very very good listener.”     But, I have no doubt that he (Obama) knows exactly where he wants to lead Jones.

New Study: How immigration flows are effected by US economy

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The Migration Policy Institute has just released a report entitled: “Immigration and the Current Economic Crisis.”

Here is what ImmigrationProf blog has to say about it.  (I’m linking their news story because I wanted you to see this blog by immigration law professors anyway).

With the United States in an economic crisis that may already be the worst since the Great Depression, a report (Download lmi_recessionjan091.pdf ) issued today by the Migration Policy Institute finds that the recession may produce differing results for legal and illegal immigration flows. The report, Immigrants and the Current Economic Crisis, cites a growing body of evidence suggesting there has been a measurable slowdown in the historic growth of immigration in the United States, largely because there has been no significant growth in the unauthorized immigrant population since 2006.

“Legal and illegal immigration flows respond differently in an economic crisis,” said Migration Policy Institute President Demetrios Papademetriou, an author of the report. “Legal permanent immigration flows are the least responsive to economic pressures, while illegal immigration flows are the most responsive.” “Still, substantial return migration of unauthorized immigrants is unlikely unless there’s a protracted and severe worsening of the U.S. economy,” Papademetriou added. The report examines the effects of the economic crisis and factors such as immigration enforcement on the immigrant population already in the United States; predicts how future immigration flows may be affected; discusses how immigrants fare in the U.S. labor market during recessions; and offers possible policy prescriptions.

For us, the gist of what is being said here is that refugees and other legal immigrants will keep coming even when there are no jobs.   Guess that just means that Americans who are working will be paying for the legal refugees to live on welfare.

The illegal flow may slow or even reverse.

India rescued Rohingya boat men, but…..

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update Jan. 19th:   Read about the meeting of human rights activists and the Thai Prime Minister at the Bangkok Post here.

….India has its own Rohingya problem as we reported just last month.   From one of the metastisizing Rohingya stories this week about the alleged mistreatment (some say murder) by the Thai military of illegal alien Rohingya Muslims trying to get into Thailand:

India’s coast guard said Sunday it had rescued hundreds of the refugees from the Rohingya ethnic group, who live along the border of Myanmar and Bangladesh, but that hundreds more were feared lost.

At least this story (AFP from Port Blair, India) mentions a reason for why the Thai Navy might not want Rohingya in Thailand.

Thailand is facing a brutal separatist insurgency in the south of the country that has left more than 3,500 people dead in the last five years, and the government would be sensitive about any mass influx of migrants.

An “expert” from Human Rights Watch discounts that fear.

David Mathieson, an expert on Myanmar with New York-based Human Rights Watch, said Thailand had for the past few years taken a harsh stance on Rohingya landing on its shores, in part because they wanted to discourage further migration of the group through Thailand.

There were also fears that some are mercenaries trying to join the separatist insurgency, although Mathieson said there was little evidence to back up those claims.

Coincidentally, India arrested Rohingya passing through India to get to Pakistan just a few weeks ago.   Here  again is the post I did on that just after Christmas.   Indian officials contend that Rohingya have joined the HuJI—Harakat ul-Jihad-I-Islami (HUJI) (Movement of Islamic Holy War).  I have  no further word on what India did with those they detained.

We have been following the Rohingya issue for more than a year now with 46 previous posts in our special category, Rohingya Reports.   If at some point anyone wants to know more about their newly arrived neighbors and how they got there (mark my words they will be resettled to your town one day), you will be able to understand the public relations campaign that brought them to the West.

Update a few minutes later:  Thai Prime Minister to meet with human rights groups tomorrow and contends that Rohingya may be involved in drug trafficking and human smuggling and not Islamic terrorism.