Pregnant Iraqi refugee: “Every day I cry”

03/16/2009 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yes, once again we have an unhappy Iraqi refugee story, this one from near Cincinnati, Ohio.

“I’m nervous. Every day I cry,” Al-Sharea ( Rasha Al-Sharea) says.

Sometimes she wonders if her decision to leave the Middle East was too hasty.

She is alone, about to be evicted, and due to have a baby any day. No wonder she is crying.

I don’t know what is going on. Her story is about the twentieth such story we have written in recent months. Ohio is one of 17* states where Iraqi refugees are left in the lurch, jobless and unhappy and often wanting to go home. The stories are virtually the same, either reporters are lemmings and one such story leads to another or the problem is so pervasive it can’t be ignored. If the stories were not all so uniformly critical of government contracted resettlement agencies, one might guess they were planted stories to drum up support for more funding for refugees, but I don’t know why these contractors would be willing to expose their failings in caring for these people.

Al-Sharea is a well-educated woman who thought she had won the lottery by being accepted to come to the US as a refugee, and now she is crying every day. The agency that has apparently let her down is Catholic Charities.

Catholic Charities South Western Ohio bills itself as the top provider of resettlement services for refugees in Greater Cincinnati.

Al-Sharea is one of 411 refugees since 2001 to arrive in the region after being sponsored by the local nonprofit agency.

Few arrivals are from Iraq, said Rod Huber, who heads the office’s refugee resettlement program. Last year brought five or six – including Al-Sharea – although the number of Iraqi refugees nationwide continues to swell.

As of early February, nearly 20,000 Iraqi refugees have resettled in the United States since 2007, according to federal statistics.

Catholic Charities lost track of her.

Catholic Charities in Cincinnati is among dozens of nonprofit agencies across the country with government approval to help refugees resettle in the United States.

Agency workers meet the refugees at the airport. They offer $425 in initial housing assistance, set refugees up with donations of furniture, household goods and clothing and offer job assistance. They hook them up with English classes if needed and help refugees apply for food stamps, cash assistance and Medicaid.

Refugees without children are entitled to eight months of public assistance by law. Benefits can continue if the family has children, Huber said.

Huber said services were offered to Al-Sharea. Then, the agency lost track of her.

Read the whole story about Al-Sharea and her misfortunes that could have been avoided if someone knowledgeable was guiding her through the red-tape maze of the welfare system.

This month, Al-Sharea received a letter from the apartment management saying the rent was habitually late and they wanted Al-Sharea to leave or face eviction.

Huber, of Catholic Charities, said he wasn’t aware of the latest housing flap or Al-Sharea’s problems getting food stamps.

A caseworker helped Al-Sharea obtain food stamps in November. But after that, they thought Malabeh had taken responsibility for her.

“We kind of bowed out at that point for that reason,” Huber said. “We want the family to be involved. We want the family to help them.”

The agency has only so much money, he said.

How much does it cost to follow-up with a phone call every month or so to see how a refugee is doing? I can see maybe losing track of them after a year or two, but within months! It would help the refugee not fall through the cracks as Al-Sharea obviously has, but if they have begun treatments for such things as TB (yes, refugees do enter the country with TB), it would protect the public as well to know where they are.

And, aren’t there reports that must be made to the Office of Refugee Resettlement involving employment? I know there are because here is the site (this is a pdf file, scroll to your state) at ORR where employment is reported. So, if Catholic Charities didn’t know within months were Al-Sharea was, how were they able to report her employment, or lack of employment? Makes you wonder about the accuracy of these reports doesn’t it?

*The 17 states where Iraqis have few job prospects and are unhappy include: Arizona, Maryland, New Hampshire,Virginia, New York, Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, Idaho, Connecticut, New Mexico, California, Utah, North Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Washington. See our Iraqi refugee category for all these stories and more.

A Muslim horror story

03/15/2009 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a horror story from England showing more of the joys of multiculturalism. By that I mean not different cultures living together, but the inability of western societies to stand up for their own values in the face of Islam. It’s hardly bearable. The Times of Britain isn’t a tabloid, but it couldn’t avoid (or resist) the tabloid-type headline, “My imam father came after me with an axe.” The story by Dominic Lawson begins:

We are all too familiar with the persecution of Christians in countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet sitting in front of me is a British woman whose life has been threatened in this country solely because she is a Christian. Indeed, so real is the threat that the book she has written about her experiences has had to appear under an assumed name.

Her father emigrated to Britain from Pakistan in the 1960s and is a respected imam. And…

He is also an incestuous child abuser, repeatedly raping his daughter from the age of five until she was 15, ostensibly as part of her punishment for being “disobedient”. At the age of 16 she fled her family to avoid the forced marriage they had planned for her in Pakistan. A much, much greater affront to “honour” in her family’s eyes, however, was the fact that she then became a Christian – an apostate. The Koran is explicit that apostasy is punishable by death; thus it was that her father the imam led a 40-strong gang – in the middle of a British city – to find and kill her.

The woman, who calls herself Hannah Shah, is now in her 30s, married and an Anglican — a member of the Church of England. She has not told the police about her father’s crimes because she hopes someday to be reconciled with her family. Read the whole article for more of her chilling story. But here’s the part I especially want to point out — illustrative of Britain’s extreme civilizational illness:

When, at school, she had finally summoned the courage to tell a teacher that her father had been beating her (she couldn’t bring herself to reveal the sexual abuse), the social services sent out a social worker from her own community. He chose not to believe Hannah and, in effect, shopped her to her father, who gave her the most brutal beating of her life. When she later confronted the social worker, he said: “It’s not right to betray your community.”

Hannah’s comment on this should be broadcast far and wide:

“My teachers had thought they were doing the right thing, they thought it showed ‘cultural sensitivity’ by bringing in someone from my own community to ‘help’, but it was the worst thing they could have done to me. This happens a lot.

The writer points out that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, reflected this mindset when he suggested last year that Muslims be allowed to use Sharia tribunals to deal with disputes within their community. You can guess what Hannah Shah thought of that:

“I was horrified.” If you could speak to him now, what would you say to the archbishop? “I would say: have you actually spoken to any ordinary Muslim women about the situation that they live in, in their communities? By putting in place these Muslim arbitration tribunals, where a woman’s witness is half that of a man, you are silencing women even more.”

And she points out that government officials never talk to women as representatives of the Muslim community; they just accept the word of (male) leaders of large Muslim organizations. Why is that? My answer is that they are afraid of Muslim men and won’t do anything that would make them angry (such as letting Geert Wilders into the country). Yes, the government asking women’s opinions would make many Muslim men extremely angry, so just sacrifice the women.

Hannah Shah goes on to talk about how Christians are persecuted in England, not just by Muslims but by the government.

She cites the recent cases of the nurse who was suspended for offering to pray for a patient and the foster parents who were struck off after a Muslim girl in their care converted to Christianity.

“Such people – I’m not talking about apostates like me – have been persecuted or ostracised in this country simply because they want to share their faith with others. People call this political correctness but I actually think it is based on a fear of Muslims, what they might do if provoked.”

It’s both. Elite opinion in Britain has long been anti-Christian, even before Muslims became such a significant force.

We are not so abjectly supine in the face of Islam in the United States as are the British, though we’re moving in that direction. I’m not sure if we lag behind because we are more willing to stand up for our culture or simply because the percentage of Muslims is far lower than in Britain. It would be interesting to know how social workers behave in areas with many Muslims, such as Dearborn, in cases like Hannah Shah’s. Do they make sure that only Muslim social workers investigate allegations of abuse?

I posted last year about a polygamous family in New York, discovered when their house caught on fire. The story I based the post on said:

The Times’s exceptionally well-researched story said that social-service workers have learned not to make an issue of polygamy in handing out benefits and guiding applicants, legal and otherwise, through the bureaucratic mazes of the welfare system. Doctors at hospitals turn a blind eye. The men speak for their wives. By quoting women who have left such marriages after abuse and misery, the story suggested that perhaps polygamy wasn’t quite as benign a multi-culti variant of our own cozy little practices as was being portrayed. Suffice it to say, however, that the story caused no changes in New York’s policies.

And we’ve posted quite a bit on honor killings which are never named as such, and other examples of “acquiescing to creeping sharia,” as Bruce Bawer put it in a great article. In fact, here are the links to my post on Bawer and Bawer’s article. Looking back at what we’ve written in our hundreds of posts in the category “diversity’s dark side,” and reading the interview with Hannah Shah, I wonder if someone should come up with an annual State of Our Dhimmitude report so we could check from year to year and see whether our submissiveness to Islam has progressed or if we’ve resisted and fought back.

Joe defiant: “I am not going to be intimidated by the politics and by the Justice Department”

03/15/2009 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I told you not long ago that the Obama Administration would be coming after Joe—Joe Arpaio, the successful sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona. The open borders crowd, using Alinsky’s rule 13, have gone after Sheriff Arpaio and thus all of the rest of us who believe that out-of-control immigration is killing America.

From US News and World Report in an article entitled: “Obama’s line in the sand on immigration enforcement.”

Civil rights leaders and immigration reform advocates met in Washington yesterday to applaud the announcement that Joe Arpaio, the publicity-seeking sheriff whose immigration sweeps and harsh treatment of prisoners in Arizona’s Maricopa County have raised eyebrows at both ends of the political spectrum, is now the subject of a Department of Justice investigation.

Arpaio received a letter earlier this week from the office of the U.S. attorney general informing him that his department, which polices a broad area including Phoenix and its suburbs, was being investigated for suspected civil rights violations, including “discriminatory police practices and unconstitutional searches and seizures … [as well as] allegations of national origin discrimination.”

According to civil rights experts, the investigation, one of the few times the government has ever conducted a civil rights investigation into a local police agency’s immigration enforcement practices, could be a sign of things to come, as the Obama administration moves toward more comprehensive immigration reform.

Read it all, and then stand up for Joe!

Iraqi ambassador: we need our people to come home

03/15/2009 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’ve written innumerable posts on this topic before but thought it was worth mentioning again, especially as we are always welcoming new readers. This conversation with Iraqi Ambassador Sumaida’ie occurred in December so I don’t know why it is being published here in March. The message is still applicable, perhaps even more so as the Obama Administration seems unable to turn the prospects for our economy around and unemployment rises.

THE NATIONAL Council on U.S.-Arab Relations (NCUSAR) hosted a “Conversation with Iraqi Ambassador Samir Shakir M. Sumaida’ie” on Dec. 16, 2008 at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC. NCUSAR director Dr. John Duke Anthony introduced the ambassador who, prior to his Washington, DC appointment in April 2006, had served as Iraq’s permanent Representative to the U.N. since July 2004.

Return and help rebuild Iraq.

Turning to the subject of Iraqi refugees, Ambassador Sumaida’ie said that 2.2 million refugees have poured into Syria and Jordan. In contrast, he noted, in 2008 the U.S. took in only 12,000 Iraqi refugees. The previous week, he had lunch with Iraqi refugees who feel they have been abandoned to their fate in the U.S., and that the established Iraqi American community has left them to their own devices and given them little support. Highly qualified Iraqis must retake exams in order to practice medicine or other professions in this country. Sumaida’ie said he encourages displaced Iraqis to go back home and take part in the rebuilding of Iraq. “A lot of educated people have fled. We need them the most,” he concluded.

We have extensive coverage in our Iraqi refugee category of the situation facing Iraqi displaced people, many of whom are unhappy and not afraid to say so (note some met with the ambassador to complain) as they are unemployed and struggling in the US.

Iraqi refugee says she knows why they are brought here

03/14/2009 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is one more in a long series of articles we’ve posted about unhappy and unemployed Iraqi refugees in the United States, but what makes this one different is that one woman ventures a hypothesis for why they are here inspite of the lousy conditions and uncertainty in which they are living.

The lead-in to the article from The National, a publication of the UAE, is as follows:

In the last two years, America has belatedly opened its doors to Iraqis seeking refuge and made efforts to resettle them across the country. But the lucky few who make it to the United States find economic catastrophe, few job opportunities and little to no help from the nation that brought them there. Neela Banerjee reports from Phoenix, Arizona.

Umm Ahmed, an Iraqi mother with a ten year old son had it rough in Iraq, but now spends her days chain-smoking, applying for jobs and worried about the end of her welfare assistance looming on the horizon.

But it is life in America, not the past in Iraq, that troubles Umm Ahmed’s sleep now. She gets government assistance for food and rent. But in a few weeks, her food and rent subsidies as a refugee will end – less than six months after they started. She has not found any work, despite filling out applications all over the city. At one restaurant, she said, the manager joked that she looked like Osama bin Laden’s mother.

Umm Ahmed goes to English classes and writes down new words in a small notebook she always carries, but her English is still rudimentary. None of the Iraqis she knows have found work, she said, and she worries that she and her son will be homeless.

Umm Ahmed talked and smoked for three hours, and by the end, only panic tumbled out. “The reason they are bringing a lot of refugees from Iraq to the US is that they are asking our forgiveness,” she said. “But they make it worse by having us here. There is no support, and people here think everyone from the Middle East is Osama bin Laden. If they can’t offer us help, why did they bring us here?”

Good question! And, here is an even better question, why are they (resettlement agencies) continuing to press for more and more Iraqis to be resettled in the US? Note Lavinia Limon of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (one of the top ten government contractors) just yesterday is asking her supporters to lobby Obama for more Iraqis when we are not taking care of what we have. Look at this letter she wants you to send the President.

Honestly, there is no logic to this business of bringing more and more refugees into our poor economy, and we have been told time and again that these agencies aren’t doing it for the money. So, I wondered about this once before —is there some sort of psychological malady at play here? Is it guilt, as this Iraqi woman suggests, or something else? In the animal rescue world there is a real psychological disorder called Animal Collector Syndrome, I wonder if there is a comparable syndrome for human beings. I don’t know why there wouldn’t be.

See also yesterday’s post about Lutheran Immigration Services, another federal contractor, and their worries about the number of refugees they are taking.