Month: March 2009

Special gym times to accommodate Somali women

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is a good time to re-read an article we posted last September from reader Avi in which he tells us about the quiet jihad in Minnesota.   Although it may seem innocuous  to some of you, here is an article from AP about special accommodations in a community center in Minneapolis for Muslim girls, prohibited supposedly by Islam to be seen by men without head coverings and long dresses. 

MINNEAPOLIS – Nearly every day, Somali boys and young men gather at the Brian Coyle Center in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood to shoot hoops in the gym.

But there are times when the boys are locked out — and the gym is set aside just for the girls.

In a single-sex environment, the high school students and young women can learn basketball, cut loose a little, and they don’t need to wear scarves and long skirts for religious modesty.

I’m not opposed to some single-sex opportunities for meetings, classes, gym times, but I wonder whether they can do it for specific religious reasons.  Could a group of Catholic girls ask for the same privilege?   I don’t know.

The Brian Coyle Center

This center located in the Cedar-Riverside section of Minneapolis  (same neighborhood where some of the missing youths resided) has figured many times in posts we have written.  It was the location where community meetings were held to discuss the murders of Somali youths in gang violence nearby, it was involved in questions about voter fraud on Nov. 4th,  and its director testified recently at the Senate hearing on Somali terrorist recruitment.

The Brian Coyle Center is funded by a supposed non-profit group Pillsbury United Communities.   The PUC employs 200 full and parttime staff, but like virtually all non-profits these days gets taxpayer funding.   Its 2007 Form 990 lists government grants of $3,427,318, about a quarter of its approximately $12 million in funding for that year.   Can they take public funding and then allow special religious accommodation in a public facility?   Does anyone know?

An aside:  We hear so much these days about the Obama Administration bringing socialism to the business community, but while we were all busy running our lives, these leftwing non-profits (like PUC) have gradually begun receiving taxpayer funding.  The line between government and leftwing policy promoters is gone, and adding insult to injury we pay for it!

NPR reported that four missing Somali youths are believed to have returned

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is a report from Friday (when I was away) from National Public Radio telling us that it is believed that four missing Somali youths have returned to Minneapolis (presumably from Africa and terrorist training), but have mysteriously disappeared from sight again.

NPR has learned that as many as four of the travelers have come back to the U.S., and NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston, who has been reporting on this unfolding story for months, tells Renee Montagne that the men have been seen around the Cedar Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, where the Somali community in the Twin Cities is centered. Sources in the community said it now appears the young men have gone underground.

I don’t buy this story that they just reappeared in their neighborhood.  If they arrived by plane from abroad somewhere they would have been picked up right at the airport. I’m still theorizing that some may never have left the country, but then the question becomes, where have they been?

Can Americans stay this great?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I came across this awesome collection of photos of the North Dakota flood and have to share it. Many of the photos are of volunteers filling sandbags and transporting them to where they are needed, building levees, pumping water — the things that need to be done. Some of the workers are standing in freezing water; many are mud-splattered. The governor is in one photo, on the ground in a blizzard.

Our esteemed Congress and President think it’s a good idea to encourage volunteering by issuing government edicts and creating and enlarging programs that pay people to “volunteer.” We know that the president and first lady believe that people who go into “public service” as opposed to private business are the good people.  

I’ll bet that almost all of the volunteers in the North Dakota have regular jobs. They are not professional volunteers. They are just acting as Americans have traditionally acted — taking care of their communities and their neighbors in need. The pictures warm my heart. The government is there too in the form of the National Guard. But without the hard work of all those other people, the damage would have been far worse.

Many countries do not have such traditions of self-help. Fewer and fewer, as their governments take over more functions (in industrialized countries) or traditional social structures are disrupted as countries develop. It is something that Toqueville noted in his visit to America in the early 1800s — our tendency to develop organizations to take care of our local needs. Two things now threaten this tradition.

One is the ever-increasing encroachment of government. Where people are accustomed to being taken care of by the benevolent state, that is what they expect in their time of need. Look at New Orleans. President Obama wants to help this process along by, for example, reducing the tax-deductibility of charitable contributions. By crippling charitable organizations, the government can step in to take over more and more of what used to be private.

The other is the decreasing assimilation of immigrants, the lack of attention paid to teaching them American customs and culture, and the tendency for some immigrants to cluster in their own groups with little desire to become part of the country where they have settled. I hope I am wrong about this. I hope that if there were a group of Somali refugees living in Fargo, their neighbors would ask them to join the groups filling sandbags and they would willingly agree. But I am pessimistic. 

Our tradition of volunteering to help each other, of taking care of our needs with as little government involvement as possible needs to be kept alive. And it needs to be taught to new Americans. It’s not a genetic characteristic, it’s cultural. It could be lost. Or it could be passed on to every immigrant who makes his new home here.

Addendum: I forgot to link to Ann’s post, Refugees flowing into Fargo, when I wrote this.

Update: The answer is yes, some of the refugees have pitched in.

Needles in meat: Just a crazy woman or a new Muslim practice?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch alerts us  to a Muslim woman who put needles in meat when she worked at a food plant in Ontario. Canwest News Service reports,

An Ontario woman charged in connection with a case of tampered food at a store in Guelph, Ont., is a former employee of a Maple Leaf Foods plant in the city, the company said in a statement Friday.

Mastoora Qezil, 41, was arrested by Guelph police Thursday and is facing a common nuisance charge.

….The Canadian Food Inspection Agency issued warnings last week after sewing needles were found in meat products at a supermarket.

Robert comments:

Poisoning food with feces is detailed as a tactic in the Al-Qaeda manual found a few years ago by British intelligence. If feces are acceptable for such use, why not needles? It would be interesting to know if Mastoora Qezil singled out pork products, but the story of course doesn’t tell us.

So how do we feel about all those Somalis working at meat-packing plants? Let’s hope they don’t read the Al-Qaeda manual. Or Canadian newspapers.

UN says 5,000 Iraqi refugees are coming to U.S.

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know where these refugees fit into our overall program, but a report from Syria says:

Around 12,000 Iraqi refugees living in Syria will be resettled in Europe and the United States, according to an official from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Germany, the US, Canada,The Netherlands and other countries, have agreed to host a number of Iraqi refugees in Syria, an unnamed source told Adnkronos International (AKI).

….”Germany has agreed to take in 2,500 refugees, and the same with The Netherlands, while the United States 5,000 others,” the official source told AKI.

“Some of the refugees will attend classes that will help them integrate to their new host country.”

I guess that’s where they will learn that the United States is a land of milk and honey that will provide everything for them and set them up in their former professions. Then they’ll get here and find that is as far from the truth as can be. They’ll be living in poverty and frustration and will end up hating America and Americans. Great program!

The report continues, with no context to these remarks:

The UNHCR source, however, rejected the notion that religion played a role in the selection of candidates.

“There is no preference about this point and among the conditions by host countries there is absolutely no discrimination in this sense,” said the source.

Who said religion did play a part? We don’t know. But it is preposterous that religion doesn’t play a part in the selection. Muslim refugees should be encouraged to go home unless there are specific reasons they can’t. Christian and other minority refugees should be resettled in third countries in places where they can join people from their particular sect, unless there are specific reasons they can go home. Our stupid policy of nondiscrimination is one more example of how political correctness has turned the brains of otherwise intelligent people to mush.