Day: April 20, 2009

Kentucky becomes state number 18 where Iraqis are unemployed

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’ve been keeping a running tally of states* where we see news accounts of unhappy Iraqi refugees unable to find employment in the US.  Some are well-educated professionals who can’t even find a low-level full time job.   But, perhaps more troubling is that someone abroad is telling them that life here will be a cake walk.

This article from the Lexington Herald-Leader reports on several Iraqis and what their experience has been in the US, some are happy to be safe, but all are worried about finding work.  This is Raghad Abdul Majeed’s story.

Months later, when it became clear she would move to the United States, Majeed attended an orientation meeting for refugees in Syria. It will be easy to find jobs in America, she was told.

Since her arrival last May, however, that has not been the case. Her professional training as an Arabic teacher didn’t count for much here because she could not speak English. In the dreadful economy, she applied for jobs that didn’t require language skills, but she encountered Americans with college degrees applying for the same work.

She landed a couple of odd jobs.

After a week as a hotel maid, she was fired for not working fast enough. Then, her temporary job at the Amazon.com shipping center stopped soon after the holidays were over.

“We had imagined America to be the safest place for our children and that it would be the best place to find a job. (But) the lack of a job is a kind of threat. It’s not a safe situation if you don’t have a job here,” Majeed said.

Luckily a church is picking up some of the slack since her resettlement agency obviously has too many refugees to care for.

When the initial money from Kentucky Refugee Ministries ran out, food stamps paid for meager groceries. Walnut Hill Church paid her phone bill and utilities. Still, it didn’t alleviate her frustration.

If only I had known….

“It’s not just my problem. It’s the problem of all the Iraqi families here,” she said. “If someone told me these are the obstacles I would find in America, I wouldn’t have come … I would return to Iraq.”

*The 17 other 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.

Somali reports on aggrieved Somalis and FBI

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The University of Minnesota newspaper ran an article last week titled FBI continues questioning U students.  It begins:

The disappearances of young Somali men from Minneapolis, including two students from the University of Minnesota, have resulted in numerous students being questioned by the FBI, both on and off campus.

The federal agents have been visiting students in high schools, colleges and the University for information about the missing Somali men.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is calling on colleges to provide more legal help for students and also says students have been approached by the FBI while walking to class and in the library. Students have also received calls from investigators.

The piece goes on to focus on one student who was interviewed, who said federal agents are “terrorizing” her family, and the rights of students not to talk to law enforcement. It concludes:

 The FBI did not return a call for comment on this story.

Not too much context is provided, I thought as I read it. Kind of one-sided. And then I looked at the author’s name: Ibrahim Hirsi, a Somali name. Is that how it works? Reporters from an aggrieved group get to do the reporting on the grievances?

Excellent analysis of the mainstream media’s abysmal coverage (or no coverage!) of the Tea Parties

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update just a few moments later:   See Mark Steyn’s column (linked there) and other excellent commentary on this same subject by our good friends over at the Blue Ridge Forum, here.

 

Kyle-Anne Shiver, the author of this excellent piece at American Thinker on how the mainstream media apparently purposefully and maliciously missed the real message of the Tea Party story, is an expert on the Alinsky School (Obama!) of community organizing.*   I suspect she gets some particular amusement at seeing the results of genuine and spontaneous outrage by citizens at the Tea Parties as opposed to the orchestrated demonstrations put on by the Radical Left (using the Alinsky method of manipulation) in recent years.

So without further ado, here is how she begins.  Please read the whole excellent column!

In all my years of watching news coverage in America, I don’t believe I have ever witnessed more condescending, amateurish, purely politicized reporting than what just transpired among the liberal MSM covering America’s Tax Day Tea Parties. The Tea Parties represented a very significant news event.

Whenever close to 300,000 middle-class Americans put their productive lives on hold on a midweek workday, make original signs with their own hands, and travel miles and miles to stand with other private citizens just to demonstrate their anger with government, in more than 300 cities from coast to coast and everywhere in between, that’s NEWS. Yet, many local newspapers – even the Boston Globe for crying out loud! – pettily refused to even cover their local protests. When every news channel – except the only one thriving on the block, Fox – finally decided to cover the events, it was with derision, mockery and elitist condescension. 

Note to MSM: This is why you’re going broke.

Dirty jokes!   I laughed when I read this next paragraph, because I too polled my friends to see if they knew what the disgusting reference was to “tea-bagging” and none did (I still don’t know and don’t want to know).  But, it tells you what kind of people Obama has on his side, doesn’t it!

The puerile, vulgar humor of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and CNN’s Anderson Cooper, targeting the most clean-cut, rancor-less groups of protesters possibly ever assembled in the U.S.A., was the kind of thing one would expect on an adolescent playground when the teacher isn’t listening. I personally polled 16 friends and relatives, aged 23 to 66, and not a single one of them had ever even heard the sexually perverse phrase regarding tea bags, which peppered Maddow’s and Cooper’s primetime rants.

Regular readers know that Judy and I demonstrated proudly and with gusto last Wednesday at our local Tea Party.

* We have discussed the Alinsky School of community organizing that inspired Obama’s career in that field at length in our Community Destabilization category.  And, here, is a link to a post in which I mention Kyle-Anne Shiver.

SEIU saves the crew of the Maersk Alabama, huh?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I told you before that I signed a petition some months back demanding a halt to all Muslim immigration to the US.   Well, within a few days I was receiving e-mails from the Service Employees International Union(SEIU), the Union all tangled up with Obama and Blago,  thanking me for signing up for their cause. They even took my name (they said) to Capital Hill in support of the Employee Free Choice Act.   I was furious at the cheaters, but their e-mails give me some insight into the cheating mind-set of this Union that is busy organizing Somalis.

Well, this past week I received an e-mail alert from them bragging about how unions, and by extension SEIU, were behind the brave action of the crew of the Maersk Alabama in their fight that ended in the annihilation of three black Somali Muslim teens.  Entitled Unions 1, Pirates 0, here it is.  Note that only with passage of the Employee Free Choice Act will such acts of bravery be possible.

I wish I could find it now, but I saw a photo of Somali SEIU lackeys demonstrating somewhere in the last few months.  The Somalis were all carrying SEIU signs.  The image came to mind when I watched that film clip of a crew member of the Maersk Alabama bragging about defeating the Somali pirates, and I wondered how the Somali Americans feel about that humiliation of their kin.

In my wandering around the web this morning to see what else I could find about Somalis being organized by SEIU, I found a couple of interesting nuggets.

Take Action Minnesota, a community organizing network to which SEIU belongs, is helping Somalis organize politically in that state.  Just last month they held their first Somali Day at the Capital.

(St. Paul, MN) March 12, 2009 – On Thursday, Minnesota’s Somali-American community gathered at the State Capitol in their first-ever “Somali Day on the Hill.” Hosted by Somali Action Alliance of Minneapolis, the all-day event was developed to introduce leaders from Somali communities from around Minnesota to the state legislative process and to provide initial contact with legislators on important issues such as education, headwear in driver’s license photos, racial justice, health care and jobs.

We have written extensively in our community destabilization category about how important it is for the hard Left to create disunity among groups of people so as to fuel the battle of the ‘have-nots’ vs. the ‘haves’ and bring about a socialist form of government.  Not to mention the fact that Unions need dues-paying members!  Since they were running out of unhappy Americans, they had to move on to organize and agitate immigrant groups to demand stuff.  That is where the Somalis fit in, they are lackeys for the Radical Left.

Ending on a humorous note (another humorous note, since the first is that Union membership saved the crew of the Maersk Alabama), Michelle Malkin reported last month that the SEIU had to dump some of its own workers and those workers went out and used their training to picket the SEIU!  I didn’t see that in the mainstream media, did you?