Terrorism expert calls Uighurs terrorists, and they’re coming soon

Andy McCarthy led the 1995 prosecution of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others for their bombing of the World Trade Center and other planned attacks, and assisted in other prosecutions of terrorists. He is now the head of the Center for Law and Counterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He knows what he’s talking about when it comes to terrorism. So when he says someone is a terrorist, I take him seriously.  Here’s how he begins his post at National Review’s Corner, The Uighurs Are Coming, the Uighurs Are Coming! :

 Despite being steeped in jihadist ideology, trained in explosives and assassination tactics, and anxious enough to get that way that they high-tailed it from China to Afghanistan to become more lethal terrorists, the Uighur Muslim detainees will be released by the Obama administration into the United States, according to this Los Angeles Times report. After all, the president has promised to close Guantanamo Bay this year, and that promise can’t be fulfilled unless we release the jihadists since many of them can’t be tried.

McCarthy references this report on the Uighurs from Thomas Jocelyn, which leaves no doubt that they are terrorists. He points out that “federal statutory law … makes aliens excludable from the U.S. if they have received terrorist training or been affiliated with a terrorist organization.”

The LA Times’s story reports that four former Uighur prisoners are in Albania and one has moved from there to Sweden. They have been living their peacefully. Maybe those countries easily accommodate people who act like this:

Not long after being granted access to TV [because they are considered nonthreatening prisoners at Gitmo, though they took part in a riot], some of the Uighurs were watching a soccer game. When a woman with bare arms was shown on the screen, one of the group grabbed the television and threw it to the ground, according to the officials.

Yup, just the kind of people we want. And did the officials take away their TV privileges or otherwise punish them? Hah!

Since then, officials at Guantanamo have bolted down the TVs and shown pre-taped programs, editing out any images they thought Uighurs might find offensive.

I suppose the government could assign each Uighur an aide who would remove everything offensive before the Uighur could see it. Would you like one of these guys to move in next door? Let’s hear from some of our apologists for multiculturalism.

See our previous posts on the Uighurs here.

Addendum: Right after I posted the above, I came across this article by Jed Babbin. It begins:

White House lawyers are refusing to accept the findings of an inter-agency committee that the Uighur Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay are too dangerous to release inside the U.S., according to Pentagon sources familiar with the action.

It continues:

….Reviewing the Uighurs detention, the inter-agency panel found that they weren’t the ignorant, innocent goatherds the White House believed them to be.  The committee determined they were too dangerous to release because they were members of the ETIM terrorist group, the “East Turkistan Islamic Movement,” and because their presence at the al-Queda training camp was no accident.  There is now no ETIM terrorist cell in the United States:  there will be one if these Uighurs are released into the United States.

According to Defense Department sources, the White House legal office has told the inter-agency review group to re-do their findings to come up with the opposite answer.

  But what does reality matter when it comes to what Obama wants?

Iraqi government is compiling stats on displaced Iraqis

This should be interesting. From Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty:

BAGHDAD — Iraqi Displacement and Migration Minister Abdul-Samad Rahman Sultan says Baghdad is working closely with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to build a reliable database about Iraqi communities abroad, RFE/RL’s Radio Free Iraq (RFI) reports.

The work is to prepare for the national census in October.

The data will also include a breakdown of qualifications and educational levels.

Sultan said the goal is to encourage well-educated Iraqis to return home.

Sultan added that reliable statistics about Iraqis living in Europe are particularly lacking.

The longstanding estimate is that 2 million Iraqis have left the country. They are not counting internally displaced people, but that number has been estimated at 2.5 million. I generally hold to the rule that reality is never as bad as estimates and media reports in any area (such as environmental problems), but occasionally wartime figures turn out worse than estimated. If I had to bet, I’d place my money on the not-as-bad scenario. There are always reasons to inflate numbers and few incentives to deflate them. This is not to question, of course, the pathetic circumstances of most of the Iraqi refugees, only the estimate of their numbers.

Harrisonburg, VA welcoming Iraqi refugees

Of course we have already heard that Iraqis, unhappy in Virginia, have recently returned to the Middle East.   Undaunted by the facts, however, puff pieces continue to be written in what I can only conclude is a continued campaign to tell the public that everything is peachy with refugee resettlement in this miserable economy.

A couple of things in this ho-hum news story prompted me to write about it, especially this first line .

The U.S. State Department decides where to place refugees.

I don’t believe the State Department is putting push-pins in a map and deciding that your city is the next “welcoming” city.   The volags, the non-profit federal contractors seem to be the driving force.  It is they, unelected and unaccountable to the taxpayer, deciding where refugees will go, or at least that is how it has been in our experience.  Once a community is targeted by a volag (see Top Ten here), the only way any community can say “no” is if citizens make a lot of noise (elected officials will run and hide).   Or, if the resettlement agency (one of the hundreds of subcontractors to the Top Ten) screws up in some way, and THEN the State Department steps in (see Waterbury, CT agency closed here).

“They’re looking for existing resources in [the] community. They’re looking for the ethnic community in place, also affordability of housing, and availability of employment,” says Sokolyuk [Director of a refugee agency that is unnamed in this article].

All those factors have come together to make Harrisonburg an appealing places to send Iraqi refugees in particular.

In the last three months of 2008, 32 Iraqi refugees came to Harrisonburg. Already this year, that number has nearly doubled.

What makes Harrisonburg a good place to relocate Iraqi refugees when Fredericksburg (maybe 70 miles away) was not?

Then this:

The resettlement office has to offer assistance to refugees for about a month. Funds are limited.

“I mean, how much can you do within 30 days? That’s all they require from us,” says Sokolyuk.

He says it used to be easier for refugees to get a job in that time frame. Now, it’s closer to three to four months.

Assistance for only one month???    That is absolutely not true.  Yes, they get a stipend toward their first month’s rent from the State Department, but the resettlement agency is responsible for them for 6-8 months depending on what programs that agency has signed up for with the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Dept. of Health and Human Services.*  The variety in the programs remains a mystery to me.  Even after the agency is no longer responsible, refugees are eligible for many government welfare programs including food stamps.

* By the way, there is little continuity from program to program, so one family of refugees in a community, resettled by one agency, can be getting a whole lot more or less than another family resettled by another agency which causes much confusion, anger and resentment within refugee communities.

Europe’s rightward lurch: lesson for America

This morning I see there was a thought-provoking essay by author Bruce Bawer (While Europe Slept) posted at the the Infidel Blogger’s Alliance yesterday.  Bawer maintains that Europe is heading to the political right while America goes left.   However, it seems that it may be too late to save some European countries already strained to the breaking point by unchecked Muslim immigration and a socialist welfare system that cannot survive the onslaught.

These are the concluding paragraphs:

Who will win the war for the soul of Western Europe? The Islamofascists and their multiculturalist appeasers, many of whom seem to believe that their job is not to defend democracy but to help make the transition to Shariah as smooth as possible? The nativist cryptofascists? Or Pim Fortuyn’s freedom-loving heirs? Interestingly, while Western Europeans have been heading in one direction, Americans have chosen to go the other way, replacing a president more loathed by the European elite than any in history with a man whom the same elite has celebrated to an unprecedented degree, often depicting his election as a mystical act of atonement for all of America’s past sins, real or imagined.

The final question, then, is whether the Western European left’s condescension toward America, and the American left’s habit of holding Western Europe up as a socialist paradise, can survive the combination of Europe’s right turn and the elevation of Barack Obama. Stir in the international financial crisis, which will almost certainly cause a socioeconomic upheaval of untold dimensions in both hemispheres, and it seems reasonable to expect that the old pattern may be broken for good. Meaning that American professors will have a far less stressful time of it at European cocktail parties—at least until Shariah comes along and forbids cocktails entirely.

Please read it all.