Day: August 21, 2009

More of Malta’s illegal aliens on the way to the US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This arrangement a former US Ambassador made with the island nation of Malta to take  aliens who arrive in this EU country illegally and send them off as refugees to the US sets a dangerous precedent.   Legitimate refugees (not economic migrants) are to ask for asylum in the first country they reach. 

What makes Malta any different then say Greece, or Italy, or France for that matter?  Will we soon be helping out other European countries suffering under the same burden?   And, as I have asked before, will these countries reciprocate and take some of our illegal Mexicans or El Savadorans—it is the same thing! 

Here is the whole short article today from the Times of Malta.  More Africans who managed to get across the Mediterranean are on their way here.

Since the US Embassy began its ongoing refugee resettlement programme in May, 303 refugees have been resettled in the US. These latest refugees are from Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia.

Chargé d’Affaires Jason Davis noted that the refugee resettlement programme reflected America’s continuing commitment to help ease the burden that migration placed on Malta, as well as its recognition of the enormous challenges and dangers that many of the migrants faced.

“The programme’s success is a tribute to continued hard work on the part of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organisation for Migration, and the United States government, as well as many others here in Malta who have dedicated themselves to improving the lives of refugees in need of humanitarian assistance,” Mr Davis said.

He said all refugees were assigned a sponsor agency in the US that provided initial services such as housing, food, and clothing, as well as referral to medical care, employment services, and other support services during the transition period to self-sufficiency. These services are provided in order to facilitate refugees with the process of integration and cultural assimilation.

Just a little reminder, we are in a recession and most refugees arriving here are not becoming self-sufficient any time soon.

Be sure to go to the Times of Malta link and look at the comments! 

Type ‘Malta’ into our search function and note how many times we have reported on this likely illegal manuever by the US State Department.

FBI keeping an eye on Somalis in Boston

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Meanwhile Minneapolis Somalis claim that the recruiting of young Somalis to go to Somalia to join the Jihad is over.

Here is the story from Boston, not the first we have seen from that city.  Hat tip: Susan

BOSTON (AP) — The FBI is reaching out to Somali communities in New England after young men in Minnesota were recruited to travel to Somalia to fight with Islamic militants.

Warren Bamford, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston office, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the FBI is staying in close touch with Somali leaders in Boston and Lewiston, Maine, where there are large Somali populations.

Bamford said Tuesday there is no evidence of recruitment going on in the Northeast.

But he said the FBI is concerned about young men in Minneapolis being sought out to travel to Somalia.

“We are concerned about them receiving training, and then of course coming back over here and then utilizing that training in some terrorist attack here,” Bamford said.

Somalis say, don’t you dare profile!  Guess they learned that lesson well from a certain Harvard professor just recently.

Somali leaders in Boston say they are cooperating but stress there is no reason to believe local men are participating. They also say they are concerned about racial profiling.

Jumping over to Minneapolis, here is a story I meant to post about ten days ago about how Somali leaders say the recruiting pipeline has dried up in that city.  So, maybe its not so farfetched to keep an eye on other Somali centers in the US.

A prominent Minneapolis Somali community leader said Tuesday that he believes the recruitment of young Somali-Americans from the Twin Cities to fight jihad in their homeland has slowed or stopped.

Speaking at a workshop to address the issue, Saeed Fahia, executive director of the Confederation of Somali Communities of Minnesota, said the radicalization of Somali youth here is “over.” The combination of worldwide media and law enforcement scrutiny, coupled with greater vigilance by parents, has caused the recruiting pipeline here to dry up, he said.

JBS Swift meatpacking plant in Greeley, CO hopes it is ready for Ramadan tomorrow

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I guess hope springs eternal, but management at JBS Swift & Co in Greeley thinks that after making a number of concessions they can accommodate their hundreds of Muslim workers demands during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.  Of course it remains to be seen whether other ethnic workers in the plant will protest the religious accommodation as they did last year.  From the Greeley Tribune today, hat tip Jerry Gordon.

Just a day before the beginning of Ramadan, the holy month of fast and prayer for Muslims, talks between meatplant workers, union representatives and company officials continued in earnest.

The objective: Avoid a repeat of the showdown at sundown that flared at JBS USA meatpacking plants in Greeley and Grand Island, Neb., last September.

During Ramadan, Muslims don’t eat or drink during daylight hours. They break their daily fast after sunset prayers.

Miscommunication about how to handle the religious practices resulted in more than 100 Muslim workers — mostly Somalis, but also other East African refugees who’ve moved to Greeley in recent years — being fired last September for walking off production lines.

Graen Isse, a Somali who helps operate the East Africa Community Center in Greeley, said he thinks conflicts will be avoided this year.

They got their special bidet toilets, but will they get their shift changes?

Unlike last year at this time, JBS has created two prayer rooms for Muslim workers inside the plant — one for men and one for women. Also, the company has installed stations in restrooms that allow workers to thoroughly wash, which is custom before prayers.

Still, some Muslims on the B shift, which runs from late afternoon to late evening and runs into prayers at sundown, have requested a monthlong switch to the daytime A shift to avoid conflicts, Isse said.

“I don’t think they’re going to move 400 workers to A shift,” Isse said of JBS. “It’s hard for them to do.”

Yes, indeed, be sure to accommodate those Somalis!

Chandler Keys, JBS spokesman, declined to comment on specific proposals being discussed.

“We think we have the right solutions to make sure the plant operates functionally and efficiently, but also trying to accommodate the needs of all the workers going into Ramadan, particularly the Somali workers,” Keys said.

There’s no telling for sure how it will work out until Ramadan begins this weekend, he noted.

I guess we will wait and see! 

Now I want to turn your attention to Graen Isse (Mohamud Ahmed Isse).  I’ve followed his ‘career’ in Greeley since it began shortly before Ramadan last year.  Well-educated and bilingual, Isse arrived in Greeley in advance of Ramadan and lo and behold got a job at the plant one week(!) before he was fired along with other workers.   Coincidence?

I don’t think so, I think Isse is a ‘community organizer’ sent to Greeley to agitate.  I guess the big question remains, who sent him? 

Just a reminder that it was also Isse who inflamed the conflict between Somalis and Hispanics by going to the Arab press and blaming the trouble on the longtime Hispanic workers, here.   Remember Alinsky says you need to create chaos to bring about change.

This is what we learned about Isse last fall here. 

Remaining [after many Somalis moved to Ft. Morgan, CO] are the “community organizers” who had intrigued me while the controversy was on-going. Graen Isse was the guy who had showed up in town just before all this started and then busied himself by talking to the likes of Arabic news outfits, blaming the problem on the Hispanics. He told the Arab publication he had worked in America since he was 16, but from this puff-piece it would appear he had a typical American high school experience. And, with an education like his, what was he doing looking for meatpacking work (even as a translator)?

Graen Isse, a local Somali leader, understands these conflicting impulses well. In his fourteen years in America, he’s bounced between three states. Now he’s trying to figure out how to help Greeley’s Somali community survive, even if he’s not sure how long he’ll stick around himself.

Slim and amiable, the 27-year-old Isse is constantly in motion — knee tapping, cell phone wire hanging from his ear, eyes scanning the room. [who is he talking to and what is he looking for?]

[Supposedly separated from his parents as a child by the everpresent violence in Africa, miraculously one day his parents were found.]

One day, Isse’s older brother appeared and announced that their parents had escaped to neighboring Kenya. As his family was reunited, another of Isse’s brothers, who had been injured in the war, made it to California as a refugee. He told the government about his family back home, clearing the way for Isse and several members of his family to apply for refugee status and move to San Diego. *see note below 

So Isse grew up as an American teenager, running track and playing high school football. After he graduated from high school in Minneapolis, where his mother had moved, his globetrotting continued. He took college classes in California, then completed his degree in Kenya before ending up back in San Diego. There he worked for a transportation tracking company, drove a taxi, even took some law school classes.

Isse moved to Greeley last summer because a friend from California, Aziz Dhies, was working as a nurse there and suggested that Isse might like the town as well. Isse was hired as a translator at Swift and had only been on the job for about a week when the Ramadan controversy began. He was thrust into the midst of the problem as he negotiated on behalf of hundreds of people whom he had only just met. He, too, was fired because he went home to eat and rest on the day the dispute was resolved instead of returning immediately to work. But he quickly found a new job, working part-time as a translator at the Weld County courts. And he and Dhies dedicated themselves to community organizing, forming the East Africa Community, which aims to be “the middleman between the leaders and our community,” Isse says.

I believe that Isse is a professional community organizer brought in to agitate the Swift workers, but I guess the big question is, who sent him? 

* For new readers:

The US State Department has admitted over 80,000 Somali refugees to the US in the last 25 years and then last year had to suspend family reunification because widespread immigration fraud was revealed through DNA testing.

The immigration fraud involved mostly Somalis filing application to bring family members to the US who turned out not to be related.  The program is still under suspension.

See our entire category (over 70 posts) on the controversy on-going with Swift and Co. and its Somali workers, here.

 

Did Alinsky have anything to follow his chaos=change strategy? Does Obama?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I don’t want to get into another long and convoluted discussion about Saul Alinsky, Obama’s role model for community organizing, but I also don’t want to lose this American Thinker article by Kyle-Anne Shiver.  So therefore I’m posting this, yet another piece on the community organizing strategy, in our category aptly named “community destabilization.”

Many people who haven’ t read Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” have asked me where did Alinsky say it (the chaos to bring about change) would lead to, to what form of government?  Alinsky never really says, he seems to have reveled in just causing turmoil.  His battle of the “Have-nots” vs. the “Haves” seemed to have no end game.  So, now that Obama has successfully used the strategy to place himself in the Oval Office, what is his end game, what are his goals for America?    Ms. Shiver seems to think he has no real idea how to govern, I say he does.

What happens when the thing a president knows best is a set of tactics designed to take power from the “haves”? When the most highly prized info a president ever garnered could be summed up as nothing better than gaming an electoral system with ACORN pay-for-registration schemes?

What happens when a president is very skilled in deceptively cloaking these less-than-altruistic means in rhetorical “moral garments” and his lies finally start catching up with him, destroying his credibility? When a president has never actually run anything successfully, not even his own paper route or a PTA meeting or a small town’s city council?

What happens when power-grab tactics, taught by a rabble-rousing revolutionary, suddenly catapult a charismatic demagogue into the highest power-perch in the world?

Well, then, Barack Obama’s big, fat governance failure happens.

Granted, Obama seems to be messing up pretty badly (strategically) right now, but not for a second do I think that he hasn’t any idea of what he wants to accomplish.  Although Alinsky may have only described a tactic to destabilize communities, others since then have figured out part II, that is, exactly what to do with that chaos and change.  They are working every day to diminish the US in the world, to knock us down a peg, to open our borders to millions of “Have-nots,” to destroy our patriotic spirit, to make us feel guilty for being a nation of mostly “Haves,” to take away our individual freedom, to tell us we need to be governed by eltitists like Obama, his Ivy-League inner circle, and his friends in big business.  The list goes on and I said I wasn’t going to get into another big yak, but here I am.   Bottomline, each day he takes more of our freedom and places it in the hands of the enlightened few in Washington.  Call it Socialism, Marxism, Statism, or liberal fascism, whatever, but he knows how he wants to govern and he has already made considerable progress.

I think Ms. Shiver demonstrates wishful thinking when she says:

Well, then, Barack Obama’s big, fat governance failure happens

Yesterday I told you about the White House meeting on Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) also known as Amnesty.  Go back now and look at the Alinsky-style agitators (all using immigrants as pawns for their own purposes), those organizations, churches, unions and businesses arrayed against freedom-loving American people and ask yourself if Obama is advancing his agenda or not.    When the Immigration Daily writer made the following point, I thought it was overstating their case, but this morning I have second thoughts.

In the long view of history, immigration reform will likely be a more profound political milestone than health care reform….

By sanctioning law-breaking illegal immigration, Comprehensive Immigration Reform will bring about the end of our borders.  If he accomplishes that and nothing else, his Presidency will have advanced the agenda of the one-worlders beyond their wildest expectations.   Alinsky might have described a strategy to bring about chaos, but Obama knows where he is taking the chaos.