Month: August 2009

Ft. Morgan gets an African Community Center to benefit Cargill and all will be well

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Maybe, maybe not.   Here is another article about Ft. Morgan, Co, a meatpacking town that seems to be opening its arms to African refugees.   Although there are a few glitches—like car accidents—not to worry, they have a ‘community organizing center’ likely paid for by the taxpayer that is expected to make everything go smoothly.   They want to avoid all that bad stuff that happens in Greeley.

So what’s a few car accidents anyway? 

The crash [a deadly crash] has also spurred a new African-run community center to start teaching English and the rules of the road to the new immigrants, including people from Kenya, Congo, and Ethiopia. But some readers of the local newspaper, the Fort Morgan Times, have suggested that the immigrants shouldn’t be allowed to drive.

Fort Morgan’s police department doesn’t keep data on accidents by race, Lt. Darin Sagel said. But Mayor Jack Darnell said it appeared the immigrants are “having a disproportionate amount of accidents,” most of them minor fender-benders.

“And they realize it. They are trying to adjust,” Darnell said.

Sagel said the accidents may be the result of not being accustomed to a new environment.

The environment?  What the heck?  Didn’t they get drivers’ licenses by passing a test?  What the article doesn’t tell you in response to that logical question is that there are massive drivers license scams throughout the US where translators receive payment under the table for “helping” immigrants with a few answers on the written test.

Cargill recruited the Africans with the help of the US State Department and now to help Cargill the African Community Center helps the Somalis and other Africans adjust.

The Africans chose Fort Morgan as their new home largely because of the presence of  Cargill Meat Solutions Corp., a Wichita, Kan.-based firm that has hired more than 360 of them, said Ibrahim Abdi, who also runs the community center.

Cargill’s wages start at $12.45 an hour for jobs from cleaning to packaging meat, Ali said. The plant employed about 20 percent of Fort Morgan’s 10,800 residents in 2007. 

Besides the U.S. government, Abdi said Somalis are grateful for Cargill.

“They gave us work, and they gave us a way to live,” Abdi said.

Center volunteers drive people to doctor’s appointments or help them find housing, another big issue. As many as 100 immigrants, most of them single men, stay in motels because there aren’t enough apartments or because they want to get a job before signing a lease, center leaders said.

So, to summarize, the Morgan African Community Center is surely a taxpayer-funded organization that supplements Cargill.  Maybe Cargill should be funding the community center!   Has any enterprising reporter looked into the funding arrangements for what amounts to another Ethnic Community Based Organization, a pet project of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).  I wonder if former Kansas governor Sebelius , now Secretary of Health and Human Services which oversees the ORR, was a friend of Cargill?   Remember the Clintons were friends of Iowa meatpackers and that is how we got so many Bosnian refugees.

As Ramadan demands are expected at the Swift plant in Greeley, Ft. Morgan is sure they will dodge the bullet because they now have a “community center.”

Abdi said the center also has acted as a mediator to prevent the kind of discord that arose among Somali Muslims and their employers around the country over prayer rituals.

In Greeley, about 50 miles west of Fort Morgan, the JBS Swift & Co. meatpacking plant fired more than 100 workers during Ramadan last year after evening-shift workers walked out, saying the firm refused to allow their breaks to coincide with sunset so they could pray. At the time, Swift said they had tried to accommodate workers’ lunch schedules by more than an hour.

There have been no such problems in Fort Morgan, workers say.

Yet anyway!

Note to the Ft. Morgan Times:  I still have your editorial of last September at my fingertips.

I’ve written a lot about Ft. Morgan but don’t have the energy to put all the links in here, so just type Ft. Morgan into our search function to learn more.

Government housing projects to blame for radicalization in Australia

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The other day I promised more on the teeth-gnashing and hand-wringing going on in Australia in the wake of the Somali/Lebanese terror plot that security forces foiled there a week ago.

The August 5th issue of Time magazine weighs in with an article that doesn’t tell us too much more, but this section interested me because it is a continuation of the theme of the lack of assimilation that seems to be at the heart of what people think is going wrong in Australia.

Rudd said the incident emanated “from a small number of individuals who should in no way be taken as a wider reflection of any group within Australian society.” A number of critics, however, say the so-called plot illustrates a failure to integrate immigrants like the Somalis into Australian society. Dr. Berhan Ahmed, chairman of the Melbourne-based African Think Tank, an organization dedicated to assisting African refugees, says outdated policies are responsible for migrants’ struggling in Australian society.

Unemployment remains a huge problem. Ahmed also cites the practice of putting refugees into troubled government-owned housing complexes or high-rise apartment blocks “where often the drug dealers are who want to recruit the kids.” Instead, parents push the kids toward religious figures, including some who preach extremist views. Says Ahmed: “What would you do for your son or daughter? Would you leave them to drug dealers?”

So, lets see, parents fearing their kids will get into drugs push them into the arms of religious zealots.  Hummm.  It has always got to be the fault of the western country that has taken in refugees, it is never the inherent problems with Islam and its Jihad imperative.

I was however interested to see that refugees in Australia are placed in substandard housing in Australia, just as they often are in the US.   What is up with that?  Maybe if they, or the US, can’t afford decent housing we SHOULDN’T BRING SO MANY REFUGEES!

CAST: Taking a stand against the spread of Shariah law

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update August 14th:  Protests continue, here.

Amid all the very large and angry demonstrations occurring over the last week and planned for the coming weeks on Obamacare, a small cheerful band of patriots stood outside the JBS Swift meatpacking plant  in Greeley, CO on Saturday to declare that Shariah law was not going to get a foothold in America.   Coloradans against Shariah Task Force (CAST) maintain, as do we, that when meatpacking companies and other employers give in to religious demands by Muslim employees for special workplace accommodation that is the beginning of the Stealth Jihad.  See my first report about CAST here.

This protest in Greeley (the birthplace of Al-Qaeda) in advance of Ramadan, the Muslim holiday which surely portends another contentious month in meatpacking towns across the country, is believed to be the first time that citizens have stood up to tell the public of the dangers they see with employers caving to Muslim (Somalis mostly in this case) demands.  By elevating Islamic requirements to the highest concern in workplace functioning, these demands are detrimental to other ethnic and religious workers in the plant.

Although the Greeley Tribune interviewed CAST leader Michael Gale, little mention was made of the real purpose of the demonstration.  See the Greeley Tribune coverage here (very strange, I know the paper had more the other day, I saw it!).   Read Jerry Gordon’s reports here and here.

Here is my recent post about Greeley and the Somalis filing Civil Rights complaints against Swift.

To catch up on this contentious issue, visit our entire category on the Greeley/Grand Island Swift controversy going back to last year here.

“You magnificent bastard, I read your book.”

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

What a fabulous line from George C. Scott in Patton and used to illustrate so appropriately the points David Stokes makes in his piece at Townhall today.    Hat tip:  Paul

Stokes, writing about the shock the extreme leftwing is experiencing when real grassroots America does some community organizing of its own, begins in “Rules for Witnesses:”

There is a scene early on in the movie Patton, where the feisty general watches the forces under his command do battle with those led by the legendary German Panzer leader, Erwin Rommel. To prepare for this particular skirmish, “Old Blood and Guts” studied the writings of his adversary, prompting the memorable line uttered in a gravely voice by actor George C. Scott: “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!”

Stokes goes on to describe Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s sputtering and muttering about Nazis and how she relates Nazism and vile people to middle Americans who have had it with the Obama Administration and Congress’ attempt to seize the health care system of the entire country, and are organizing opposition.

Stokes says, we have read your book!   He is talking about Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” and the seminal writing that all community organizers , including Obama, study when they sign up to “change” America.  All I can say is it’s about time everyone reads it.  I myself should have read it 40 years ago, but then in 1969, that tumultuous year for college students, I sadly would not have understood the significance.  [Historical note:  The earlier version of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” was published in hardcover in 1969 by Random House under the title “Reveille for Radicals”]

What Nancy Pelosi is seeing is her side being on the receiving end of some of the kind of methodological medicine the left has been forcing down the country’s throat for quite a long time. I recently got around to reading Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals. Yes, I know I should have done so long ago, but I thought I had a good enough grasp on what the man said back in 1971 via the thorough treatment his musings have received from the conservative punditry.

I was wrong. My bad. Every American should read it. It’s chilling.

I believe what we are now witnessing is a case of people being, as the saying goes (and as is actually used in Alinsky’s book) “hoisted with their own petard.” Fire is being fought with fire. The reflexive dismissal of angry citizens showing up at town hall meetings these days to give Washington insiders a piece of their mind as somehow orchestrated, notwithstanding.

This is not a top-down campaign with a few sinister puppeteers pulling the strings. The opposition to liberal health care machinations and other stuff is very real. What they see as orchestration is actually mobilization.

I have been laughing all week watching the radical Left twist themselves inside out as they watch conservatives do real community organizing!  Now, it seems the strategy is not so cool, right President Obama!  Right Mr. Axelrod!  Right Nancy!

What about immigration?

Now that conservatives are understanding community organizing and reading Alinsky, I look forward to the day when we begin to understand the connection of the Alinsky model (create chaos to bring about change) and how it relates to immigration.

Alinsky began his work in ethnic neighborhoods in Chicago.  In order for the entire Alinsky strategy to work organizers need angry, poor people (with a little racial tension thrown in for good measure) to continually demand more of the government.    The original minorities Alinsky agitated gradually became middle class citizens basically content with their lives and often very patriotic.  Darn, there went the army of the revolution—right into decent jobs, their own homes in the suburbs, sending kids to college or proudly to the military.

For all of us wondering where the  common sense is of the open borders leaders who continually demand that we import millions of poor immigrants who won’t have jobs and will thusly depend on government support, they are building  (or re-building) an Alinsky army.  The poor immigrants are just cannon fodder and the humanitarian do-gooders are their cover.

We have been talking about Alinsky in our Community Destabilization category since Obama was elected, here.

Iraqis denied asylum in Denmark have disappeared

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I told you about this story some time ago here.  A Copenhagen church was sheltering Iraqi refugees who had been denied asylum in Denmark.  Now, more than 40 are missing.  From Ice News:

The refugee support group Asylret has come forward and told Danish police that 44 of the Iraqi asylum seekers who were staying in Denmark have disappeared. The group of 80-plus Iraqis was facing forced repatriation to their home country, prompting more than half of them to flee into hiding. 

[….]

Up until last week, some 80 Iraqi asylum seekers were staying in Copenhagen’s Brorsons Church. But 44 of them have gone missing, and Danish police can’t find them.

More Muslim immigrants for Europe I guess.