That’s the gist of this story published on 9/11 at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. (Hat tip: Robert). Local mosque leaders want to be sure that the Somali Bantu know they can’t have underage sex (rape anyone), settle their differences with violence, or beat their children. For the record, I am glad someone is doing this job, but isn’t this all information they should have received from the federally-funded resettlement agency (or agencies) that brought them to Wisconsin in the first place?
When the local Somali Bantu community began arriving in Milwaukee in 2003, people came with little more than the clothes on their backs.
Largely illiterate, few spoke English. And little in their decade in the refugee camps of Kenya, where they’d fled Somalia’s civil war, prepared them for life in the United States.
It’s been a difficult adjustment for many of the Bantu, as families struggled to maintain their religious and cultural identities while navigating the complexities of American society and its laws.
Now, their fellow Muslims are working to ease that transition, offering a series of educational programs aimed at helping the Somali Bantu better assimilate.
“A Muslim must respect the law of the land and always be a good citizen,” Imam Ziad Hamdan, speaking through a translator, told about 300 Bantu gathered this week for an Iftar – the nightly breaking of the fast during Ramadan – sponsored by the Islamic Society of Milwaukee. Those who do so, said Hamdan, “will please Allah and live in peace in this society.”
The initiative, funded in part by the Women’s Fund of Greater Milwaukee and the Islamic Society, has been welcomed by Bantu leaders, who worry that their youth are being influenced by negative aspects of American culture – truancy, teen pregnancy, drug and alcohol abuse – and that their parents are ill-equipped to stop it. [It is always America’s fault!]
“This is helpful for our community,” said Abdiwahab Aden, president of the local Bantu-American Friendship Association, who estimates there are about 600 Bantu, in about 130 families, in the Milwaukee area.
The Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition began developing the program this spring after two young Bantu men, ages 25 and 23, were convicted of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl they met at a library.
By the way, I follow the news pretty closely and never heard about this rape conviction and just now tried to find a story on it and couldn’t. Does anyone have a link?
Update September 15th: Thanks to Brenda Walker, here is the link to the rape case story. Although it’s an old story it is worth a separate post, here.