This is just a note to let all of my internet friends know I will be away for a few days and likely will not have internet access. I enjoy getting your e-mail communications and just didn’t want you to think I was simply not responding. I should be back on-line by Thursday evening. Ann
Month: September 2009
Somali rapist went to college, worked for refugee agency but didn’t understand our customs?
Thanks to Brenda Walker, a VDARE journalist, for sending the link to a story from Milwaukee in response to my request for more information on this rape case yesterday, here. Here is what Walker had to say on Sunday.
Although this is 6 months old it is worth posting now because it highlights several troubling issues. From the Journal Sentinel in March of this year:
A 25-year-old refugee from Somalia has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a teenage girl he met at a Milwaukee library last year.
Abdiwahab Hussein was found guilty of the March 3, 2008, attack during a jury trial in December. On Thursday, Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Carl Ashley sentenced him to 25 years in prison, followed by 25 years of extended supervision on two counts related to the incident. Ashley also sentenced Hussein to seven more years in prison and seven years’ extended supervision for two other counts, to be served concurrent to the longer sentence.
Ali Mursal, 23, a co-defendant who also is a refugee from Somalia, pleaded guilty last month and is scheduled for sentencing this week.
Hussein went to college and worked with a refugee agency! Which one?
According to statements made at Hussein’s sentencing, he spent much of his life in refugee camps before fleeing his war-torn homeland four or five years ago. Here, he completed two years of college and worked for a nonprofit agency coordinating programs for other Somalian refugees.
Even with some college education and an interpreter (is this why so many interpreters are needed in places like Nashville?), he says he couldn’t understand the proceedings. Yeh, sure, we believe that one.
Hussein has maintained his innocence. In a letter to Ashley and at his sentencing, he said he did not understand all that had occurred in court.
Ashley had appointed an interpreter and repeatedly offered Hussein the chance to talk about what his sentence should be. Instead, Hussein proclaimed his innocence and repeated that he had not understood the earlier court proceedings despite the presence of an interpreter.
His lawyer says he didn’t understand our customs! I know it’s their “custom” to rape in Africa but surely the refugee agency where he worked must have given their African refugees some training about our customs (our laws!) especially when they are to be employed by the agency. Which agency was it?
Jeffrey Gaines, a lawyer representing Hussein, pleaded for a lighter sentence, noting that Hussein was unfamiliar with American customs and practices. He said Hussein would be deported once released from jail.
“Where he’s deported to, I don’t know,” Gaines said. “There is not government and no civilized legal society (in Somalia).”
Fat chance he will be deported. There are others we have written about on these pages that should be deported to Somalia but never will be.
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.
Incidentally this article does not tell us how Hussein got into the US. Was he admitted as a refugee through the US State Department? Why does the article say he came 4 or 5 years ago, does no one know? Or perhaps he came across our border illegally and asked for and received asylum. Does anyone know?
American newspapers deceive foreign media, and they don’t like it
Mark Steyn has a post on The Corner, Don’t Blame Us, Blame the Newspaper We Copied It Out Of, that deserves attention.
The USS Neverdock notices an emerging global trend: newspapers suckered by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Down under, the Sydney Morning Herald has retracted its “original” “report” of the Van Jones resignation:
A week ago, the Herald ran a story which, in its essence, was not true. The paper did not know this. It was the unwitting victim of a distortion created at The Washington Post, which produced the original story.
We’ve commented frequently on reports in the media that leave out the most relevant and interesting facts. Ann has posted on any number of puff pieces on refugees in local newspapers in which the reporters don’t or won’t look below the surface. Those who do real reporting are heroes, and we’ve given them lots of space, most notably Brian Mosely and the Shelbyville (Tennesee) Times-Gazette.
Mark Steyn mentions a second retraction, this one from the Irish Times which was snookered by a New York Times story. And here’s his perceptive bottom line:
Of course, neither the Sydney Morning Herald nor the Irish Times are “unwitting victims” of the Washington Post and New York Times. It’s their choice to copy blindly any slab of hooey appearing in the Post and Times that happens to suit their prejudices without checking it for themselves. As the Neverdock points out, if you can’t do as well as some blogger using Google, maybe you shouldn’t be in the news business.
That’s exactly right. We get most of our information here at Refugee Resettlement Watch from poking around the Internet. Once we got started, of course we began getting information directly from people in the know, so that in some ways we became somewhat more like traditional reporters. (I should say Ann is, since I don’t do much original reporting.)
When you look at all the recent stories that the mainstream media have ignored or minimized, you do have to wonder why these media outlets exist at all. The Van Jones scandal and resignation, the undercover films of ACORN employees encouraging what they thought was a brothel using underaged girls, the huge Washington march on Saturday — these were covered well and thoroughly by websites, bloggers and Fox News — and little else.
US Navy Seals kill an Al-Shabaab bigwig inside of Somalia
Seems that Obama is going to take these Al-Shabaab jihadists seriously. If any more Somali youths (former refugees)* get the big idea of joining Al-Shabaab in Africa maybe this will give them pause. From Fox News thanks to Blulitespecial.
Navy Seals from U.S. Special Operations Forces conducted a raid in southern Somalia on Monday that killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of 4 co-conspirators wanted in the 2002 bombing of an Israel owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, two senior U.S. military officials told FOX News.
Ten days ago President Obama signed the Execute Order for Nabhan, who since 2006 was on the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists. He was also wanted for the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Kenya in 1998.
Two MH-6 Little Bird helicopters deployed from one of two U.S. Navy vessels near Somalia’s coast strafed a vehicle Nabhan was using to go back and forth between meetings. Intelligence operatives had been monitoring Sabhan prior to the attack. The helicopters passed once, firing on the vehicle, and then circled back around to retrieve the body so they could make a positive identification, according to one official.
[….]
Nabhan’s group Somali, Al- Shabaab, has links to Al Qaeda.
He, he, he! I wonder if Al-Amriki will be next?
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.
We have been following the case of Somali “youths” being recruited to join Al- Shabaab since last November, here.
Milwaukee Muslims teaching Somali Bantu how to behave in America
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.