Day: November 3, 2009

Noor Almaleki dies, victim of honor killing

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The Arizona Republic misleadingly headlines the story Woman in Peoria hit-and-run incident dies from injuries. Ann has been following this story here and here. The current Arizona Republic article begins:

A 20-year-old Valley woman has died of injuries sustained in what prosecutors are calling an “honor killing.”

Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48, of Glendale, is accused of running over his daughter, Noor Almaleki, and another woman in his Jeep Cherokee because he was infuriated with his daughter for becoming “too Westernized.”

Noor Almaleki died Monday of injuries she received during the Oct. 20 attack.

The charges against the father will be upgraded. I wonder if they have the death penalty in Arizona. But maybe he wouldn’t get the maximum penalty. The article explains:

Social experts say honor killings are an accepted practice in Iraqi tribal society, where family members feel they must kill a woman who shames them by not adhering to traditional Muslim or Iraqi values.

Oh well, then, it’s just their culture. And we are multi-cultural.  We wouldn’t want to offend Muslims by putting “honor killing” in the headline, would we?  Or punishing the perpetrator too harshly just for following his cultural rules.

Mark Steyn has a biting commentary at the Corner, including this:

If there were a Matthew Shepard murder every few months, Frank Rich et al would be going bananas about the “climate of hate” in our society, but you can run over your daughter, decapitate your wife, drown three teenage girls and a polygamous spouse, and progressive opinion and the press couldn’t give a hoot. Indeed, as The Atlantic notes, it’s merely an obsession of us right-wing kooks.

Bhutanese refugee critically injured attempting to cross busy road

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is the story from Seattle: 

SEATTLE – A refugee from Bhutan is recovering at Harborview Medical Center after she was critically injured in a hit-and-run accident.

Local relief agencies say they see at least a few accidents a year involving refugees who may not understand the rules of the road.

They’ve come to this country to start over. That means learning a new culture, a new language, and finding a job. But the hardest part for many of these refugees may just be crossing the street.

[…..]

Sadly these kinds of accidents involving refugees are becoming more common.

Why didn’t she know the “rules of the road?”  Hummm?  There are no cars in the camps where she lived for 17 years!   Shouldn’t the federally contracted resettlement agencies be teaching them how to stay safe.   It appears her resettlement agency is World Relief—“the humanitarian assistance arm of the National Association of Evangelicals.”   You know the NAE is the Christian progressive group that is lobbying for amnesty for illegals.  We mentioned them here recently.

Then get this, she was headed to work in the dark at 5 a.m.

It was 5 a.m. Narmada had just left for work. She was crossing the five-lane road heading toward the bus stop when she was hit.

[….]

Narmada works at a fish processing plant that pays minimum wage but no health benefits.

Bhutanese refugees are having a tough time.  First we learned about the poor young Bhutanese guy also resettled by World Relief who was murdered by a thug in Jacksonville here.  Then there was the little girl killed by being run over in Atlanta, here.  There was also a young Bhutanese woman robbed at gunpoint in another rotten neighborhood, here. And then note the intimidation of other Bhutanese refugees in the Bronx, here.

Center for Immigration Studies report explains how the Sierra Club justifies more immigration

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

If you follow immigration issues generally, one of the most perplexing questions is how did it come about that the major environmental organizations (especially the Sierra Club) in the US don’t want to work to slow immigration when it is clear that more people means more environmental degradation.  Jerry Kammer has written a very detailed piece for the Center for Immigration Studies entitled, “Strategic Negligence: How the Sierra Club’s Distortions on Border and Immigration Policy Are Undermining its Environmental Legacy” that seeks to explain how this happened and tells us that some true conservationists are trying to turn that around.   Please read the report.

Mr. Kammer is just missing one key element in my opinion.

That key element is that Carl Pope, the Sierra Club’s long-time Executive Director, is more a Marxist than an environmentalist.   The new communist movement in this country has coalesced around the Apollo Alliance (Pope sits on its board of directors).   Pope is more comfortable with the far left labor unions, leftwing foundations, the big corporations and the likes of revolutionary Van Jones (be sure to watch the Pope/Jones interview linked in here) then he would be with David Brower.    The powerful alliance that helped elect Obama must have poor demanding immigrants to “change” our government—the goals of the “social justice movement” are more important to Pope and Jones than saving a little biodiversity.   

I only wonder that it took so long for people truly concerned about the environment to organize against open borders communists.  No, I don’t really, because they are mostly on the political left too and couldn’t begin to grasp that Far Left (communists!) had taken over the environmental movement that they began.

P.S. to all the environmentalists concerned with population growth generally, well-educated Americans have been having fewer children while the Somalis, Bosnians and other Muslims pouring into the US have no such concern—six kids and up is what they are aiming for—because they don’t give a damn about the environment!

Refugee would-be kidnappers sentenced in Roanoke, VA

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We first reported this story in May, here.  Yesterday a judge in Roanoke, Virginia sentenced four former refugees to short prison sentences and deportation when they are released from prison in the attempted kidnapping case that shocked rural Virginia.

From the Roanoke Times:

The plot was bizarre, carefully planned and amateurishly executed: To make money in America, three young men from refugee families set out to find a wealthy woman, abduct her from her home and hold her for ransom.

It all unraveled as soon as Audrey Levicki answered the door to her Southwest Roanoke County home.

Suspicious that the two men were not the Red Cross volunteers they claimed to be, Levicki braced the door with her foot and then slammed it shut on the arm of the one who tried to reach inside.

The two men ran off, despite months of planning and a getaway car waiting at the end of the driveway with rope, handcuffs and other tools of a kidnapping. The duo was quickly arrested along with two accomplices, setting in motion a series of unintended consequences that culminated Monday at a sentencing hearing in U.S. District Court in Roanoke.

Levicki, whose intended fate was to be held in a rundown camper until her captors could collect up to $1 million from her corporate executive husband, said that she is now a prisoner in her own home.

“My life went to hell on April 6,” Levicki said in a statement to Judge James Turk, recounting how the incident led to fearful days, sleepless nights and a loss of security so profound that she no longer ventures outside to feed the dog unless armed with a baseball bat.

For the three African natives who tried to kidnap Levicki — Luke Musa Elbino, 20; Mohammed Hussein Guhad, 20; and Joshua Kasongo, 19 — the consequences went beyond the five-and-a-half-year prison terms they received at the end of a daylong hearing.

Once they are released from prison, the three face almost certain deportation back to Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda — countries their families fled when they were boys to escape civil war and genocide.

This part is a joke, we won’t deport them.  We never send refugees back to places like Somalia and possibly not even the Sudan or Rwanda.  In five and a half years they will be back in Roanoke with additional ‘skills’ they learn in prison!  Maybe they will be reformed, maybe not.

Then here is the ultimate in liberal do-gooder hubris:

“They went through terror themselves, so I couldn’t imagine them inflicting that on anyone else,” Barbara Smith, the retired head of the nonprofit Refugee and Immigration Services* office in Roanoke, said while testifying for the defendants.

People like Smith assume that when the US shows kindness, the kindness will be returned.  She can’t believe that young men plucked from the hell hole of Africa could bite the hand that feeds them.  

Read the entire article in the Roanoke Times, there is lots more to the story.  Note that even the reporter in using words and phrases like, “bizarre,” “surreal,” “full of ironies,” appears to be demonstrating his disappointment that these young men didn’t follow the magical pattern of what refugees are supposed to be—grateful and ultimately successful.

In fact, in that May post on this story, the Judge at that time, Judge Michael Urbanski, said he was sad about the case.  Here is what I said about his sadness:

For whom are you sad Judge? It doesn’t sound like you have the frightened women who were stalked by these men at the top of your “sad” list. Are you sad that these men ‘flipped the bird’ at the gift given them by the ‘humanitarians’ at the State Department and the volag federal contractors who brought them to America? Or, are you sad for yourself because the myth of the beautiful American melting pot has been tarnished?

* Looks like this resettlement agency is a Catholic Charities (US Conference of Catholic Bishops) subcontractor.

Endnote:   This isn’t the first time we have heard about problems in “welcoming” Roanoke.  Back in April 2008 we reported on the on-going conflicts between African Americans and the new African refugees resettled by this agency, here, in Roanoke.  These agencies have this naive notion that African Americans will welcome with open arms their black brothers from Africa into their communities.  It’s not about skin color, it’s about culture and the cultures are often in conflict.  It doesn’t help either that refugees get all sorts of government stuff.