Former Iraqi refugee is an Army National Guard recruiter in Nebraska

11/22/2009 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is a revealing story about how a former Iraqi interpreter now using his skills in the National Guard in Nebraska struggles to dispel the negative image of Muslims in the military in the wake of the massacre at Ft. Hood. He seems like a decent and sincere man who is happy to be in America, but one section of this story in the Omaha World Herald was revealing. In his effort to recruit diversity into the Guard, he comes upon immigrants who obviously hate the country that now harbors them, and the National Guard that keeps them safe.

Many of the people he recruited welcomed him, thrilled to converse with someone who looked like them and wore an American military uniform.

But no map is good enough to keep him from taking wrong turns and slamming into walls.

He left a mosque once when the worshippers made him feel uncomfortable about the way he folded his hands to pray.

He learned that certain people from certain communities in Nebraska — he doesn’t want to say who — consider him an enemy of religion. They’ve hissed at him and called him everything short of an infidel. [Three guesses who the ‘hissers’ are in Nebraska!]

“There are strict people,” he said. “You know, people who just know good or bad and that’s all. When you live like that, it is easy to kill. It is easy to say ‘In the name of God’ — bang! — ‘That’s it.’

“But of course it doesn’t work that way.”

Basim refused to stop, kept right on talking that day to the Muslim man convinced that the Nebraska National Guard was the enemy.

Basim told him he wasn’t going to fight his people, he was going to fight people who were hurting his people.

The argument turned into a debate, and the debate morphed into a chat. They parted as friends.

The man did not join the Guard. But maybe, Basim thinks, they changed each other’s minds just a little. [I sure hope he didn’t change Basim’s mind a little!]

Just one of many posts at RRW on Somalis in Nebraska for your reading pleasure.

Somali Migration to Maine: it’s the welfare magnet, stupid

11/22/2009 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday I brought to readers’ attention that now that the Somali population in Lewiston, ME is large and well-established, the demands for accomodation of Muslim religious practices has begun, see CAIR threatens, here. Among those who study Islamic supremacism around the world, this is known as the Stealth Jihad (see our entire category here)—changing a country from within to bring about Islamic dominance.

In my post I attributed a role to Catholic Charities in bringing the first Somalis to Maine, and after a little research I found that assertion was accurate. However, the majority of the thousands of Somalis now continuing to upset Lewiston are secondary migrants resettled by Catholic Charities and other federally contracted agencies in Georgia. Here is the best summary I’ve found so far about how Lewiston got to the point it’s at now with CAIR breathing down the necks of school adminstrators. I’ve only taken a bit of this very long and thorough 2002 article, so please read the whole thing.

LEWISTON — Every week, another four or five Somali families arrive in this workaday city on the Androscoggin River.

They are refugees from the clan-wracked ruins of their homeland on the Horn of Africa, from years of waiting in camps in Kenya. And they are migrants from their place of first resettlement in America, more often than not trekking 1,000 miles from the heat and multihued humanity of metropolitan Atlanta to this sparse, wintry, whitest of all states.

They are nomads, their ancient instincts honed to a 21st century edge. Pioneers in a new world, they discovered Lewiston and claimed a bit of it for themselves.

“It’s like finding a small island in the middle of the Pacific,” says Mohammed Abdi, who last year moved here from Decatur, Ga., and was quickly hired as the liaison between the city’s schools and the burgeoning Somali community. “We put it on the map.”

They were originally resettled with American blacks and that wasn’t going so well, an issue we have discussed at RRW on previous occasions.

In their exodus, they say they are looking for peace and quiet, cheaper housing, a more benevolent welfare system, better schools and a place to raise their children — families of seven or more are common —with fewer perils and temptations. That they are leaving a metro area renowned as an African-American mecca to resettle in Maine, home to fewer than 7,000 blacks in 2000, is less a matter of irony than intent, given the prickly state of their relations with African-Americans and a desire to protect their children from assimilating too quickly.

Scouts sent out! But, I will bet you anything they had some hints from their friends at Catholic Charities which was already resettling Somalis in Portland, ME.

Fed up with life in Atlanta —he was robbed twice — Abdiaziz Ali said members of the Somali community there researched other places on the Internet, comparing crime rates, the cost of housing, test scores. Then they sent scouts to a handful of cities — Kansas City, Mo., Nashville, Tenn., San Diego, Houston and El Paso in Texas, and Portland and Lewiston in Maine.

Maine was preferred, and Portland was full.

It is cold but the welfare is oh so good! Note when you read the article that some of the men stayed back in Georgia to continue to work while the wives and kids went to Maine for the welfare.

Indeed, in moving from Georgia to Maine, Somalis are trading one of the nation’s least generous welfare systems for one of its most generous.

Lewiston provides general assistance to anyone in need, splitting the cost with the state. Such relief was unavailable in Clarkston. In Georgia, there is a four-year time limit for receiving Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. In Maine it’s five, but even that can be extended. About a quarter of Lewiston’s Somali families receive that form of welfare, according to the state. And in Maine, a state-funded program assists single parents while they attend college.

There is a waiting list for public housing in Lewiston, but not nearly as long as back in Georgia. About a third of the more than 90 apartments at Hillview, Lewiston’s largest public housing project, have Somali tenants, and about 35 more Somali families have received Section 8 vouchers, which subsidize the rent on private apartments.

[…]

Fulfilling that expectation [that people work] is complicated because so many of the Somali families are single mothers and children, the fathers dead, missing, still in Africa or still in Atlanta.

“The men don’t like it here — it’s too cold or too quiet or too behind,” says Fatuma Hussein, whose own husband still drives a taxi in Atlanta, making frequent visits to her and their three young children.

The role of Catholic Charities

There were no Somalis in Lewiston prior to the colonization that began after 9/11. Note in the article that Somalis are quoted as saying Portland was “full.” That would be full of primarily Somalis and Sudanese resettled in Maine by Catholic Charities, the only refugee resettlement contractor in the state for 30 years. That makes it easy for us to check the numbers Catholic Charities brought. Not nearly the tens of thousands resettled in other states, but from 1983-2005, Catholic Charities resettled 498 Somalis and 607 Sudanese (I mention the Sudanese because we have heard lots about problems with the “Sudanese community” of Portland recently). You will see later that the number 498 is inaccurate because in just 3 individual years during that time period, reported in annual reports to Congress, below, the number exceeds 498.

To this day, Catholic Charities is resettling new Somalis in Maine. The stats aren’t out for 2009 but in 2007 the number of Somalis resettled was 118 and in 2008 it was 60 (that drop may be because of the discovery by the State Department of the fraud in the family reunification program).

I don’t believe the Somali scouts found Lewiston all on their own—-I think there is a really good chance that earlier resettled Maine Somalis and Catholic Charities (CC) in Atlanta tipped-off the scouts to the lucrative welfare in Lewiston. So, I checked the Office of Refugee Resettlement annual reports to Congress for the years 1997, 1998, and 1999 to see how many Somalis CC had brought to Maine in the years preceding the migration. Sure enough, in 1997, CC resettled 228 Somalis to Maine, in 1998 the number was 168 and in 1999, 277. What are the chances that a few of those Somalis were “related” to Atlanta Somalis and told them to ‘come on up, the public assistance is great!’

Piven must be so proud!

Note to readers in Maine: I have many more discoveries I want to share with you in another post, things that need further research, but this is getting too long!

To all readers: If you want to learn more about the Lewiston multicultural experiment, search RRW for ‘Lewiston,’ we have written a lot on the topic.

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. That specific program has not yet been reopened, but will be soon. Nevertheless, thousands of Somalis continue to be resettled as I write this.

Cloward-Piven Strategy: bring down Capitalism by flooding the welfare system

11/22/2009 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

More on November 23rd: Jim Simpson, an expert on the Cloward-Piven strategy has more today at the American Thinker, here.

That is the basic goal involved in the Cloward-Piven strategy that most of us never heard of until Obama and the community organizers got to the White House. I’ve been reading about it lately, thanks to RRW reader Paul, and it came to mind last night as I considered the fact that Somali refugees had flooded Maine primarily for the generous welfare system (more shortly).

This is just some background from David Horowitz’s Discover the Networks that I want to post so we can continue to build our ‘community destabilization’ category, and not lose the links.

Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called “crisis strategy” or “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.

You should take some time and read Cloward and Piven’s 1966 seminal work in the Nation magazine to fully understand the concept. They (and their comrades today) want to enroll as many people as they can on public assistance, cause a crisis by overloading local governments, bring greater federal control and ultimately collapse Capitalism as the federal government takes greater control and brings about ultimately a guaranteed wage for all— a redistribution of wealth.

This is the opening paragraph of the Nation article:

How can the poor be organized to press for relief from poverty? How can a broad-based movement be developed and the current disarray of activist forces be halted? These questions confront, and confound, activists today. It is our purpose to advance a strategy which affords the basis for a convergence of civil rights organizations, militant anti-poverty groups and the poor. If this strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty.

My theory is that the “poor” of the 1960’s were, in subsequent decades, entering the middle class. Thanks to Capitalism there weren’t enough of them to collapse the system and many other Americans have an antipathy to living off the government and accepting welfare! So community organizers need the immigrants and refugees who have become accustomed, in the case of refugees, to living off of the United Nations, to help swell the welfare rolls. That is the only logical explanation for the Obama Administration continuing to resettle very high numbers of refugees right now (in a recession!) when there is little work for them—well that, and the desire on their part to create a magical borderless utopian world.

The Somalis who migrated to Maine are only too happy to comply, next! Here it is.