Parents of Liberian girl raped in Phoenix arrested

11/24/2009 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The arrest happened over the weekend, but I just saw this story now at Gates of Vienna. For our previous reports on this horrible case from July, go here.

From CNN on Saturday:

The parents of an 8-year-old Liberian girl who was allegedly sexually assaulted by four boys in July were arrested Friday on child abuse charges, according to Arizona police.

The father, 59, and mother, 47, were arrested Friday in Phoenix on seven counts of child abuse, said police spokesman Sgt. Andy Hill. Police were waiting for them at their home after the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office issued the warrants.

The names of the parents have been withheld by CNN to avoid identifying the daughter, who is an alleged rape victim.

The child abuse investigation was based on documented incidents from the Phoenix Police Department and numerous referrals to Arizona Child Protective Services dating to 2005.

Police said the parents, refugees from the West African nation, used sticks, wires and their fists to hit their young daughter.

Witnesses told CNN affiliate KTVK that the parents left their daughter wandering their apartment complex alone at night, begging for food.

Details of the girl’s assault last summer shocked the nation. She was allegedly lured to a storage shed, pinned down and gang-raped by four boys, none of them older than 14.

The parents said they felt they had been shamed by their child and blamed her for being victimized. As a result, the girl was taken from her home and placed in state custody.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said at the time that the parents’ reaction was wrong and that they needed counseling.

This is what I said in one of my earlier reports on this case:

Why so many Liberians in the US when that country is pretty stable now?

Apparently we have a category for temporary asylum (for humanitarian purposes!) and we brought thousands of Liberians here years ago. In February, I reported that many where supposed to be deported to Liberia by March 31st, but a public relations campaign, spearheaded by Senator Jack Reed of one of America’s highest unemployment states, Rhode Island, was waged to keep them here. Guess he won. We lost.

Targeted Assistance grants tell us where the refugee overload is

11/24/2009 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your tax dollars:

That’s how I look at this program of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. When you check the list of counties receiving the grants, you will see according to how much federal support the counties are getting where the refugees are congregated. It is not a perfect correlation because I bet some politics are involved too, I don’t know for sure, just a guess considering the way Washington works these days.

We hear all the time in the mainstream media that refugees only get that measly $450 or so when they arrive in the US, but there is so much taxpayer money sloshing around, one just needs to find it all! And, frankly most of the money doesn’t go to the refugees—salaries and programs eat it up.

Targeted Assistance is federal grant money that goes through states to counties experiencing the worst refugee overpopulation and where refugees are not economically self sufficient and are relying heavily on public assistance (aka welfare).

Here is how it is described at ORR’s website:

The Targeted Assistance program (TAG) is part of the Division of Refugee Assistance and allocates formula funds to States that qualify for additional funds due to an influx of refugee arrivals and a high concentration of refugees in county jurisdictions with high utilization of public assistance.

TAG services are the same as Refugee Social Services and are intended to assist refugees obtain employment within one year’s participation in the program and to achieve self-sufficiency. TAG service priorities, however, are distinctive in that they prioritize (a) cash assistance recipients, particularly long-term recipients; (b) unemployed refugees not receiving cash assistance; and (c) employed refugees in need of services to retain employment or to attain economic independence.

One question I have after reading the lengthier discussion, available apparently only as a pdf file, is that it appears that Ethnic Community Based Organizations (ECBOs) can receive some of these dollars as pass-throughs from their county government. ECBOs can be nothing more than a few folks of a particular ethnicity filing a $50 incorporation with a state and presto they are legit groups to receive your money. They don’t even have to be federally designated 501(c)3 charities!

Here are the top counties in the US receiving this extra money for FY2009 (FY2010 will be the same) Total funding is $43,731,000 for the year. I’ve only selected those counties that received over $1 million. These then are the hotspots for refugees not finding work and trying to survive on public assistance:

Arizona, Maricopa County: $1,232,374

California, Los Angeles County: $2,276,525

San Diego County: $1,053,907

Florida, Maimi -Dade: $12,176,596 (jackpot!)

Georgia, DeKalb County: $1,004,721

Illinois, Cook/Kane/Dupage: $1,005,683

Minnesota, Ramsey/Hennipin: $2,389,647

New York, NYC: $1,400,675

Texas, Dallas/Tarrent County: $1,025,330

Harris County: $1,142,247

Washington, King/Snohomish: $1,137,988

If you would like to see if your county is receiving this funding, write to me at Ann@vigilantfreedom.com and I’ll send you the pdf. Or write or call the contact person at the bottom of this page at ORR. The table with the counties is actually a very cool list because it will even tell you how many asylees are in the county.

Endnote: Two cities we have talked about lately with refugee overload in Kentucky (Bowling Green) and Maine (Lewiston) don’t get any extra money.

Who fingered Zakaria Maruf?

11/24/2009 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That is a question I asked last summer, here, when Andrea Elliot in a lengthy New York Times story on the missing Somali youth case reported that Maruf was thought to be THE recruiter. Funny thing is, Maruf, is believed to have been killed in Somalia within the same two or three day period that the NYT went to press with the story.

So, either someone was trying to throw off the investigation and gave erroneous information to the NYT and then “killed” Maruf off either in fact (sacrificed for the good of Allah) or in fiction; or suspicions arose about Maruf talking (bragging?) and he was ‘offed’ by Al Shabaab to shut him up. In either case, I found it interesting that Maruf is still listed among the living in the Press Release yesterday from the FBI.

If someone else (other than Maruf himself) told the NYT he was the recruiter, I would be grilling that person real hard.

See what his sister told RRW in a comment in July, here.

Now, visit Andrea Elliot’s New York Times piece on yesterday’s announcement—not a mention of Zakaria Maruf, a man who played a large role in her July story. What is up with that?

A final thought, then I have to get to work on some boring posts. I find it interesting that none of the reports on the Somali terror case ever mention how the Somalis got here in the first place. A reader unfamiliar with the refugee resettlement program would think they just arrived here one day. That is why I put this little explanation at the end of many of these Somali posts.

Hope springs eternal that one day a mainstream media reporter will actually inform readers about how we, the US State Department through many Administrations, selected these Somalis and brought them here.

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.

Abdirizak Bihi: Not close to the big fish yet!

11/24/2009 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update: Jerry Gordon’s take on the news, here, at New English Review.

Here is a very thorough report at the Minneapolis Star Tribune today about yesterday’s announcement by the FBI of more arrests in the Somali missing youth case. See my previous posts here and here.

Please read the Star Tribune article and note this near the end of the story. Abdirizak Bihi and I seem to be on the same page about yesterday’s announcement.

Less satisfied was Abdirizak Bihi, uncle of Burhan Hassan, 18, who was killed in June, just one day before his class graduated from Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis.

“This isn’t close anywhere to the big fish who were responsible for masterminding the recruitment of our kids,” he said.

“This is nothing, actually. What does this do?” said Nimco Ahmed, a former high school classmate of both Faarax and Shirwa Ahmed.

B. Todd Jones, U.S. attorney for Minnesota, said the investigation is not yet complete. But he hopes the message to those who would leave this country to fight in another is clear.

I hate to sound so cynical, but Mr. Ahmed is right, “What does this do?” In my opinion, it serves only to send a message to a country grieving over the massacre at Ft. Hood that the FBI is on the job after they dropped the ball, surely out of political correctness, in following Major Nidal Hasan’s jihadist trail. Imagine if one of these trained Somali terrorists actually carried out a terrorist attack in the US now! The political repercussions for the Obama Administration would be profound. Frankly it would be the nail in the coffin for Obama’s Presidency.

Endnote: We previously heard directly from Mr. Bihi who wanted us to know this. Among other things he stressed that the families were being silenced by CAIR, aka Muslim Mafia. And the sister of Zakaria Maruf, one of those indicted yesterday but believed to have died in Somalia some months ago, told us this.