Month: November 2009

Columbus: Mosque fire exposes Somali infighting

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’m starting to feel like I should rename this blog ‘Somali Watch’ because just when I thought I had a window of time to write the much needed post about that boring “Targeted Assistance” program I’m procrastinating  about, comes two hot Somali stories in the US and another in Finland.  And, oh geez, I forgot to tell you about the Somali missing youths from Canada!

Here is Patrick Poole, an expert on radical Islam from Ohio, writing on the intrigues surrounding a battle between a moderate Somali mosque and an Al-Shabaab-terror-supporting mosque in Columbus, Ohio.  Hat tip:  Jerry Gordon.

Poole begins:

In the early morning of October 19, a fire ravaged through the property surrounding Masjid Salama, a growing Columbus, Ohio, mosque frequented primarily by members of the local Somali community. Several Somali-owned businesses surrounding the mosque were heavily damaged, but the mosque itself was not touched. However, because of the surrounding damage, the mosque itself has not been cleared for reopening.

As reported by the Columbus Dispatch, fire investigators immediately determined that arson was to blame for the blaze.

But rather than blaming the arson on unknown anti-Muslim individuals engaged in a religious hate crime, many inside the Columbus Somali community are fixing their suspicions on leaders of another local Somali mosque, Masjid Ibn Taymiya. This mosque is dominated by supporters of the al-Shabaab terrorist group, and members have made repeated attempts to take over the rapidly growing Salama congregation through an unsuccessful campaign of legal and physical intimidation.

Following the blaze, I met with two leaders of Masjid Salama, who described the ongoing efforts by the leaders of Ibn Taymiya to take over their burgeoning year-and-a-half-old congregation. On November 12, the Salama leaders had to obtain a temporary restraining order to prevent the bulldozing of their rented facility by a leader of the Ibn Taymiya mosque, Mohamed Hassan, who, they say, is the ringleader of the campaign.

Read the whole article.  Poole wraps up with this:

While arson investigators continue to look into the fire that has temporarily displaced Masjid Salama, the leaders are waiting to see whether local officials and the media in Ohio — who have thus far ignored the larger controversy surrounding the fire — will finally recognize the larger battle between Muslim moderates and extremists happening in the Columbus Somali community.

And waiting to see exactly who the politicians and media will side with in this struggle.

Minneapolis, MN, Columbus, OH, Seattle, WA, San Diego, CA, Nashville, TN, Boston, MA and even little Lewiston, ME  (see the Mayor of Lewiston just this week talking up the joys of multiculturalism) are “welcoming” cities for Somali refugees and residents can expect similar warm and fuzzy diversity-is-strength experiences in the near future.   You can thank the US State Department and its Ten federal refugee contractors for this opportunity.

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 thousands of Somalis continue to be resettled as I write this.

Only ten more days to apply for the diversity visa lottery…

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

….and be one of those lucky 55,000 immigrants to win the big prize and come to America!   That’s right, new readers will be shocked to learn that Congress in its infinite wisdom has mandated we increase America’s diversity and take immigrants from countries that have sent less than 50,000 immigrants here in the last 5 years. 

I’ve written about this on several occasions, but was reminded that it must be application time when reader Cristina sent me this link to an immigration law firm that will help you get your ducks all lined up to participate in the lottery (for a fee I’m sure!).

Here is the press release, dated September 29th, from the State Department. 

The congressionally mandated Diversity Immigrant Visa Program is administered on an annual basis by the Department of State and conducted under the terms of Section 203(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Section 131 of the Immigration Act of 1990 (Pub. L. 101-649) amended INA 203 and provides for a class of immigrants known as “diversity immigrants.” Section 203(c) of the INA provides a maximum of 55,000 Diversity Visas (DVs) each fiscal year to be made available to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.

The annual DV program makes visas available to persons meeting simple, but strict, eligibility requirements. A computer-generated, random lottery drawing chooses selectees for DVs. The visas are distributed among six geographic regions, with a greater number of visas going to regions with lower rates of immigration, and with no visas going to nationals of countries sending more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States over the period of the past five years. Within each region, no single country may receive more than seven percent of the available DVs in any one year.

For DV-2011, natives of the following countries are not eligible to apply because the countries sent a total of more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States in the previous five years:

BRAZIL, CANADA, CHINA (mainland-born), COLOMBIA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, ECUADOR, EL SALVADOR, GUATEMALA, HAITI, INDIA, JAMAICA, MEXICO, PAKISTAN, PERU, PHILIPPINES, POLAND, SOUTH KOREA, UNITED KINGDOM (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and VIETNAM. Persons born in Hong Kong SAR, Macau SAR, and Taiwan are eligible.

No countries have been added or removed from the list of eligible countries. The list of eligible countries remains the same as for DV-2010.

Here is a breakdown of last year’s applicants, I don’t know who the “winners” are.

“Winners” get to come stand in line overnight in places like Shelbyville, TN to compete (and scuffle) for scarce jobs with refugees and Americans at the Tyson’s chicken plant there as we learned from the Shelbyville Times Gazette in February and reaffirmed by the Wall Street Journal here in May.

In May I also reported that legislation had been introduced in Congress to halt this program, here, but with the Leftwing progressives running the place, the bill could hardly be more than symbolic.

The refugee resettlement program brought in about 75,000 refugees this past fiscal year, and in 2010, the goal is 80,000 (No!  We are not cutting back in this recession).  Only about 20% of refugees are finding jobs, and they will compete with 55,000 new immigrants in this program.   One difference is that refugees get all sorts of public assistance and the diversity visa immigrants are on their own.

Horowitz publishes pamphlet on rules for revolution

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

David Horowitz has published a pamphlet that helps to educate us about Saul Alinsky and his influence on Obama and his Administration, something we have addressed  in our “community destabilization” category which we began at this time last year.   Here is what Frontpage magazine says about Horowitz and the pamphlet:

David Horowitz was one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s and an editor of its largest magazine,Ramparts. He is the author, with Peter Collier, of three best selling dynastic biographies: The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976); The Kennedys: An American Dream (1984); and The Fords: An American Epic (1987). Looking back in anger at their days in the New Left, he and Collier wrote Destructive Generation (1989), a chronicle of their second thoughts about the 60s that has been compared to Whittaker Chambers’ Witness and other classic works documenting a break from totalitarianism. Horowitz examined this subject more closely in Radical Son (1996), a memoir tracing his odyssey from “red-diaper baby” to conservative activist that George Gilder described as “the first great autobiography of his generation.”

Since taking office Barack Obama, who promised during his campaign to create a moderate, inclusive administration, has engaged in actions that have created division and fear because they are meant to radically change America, not improve on what has always worked. As a result, David Horowitz writes in Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, “Many Americans have gone from hopefulness, through unease, to a state of alarm as the President shows a radical side only party visible during his campaign.”

Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model provides an understanding of the roots of the current administration’s effort to subject America to a wholesale transformation by looking at the work of one of the President’s heroes—radical Chicago “community organizer” Saul Alinsky.  

Read on and learn how you can get a copy.

How does this involve refugees and immigrants?  My theory is that since Alinsky said in order to “change” America one needed to continually pit the “have-nots” against the “haves,”  as Americans generally rose out of poverty, the immigrants were needed to continually build the “have-not” armies.  Now with Obama’s policies and the far left activists he has spread throughout government we will see an acceleration of immigrants, refugees and Americans arriving at the poverty level.  That is the goal!  That is why it is so baffling to logical people who wonder how we can continue to bring in tens of thousands of refugees and other immigrants when there is no work for them.  Their strategy is to build the “have-not” armies.

By the way, as I write this Judy is at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend, so maybe we will get a report about this auspicious gathering of conservatives when she returns.

Endnote:  I was looking for something else and came upon this post from earlier this month to help illustrate what I’m saying about a strategy and a goal, here.

Not all that “welcoming” in Sweden; girls convicted for harrassing refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is an update of a story we reported last May, here.    Seems that the country highly praised for its generosity to immigrants has its refugee conflicts on-going as well.  Swedish girls involved in the “mob” attack on an apartment building housing Iraqi refugees have been convicted of terrorizing refugees.  From The Local:

Two teenage girls have been convicted for their role in terrorizing refugees in Vannas in northern Sweden last May in what was described at the time as a “lynch mob”.

The girls, aged 16 and 17 when the incident took place, were sentenced to juvenile care by the district court in Umea for harassment and vandalism, Sveriges Radio (SR) reports.

The charges stem from a May 9th incident in which a group of 30 to 50 young people shouted and threw stones at an apartment building housing a large number of refugee tenants, predominantly from Iraq.

Authorities decided to evacuate about 40 refugees to avoid potential violence. Within two weeks, nearly half of the refugees had decided to leave the area permanently.

According to the Västerbotten-Kuriren newspaper, the incident stemmed from a dispute involving a group of local youths who confronted a refugee boy about the alleged assault of a local girl.

Tensions from the school yard confrontation escalated over several days, culminating in the assembling of what police described as a “lynch mob” outside the apartment building.

Not a word in the story about any investigation into the origin of the incident—a refugee boy possibly assaulting a local girl.

The famous blogger Fjordman said this at the time of the original incident.

This is the price you pay for destroying the cultural and social fabric of a nation through mass immigration. Similar problems are now rapidly emerging throughout the Western world for roughly the same reasons. The state can no longer uphold law and order and frequently doesn’t even try. The only option left to ordinary citizens is vigilante justice and the formation of armed clans and groups to withstand the attacks of other armed clans and groups. It’s the re-tribalization of society, which is and always has been the logical consequence of Multiculturalism. If you’re a Westerner, it’s coming to a street near you very soon, accompanied by loud cheers from the intelligentsia.

I guess they didn’t get the “diversity is strength” memo.

Search RRW for ‘Sweden’ and you will see lots of posts on the immigration issues affecting this European welfare state.   For whatever reason (I have no clue), this 8 month-old post, “Muslim immigration killing Sweden” still gets many visitors every day here at RRW.

BBC: FBI probe biggest plot since 9/11

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That’s the BBC’s title for a report yesterday about the on-going investigation into the Somali (former refugee) missing youths case that we began following last November, here.

My immediate thought on reading the title was that the FBI completely MISSED the biggest terrorist attack since 9/11—the massacre at Ft. Hood!

I don’t really see anything new in this dramatic telling but what follows are some sections I want to comment about.  This is how the article begins:

Newsbeat has been given exclusive access to one of the biggest anti-terrorist operations in America since the 9/11 attacks.

The FBI is worried a group linked to al-Qaeda is training up a new generation of terrorists.

They’re thought to be targeting young Somali immigrants, radicalising them to carry out attacks on their home country and possibly the US in the future.

It is not clear why they gave up their good life in America?  Sure it is, Allah told them to do it and we have that directly from one of the now-dead “youths.”  And, by the way, there are 6 dead now (that we know of).

It’s not clear why teenagers like these are giving up their comfortable lives in America and returning to their war torn homeland.

But over the past three years, authorities believe 20 young Somali men have gone back to fight in the bitter civil war, which is reported to have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

None of them have come back and three are thought to be dead.

None of them came back?  That is wrong too.  At least two who returned have been indicted and plead guilty, here.  Update:  Today, November 20th, we learn there are 6 arrested or indicted.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for the future of our country for people to grasp the concept that Islamic fundamentalists don’t care about nice stuff and nice lives.   What the Koran (and their Imam!) tells them to do trumps everything.   When I said in my post earlier this morning  that we had made a grievous error in admitting so many Somalis to the US, that is what I mean.

Where on earth did the BBC reporter get this number—35,000?

According to census figures there are 35,000 Somalis living in America but the figure is almost certainly a massive underestimate as many live in the country illegally.

Some of them came to the US as refugees looking for a safer place to settle and raise families.  [Edit:  Some did and some didn’t come for a safe place; some came to change America and promote Shariah law.]

We have resettled over 80,000 Somali refugees in the last 25 years.  That number does not include all the Somalis who have illegally crossed our borders or who successfully applied for asylum.  Somalis also have large families and although I have never seen official figures the number is estimated to be well over a quarter of a million now.   Thankfully the US State Department, having uncovered widespread immigration fraud among Somalis and some other Africans, suspended the family reunification program well over a year ago, but it is expected to re-open soon.

The FBI is likely shaking in its boots over the big question, will more of the trained Somali jihadists return to the US?

The FBI were reluctant to spell out the threat, but they do believe something sinister is happening in the local Somali community.

They’re calling it their biggest terror investigation since 9/11.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the civil war in Somalia
They’re not just concerned about those who may be travelling from America to Somalia either.

They’re also worried about who may come back, war hardened and perhaps prepared to plot attacks on American soil.

EK Wilson, one of the special agents investigating the case, says they have to consider all possibilities.

You can bet they are being radicalized in the US, where else?

Agents won’t say if mosques or religious leaders are involved but they do think victims are being radicalised in America before being trained as fighters in Somalia.