Update January 28th: Diana West has an update, CAIR is now involved here.
Update January 24th: Man who posted cartoons cited for violating city ordinance, here.
Here is a story yesterday from the St. Cloud Times about Somali students demonstrating this past Wednesday at St. Cloud State University to protest cartoons of Mohammad that appeared around campus.
The recent posting of offensive anti-Islamic cartoons in St. Cloud was part of a pattern of hatred toward people of color in this area, some said Wednesday at a rally at St. Cloud State University.
The university’s Somali Student Association sponsored the rally, which drew comment from city and university leaders, students and one gubernatorial candidate.
The session was a response to last month’s cartoon incident, in which sexually explicit drawings of the Prophet Muhammad and a swastika were posted around St. Cloud, including near a mosque and a Somali-owned store.
St. Cloud State President Earl H. Potter III professed empathy for those hurt by the cartoons, while two professors took aim at what they called systemic racism in the St. Cloud area.
A professor throws in a gratuitous attack at Rep. Michele Bachmann (St. Cloud is the heart of her district), the conservative firebrand and outspoken critic of the Obama Administration, with a veiled suggestion that somehow she is the ringleader of the “racists.” These leftists’ reliance on the race card is getting old and most of us see through that despicable strategy.
Luke Tripp, a professor of community studies, said the same “conservative white” mind-set led to the election of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Stillwater.
Tripp cited a history of racially motivated high school fights as evidence of the animosity that Somalis encounter here.
There has been a series of hateful attacks against the growing Somali community since they began arriving here,” Tripp said.
I don’t know if St. Cloud has an American black population, but I assure you that American blacks and African blacks, especially Somalis, as we have reported repeatedly (here in Rochester, MN) on these pages are in conflict across the country (not just in Michele Bachmann’s district!). It has little to do with skin color and more to do with a culture clash in places where thousands and thousands of Somalis have been settled by the US State Department and its supposedly non-profit government contractors into American cities with the naive expectation that the American melting pot will work its magic.
Let’s just look at the numbers for Minnesota! Go here and follow the links back to the databases at the Office of Refugee Resettlement (US Health and Human Services). From 1983 to 2005 Minnesota received 10,695 Somalis out of a total refugee load ot 59,878. In several years since 2005, Minnesota received thousands more Somalis. If you add up all the numbers you will find that Minnesota got the largest number of Somalis of any state in the US. Don’t ask me how that happened, but family reunification is a likely reason.
Once an original refugee population is established each of those families can apply for extended family members to come from, in this case, Africa. That was until 2008 when the US State Department did some random testing and learned that upwards of 80% of those applications from mostly Somalis for family reunification were fraudulent. See our most recent coverage of that scandal, here.
The St.Cloud meatpacker connection. I have been contending all along that the US State Department and the resettlement contractors have been working hand-in-glove with the large US meatpackers to supply cheap refugee labor. Does Gold’n Plump Poultry ring a bell?
This is from a history of that meatpacking plant in St. Cloud:
In 1996 a raid by the Immigration and Naturalization Service took place at the Cold Spring facility. Workers with forged papers were arrested and deported. Gold’n Plump established new hiring procedures in the wake of the event. The labor market was tight for processors in the industry and many new immigrants comprised much of the company’s labor force. In 1983 a survey showed that 18 percent of the Cold Spring workers were of Asian descent. Throughout the 1990s the ethnic makeup of company workers was mostly Hispanic. The late 1990s and into 2000 saw an influx of Somali refugees in Minnesota, and their numbers were increasing at the plant.
This is a similar story to ones in other cities with meatpacking plants. Perhaps the clearest example of this strategy was the Clinton Administration’s opening the door to Bosnians to work in Iowa meatpacking plants after his Bosnian war. Plants (like Gold n’ Plump) had been using illegal aliens then they realized with Clinton’s help that legal refugee labor was just the ticket, here.
I would be here all morning if I linked all the posts we have written on meatpackers and their use of refugee labor, suffice it to say it has brought much controversy in places like Shelbyville, TN, Greeley, CO, Ft. Morgan, CO, Emporia, KS and Grand Island, NE, just to name a few with Somali worker conflicts.
Gold n’ Plump in St. Cloud, sued by Somali Muslims and the meatpacker lost. So you can bet that tensions are already high in St. Cloud when Somalis demanding special prayer accommodations won a lawsuit against the meatpacker. We reported the story here and here, Jihad Watch has it here, and the EEOC official version of the judgement is here.
What about that dog story? When I saw this St. Cloud article yesterday I wondered where besides the Gold n’ Plump settlement had I heard of St. Cloud before? Then I remembered! In May 2008 a handicapped student with a dog was taunted by Somali students at a technical school and he left the school fearing someone would hurt his dog. Islamists consider dogs one of ten dirty things in the ‘religion’ right along with feces, urine and dead bodies, thus I guess they felt they could legitimately harrass a dog. Judy concluded her post on that story with this line:
Yes, we have to respect the Somalis’ right to taunt a dog. Why don’t they just tell the Muslim students that in America we do not tolerate mistreatment of dogs or of dog owners? Oh, that wouldn’t be sensitive.
So back to the St. Cloud protests this week. We want human rights (yes, theirs are more important than those of the service dog owner, or other workers at Gold n’ Plump) and a human rights office too (paid for by taxpayers of course).
Several speakers also criticized the lack of a fully funded city human rights office.
[…..]
Mohamed Mohamed, president of the Somali Student Association, said he’s encountered discrimination in St. Cloud. But Mohamed added that Wednesday’s rally shouldn’t be about pitting one race of people against another.
“This issue is not white and black,” Mohamed said. “It’s human rights.”
Readers, this is the stealth jihad—we change to accommodate them. Learn more by visiting this post from 2008 where a commenter tells us how it is being accomplished first in Minnesota.
Update: Jerry Gordon posts on our post and adds some additional information, here, at New English Review.