Day: February 22, 2010

So-called Somali recruiter fights extradition in the Netherlands

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The US is trying to extradite Mohamud Said Omar who some of the Somali youths in Minnesota have fingered as the “recruiter” who helped the Somali missing youths (some dead youths now) leave the good life in the US and return to Somalia in order to learn the Islamic Jihad trade.

We told you about this guy previously here.  Apparently he was a “refugee” we resettled in Rochester, MN.  I often wonder how refugee resettlement workers feel when they hear someone they resettled and helped turns out to be a terrorist bag man (alleged terrorist).

From AP via the New York Times:

ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) — Lawyers for a Somali man fighting extradition to the U.S. on terrorism charges stemming from a case in Minneapolis argued in a Dutch court Monday he is innocent and should be released.

Mohamud Said Omar, 44, is suspected of providing money to the Somali Islamist group al-Shabab that was used to buy guns. Around 20 youths of Somali descent are believed to have traveled to Somalia from Minnesota since 2007 to help the group, which the U.S. says has ties to al-Qaida.

Omar’s lawyers say he never intended to help terrorists.

”In any case Omar denies that he has ever been involved in any way whatsoever with the financing of terrorism,” his lawyer Bart Stapert said.

Omar has been held in a high-security Dutch prison since his arrest at the request of the U.S. government in November. He has residency in the U.S. but had been living in a center for would-be asylum seekers in the Netherlands since December 2008, apparently before he was a suspect. 

A total of 14 people have been charged in the ongoing U.S. federal investigation into the travels of as many as 20 young men who went to Somalia to fight over a period of two years starting in 2007. They face a variety of accusations from recruiting and raising funds for the trips, to engaging in terrorist acts in Somalia and perjury.

For new readers:

For more on the Somali missing youths, use those search words.  We have written dozens of stories on the case.

The US State Department has admitted over 80,000 Somali refugees to the US (this linked post continues to be one of the most widely read posts we have ever written) 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 (that we know of), but will be soon. 

Nevertheless, thousands of Somali Muslims continue to be resettled as I write this. We recently learned that we will be taking 6000 Somalis this year from one camp in Uganda and as many as 11,000-13,000 total from around the world.

Attacks on Jews the ultimate result of Sweden’s liberal immigration policies

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is a follow-up to my post yesterday about Sweden’s Muslim problem.  The UK Telegraph is reporting that Jews who had found a home in Sweden decades ago in the wake of the European Holocaust are now leaving the country in which they once felt safe.

When she first arrived in Sweden after her rescue from a Nazi concentration camp, Judith Popinski was treated with great kindness.

She raised a family in the city of Malmo, and for the next six decades lived happily in her adopted homeland – until last year.

In 2009, a chapel serving the city’s 700-strong Jewish community was set ablaze. Jewish cemeteries were repeatedly desecrated, worshippers were abused on their way home from prayer, and “Hitler” was mockingly chanted in the streets by masked men.

“I never thought I would see this hatred again in my lifetime, not in Sweden anyway,” Mrs Popinski told The Sunday Telegraph.

“This new hatred comes from Muslim immigrants. The Jewish people are afraid now.”

Malmo’s Jews, however, do not just point the finger at bigoted Muslims and their fellow racists in the country’s Neo-Nazi fringe. They also accuse Ilmar Reepalu, the Left-wing mayor who has been in power for 15 years, of failing to protect them.

Mr Reepalu, who is blamed for lax policing, is at the centre of a growing controversy for saying that what the Jews perceive as naked anti-Semitism is in fact just a sad, but understandable consequence of Israeli policy in the Middle East.

Read the whole article.  While the mayor may blame it all on Israel (don’t they always!), a line near the end places the blame squarely on liberal immigration policies.

For many of Malmo’s white Swedish population, meanwhile, the racial problems are bewildering after years of liberal immigration policies.

Message to America’s far left Jews and especially the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society: what part of this story do you fail to understand?   Do you think as you continue to resettle Muslim refugees and encourage Muslim immigration that you will escape this same fate right here as the Muslim population increases?  Do you really think the magical American melting pot somehow sets us apart from Sweden, that the outcome will be different?

Canada faces Somali assimilation problems, gang violence

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

With this post I just want to bring a few things to your attention (some articles and a report that I have not much to say about, just didn’t want to lose the links!)

First, here is piece from the Ottawa Citizen about how church groups are trying to dissuade young Muslims from joining gangs.  Frankly, I think the ACLU-types (CAIR too!) would go wild in the US if roving Christians distributed leaflets in Somali communities and set up church activities in Muslim neighborhoods.

Maybe religious leaders can’t reach Ottawa’s hard-core gang members, but they believe their teachings can divert younger kids headed that way. The snag is often a parent who objects.

Crime prevention officials, police and Christian and Muslim community volunteers recently addressed the city’s new faith and gangs group to explore how congregations might keep kids from a gang lifestyle. 

[…..]

“We set up in a playground doing stuff kids love to do.” Bethel’s “Sidewalk Sunday School” offers a story with a life lesson, “Bible-related but not preachy, tract stuff.” If the kids want more games, a bus will take them to the church near Fisher Avenue and Prince of Wales Drive “where there’s a little more teaching.”

To counter problems with Somali kids not making it in public schools, I see some have turned to homeschooling.

Wahid pulled some of his own seven children out of public school and home schooled them. His youngest, twin sons, have graduated at age 19 from the University of Ottawa. He said the Somali community has formed homework clubs and support for home schooling parents, as well as a mentoring system for people in trouble with the law, either a youth with a minor offence like shoplifting or a man getting out of jail who needs a job.

Coincidentally the Washington Post has a long story yesterday about how many Muslims are turning to homeschooling in the US.

Also, in my inbox this morning was a 2003 report from Canada about how Canada had opened its doors too wide and didn’t check carefully those refugees and immigrants they admitted willy-nilly to their country. Hat tip: Richard

Sounding an optimistic note in the introduction (remember this is now 7 years ago),the author of the Mackenzie Institute report says:

That peaceful, civil, and cosmopolitan society we want has not vanished, nor is it really endangered – provided that we become intolerant about one particular point. We must become absolutely intolerant of those who come here to perpetuate other people’s wars and prey on our citizens who share their background. Our future depends on it.

Here is one section of the report that I’m posting because again I don’t want to lose these links or some of this information.  I’ve heard here in the US that citizens in communities (Lewiston, ME for instance) were baffled that Somalis arrived knowing all their rights and what they were entitled to receive from government programs (and how to play the race card!).  The same appears to be true in Canada.

“Perhaps one of the most spectacular Canadian uses of the welfare system to fund other
peoples’ wars came as a result of the Somali civil conflict of the early 1990s. Canada
soon became a destination of choice for Somalis fleeing the country, and Canadian
immigration officers and social workers in the Toronto area were often to find that many
of them had a precise knowledge of all their entitlements before they landed in Canada.
Moreover, at that time, the Province of Ontario (then under an NDP government) was
operating with a very relaxed attitude towards new claims, accepting most of them at face
value.

It soon turned out that many Somalis soon started making multiple claims, usually by
traveling into the United States and then turning around and making a new refugee claim
under an assumed name on re-entering Canada.

However, few of these multiple claims were for personal benefit, as money from social welfare payments was diverted to Africa to buy arms and supplies for clan militias back in Somalia.

To compound matters, the favored wife of the most notorious Somali warlord, Mohammed Farah Aideed (who was already working with al Qaeda in 1993), was living in London, Ontario with four children. When challenged on this, she predictably accused the Canadian reporters who were trying to interview her of being racist.”