Luke Tripp and Mahmoud Mohamed are community agitators.  What is happening in St. Cloud, MN now and for the last few years is a perfect example of Saul Alinsky’s (Rules for Radicals) strategy being put into motion to bring about “change” through creating crisis in communities.  It is no coincidence that one of the most outspoken conservative critics of the king of community organizers (Barack Obama) happens to be the Representative for this Congressional district which includes St. Cloud—Michele Bachmann.   Tripp is a race baiter and he is using the recent Somali unrest to get Michele Bachmann.

An aside:  Readers, especially conservative readers, should study Saul Alinsky.  Much of the reason that we are continually caught off guard by the ‘crisis creates change’ strategy is that we don’t think that way.  We generally think that to solve problems and conflicts one should try very hard to work together in a quiet and dignified way.  Not so for community organizers and union agitators—they must continually create chaos to move the so-called “community” to their far Left view of governance.  (We discuss this at length in a category we call ‘community destabilization.’)  In St. Cloud we observe a perfect microcosm of community organizing (destabilization). When you read the rest of this post, think about the St. Cloud Area Somali Salvation Organization (SASSO) as a mini-ACORN—keep that ACORN model in your head!

The article that set me to researching SASSO yesterday is this opinion piece by a black studies professor at the local college, Luke Tripp.    Readers unfamiliar with the St. Cloud public school controversy should first read this post I wrote in January and a follow-up post last month here about what is happening in St. Cloud.   Read Tripp’s inflamatory op-ed here. [Emphasis RRW’s]

The comments of St. Cloud schools Superintendent Steve Jordahl and board member Jerry Von Korff in the March 29 Times suggest that they are clueless with regard to the fundamental issues that were the focus of the Somali-sponsored rally on March 29 at Apollo High School.

Reacting to complaints of Somali students (and their allies) about harassment, Jordahl told the Times the district responds appropriately to every complaint and act of bullying against any student. He disputes that staff are not doing enough.

Jordahl also said in his almost two years in the district he has not received any complaint about a staff member nor has any staff member been disciplined for inappropriate behavior toward Muslim students.

According to the Times, Von Korff said Mohamoud Mohamed, executive director of St. Cloud Somali Salvation Organization, is more interested in standing in front of people than working to make things better.

“He has not articulated to me any vision that his main goal is to solve problems. There are a lot of Somalis in our community that are very interested in solving problems,” Von Korff said.

Key issue

The basic issue that the rally and the Somali community are calling attention to is the failure of the administration and board to seriously address the toxic anti-Somali climate and institutional racism in the school system. [Tripp makes his living teaching about racism] Jordahl and Von Korff seem to view the complaints as issues of misbehavior of a few individual white students.

But the racial incidents are merely symptoms of institutional racism. The schools were designed to educate and socialize white, Christian, American-born youth. With the recent influx of many Somali students who are black, Muslim and African-born (or children of African-born parents), the schools are facing a clash of cultures.

Many administrators and staff members and some board members do not seem to grasp the significance of the social transformation of their school system.

Failed leadership

The biggest problem is the backwardness and ineptness of the leadership.

So, if you are serious about solving a problem, is this how you would go about it, by inflaming the debate?   No, a decent conservative thoughtful person would not, but this is how agitators work.

The demonstration at Apollo High School referred to by Tripp is discussed in some detail here.  Was a demonstration organized by SASSO head honcho Mohamoud Mohamed necessary to calm the conflict—NO!  But, that is what Mohamed does—he is an agitator.

Remember the Gold’n Plump meatpacker religious discrimination case where St. Cloud Somalis received a large sum of money because they claimed break times did not accomodate their Islamic faith?  We told you about it here, here and here.  Well, yesterday the pieces came together when I realized that the case was brought by none other than Mohamoud Mohamed.

Mohamoud Mohamed, a Somali advocate representing the employees, says all parties involved are pleased with the outcome.

“This is a step forward, and it shows us that this system is helping us to work in an environment that accepts our culture,” Mohamed said.

Readers, this is the stealth jihad (see the Muslim Brotherhood’s quiet Minnesota jihad, here) .  It is happening in many cities in the US and the Somali personality type is perfect to push for the insertion of Islamic Shariah law into the fabric of America.  We have written dozens of posts on cities such as Lewiston, ME, Greeley, CO, Ft. Morgan, CO, Grand Island, NE, and Emporia, KS where Somalis agitate for their “rights.”  Incidentally, other than Lewiston, all of those agitated cities are meatpacking towns.

I suspect the Gold’n Plump settlement and other examples of Somali clashes may have set up the local community to be ripe for agitation.  Remember there was also the case of the disabled student whose dog was harrassed by Somali students.  Judy told you about it here in 2008.   I’m not condoning any racist behavior by anyone, but keep in mind that the Somalis of St. Cloud are not pure as the driven snow.  They are not the “victims” every time!

Now to SASSO—the mini-ACORN

In many of those cities I mentioned above Somalis have formed what the federal government calls Ethnic Community Based Organizations (ECBO’s).  We have a whole category on ECBO’s here.  Here is a website with many Somali ECBO’s.  What they are in a nutshell are organizations funded often by government (your taxes) that teach “their people” how to access public assistance— welfare.   Think about the ACORN model that we learned about in the last year.  They teach people how to get stuff out of the government.  AND, they agitate for rights for “their people”  and get them politcally active.   That is what the St. Cloud Somali Salvation Organization (SASSO) run by one man, Mohamoud Mohamed, is.

I see that SASSO has submitted Form 990’s to the IRS, but the funny thing is that I cannot find any record of SASSO being registered as a non-profit organization in the State of Minnesota.  I have searched for all sorts of variations on the name and cannot find it.  However, I notice that a new organization at the same address (22 Wilson Ave. NE) as SASSO—St. Cloud Area Somali Women’s Association (SASWA)— was incorporated in Minnesota on 12/31/08.  If anyone can direct me to the incorporation of SASSO it would be much appreciated.

Here is SASSO’s most recent Form 990.  Note that gifts and private grants are $63,000 and government grants and contracts $49,447.  So they do get taxpayer funding.  I sure hope they keep it separate from their agitation budget.   One frustrating aspect of researching 990’s is that the agency is not required to list for the public who gives them money, so you have to search around in other places.

I found two foundations that fund SASSO, but interestingly they both refer to the Somali women’s organization (SASWA) that is located at the same address as SASSO.  It came to our attention in Nashville, TN that funders like to give money to Somali women (I think its a goo-goo notion that they will succeed in liberating Somali women).  In the Tennessee case a federal investigation ensued when it was learned that federal grant money ostensibly for Somali women (to combat domestic violence and female genital mutilation) was used by the men for who knows what sort of political activity.  Some critics in Nashville even suggest the federal grant money went back to Africa.

Here are two grants I found in my research.  Both are earmarked for the Somali women involved with SASSO.  The Otto Bremer Foundation of St. Paul, MN gave $20,000 here.  And, the Morgan Family Foundation of Cincinnati, OH gave $50,000 for the Somali women in-house organ of SASSO, here.   I have to laugh when I see that SASSO has hired a woman, here.  Is that to make the organization more attractive to funders?

Back to the agitator Luke Tripp

This is about getting Rep. Michelle Bachmann.  The unfortunate situation with a few high school kids have given him the opportunity to use the Somalis to slam Bachmann, one of Obama’s greatest critics, and to push for more public funding of the race industry.   Here is what Tripp said in a Somali publication in February:

I believe that Somalis are under attack in St. Cloud because of their race (they are Black), their religion (they are Muslims), and their immigration/refugee status (they are perceived to be untrustworthy aliens).

The animosity against Somalis reflects the sentiments of a significant segment of conservative White residents in the city of St. Cloud whose views are politically expressed by their right-wing extremist congresswoman, Michele Bachmann, who represents Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District. [This is Alinsky Rule 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” He is making Bachmann the face of the problem although as far as I can tell she hasn’t been involved.]

Bachmann is a staunch advocate of barriers against immigrants and their culture. Her voting record on anti-immigration legislation is graded A+.

One comment Bachmann has never explained came during a debate she had while running for Congress the first time in November 2005. Prompted by a question on the rioting in France and Europe at the time, Bachmann said, “Not all cultures are equal, not all values are equal,” letting it be known that she thought that people of the Muslim faith had an inferior culture to that of the United States and the West.

The point is that racism and religious intolerance are deeply rooted and still prevalent in St. Cloud. It follows that we need a strong human rights office in the city’s government to change the climate of bigotry in the city.

We need to make our demand for justice and human rights a top priority of city government. We can do that by lobbying and pushing city government officials to provide financial resources to support a full-time human rights director.

So are those the words of a man sincerely trying to solve a difficult problem in St. Cloud, or the words of a professional race agitator?

What needs to be done?

Someone needs to use some Alinsky ideas and begin to expose people like Tripp.  Find out his relationship to the Obama machine for instance.  Dig into the background of SASSO and its leader.  Publish what you find!  Go on the offensive!   And, whatever you do, do not cower when they start hurling the racist epithets—this is not about you, this is about the future of America!