“There is a big elephant in the room, but our society continues not to see it.”

Those are the words of Melvin Bledsoe whose son converted to Islam and subsequently killed a soldier who happened to be standing outside of a recruiting station in Arkansas on a fine spring day in 2009.  My posts on the murder are here.  Bledsoe said in testimony yesterday that his son was radicalized in Nashville.

For more on the important and controversial hearings see Jerry Gordon writing at the Iconoclast here, and Steve Emerson at the Investigative Project on Terrorism, here.

Abdirizak Bihi

Note that one of those giving testimony was Abdirizak Bihi who we encountered in 2009 when he wrote to Refugee Resettlement Watch (here) in an attempt to get the story out about his nephew being lured to Somalia for Jihad training.  We reported on Bihi again in November of 2009, here, when he said the FBI wasn’t anywhere close to the “big fish” responsible for recruiting the Somali “youths.”

By the way, the US Senate Homeland Security Committee held hearings in March of 2009 on the radicalization of Somali young men, but they were squishy politically correct hearings and I could barely stand listening to it, here.

Not the “big fish” by any stretch, but readers should know that a former Somali refugee from Minnesota, Mohamud Said Omar, was captured in the Netherlands in connection with funding the trips of the Somalis who returned to Africa for Jihad training.  Last I heard (May 2010) he was fighting extradition from the Netherlands to the US.  I bet he knows if the mosque in Minneapolis was involved in recruiting.

For new readers: We have admitted well over 100,000 Somali refugees to the US.   To check out the numbers visit this post, one of our most widely read posts over the last few years.   In FY2010 which ended September 30th the US State Department resettled 4,884 Somalis (here) to towns near you.

Also, after being closed for nearly two years, the US State Department is on the verge of resuming the fraud-ridden family reunification program that admitted as many as 36,000 Somalis fraudulently to the US between 2003 and 2008.  See the latest on new regulations, here.  The State Department is on the verge of re-opening the program and may already have done so.