Month: May 2011

Convicted Fort Dix terror plotters trying to get convictions overturned

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

JJ: This is a SFP (Somali-free post)!

We first told you about this case in 2007, and you likely saw it in the news.  The plotters were originally six and the case became popularly known as the Fort Dix Six terror plot.   Our original interest centered around the fact that one of the six had actually been a refugee brought to America with his family from Bill Clinton’s Bosnian war and housed at the New Jersey military base he was later accused of plotting to attack.

However, in 2007, he admitted guilt and was sentenced to only five years, here.   The other five went on to trial, were convicted, most got a life sentence, but are now trying to appeal their case.

From AP:

PHILADELPHIA—Wiretaps obtained under a Patriot Act provision aimed at gathering foreign intelligence wrongly helped convict Muslim immigrants in a domestic criminal case, defense lawyers argued Monday in U.S. appeals court in Philadelphia.

The lawyers represent five young men convicted of plotting a deadly strike at a New Jersey military base. Prosecutors call evidence in the three-month trial overwhelming and the two wiretaps in question incidental to the conviction.

Defense lawyer Michael E. Riley argued otherwise.

“We don’t know which of the nails in the coffin were the final nails in the coffin (for jurors),” he said.

A federal jury in Camden, N.J., convicted the men—Mohamad Shnewer, Serdar Tatar, and brothers Dritan, Eljvir and Shain Duka—in December 2008 of conspiring to kill U.S. military personnel at Fort Dix. All but Tatar are serving life terms.

Prosecutors charged that the Philadelphia-area residents, inspired by al-Qaida, had taken training trips to the Pocono Mountains and scouted out Fort Dix, an Army base in New Jersey used primarily to train reservists for duty in Iraq, and other sites.

Just your immigrant next door, working in jobs Americans won’t do and doing a little target practice in the Poconos for fun and recreation.

Four of the defendants had attended public high school in Cherry Hill, N.J. The men include Shnewer, a Jordanian-born cab driver; Tatar, a Turkish-born convenience store clerk; and the Dukas, ethnic Albanians from the former Yugoslavia, who had a roofing business.

There is more, read it all.

Arab and African “refugees” killing each other in refugee camps

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Ho hum, this is another one of those diversity is strength reports.  Turns out that at a UN camp (where “refugees” are waiting to be resettled to a third country—including America! which takes the largest numbers of refugees), there are rapes and murders going on between those of Arab descent and Africans.

But, of course we all know that when they arrive in the magical American melting pot they will give up their centuries old animosities and settle down to the American dream—right!

From Christian Today (Australia):

Four Eritrean refugees were burnt to death, and one was critically injured, after their tents [tents likely paid for by American tax payers—ed] were deliberately set on fire at a Tunisian refugee camp close to the Libyan border in the early hours of Sunday 22 May.

Ibrahim Suleman Ahmed, Ahmed Mohamed Saleh, Jamie Mohamed and Saleh Ismail had recently fled Libya, and were waiting to be resettled in a safe third country by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Two Sudanese refugees have been arrested in connection with the deaths and remanded in custody.

According to reports, a few Sudanese refugees had been sexually harassing Eritrean female refugees in Shusha Camp, Ras Jedir. This generated tension in the camp as Eritrean men attempted to protect the women.

On Saturday 21 May, a Sudanese man reportedly entered a married couple’s tent and tried to rape the woman. The Eritrean men who were nearby managed to stop him, and he was later heard saying that he would kill Eritreans in the camp.

The four victims of the blaze were not involved in the dispute and were murdered simply because of their nationality.

[….]

These are not the first murders to occur in Shusha camp. Although the UNHCR office in Tunisia is aware of these incidents, there is still no security in the camp, despite demands from refugees for greater protection. The non-governmental organisation (NGO) Human Rights Concern-Eritrea (HRC-E) has been informed that the refugees in the camp are now extremely anxious following the recent murders, and the atmosphere remains very tense. Last night the Tunisian armed forces were forced to fire in the air as tensions boiled over between refugees of Arab and African descent.

Multiculturalism is so beautiful (vibrant too!), don’t you agree?

Reader JJ just pointed out in a comment this morning, here, that RRW should be renamed Somali Refugee Resettlement Watch.  This post is then a Somali-free post (SFP)!

ORR hides the numbers of Somalis admitted to the US since 9/11

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Top Somali admission years are not mentioned…..

While doing a little bedtime reading—2008 Annual Report to Congress on the refugee program—sure to put anyone to sleep, I came across this line in the Admissions section on Page 5:

In FY 1994, 3,508 Somalis fled to the U.S. Admissions reached 6,022 in FY 2000 before plunging to 242 in FY 2002, swelling to 6,958 in FY 2007, and declining to 2,510 in FY 2008.

First, readers should know that the severe decline in refugee numbers in 2002 was because of the major potential security threat refugees and immigrants generally, but especially Muslims, posed to the US, so there was a drastic curtailment of this program that year as new security measures were put in place.  I also would like to argue with the choice of the words “fled to the US.”  They didn’t flee to the US, most were brought here at the behest of the United Nations and the federal contractors who are paid by the head to resettle refugees.

But, what really jumped off the page was this:  “….swelling to 6,958 in 2007.”  I think the average reader (some poor Congressional staffer perhaps) would take that to mean that 2007 saw the highest number of Somalis admitted to the US in a given year.

Isn’t that what the words “swelling to” implies?

When I saw that I immediately assumed my early research, and our most widely read post, this one, might have some errors.

It doesn’t!

The Office of Refugee Resettlement failed to tell readers that the “swelling” occurred in 2004, 2005 and 2006.  There were 12,814 Somalis admitted in 2004, 10,101 in 2005, and 10,330 in 2006.    (All before the State Department confirmed the widespread refugee fraud going on in Africa!)

See the appendix to the 2007 Annual Report to Congress, here.   Near the end of the report you will find a chart of Admissions by country of origin (Table 1).  See for yourself!   And, note also that before 2003 we admitted over 40,000 Somalis.

Thank the US State Department!

Two days ago I told you about Somali food stamp fraud and the tension in Shelbyville, TN with Somali refugees, four days ago it was the tension in Minneapolis between Somalis and Native Americans, also four days ago it was the massive Somali drug bust, before that it was those murder cases in the Dakotas.  And, how could I almost forget the Somali “youths” who returned to Africa for Jihad training.  Today, later, when I get a minute, it will be a story about the Somali cabbie who might be a terrorist!

Are all these reasons for the federal government to downplay the number of Somalis who have entered the US through the “humanitarian” refugee program?  You bet they are!

Somalis on the move out of South Africa—to Europe or the US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I had two stories last week which I never got around to writing about the Rainbow Nation—that would be South Africa—and Somalis.  You never hear about South Africa much in the mainstream media these days and that is (I think) because it didn’t turn out to be such a multicultural dream—a “rainbow” Nation after all.   Like most of the world’s countries if you aren’t a “native” you aren’t so welcome (it is called ethnic nationalism).  And folks, it isn’t the white South Africans (they are pretty much hiding out) it’s the black South Africans attacking the outsider Somalis and other Africans.

This story then at Times Live caught my eye.  Writer Jonny Steinberg is apparently hanging out with some Somalis in a Mitchell’s Plain, South Africa flop-house as he writes this:

Somalis glued to the news—looking for the next move:

Each room had four or five mattresses strewn across the floor; a traveller, I was told, paid R30 a night to sleep on one, his roommates invariably strangers. Everyone in the establishment – the owner, the people who cleaned the rooms and cooked, as well as the guests – was Somali.

The lodge’s little restaurant was packed, each customer’s attention fixed on the television screen on the wall. Standing with remote control in hand, the proprietor switched from Al Jazeera to Sky to CNN: any channel covering Libya earned the lodge’s attention.

With the attack on Libya and the disarray in that country they see an opening to get to the Mediterranean and Europe.

My interest in the coverage was somewhat abstract. I wanted Gaddafi to go lest he slaughter people I had never met. The conversation among the travellers around me, translated into English courtesy of my Somali companion, was considerably more practical. Were civil war to break out in Libya, someone asked, would Gaddafi’s forces be too busy fighting to worry about border control? Would it be possible to walk right through the country to the Mediterranean and get a boat to Europe? And what if Gaddafi were overthrown, another person asked. It would take a new regime a long time to settle. Now would be a good time to get to Europe through Libya.

I was being educated in a whole new way of watching television. These people, I realised, imbibed large quantities of international news each day of their lives. All corners of the planet were of interest to them. They combined what they learned on television with the hearsay of travellers; with e-mails and Facebook postings from long-lost relatives; with rumours. They were always calculating, as habitually as they ate and drank, the question forever in their minds: where to go next?

Hey, or another option is the US Southern border!

….. My companion had been told that if you walked across the Mexican border into the US, you would be caught and jailed. But the authorities would not deport you to Somalia’s civil war. After a year or two in prison, they would give you American papers, and you could call for your family to join you.

“How do you know this?” I asked. “Stories,” he replied. “Just stories.”

That’s the thing. CNN, Al Jazeera, the word of a passing traveller: these are hardly reliable sources of news. To be homeless is to be a gambler. You gather the information you can, you calculate, but ultimately you take a leap of faith into the unknown.

Our author suggests the news from passing travelers might not be reliable, but guess what, they have the US asylum and family reunification process pegged.

Heck, today if you can say you have family somewhere in the US, you might not even get detention when caught at the border.    Here is what happens:  Somali crosses the border and asks for asylum from those bad old terrorist Al-shabaabers in Somalia, gets US immigration lawyer, maybe detained, maybe not, lawyer (at taxpayer expense) gets the asylum seeker through the legal loopholes, asylum is granted and asylee gets welfare benefits/job training and then is taught how to get his “family” to America.

By the way, according to the most recent annual report from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, 22,852 asylum cases were approved in 2008.  This is a must-read report!

Somali with ten kids, on food stamps, rips off taxpayers for $474,000

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

These food stamp fraud stories just get better and better—you couldn’t make this stuff up!   We first told you about this Mohamed on May 5th, here, but there are new revelations.

From the Grand Rapids Press:

GRAND RAPIDS – The store owner accused in a $474,000 food-stamp scheme also collected nearly $85,000 in personal food-stamp benefits since 2001, recently unsealed documents said.

Ahmed Sheik-Mohamed was indicted on a charge of food-stamp fraud.

He and his son, Mohamed Isse [bet they aren’t even related—ed] who has not been indicted, are accused of redeeming electronic benefits for cash and ineligible items at Rayan Phone Card & Grocery on Eastern Avenue SE, records filed in U.S. District Court showed.

The store is one of at least five in the area allegedly involved in such frauds since last year.

He received $84,900 for his own food stamps while ripping off customers at his store, then spent some of his own food stamps at a store two hours away.  Sounds fishy!

The government also said that Sheik-Mohamed was receiving $1,381 in monthly food-stamp benefits for himself as of late 2009, when authorities conducted searches.

Since 2001, he has received around $84,900, the government said in court records.

More than $7,000 was spent at a store similar to his on the east side of state.

“Because Ahmed operates Rayan and therefore has ready access to Somali foods in Grand Rapids, he would have no reason to redeem large amounts of food stamp benefits at Abbas Phone Card and Grocery in Ypsilanti, two hours away,” special agent Travis Deters wrote in a search-warrant affidavit.

He said Sheik-Mohamed in 2007 reported that he was employed as a meat cutter at Rayan, earning $7.50 an hour while supporting a family of 10.

We learned in that first story on May 5th that Sheik-Mohamed sent some money out of the country.

I guess those ‘Welcome to Shelbyville’ filmmakers I told you about in my earlier post today would call us racist for even raising an eyebrow over this one!

Search RRW for ‘food stamp fraud’ and read dozens more posts similar to this one (although this is the first story where the perp was also receiving food stamp benefits).