Month: December 2011

Libya: Obama “responsibility to protect” will now be tested (on us?)

~ Ann Corcoran

Samantha Power and the women around Obama (Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton) we are told convinced Obama to back the ouster of Qadhafi in Libya based on the “new international community’s responsibility to protect.”    I was never quite sure who exactly was being protected from whom.

Here a writer in The Star from Toronto says he is hopeful that Libya will “emerge as a showpiece of the Arab Spring” (really now, like Egypt was supposed to have been?).  In your dreams!

The Star:

The sheer messiness of the moment renders premature any declarations of mission accomplished. What Canada joined — a new kind of war framed on the emerging ideal of the international community’s “responsibility to protect” — has given rise to a new kind of aftermath.

Libya is altogether different today than Iraq in 2003, or Afghanistan in late 2001. Uglier, in some ways, because of the score-settling…

So who is the target of the score-settling by Arab Islamist militias?   Dark-skinned people, that’s who.

Nowhere did the revolution’s ugly aftermath present itself as viscerally as at a Tawerga refugee encampment near Tripoli Airport, where close to 2,000 darker-skinned Libyans are living in fear of continued score-settling. Many acknowledge they fought with Gadhafi forces. But many did not. And unlike lighter-skinned Libyans who allied with the ousted regime, the Tawerga refugees have been subjected to near-blanket reprisals — most recently, at this camp, a night raid in early November involving 60 carloads of fighters from the hornet’s nest of anger that is Misurata, Tawerga’s neighbouring city.

This is one of nine Tawerga camps…

Watch for it!   The ‘responsibility to protect’ means we go to war and create a whole new bunch of refugees that need to be resettled in the West!

Don’t make Omar Jamal the poster boy for the anti-CAIR crowd!

~ Ann Corcoran

You know I’ve been out of the loop since mid-October or so, so I didn’t know about all this business about CAIR going after Somalis Abdi Bihi and Omar Jamal in Minneapolis until I saw this post by Marisol at Jihad Watch yesterday that begins:

CAIR’s Minnesota chapter led a personal attack on the credibility of Omar Jamal and Abdi Bihi in connection with their planned presence at a conference whose literature described al-Shabaab as an “Islamic extremist terrorism organization,” to which CAIR took exception.

There are at least two noteworthy aspects to this story: First, the threats are a reprise of the old chestnut “Say Islam is a Religion of Peace, or we’ll kill you.” The second is that CAIR is caught in its own game, for as hard as it has worked to cast all criticism as incitement to a violent “backlash,” at least where Islamic teachings and advocacy groups are concerned. How about their intense criticism of Omar Jamal and Abdi Bihi? If CAIR Minnesota is to hold itself to the standards it imposes on others, it would have to apologize, shut up, pay up, and disband.

Then again, claiming victim status tends to require a certain ideological pedigree, and the right connections. “FBI Investigating Facebook Death Threats on Somali Advocate,” by Tom Lyden for Fox 9 News, December 2 (thanks to The Religion of Peace)….

Seems that Jamal now claims he is getting death threats on his facebook page.   As we have noted here at RRW (innumerable times since 2007 when I noted he defended a Somali rapist caught in the act and on camera), Jamal is a publicity hound and possibly more than that.  I call him the Somali Jesse Jackson (Frontpage Magazine writers called him the Al Sharpton of the Somali community) and he is at the center of anything to do with Somalis including driving media attention away from the Somali who died with cyanide (enough to kill hundreds) in his hotel room in advance of the 2008 Democratic Convention, here.   At that time we learned that Jamal was here illegally and had been convicted of immigration fraud in 2003 in Tennessee.  He was never deported.

Readers:  Search RRW for ‘Omar Jamal’ and you will see what I mean.

Abdi Bihi, on the other hand, seems to be the real deal and should be encouraged.   Here is one of many posts on Bihi  at RRW.  At one point I suspected that Jamal had only pretended to be on Bihi’s side to get more information to pass along—to someone.   Facebook threats from Al-Shabaab would be a very handy way to solidify one’s cover, or simply to get media attention.

Salt Lake Tribune article gives insight into how refugee teens are doing when dumped into an American high school

~ Ann Corcoran

This is a long article but worth reading if you are interested in what happens to teenage refugees who arrive in the US with no English and are expected to cope in a big city high school.  Imagine sitting in a math class for months and not even understanding what is being said, and no one follows up to help you figure out how to get lunch, follow a changing class schedule or open your locker.  Where are their resettlement case workers?  No wonder some kids quit and turn to crime.

And, the American fetish for political correctness doesn’t help either!

Below are just a few short paragraphs to consider from this Salt Lake Tribune piece (emphasis mine):

Granite is the only district in Utah to try — and then close — a newcomer academy for newly arrived refugees and immigrants over concerns the district would be accused of segregation. But it’s a strategy that’s still being urged by advocates here. In October, 100 service providers and educators held a meeting called by the Utah Office of Refugee Services to brainstorm ways to help refugee youths toward promising futures and careers. A newcomer academy was a common goal. Rising problems with drugs and gang violence, particularly among refugees in the 18-21 age group, has prompted the office to redouble its efforts with youth.

Brown, the refugee services director, says he has attended four funerals for young refugee men in the past two years due to violence or drugs.

“We’re determined to do something about it,” Brown says. “There’s no single answer, but I think if we can put a lot of different things together, then we do have a real chance.”

Part of it is helping students succeed academically, he says. Too often, youths become frustrated when they cannot compete with their peers in school. They find other ways to stand out.

But, of course, the overarching questions for me, are:  Can taxpayers afford what needs to be done, and are we even doing the best thing for some “refugees” by yanking them out of their own cultures?  And, I am sure there are some readers who are asking why we are doing any of this when we have American troubled kids aplenty.

Union Leader: Manchester mayor needs help from NH Congressional delegation for moratorium

~ Ann Corcoran

Your tax dollars!

That is right—that is exactly where the mayor and citizens of Manchester and New Hampshire generally need to go to get a moratorium on refugee resettlement.  And, you gotta pound them!  And in turn, they need to pound the US State Department.  Here they are (where the pounding begins!).

And, it wouldn’t hurt either to get the Republican Presidential candidates on record on this as well!  This is truly a states rights issue if there ever was one.  Tennessee recognized that when its legislature passed (and the governor signed) its ‘Refugee Absorptive Capacity Act‘ last May.

Here is the whole Union Leader editorial from yesterday (they don’t keep things on-line long at the paper, I don’t want this to disappear).   Mayor Gatsas wants to know where the money is going!

Manchester Mayor Ted Gatsas is making some headway in his effort to hold the refugee-charitable-complex accountable to the taxpayers. He could make more if he got additional help from New Hampshire’s top elected officials.

At Gatsas’ request, the governor and Executive Council voted to table for two weeks four federal contracts to charities that resettle and provide services to refugees in New Hampshire. The charities are the International Institute of New England and Lutheran Social Services. The tabling was done to give Gatsas more time to find out from the charities and from federal officials how the money is being spent.

Gatsas wants to know this because refugees are imposing a burden on city services, and the mayor has concluded that the city cannot afford to accept the hundreds of new refugees-in-need of services the International Institute and Washington plan to bring to Manchester. Though he has explained this to the institute and the federal government, which work together to move refugees here from overseas, they refuse to give the city a breather by settling refugees elsewhere for a while.

The council’s move buys Gatsas a few weeks, which is not a lot of time, considering that this continual influx of poor people who need public aid has been a problem in the city for more than a decade. It would help if the state’s congressional delegation would make a dedicated — and public — effort to help Gatsas solve this problem.

It’s not anti-immigrant, anti-refugee or anti-charity to back the mayor’s call for a temporary stay on refugee resettlement in the city. It’s pro-taxpayer. No one is asking that the city be off-limits to people from other countries who need a new start. All Gatsas wants is some time for the city to make sure that those who are already here can support themselves before the next group arrives.

Many other city leaders (not necessarily the elected ones who seem too chicken generally) have asked for the same right, but no one so doggedly as Gatsas.

New readers:  Type ‘Manchester’ into our search function for several years of background on the problems there.

Immigrants largest group in Sweden living in poverty

~ Ann Corcoran

67% of foreign-born residents of Sweden are receiving social benefits according to The Local:

Two thirds of the people in Sweden relying long term on social benefits have a foreign background, while child poverty in the same group is becoming more and more serious, according to new reports.

”It is a real problem that poverty in Sweden has taken on an ethnic dimension,” said Björn Halleröd, sociology professor at Gothenburg university, to dail Dagens Nyheter (DN).

The report published in the paper revealed that 67 percent of those on long term benefits were born overseas, with unemployment being the main cause.

Using statistics from 2010, of the 117, 000 people on long term benefits, (defined in this case as over 10 months), 78,000 were from foreign countries.

Meanwhile the charity Save the Children has also flagged the problem of child poverty in Sweden.

In a recent survey carried out by the organisation, child poverty is markedly over-represented among those from a foreign background whose parents are unemployed.

I wonder what percentage it is in the US.  Does anyone know?

We’ve written a lot about Sweden’s immigration crisis, use our search function for more.  Just type in ‘Sweden.’