Day: June 7, 2012

Excluded Parties List System—a handy resource

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I had forgotten about this database until a reader reminded me about it today.

Do you have someone in your community getting or trying to get any federal contracts and such—maybe one of those Ethnic Community Based Organizations.    Check out the Excluded Parties List System where all those who have been debarred or otherwise prohibited from doing business with the federal government are listed.

Go here and for fun, go to the advanced search.  Type in the name Jack Abramoff and note he is excluded from government contracts and now put in the name Mohammad and see what you get—pages and pages!   LOL!  Be sure to check out all the aliases that come up for many excluded Mohammads.

This is filed in our ‘where to find information’ category to help you find it in the future.

Buddhist v. Muslim violence erupts in Burma

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The gist of the story is that Buddhists were enraged earlier this week in majority Buddhist Burma (also known as Myanmar) when a Buddhist girl was raped and murdered supposedly by Muslims.  A mob of Buddhists then reportedly dragged eight Muslim “pilgrims” from a bus and beat them to death.   The suggestion is made that these eight had nothing to do with the rape/murder.

Why does this interest us?  Because when you read both of these articles, here and here (and there were many more), the reporters drag the alleged “persecution” of the Rohingya Muslim minority into the story even when a Rohingya leader said the dead Muslims are not Rohingya.  This is how the media keeps the Rohingya-are-persecuted drumbeat alive for western consumption.

If we find out who raped and murdered the Buddhist girl, I’ll update this post.   Actually one thing that puzzled me was what were eight Muslim “pilgrims” doing anyway, or were they perhaps Islamist agitators in Rakhine province to help stir up the locals?   This is what raised my suspicion from the BBC article:

Rakhine is home to Burma’s largest concentration of Muslims, including much-persecuted Rohingya Muslims, and their presence is often deeply resented by the majority Buddhist population.

In a joint statement quoted by Reuters, eight Rohingya rights groups based outside Burma condemned the attack on the Muslims on the bus, whom they termed “Muslim pilgrims”.

Although it appears those on the bus were not Rohingyas, the groups said the attack followed months of anti-Rohingya propaganda stirred up by “extremists and xenophobes”.  [Who else might be doing some stirring?—ed]

Here is one little nugget in the second article (from AFP) that I found interesting to explain some of the hatred the Buddhists have for the Muslims.   We have written before that some Rohingya rebels had traveled to Afghanistan in years past to fight with the Taliban.

Talking about hostility to Muslims in general, he said: “One day it will be a serious problem, they caused trouble in Thailand, Europe, USA. They try to make trouble in Rakhine State.”

Despite decades of isolation, Muslims have also suffered from the images of violence associated with radical Islam, according to a foreign researcher, who asked not to be identified.

He said Myanmar’s devout Buddhists had been particularly shocked by the destruction of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan* by Afghanistan’s Taliban regime.

“There is a feeling, a fear among the country’s Buddhists about being invaded,” he added.

Readers, I am not going to let you forget that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops testified on May 1 that they and the US State Department should be resettling more Rohingya to your towns.

This is the 105th post in our Rohingya Reports category, here.

*Dynamited by the Taliban in 2001.

Another Somali Muslim dead in Canada due to gang violence

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday was Muslim refugee crime day at RRW with three crime story, I hope today isn’t shaping up the same way.

Here is a story from Canada, not new to us, we have written on many occasions about the young Somali men getting blown away when involved in drug and gang violence in Canada.   However, this article from The Globe and Mail is somewhat more interesting than the usual because it describes the structure of Somali gangs.

Imam Said Rageah, who spoke during the hour-long gathering, said that in the past two years he has witnessed about 30 funerals for murdered Somali-Canadians, mostly in Alberta.

Ahmed Hassan died when an assailant drew a gun and fired, killing him and wounding six others; his short life offering a glimpse into a community racked by gang violence. His journey from Toronto to Alberta and back is well-worn by a criminal minority among Somalis who made Canada their home.

Somali gangs are looser and thus harder to dismantle:

Last year, Edmonton police gauged that the number of Somali-Canadians involved in the drug trade totalled about 2,000, countrywide, with a hard core of perhaps 100. And as with almost all types of organized crime, the primary motivator is cash. But in almost every other respect, the Somali drug gangs differ greatly from other ethnically based criminal organizations, police say, and the most striking is in the way they are structured.

The traditional mob model is pyramid-shaped – a hierarchy in which power flows from the top – and law enforcement responded accordingly. Cut off the head, so the thinking went, and the leaderless group will flounder, if only for a while.

But the Somali gangs are looser, much harder to dismantle than more traditional groups. They offer considerable scope for an ambitious, money-driven individual who does not have to “kick the money upstairs” as the loyal Mafia soldier must.

The Somali-dominated gangs also tend to be low profile and highly mobile, often moving as a group from one city to another, chiefly along a circuit that links Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, Fort McMurray and, to a lesser degree, Vancouver.

A former Mountie, who is now a professor of criminology at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, suggests that one of the strengths of the Somali-Canadian criminal element is its national network.

“When the heat gets to be a little too much, boom, they’re gone,” said William Pitt. “They’re highly integrated, the Toronto gang, the Edmonton gang and even the Vancouver gang to a lesser extent.”

If you need a summary of refugee-related crimes, be sure to check our “crimes” category, here.  Some crime posts are about refugees who have been the victims of crimes, but a larger number of stories are about refugee-generated crime.  However, be ready for a lot of reading—there are 940 posts cataloged there!

I wonder if those Kurdish gangs in Nashville are fighting with the Somali gangs yet?