Month: June 2012

NM: Handless Burundian refugee lies about his identity

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Hmmmm….True Refugee Crime Stories* continues with latest installment.

A Burundian refugee sans hands throws rocks through a window (presumably using only arm stubs), gets arrested and authorities learn he has stolen a neighbor’s identity.  I didn’t make this story up!

From KOAT ABC7 Albuquerque (thanks to a reader):

An Albuquerque man is in custody after being accused of throwing a volleyball-sized rock through a fast food restaurant window.

Investigators said the man — who is without hands — shattered two windows at the restaurant.

As detectives investigate the case, the man’s former neighbors are saying that the man isn’t who he claims to be.

Koffi Mbairamadji said he was stunned when people started asking him if he had been to jail recently.

Mbairamadji said the man who broke the windows is actually known as Adjabo. He said Adjabo is from Burundi, a country in central Africa.

“He can’t even read, so how can someone who doesn’t know how to read can get my personal information?” Mbairamadji asked.

Mbairamadji said Adjabo came to Albuquerque two years ago as a political refugee. He said he doesn’t know how Adjabo lost his hands but that it’s likely they were cut off during a battle in his native country.

Of course another reason he could have lost his hands is by being punished for stealing—justice under Shariah law.

Looks like it’s Catholic Charities bringing Burundian diversity to New Mexico, here.  No surprise there.

* Refugee crimes are archived here in our special “crimes” category.

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?

State Department to hold Muslim “diversity” and “inclusion” shindig tomorrow

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I wanted to give you the link, but can you believe it—it’s dead.  Anyway, here is the e-mail Press Announcement.  Don’t rush down there though because bloggers aren’t legitimate media and it sure doesn’t look like it’s open to the general public.  Guess who is giving the opening remarks—-Maryland US Senator Ben Cardin!

The Office of the Special Representative to Muslim Communities together with the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and the Office of Civil Rights, will host the first ever strategy session on Diversity, Inclusion and U.S. Foreign Policy. The U.S. Department of State will convene 100 top diversity leaders from the public and private sectors to focus on the impact of diverse professional environments and the way in which the diversity and inclusion agenda informs U.S. foreign policy.

The program opens promptly at 8:30 a.m. on June 7 in the Marshall Center with opening remarks from Senator Ben Cardin (D/MD), Special Representative to Muslim Communities, Farah Pandith, and Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Director General of the Foreign Service and Director of Human Resources at the Department of State. Presentations and working groups continue throughout the day until 4:30 p.m. Dr. Ernest Wilson III, Dean of the Annenberg School of Public Diplomacy, will offer the keynote address at 8:45 a.m. on “Why Diversity is ‘Mission Critical’ for the U.S.” Under Secretary for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs Robert D. Hormats will address the session at 2:35 p.m.

[Be sure to check out the big businesses concerned with “diversity” and labor—ed]

Participants will include U.S. government leaders from the White House, Congress, USAID, the Department of State, Peace Corps, the U.S. Marine Corps, and the U.S. Navy, and Chief Diversity Officers from leading U.S. corporations, educational institutions, and nonprofit and other organizations, including Merck, Citigroup, Wal-Mart, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, McDonald’s, Abercrombie & Fitch, GlaxoSmithKline, American Red Cross, United Way Worldwide, Harvard University, Cornell University, and many others. The International Society of Diversity and Inclusion Professionals and the Society for Human Resource Management are partners in this event.

The event is open to credentialed members of the media. Pre set for Cameras: 7:15 a.m. from the 21st Street entrance lobby.

Final access for writers and still photographers: 8:00 a.m. from the 21st Street entrance lobby.

Media representatives may attend this event upon presentation of one of the following: (1) A U.S. Government-issued identification card (Department of State, White House, Congress, Department of Defense or Foreign Press Center), (2) a media-issued photo identification card, or (3) a letter from their employer on letterhead verifying their employment as a journalist, accompanied by an official photo identification card (driver’s license, passport).

PRESS CONTACTS:
Lora Berg
Office of the Special Representative to Muslim Communities
202-647-7954
berglj@state.gov
Evan Owen
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights & Labor
202-647-4747
owene@state.gov
Office of Press Relations
202-647-2492