All eyes on the Imam as Somali terror funding trial gets underway in San Diego

Update on the trial (February 20th) here.

From UT San Diego (emphasis mine):

SAN DIEGO — Scores of recorded phone calls show that four Somali immigrants conspired in 2008 to raise money and send it to their homeland to assist the terrorist group al-Shabaab, a federal prosecutor said at the opening Wednesday of a terrorism trial in San Diego.

But defense lawyers for the four men countered that those phone calls, as well as other evidence, has been misconstrued and taken out of context by prosecutors, and that the funds sent were for humanitarian — not terrorist — purposes.

The trial, expected to last three weeks, covers events from January to August 2008, when about $8,500 of cash was sent from San Diego to Somalia. The four defendants are charged with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and to a foreign terrorist organization — in this instance, the Somali-based group al-Shabaab. They are also charged with money laundering.

The U.S. government designated Al-Shabaab a terrorist organization in 2008. Its members have been connected to bombings, assassinations, and attacks on civilians, officials with various governments in the unstable country, and peacekeeping forces. It’s also been linked to al-Qaeda.

The defendants come from widely different backgrounds. Basally Saeed Moalin was a cabdriver in San Diego before his arrest in 2010. Assistant U.S. Attorney Caroline Han told jurors he was the main connection with the fighters in Somalia and orchestrated the fundraising in San Diego.

Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud was the popular imam of the al-Ansar mosque in City Heights, in the heart of the San Diego’s immigrant Somali community. Issa Doreh worked at the Shidaal Express, a hawala, or money-transfer business. The fourth defendant, Ahmed Nasir Taalil Mohamud, was a cabdriver in Anaheim who met Moalin when both drove taxis in St. Louis.

The prosecution has been closely followed by San Diego’s Somali immigrants. At every hearing in the run-up to the trial, dozens of supporters from the Somali community have filled the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller.

In a rare move Wednesday, the court opened an adjacent courtroom for the overflow crowd, piping in an audio feed of the proceedings…

[…..]

“People are following it a lot and are very interested in what is going to happen,” said Hussein Nuur, director of economic development for the Horn of Africa community group in City Heights.

Nuur said much of the talk focuses on Mohamud, the imam and spiritual leader for the mosque. Skepticism of the government’s case runs high, he said.

Type ‘San Diego’ into our search function for more on the activities of San Diego’s large Somali immigrant community.

For new readers we have resettled more than 100,000 Somali refugees to cities large and small in the US over the last 25 years.  See one of the most widely read posts here at RRW.  In three years since 9/11 ( Bush years 2004, 2005, 2006) the number of Somalis arriving topped 10,000 per year.  Those refugees then began bringing in the family (chain migration!) until 2008 when shock of shocks! the State Department discovered that as many as 30,000 Somalis had lied about their kinship and weren’t related at all.  The State Department then closed the “family reunification” program for Somalis.  It has recently been re-opened for new and legit family members, but they have no intention of finding and deporting the liars.   However, we learned recently that we are deporting criminal Somalisairlifts to Mogadishu anyone!

Denmark could save itself from cultural annihilation by closing bridge to Sweden

From Dispatch International via The Muslim Issue:

During an interview with Dispatch International, Pia Kjærsgaard, former chairman of Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party) Pia Kjærsgaard commented on the consequences of the massive Muslim and Middle Eastern immigration into Sweden.

According to Migrationsverket (the Swedish immigration authority), an estimated 175,000 immigrants will come to Sweden, primarily from Somalia and Afghanistan. All these so-called ‘asylum seekers’, as well as their relatives, will be free to enter Denmark after having gained a Swedish permit of residence.

How will Pia Kjærsgaard solve this problem?

“I said already ten years ago that we might need to block the Øresund bridge leading to Sweden. It was intended as a joke, of course, though a serious one. We are in the process of digging our own graves. I am all for Nordic cooperation, but the Swedish policy is a liability. Eventually, Denmark may be forced to discriminate about which Swedes can be permitted to take up residence in Denmark, so that real Swedes may be freely admitted, while we keep immigrants from certain third world countries and their descendants out.

Pia Kjærsgaard stresses that she is not at all afraid of using the word ‘discrimination’.

”We already discriminate in a lot of areas. For instance, one needs to be of a certain age to vote, and a certain age in order to receive a public pension. We do differentiate among people. We also have the right to discriminate between persons who are able to become integrated into the Danish society, and those who are not.”

There is more, here.

Rohingya Muslims warmly welcomed in terrorist-ridden southern Thailand….

….and the Saudis are hypocrites!

Nobody wants Rohingya Muslims (except of course the US Conference of Catholic Bishops), least of all the Thai government that fears they are arriving on their shores to add to the already aggressive Islamist population in Thailand’s southern provinces, so why they sent a bunch of the recent Rohingya “asylum seekers” to the troubled south is beyond me.

Here is the story from The Irrawady a few days ago:

PATTANI, Thailand — The three conflict-ridden provinces of Thailand’s Deep South are not a popular destination for many visitors. A renewed and intensifying insurgency, which has killed more than 5,300 people since 2004, provides a daily diet of military check-points, assassinations and bombings.

But for Sakir Husan, 18, and other ethnic Rohingya fleeing sectarian violence in Burma’s Arakan State, the region is proving a welcome escape from the nightmares of their lives back home. Husan is part of a 22-strong group—18 men and four women—currently being housed in the capital of Pattani Province since Jan. 16.

They are among hundreds of Rohingya who have landed on the shores of southern Thailand this month and then been dispersed across the country by the authorities. But in contrast to the frosty reception Rohingya have often received from the Thai state, which has been criticized by human rights groups for previously returning them to sea or overland to Burma, the group in Pattani has received the warmest of welcomes from the local—predominantly Malay-Muslim—population.

No surprise that—Muslim charity to fellow Muslims is well-known, or is it?

Saudi racists!  Saudi Arabia takes NO refugees!

We have reported on many occasions that Rohingya refugees have been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia, here.  Somali refugees who get through Saudi Arabia’s state of the art border fence are immediately flown back to Somalia, here.  And, Saudi Arabia refused to give refuge to any Iraqis at the height of the war, here.   They want no foreigners to become part of their culture—they want NO diversity in Saudi Arabia!

And, yet they have the audacity to write sanctimonious op-eds lecturing other countries (Thailand!) about their treatment of Rohingya!

I guess this is Taqiyya straight up!  From Saudi Arabia’s Arab News:

Refugees are a nuisance. That is a reality. Settled, stable communities around the world that find themselves hosting frightened and traumatized people, with little more than the clothes they stand up in, often with limited understanding of the language and culture of the land to which they have fled, can pose a threat to public order. They will inevitably disrupt the lives of the people in whose world they have arrived.

Yet the challenge posed by refugees cannot be ignored. They are vulnerable, pauperized and afraid. Common humanity dictates that a society which finds itself hosting people driven into exile, must do its best to take care of them. Along with their government, they must be prepared to extend shelter, concern and friendship to refugees.

And by and large, this is what has been seen. Turks, Jordanians and Lebanese have been prepared to do what they can to assist those who have fled from Assad’s monstrous repression in Syria. [But not so Saudi-Arabia—-ed]   However there have been some deplorable exceptions to this generous behavior. One of the most unforgivable has been taking place in Thailand, with the treatment of Muslim Rohingya who have fled bloody persecution by Myanmar’s Buddhist majority. To escape the massacres, which the Burmese police and military seem to be doing little to stop, let alone investigate, thousands of Rohingya have taken to flimsy, overcrowded boats in an attempt to reach the friendlier and more welcoming shores of Malaysia.

The nerve of these Saudis!

The Obama Administration and the UN should demand that rich Saudi Arabia help with the hundreds of thousands of “homeless” Muslims roaming the world by resettling them there in Saudi Arabia (when pigs fly!).

For new readers:  We have 132 previous posts on the Rohingya issue going back five years.  Our interest is that their migration is a study in how a Muslim population spreads and how the media helps the Islamists (Saudi Arabia for one!) build a case of VICTIMHOOD.  You watch, they are already being resettled in the West and in the US, it won’t be long before a full blown howl begins that we need to resettle them in larger numbers.   We weren’t around for the drumbeat on Somalis, but now we have chronicled the build-up on the Rohingya (for what it is worth!).

Kentucky: Iraqi refugee convicted of terrorism trying to avoid life sentence

Lawyer says the FBI took advantage of “bigoted and susceptible immigrants.”

This is the latest on those Iraqi “refugees” who lied (can you believe it!) on their paperwork to get into the US and were subsequently convicted on terrorism charges in Bowling Green, the refugee chicken factory capital of Kentucky.  (We first reported on the arrests, here, in June 2011.)

Now, one of them is employing an unusual tactic to try to avoid a life sentence.

Read all about it in the Courier-Journal:

Hoping to avert a life sentence, one of two Iraqi refugees to be sentenced Tuesday in Kentucky for attempting to send weapons and cash to al-Qaeda alleges the government improperly schemed to get him a longer sentence.

A lawyer for Mohanad Shareef Hammadi cites a study of more than 500 terrorism prosecutions since 9/11 that found an FBI informant led more than one-third of the plots and provided all the necessary weapons, money and transportation.

In a sentencing memorandum, Hammadi’s appointed lawyer, James Earhart, says his client was unemployed and had no money, weapons or means of transporting them when he was recruited by a confidential government informant.

In the first terrorism case in Kentucky, Hammadi and Waad Ramadan Alwan are to be sentenced in Bowling Green by Senior U.S. District Court Judge Thomas B. Russell.

They both pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization and lying about their backgrounds when they applied to be admitted into the United States as refugees.

They were arrested in May 2011 after they agreed to help a government informant load cash and weapons, including surface-to-air Stinger missiles, into a tractor-trailer, believing it was destined for al-Qaeda.

Alwan also pleaded guilty to attempting to kill to kill U.S. soldiers when he was an insurgent in Iraq.

The story is a long one, but please read the whole thing.

Fantasies of “bravado and bigotry.”

He [author of a report critical of the FBI—ed] says the government, understandably trying to protect Americans from terrorism, has found “bigoted and suggestible” immigrants who are incapable of committing terrorism on their own and created acts of terrorism out of their “fantasies of bravado and bigotry.”

But, wait!  What is this bigotry business.  Only white Americans are bigoted!  And, aren’t we supposed to believe that refugees like us and that they come here seeking an opportunity for a good life!

We have 556 previous posts on Iraqi refugees in case someone out there wants to write a book!

South Dakota rape suspect still on the lam

A reader sent me this story the other day and I’ve been looking for more information on the case and the latest news since then.   I would like to know how alleged rapist Obadiah Loyira came to be in Sioux Falls in the first place and where in Africa he is from, but of course the media never tells us that.

Why this conspiracy of silence about how immigrants charged with crimes got here—through which LEGAL program they entered the US?  Or are they illegal aliens?

The only hint we have that he is a refugee is from the citizen comments on this news story which run along the lines of—“when are people going to realize lutheran social services is ruining this town.”

Lutheran Social Services is a federal refugee contractor resettling refugees to South Dakota, here.  Do they know where he is?

Here is the latest story (I could find)—-a second arrest has been made—but still no Obadiah Loyira (although the authorities interviewed him earlier and let him go!):

Authorities arrested a second suspect in connection with the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl and possesion of child pornography in Lincoln County.

A 16-year-old male from Council Bluffs, Iowa was arrested in Council Bluffs Friday on charges of first-degree rape and sexual contact with a child under 16, according to Lincoln County Sheriff Dennis Johnson.

A 20-year-old Sioux Falls man has already been charged, and police are still looking for a Harrisburg man, Obadiah Loyira, 19.

Detective Matt Kopecky said Loyira, who uses aliases of Jay or J.J., has ties to Sioux Falls and is thought to be in the Sioux Falls area.

Elizeo Kalimba, 20, was charged with first-degree rape and two counts of child pornography in his initial court appearance Tuesday. A $25,000 cash bond was set for Kalimba with conditions including house arrest — except for work and school — and that he has no contact with anyone under age 18, court documents say.

Loyira is wanted on the same charges. He is described as black, 6-foot and 180 pounds with black hair and brown eyes.

[…..]

On Saturday, a search warrant was served at Loyira’s home and Loyira admitted to having “sexual intercourse” with the victim and taking graphic pictures of her with his cellphone, according to court documents.

Johnson said a decision was made not to take Loyira into custody to help further the investigation. An arrest warrant was issued Tuesday, and Loyira was not found at his home, Johnson said.

Readers, if you have anything more on this story, please send it my way!  I do want to get the whole story!