Month: July 2013

Lewiston, ME: Somali teen released to ‘residential facility’ over District Attorney objections

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Back in April and May there were several arson fires in Lewiston, ME.   A Somali boy is charged in one of those fires (see our earlier posts, here and here), now that boy is being released from a juvenile detention facility, but the District Attorney, earlier this week objected to the judge’s decision citing the boys prior criminal record.

One of Lewiston’s several arson fires that occurred within a week. Photo Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal

Here is the latest from earlier this week from the Lewiston Sun Journal (Hat tip: Michael):

LEWISTON — A judge on Wednesday ordered the release of a 13-year-old boy charged with four counts of arson in a May 3 fire that burned four downtown apartment buildings and left nearly 100 people homeless.

Abdi Ibrahim of Lewiston was in 8th District Court for a juvenile detention hearing. Because he is charged with felonies, his court proceedings are held in public.

His attorney, Richard Charest, said a residential facility that offers programs that address the teen’s problems is the least restrictive setting for him, something required by the state’s juvenile code.

Judge Rick Lawrence agreed, provided a safety plan is in place that will protect Ibrahim as well as the community.

Assistant District Attorney Melanie Portas opposed the placement, telling Lawrence that Ibrahim posed a risk to the community if released from a lockdown facility such as Long Creek Youth Development Center in South Portland, where the teen has been held since he was charged.

Abdi was already in trouble with the law at 9-years old***

Portas cited Ibrahim’s criminal record, which dates back to when he was 9 years old. Charges include theft, robbery, burglary and assault. In addition to the arson fires, he has been charged with criminal mischief and criminal threatening, Portas said.

She said the seriousness of the new charges, coupled with the manner in which fire investigators believe the fires were set — using gasoline on materials in a Pierce Street garage and igniting them with a lighter — was of particular concern to prosecutors.

A residential setting “cannot ensure that (Ibrahim) will not set another fire,” she told the judge.

Portas referenced a recent psychological evaluation that concluded Ibrahim suffered from poor impulse control, displayed a “significant amount of immaturity” and “under appreciates” the effect of his actions on others by showing a lack of remorse.

Photo:  The photo is from one of the Lewiston fires, but the article has this informative item.  Abdi’s parents both live in Lewiston, but not together.  It makes me wonder if Dad has more than one wife, a common practice in Somalia that has been brought to America.

Ibrahim lives with his mother, Marian Ibrahim, according to court papers. His father, Yussef Abdi, lives at a separate address in Lewiston.

An American kid is charged in another of the fires.

***It just occurred to me—I wonder if Abdi was among the Somali boys back in 2009 who were attacking people (for the “thrill”) on the streets of multicultural Lewiston, here.

For new readers, our complete Lewiston archive is here. Be sure to see this 2009 post about how Somalis came to be in Lewiston in the first place, it is still one of our most widely read posts.

Food stamp fraud bust story with a couple of important pieces of information

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Lately I’ve passed up a bunch of food stamp fraud stories because they were mostly the same-old story.  There was one I should have posted though and didn’t where the immigrant fraudster not only trafficked in food stamps in his convenience store, but also ran an illegal gambling parlor in the back room.

Innocuous-looking Cheese store busted in Schenectady, NY

These food stamp fraudsters in Schenectady, Vishnunarine Singh and Elvin Singh, were charged in your basic scam involving exchanging food stamps for cash at 50 cents on the dollar.   However, here is the big difference with this story—to send a message, the prosecutor is going after the sellers of their stamps (the customers who got the cash)!  So, resettlement contractors need to alert their refugee clients that selling food stamp privileges is illegal!

70% if refugees (95% of Iraqis!) in the US are on food stamps as of the latest complete report we have from the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

From the Daily Gazette:

SCHENECTADY — The investigation into the city business that authorities say regularly defrauded the food stamp system continued Thursday, with the prosecutor saying the total number of recipients who illegally exchanged their benefits for cash could reach into the hundreds.

Nearly two dozen have already been arrested for the alleged actions at Cheese Bakery and Grocery, 1007 State St., including the store owner and his son. More arrests are possible, officials have said. Those not charged criminally could face loss of their benefit privileges.

Vishnunarine Singh

Prosecutor Katie McCutcheon provided more information on the investigation Thursday, after store owner Vishnunarine Singh, 57, of Ozone Park, and his son Elvin, 27, of Schenectady, were arraigned on multiple felony counts. Both pleaded not guilty.

Elvin Singh

The two are accused of essentially trading food stamp benefits for cash, with little or no actual food included in the transactions. The recipient would then get typically about 50 percent of the face value of the benefits and the store would keep the other half, officials said.

Such scams have been perpetrated before by store owners.

Three store owners and one store operator were arrested in 2011 in Albany, accused of running the same type of scam. Together, they were believed to be responsible for more than $6.1 million in suspicious food stamp activity.

In the Schenectady case, the arrests of the store owner and son on food stamp fraud charges were accompanied by the arrests of 21 others, accused of using their own food stamp privileges at the store illegally.

“We do want to send a message to the community, store vendors as well as recipients, that this type of fraudulent activity is not going to be tolerated in this community,” McCutcheon said.

Then reporters Steven Cook and Kathleen Moore did a bit of extra research and reported this (below).  So where is the mainstream media?  Where is the Washington Post, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal on the story of an epidemic in convenience store food stamp trafficking?   Based on my 5-plus years of following the scams as a side interest here at RRW, I will bet a bundle that the largest majority of busted stores are owned and operated by immigrants.  Is no one curious how they were able to finance and set-up these scams in the first place?

Nationwide in fiscal year 2012, nearly 1,400 stores were permanently disqualified for trafficking and nearly 700 stores were sanctioned for other violations, according to the USDA. Those efforts were the result of reviews of more than 1,500 stores and nearly 4,500 undercover investigations.

For our complete archive on Food Stamp Fraud cases, click here.

UNHCR Guterres looking to resettle tens of thousands of Syrians ….

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

….to countries that can afford them!

UNHCR Socialist Antonio Guterres just licking his chops to pressure US into starting the Syrian migration to America.

Antonio Guterres also told The Guardian that he expected the resettlement to be as large as the one they undertook with Iraqis.  (hat tip: Mike)

Guterres compared the Syrian refugee issue to that of Iraqis during the last decade, when more than 100,000 were resettled away from the region. “If things go on for a prolonged period of time then resettlement will become a central part of our strategy,” he said. “We would like when the time comes … to be able to launch a resettlement programme as massive as the one for Iraqis.”

From 2007 to this spring, the US resettled 84,902 of the Iraqis resettled anywhere in the world, so expect the UN to put the screws to the US State Department to lead the way again.  Surely that is on-going at this very moment with the resettlement contractors busy lobbying behind-the-scenes for the State Department to bring them some Syrians to add to their diversity stew.  Incidentally, that 84,000 figure doesn’t include the earlier waves of Iraqis who came to the US as refugees, like the guy who bombed a federal building in Arizona, here.

Here is more from The Guardian:

Western countries including the US and Britain may be asked to accept tens of thousands of Syrian refugees because the exodus from the civil war is overwhelming countries in the region, the UN’s refugee chief has warned.

With no end to the war in sight, the flight of nearly 2 million people from Syria over the past two years is showing every sign of becoming a permanent population shift, like the Palestinian crises of 1948 and 1967, with grave implications for countries such as Lebanon and Jordan, UN and other humanitarian aid officials say.

[….]

In an interview with the Guardian, António Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, said the situation was already far more than just a humanitarian crisis. If a resolution to the conflict was not found within months, the UN will look to resettle tens of thousands of Syrian refugees in countries better able to afford to host them, including Britain. Germany has already offered to take 5,000, but other offers have been limited, Guterres said.

I’m beginning to think these Muslim conflicts in the Middle East are about getting Muslim migrants spread around the Western world, or at least that is the side-benefit for Socialists like Antonio Guterres.

Reminds me to mention the Palin Doctrine—-when both sides in a conflict are shouting ‘Allahu akbar‘ and killing each other, let Allah sort it out!

Let your Senators and Members of Congress know how you feel about Syrian immigration to America during their August recess.  They will be amazed that you are on top of the news (because they likely are not!).   And, tell them that the Iraqis that came before them are heavily dependent on welfare and are suffering from high unemployment rates.

Breivik’s message to Norway (Pravda doesn’t mind mentioning it)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Where is the rest of the media?

Earlier this week few media outlets marked the second anniversary of Anders Breivik’s slaughter of mostly children of the political ruling class in Norway reminding us of those iconic monkeys.  But, I see that Pravda isn’t shy about presenting some facts.

Honestly, I think the average westerner, average American (including reporters), can simply not wrap their minds around the demographic fact that Europe will be a Muslim-dominated continent by mid-century if there are no immediate policy-changes regarding refugees and immigration generally.

Here are several snips from the Pravda piece on the anniversary of Breivik’s “message.”  The article is worth reading in its entirety.

Two years have passed since the dreadful massacre in Norway by an ultra-right activist Anders Breivik. The tragedy has highlighted the fact that the country’s authorities have failed to solve the problem of immigrants, especially Muslims. Inaction of the authorities largely provoked the heinous crime whose victims were mostly Norwegians.

[….]

The most unpleasant fact for the Norwegian authorities is that many citizens of the kingdom, while finding Breivik’s actions unacceptable, partially agree with some of his ideas. In the 2009 elections, the ultra-right Progress Party won the second place with 23 percent of the vote, demanding to ban Muslim immigration and restrict immigration altogether. Norwegian Muslims from the local Center for Combating Racism complained that after Breivik’s crime the attitude towards them has only worsened.

Can you imagine a paragraph like this one in any major publication in the West?

Norwegian official statistics says that the unemployment rate among immigrants from Asia and Africa exceeds nine percent, while among the indigenous Norwegians it is four times lower. Why would they work? Unemployment benefits amount to a thousand dollars a month, child benefits are even larger. They can live, breed, and the government will pay. As a result, indigenous Norwegian taxpayers have been maintaining a number of immigrant slackers for decades.

Breivik predicted that in ten years Oslo would be Muslim:

Muslim immigrants whose number amounts to approximately 180,000 (over three percent of the population) have even harder time integrating into the local community. 32,000 of them came from Pakistan, 28,000 – from Iraq and Somalia. 16-17 thousand people from Turkey, Iran and Bosnia reside in the country; there are also numerous immigrants from Afghanistan and Kosovo. A significant portion of immigrants from Russia (16,000) are natives of the North Caucasus.

The first mosque in Oslo was erected in 1974, and today there are several of them. Various Muslim organizations operate in the country. As of last year, approximately 40 percent of school children in the capital were children of Muslim families. In 58 of the 136 schools children of immigrants (mostly Muslims) already make up the majority of students. Breivik concluded that in ten years city of Oslo will be Muslim, and many agreed with him.

“We came to change you!”  (Iraqi Kurd now in prison in Norway):

An Iraqi Kurd nicknamed Mullah Krekar has been living in Norway for over 20 years. “We came to change you. Look at the population growth in Europe where the number of Muslims is growing like a mosquito swarm. In 2050, 30 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim,” he said.

Here comes my nag!  Don’t forget to read about Al-Hijra.  The Islamic Doctrine of jihad by immigration (and how we deal with it) is, in my view, a more significant factor in the future of the West than any terrorist attacks or upheavals in the Middle East making headlines today.

Analyst: Europe unprepared for potential large scale exodus from Egypt

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Writing at World Review, economic analyst Bernard Siman asks whether Europe could handle a new wave of “refugees” escaping Egypt this time.

Greece and Cyprus are the closest European countries to Egypt in Africa.

There has been little, if any, public discussion of possible scenarios, let alone serious crisis planning, whether politically, economically, administratively or militarily.

This is potentially a huge scale multi-dimensional problem.

Egypt’s 82.5 million population is separated from the Schengen area’s most eastern point of entry at Cyprus by 500 kilometres of Mediterranean Sea.

Any mass population movement fleeing Egypt’s violence – and in extremis civil war – will potentially be a game-changer at a time of serious and combined financial and economic crisis across Europe.

Austerity, deep financial cuts, widespread and vocal populist discontent about multiculturalism and immigration are affecting the eurozone and Cyprus and Greece in particular – the two Schengen members closest to the north Egyptian coast.

It is hard to say whether any naval crisis-planning exists to deal with such a sudden mass influx of Egyptian boat-people in the eastern Mediterranean.

Civil War in Egypt?

Egypt is descending into prolonged instability at best and civil war at worst. Both are likely to lead to increased migration through normal individual arrangements or mass exits.

The impact will not just be Europe’s to suffer….

See all of our posts on Malta (and Italy) going back almost 6 years and the problems they face with migrants arriving from Libya to get an idea of what Cyprus and Greece might face.  The US State Department has already set a dangerous precedent by transforming Malta’s illegal alien Africans into refugees being resettled now in your cities.  What is to stop them doing the same for (Muslim Brotherhood???) Egyptians arriving on Cyprus?