Update October 8th: Contentious hearing ends with Somali Islamic Center withdrawing its plan, here.
Update: I have just heard from the editor of the St. Cloud Times who asked me to remove their copyrighted story. I am therefore honoring his request.
St. Cloud is a city on the Mississippi River in central Minnesota with a population of about 66,000. Although no one seems to have the definitive answer (a published number that I could find!), I’m told the Somali population has grown to over 10,000. Now the Somalis want a mosque, a school and an entire Islamic complex in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
Organized opposition (see below for their website) has grown and tonight the City Council could vote (after hearing from residents) to support their Planning Commission’s recommendation for the Mosque and School portion of the proposed plan.
This is the news we have removed from the St. Cloud Times (please follow the link to the story).
Were they planning a city within a city for THEIR people?
One of the first questions I have is where is all the money coming from for this ambitious project? Saudi Arabia? The city’s Somali population has grown rapidly in only a few years and is largely made up of ‘poor’ “refugees,” right? Primary employment for Somalis in the area is in meatpacking. They can’t possibly be getting rich doing that!
How did the population grow?
And, if you are wondering how so many Somalis got there—thank the US State Department and their contractors, specifically Lutheran Social Service! St. Cloud had originally been a secondary migration site, but in 2010 the US State Department made it a primary resettlement city, meaning Somalis were being settled there directly from Africa rather than having migrated to St. Cloud from another US city. See our December 2010 post on the change.
Note the involvement of SASSO (an ECBO like the one in Seattle we told you about yesterday) in St. Cloud.
We have an extensive archive on St. Cloud, click here. Be sure to take a few minutes to visit this 2010 post about how the Somalis have joined forces with the hard Left to destabilize the community with one of several aims—-to get rid of Rep. Michele Bachmann whose district includes St. Cloud. She has recently announced her retirement from Congress.
If you want to do something, visit the website for the group (St. Cloud Citizens for Responsible Zoning) opposing the zoning change, here.
Note they have a petition you can sign.
But, if you really want to do something more permanent—someone needs to thoroughly research how St. Cloud is being changed by Muslim migrants and write a book about it and get as much media attention as possible for its release.
A friend asked me in an e-mail this morning about how one reaches Members of Congress on what is happening and how they are funding community organizing by Muslim groups, and I told her that they aren’t going to listen until the issue gets to the national stage. A book would help get it there. And, hey, the book could include several other small cities being transformed—Lewiston, ME comes to mind! Update! how about Ft. Morgan, CO too!
One more thing! Read this post from 2008 about the stages of the Quiet Jihad in Minnesota.
Just because there aren’t planes flying into buildings doesn’t mean it isn’t jihad.