Could there be racial bigotry among practitioners of the religion of peace?

Fighting a war on two fronts! Some Muslims believe “we shouldn’t talk about anti-blackness within the community, because we’re under siege by Islamophobes. This is not the right time to air internal laundry.”

(Kameelah Rashad, University of Pennsylvania)

 
Yup, you know it is true!  Or, why would Somali Muslims, for example, want to build their own mosques in a community where  the Arab Muslims already had one?
Also, according to The Atlantic there is a split between immigrant Muslims (many black) and the long-established (well-off) Arabs in America.  The tension within the ‘community’ burst in to full-flower, we are told, at a December Muslim conference in Toronto.

Kameelah Rashad (right) with Linda Sansour. Rashad says she is fighting a war on two fronts—racism within Muslim ‘community’ and Islamophobia everywhere else. Photo: http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/jehron_muhammad/Jehron-Muhammad-Why-do-Muslims-have-to-apologize-for-the-actions-of-a-few.html

The article is a bit disjointed (or maybe it is me!).  Or, could that be because the author can’t quite present the politically-incorrect information in a straightforward manner?
[BTW, when you have a few minutes look around at the many historical reports about how light-skinned Arab Muslims enslaved Africans for over a thousand years.]
Here are a few snips of Emma Green’s article at The Atlantic (emphasis is mine):

Muslim Americans Are United by Trump—and Divided by Race

When weary Muslims gathered in Toronto in December for an annual retreat, marking the end of a tumultuous U.S. election year, they probably didn’t expect the event to turn into a referendum on racial tensions within the American Muslim community. But it did.

[….]

Even though slightly less than one-third of American Muslims are black, according to Pew Research Center, American Muslims are most often represented in the media as Arab or South Asian immigrants. The distinction between the African-American Muslim experience and that of their immigrant co-religionists has long been a source of racial tension in the Muslim community, but since the election, things have gotten both better and worse. While some Muslims seem to be paying more attention to racism because of Donald Trump, others fear that any sign of internal division is dangerous for Muslims in a time of increased hostility.

While the Toronto conference was upsetting, Evans [Ubaydullah Evans, the executive director of the American Learning Institute for Muslims, who is black] said, he doesn’t think it’s representative of the biggest racial problems in the American Muslim community. White racism toward black people is “not the kind of racism that circumscribes my life as an American Muslim,” he told me. “It’s the social racism I experience from people of Arab descent, of Southeast Asian descent. This is the racism no one is talking about.” [Wait!  I thought only white Europeans could be racists! Arabs too?—ed]

[….]

The wave of immigration that shaped today’s American Muslim population began in the 1960s, after Congress lifted previous race-based restrictions on immigration. In many ways, this surge was directly connected to the work of black Muslims and others involved in the civil-rights movement: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed far greater numbers of people from Asia and Africa to emigrate to the U.S. As of 2014, an estimated 61 percent of Muslims were immigrants, according to Pew, and another 17 percent were the children of immigrants. Many of the perceived racial tensions among Muslims come from conflicts between these immigrant communities and non-immigrants, who are often black.

[….]

Omar Suleiman (Dallas Imam): American Muslim population segregated by ethnicity and income.

“Immigrant Muslims had a convenient comfort zone,” said Omar Suleiman, an imam based in Dallas with a large online following. As each new immigrant community established its own mosques and community centers, portions of the Muslim American population became segregated by ethnicity and income.

For non-black Muslims who grew up in the suburbs, attended private schools, and rarely encountered black Muslims in their mosques, it’s easy “to internalize many of the poisonous notions about the black community that … diminish the pain of those communities,” he said.

“I think a lot of African American Muslims see a hypocrisy sometimes with immigrant Muslims,” said Saba Maroof, a Muslim psychiatrist with a South Asian background who lives in Michigan. “We say that Muslims are all equal in the eyes of God, that racism doesn’t exist in Islam.” And yet, cases of overt racism aren’t uncommon, like when South Asian or Arab immigrant parents don’t want their kids to marry black Muslims. “That happened in my family,” she said.

[….]

Some Muslims believe “we shouldn’t talk about anti-blackness within the community, because we’re under siege by Islamophobes. This is not the right time to air internal laundry,” Rashad [Kameelah Rashad, a black Muslim chaplain at the University of Pennsylvania] said. But “if I have to contend with anti-Muslim bigotry outside of the Muslim community, and within my own community, I’m having to push back on anti-black racism, I’m kind of fighting a war on two fronts.”

There is much more, continue reading here.
Melting pot myth exploded!
So, not only do we have a lack of assimilation among the many ethnic and religious groups we are admitting to the US, we obviously have it within Islam in America too!

"Battle of Rotterdam" on eve of historic election in the Netherlands

Invasion of Europe news….

Western Civilization is under assault: “If this continues, our culture will cease to exist.”

(A Dutch citizen of Amsterdam told The Washington Post this week)

 
All eyes will be on the Dutch election scheduled for this Wednesday!
And, if things couldn’t be more tense in the lead-up to election day, last night Turkish Muslim protestors were driven from the streets of Rotterdam by mounted police officers and water cannons.
Trumpeted The Sun:

THE BATTLE OF ROTTERDAM Dutch riot cops use batons, water cannon and horse charges to clear thousands of Turkish protesters in Rotterdam

DUTCH riot police have broken up protests by supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after Turkish ministers were barred from speaking at a rally in the Netherlands.

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the Turkish consulate in Rotterdam last night after cops prevented Turkey’s family minister from entering the building.

The Washington Post, in a lengthy story written before the Battle of Rotterdam last night, tells us what is at stake on Wednesday:

Anti-immigrant anger threatens to remake the liberal Netherlands

AMSTERDAM — Xandra Lammers lives on an island in Amsterdam, the back door of her modern and spacious four-bedroom house opening onto a graceful canal where ducks, swans and canoes glide by.

The translation business she and her husband run from their home is thriving. The neighborhood is booming, with luxury homes going up as fast as workers can build them, a quietly efficient tramway to speed residents to work in the world-renowned city center, and parks, bike paths, art galleries, beaches and cafes all within a short amble.

By outward appearances, Lammers is living the Dutch dream. But in the 60-year-old’s telling, she has been dropped into the middle of a nightmare, one in which Western civilization is under assault from the Muslim immigrants who have become her neighbors.

“The influx has been too much. The borders should close,” said Lammers, soft-spoken with pale blue eyes and brown hair that frames a deceptively serene-looking face. “If this continues, our culture will cease to exist.”

The stakes have risen sharply as Europeans’ anti-establishment anger has swelled. In interviews across the Netherlands in recent days, far-right voters expressed stridently nationalist, anti-immigrant views that were long considered fringe but that have now entered the Dutch mainstream.

Voters young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural said they would back the Geert Wilders-led Freedom Party — no longer the preserve of the “left-behinds” — which promises to solve the country’s problems by shutting borders, closing mosques and helping to dismantle the European Union.

“They’ve found a very powerful narrative,” said Koen Damhuis, a researcher at the European University Institute who studies the far right. “By creating a master conflict of the national versus the foreign, they’re able to attract support from all elements of society.”

Ronald Meulendijks has a poster of Geert Wilders in his IJburg apartment. “I think Holland will need a civil war,” he said, “between the people who don’t belong here and the real people.” (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)

[….]

“The main issue is identity,” said Joost Niemöller, a journalist and author who has written extensively on Wilders and is sympathetic to his cause. “People feel they’re losing their Dutch identity and Dutch society. The neighborhoods are changing. Immigrants are coming in. And they can’t say anything about it because they’ll be called racist. So they feel helpless. Because they feel helpless, they get angry.

Echoing a theme I’ve heard on my travels everywhere in America:

“A government has to treat its own people correctly before accepting new ones. First, you must take care of your own.”

And if the government fails, Meulendijks has dark visions of what’s to come.

“I think Holland will need a civil war,” he said, “between the people who don’t belong here and the real people.”

Continue reading here.
Did the civil war begin in Rotterdam, last night?
Americans should be enormously thankful that we have a window on our own future as we watch the invasion of the European continent.  And, now that Donald Trump is in office, we, God-willing, will not go down the path Europe has been on for way too long.
Go here for our complete ‘Invasion of Europe’ archive.  And, here for The Netherlands, Geert Wilders, here.
BTW, we heard Wilders speak as a side event at CPAC 8 years ago (2009). It was a side event because the organizers of CPAC refused his presence on the main program. (CPAC organizers have been notoriously Republican establishment dolts who never understood where the people were headed on the issues of Islam and immigration.)

Idaho refugee contractor: Refugees pay taxes!

Who are you trying to kid?
Message to the head of the local resettlement agency in Twin Falls, Idaho: It is not a good idea to start putting out information about a refugee’s tax liability that can be easily checked!

70% of the workers at Idaho dairy factories are immigrants, many illegal, however refugee labor is being employed not just at Chobani Yogurt in Twin Falls, but at the milk production end as well. https://www.pri.org/stories/2013-10-31/lesson-immigration-reform-head-idaho-dairy-farm

Zeze Rwasama spoke earlier this month to the Pocotello Rotary Club and made the claim that refugees are not getting much in the way of taxpayer support:

“Resettlement in the U.S. in not for them to become a burden to our public assistance,” Rwasama said. “Yes, we help them for only eight months. After that, they become taxpayers as well. That means we can help more. … A single refugee brought in 2014 working in a dairy made about $26,000 that year. But when you look at how much the agency spent on that person, it was only about $4,600. When you look at the W-2 form and see how much money that person paid into tax that one year, it’s actually close to that $4,600. So in one year this person has paid into the tax funds the total amount of money that was spent on him. That means we can help more because they are coming here to contribute and coming here to support themselves.”

LOL! I’m betting members of the Rotary Club were doing some mental math as he spoke—$4,600 federal tax liability on $26,000 annual income? No way!
Do you see how Rwasama has parsed his words. His dairy worker “paid into tax” close to that $4,600, but when you check his tax liability it is about $2,255 ($2,345 less than the $4,600 withheld).  He will get a tax refund of that difference—approximately $2,345!  (That tax calculation may vary depending on which year, but you get the idea!).
And, then Zeze Rwasama is only referring to the $4,600 his agency paid to subsidize the dairy farmer’s employee and doesn’t mention the medical care, food stamps and possibly even a housing subsidy that the refugee making $26,000 a year would be eligible for!
And, I just realized that what is never calculated is the cost of the overseas processing of this dairy worker: the vetting, the medical checks, the cost of sending US workers to do the paperwork.
BTW, if the dairy farm employee took a refugee wife on this salary (filing jointly) he might only pay in about $530 in federal income tax.
Rwasama’s agency would presumably have spent $4,600 on her and the couple would then have cost you $9,200 (not including Rwasama’s salary and office expenses, which you paid too!).
If you are interested, just search around for news on Idaho (Oregon, Wisconsin) dairy farms and refugees=controversy!
See our extensive Twin Falls archive by clicking here.
For all of you working in ‘pockets of resistance’ be sure to find out what industries are driving the resettlement where you live.  Look for large corporate farms, meatpackers, hotels, manufacturers requiring few skills, and anyone needing cleaning staff. (This is why you see little interest on the part of Republican leaders in Congress to reform the US Refugee Admissions Program.)
This is not about humanitarianism!
Endnote: If there is some accountant out there who has better numbers than I can find, have at it! Let me know what you find. Wouldn’t it be great if someone followed one of these dairy (or hotel, or meatpacking) workers from a camp in Thailand, Kenya or Nepal all the way through the system to see how many tax dollars support the delivery of one (captive) worker to BIG MEAT or BIG DAIRY.

Michigan: More confirmation that refugee resettlement is an industry

I don’t have enough time in my day to post all of the stories from around the country where federal refugee resettlement contractors are crying about their loss of clients and thus their loss of taxpayer funding.
But, this one from Michigan has a few extra nuggets of information that further confirms our contention that refugee resettlement is more of an industry than it is a humanitarian endeavor.

Julie Harris, St. Vincent Catholic Charities Refugee Services, photo here from one year ago this same week (what a difference a year/election makes). http://www.secondwavemedia.com/capitalgains/features/fugee1005.aspx

The Trump Administration must pressure Congress to repeal, and, if necessary, replace the Refugee Act of 1980 with its perverse incentives to place refugees (secretively) in towns that can ill afford the additional poverty.
If a town is overloaded with costly-to-support refugees, the system is set up in such a way as to conspire against rational decision-making.
Watch for these key points:

~Contractors are paid by the head, so there is no incentive for contractors to voluntarily slow the flow.

~Landlords with low income and subsidized rentals have become dependent on the arrival of poor people from the third world.

~Businesses want the cheap compliant immigrant labor.

~And, ‘refugees’ have become dependent on the idea of being able to bring over the whole family after one member scouts out your town to see if it suits them before others are brought over (with the help of those same contractors and their per head payment).

From WKAR Lansing, Michigan:

The executive orders on immigration directly impact immigrants and refugees trying to come to the US and those living here already. But the orders are also causing problems for organizations who support refugees.

[….]

There’s a call for a 120 day delay on all refugee resettlement from everywhere. And during that time presumably there will be a revision and a a reestablishment of vetting procedures. And then the other piece of that that will be hurting us is the overall reduction in the number of refugees coming in for the rest of 2017 and 2018 probably.”

And this impacts St. Vincent and other refugee resettlement organizations because they are based on a per-capita funding structure.

“All of that greatly reduces the number of refugees that we’ll be receiving, and that in turn reduces our budget. So we’ve had to do some staff reductions and layoffs and reorganizing while we’re still trying to serve the people who are here, the people who have already arrived” Harris says.

It goes beyond just St. Vincent. Harris says the community and the organizations they partner with when resettling refugees are impacted too.

“We work with a lot of different landlords and different apartment complexes and different landlords around the city and some of them have called us and said ‘what are we going to do? Who are we going to put in our housing?’

Because they rely on us because there’s a lot of folks who move in and out, and a lot of the low income places who have been very kind to the whole community, they need people to be coming in and keeping their units full. And also a lot of our employers, we work with some big companies who look forward to having a steady stream of people who come in. A lot of refugees will start off in an entry level job and they’ll work hard and after they learn English, they learn a few more things, they’ll move up. And so these companies need the steady flow of people coming in and keeping their businesses running.”

Continue reading here to learn about how the family reunification works and will be disrupted by the Trump EO.
If you are working in a ‘pocket of resistance’ investigating the program where you live, be sure to research costs, but look for those people/businesses benefiting from the refugees.  Remind your fellow (taxpaying) citizens that there is money (for some people) in the resettlement industry.
Endnote:  I just did a quick look at USASpending.gov and see that the Diocese of Lansing gets millions of $$$ of federal funding from the usual agencies—HHS and Dept. of State, and that St. Vincent’s also got money from HUD.
They aren’t in the landlord business themselves are they?

Muslims and non-Muslims given guidance on how to fight Trump's refugee slowdown

From a publication called Truthout comes words of advice for open borders activists on how to think, organize and push back against the Trump Administration’s refugee admissions and travel pause Executive Order.
Entitled ‘A guide to resisting Muslim ban 2.0’
(Here are just a few snips of advice from author Hoda Katebi, emphasis is mine)

Two big no-nos here according to author Katebi. Don’t pretend you are a Muslim, and for Muslims, don’t wrap yourselves in American flags! Reuters photo here: http://www.rediff.com/news/report/pix-in-new-york-protesters-take-to-the-streets-to-say-i-am-muslim-too/20170220.htm

….if national security is actually the problem — if the US government actually cares about ending the killing of American citizens — why does it not start with dismantling its own police forces? These forces comprise an armed, emboldened and deadly organization that receives training from a foreign apartheid state (Israel), and kills almost 1,000 people annually (including already over 200 people this year). United States law enforcement officers are a larger threat to the safety and security of individuals living in this country (particularly Black and Indigenous people) than “radical Islam” — whatever that means — ever will be.  [Any sane person could see immediately the anarchy, looting and lawlessness that would engulf US cities in minutes if law enforcement officers stood down or were non-existent!—ed]

In fact, it is important to recognize that “national security” is only a code word for anti-Muslim policies domestically, as well as the justification for US military violence against Muslim communities internationally, which is often erased from public view.

[….]

Wherever you see it, challenge the normalization of bans on immigration and refugee resettlement. Do not ignore the rhetoric of the people around you. Do not think that this is OK. Do not think that this can go unchallenged. Here are some things to remember and steps to take as we move forward:

[….]

4. Do not make compromises. Do not compromise your values for the sake of having an extra white person join your protest.

[….]

6. As always, be intersectional. Half of the officially banned countries are Black-majority countries. Black, Muslim immigrants and refugees are oftentimes left out from both Black and Muslim spaces, so be intentional about centering those who are on the margins of the margins. Beyond making sure not to exclude your own people, keep in mind that Customs and Border Patrol, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security, municipal law enforcement and other violent institutions that target people of color are just different enforcement mechanisms with the same goal: upholding white supremacy. You cannot succeed by ignoring those relationships.

And for our non-Muslim allies:

1. Show up. Support the ongoing efforts of Muslim-led organizing in resisting the ban. If you’re an immigration lawyer, volunteer. If you’re a teacher, connect your Muslim students to resources, and talk to your class about what is happening. If you’re a journalist, document the movement. Share the work of Muslim artists, writers, creators, organizers and scholars. Hold your racist friends and family accountable.

2. Do not claim an identity that is not yours. No, you are not #Muslimtoo — and claiming such only covers the voices of actual Muslims trying to share their real experiences. Rather, listen to the leadership, direction and experiences of Muslims who are speaking out and up. [Non-Muslim activists must listen to Muslims! Do what you are told!—ed]

3. Be careful not to perpetuate anti-Muslim undertones in your conversations. When talking about the Muslim ban, do not challenge it by saying there have been “no fatal attacks by immigrants from countries listed in the Muslim ban.” While that is true, this not only provides a justification for banning immigration from countries that have had someone commit violence, but also legitimizes collective punishment. Also, we are not all immigrants — that concept erases the histories of Indigenous people native to this land and Black people who were forcibly enslaved and brought here. Moreover, a Muslim refugee from a country the United States destabilized is not the same as an immigrant from the UK who is here getting a PhD. See Number. Another thing: Stop draping American flags over our hijabs.

I recommend that you read the whole thing, here.