Another ‘recruited for jihad’ story from Minneapolis

The Minneapolis Star Tribune has another article this past Saturday highlighting the life and the disappearance of a Somali Muslim (former refugee) youth believed to have joined the Jihad in Somalia.    It begins:

Six months have passed since Mustafa Ali vanished from St. Paul. His family is left to wonder how he got to Somalia and why.

The article goes on to lay out the theory that Mustafa (who had been in the US since he was a baby!) was lured back to Somalia because of indoctrination he received at his neighborhood mosque.   Although there isn’t much new, please read the whole story here. 

And, then check out the much more interesting comments (there are 92 at the time of this writing).    Commenter ‘Momsbasement’ tells you why you should hurry on over to read the comments.

WOW. . . .I CAN’T BELIEVE STAR TRIBUNE IS ALLOWING COMMENTS ON ONE OF THEIR DIVERSITY GROUP ARTICLE.

Usually these comments are censored to the point where only comments that favor the diversity side of the issue are allowed to post. Don’t be surprised to see all these comments deleted real soon and a disclaimer posted by Star Tribune “due to the sensitive nature of this article all post will be review before they are posted”. That’s what they did last time.

Note to new readers:   To catch up on this story we have been following for months, start here.

Missing Somali youths press conference cancelled yesterday

I should have mentioned this yesterday, but there really isn’t much to report here.  I did decide to post this little bit just to keep our chronological order of events up to date.

Imams, community leaders, and parents of Somali youth who have disappeared in recent months planned a press conference in response to recent media coverage. But disagreements led the organizers to cancel the event.

[…..] 

Members of the Somali community organized a press conference to take place in Cedar-Riverside today to respond to the media coverage. It was not immediately clear why the press conference was canceled.

It is not clear to me why the press conference was called in the first place.

Somalis not transitioning well in Shelbyville, TN either

I just now wrote a post about an NPR interview that suggests, among other things, that the Minnesota missing Somali youths lured to Somalia by jihadists hadn’t “transitioned well” to America.   Now comes news that Shelbyville, TN has some youths (men!) having problems too.

Khat was confiscated from a vehicle Thursday after police responded to complaints of offensive behavior in the parking lot of the state employment office on North Main Street.

Saad Kassim Omar, 27, of Nashville, was charged with possession of a schedule IV drug and disorderly conduct, Bedford County Jail records show.

Omar and Zein Hussein Bonaya, 27, whose address was not listed in reports, allegedly were drinking, begging money, and making lewd comments to passing women, police said.

Here is a plan for all those not transitioning well, let’s give them a one-way ticket  to join their brethren in Somalia.

We have written extensively on problems with Somalis in Shelbyville, TN.  I wish now we had made an entire category for the topic.   Since we didn’t, you can use our ‘search’ function for Shelbyville and follow the trials that Tennessee town is facing.

Past posts on Khat are here.

NPR paints picture of missing Somali ‘youths’ as victims

Here is a lengthy article from NPR plus a link to a fascinating interview with the uncle of one of the Minneapolis Somali refugee young men—you know, the ones who have reportedly gone to become jihadists in Somalia.

I highly recommend listening to the interview with its discussion about who on earth could be “brainwashing the children?”   Who indeed?  It must have been some dastardly plot by the Jews, right?   Wrong!   It was the local mosque (although the Imam is now denying it), the place where the “children” congregated because there aren’t enough “resources for the youths” in this obviously closed Somali community.

At one point in the interview the reporter asks, ‘is there any common denominator,’ involving those who disappeared?   Did they not transition well?   In fact there are some common denominators.  They lived in a closed Somali community.  All were raised by single moms and all attended the mosque regularly (we know this from many other previous reports).

Hassan’s single-parent existence is mirrored by the other young men who have disappeared. All of them were reared by single mothers, and all of them were particularly devout Muslims. They all prayed and signed up for youth programs at two local mosques — one near The Towers and another across the river in St. Paul. The local mosque was Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center, the biggest mosque in Minneapolis and just a stone’s throw from The Towers. The Dawah Institute in St. Paul was the other.

Dawah is in a converted cinder block storefront in a deserted strip mall. There are rows of plywood shelves to store shoes at the front door. Masking tape marks off lanes on the carpet, so those who come here for prayers can line up in regimental rows. On a recent evening, Imam Hassan Mohamud is helping a small group of young men and women memorize the Koran. According to the missing boys’ parents, their sons spent a lot of time here. Many spent the night.

The imam said that the young men might have come for the occasional prayer, but he didn’t know them personally.

“We are not missing any single student who is connected to the mosque and the Dawah Islamic center,” he says. “And that has to be very clear.”

An identity crisis, of course that is it!

Nearly all of the young men who have disappeared lived in The Towers. Take an elevator up to any floor, and the doors open to reveal hallways that look 1970s public housing chic — all fluorescent lights and linoleum tile. The floors gleam, as if they have just been waxed. Women gossip at one end of the hallway. Their sons skip down the corridors.

This is where Burhan Hassan grew up. It was easy to imagine him running up and down the hallways of this complex, fully aware that he could knock on just about any door and expect to be greeted by a fellow Somali. Omar Jamal, who runs a local legal aid society for the community, says the children who came here have had to straddle two worlds.

“Most of those kids are going through an identity crisis,” says Jamal. “They don’t know who to belong to: ‘Who are they? Who am I? I am not American, I am not Somali.’ I see them as victims.”

Victims of fatherlessness, victims of ‘not enough resources,’ victims of not transitioning well, victims, always victims.  Omar Jamal (mentioned in all these posts), who should have been deported years ago after his conviction  for immigration fraud, has figured out very well how to play the victim card.   What about victims of this ‘diversity is beautiful’ garbage promoted by resettlement agencies?  What about victims of radical Islamic teachings by local MOSQUE leaders and other ADULTS?

Now, go back and read Judy’s post of earlier today, ‘Not everybody “is just like us.”‘

Writer at HuffPo blames FBI for not preventing Somali terrorist recruitment in US

First,  I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this opinion piece at the Huffington Post this morning that readily admits terrorist recruitment and indoctrination is occurring in the US Somali community.  The writer, Faisal Roble (of Wardheernews) begins with a summary of the Minneapolis missing youths that I’m repeating here in case we have new readers unfamiliar with the ever-expanding story.

It is believed that as many as 20 naturalized Somali Americans have recently vanished without any prior knowledge of their parents and joined the more radical Al-Shabab, “the youth” – an Islamist firebrand aligned to al-Qaeda. Al-shabab is an extremist group whose political objective is to establish a non-secular Sharia-based government in Somalia. So far, at least one naturalized American citizen had committed suicide in this past October, killing 30 people in northern Somalia. Most available evidence points at the Al-Shabab group who either train or commit the vanished youth to suicidal acts.

Then he goes on to blame the FBI (and the Somali families) for not spotting or reporting what is going on.  My first instinct is to defend the FBI, but I can’t.  I have heard first hand that people have attempted since 9/11 to alert the FBI to strange things going on in the Somali community and have been rebuffed by the agency.

It is disconcerting to learn that both the FBI and the Somali community did little to stop the anguish of boys disappearing from their homes. This is so because there is no meaningful cooperation between FBI and the Somali community either in Minnesota or elsewhere in the country. If any cooperation existed, protecting young Somali-American boys from exploitation by “terror networks” amongst us could have been a lot easier.

Both the FBI and the Somali community are at fault here and deserve serious criticism. For one, the FBI could be blamed for sleeping at the wheel in that it had failed to unveil a “network of terror” that has been transporting high school kids from North American cities to Somalia. It should have taken a little effort on the part of FBI to find out the adults who assist 17-year-old kids from our own American inner cities get their US passports, collect transport allowance amounting $3,000 each, a well arranged rout to Mogadishu, Somalia. But the FBI has royally failed in making any dent on a “network of terror” in our midst.

At one point Roble especially points a finger at the Bush Administration for not keeping a better eye on mosques.  No doubt, they didn’t do their job, but in defense of Bush, the minute he would have suggested any sort of surveillance  of Muslims the Leftwing crazies and CAIR* would have been on him like a big bird!  And, if Roble, a big fan of Obama’s,  thinks Obama will be any better, forget it!

Without witch-hunt, the FBI must seriously investigate the role of local mosques ran by extremist-leaning Islamist activists, if any, and the role they play in organizing infrastructural network for this particular operation. Unveiling these networks is a key component of national security as well as helping our vanishing Somali-American youths.

There is a lot of fascinating information in Roble’s article, so please read the whole thing.    But, to me this is one of the most astounding revelations Roble makes:

Horrendous stories, where boys as young as 12-years-old are temporarily removed from the protection of their families to commit them to a religious obligation program called “Da’wa,” are abundant in Minnesota and elsewhere. For a child to complete his religious obligations, the presiding mosque would assign a local priest as a caretaker for a bunch of boys during the entire period of the “Da’aw,” sometimes an entire summer vacation with no communication with their parents. The only information availed to the parents during this period is occasional but limited status report on the kids and the progress of their religious obligation, most often provided by the Mosque-assigned caretaker.

Maybe now that a Somali writer (I presume Roble to be a Somali American) is saying what Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch and others have been saying for years, the leftwing loonies reading the Huffington Post might start to take notice.

Endnote:  The FBI is on the alert now for terror recruitment among refugees, but this account from Atlanta suggests that they are not going about it very effectively.

*The FBI severed its ties and cooperation with CAIR just this week.  Hat tip:  Blulitespecial.   I’m wondering if CAIR had actually kept the FBI from gaining more contacts in the Somali community.