Category: Europe

Netherlands to crackdown on asylum seekers, especially Somalis

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I guess they have finally said, enough is enough, and this member state of the European Union is taking matters into its own hands.  Hurrah for the Dutch!

From Crossroads magazine:

Foreign nationals who come to the Netherlands with the intention to abuse the asylum procedures will also be dealt with outside the European Union. Experts from the Netherlands and the Ukraine have agreed to cooperate in identifying foreign nationals, in investigating travel routes, and in taking measures to combat human smuggling and human trafficking. Dutch State Secretary for Justice Albayrak made agreements about this with the Ukraine during the EU Migration Conference in Prague, which conference included the participation of countries to the east and southeast of the European Union.

Research has revealed, for instance, that Somali asylum seekers, currently the largest group of asylum seekers desiring admittance to the European Union, are being smuggled into the Netherlands through the Ukraine. About half the Somalis state to have received help during the journey, whether or not against payment. Afghans and Pakistanis are also entering the European Union through the eastern borders of the European Union.

Maybe Geert Wilders “speech” is breaking through to the political powers in the Netherlands afterall.

Al-Shabaab’s hip-hop recruitment video, hundreds recruited

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

According to this article from CNN (Hat tip: Women against Sharia blog), al-Shabaab is using western style hip-hop in a recruitment film— a strategy believed to have been master-minded by the American-Somali we told you about here.    It is not clear to me if this is another video or whether CNN is just a month late in catching on to the story.  Nonetheless, here it is.

Intelligence experts say the video was probably made in recent weeks and comes on the heels of an audio message in March purportedly from Osama bin Laden. In that recording, the al Qaeda leader calls on his “Muslim brothers in Mujahid Somalia” to overthrow President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed for cooperating with the West.

Al-Shabaab is the militant Islamic wing in Somalia. It means “Youth” in Arabic.

“We’re seeing perhaps their most sophisticated attempt so far to really reach an audience of potential recruits in America, and that’s one of the things that made that video very significant,” said Ben Venzke of the IntelCenter, a Washington-based research group that tracks al Qaeda’s development and messages.

“They’re casting it in a way that’s going to speak to the youth of today,” Venzke said. “Most of the time, what we’re seeing in their videos directly parallels what the groups are doing operationally, what they are targeting, where they’re recruiting.”

It has been quiet for sometime now on the Somali missing youth story that we have followed since last November, but this CNN report has added a bit more new information in addition to the old news about the recruitment film.

Sheik Ahmed Matan knows that (that recruiters are speaking to today’s youth) firsthand. A respected member of Britain’s Somali community, Matan said he knows of hundreds of young Somali men who have returned to Somalia for terrorist training. 

“A lot of young people from here, from America, from Canada, from everywhere from Europe — they went there,” he said.

He added that these men are capable of being sent back home to conduct terrorist operations, even suicide bombings.

“It can be, they can train anytime and send them here, anytime,” Matan said.

Hundreds!  That is the first time we have heard that hundreds of former refugee youths have returned to Somalia for terrorist training.   Matan goes on to say that mosques in Great Britain must be monitored to root out recruitment activity—FAT CHANCE!  British authorities are the biggest chickens in dealing with Islam on any level.

Greece “can’t cope” with illegal aliens seeking asylum

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

From the Washington Times, my favorite paper, yesterday:

PATRAS, Greece — Every day since he arrived in Greece two years ago, Mohamadi al-Raza has woken up in this port city wishing he could make it across the Mediterranean to Italy.

The 24-year-old Afghan refugee, who said he fled his country “because of the wars, the mafias and the Taliban,” has lived for months inside a makeshift refugee encampment – a five-minute walk from the barbed-wire gates of the port.

Like thousands of other Afghan refugees, Mr. al-Raza is stuck on the threshold of Western Europe, because he landed first in Greece. Rules in the European Union won’t let him go any farther.

As part of his daily routine, Mr. al-Raza tries to creep into one of the trucks that leave the port on ferriesfive times a day for the Italian coast and comes back at night after another failed attempt. “It’s like a regular job,” he said.

Smugglers bring them to Greece on the frontier of Europe from all over Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

Mr. al-Raza is one of about 1,300 Afghans in the encampment. Local nongovernmental organizations say most paid about $13,300 to smugglers to reach Patras, passing through Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and the Greek islands of the Aegean Sea.

According to the Patras coast guard, the Afghans are among 4,000 illegal immigrants waiting for a chance to sneak out of Greece. The others come from elsewhere in South Asia, Iraq and Somalia.

One of many pitfalls of being in the European Union is that illegal aliens must be processed in the first European country in which they land.    That is why besides Greece, the island of Malta which we have reported on extensively has had such a difficult time with thousands arriving illegally on its shores.  (Use our search function to learn more about Malta.)

Under EU rules, the first country an immigrant reaches is supposed to deal with asylum requests. However, Greece, which claims it has become the most targeted entry point into the European Union, is hardly ever the refugees’ preferred destination. Most would rather live in Germany, France, Britain or Sweden.

The local people have had enough.

At first, people were helpful with the migrants,” said Kristos Karapiperis, an official with the Greek Red Cross. But in 2006, the settlement reached an unprecedented size and people started to get afraid, he said.

“People actually began to see the camp,” which prompted protests amid the local population, he said, especially among truck drivers and employees of the ferry companies who resent the delays and the financial losses from illegal immigration.

“It’s creating a huge societal and economic problem,” said Konstantinos Bitsios, the general secretary of the Greek Interior Ministry. “I’m not ashamed to say we cannot cope with it,” he said, referring to the rise in asylum seekers and other illegal immigrants.

One thing Greece could do is get out of the European Union and set its OWN laws to protect its OWN country, but it won’t.

Previously we told you about immigrant violence in Greece here and here.

Sweden: Highest number of rapes of any European country…

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

…. high Muslim immigrant population blamed.  From Europe News:

“According to a new study from the Crime Prevention Council, Brå, it is four times more likely that a known rapist is born abroad, compared to persons born in Sweden. Resident aliens from Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia dominate the group of rape suspects. According to these statistics, almost half of all perpetrators are immigrants.”

Read it all.   And, see my earlier post about Muslim immigration killing Sweden, here.

Europe’s rightward lurch: lesson for America

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This morning I see there was a thought-provoking essay by author Bruce Bawer (While Europe Slept) posted at the the Infidel Blogger’s Alliance yesterday.  Bawer maintains that Europe is heading to the political right while America goes left.   However, it seems that it may be too late to save some European countries already strained to the breaking point by unchecked Muslim immigration and a socialist welfare system that cannot survive the onslaught.

These are the concluding paragraphs:

Who will win the war for the soul of Western Europe? The Islamofascists and their multiculturalist appeasers, many of whom seem to believe that their job is not to defend democracy but to help make the transition to Shariah as smooth as possible? The nativist cryptofascists? Or Pim Fortuyn’s freedom-loving heirs? Interestingly, while Western Europeans have been heading in one direction, Americans have chosen to go the other way, replacing a president more loathed by the European elite than any in history with a man whom the same elite has celebrated to an unprecedented degree, often depicting his election as a mystical act of atonement for all of America’s past sins, real or imagined.

The final question, then, is whether the Western European left’s condescension toward America, and the American left’s habit of holding Western Europe up as a socialist paradise, can survive the combination of Europe’s right turn and the elevation of Barack Obama. Stir in the international financial crisis, which will almost certainly cause a socioeconomic upheaval of untold dimensions in both hemispheres, and it seems reasonable to expect that the old pattern may be broken for good. Meaning that American professors will have a far less stressful time of it at European cocktail parties—at least until Shariah comes along and forbids cocktails entirely.

Please read it all.