Update September 10th:   Talks break down.

Update September 8th:  Is there a cover-up?

This is a follow-up to my post this morning where I reported on protests at a Swift meatpacking plant in Greeley.  Seems non-Muslim workers have had it with the demands of Somali workers who want special accommodations in the workplace.  Said one of the protesters, “Somalis are running our plant.”  Apparently, the Somalis got violent but that went unreported in the local press.

I’ve written several posts about the influx of refugees to this area of Colorado lured apparently by the prospect of employment in the meatpacking industry.  (Sorry this may seem like a lot to wade through, but if you are really interested in this, please follow the links back.)

I first made note of the activity in July 2007 when I reported that the Office of Refugee Resettlement (US Department of Health and Human Services) was helping open a refugee office for the cities of Ft. Morgan and Greeley, which, by the way, are about 50 miles apart.

This is from the local paper last summer:

An influx of Somalian and other African refugees to Greeley and Fort Morgan is spurring the formation of a refugee and asylee office.

In the course of about a year, about 150 refugees have moved to the Fort Morgan and about 40 to Greeley. The refugees migrated here from other states, including Minnesota, primarily to pursue jobs in the meatpacking industry, said Paul Stein, Colorado state refugee coordinator.

The office is funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services office of Refugee Resettlement, through the Colorado Department of Human Services’ Refugee Services Program.

This told me at the time that the meatpacking industry, in this case Swift and Cargill, were in the process of bringing Somali refugees to the area and the federal government was in on the plan.   The purpose of this office is to facilitate all the other aspects of the worker’s lives:  apartments, food stamps, medical care and English lessons, etc.  In other words, you are subsidizing the labor needs of these giants by taking care of the other needs of the imported workers.  To hell with the American workers who have to take care of their own needs and to hell with the community that gets overrun.  

So if Swift is getting shafted now, they brought it on themselves!

Then here is an update, again in July 2007, where the prayer issue raises its ugly head in Greeley/Ft. Morgan.

Another article that attracted my interest involved four questionable Somali men, or at least questionable to me!  Perhaps it is nothing more than an example of the annoying State Department practice of bringing hordes of single men ‘refugees’ to the US (yes, and I bet you were thinking most refugees were sweet women with needy kids), but this account of Somalis in Greeley looked strange to me.  (This is from an AP story that I now see is no longer available).

GREELEY, Colo. — The four Somalis moved into the apartment last August, six floors up in a downtown Greeley building. The living room is furnished with only a metal folding chair and small table covered in papers and a laptop computer. A Somali flag, a white star against light blue, is the only wall hanging, draped behind the table.

They sound like 4 guys really hankering to be Americans don’t they?

And finally from this news account a month ago, one could tell things were not going well in the community with refugees who had come to Ft. Morgan and Greeley to work for meatpackers.

Here is the answer to my comment at this morning’s post about what role Greeley played in the birth of Al Qaeda.   Sayed Qtub had come for a visit:

Communism had Karl Marx. Al Qaedaism has Sayed Qtub. Who’s he, most people would ask. The ideology that nurtured modern Islamic extremism, and spawned every violent movement from Hezbollah to al Qaeda, was born in 1952 when Qtub, an Egyptian writer, returned from studying American literature at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colo.

The tipping point from detached observer to extremist ideologue took place at a church dance in Greeley when, as Qtub recalled in “The America I Saw,” the pastor dimmed the lights and put on the come-hither number “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” a hit tune from the MGM movie “Neptune’s Daughter” — a guy, girl and bathing suit lemon — with Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban.

“The room,” Qtub wrote “became a confusion of feet and legs; arms twisted around hips; lips met lips; chests pressed together,” That was the scene that turned him off American culture in particular and Western culture in general — and onto Islamic fundamentalism.

Read more here and consider how Greeley could just be an excellent target city in which Shariah might be planted in America.   The irony.