Category: Greeley/Swift/Somali controversy

CAST continues its demonstrations against Shariah law in Greeley

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Members of CAST, Coloradans Against Shariah Taskforce, continued their vigil outside the Greeley, CO, Swift and Co. meatpacking plant and handed out literature about the danger of Shariah Law taking root in the American workplace.  See all the latest here at New English Review’s Iconoclast.  For our first post on the demonstrations last Saturday, go here.

Ramadan begins on August 21st and it is believed that Swift could cave-in to Muslim demands for religious accommodations that hurt other workers at the plant.  To understand all the background on this issue that has been on-going for a year, see our special category on the topic here.

Ft. Morgan gets an African Community Center to benefit Cargill and all will be well

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Maybe, maybe not.   Here is another article about Ft. Morgan, Co, a meatpacking town that seems to be opening its arms to African refugees.   Although there are a few glitches—like car accidents—not to worry, they have a ‘community organizing center’ likely paid for by the taxpayer that is expected to make everything go smoothly.   They want to avoid all that bad stuff that happens in Greeley.

So what’s a few car accidents anyway? 

The crash [a deadly crash] has also spurred a new African-run community center to start teaching English and the rules of the road to the new immigrants, including people from Kenya, Congo, and Ethiopia. But some readers of the local newspaper, the Fort Morgan Times, have suggested that the immigrants shouldn’t be allowed to drive.

Fort Morgan’s police department doesn’t keep data on accidents by race, Lt. Darin Sagel said. But Mayor Jack Darnell said it appeared the immigrants are “having a disproportionate amount of accidents,” most of them minor fender-benders.

“And they realize it. They are trying to adjust,” Darnell said.

Sagel said the accidents may be the result of not being accustomed to a new environment.

The environment?  What the heck?  Didn’t they get drivers’ licenses by passing a test?  What the article doesn’t tell you in response to that logical question is that there are massive drivers license scams throughout the US where translators receive payment under the table for “helping” immigrants with a few answers on the written test.

Cargill recruited the Africans with the help of the US State Department and now to help Cargill the African Community Center helps the Somalis and other Africans adjust.

The Africans chose Fort Morgan as their new home largely because of the presence of  Cargill Meat Solutions Corp., a Wichita, Kan.-based firm that has hired more than 360 of them, said Ibrahim Abdi, who also runs the community center.

Cargill’s wages start at $12.45 an hour for jobs from cleaning to packaging meat, Ali said. The plant employed about 20 percent of Fort Morgan’s 10,800 residents in 2007. 

Besides the U.S. government, Abdi said Somalis are grateful for Cargill.

“They gave us work, and they gave us a way to live,” Abdi said.

Center volunteers drive people to doctor’s appointments or help them find housing, another big issue. As many as 100 immigrants, most of them single men, stay in motels because there aren’t enough apartments or because they want to get a job before signing a lease, center leaders said.

So, to summarize, the Morgan African Community Center is surely a taxpayer-funded organization that supplements Cargill.  Maybe Cargill should be funding the community center!   Has any enterprising reporter looked into the funding arrangements for what amounts to another Ethnic Community Based Organization, a pet project of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).  I wonder if former Kansas governor Sebelius , now Secretary of Health and Human Services which oversees the ORR, was a friend of Cargill?   Remember the Clintons were friends of Iowa meatpackers and that is how we got so many Bosnian refugees.

As Ramadan demands are expected at the Swift plant in Greeley, Ft. Morgan is sure they will dodge the bullet because they now have a “community center.”

Abdi said the center also has acted as a mediator to prevent the kind of discord that arose among Somali Muslims and their employers around the country over prayer rituals.

In Greeley, about 50 miles west of Fort Morgan, the JBS Swift & Co. meatpacking plant fired more than 100 workers during Ramadan last year after evening-shift workers walked out, saying the firm refused to allow their breaks to coincide with sunset so they could pray. At the time, Swift said they had tried to accommodate workers’ lunch schedules by more than an hour.

There have been no such problems in Fort Morgan, workers say.

Yet anyway!

Note to the Ft. Morgan Times:  I still have your editorial of last September at my fingertips.

I’ve written a lot about Ft. Morgan but don’t have the energy to put all the links in here, so just type Ft. Morgan into our search function to learn more.

CAST: Taking a stand against the spread of Shariah law

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update August 14th:  Protests continue, here.

Amid all the very large and angry demonstrations occurring over the last week and planned for the coming weeks on Obamacare, a small cheerful band of patriots stood outside the JBS Swift meatpacking plant  in Greeley, CO on Saturday to declare that Shariah law was not going to get a foothold in America.   Coloradans against Shariah Task Force (CAST) maintain, as do we, that when meatpacking companies and other employers give in to religious demands by Muslim employees for special workplace accommodation that is the beginning of the Stealth Jihad.  See my first report about CAST here.

This protest in Greeley (the birthplace of Al-Qaeda) in advance of Ramadan, the Muslim holiday which surely portends another contentious month in meatpacking towns across the country, is believed to be the first time that citizens have stood up to tell the public of the dangers they see with employers caving to Muslim (Somalis mostly in this case) demands.  By elevating Islamic requirements to the highest concern in workplace functioning, these demands are detrimental to other ethnic and religious workers in the plant.

Although the Greeley Tribune interviewed CAST leader Michael Gale, little mention was made of the real purpose of the demonstration.  See the Greeley Tribune coverage here (very strange, I know the paper had more the other day, I saw it!).   Read Jerry Gordon’s reports here and here.

Here is my recent post about Greeley and the Somalis filing Civil Rights complaints against Swift.

To catch up on this contentious issue, visit our entire category on the Greeley/Grand Island Swift controversy going back to last year here.

Greeley Group plans anti-sharia protest Saturday

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Citizens of Greeley, CO, fed up with the stealth jihad they see going on with Muslim employees of the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant there (demanding religious accommodations during Ramadan) are planning to protest Saturday.  Long-time readers will recall that we followed the Somali protests and subsequent firings there last year.   For new readers  (and others who need a refresher), please see our entire category(69 posts) on the subject here.

Jerry Gordon writing at New English Review yesterday tells us what is being planned, here.   One of the most fascinating and ironic aspects of what is happening in Greeley is that Greeley is considered instrumental in the historical development of the radical Islamic ideology that spawned Osama bin Laden.

On Saturday, August 8th, a Greeley, Colorado pro-Israel Christian Zionist group, The Celebration Congregation will protest a Somali effort to impose Sharia in this Front Range community in the foothills of the Rockies. They are doing this to take a stand against creeping Islamization in their home community and America. They have done this before in protests against anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian groups at a Denver area Presbyterian Church and the University of Denver in 2005 and 2006.

Greeley, Colorado, as Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer Prize winning author of “The Looming Tower” has written, is the birthplace of Al Qaeda. That is where in 1948, an Egyptian foreign exchange student, Sayyid Qutb, was so offended by American culture, especially ‘obscene’ close slow dancing which he witnessed at a Church social, that he resolved to fight it by returning to the roots of Jihadist Political Islam and Sharia. His book “Milestones” chronicled his spiritual epiphany in Greeley. Subsequently he was jailed, tried and hung by the late Egyptian President and dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser. His writing was the foundation of what became the Al Qaeda movement headed by Osama bin Laden, the perpetrator of 9/11.

So it is ironic that the legacy of Qutb has returned to Greeley in the form of Somali immigrant workers at the JBS Swift & Company meat packing plant there.

Gordon also discusses the ethnic conflicts going on at this plant between long-time Hispanic workers and the Somali refugee workers brought in by the US State Department.  To learn more, read on.

Also for new readers:

The US State Department has admitted over 80,000 Somali refugees to the US in the last 25 years and then last year had to suspend family reunification because widespread immigration fraud was revealed through DNA testing.

Civil rights complaints have been filed in Greeley, CO

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Possibly related story update:  I almost forgot Blulitespecial sent me this link yesterday about E Coli tainted meat being recalled from this very same meatpacking plant in Greeley.  Seems some people are getting sick around the country.  How safe is our food supply?

 

The Denver Post this week published another of those puff-piece stories about how Somalis, former refugees,* are blending nicely into Greeley, CO, opening shops and getting along just great with the local people—the same template story (later corrected by city officials) we heard from Newsweek about the Somalis in Lewiston, ME.  

So after wading through the article I find there is “related news” tacked on at the end—-Somalis have filed a civil rights complaint with federal and state officials about their supposed mistreatment at the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant which employs about 300 of them.

Complaints center around alleged mistreatment by Hispanic supervisors, while Swift & Co. is scrambling to give the Somalis what they demand.  Apparently bidets for Somalis were not enough to satisfy them!

GREELEY — State and federal civil-rights officials are investigating claims that Somali workers at the JBS Swift Beef Co. meatpacking plant were mistreated.

Complaints have been filed with state officials and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said Steve Chavez, director of the Colorado Civil Rights Division.

Chavez met with Somalis in Greeley last week. He said federal officials are taking the lead on the investigation.

EEOC officials declined to comment.

Concerns surfaced last year after JBS managers refused to let late-shift Somalis pray at sunset during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Workers walked off the job, and more than 100 were fired. Somali workers have since claimed ongoing issues with their Latino supervisors, Chavez said.

“They believe they were treated differently because they were Somalis,” he said.

JBS spokesman Chandler Keys said the company has attempted to accommodate religious practices by installing foot washes in locker rooms for foot-cleansing prior to prayer and bidet-type spray devices on toilets to assist with cleansing after using the rest room.

Be sure to see my post last night on the strategy being used to disrupt communities to bring about “change.”

Greeley and the historical roots of radical Islam. 

The irony of all of this happening in Greeley, CO is surely not lost on the Islamists driving these demands for religious accommodation.  I have speculated before that they are having a good laugh over the fact that Greeley is considered the birthplace of some of the most extreme Islamic fundamentalism rampant in the world today.

This is what I told you last September when much of the controversy with the Somalis and Swift & Co. came to our attention.

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.

*To new readers:    

The US State Department has admitted over 80,000 Somali refugees to the US in the last 25 years and then last year had to suspend family reunification because widespread immigration fraud was revealed through DNA testing.