Two would-be jihadists nabbed by feds as they leave NJ for Somalia

Update June 13th: Many readers will recognize this photo published again today at Gateway Pundit, Death to all Juice, turns out that the guy with the sign is one of these Jersey Jihadists!

Update June 8th: Somali professor blames it on the internet and radicalization at mosques, here.

Update June 7th: The Star Ledger tells us more about the Jersey Jihadists, here.   Almonte converted to Islam about 5 years ago.

Update: Fox News is reporting that Alessa is of Palestinian descent and was born here.   Almonte they say was born in the Dominican Republic.

Breaking News this morning!   Two young men, both American citizens, were intercepted by the feds as they attempted to board a plane to join Al-Shabaab in Somalia.

Here is a bit of a very detailed story about Operation Arabian Knight from The Star Ledgers’ NJ.com:

Two New Jersey men intent on killing American troops were arrested Saturday as they boarded flights to link up with a virulent jihadist group in Somalia, authorities said.

The men, both North Jersey residents, were charged with conspiring to commit an act of international terrorism through a group tied to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network, according to officials familiar with the details of the arrests.

Mohamed Hamoud Alessa, 20, of North Bergen, and Carlos Eduardo Almonte, 26, of Elmwood Park were apprehended at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens before they could board separate flights to Egypt, where they were to start journeys to Somalia. The men were arrested by teams of state and federal law-enforcement agents who have been investigating the pair since October 2006, according to the officials, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the operation publicly.

Late Saturday night, the state homeland security agency confirmed a police action at the airport but gave few details.

The case is similar to the one we have reported ad nauseam from Minnesota since 2008 (just search RRW for ‘somali missing youths’).

Authorities said the men planned to wage jihad as part of a Somalia-based Islamist terror group called al Shabaab, an organization of several thousand fighters spread through Somalia’s southern region. Al Shabaab, whose full Arabic name means “Mujahideen Youth Movement,” has had ties to al Qaeda since 2007, according to national security experts.*

Last year, federal authorities in Minnesota charged 14 men connected to a plot designed to entice young Americans to join up with al Shabaab. And, in February, the New York Times reported the group announced it was joining forces with the ‘’international jihad of Al Qaeda.”

As in the Minnesota case, investigators believe Alessa and Almonte were recruited by others, who are also now coming under scrutiny. “We hope this will lead to a spider web of arrests,” said one official briefed on the case.

* Isn’t that amusing, now national security experts say they knew since 2007 that Al Shabaab was connected to international terrorist groups like Al Qaeda!  Why didn’t they report that to the Senate Homeland Security Committee hearings that I attended in March 2009, here?   Senators Lieberman and Collins were very happy to hear from national security experts that the Somali missing youths were NOT connected with international terrorism.

Just a reminder that Somali reader Khadra has said that many Somali Muslim men born in the US (Hispanics too it looks like based on the name Carlos Almonte) have no intention of assimilating and are hellbent on violent Jihad.

More news! Jerry Gordon just sent this report from the Investigative Project on Terrorism on the Somali terrorist threat!  By the way, the man interviewed in this report was at the Senate hearings in 2009 and warned the Senators about the real threat—that trained Jihadists with US passports would come back!   The wheels of government work ever so slowly.

Related story yesterday: Somali Smuggler Walks, here.

Somali smuggler walks!

The Virginia man accused of illegally smuggling as many as 270 Somalis into the US is a free man today.  Unbelievable!  This is a story we first reported here.  In addition to the shocking news that he got off with time served, it turns out he had been an agent of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and another unnamed US federal agency in Kenya (FBI?  CIA? they aren’t saying).  Are they protecting us or their agent?

Here is the Canadian Press story today.  The feds couldn’t find any of the Somalis he supposedly brought to the US.  Ho hum, so what else is new!

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — This much is known about Anthony Joseph Tracy: He told government agents he helped 270 Somalians illegally enter the United States through Cuba. He flunked a lie detector test when he denied helping members of the Somali terror group al-Shabaab. He was some sort of informant for the federal government going back at least as far as 2002.

And on Friday, the Winchester, Virginia, man was sentenced to roughly four months in jail, equal to time served, and walked out a free man.

The case against Tracy, who spent significant time in Kenya running an illicit travel agency, is shrouded in secrecy. His sentencing hearing Friday was held in open court, but lawyers and the judge talked around the specifics of what he actually did.

In fact, his guilty plea, apparently entered earlier this year, remains under seal. So the exact nature of Tracy’s misconduct remains unclear. [This is a fishy story–ed]

The few court records that are unsealed indicated that federal agents have been working feverishly for months trying to find the people that Tracy said he helped enter the U.S.

He picked up a Somali trait in his travels I see—a second wife.  [Ha! A New York Times version of the story leaves out the second wife information, here.]

Tracy, who has a wife and five children in Winchester, also married a woman in an Islamic ceremony in Kenya, according to transcripts.

Be sure to read comments by Somalis Khadra and Abdi to this post about Tracy where they allege that illegal Somalis are tricking our authorities every day.

Robert Samuelson: Immigration increases US poverty, leads to the redistribution of wealth

Then what?

Roy Beck director of Numbers USA has a good piece this week in which he quotes from an article by economist Robert Samuelson.

Beck and Samuelson are discussing the issue of how high immigration levels lead to higher poverty and why on earth would thinking people and our leaders be purposefully increasing poverty levels.   Beck gets to the point in his discussion where he concludes that for the Left it’s all about the redistribution of wealth.  Why some Republican leaders are supporting more poverty remains a mystery.  But it strikes me that they still don’t want to say what seems obvious to me—immigrants are the pawns in a power play to bring crisis and chaos as taught by the masters of the diabolical strategy—Cloward and Piven— to bring down our form of government.

Here is Beck:

Samuelson bluntly gives the reason why all those experts don’t question:

Poverty ‘experts’ don’t dwell on immigration, because it implies that more restrictive policies might reduce U.S. poverty.

For some reason, nearly all of our policy elites in think tanks, universities, government agencies and political office are so wedded to high immigration that they would rather keep adding to poverty than to acknowledge the problem and have to be confronted with the possible option of reducing immigration.

Samuelson offers the reader a reason why this might true.

He quotes Robert Rector (one of the few Washington opinion elites who actually looked at the data and decided immigration policy had to be changed). Rector suggests that all the various things that are defining and creating larger populations in poverty in the United States are also serving the interests of those who desire to see more income redistribution, to which Samuelson says:

He has a point.

For liberal backers of mass immigration, Samuelson’s comments have to raise questions about why they would promote a policy that makes the United States a place of so much greater economic disparity. [You guys have got to read Saul Alinsky—to create constant turmoil and chaos there must be a battle of the Have-nots against the Haves—ed]

For the conservative backers of mass immigration (who have control of the national Republican Party machinery), one has to ask why they would continue to promote a policy that every year creates more and more pressure for bigger and bigger government and greater and greater income redistribution.

In this last paragraph, I take issue with Beck’s use of the word “conservative” in describing what really are Republican Washington, DC insiders who support mass immigration and I can only surmise that those insiders are looking to help business interests keep their cheap labor.  True conservatives are not out promoting more immigration.

The Leftists who control the Democratic Party right now use immigrants to increase their voting power and to bring about a new form of government.  Some of the Republican insiders use immigrants for cheap labor and because they are really Corporatists—those are big businesses and their supporters in Washington who see the writing on the wall (I’m hoping the writing is not going to stay on the wall!) and use government to advance their financial agenda.  Judy described it well in her post a year ago entitled, “Socialism, communism, fascism or corporatism?” where she discusses Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism (a must read!)

….let’s confine our label to corporatism. I don’t think most American big businesses are interested in hero-worship and the other stuff. But some of them sure do want the government to be their partner in making profits easier for them — bringing in immigrants to work cheaply, stifling competition through regulation, giving them subsidies or bailouts, and so on.

This corporatist tendency has been growing for decades — that’s one reason almost all large businesses  and business associations have big lobbying staffs in Washington. They’re either defending their businesses from government’s heavy hand or looking for a handout from government. But Obama is bringing it to new and ominous heights. We’re better off using the word “corporatism” because it doesn’t set off the crazed reaction that “fascism” does. But as far as I can see, except for the extreme nationalism that was typical of European fascism, the latter term describes much of Obama’s agenda.

If the Left  (Cloward-Piven acolytes) succeeds in bringing down our form of government there will be some big businesses that will survive by having completely burrowed into the system with the help of the Republican insiders who are corporatists NOT conservatives!

Who loses?  The average American ‘forgotten man’ and the immigrant pawns.

Immigration mood swing in Massachusetts too!

Massachusetts home of the Open Borders Kennedy clan, and incidentally where Obama’s Aunt Zeituni lived illegally in public housing for years, seems to be having second thoughts about out of control immigration and the costs to the state budget.  Here is a story from the Boston Globe reporting that, in a surprise move, the Massachusetts Senate has voted to clamp down on illegal aliens.

With one lawmaker citing President Lincoln’s respect for the rule of law, the Massachusetts Senate passed a far-reaching crackdown this afternoon on illegal immigrants and those who would hire them, going further, senators said, than any immigration bill proposed over the past five years.

In a surprising turn of events, the legislation replaced a narrower bill that was passed Wednesday over the objections of Republicans.

The measure, which passed on a 28-10 vote as an amendment to the budget, would bar the state from doing business with any company found to break federal laws barring illegal immigrant hiring. It would also toughen penalties for creating or using fake identification documents, and explicitly deny in-state college tuition for illegal immigrants.

The amendment would also require the state’s public health insurance program to verify residency through the Department of Homeland Security, and would require the state to give legal residents priority for subsidized housing.

The amendment will now be part of negotiations with the House as part of the entire state budget.

Read it all.

Meanwhile, the Obama Dept. of Justice is going after a previous immigration bill in Arizona signed by Janet Napolitano when she was governor.  Apparently they are seeking to gain federal control (taking any legal power from the states) of all immigration issues.

By effectively joining the challenges to the law, the Obama Administration is asserting broad federal control of immigration–a position that will make it easier to pursue a lawsuit against the more controversial immigration law passed in Arizona this year allowing local police to make arrests of non-citizens lacking legal status. The administration is also siding with immigrant-rights groups who have accused the White House of not making immigration reform a priority.

See Politico here.  Hat tip:  Susan

I’m not a lawyer, but I am guessing that if they are successful, Massachusetts would not be able to do what the Senate hopes to do.

Former Congressman issues another call for moratorium on immigration across the board

We reported in April that former Virginia Representative, Virgil Goode, had called for a moratorium on all immigration.  Today at Frontpage magazine Goode repeats that call.

If we really want to put Americans back to work, we need a moratorium across nearly all categories of legal immigration. A moratorium will free up jobs for American citizens, reduce the stress on social services, and allow the immigrants already here to assimilate.

The only people who will lose out from a moratorium are the ethnic interests who want new constituents and the business lobbies who want cheap labor. Unfortunately, both political parties are more concerned with the well-being of these special interests than the well-being American citizens.

Read it all!