You’ve been seeing the phrase in news reports…. So where did it come from?
‘Pockets of resistance’ is what the federal bureaucracy initially called us! We liked the description so much that we have made it our own!
I just did a quickie look around for the idiom ‘pockets of resistance’ and see that it usually is a reference to a small group of people resisting domination. Hmmm! When I first heard it to describe us—anyone questioning the UN/US government’s colonization of our communities with third world refugees—I thought of the famous, tough and brave French resistance to Hitler’s domination of France. Pockets of resistance in WWII France fought bravely against Hitler’s domination of the country
I first heard the phrase uttered (in derogatory tones) by an employee of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement three years ago (June 2013) in Lancaster, PA, and was amazed that federal bureaucrats and their refugee contractors had actually taken time to ‘brand’ us.
They mentioned three states where ‘pockets of resistance’ had formed—Georgia, New Hampshire (because of Gatsas) and Tennessee.
Now there are many many more in a national network of ‘pockets of resistance!’
Up until a reader from Tennessee directed me to a 2012 news story posted at the UNITED NATIONS, I assumed the phrase originated in the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (in HHS), but check this out: The UNHCR, when reporting on a US State Department trip to mollify Tennesseans, references the phrase!
The U.S. State Department’s head of refugees met with local officials Thursday. His visit is partially in response to pockets of resistance to resettlement in Tennessee.
So, it appears that the inner circles at both the US State Department and at the Dept. of Health and Human Services were both using ‘pockets of resistance’ when discussing American citizens’ concerns about the program. Amazing!
See our category, pockets of resistance, here. Addendum! If you would like to find a ‘pocket of resistance’ where you live, contact James Simpson at this e-mail address: (And, don’t take offense if you are ‘vetted!’ We need to be sure we know who we are talking to because we are up against some powerful and ruthless people). resettlementresister@gmail.com
There is so much new news that needs to be reported and discussed that writing once again about Somali (Minnesota-raised) youths, who have been found guilty of supporting ISIS after about 40 other Minnesota-raised Somali former refugees have gone to join the jihadists, is annoying. Omar Jamal (Somali community organizer) suggests all-white jury might not have been impartial. Photo: http://www.mprnews.org/story/2009/04/24/omar_jamal
As a matter of fact, there are three issues that I’ve been writing about for about EIGHT years that annoy me to have to continue to write about! One of the three is what I reported last night—we are taking illegal aliens from Malta and spending at least $20,000 a pop for starters to resettle them in your towns.
Another EIGHT-year-old story is about how we eight years ago did NOT take Rohingya Muslims from Burma to the US (because of their links to radical groups in Bangladesh, Burma and Thailand), but now we take in thousands! (See our huge archive on the Rohingya by clicking here, do you want to write a book?).
And, the third storyline I am sick to death of is this one—poor Somali kids with no future in Minneapolis who are mysteriously radicalized and give a middle finger to you (the taxpayer) and head out to join the Islamic killers elsewhere in the world (I don’t know why we even try to stop them). This latest bunch will now cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep them behind bars—JUST LET THEM GO TO ISIS!
Here comes Jamal!
Then to top off my annoyance this morning—that I’m writing probably the hundredth post on these “kids”—I’m seeing that Omar Jamal has still not gone away!
You can read the whole conviction story yourself here at Twin Cities Pioneer Press.
But, who should appear speaking for the Somali “community”—none other than the Somali Jesse Jackson himself, Omar Jamal!
Twin Cities Pioneer Press:
Outside the courtroom, Omar Jamal, a Somali community activist, worried that the Somali community would find little solace or justice in guilty verdicts handed down by an all-white jury that was shown violent Islamic State propaganda videos.
“This decision will reinforce the perception in the community that the system is rigged,” Jamal said.
Damn we have been writing about the man convicted of immigration fraud for EIGHT years.
Although we had noticed him before, he made a big splash on the scene in Denver when just a short time before the 2008 Democrat convention a Somali man from Canada was found dead in a Denver hotel (near the convention site) with enough cyanide to kill hundreds. Jamal shows up and persuades authorities (or at least tells the media) to move along, nothing to see, just a crazy guy from Canada.
If you have the time and patience, follow Jamal’s ‘career’ here at RRW. See his arrest in Minnesota in 2003 on immigration violations (he was an illegal alien!). See here in 2009 where Minnesota Public Radio outed him (to some degree). So why was he never deported? Does he work for the feds? But, it seems that lazy reporters continue to call upon him for his comments every time a Somali does something bad almost anywhere in America!
Then get this, the Minneapolis Star Tribune published his mealy-mouthed op-ed yesterday in which he says that US policies in the war on terror will drive more of the little confused darlings*** to join the jihad. He said:
In fact, I am afraid that if aggressive, heavy-handed policies continue unchecked in the war on terror, this recent trial will be a Trojan horse to further recruit more kids to ISIL.
Why does anyone give this man any ink when he should be in jail or deported himself! Where are you Jared? How about a story on Jamal? He is right there in your hometown!
***These are the “kids” you “welcomed” to America, paid for their housing and food, their educations. You kept them healthy enough to grow up even (to become Islamic soldiers), and what do you get? They hate you and they hate America. I suggest we make it easy (and cheaper for us), ask them if they want to go to the Middle East or back to Somalia and pay their airfare (and take away their passports when they board that plane!). What is that expression our Mom’s used: “Good riddance to bad rubbish!”
According to reports from very angry elected officials in Baldwin County, Alabama, there is nothing on the federal land but airstrips for practice landings and takeoffs and a hayfield at the moment. Construction of housing, including sewer and water, will be very costly. But apparently the Obama Administration is in the process of determining if the Dept. of Defense sites in Alabama would be good ones to “temporarily” house some of the tens of thousands of so-called ‘unaccompanied alien children’ streaming across the US border at the moment. Why do they care if the ‘children’ are near an airfield? I wondered if ‘refugee’ camps like this proposed location might be built and later used to airlift larger numbers of Syrians and Middle Easterners/Africans to the US. Seems like its an awfully expensive plan for a “temporary” facility.
I suspect that considering a site in Alabama is probably because the Obama Administration wants to take a whack at Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, the most important Senator in America questioning Obama’s opening our doors to illegals of all sorts (this article uses the word “refugee” in the title, these are not refugees!), and the fact that Sessions is a chief adviser to the Donald Trump campaign.
Forget Alabama for a minute and consider the import of this story—they are anticipating another summer invasion of the US border, perhaps larger than the invasion of 2014 as a Trump Presidency looms on the horizon.
And, could this involve the creation of a ‘refugee camp’ for future use?
A plan from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) to assess the feasibility of housing unaccompanied illegal immigrant children at two airfields in Baldwin County is being met with hostility by elected officials at the federal and local levels because of concerns about the lack of infrastructure at the sites and the plan’s potential impact on the county.
ORR, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, notified officials of the assessments in a letter last week. In the letter Rose Hacking, an HHS representative, said ORR is trying to identify locations to provide shelter for potential increases in unaccompanied children apprehended at the Mexican border.
The letter notified officials HHS would soon schedule site assessments at the Naval Outlying Fields in Silverhill and Josephine to determine the feasibility of using the sites as semipermanent shelters if HHS exceeds its current shelter capacity.
[….]
According to Hacking’s letter HHS currently has 8,700 beds in its “shelter network” and an additional 2,000 beds on reserve if needed. Some reserve beds are already available at the Homestead Job Corps Center in Homestead, Florida, and the semipermanent structures would be used only if the department were to experience a “substantial” increase in unaccompanied children.
Andrea Helling, ORR chief of staff, said the temporary shelters are typically used for roughly 30 days while the unaccompanied children are evaluated in the court system. She stressed none of the children who may come to Baldwin County sites would impact the county school system or the local health care system.
Baldwin County Commission President Tucker Dorsey. http://tuckerdorsey.com/about/
[….]
According to Helling, the assessors will inspect the sites to determine the ease of installing temporary infrastructure and buildings. They also consider each sites’ proximity to airports and the amount of land available for construction.
Baldwin County Commission President Tucker Dorsey said county officials have not been told how many children may be moved to the site in the event it is used.
“Forget the fact that these would be children who are in the country illegally and the federal government doesn’t properly enforce immigration law,” Dorsey said. “Apart from that, this would be a logistical nightmare for us and them.”
Dorsey said while both sites are large, the federal government would have to install infrastructure and construct buildings at a great cost because the sites currently amount to nothing more than large fields with landing strips.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement is shelling out nearly $1 billion this year (FY2016) to take care of the children.
And, the ‘children’ who arrived in FY2015 are 82% teenagers and 68% of the total are boys. See here.
I had a good laugh last night when I spotted this piece on Rutland that is your classic Leftwing tactic to smear the critics (with the racist, Islamophobic label) and divide the local critics of the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program from the national movement (pockets of resistance***) by smearing yours truly and Jim Simpson at the Center for Security Policy. Rutland writer, guitarist, mixed-drink expert, Jim Sabataso says his “soul hurts” when he reads about criticism of the refugee admissions program of the UN/US State Department.
First here (at the Times Argus) is what the poor baby who felt he had to take a shower (after reading their facebook pages) says of the local groups in opposition to Syrian resettlement for Rutland:
This week, against my better judgment, I decided to wade into the muck to explore what those opposed to Syrian refugee resettlement in Rutland are saying on social media. I say muck, because, holy hell, my curious clicking took me to a dark, dark corner of the local Facebook community.
Opponents to resettlement have expressed consternation about being painted as uneducated bigots. While I understand the frustration of those who feel that they are being unfairly characterized as intolerant for their dissent — indeed, some folks have managed to express their opposition intelligently and eloquently — it’s hard not to draw that conclusion based on the rhetoric coming out of that camp.
Hosting extremist speakers such as James Simpson to discuss, as the Rutland Herald put it, “the coming plague of sex crimes, diseases such as latent tuberculosis and mosques led by radical imams preaching jihad,” makes it difficult not to paint the opposition as paranoid and dangerously misinformed. When the individual spearheading the effort to put the refugee issue to a city-wide vote suggests that Muslim lives are not as valuable as those of Christians, it’s hard not to dismiss the whole group as narrow-minded, Islamophobic bigots.
Besides Simpson, who the mayor calls the leader of a hate group and champion of “pockets of resistance” here, local musician, writer and self-proclaimed mixed drink (alcoholic beverage) expertJim Sabataso weighs in on Refugee Resettlement Watchas a hate group leader having an unduly large influence on the local people suggesting that they don’t have intelligence of their own to sort through the facts and make judgments about what is good for their own community.
Refugee Resettlement Watch: Founded by Ann Corcoran, a major voice in the anti-refugee, anti-Muslim community. The blog is also monitored by the SPLC for its extremist content.
I love it actually! For eight or so, of the nearly 9 years, I’ve been writing about this issue, I was looking forward to the day I would be “monitored” by the SPLC because if they were truly monitoring my work they might learn something. They might learn that refugees are exploited for cheap labor and that Chambers of Commerce want refugees to buy used cars and rent Section 8 housing.
Clearly young Jim Sabataso hasn’t read many of the 7,623 posts we have written or he wouldn’t be telling local concerned citizens to stay away from RRW.
All of the issues he mentions below have been reported at RRW for nearly 9 years. These are the primary issues we report here every day!
So there you have it. Absent from these two groups is any substantial or grounded discussion of issues of government transparency, employment, housing, education, economic impacts or support for veterans and homeless Vermonters — issues, which those in opposition have said are at the root of their dissent. “We need to look out for our own first” has been a common rallying cry, but that talking point was nowhere to be found in my search. If those opposed to refugee resettlement in Rutland want to be taken seriously and not dismissed as ignorant bigots, they best reconsider the company they keep.
Here is what young Jim, writer/bartender/cocktail explorer (he plays guitar for money!), newly-minted expert on refugee resettlement, said on twitter a few days ago:
I just spent the last three hours reading through Rutland’s anti-refugee Facebook groups. I need a shower. Also, my soul hurts.
Continue reading here about what the sensitive soul, Jim, has to say about us. Having read some of his other work, he does have a fear of “dark” places. And, by the way, I probably have now read more of Jim’s work than he has of mine (yet he describes RRW as a hate group).
A couple of related nuggets:
Be sure to read the supposed news article from the Rutland Herald last week that reads like an op-ed and also mentions the haters and extremists at RRW and the Center for Security Policy.
The article scoffs at the notion that tuberculosis could come in with the refugees, but guess what? It is already in Vermont as we learned here this morning from the media expert (Michael Patrick Leahy) on TB in refugee populations in the US.
Go here for our ‘Health issues’ category (300 posts) for all of the recent shocking news about ACTIVE TB in US refugees.
*** The ‘pockets of resistance’ label was originally used by the federal governmentto help create a propaganda campaign (the ORR actually hired a contractor to create the campaign) against any community that might question the placement of large numbers of refugees secretly in to their towns and cities. We first heard about it from federal officials in PA in 2013. The three ‘pockets’ the feds named at that time were in New Hampshire, Tennessee and Georgia. Some of us liked the label and now there are dozens and dozens of ‘pockets of resistance’ that have grown up spontaneously throughout the US. Welcome Rutland, VT!
The answer is no, but there isn’t any reason it shouldn’t. It is only about 75 miles from the state’s largest resettlement site—Milwaukee. (Any town within a hundred miles of a federal contractor’s office is fair game).
Janesville, Wisconsin is Speaker Paul Ryan’s hometown and a reader asked me recently, that since he is so gung-ho for refugeesto come to America, does he have them where he lives?
Maybe a few have moved from other resettlement cities in Wisconsin—Milwaukee or Oshkosh, but there is no federally funded resettlement office there.
Since I checked the data for our inquisitive reader, here are a few facts about the numbers going to Wisconsin.
I started my search in the fall of 2008 (just as Obama was being elected) and ended the first of May.
Wisconsin ‘welcomed’ 7,143 in those nearly 8 years. That is a small number compared to the the big states like Texas which resettles that many in one year. A cartoon circulating on twitter last night. Sorry there is no cartoonist identified. In Ryan’s 1st District, none went to Janesville, but a tiny number, about 30 went to Waukesha, just outside of Milwaukee. Only a handful went to Racine.
Of the 7,143 who went to the state of Wisconsin, the breakdown is as follows: Burmese (4,029), Iraqis (1,083) and Somalis (811), in addition to smaller numbers of many other ethnic groups.
According to the Washington Postthe impact on his family might not be so great anyway since his kids all attend private Catholic School. Schools are where ‘welcoming’ towns first experience the cultural and economic pressure a few years after opening their doors to the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program.
What? No mosque, no interfaith group as welearned about this morningin Charleston, WV pushing for Syrians to be seeded into Janesville?
So, why not Janesville? Maybe there is a cheese factory nearby in need of cheap immigrant laborers?
Endnote: Republican Paul Nehlen is hoping to upset Ryan in the upcoming primary there on August 9th.
