Negri, formerly the manager of the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel in Nashville is credited with changing Nashville from the Bible-belt mecca of Country Music into a community that welcomes Muslim diversity and low-skilled immigrant laborers (needed in the hotel industry!).   It amazes me how the media builds a myth around the politically-correct concept that everything is sweetness and light when a city becomes as diverse as Nashville.

Here is a glowing tribute to Negri’s role in bringing Somalis, Kurds and others to Nashville.  But, here is one thing that isn’t mentioned in the tribute—Negri is opposed to free speech.  In 2009 I was registered to attend a conference about political Islam at the Loews Vanderbilt hotel and just days before the conference, then hotel manager Negri broke the contract with organizers.

He apparently couldn’t abide the idea that people might meet in his hotel with a point of view different from his.  Or, did he bow to pressure from the increasingly powerful Islamists in Nashville?   The conference went on in a pleasant welcoming hotel elsewhere in the city.

Check out our Nashville category (click here) for 52(!) previous posts on Nashville troubles and tensions with its immigrant population.

As we told you just last month, Negri is on the board of the propaganda outfit—Welcoming America.

Tonight ‘Welcoming America’ plans to begin changing Cleveland—bring in the immigrants to save the city!

From the Plain Dealer:

“They’ve been great for our community,” said Tom Negri, a Nashville business leader. “It just took a while for people to realize that.”

The group that helped convince middle Tennessee that new Americans represented progress is about to embrace a new challenge. Welcoming America is bringing its message to Cleveland, a city that has not witnessed an immigrant stream in 50 years.

Its top executives will be in town this week to join discussions and strategy sessions designed to foster a “welcome world” attitude on Ohio’s north coast.

‘Welcome to Shelbyville’—that damn film again!

David Lubell, the founder and executive director of Welcoming America, will address an audience Tuesday night at MetroHealth Medical Center and join a panel discussion that follows the screening of “Welcome to Shelbyville,” a documentary about cultural change in a small Tennessee town.

For new readers, we have traced the development of that propaganda film—‘Welcome to Shelbyville’—from the arrival of the Leftwing-funded filming team in Somali-disrupted Shelbyville, TN five years ago.  This is what I said, here,  in 2008:

Shelbyville BeWare BeCause, they are using your town!   They will gloss over the tensions and problems of the Tyson’s African employees and then show what great work the TIRRC and the Somali Community Center are doing to bring you all together in harmonious unity.  This is a politically motivated campaign.  Your film, your town, will then be used to shame other towns into silence.

Here is our archive of dozens of posts in which that propaganda film is mentioned. If you read nothing else, be sure to read this post on the truth about the film.  My prediction of 2008, that the film would be used to “shame” communities has turned out to be accurate!

Back to Cleveland and community organizers ‘Welcoming America’ getting ready to target Cleveland tonight:

Training sessions on Wednesday could mark the first step toward Cleveland or Cuyahoga County or both joining the growing roster of “welcoming communities.” These are cities and counties that welcome immigrants with official proclamations and then work to assimilate them, making it more likely that immigrants will come to stay.

“It takes time for different sectors of the community to come around to this,” said Lubell, a Philadelphia native recognized nationally as a leader in immigrant welcome efforts. “We’re not in a rush. We want to meet the community where it is and help get them to a new place of greater prosperity.”

Cleveland readers must go out to this event tonight!

Representatives of ethnic communities have been invited to Tuesday’s reception, which begins at 5:30 p.m. in MetroHealth’s Rammelkamp Atrium and is open to the public.