Here is a revealing story about how a former Iraqi interpreter now using his skills in the National Guard in Nebraska struggles to dispel the negative image of Muslims in the military in the wake of the massacre at Ft. Hood.  He seems like a decent and sincere man who is happy to be in America, but one section of this story in the Omaha World Herald was revealing.   In his effort to recruit diversity into the Guard, he comes upon immigrants who obviously hate the country that now harbors them, and the National Guard that keeps them safe.

Many of the people he recruited welcomed him, thrilled to converse with someone who looked like them and wore an American military uniform.

But no map is good enough to keep him from taking wrong turns and slamming into walls.

He left a mosque once when the worshippers made him feel uncomfortable about the way he folded his hands to pray.

He learned that certain people from certain communities in Nebraska — he doesn’t want to say who — consider him an enemy of religion. They’ve hissed at him and called him everything short of an infidel.  [Three guesses who the 'hissers' are in Nebraska!]

“There are strict people,” he said. “You know, people who just know good or bad and that’s all. When you live like that, it is easy to kill. It is easy to say ‘In the name of God’ — bang! — ‘That’s it.’

“But of course it doesn’t work that way.”

Basim refused to stop, kept right on talking that day to the Muslim man convinced that the Nebraska National Guard was the enemy.

Basim told him he wasn’t going to fight his people, he was going to fight people who were hurting his people.

The argument turned into a debate, and the debate morphed into a chat. They parted as friends.

The man did not join the Guard. But maybe, Basim thinks, they changed each other’s minds just a little.   [I sure hope he didn't change Basim's mind a little!]

Just one of many posts at RRW on Somalis in Nebraska for your reading pleasure.

Yesterday I brought to readers’ attention that now that the Somali population in Lewiston, ME is large and well-established, the demands for accomodation of Muslim religious practices has begun, see CAIR threatens, here.  Among those who study Islamic supremacism around the world, this is known as the Stealth Jihad (see our entire category here)—changing a country from within to bring about Islamic dominance.

In my post I attributed a role to Catholic Charities in bringing the first Somalis to Maine, and after a little research I found that assertion was accurate.  However, the majority of the thousands of Somalis now continuing to upset Lewiston are secondary migrants resettled by Catholic Charities and other federally contracted agencies in Georgia.    Here is the best summary I’ve found so far about how Lewiston got to the point it’s at now with CAIR breathing down the necks of school adminstrators.  I’ve only taken a bit of this very long and thorough 2002 article, so please read the whole thing.

LEWISTON — Every week, another four or five Somali families arrive in this workaday city on the Androscoggin River.

They are refugees from the clan-wracked ruins of their homeland on the Horn of Africa, from years of waiting in camps in Kenya. And they are migrants from their place of first resettlement in America, more often than not trekking 1,000 miles from the heat and multihued humanity of metropolitan Atlanta to this sparse, wintry, whitest of all states.

They are nomads, their ancient instincts honed to a 21st century edge. Pioneers in a new world, they discovered Lewiston and claimed a bit of it for themselves.

“It’s like finding a small island in the middle of the Pacific,” says Mohammed Abdi, who last year moved here from Decatur, Ga., and was quickly hired as the liaison between the city’s schools and the burgeoning Somali community. “We put it on the map.”

They were originally resettled with American blacks and that wasn’t going so well, an issue we have discussed at RRW on previous occasions.

In their exodus, they say they are looking for peace and quiet, cheaper housing, a more benevolent welfare system, better schools and a place to raise their children — families of seven or more are common —with fewer perils and temptations. That they are leaving a metro area renowned as an African-American mecca to resettle in Maine, home to fewer than 7,000 blacks in 2000, is less a matter of irony than intent, given the prickly state of their relations with African-Americans and a desire to protect their children from assimilating too quickly.

Scouts sent out!   But, I will bet you anything they had some hints from their friends at Catholic Charities which was already resettling Somalis in Portland, ME.

Fed up with life in Atlanta —he was robbed twice — Abdiaziz Ali said members of the Somali community there researched other places on the Internet, comparing crime rates, the cost of housing, test scores. Then they sent scouts to a handful of cities — Kansas City, Mo., Nashville, Tenn., San Diego, Houston and El Paso in Texas, and Portland and Lewiston in Maine.

Maine was preferred, and Portland was full.

It is cold but the welfare is oh so good!   Note when you read the article that some of the men stayed back in Georgia to continue to work while the wives and kids went to Maine for the welfare.

Indeed, in moving from Georgia to Maine, Somalis are trading one of the nation’s least generous welfare systems for one of its most generous.

Lewiston provides general assistance to anyone in need, splitting the cost with the state. Such relief was unavailable in Clarkston. In Georgia, there is a four-year time limit for receiving Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. In Maine it’s five, but even that can be extended. About a quarter of Lewiston’s Somali families receive that form of welfare, according to the state. And in Maine, a state-funded program assists single parents while they attend college.

There is a waiting list for public housing in Lewiston, but not nearly as long as back in Georgia. About a third of the more than 90 apartments at Hillview, Lewiston’s largest public housing project, have Somali tenants, and about 35 more Somali families have received Section 8 vouchers, which subsidize the rent on private apartments.

[...]

Fulfilling that expectation [that people work] is complicated because so many of the Somali families are single mothers and children, the fathers dead, missing, still in Africa or still in Atlanta.

“The men don’t like it here — it’s too cold or too quiet or too behind,” says Fatuma Hussein, whose own husband still drives a taxi in Atlanta, making frequent visits to her and their three young children.

The role of  Catholic Charities

There were no Somalis in Lewiston prior to the colonization that began after 9/11.  Note in the article that Somalis are quoted as saying Portland was “full.”   That would be full of primarily Somalis and Sudanese resettled in Maine by Catholic Charities, the only refugee resettlement contractor in the state for 30 years.   That makes it easy for us to check the numbers Catholic Charities brought.    Not nearly the tens of thousands resettled in other states, but from 1983-2005, Catholic Charities resettled 498 Somalis and 607 Sudanese (I mention the Sudanese because we have heard lots about problems with the “Sudanese community” of Portland recently).  You will see later that the number 498 is inaccurate because in just 3 individual years during that time period, reported in annual reports to Congress, below, the number exceeds 498.

To this day, Catholic Charities is resettling new Somalis in Maine.   The stats aren’t out for 2009 but in 2007 the number of Somalis resettled was 118 and in 2008 it was 60 (that drop may be because of the discovery by the State Department of the fraud in the family reunification program).

I don’t believe the Somali scouts found Lewiston all on their own—-I think there is a really good chance that earlier resettled Maine Somalis and Catholic Charities (CC) in Atlanta tipped-off the scouts to the lucrative welfare in Lewiston.  So, I checked the Office of Refugee Resettlement annual reports to Congress for the years 1997, 1998, and 1999 to see how many Somalis CC had brought to Maine in the years preceding the migration.  Sure enough, in 1997, CC resettled 228 Somalis to Maine, in 1998 the number was 168 and in 1999, 277.  What are the chances that a few of those Somalis were “related” to Atlanta Somalis and told them to ‘come on up, the public assistance is great!’

Piven must be so proud!

Note to readers in Maine: I have many more discoveries I want to share with you in another post, things that  need further research, but this is getting too long!

To all readers:  If you want to learn more about the Lewiston multicultural experiment, search RRW for ‘Lewiston,’ we have written a lot on the topic.

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.  That specific program has not yet been reopened, but will be soon.  Nevertheless, thousands of Somalis continue to be resettled as I write this.

That is the basic goal involved in the Cloward-Piven strategy that most of us never heard of until Obama and the community organizers got to the White House.  I’ve been reading about it lately, thanks to RRW reader Paul, and it came to mind last night as I considered the fact that Somali refugees had flooded Maine primarily for the generous welfare system (more shortly).

This is just some background from David Horowitz’s Discover the Networks that I want to post so we can continue to build our ‘community destabilization’ category, and not lose the links.

Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called “crisis strategy” or “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.

You should take some time and read Cloward and Piven’s 1966 seminal work in the Nation magazine to fully understand the concept.  They (and their comrades today) want to enroll as many people as they can on public assistance, cause a crisis by overloading local governments, bring greater federal control and ultimately collapse Capitalism as the federal government takes greater control and brings about ultimately a guaranteed wage for all— a redistribution of wealth.

This is the opening paragraph of the Nation article:

How can the poor be organized to press for relief from poverty? How can a broad-based movement be developed and the current disarray of activist forces be halted? These questions confront, and confound, activists today. It is our purpose to advance a strategy which affords the basis for a convergence of civil rights organizations, militant anti-poverty groups and the poor. If this strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty.

My theory is that the “poor” of the 1960’s were, in subsequent decades, entering the middle class.  Thanks to Capitalism there weren’t enough of them to collapse the system and many other Americans have an  antipathy to living off the government and accepting welfare!   So community organizers need the immigrants and refugees who have become accustomed, in the case of refugees, to living off of the United Nations, to help swell the welfare rolls.  That is the only logical explanation for the Obama Administration continuing to resettle very high numbers of refugees right now (in a recession!) when there is little work for them—well that, and the desire on their part to create a magical borderless utopian world.

The Somalis who migrated to Maine are only too happy to comply, next!

November 22nd:  For more background on the Somali migration to Lewiston and the role of Catholic Charities, go here.

Here we go!  Lewiston, the city that has struggled for years ever since federal government contractors, such as Catholic Charities, chose it as a site for refugee resettlement [correction: I am alerted by a reader that Catholic Charities didn't choose Lewiston, see comments] and after a secondary migration of mostly Somali refugees picked this city in “welcoming” Maine, the joys of multiculturalism have come home to roost.  And, darn, just when town fathers thought citizens were finally getting the memo that diversity is strength something like this happens.

The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) the subject of an important new book entitled, “Muslim Mafia:Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America,” has the audacity to threaten to bring action against a school district that supposedly denied a Muslim girl the right to pray during school.  Here is the story from the Sun Journal today.  Hat tip: Mars

LEWISTON — A national Muslim civil rights organization has filed a formal request with the Lewiston School Department to allow a middle school student to pray on school property. The group also wants Lewiston to modify existing policy and provide “constitutionally protected religious accommodation,” such as a designated prayer room.

The group has also requested the school department institute diversity training for school staff, and to ensure the middle-schooler won’t face retaliation because of her request to pray at the Lewiston Middle School.

According to the Washington, D.C.,-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, seventh-grader Nasra Aden had been routinely “praying discreetly during her free time or lunch break in a corner of a school hallway.” But, on Tuesday, CAIR asserts a teacher told Aden “never to pray on school property” after Aden was seen preparing to kneel in prayer in a corner of one of the hallways.

After Aden told her mother, Jamad Warsame, what happened, Warsame spoke with school Principal Maureen Lachappelle and asked the school to accommodate her daughter’s desire to pray. According to CAIR, Warsame’s request was rebuffed and she has been “forced to pick up her daughter every day and take her to a nearby park to pray.”

Lachappelle said Aden is not being forced to leave school to pray, but that the district accommodated her mother’s request for her to leave the campus this past week for prayer.

Lewiston Superintendent Leon Levesque, who learned of CAIR’s written accusations hours after a press release had already been published on various Web sites, said, “Students are free to pray quietly during class if they choose as long as it’s not disruptive,” because “prayer is constitutionally protected in schools.”

“A stunning scenario of lack of multicultural competency” —they have learned the lingo!

In a written statement, Ismail Warsame called school officials’ alleged actions in responding to Aden’s effort to pray “a stunning scenario of lack of multicultural competency” and “clear violation of our constitutional rights to free religious expression.”

Warsame also accused Lachappelle of hanging up on him as he was asking whether the school department would accommodate the family’s request to accommodate the specific religious needs of certain students. Lachappelle acknowledged she did end a phone conversation with Warsame abruptly because “he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

According to Lachappelle, after an involved conversation about the school’s position on allowing silent prayer, she said she told Warsame that “this is what the ruling is. We’re disagreeing, and I’m following district policy. I feel we need to end this conversation.”

Readers should know that we have had reports from many cities about the fact that some Muslim men do not respect female school teachers and administrators, so that may explain what happened in this phone conversation.

Ibraham Hooper threatens:  Do what we say, or else!

CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper said Friday that if the Lewiston School Department did not address its four requests to allow prayer, modify school policy, institute training and protect Aden from retaliation, “we wouldn’t really have much choice but to take the case further” because “the student has the legal right and the constitutional right to pray in school in a manner that is not disruptive to the learning environment.”

I wonder what Lewiston Mayor, Larry Gilbert, thinks now?   This sort of coincidence has happened before.  I had something to post earlier in the week about the Mayor of Lewiston and didn’t get to it, and then sure enough something like this story comes along and the two pieces fit nicely together. 

On the Mayor’s website just a couple of days ago appeared a report of a meeting where the City Council had a briefing about refugees and the resettlement programs in Maine.  It is there that we learned this:

Catholic Charities Maine (CCME) has been the only refugee resettlement agency in Maine during the past 30 years.

Read the glowing account of how great the refugee resettlement program is and then note this conclusion by the mayor.

I hope that sharing this information will assist in allaying the many misconceptions and fears that somehow permeate our community.

As I have mentioned in previous columns, it is only through communication with those who may appear to be different from us, that when we engage in conversation, we find that we have far more similarities than differences. Our skin color may be different, our language may be different and our customs may be different. What we do find is that we seek the same things, quality of life, family life, employment, religion, education, music, arts, etc. We find that we truly are one-humanity. Assimilation may take a bit of time, but it will happen just like it has with all of our forefathers who have made us this richest country in the world, a country of immigrants.

If we truly believe that we are all God’s children, then we must therefore believe that we are all brothers and sisters created in His image.

Tell that to the Islamic supremacists at CAIR!

We have covered Lewiston Somali problems extensively, use our search function and you will see what I mean!

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.  That specific program has not yet been reopened, but will be soon.  Nevertheless, thousands of Somalis continue to be resettled as I write this.

I said yesterday that I had a couple (turns out to have been 5!) of those hot Somali stories and this is one I didn’t get to.  The sixth indictment has been handed down in the FBI investigation into the Somali (former refugee) missing youth case.  Hat tip: ever-watchful in Tennessee.

From the Minneapolis Star Tribune, a paper that keeps on top of this story:

A 24-year-old local Somali man has been indicted in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis on charges of conspiring to provide support to terrorists.

Omer Abdi Mohamed, an unemployed employment counselor and father of a 2-month-old boy, was indicted on charges of conspiracy to “kill, kidnap, maim or injure” people in foreign countries, according to an indictment filed Tuesday but made public Thursday.

Mohamed, of Minneapolis, is the sixth Somali man with local ties to be charged in connection with a two-year-old federal counterterrorism investigation aimed at finding out who recruited as many as 20 area men of Somali descent to return to their homeland and train and fight with the terrorist group, Al-Shabaab. The probe is considered to be one of the most sweeping international counterterrorism investigations since Sept. 11, 2001.  [Reminder: the FBI missed Major Nidal Hasan]

[....]

According to the indictment, others connected to the conspiracy include: Salah Osman Ahmed, Kamal Said Hassan, Ahmed Ali Omar, Abdifatah Isse and Khalid Mohamud Abshir — all of whom left the United States in December 2007 with a final destination of Somalia. Ahmed, Hassan and Isse all have pleaded guilty to the same charges Mohamed faces.

How and where were they radicalized?  It all just keeps coming back to the mosque they had in common—-Abubakar as-Saddique Islamic Center.

Officials at the mosque have repeatedly denied any role in recruiting or enabling the men to return to Somalia. Just last week, two mosque officials were cleared to fly after their names had appeared on a federal “no fly” list last year. According to an attorney for one of the men, the move cleared them of any involvement in the Somali men’s disappearance.

Why did they go?  

The woman [who knows the men well and helped the FBI in the investigation] said she doesn’t know for certain why all the men left for Somalia, but said she believes it’s rooted in a combination of patriotic feelings toward the Somali homeland and religious fervor.

I’m guessing 10% patriotism and 90% religious fervor.  This is an important point of discussion as I learned when I went to the Senate Homeland Security hearings on this terror-training investigation.  The Senators and those in the intelligence community testifying were eager to dismiss the return to Africa by men who had been given a good life through our refugee resettlement program, if it was patriotism that motivated them.  They skirted the religious fervor angle in what I’ll call the Major Nidal Hasan syndrome.

A judge released this latest indicted man on bond.

Mohamed appeared Thursday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Franklin Noel, who agreed to release him on a $25,000 signature bond after Wold argued that his client was not a risk to flee. As of Thursday night, he was preparing to be released, pending the installation of an electronic home monitoring system.

Let’s see, so 6 have died and 6 have been indicted. Then an alleged ringleader was arrested in the Netherlands.  The FBI has been saying 20 left the US for Somalia.  If you count the ringleader that makes 13 accounted for, leaving only 7 who knows where.   Wanta bet there were more than 20 from the US?

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.  That specific program has not yet been reopened, but will be soon.  Nevertheless, thousands of Somalis continue to be resettled as I write this.

We have been sold such a bill of goods about the South African government spawned by the revered Nelson Mandela and those who followed him to power in the so-called “Rainbow Nation.”   Rarely do we see stories in US publications about the violence of the majority black population against other Africans and the white population.  Gosh, is it possible that blacks can be xenophobic and racist?  Or, is it just plain-old tribalism and protecting one’s own stuff driving the violence—something the multiculturalists at the UN fail to acknowledge as they, and the one-worlders, perpetuate the myth of multiculturalism as nirvana?

Looks like trouble is brewing again according to this article from the BBC.

The UN has condemned attacks against Zimbabweans seeking work in South African vineyards, which it says have driven 3,000 people from their homes.

Local farm workers accused the Zimbabweans near Cape Town of stealing their jobs by accepting lower wages.

South Africa saw an outbreak of xenophobic violence in May last year, when Zimbabwean refugees and asylum seekers were attacked.

More than 60 people died in the waves of mob violence.

The UN refugee agency said those displaced in the latest unrest were living in tents in a sports field north-east of Cape Town.

On Friday, police said they had arrested 22 people in the informal settlement of De Doorns in Western Cape for allegedly attacking foreigners earlier this week, South African Press Association reports.

The trouble broke out when South African farm labourers were angered at reports that the farmers were employing migrant workers at lower wages.

“They started to shout at us saying that we had to go back to Zimbabwe,” one migrant worker told the BBC.

“After that they started to break our houses. We phoned the police but the police didn’t take action. They just stood there as people broke our houses and they stole our things.” [A little corruption in the police, eh?]

Correspondents say South Africa is keen to show the world that poverty and crime is under control in preparation for next year’s World Cup.

In addition to the BBC’s UN-slaps-wrist article above, my alerts reminded me of the website ‘Why I am a White Refugee,’ here where Friday’s article begins with this quote:

In SA, a major way of problem-solving is mob rule….. This use of mobs and the impunity of the anonymity of mass action lead to a breakdown in the rule of law. This, as academics have observed, is a direct result of the merging of militarised struggle politics with unions and community organisations.

Can you believe it, struggle politics, unions and community organizing there too?  Do we see a pattern?   Could they be reading Rules for Radicals too?

We have written about South Africa a lot, use our search function to learn more.

Here is a story I am ashamed to say I missed two weeks ago!   According to Matthew Lee of AP, yes, apparently the same Mr. Lee who reported on the last day of every month in the waning months of the Bush Administration that that awful Mr. Bush didn’t let in to the US enough poor Iraqis, here, tells us the State Department will soon re-open the controversial family reunification program.   

And, he reports that nothing will likely be done about the estimated 36,000 Africans (mostly Somalis) who may have gotten into the US by lying.  We admitted over 80,000 Somalis over 25 years.

Although no final decisions have been made, the State Department said it “was close to the end” of a review that had been delayed by the change in administrations. “Now that policy-level people responsible for this issue are in place, we expect to reopen the program with revised procedures in the near future,” an official said.

The suspended pilot program, known as Priority 3, allows foreign — almost all of them African — family members of legal U.S. residents to join relatives here.

With little fanfare [Edit: little fanfare!  It was because they wanted to keep it quiet, the WSJ had it, where were you?] , the program was halted in March 2008 after DNA testing on applicants in Africa found that up to 87 percent of their familial claims were fraudulent.

The experimental program was conducted in late 2007 and early 2008 on about 3,000 people mostly from Somalia, Ethiopia and Liberia who claimed blood relationships with each other and wanted to be reunited with a family member who had been resettled as a refugee in the U.S.

DNA testing was not done on the alleged relatives in the United States. The State Department said it targeted Africans abroad only for genetic testing because they make up 95 percent of applicants to the program. The testing started, officials said, only after suspicions of fraud arose in applications originating among refugees in Kenya.

“We were … only able to confirm all claimed biological relationships in fewer than 20 percent of cases,” the State Department said in a fact sheet. “In the remaining cases, at least one negative result was identified or the individuals refused to be tested.”

Ho hum, fearing the ire of civil rights groups nothing will be done about the possibly 36,000 illegal aliens.

As the U.S. review winds down, questions were raised about what to do with the estimated 36,000 African refugees who arrived in the United States under the resettlement between 2003 and its suspension.   [Edit:  I don't get why they are only going back to 2003 for this number, we have been resettling Somalis and other Africans long before that, I bet it's more than 36,000 questionable refugees.]

The Homeland Security Department has jurisdiction to determine if any of those applications were fraudulent but department officials said Thursday they had no plans to check those already in the United States. Such a move would likely draw opposition from civil rights groups.

Gosh, maybe some of those are involved in the Kansas City, MO murder, or the recent Somali murder in Fort Morgan, CO, or the Boys in the Hood we heard about just two days ago,  or Somali gangs in Minneapolis and Seatttle, or the mosque arson we reported this morning, or maybe some of the Somali missing youths—one of whom was arrested just today for attending terrorist training in Somalia.   Nah, it couldn’t be, and besides it’s not worth riling up the diversity-is-strength gang !

Shades of Major Nidal Hasan, wouldn’t you say?

I’m starting to feel like I should rename this blog ‘Somali Watch’ because just when I thought I had a window of time to write the much needed post about that boring “Targeted Assistance” program I’m procrastinating  about, comes two hot Somali stories in the US and another in Finland.  And, oh geez, I forgot to tell you about the Somali missing youths from Canada!

Here is Patrick Poole, an expert on radical Islam from Ohio, writing on the intrigues surrounding a battle between a moderate Somali mosque and an Al-Shabaab-terror-supporting mosque in Columbus, Ohio.  Hat tip:  Jerry Gordon.

Poole begins:

In the early morning of October 19, a fire ravaged through the property surrounding Masjid Salama, a growing Columbus, Ohio, mosque frequented primarily by members of the local Somali community. Several Somali-owned businesses surrounding the mosque were heavily damaged, but the mosque itself was not touched. However, because of the surrounding damage, the mosque itself has not been cleared for reopening.

As reported by the Columbus Dispatch, fire investigators immediately determined that arson was to blame for the blaze.

But rather than blaming the arson on unknown anti-Muslim individuals engaged in a religious hate crime, many inside the Columbus Somali community are fixing their suspicions on leaders of another local Somali mosque, Masjid Ibn Taymiya. This mosque is dominated by supporters of the al-Shabaab terrorist group, and members have made repeated attempts to take over the rapidly growing Salama congregation through an unsuccessful campaign of legal and physical intimidation.

Following the blaze, I met with two leaders of Masjid Salama, who described the ongoing efforts by the leaders of Ibn Taymiya to take over their burgeoning year-and-a-half-old congregation. On November 12, the Salama leaders had to obtain a temporary restraining order to prevent the bulldozing of their rented facility by a leader of the Ibn Taymiya mosque, Mohamed Hassan, who, they say, is the ringleader of the campaign.

Read the whole article.  Poole wraps up with this:

While arson investigators continue to look into the fire that has temporarily displaced Masjid Salama, the leaders are waiting to see whether local officials and the media in Ohio — who have thus far ignored the larger controversy surrounding the fire — will finally recognize the larger battle between Muslim moderates and extremists happening in the Columbus Somali community.

And waiting to see exactly who the politicians and media will side with in this struggle.

Minneapolis, MN, Columbus, OH, Seattle, WA, San Diego, CA, Nashville, TN, Boston, MA and even little Lewiston, ME  (see the Mayor of Lewiston just this week talking up the joys of multiculturalism) are “welcoming” cities for Somali refugees and residents can expect similar warm and fuzzy diversity-is-strength experiences in the near future.   You can thank the US State Department and its Ten federal refugee contractors for this opportunity.

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.  That specific program has not yet been reopened, but thousands of Somalis continue to be resettled as I write this.

….and be one of those lucky 55,000 immigrants to win the big prize and come to America!   That’s right, new readers will be shocked to learn that Congress in its infinite wisdom has mandated we increase America’s diversity and take immigrants from countries that have sent less than 50,000 immigrants here in the last 5 years. 

I’ve written about this on several occasions, but was reminded that it must be application time when reader Cristina sent me this link to an immigration law firm that will help you get your ducks all lined up to participate in the lottery (for a fee I’m sure!).

Here is the press release, dated September 29th, from the State Department. 

The congressionally mandated Diversity Immigrant Visa Program is administered on an annual basis by the Department of State and conducted under the terms of Section 203(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Section 131 of the Immigration Act of 1990 (Pub. L. 101-649) amended INA 203 and provides for a class of immigrants known as “diversity immigrants.” Section 203(c) of the INA provides a maximum of 55,000 Diversity Visas (DVs) each fiscal year to be made available to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.

The annual DV program makes visas available to persons meeting simple, but strict, eligibility requirements. A computer-generated, random lottery drawing chooses selectees for DVs. The visas are distributed among six geographic regions, with a greater number of visas going to regions with lower rates of immigration, and with no visas going to nationals of countries sending more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States over the period of the past five years. Within each region, no single country may receive more than seven percent of the available DVs in any one year.

For DV-2011, natives of the following countries are not eligible to apply because the countries sent a total of more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States in the previous five years:

BRAZIL, CANADA, CHINA (mainland-born), COLOMBIA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, ECUADOR, EL SALVADOR, GUATEMALA, HAITI, INDIA, JAMAICA, MEXICO, PAKISTAN, PERU, PHILIPPINES, POLAND, SOUTH KOREA, UNITED KINGDOM (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and VIETNAM. Persons born in Hong Kong SAR, Macau SAR, and Taiwan are eligible.

No countries have been added or removed from the list of eligible countries. The list of eligible countries remains the same as for DV-2010.

Here is a breakdown of last year’s applicants, I don’t know who the ”winners” are.

“Winners” get to come stand in line overnight in places like Shelbyville, TN to compete (and scuffle) for scarce jobs with refugees and Americans at the Tyson’s chicken plant there as we learned from the Shelbyville Times Gazette in February and reaffirmed by the Wall Street Journal here in May.

In May I also reported that legislation had been introduced in Congress to halt this program, here, but with the Leftwing progressives running the place, the bill could hardly be more than symbolic.

The refugee resettlement program brought in about 75,000 refugees this past fiscal year, and in 2010, the goal is 80,000 (No!  We are not cutting back in this recession).  Only about 20% of refugees are finding jobs, and they will compete with 55,000 new immigrants in this program.   One difference is that refugees get all sorts of public assistance and the diversity visa immigrants are on their own.

David Horowitz has published a pamphlet that helps to educate us about Saul Alinsky and his influence on Obama and his Administration, something we have addressed  in our “community destabilization” category which we began at this time last year.   Here is what Frontpage magazine says about Horowitz and the pamphlet:

David Horowitz was one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s and an editor of its largest magazine,Ramparts. He is the author, with Peter Collier, of three best selling dynastic biographies: The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976); The Kennedys: An American Dream (1984); and The Fords: An American Epic (1987). Looking back in anger at their days in the New Left, he and Collier wrote Destructive Generation (1989), a chronicle of their second thoughts about the 60s that has been compared to Whittaker Chambers’ Witness and other classic works documenting a break from totalitarianism. Horowitz examined this subject more closely in Radical Son (1996), a memoir tracing his odyssey from “red-diaper baby” to conservative activist that George Gilder described as “the first great autobiography of his generation.”

Since taking office Barack Obama, who promised during his campaign to create a moderate, inclusive administration, has engaged in actions that have created division and fear because they are meant to radically change America, not improve on what has always worked. As a result, David Horowitz writes in Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, “Many Americans have gone from hopefulness, through unease, to a state of alarm as the President shows a radical side only party visible during his campaign.”

Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model provides an understanding of the roots of the current administration’s effort to subject America to a wholesale transformation by looking at the work of one of the President’s heroes—radical Chicago “community organizer” Saul Alinsky.  

Read on and learn how you can get a copy.

How does this involve refugees and immigrants?  My theory is that since Alinsky said in order to “change” America one needed to continually pit the “have-nots” against the “haves,”  as Americans generally rose out of poverty, the immigrants were needed to continually build the “have-not” armies.  Now with Obama’s policies and the far left activists he has spread throughout government we will see an acceleration of immigrants, refugees and Americans arriving at the poverty level.  That is the goal!  That is why it is so baffling to logical people who wonder how we can continue to bring in tens of thousands of refugees and other immigrants when there is no work for them.  Their strategy is to build the “have-not” armies.

By the way, as I write this Judy is at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend, so maybe we will get a report about this auspicious gathering of conservatives when she returns.

Endnote:  I was looking for something else and came upon this post from earlier this month to help illustrate what I’m saying about a strategy and a goal, here.