The Terrorist Next Door (16 page)

A spokesman for the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration told me in an interview that the program, which is a billion-dollar annual enterprise funded by taxpayers, specifically targets refugees from Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia—Islamic strongholds all.
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The thinking here is that if the United States continues to help Muslims, they will begin to like us—even though, as
mentioned previously, all existing evidence points to the contrary. “It's one of the best facets of America, that we are a very generous, hospitable country,” the spokesman said, noting that a number of Iraqi Christians have also been resettled in the United States in recent years.

Amen to that last point: I support an influx of Iraq's beleaguered Christian minority—which is being systematically exterminated by Islamic jihadists—into the United States. Of course, Iraqi Christians do not follow a religious-political system that commands them to wage jihad, slay Christian and Jewish infidels, and impose sharia law until the Day of Judgment comes. Muslims, however—at least those who take their Islam literally, and many Somalis do—follow such a system. Nevertheless, they receive red carpet treatment from the U.S. government.

In fact, the Somali presence in the United States has exploded since 9/11, and is slated to expand further. Here are the figures from the invaluable Refugee Resettlement Watch website on the number of Somali refugees admitted to America, beginning ten years ago:
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The huge dip here shows that the government momentarily wised up after 9/11—but only momentarily, as the annual number of Somali refugees admitted to the United States increased by over 14,000 between 2002 and 2004 alone. Bear in mind also that each Somali family in America has, on average, six children. Here are the figures for the ensuing years:

We see a big dip in 2008, likely due to massive fraud that was uncovered in the family reunification, or P-3, portion of the resettlement program. In a bombshell revelation, the State Department admitted that up to 80 percent of the African refugees that were granted entry to America between 2003 and 2008—tens of thousands of them—had falsely claimed to have family members who were already here. Were any of the Somalis that fraudulently exploited the program covert al-Shabaab operatives aligned with al-Qaeda? Were any of them pirates, warlords, or participants in the Black Hawk Down incident? If the State Department knows, it isn't saying.

And apparently, it isn't too concerned, as the number of Somali refugees is now back on the rise, with a combined 9,073 Somalis admitted in 2009 and 2010 despite the family reunification travesty and the growing menace of Islamic jihadism emanating from Somalia, courtesy of al-Shabaab.

Under President Obama, who has made Muslim outreach a top priority, the number of Somali refugees promises to increase further. Obama announced in September 2010 that the ceiling for refugees in 2011 would be the maximum currently allowed under the resettlement program: 80,000.
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Of that number, well over half will hail from Muslim countries, including Somalia. But don't worry: that same State Department spokesman said all necessary precautions are taken to ensure that Islamic jihadists are not among the new arrivals, assuring me that State “work[s] closely with the Department of Homeland Security to make sure we vet people coming here. Especially since 9/11, it's very important.”

I would say so, and forgive me if I'm a bit uneasy that the same administration that failed to connect the dots at Fort Hood and with the Christmas Day underwear bomber is in charge of detecting potential Somali terrorists. And sure enough, even the most cursory investigation shows that, despite the supposedly rigorous screening process for refugees, an alarming number of Somalis in America are turning to terrorism and jihad. Minnesota, take a bow.

For someone arriving at the departure gate of an air terminal, there are few scenes more disconcerting than seeing a dozen men performing Islamic prayers in front of the building. In a post 9/11-world, it's an unfriendly reminder of the jihadist danger that might be lurking on the plane you're about to board. So it was with great interest that I observed the concerned expressions worn by pedestrians arriving at MinneapolisSt. Paul International Airport one afternoon in June 2007, as a group of Somali Muslim taxi drivers performed prayers next to a fleet of parked cabs. While some prayed, others sat on the curb and ritually cleansed their feet from water bottles as they readied to face Mecca. It was a public and brazen display of Islamic supremacism, yet the cabbies were none too happy that my cameraman and I had decided to film it. Some shouted at us angrily and others hopped in their cabs and sped away. Unfortunately for them, we had been cleared to film at the airport—but the rules are a mere trifle to the Somali cabbies, who operate a whopping 75 percent of the airport's 900 or so cabs.

Indeed, I'd come to the Twin Cities, home to the nation's largest Somali population, to report on the widespread refusal of Somali cabbies at the airport to transport passengers who had alcohol in their possession.
So you've just arrived in Minneapolis from out of town and want to take a nice bottle of wine from the duty-free store to your parents' house for Christmas dinner, eh? Forget about it, infidel.
Alcohol is
haram
—forbidden—in Islam, and in the Somali cabbies' view, to merely transport it in their cars is a grave sin. The same goes for transporting seeing-eye dogs for blind passengers, since dogs are viewed as filthy by Muslims and were detested by Islam's prophet, Mohammed, according to Islamic tradition.

Since most non-Muslims don't share these hang-ups about booze and dogs, the Somali cabbies were effectively practicing religious discrimination, not to mention imposing sharia law, in their own creative way. It was no coincidence, then, that they had been emboldened to turn away passengers with alcohol by a fatwa issued by the local chapter of the Muslim American Society, or MAS, that commanded as much. MAS is an American
arm of the Muslim Brotherhood that is devoted to imposing sharia law far and wide—and the Somali cabbies got the memo. Thankfully, their efforts at making the Twin Cities' airport sharia-compliant seem to have failed for the moment, as the Metropolitan Airports Commission eventually ruled that a cabbie's license can be revoked for thirty days for refusing to pick up a passenger for any reason, with a second refusal bringing a two-year revocation.

Nevertheless, Somali Islamists are making great strides elsewhere in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where their pressure campaigns have led to the installation of ritual foot-washing basins at some local universities and the continued operation of a taxpayer-funded Islamic public school in suburban St. Paul, called the Tarek ibn Zayad Academy, that even the Muslim-coddling ACLU has accused of Islamist indoctrination. In addition, Minneapolis Somalis form a powerful voting bloc that was critical in electing America's first Muslim congressman, Democrat Keith Ellison, a Muslim Brotherhood favorite who swore his individual oath of office on a Koran.

But the most notorious contribution by Somali Islamists in Minneapolis has been to the global jihad. U.S. officials say that since 2007, at least twenty young Somalis from the Twin Cities area have traveled back to their homeland to fight alongside the terrorist group al-Shabaab in its jihad campaigns against both internal rivals and soldiers from neighboring Ethiopia, which occupied Somalia from 2007 until 2008. In the process, these Somali-American terrorists have no doubt received invaluable jihadi training from their Shabaab overlords that, as FBI director Robert Mueller pointed out in 2009, “raises the question of whether these young men will one day come home, and, if so, what they might undertake here.”
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The potential magnitude of this danger became clear in October 2008 when Shirwa Ahmed, a Somali-born Minneapolis resident, became the first successful American suicide bomber. Ahmed, a naturalized U.S. citizen, drove a car filled with explosives into a government compound in northern Somalia, killing himself and twenty-nine others. Ahmed and
his family had arrived in Minneapolis in 1996 courtesy of—you guessed it—the State Department's refugee resettlement program. Mueller said shortly after the suicide bombing that Ahmed “was radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota.”
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Of course, that didn't stop Mueller and the Bureau from shipping Ahmed's remains home to Minneapolis for an Islamic burial on the U.S. taxpayers' dime. As for a potential radicalization spot, a great deal of suspicion has surrounded the Abubakar as-Siddiq mosque in Minneapolis, which Ahmed and several other Shabaab wannabes had attended before trekking to Somalia in pursuit of their seventy-two virgins. (The mosque's imam, predictably, has denied any involvement.) Sure enough, at least six of them have been killed, including a white convert to Islam who had had hooked up with Somali radicals in Minneapolis.

The prospect of battle-hardened Somali jihadists carrying U.S. passports is a nightmare scenario for U.S. intelligence officials; one former federal investigator told me in late 2010 that Somalis have moved to the top of the list of potential threats to the American and Canadian homelands. It's not hard to see why:

And Somali Islamist mayhem isn't limited to the Western Hemisphere:

In the June 2009 issue of
New English Review
magazine, counter-jihad activist Jerry Gordon outlined a chilling scenario of a Mumbai-style attack being carried out on U.S. soil by Somali-American terrorists:

Gordon's article was proven prescient on Black Friday—November 26, 2010—when a 19-year-old Somali-American named Mohamed Osman Mohamud was arrested after attempting to detonate what he believed was an explosives-laden van at an annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon. Mohamud, who was snagged through an FBI sting operation (undercover agents had supplied the phony explosives), told the feds he was aiming to murder as many people as possible—and indeed, such an attack would have potentially killed thousands. He yelled “Allahu Akhbar” and tried to kick agents and police as he was taken into custody. He also made a pre-attack video in which, dressed in al-Qaedatype garb, he denounced America and extolled jihad.

These and other facts of Mohamud's case no doubt left government officials scrambling for answers. Up until his arrest, their scant public comments about the Somali terror threat in America focused on Ethiopia's occupation of Somalia or various social ills as the prime motivators for Somali radicalization. Yet in Mohamud's case, he had never traveled to Somalia or made contact with al-Shabaab (although he did reach out to terrorists in Pakistan's tribal regions). An engineering student at Oregon State University, he was, by most accounts, well-adjusted to American life and fairly normal, at least on the surface. So forget about social ills. At the end of the day, what has motivated Mohamud and all the other Somali jihadists to emerge from American cities is Islamist ideology, plain and simple.