I swear I am not trying to be the Cassandra of this blog but some things just jump out at me. A Richard Fernandez column today did that as it agreed with a post of mine on my own blog from several days ago.
A significant number of Somali immigrants’ children have traveled to the middle east as jihadis.
ISIS has been luring thousands of Westerners to the battlefields of Syria and Iraq. The number of Americans who have traveled to Syria is still relatively small — in the neighborhood of 150 people — and a thin slice of that group, perhaps as many as two dozen Americans, are thought to have joined ISIS.
In the discussions at the White House this week, one city has focused minds: Minneapolis-St Paul. It had been ground zero for terrorist recruiters in the past, and is fast becoming the center of ISIS’ recruitment effort in the United States.
This is a growing problem with the emergence of “lone wolf” attacks by jihadis.
The young man pictured above is one of many young black men, many recruited in prison, who have committed these actions.
Over the weekend, the FBI announced that it would treat Islamist Alton Nolan’s alleged beheading of Colleen Hufford, 54, as a case of workplace violence. That despite the fact that Nolan’s Facebook page contains a picture of Nolan giving the ISIS salute, multiple pictures of Osama Bin Laden, a screenshot of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, and a quote reading, “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smile ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them.”
Then, of course, we have another example of “workplace violence” courtesy of Major Hasan.
Nidal Hasan, the convicted shooter in the Fort Hood attack that left 13 dead and more than 30 injured, has written a letter to the head of the Islamic State, requesting to become a “citizen” of the terrorist organization.
A small town in Norway has seen some troubling developments.
Why it is that certain towns, and even small areas within them, generate a disproportionate number of jihadists?
It “is a big puzzle,” said Jon Fitje Hoffman, director of strategic analysis at Norway’s domestic intelligence agency, the Police Security Service, known as PST. It is also one that has flummoxed security services from Denmark to Germany to France.
In interviews, the families of those who traveled to Syria, other residents and local officials described an unsettling and relatively sudden turn for a clutch of youths, apparently impressed by the example of a popular local soccer player, Abdullah Chaib. Beneath an alluring image as a personable and handsome local hero, he harbored a deep commitment to jihad and was among the first to go.
Aside from living just a short walk from one another, all those who followed from Fredrikstad had little in common, coming from different ethnic, socio-economic and even religious backgrounds.
Some of them were not even Muslim but converted. What is going on?
Mr. Foss, the local police officer, said he first noticed Prophet’s Umma when a Fredrikstad mother filed a complaint that activists from the group were pestering her mentally disturbed son, trying to persuade him to go to Syria. He did not go and is now in a mental hospital.
Those who did go, he added, had shown no previous interest in Islam. “None of them ever even mentioned religion when we knew them,” said Mr. Foss, sitting in an office piled with confiscated water pipes and other drug paraphernalia.
“The only thing they had in common is that they did not function in society,” he added. “But they wanted to be able to do something, to be good at something.” Radical Islam, he said, “offers a whole package.”
“It is ready and all you have to do is accept it,” Mr. Foss said.
Richard Fernandez and Belmont Club today says almost the same thing.
Interesting too were the differences in motivations by place origin, ISIS fighters from the MENA region came mostly for status (22%) or thrill (22%), while Western recruits came to address a profound sense of alienation. Sixty two percent came to find their “identity”. This makes sense, the fighters from the region were poor, rootless men; “soldiers of fortune” as it were. By contrast, the Westerners were more affluent youths looking to find themselves, have lost their identity somewhere in the Western schooling system, where they were waiting one supposes for another to be issued to them, only to find a blank stare.
Out of place and searching for purpose, Mr. Hammer and his friends did so with gusto. He converted to Islam — after being raised Roman Catholic — and changed his first name from Torleif to Abdul.
Add this to the history of prison recruitment and radicalization and we have a serious problem, especially among young black men already alienated from society.
The statistics are staggering, and woefully out of date. One out of three African-American inmates in U.S. prisons convert to Islam while incarcerated.
This statistic is no longer limited to African-Americans in prison. The Huffington Post reported an estimated 35,000 40,000 inmates convert to Islam each year, and that 15 percent of the total U.S. prison population or 350,000 inmates are Muslim.
Much of this is going on at taxpayer expense.
While Egypt and Saudi Arabia have banned the Muslim Brotherhood, classifying it as a terror group, the White House, U.S. prisons, and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security continue to work with Muslim Brotherhood groups.
For example, Paul Pitts served 14 years in prison for murder, where he converted to Islam and became Imam Abdu-Shahid. He was paroled in 2001 and hired as a prison chaplain in 2007 with an annual salary of $49,471. In Feb 2010, he was caught trying to bring scissors and razor blades into the Manhattan Detention Complex.
A New York City corrections department source told the New York Post: “It’s a disgrace that taxpayers are funding Muslim chaplains who not only have criminal records, but also are promoting violence.”
Abdu-Shahid’s boss head chaplain Umar Abdul-Jalil was hired at an annual salary of $76, 602 even though he served 14 years for dealing drugs. In 2006, he was suspended for two weeks without pay after declaring that “the greatest terrorists in the world occupy the White House.” He continues to oversee 40 prison chaplains.
When the jihadis start to come home and join the prison recruits, all hell will break loose. Richard Fernandez has some predictions that sound likely to me.
The dream of a secular, liberal world isn’t going to happen. Pew projects that by 2050 “Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world”. However, ”atheists, agnostics and other people who do not affiliate with any religion … will make up a declining share of the world’s total population”. The Muslims will outnumber them. In fact the Hindus will outnumber them.
Not only will liberal secularism not inherit the earth, the trope that Christianity is a Eurocentric religion foisted on the poor benighted colored masses will finally be laid to rest. Islam will become a major European religion and make up 10% of the population. Over the same time frame, Muslims will outnumber Jews in America. Statistically Christianity will become the black man’s religion and “four out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa.” It is not fanciful to think that by then, all the best white people will be Muslims.
He quotes Cardinal George in this essay from 2012.
I am (correctly) quoted as saying that I expected to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. What is omitted from the reports is a final phrase I added about the bishop who follows a possibly martyred bishop: “His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.” What I said is not “prophetic” but a way to force people to think outside of the usual categories that limit and sometimes poison both private and public discourse.
There is our future. Not mine, thank God, as I am old enough to be gone by the time this happens, if I”m lucky.
This is yet another of the endless failures of American governance.
Yawn.
Oops, sorry. I’ve become so used to the bottomless incompetence that these examples don’t faze me at all.
Anyway, while I have vast respect for Richard Fernandez and read his site daily, I have an ugly suspicion there won’t be quite as many muslims in 2050 as he thinks.
A religion that attracts Western losers, criminals, murderers, and other unpopular folks, all while inspiring mayhem, murder and terrorism, is quite likely to eventually create such trouble that it generates an equally violent and hostile response. Plus, it appears multiple muslim states are about to get nukes, thanks to Barry. I’m sure that will turn out well.
Not only that, but since I’m a fan of the Strauss/Howe Fourth Turning idea, I figure that rather soon the hopelessly dysfunctional American regime will collapse and be replaced by something harder and more effective. I note that the GOP- despite leadership that raises fecklessness to a high art- has not been stronger nationally since the 1920s. Imagine what will happen if the party manages to find leadership that is politically competent.
Maybe I’m dreaming, or just stupid- but the future like the past is a different country and they will do things different there.
They will have no choice.
“Over the weekend, the FBI announced that it would treat Islamist Alton Nolan’s alleged beheading of Colleen Hufford, 54, as a case of workplace violence.”
On the whole I don’t find American comedians funny. I’m glad that the Federal Government is standing in for them.
(Exception: the genius Buster Keaton.)
“In the discussions at the White House this week, one city has focused minds: Minneapolis-St Paul.”
Back in the 90s after their country fell apart, someone got the bright idea to relocate Somali refugees to cold northern climates. They haven’t adapted well. Half to 3/4 of them in Minnesota and Scandinavia live in poverty, and their children have a ghastly rate of developmental disorders.
The study ”” by the University of Minnesota, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the research and advocacy group Autism Speaks ”” found high rates of autism in two populations: About one Somali child in 32 and one white child in 36 in Minneapolis were on the autism spectrum.
The national average is one child in 88, according to Coleen A. Boyle, who directs the C.D.C.’s Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities.
But the Somali children were less likely than the whites to be “high-functioning” and more likely to have I.Q.s below 70. (The average I.Q. score is 100.)
The results echoed those of a Swedish study published last year finding that children from immigrant families in Stockholm ”” many of them Somali ”” were more likely to have autism with intellectual disabilities.
I don’t know if it’s something in the water up there or what, but you probably don’t have to look far in discerning the intentions or the state of mind of Somali youths who are joining the jihad.
Isn’t diversity great?
The average IQ in Somalia is 70.
Youssef Bartho Assidiq – “native Norwegian”. This guy is less Norwegian than Elizabeth Warren is Cherokee.
“native Norwegian” means he was born in Norway. Was he? If so the description is accurate, albeit doubtless intentionally misleading.
P.S. The expression “native American” logically covers you white chaps too, if you were actually born there. Was the expression chosen by someone who was a bit vague about the English language?
If he’s a native Norwegian, can we give him back to Norway?
““native American” logically covers you white chaps too,”
I’v always been amused at the attempts of the left to deny the term “Indian.” The Indians have no problem and the really stupid things, like Kennewick Man are usually projects by white leftists.
Powell said that Kennewick Man was not European but most resembled the Ainu[8] and Polynesians.[13] Powell said that the Ainu descend from the JÅmon people who are an East Asian population with “closest biological affinity with south-east Asians rather than western Eurasian peoples”.[14] Furthermore, Powell said that dental analysis showed the skull to have a 94 percent chance of being a Sundadont group like the Ainu and Polynesians and only a 48 percent chance of being a Sinodont group like that of North Asia, the people who migrated to North America.[13] Powell said analysis of the skull showed it to be “unlike American Indians and Europeans”.
Outrage followed.
MI5 looked over the PCs left behind by jihadist emigrés. In most cases (80%?) they are filled with sadistic-rape-fantasy porn. IOW, these are creeps attracted to ISIS for the opportunity to enslave and rape infidel women.
The Muslim who worries me the most is the one who is president of the United States.
Dearieme- Being born in Norway doesn’t make you Norwegian.
Dearieme – In US English “native American” means Amerindian.
“In US English “native American” means Amerindian”: yes, but my question is who imposed this absurd and ahistorical usage? In the 19th century (and perhaps for the first half of the twentieth?) “native American” denoted it’s plain meaning in English; it distinguished those born there from those who immigrated. Thus it would have made perfect sense to describe the present mayor of London as a native American. But he has no relation to the world of teepees, tomahawks and so forth.
Put otherwise, you now have the absurdity that the “native” in “native American” has a different meaning from the “native” in “an American native” or a “a native Norwegian” or “a native of Indiana” or “a New York native”.
“Was the expression chosen by someone who was a bit vague about the English language?”
The situation was impressively muddled by other forms of confusion well before PC got to it. “American Indian” seems at least as silly to me as “native American”. And “West Indies” is similarly silly. It’s as though the currents and eddies of history had left us calling spectroscopy “particulate phlogiston measurement” or “radiative analytical alchemy”.
A logically elegant linquistic result doesn’t seem to be a likely outcome when building on such a foundation of confusion using the usual PC technique of rejargoning a politically charged grouping (for blacks, American Indians, mentally handicapped, homosexuals, …) once or twice a generation whether it needs it or not.
What would have been wrong with “Indigenous Americans”? It seems pretty good to me.
‘“American Indian” seems at least as silly to me as “native American”’. I disagree. The former is a result of human action, the latter of human design – and a lousy design it is: presumably deliberately lousy?
There were no ‘terrorists’ in the 1800’s. Instead, we had ‘outlaws’. Anyone could get a reward for killing them.
We didn’t need no DEA or Homeland Security or SWAT or NSA or FBI or IRS or CIA or any other secret police or secret military group. Just a Wanted poster and armed civilians. Justice was swift and available everywhere.
dearieme – “indigeneous” isn’t English, at least not Americasn English, it’s Latin.
I have often wondered if the appeal of Islam to convicted criminals is that it provides a handy framework and justification for doing what they have incontrollable impulses to do anyway.
“the appeal of Islam to convicted criminals”
When Elijah Mohammed started the black Muslims I was not concerned and even thought it might be a good idea. He was into cleaning up their act and they had small businesses. I’ve bought luncheon snacks from their bakery in Oakland and thought it was a good thing.
While Muhammad was in prison, the growth of the Nation of Islam had stagnated, with fewer than 400 members remaining by the time of his release in 1946. However, through the conversion of his fellow inmates as well as renewed efforts outside prison, he was able to redouble his efforts and continue growing the Nation.[6] From four temples in 1946, the Nation of Islam grew to 15 by 1955. By 1959, there were 50 temples in 22 states.[15]
He recruited followers in prison and taught a rather confused version of Islam but the members of his following were working and dressing pretty well when I saw them.
By the 1970s, the Nation of Islam owned bakeries, barber shops, coffee shops, grocery stores, laundromats, a printing plant, retail stores, numerous real estate holdings, and a fleet of tractor trailers, plus farmland in Michigan, Alabama, and Georgia. In 1972 the Nation of Islam took controlling interest in a bank, the Guaranty Bank and Trust Co. Nation of Islam-owned schools expanded until, by 1974, the group had established schools in 47 cities throughout the United States.[17] In 1972, Muhammad told followers that the Nation of Islam had a net worth of $75 million.[5]
In spite of the radical teachings, I wasn’t worried. I have always wondered why blacks did not seem to be interested in entrepreneurial ventures like small shops. The Muslims seemed to be correcting that deficiency and I didn’t really care much about the weird teachings. Farrakhan is another matter.
The “mainstream Muslims” seem to be worse and we would be better off with Elijah’s version.
Sleepers, biding their time. Ten, twenty, fifty years, no matter. Anyone reading between the lines could and can see the intent. Wasn’t the term “chickens coming home to roost” first used by Malcolm hex when Kennedy was shot? I believe that there was an article in the NY Times about the nation and the panthers meeting with A-jad when he came to town. If true, wouldn’t that be enough, if not, then what’s it going to take? I do wish some elected official in Oklahoma would get in front of a camera and correct the FBI on this vile act. Come right out and say it.
“dearieme – “indigeneous” isn’t English”. Eh? It was at my school. Anyway, where on earth do you suppose “native” came from?
Michael,
It may have been you I cautioned not to enter into gunfights with terrorist Chechens with a .22.
I take it all back.
Just ah..take precautions.
Quite legal. Sorta.
http://www.silencerco.com/products/sparrow-22/
Or it may have been some guy from Wisconsin.
I still take it back.
Go for it.
I was always partial to the .220 swift .
It is good for varmints out to 375 yards.
It’s not easy to see the photos of these “known wolf” terrorists but Google helps.
Once again, the FBI fails to apprehend the terrorist until the least moment. At least they got him before he set off the bomb.
More “workplace violence.”
Dearieme – You’re probably high-class. Ordinary Americans don’t use the word “indigenous” but they do use the word “native”.