Happy Easter

Eternal Memories to The Ethiopian Martyrs

Ethiopia  Martyrs

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Somali ‘Refugee’ Influx Continues Unabated

The Islamic State’s Cyber Army used an online cellphone app to post a “kill list” of names, addresses, phone numbers and other personal information on 36 police officers in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota.

The FBI said this week it is investigating the case but analysts say it’s obvious why ISIS chose to target the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

The area is home to America’s largest Somali refugee community and has been a hotbed of Islamic terrorist recruitment dating back to at least 2007. Since then more than 34 young Somalis have left Minnesota to join the ranks of foreign terror groups, including the Islamic State in Syria and al-Shabab in Somalia. Others have been convicted of sending material support to overseas terrorist organizations.

It’s not as though Congress hasn’t been warned about the festering radicalism of Somali youth.

Back in March 2009 the Senate Homeland Security Committee heard testimony that Somali youth were being radicalized in Minnesota.

The 2009 hearing highlighted the case of Shirwa Ahmed, a 27-year-old Somali who came to Minnesota as a refugee and was radicalized in his adopted country by al-Shabab – which convinced him to travel to Somalia and blow himself up along with 29 others.

“The idea that Ahmed was radicalized in the United States raised red flags throughout the U.S. intelligence community,” CNN reported at the time. The incident – the first suicide bombing by a naturalized U.S. citizen – was the “most significant case of homegrown American terrorism recruiting based on violent Islamist ideology,” then Sen. Joseph Lieberman said at the Senate hearing.

The problem has only gotten worse since 2009. Andrew Luger, the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, admitted last spring, after six more Somalis were arrested for trying to board planes bound for Turkey with plans to join ISIS, that his state has “a terror-recruitment problem.”

Yet, the Obama administration has kept the pipeline of new Somali “refugees” well-oiled. They continue to come at a rate of 700 per month, most of them coming from United Nations’ camps in Kenya – camps that the Kenyan president has threatened to shut down because of their suspected ties to terrorist attacks inside his country.

The problem of terror recruitment in Minnesota has become so palpable that the federal government is now issuing grants to nonprofits for the purpose of teaching young Somalis not to succumb to the temptation of joining “extremists” like ISIS and al-Shabab.

According to the Twin Cities Pioneer Press, six organizations working with Somali youth in Minnesota have been awarded $300,000 in grants as part of a federal pilot program designed to combat terrorism. Boston and Los Angeles are also participating.

Marcus Pope, director of partnerships and external relations for Youthprise, the nonprofit administering the money, said Minnesota is home to many creative and bright Somali youth, but many of them face “formidable challenges, including a sense of alienation, a search for identity as new immigrants, unemployment and poverty that can open them to recruitment by extremist groups.”

Of course many immigrants throughout American history could offer the same excuse, that they came to their new country with nothing but the shirts on their backs – dirt poor – but they did not have a history of participating in terrorism nor did they offer aid to those who wished to harm America.

This begs the question, if the Somalis are such a problem that they require special taxpayer-funded programs to teach them how to avoid the temptation of terrorism, why does the Obama administration continue to place them into dozens of U.S. cities and towns?

The U.S. has taken in more than 115,000 Somali refugees since 1992. They have large families and some estimates put the current size of the Somali-American community at more than 200,000.

And the flow continues at break-neck speed.

In just the first 10 weeks of 2016, from Jan. 1 through March 17, the U.S. State Department has imported 1,984 Somali refugees from U.N. camps, according to the department’s refugee database.

For the past 12 months, the government has imported 8,386 Somalis. That’s an average of 700 Somalis per month going into small, medium and large cities across the United States. Towns as small as St. Cloud and Willmar, Minnesota; Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota; Irving and Amarillo, Texas; Greeley, Colorado; High Point and Durham, North Carolina; Lexington and Omaha, Nebraska; Anchorage, Alaska; Noel, Missouri; Boise, Idaho; Wichita, Kansas; Bowling Green and Owensboro, Kentucky; Portland and Lewiston, Maine, have all received at least a dozen Somali refugees over the past year. Some of these small towns, like St. Cloud, have received hundreds of Somalis, sparking a citizen backlash that has been previously reported by WND.

The Somalis have been resettle in Minnesota by Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Charities. The government pays these agencies nearly $2,000 for every refugee they resettle and also awards grants to provide specialized services to the refugees.

Top 20 cities receiving Somali refugees

The cities receiving the most Somali refugees over the past 12 months are as follows:

Minneapolis-St. Paul – 646

Columbus, Ohio – 412

Buffalo, N.Y. – 361

Syracuse, N.Y. – 307

Dallas-Ft. Worth – 302

Salt Lake City, Utah – 276

San Diego – 275

St. Cloud – 243

Louisville, Ky. – 236

Phoenix, Ariz. – 218

Seattle, Wash. – 212

Erie, Pa. – 207

Atlanta – 159

Glendale, Ariz. – 155

Tuscon – 154

Boston – 153

Houston – 150

Nashville – 148

Kansas City, Mo. – 145

Portland, Ore. – 132

Will Minnesota learn from mistakes?

Continue reading…

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In Most Faiths, Especially Christianity, Women Are More Faithful Than Men

AS MANY people read it, the Easter narrative being celebrated today by hundreds of millions of Christians across the world makes a point about gender as one of its many sub-texts. In his darkest moment, Jesus seems to be abandoned by most of his cowardly male disciples who are disappointed that he has failed to triumph as an earthly king, and frightened for their own skins; but his female followers, though grief-stricken over his fate, remain loyal and determined to their cultural duty by anointing his body with spices; the women are duly rewarded by getting the first news that their master has risen.

Here is one of the many paradoxical things about religion as a feature of human society. Its founders, administrators and gate-keepers have generally, with important exceptions, been men. But its most loyal practitioners, including and perhaps especially in times of adversity, have been women. During the atheist Soviet regime, it was devout women who kept the flame of faith alive and passed it onto their children. There were babushkas or grandmothers who kept religious icons in their houses and taught their children to pray. Among the Sufi Muslim communities in remote parts of the Caucasus, women ran prayer circles; and in the indigenous religions of Siberia, the task of healing often fell to female shamans.

A global survey by the Pew Research Center, an independent body based in Washington, DC, has found that by a whole series of yardsticks, women are generally more devout than men, albeit with some exceptions. It looked at six faith categories (Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews and the unaffiliated) as well as public data from 192 nations, including its own surveys in 84 countries, gathered since 2008. Among its broad conclusions:

“On all the standard measures of religious commitment examined…Christian women are more religious than Christian men. By contrast, Muslim women and Muslim men show similar levels of religiousness on all measures of religious commitment except frequency of attendance at worship services. Because of religious norms, Muslim men attend services at a mosque much more often than Muslim women do. ”

Looking in greater detail, the survey found that 83.4% of women round the world identified with a religious group compared with 79.9% of men. In 61 out of the 192 countries, the female lead was more than two percentage points. Among the 84 countries where Pew had asked the question, there were 43 where substantially more women than men reported praying daily. The only country where more men than women engaged in daily prayer was Israel; as the survey notes, in Orthodox Judaism, practised by 22% of Jewish Israelis, an act of worship requires a quorum of 10 men, or minyan. In 36 of the 84 countries, women were significantly more likely than men to describe religion as very important in their lives; only in Israel and Mozambique were male respondents more likely than female ones to attach a big role to religion.

Generally, Muslim men and women were more alike in their levels of piety than were male and female Christians. In the 40 countries where data was available, Muslim women reported praying daily in only fractionally greater numbers than their male counterparts. However a look at Christians’ prayer habits in 54 countries revealed a much bigger gap; there were 29 countries where female prayerfulness exceeded that of males by 10 points or more, and in Greece the gap was 25 points.

The United States is one of the countries where the gender gap is large. Some 60% of American women consider religion very important, against 47% of men. Daily prayer is practised by 64% of female Americans against 47% of males; and weekly church-going is a habit among 40% of American women versus 32% of men.

Although it certainly isn’t the whole story, part of the explanation may lie in the traditional European societies, especially Catholic ones, from which present-day Americans originate. In old-fashioned Mediterranean communities, where everybody was formally devout, the task of praying, church-going and keeping the family right with God and His saints was one that fell to females more than to males. That division of labour persisted among American Catholic migrants, and it was remarkably long-lasting in the Old World too. In her study of a working-class Greek community in the early 1970s, Renee Hirschon found that women had a deep theological understanding of the rituals they enacted, from mourning the dead to preparing festive meals for different occasions on the church calendar, culminating in Easter. The women, more clearly than their husbands, could see and describe how faith and custom interacted.

Source

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