by Ann Coulter
In other words, the Somalis owe us. But U.S. immigration officials decided: Let’s ratchet up the degree of difficulty in our immigrants. Not only will we let in the poorest, most backward people of the world, but let’s not even take African Christians. Let’s take the African Muslims!
WE NEED SOME PIZZAZZ—HOW ABOUT 100,000 SOMALIS?
The reason Scandinavian Minnesota ended up with more than one hundred thousand Somalis is that liberals thought the state was too white-bread and not at all diverse. In the 1990s, the head of the Minneapolis Foundation, Emmett Carson, complained that California and New York were much more “multicultural” than Minnesota. Wouldn’t Minnesota be a much cooler state with a hundred thousand Somalis? The foundation ran a public information campaign, showing a photo of three smiling Somali women in their native garb over the caption: “Maybe you’re just not sure what to make of all these new Minnesotans bringing in all these strange new cultures and customs. But hey, have you ever really thought about lutefisk?” Pleased by the success of his campaign, Carson exulted: “Minnesota is changing.”5
Yes, Minnesota used to be very boring. Now it’s exciting!
Indictment: Somali Gangs Trafficked Girls for Sex
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) Twenty-nine people have been indicted in a sex trafficking ring in which Somali gangs in Minneapolis and St. Paul allegedly forced girls under age 14 into prostitution in Minnesota, Tennessee and Ohio, according to an indictment unsealed Monday.
The 24-count indictment, unsealed in U.S. District Court in the Middle District of Tennessee, said one of the gangs’ goals was recruiting females under age 18, including some under age 14, and forcing them into prostitution so the defendants could get money, marijuana or liquor.
The indictment details several instances in which young Somali or African American girls were taken from place to place and forced to engage in sex acts with multiple people. One girl was under 13 when she was first prostituted.6
In just a few decades, Minnesota has gone from being approximately 99 percent German, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, and Polish to 20 percent African immigrant,7 including at least one hundred thousand Somalis.8 And that’s not counting the Somalis who have recently left the country to fight with al Qaeda and ISIS. One hundred thousand is just an estimate. We don’t know precisely how many Somalis the federal government has brought in as “refugees” because the government won’t tell us. The public can’t be trusted with the truth.
Since becoming more multicultural, Minnesota has turned into a hotbed of credit card skimming, human trafficking, and smash-and-grab robberies.9 Mosques have popped up all over the state—as have child prostitutes and machete attacks.
Welfare consumption in Minnesota has more than doubled on account of the newcomers—only half of whom have jobs. Those Somalis who do have jobs earn an average of $21,000 a year, compared with $46,000 for the average Minnesotan. (Consider yourself lucky, Minnesota: In Sweden, only 20 percent of Somalis have jobs.) Eighty percent of Somalis in Minnesota live at or below the poverty line. Nearly 70 percent have not graduated from high school, compared with only 8.4 percent of non-Somali Minnesotans.10
But no Democrat will cross them, and no Republican will mention them: Somalis have leapfrogged past native blacks to become a major political force in Minnesota. For every white Minnesotan who becomes a Republican each year, two Somalis turn eighteen and start bloc-voting for the Democrats.
Everyone seems to agree that it is Minnesotans’ responsibility to assimilate to Somali culture, not the other way around.11 The Catholic University of St. Thomas has installed Islamic prayer rooms and footbaths in order to demonstrate, according to Dean of Students Karen Lange, that the school is “diverse.” Minneapolis’s mayor, Betsy Hodges, has shown up wearing a full hijab to meetings with Somalis. (In fairness, it was “Forbid Your Daughter to Work Outside the Home” Day.) A suburban Minnesota high school has “Welcome” signs written in Somali, a Somali student group, and articles in the school newspaper about how unhappy the Somalis are.
Kate Towle, the parent leader of a high school group called “Students Together as Allies for Racial Trust” explained that diversity skills “have to be developed like math, history.”12 Maybe it would be better for students to be learning math and history, rather than the important skill of: Getting Along with Somalis. It doesn’t seem to be working, anyway: There are still violent ethnic brawls that send students to the hospital.
What did we do to Somalis? What did we do to Cameroonians or Senegalese? Absolutely nothing. But now these immigrants, who arrived yesterday, will get affirmative action over white Americans. Do the media really not know how the Ghanaian immigrant got accepted to ALL EIGHT Ivy League schools? According to New York magazine, it’s because he’s “better than you.”13
“THANK YOU” WOULD BE NICE
We can’t assimilate immigrants to Western ideas about pedophilia, human trafficking, and credit card fraud, but they take like fish to water to America’s victim culture. People adapt amazingly quickly to a sense of entitlement. In about ten seconds, impoverished immigrants go from Wait—I can have this? to Where’s my money? As a white female Sears employee told the New York Times, Somalis “think this is a great opportunity for them, this prejudice thing. If you look at them the wrong way or they don’t have enough money, they say it’s prejudice.”14 Newcomers hear American paeans to tolerance, respect, and inclusion and think: Great! That means tolerance of ME, respect for ME, and inclusion for ME.
In 2002, Minneapolis police shot a Somali man, Abu Kassim Jeilani, who was walking down the middle of a busy street waving a machete. While this may be common behavior in Mogadishu, it’s generally frowned upon in Minneapolis. Even after being tasered a half dozen times, Jeilani continued to menace cops with his machete, charging the officers and smashing it on their squad cars. Eventually, Jeilani rushed an officer and ended up dead.15 Luckily, every Somali in Minnesota who has a job works for an ethnic grievance outfit—for example, the Somali Justice Advocacy Center, the Somali Resources Aid Associates, the African Development Center, and the Confederation of Somali Community in Minnesota. (And those are just some of the jobs being created by immigrants!)
This allowed the Somali community to erupt in rage, claiming Jeilani’s “civil rights” had been violated. Omar Jamal, of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center, denounced the shooting, claiming, unironically: “We are taxpayers. We pay these people to serve and protect us. We pay taxes and they pay taxes.”16 With half of Somalis in Minnesota unemployed and 80 percent living at or below the poverty level, one thing they are definitely not doing is “paying taxes.” I think the phrase he’s looking for is “accepting welfare.” The Somalis’ civil rights lawsuit on behalf of a man who ran at cops with a machete was unsuccessful. It was very successful, however, in wasting the resources of U.S. federal courts for five years.17
About a decade ago, thousands of Somalis moved to the small working-class town of Lewiston, Maine. Within the first year of their arrival, the town’s welfare caseload doubled. Before the town was bankrupted, Mayor Laurier T. Raymond Jr. wrote a letter to Somali elders asking them to discourage their fellow countrymen from continuing to move to Lewiston. He respectfully explained: “We have been overwhelmed and have responded valiantly. Now we need breathing room. Our city is maxed-out financially, physically and emotionally.”
In response, the Somali elders accused him of racism. Calling the mayor an “ill-informed leader who is bent towards bigotry,” they said he was trying to incite “violence against our people physically, verbally and emotionally.” The governor and attorney general were forced to defend the mayor from charges of racism. But the Somalis pushed on, demanding that everyone acknowledge how peachy they are. “We hope that others appreciate,” they said, “the potential richness and opportunity newcomers bring to the city.”18
At least Lewiston has shed its boring whiteness! Today, Somali boys roam the streets physically assaulting the locals. Within a few days in the summer of 20
09, three separate residents were mugged, including one woman in her sixties and one man who had to be hospitalized. Another time, a gang of Somali boys attacked a woman walking her dog, beating the dog with a stick. Muggings by Somalis are so common that some Lewiston residents have been victimized more than once.
Even Somalia doesn’t want Somalis. Convicted rapist Mohammed Mukhtar avoided probation by agreeing to be deported after completing his sentence.19 Somalia, however, is unlikely to take Mukhtar back. We want him to go, he claims he wants to go, but Somalia can say, We’re leaving the rapist with you. Our immigration laws are working fantastically well for every country in the world except our own.
THEY MOVED HERE
It’s not just Somalis bringing heinous cultural behaviors here and then claiming victimhood. After an illegal alien from Mexico snatched a nine-year-old American girl off her bicycle in Ohio, dragged her to his house, and repeatedly raped her, the reaction from the Mexican community was to complain about the “negative picture of Hispanics in the minds of some,” as Jason Riveiro with the League of United Latin American Citizens said.20
In a case the New York Times described as a “family drama involving clashes of cultures,” a Brazilian woman and Palestinian man in St. Louis murdered their own daughter because she was a “whore” for “going out with a black boy.”21 By lucky coincidence the girl’s father, Zein Isa, was a suspected terrorist, so the FBI captured the entire murder on a surveillance tape in their home—in subsidized housing, naturally. (Zein could be heard on the tape boasting about how much he loved the United States because there were so many different welfare programs to game.)
On the tape, played for the jury, the girl can be heard shrieking as her father coldly says, “Do you know that you are going to die tonight?” then stabs her to death, as Mommy Dearest holds her down.22 One of the prosecutors described the tape as “worse than any movie, any film, anything I thought that I would ever hear in my life.” Jurors, who voted for the death penalty, said they would never get it out of their minds.23
But the Muslim community in St. Louis complained that the verdict did not respect Islamic culture. “I feel it’s not right,” a Muslim neighbor told the New York Times. “We follow our religion.” The parents, she said, would “be embarrassed in front of everybody in the country like somebody when they go without their clothes outside.”24 An anthropology professor at the State University of New York, Nicolas Gavrielides, testified for the defense, saying, “Everyone growing up in the Middle East knows being killed is a possible consequence of dishonoring the family.”25
In another one of those madcap “clash of cultures” episodes, Salem Al-Saidy, an Iraqi immigrant living in Nebraska, forced his thirteen- and fourteen-year-old daughters into arranged marriages with Iraqi men aged thirty-four and twenty-eight, then took them to be raped by the men. When the father and “husbands” were arrested, they expressed indignation—through interpreters—that anyone thought they had done anything wrong.26 “Nobody ever told my client,” the father’s lawyer said, “what the criminal laws were here in the United States, much less the state of Nebraska, much less the city of Lincoln.”
A Chinese immigrant in New York, Dong Lu Chen, bludgeoned his wife to death with a claw hammer because she was having an affair. He was unashamed, greeting his teenaged son at the door in bloody clothes, telling the boy he had just killed Mom. Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Edward Pincus let Chen off with probation—for murder—after an anthropologist testified that, in Chinese culture, the shame of a man being cuckolded justified murder. Judge Pincus admitted that if the exact same crime had been committed by an American, “the Court would have been constrained to find the defendant guilty of manslaughter in the first degree.” But in Chen’s case, the murder flowed from “traditional Chinese values about adultery and loss of manhood.’’27 Why do “traditional American values” about not murdering your wife lose out to “traditional Chinese values” about murdering her?
The female head of the Asian-American Defense and Education Fund, Margaret Fung, applauded Chen’s light sentence, saying that a harsher penalty would “promote the idea that when people come to America they have to give up their way of doing things. That is an idea we cannot support.”28 At least Chen came to the United States based on his specialized knowledge of nuclear cell extraction biology. No, I’m sorry—Chen immigrated to America with his entire family when he was fifty years old—fifteen years away from collecting Social Security—to be a dishwasher.29
Female immigrants from Japan periodically kill their children because they have been “shamed” by a husband’s infidelity, leading to long cultural pieces in Newsweek calling such child murders a “tragedy” and explaining that, in Japan, “the shame of having failed at her own suicide would be regarded as punishment enough.”30 There’s isn’t a lot of soul-searching when an American man kills himself and his kids, though those cases also tell a tragic story about shame and failure.31
IMMIGRANT MASS MURDERS—LIVING TEDDY KENNEDY’S AMERICAN DREAM
Here are some of the Americans who would still be alive if the government had been a bit choosier in determining who gets to live in America. Please don’t write me with your favorite story of immigrant criminality. I know each of them is special in its own way, but there just isn’t the space to list them all. To keep it short, I’ve limited the list to recent mass murders committed by legal immigrants.
The seven people murdered by Chechen immigrants Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who planted a bomb at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013. In addition to the three people killed in the blast, including an eight-year-old boy, dozens of Americans suffered severe injuries in the marathon bombing and are still learning to live with prosthetics and other artificial devices to replace lost legs, feet, eyes, and hearing—all thanks to an immigration policy that allows other countries to dump their losers on us. Days after setting off the bomb, the duo murdered a young MIT police officer during their attempted escape, and two years earlier Tamerlan and another Muslim immigrant slit the throats of three Jewish men on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack—which I believe was also the work of immigrants. CNN headline after the attack: “Boston Bombing Shouldn’t Derail Immigration Reform.”32 Leaving aside the wanton slaughter, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were tremendous assets to America. They were on welfare and getting mostly Fs in school. Good work, U.S. immigration service!
The three people, including a fifteen-year-old girl, Ashley Chow, murdered in North Miami in 2012 by Kesler Dufrene, a Haitian immigrant and convicted felon who had already been arrested in the United States nine times. Dufrene was due to be deported, but was released when Obama halted deportations to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.
Sixty-seven-year-old Florence Donovan-Gunderson and three National Guardsmen—Heath Kelly, Miranda McElhiney, and Christian Riege—fatally shot in a Carson City IHOP by immigrant Eduardo Sencion in 2011. Four other IHOP patrons were left in critical condition by the Mexican-born Sencion.
The thirteen soldiers killed at Fort Hood in 2009 by Major Nidal Malik Hasan, son of Palestinian immigrants. Hasan’s parents operated a restaurant in Roanoke, Virginia—because where are we going to find Americans to open a restaurant?
The thirteen people murdered by Vietnamese immigrant Jiverly Wong, at an American Civic Association in Binghamton, New York. Wong became a naturalized citizen two years after being convicted of fraud and forgery in California. Apparently, Wong decided to commit mass murder because he was upset that people disrespected him for his poor English skills, a problem that could be avoided by admitting immigrants who speak English.33
The five people murdered at the Trolley Square Shopping Mall in Salt Lake City by Bosnian immigrant Sulejman Talovic in 2007. Talovic was a high school dropout with a juvenile record. INS: No room for you, Norwegian doctor. We think this Sulejman is really going to amount to something!
The thirty-two people murdered at Virginia Tech in 2007 by Seung-Hui Cho, a South Korean immig
rant.
The six people killed in northern Wisconsin in 2004 by Hmong immigrant Chai Soua Vang, who shot his victims in the back after being caught trespassing on their property. Minnesota Public Radio sensitively reported that Hmong don’t understand American laws about private property, endangered species—or really anything written in English.
The six men murdered by Mexican immigrant Salvador Tapia at the Windy City Core Supply warehouse in Chicago in 2003, because he was angry about being fired. Tapia was still in this country despite having been arrested at least a dozen times on weapons and assault charges. Only foreign newspapers mentioned that Tapia was an immigrant.34 American journalists blamed the gun.35
The three people murdered at the Appalachian School of Law in 2002 by Nigerian immigrant Peter Odighizuwa, who was angry at America because he had failed out of law school. Even before his killing rampage, what was Odighizuwa’s contribution to America? He was a forty-three-year-old law student. The INS thought we needed to address America’s chronic shortage of forty-three-year-old lawyers?
Two of the most famous murder sprees of the 1990s were also perpetrated by legal immigrants. The 1993 Long Island Railroad massacre that left six passengers dead was committed by Jamaican immigrant Colin Ferguson. Before deciding to murder white people, the unemployed immigrant kept busy harassing women on subways, bringing endless lawsuits, applying for workman’s compensation for fake injuries, and blaming all his problems on white Americans. Whites are going to be a minority in this country a lot faster if the INS keeps bringing in immigrants like Ferguson.