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Showing posts with label Helena. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Helena. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Small Town American Being Swamped With Syrian Immigrants


image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2016/01/montana-map.jpg
The federal government is working with churches and NGOs to bring foreign refugees, including some from Syria, to small towns in Montana, including Helena and Missoula.
The federal government is working with churches and NGOs to bring foreign refugees, including some from Syria, to small towns in Montana, including Helena and Missoula.
More than 120 people braved the snow and ice Monday to rally in front of the Missoula County Courthouse, protesting an effort by the Obama administration and its army of community organizers to plant foreign “refugees” into small cities in western Montana.
One of the speakers was a woman who moved recently to Montana from Amarillo, Texas, which has been inundated with thousands of refugees over the past 15 years.
“Amarillo is overrun with refugees,” said Karen Sherman, who stood and spoke to the crowd amid blowing wind and falling snowflakes. Sherman just moved to Missoula, a college town that serves as home to the University of Montana.
It’s a far cry from Amarillo, which she described as a city of rampant crime and cracking social fabric, thanks to the heavy influx of refugees sent there by the U.S. State Department in cooperation with the United Nations.
“Our city is failing because of the refugees. We have 22 different languages spoken in our schools. We’ve got 42 languages being fielded by our 9-1-1 call centers, and crime is just through the roof. We need to exercise caution, especially for the sake of our children,” she said.
The protesters carried signs that read, “Christian Refugees 2 Christian Nations, Muslim Refugees 2 Muslim Nations, That’s Only Fair,” and “Refugee Resettlement Means Big $$$$$ – No Accountability.”
Sherman said Amarillo, a city of just more than 200,000 people, has gang violence that has surpassed that of much larger Texas cities such as Fort Worth. She fears U.S. cities like Amarillo and Minneapolis, Minnesota, could be in line to become the next Rotherham, England, or Cologne, Germany, or Stockholm, Sweden, where mass rapes by Muslim men have gained much attention in Europe.
Touching off a rape epidemic
Amarillo was recently named the fifth most dangerous city in Texas, according to FBI crime statistics, up from sixth last year. And it has been nationally recognized as having one of the highest rates of rape in the nation.
That’s a dubious distinction that Sherman believes is tied to the high number of Muslim refugees shipped there by the U.S. government.
“The rape epidemic in this world is becoming pandemic. It’s not confined to one location. Fifteen years ago in Norway, rape was unheard of. Now it’s an epidemic,” Sherman said. “The perpetrators are 100 percent Muslim males. In Sweden, rape has gone up by 500 percent. Stockholm recently had the dubious honor of opening their very first rape center for men and boys.”
In the northern U.K. city of Rotherham, more than 1,400 children have been beaten, raped and trafficked in a well-documented turn of events that has gone largely unreported in the U.S.
“It was covered up by the local government for fear of being viewed as racist. This only came to light because a journalist decided we needed to know about that, not the government,” she said, referring to the rape scandal that unraveled in England in 2014, when it was revealed by media that gangs of mostly Pakistani men had been sexually assaulting English girls for years while police covered it up for fear of being perceived as “anti-Muslim.”
“You can have female equality, or you can have refugees. You cannot have both,” Sherman said.
Too late to save Texas?
Texas Gov. Greg Abbot has called for a stop to the influx of refugees, but it’s too late, she said. The program continues unabated because, if even one refugee is present in the U.S., he is entitled under current law to bring in his entire extended family.
“It’s called family reunification,” Sherman said.
image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2012/09/greg_abbot.jpg
Texas' GOP Gov. Greg Abbott has tried to turn off the refugee spigot but it may be too late.
Texas’ GOP Gov. Greg Abbott has tried to turn off the refugee spigot but it may be too late.
She said America, founded on Judeo-Christian principles of tolerance and respect for one’s fellow man, should not expect people from Third World cultures to share those values.
“If people don’t choose to follow the law, you cannot hire enough police officers,” she said.
“Whether you believe (in the Judeo-Christian God) or not, your values and your principles were influenced by that. Now we’re asking that these people come here, who have been taught for thousands of years of violence and hatred, and we’re expecting them to come here and assimilate to our way of life,” Sherman told the crowd gathered in Missoula. “This is a dangerous and foolish expectation.”
Watch video of Karen Sherman describing the life she left behind in Amarillo, Texas.
Amarillo has received 5,251 foreign refugees since January 2002, according to the federal refugee database. That's more than half of the nearly 8,000 refugees sent to Texas during that period.
President Obama has  increased the number of foreign refugees bound for American soil in fiscal 2016 to 85,000. That's a 20 percent increase over the previous year, and 10,000 will come from the jihadist hotbed of Syria.
WND reported last week that two groups are working to resettle Syrian refugees in Montana. One group, WorldMontana, is working in Helena and the other, Soft Landing Missoula, is working in Missoula.
Caroline Solomon drove more than 100 miles to Missoula Monday from her home in Big Fork, Montana, to participate in the rally.
"About four people (from her group) didn't make it because of weather, but we think there were about 125 people on our side and about six with signs calling us 'racists,'" she said.
Softening up the soil
Soft Landing Missoula is working with city and county officials to bring Third World refugees to Montana while the state's Act For America chapter and other activists are trying to stop that from happening. Soft Landing, like most of the non-governmental organizations working with the government to plant refugees into U.S. cities, is working with churches and faith-based groups behind the scenes to create an atmosphere that is more "welcoming" of refugees.
image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2015/05/david-lubell-welcoming-america.jpg
David Lubell of Welcoming America works closely with the White House to soften up the soil in cities targeted to receive an influx refugees.
David Lubell of Welcoming America works closely with the White House to soften up the soil in cities targeted to receive an influx Muslim refugees.
Many of the community organizers have received training or consultation from David Lubell's Welcoming America organization, which was started with seed money from billionaire George Soros. Lubell is a close adviser to President Obama's "New Americans" initiative, which seeks to convert millions of refugees and recent immigrants into U.S. citizens with full voting privileges.
The modus operandi used by resettlement agencies usually involves sending a handful of refugees at first and then gradually increasing the influx to hundreds per year.
Mary Poole, who represents Soft Landing, Missoula, told KGVO News Radio that many immigrants have settled in Missoula over the past 30 years. She compared the mostly Middle Eastern migrants from Muslim countries like Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq to the Hmong refugees fleeing communist Vietnam in the late 1970s and early '80s.
"We’ve successfully resettled a Hmong community, as well as Belorussians and Ukrainians, who are now members of our community and part of the fabric of Missoula," Poole told KGVO. "We’re just working on revamping the infrastructure that has already existed here."
But according to the federal database, the state of Montana has not received any refugees since 2008, and only 61 have been sent there since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Montana resistance follows backlash in Idaho
Other small towns in the West have similarly struggled to oppose the plans of urban elites to import what they see as the problems of the Third World into their communities.
In Sandpoint, Idaho, City Council members voted last Wednesday to withdraw a resolution supporting refugee resettlement, bringing an end to a heated, month-long debate over whether that was a wise move. It had the full backing of Sandpoint Mayor Shelby Rognstad.
Cheers erupted from the audience when the newly elected Sandpoint mayor capitulated, asking the council to withdraw his resolution from consideration. His resolution was meant to counter statements from county commissioners and the local sheriff opposing the refugees. Rognstad said his resolution was intended to restate Sandpoint's commitments to "human rights."
"This resolution has only served to divide us and this community,” said Rognstad, as he requested the withdrawal. "That saddens me."
But others see the situation in reverse. They see nonprofits and NGOs, often flush with government grant money, coming in and stirring up controversy within their once-peaceful communities.
In Twin Falls, Idaho, Chobani opened the world's largest yogurt factory and gave 30 percent of the 600 jobs to foreign refugees, and the federal government has plans to send 300 more refugees, this time from Syria, to the Twin Falls area. That touched off a backlash from a group called 3 Percent of Idaho, which organized a protest at the Idaho Statehouse in late November that attracted more than 1,000 people from both sides of the issue.
If the past record is any indication, the groups seeking to bring Third World refugees to small town America will not be easily chased off by people with signs.
In fact, the pro-refugee Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, put together a field manual in 2013 on how to deal with "pockets of resistance" in the American heartland. One of the strategies in that manual is to research the backgrounds of resistors and identify them as "anti-Muslim" racists.
WND report from May 2015 exposed the HIAS strategy to deride and intimidate any politician or activist who opposes the refuge industry's agenda to change the demographics of a town.
The HIAS report, titled “Resettlement at Risk: Meeting Emerging Challenges to Refugee Resettlement in Local Communities," calls for "new tools to fight back against a determined legislator or governor who has decided to challenge resettlement for political or other reasons."
Copyright 2016 WND

Saturday, January 30, 2016

Small Town America Quickly Becoming Muslim

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image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2015/11/Syrian-refugees-UNHCR-photo8.jpg
Syrian refugees (Photo: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees)
Syrian refugees (Photo: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees)
Another big battle is brewing over Syrian “refugees” sweeping into small-town America.
Rural folks in Montana are pushing back against plans by urban elites to plant hundreds of Muslims from the Third World into Helena and Missoula. They plan a protest rally at 10 a.m. Monday in front of the county courthouse in Missoula. And if the pattern holds of similar rallies in Twin Falls, Idaho, and Fargo, North Dakota, a contingent of pro-refugee people will show up to counter protest.
Of all the 50 states, there are only two that have not received their “share” of the nearly 1 million Muslim refugees that have been infused into more than 180 U.S. cities and towns over the past 35 years, compliments of the U.S. State Department and the United Nations.
Those states are Wyoming and Montana.
Wyoming has received only five refugees from the federal resettlement program since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and is currently not participating in the program (although Gov. Matt Mead has indicated he’d like to restart the program). Montana has only received 61 refugees since 9/11 and none since 2008.
Compare that to neighboring Idaho, which has received 10,730 refugees over the same period, according to the federal refugee database. WND reported last week that Chobani’s billionaire Muslim CEO has been working with the federal government to import refugees to work in his massive yogurt plant in Twin Falls.
image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2016/01/sandpoint-mayor.jpg
Sand Point, Idaho Mayor Shelby Rognstad
Sand Point, Idaho, Mayor Shelby Rognstad was forced to pull back his welcoming resolution for Syrian refugees.
That has caused tensions as far out as Sand Point, in northern Idaho, where mayor Shelby Rognstad tried to lay out the welcome mat for Syrian refugees but was forced to retract his proposal after extreme blowback from the community, the Boise Weekly reported.
Another neighboring state, North Dakota, has been on the receiving end of 4,912 U.N. refugees since 9/11, according to the federal refugee database. Colorado has absorbed 18,122 refugees, Minnesota 37,838, Washington state 36,395, and Nebraska 9,161.
As WND has reported, Obama’s plan to import Syrian and other Muslim refugees has met spirited resistance in South Carolina, Idaho, Minnesota, North Dakota and Michigan. Residents in many areas of these states have let it be known they are not on board with the progressive vision of a multicultural America. They argue, with mounting evidence, that such policies in Europe have led to rampant crime, mass rapes and terrorism.
And the multicultural vision is no longer limited to gateway cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or Miami.
Small cities like Boise, Idaho; Fargo, North Dakota; Wichita, Kansas – and now Helena and Missoula, Montana – are vying for a bigger slice of the refugee pie.
Here in “Big Sky Country” local politicians in Missoula, working with pro-immigrant NGOs, are inviting the federal government to begin sending Syrians, comparing them to the Hmong refugees who fled Vietnam’s communists in the late 1970s. They have not been deterred by the fact that 98 percent of Syrian refugees are Sunni Muslims, the vast majority of whom FBI Director James Comey admits are impossible to vet for ties to terrorism.
Despite Comey’s warnings, the Missoula Board of County Commissioners sent a letter on Jan. 13 to the U.S. State Department requesting Syrian refuges. “We look forward to seeing approximately 100 refugees per year resettled in Missoula,” the letter states.
“Missoula is an ideal city for resettling refugees,” the letter continues. “Our community enjoys good schools, incredible natural beauty, and a low unemployment rate, among other factors.”
A group of Montanans has mobilized against the plan. They are trying to educate their state and local representatives about how the refugee resettlement program actually works, including the high welfare usage of refugees, the costs of educating children who speak zero English and the risks to national security.
Wild-eyed lefties in the Wild West
Monday’s protest rally is not just aimed at Democrats. Citizen activists described the resistance put up by Republicans in the state Legislature as tepid at best.
“They’ve done little to help us and have basically given lip-service,” said Paul Nachman, a Bozeman activist who described Missoula as a town dominated by progressive politics, due largely to the influence of the University of Montana.
“It’s a wildly left-wing town, known around here as the Berkeley of Montana,” he said.
image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2016/01/montana-map.jpg
montana map
Nachman says the commissioners Jan. 13 letter was astonishingly naïve.
Under the resettlement program, as governed by the Refugee Act of 1980 (authored by former Sens. Teddy Kennedy and Joe Biden), local elected leaders are not afforded any control over the number of refugees the federal government sends into their communities. The feds must “consult” with state and local leaders but are not required to abide by any suggested limits on the number of refugee arrivals. Nor is the federal government bound to restrict refugees coming from any particular country, such as Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan or any other jihadist-infested country.
The flow of refugees could begin with 10 Christians from Myanmar, for instance, but quickly evolve into hundreds of Muslims from Syria or Somalia. The Obama administration claims it has carte blanche authority over how many refugees will arrive in any given town and where they will come from.
Paul Ryan’s capitulation
Obama plans to send at least 10,000 Syrians to dozens of U.S. cities and towns this year and thousands more in 2017. The program as a whole will deliver 85,000 refugees to U.S. cities in 2016 and 100,000 in 2017, all completely funded by Speaker Paul Ryan’s Congress.
image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2015/12/Paul-Ryan-Loudon.jpg
House Speaker Paul Ryan paid lip-service against unvetted Syrian refugees, then turned around and orchestrated an omnibus funding bill that fully funded President Obama's expanded refugee program.
House Speaker Paul Ryan paid lip-service against unvetted Syrian refugees, then turned around and orchestrated an omnibus funding bill that fully funded President Obama’s expanded refugee program.
Since the controversy erupted last fall over Syrian refugees, Secretary of State John Kerry’s top refugee lieutenant, Anne Richard, has repeatedly said states have “no authority” to stop the flow of refugees.
Yet, the Jan. 13 letter shows a stunning lack of knowledge on the part of the Missoula County commissioners, said Nachman, who lives in Bozeman. The commissioners seem to believe they can simply put their order in for a specific number of refugees.
“They are practically begging” for 100 refugees per year, says Nachman, a 67-year-old retired physicist. He came to Montana from Southern California in 2005 where he was involved in that state’s pitched battles over illegal immigration.
As in many small towns and rural areas, debates on controversial issues in Montana often play out on the op-ed pages of local newspapers and on talk radio shows.
Nachman has written several letters to the editor to local papers, countering what he says has been dishonest propaganda put out by representatives of pro-refugee agencies that stand to make a lot of money off of the resettlement of Syrians in Montana. One group, Soft Landing Montana, is affiliated with the International Rescue Committee or IRC, which is one of nine major contractors the U.S. government pays to resettle refugees. It wants to bring Syrians to Missoula.
Another group, WorldMontana, is less advanced in it’s plans to seed Helena with Muslim refugees. It has held three meetings at the Plymouth Congregational Church to plan a “potential refugee resettlement,” according to the WorldMontana website.
Stepehn Maly, president of WorldMontana, said “fear is our nemesis,” according to a report in the Great Falls Tribune.
image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2016/01/stephen-maly-WorldMontana.jpg
Stephen Maly
Stephen Maly
Maly said the discussion of bringing Syrians into Helena has become “very noisy and loud.”
He said some city officials have spoken against the idea, but he believes state officials are prepared to support the resettlements in due time.
The Jan. 21 meeting in Helena was attended by representatives from Catholic Social Services, the Helena Ministerial Association and included input from refugee bureaucrats in neighboring Idaho along with Boise Mayor David Bieter. The agenda also included a presentation by a “social justice” grant-maker from Minnesota.
Maly said he has met with federal officials to discuss refugee resettlement in Helena and was told to “go slow, be transparent and inclusive, try to avoid the snares of partisanship and politicization” and to be patient and persistent, the Tribune reported.
But the “inclusiveness” only extends to those who are willing to jump on board with the program, say opponents.
Caroline Solomon lives in the city of Big Fork in Flathead County, which is tucked away in the northwest corner of Montana. She said rural Montanans are getting stirred up and frustrated by the bare-knuckle approach of the refugee-resettlement groups.
Montana vs. Belgium
Solomon is a member of the local chapter of ACT For America, an organization that educates the public about the dangers of creeping Shariah law. She is originally from Belgium and lived near a section of Brussels that is now infested with jihadists, several of whom were recruited by ISIS to take part in the Nov. 13 Paris terror attacks.
She and her husband retired to Kalispell, Montana, in 1993 and quickly fell in love with the community.
“We have had 23 years here, and I tell you I cannot describe the way the people are here,” she said. “You get airlifted to Spokane with a medical problem, and before you know it people are in their cars driving to visit you. I could not understand that as a European. It’s like one big family. Everybody is nice. When you go shop, everybody talks to everybody. When I go back to the big city, I think I must look like a country bumpkin because I have a smile on my face. That’s why people come here.”
Contrast that with the no-go zones in Europe, or the growing enclaves in Minneapolis, Minnesota, or Dearborn, Michigan, and you can see why Solomon and others aren’t warming up to the changes proposed by liberals in Missoula.
“This subject (of refugees) is now a very hot topic here,” she said. “We had over 100 people at our last meeting, and the one in December we had over 300.
“They all say ‘not in Montana.’ Well it’s time to wake up because they are coming to Montana,” Solomon said. “They are asking the government to send them. We are about 100 miles north of Missoula, but a lot of us will hopefully be going to that rally Monday.”
‘Assimilation is the problem’
She stressed that she is not anti-immigrant.
“I am an immigrant. So anybody saying I’m against that is absolutely wrong. There are people who need help in a serious way. That’s what this country is all about. What makes me mad and sad is they want to bring people in without knowing who they are or what they are involved with,” Solomon said. “Our own FBI says they can’t vet them. We know ISIS is using this loophole to get people into our country. We have seen it from the attacks on Europe and San Bernardino.”
Assimilation is the problem, she said. Neither Europe nor America is demanding that its refugees from the Middle East assimilate. And 91 percent of refugees from the Middle East were receiving food stamps between 2008 and 2013, according to data from the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, while 73 percent were on Medicaid and 68 percent were receiving cash welfare assistance.
“I have a problem with people who come here as immigrants or refugees and do not assimilate. They do not want to assimilate. I would have never thought that this little part of Brussels where we used to shop would be a place where terrorists hide in a no-go zone. The younger generation of Muslims, they do not want to assimilate, and I think there are forces pushing these young people (into jihad).”
Solomon said the county commissioners in Missoula are extremely uneducated about the refugee issue.
“That letter reads like an advertisement for tourists to come to Montana,” she said. “They say how wonderful the scenery is. What’s so dangerous is, I think that’s what they believe. You know, the kumbaya crowd, and that’s why we are doing what we are doing and trying to educate them and show what is really going on.”
Ad hominem attacks
While a handful of state legislators and city officials have been receptive and sympathetic to residents’ concerns, the reaction is often hostile from the community organizers, she said.
“They call us all kinds of names, like Islamophobes, and I think CAIR is behind it,” she said, referring to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “I think political correctness will destroy us. The Muslim Brotherhood, they said it in their Explanatory Memorandum (seized by the FBI as evidence in 2004 from a house in Virginia), that they will destroy us from within using immigration and political correctness as a weapon, and they are using it very aggressively at this time.”
A WND report from May 2015 exposed the strategy of the refugee-resettlement industry to deride and intimidate any politician or activist who opposes its agenda to change the demographics of a town.
The report, titled “Resettlement at Risk: Meeting Emerging Challenges to Refugee Resettlement in Local Communities,” was authored by one of the nine federal contractors responsible for sending thousands of refugees to the states in return for lucrative taxpayer grants and fees. It calls for “new tools to fight back against a determined legislator or governor who has decided to challenge resettlement for political or other reasons.”
Montana governor falls in line
The pro-refugee organizers in Montana have an ally in Democrat Gov. Steve Bullock, who is from Missoula and has been a vocal advocate of refugees including those from high-risk countries like Syria.
image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2016/01/Steve-Bullock-Montana-Governor.jpg
Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana.
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock is a big supporter of refugee resettlement.
After the Nov. 13 attack on Paris in which 130 people were killed by eight ISIS terrorists, including two who are believed to have entered Europe through the ranks of Syrian “refugees,” more than two-dozen governors sent letters to the Obama administration requesting, to no avail, that the flow of refugees into their states be stopped.
But not Bullock. On Nov. 16, he issued a statement that Montana would remain open for business as usual with regard to refugees.
Solomon said she doesn’t buy President Obama’s theory that poverty is the main cause of violent extremism, or that providing jobs to disillusioned Muslims will solve the problem of global jihad.
“It’s in their book (the Quran) that they are not refugees they are migrants. They are on the hijra (migration), and Muhammad was the first one to migrate, going from Mecca to Medina and that is what’s happening, and all the pieces are falling into place,” she said. “A lot of them are not poor refugees but migrants. The migration is happening and that is what I am afraid of. They say they want 100 per year in Missoula, and the families will come and they will seed them. The first little seed is going to be planted in Missoula but then the families will come. What’s a family for them? They have multiple wives and many children.”
Montana already has at least one mosque, near Montana State University in Bozeman, and several Islamic centers.
“Missoula has an Islamic Center and a very active MSA (Muslim Student Association) chapter at University of Montana,” Solomon said.
The MSA was exposed as a front group for the Muslim Brotherhood in court documents filed during the Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial in 2007. It has hundreds of chapters on college campuses across the U.S. and is notorious for stirring up anti-Israel sentiment and boycotts among college students.
Solomon said her ACT For America chapter met with Montana’s congressional delegation in Washington, D.C., last summer, and also with Texas Rep. Brian Babin, who is sponsoring House Bill 3314, which would halt all refugee resettlement until a full audit of the program can be conducted. So far House Speaker Paul Ryan has refused to promote Babins’ bill even though it has more than 80 co-sponsors.
Nachman, who fought many immigration battles in Southern California, said he too loves Montana.
But the state has many communities that aren’t prepared for these battles and can be hoodwinked by clever pro-immigration activists.
“You have a lot of naïve communities,” he said. “When I came in 2005, Montana reminded me of the Midwest in the 1950s. It reminded me of that, lost in time, sort of throw-back community, but the problems of big cities are bound to come here if we don’t fight them off.”
Copyright 2016 WND

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/01/plan-to-infuse-small-towns-with-muslim-migrants-meets-resistance/#M5ZTi4vvG52Pdfcp.99