(Un)happy Fourth of July!…In The New American Heartland

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

“A Call to Jihad, Answered in America” was the headline on the front-page news story, printed above the fold in the New York Times for 12 July, 2009.

The story, by Andrea Elliott, was about four young Somalis who arrived in the United States as refugees when small children and were enthusiastically transplanted to Minneapolis by the state and local authorities. Later, all four attended the University of Minnesota to train for professional careers.

Then, in 2008, one of the four, Mahmoud Hassan, an engineering student, had a bright idea. “Why are we sitting around in America, doing nothing for our people?” he asked his friends. Several months later, Hassan and two other students left Minnesota for Somalia where they joined up with the Shabaab, a violent Islamist group allied with Al Qaeda in the attempt to overturn the imperiled Somalian government.

The NYT story continued,

“The students are among more than 20 young Americans who are the focus of what may be the most significant domestic terrorism investigation since September 11. One of the men, Shirwa Ahmed, blew himself up in Somalia in October, becoming the first known American suicide bomber. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert M. Mueller, has said Mr. Ahmed was ‘radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota.’”

The reporter added that Ahmed’s story reveals the presence of a widespread jihadist movement in “America’s heartland“ that is attempting to recruit other young Americans to holy war, and mentioned the FBI’s concern that the jihadists might use their training and U.S. passports to stage attacks in the United States.

Two days before the Times printed the piece, VDARE.com had posted an article by Joe Guzzardi—Al Franken On Immigration: The Bad and The Good (Yes, I Said “Good”]—noting that Minnesota is 88 percent white, and only four percent Hispanic.

By coincidence, I spent the weekend of July 3-5 in Minneapolis-St. Paul, attending a family wedding. I trust Guzzardi’s demographic data regarding Minnesota. But no one could possibly guess, from a visit to the Twin Cities, that the state is 88 percent white.

The day after the wedding, I took a taxi to the Como Park Zoo in St. Paul to visit the zoo’s four African lions. Como Park, which was founded more than 100 years ago, is a pretty little zoo with a relatively small collection of well-kept animals and a beautifully designed and unusually spacious Large Cat Exhibit. As for the human population, it must have been, on the day of my visit, 95 percent nonwhite, including some Hispanics, a large number of blacks, native and otherwise, and a huge majority of Asians, principally Thais, Vietnamese, and Hmong.

I remained with the lions for a couple of hours, surrounded by visitors most of whom spoke a language other than English. How the zoo staff copes with the multiple language barrier I cannot imagine. My guess is they don’t bother to try. Spanish-language classes for docents, which many American zoos offer, would be ludicrously insufficient here.

My wife and I were driven into the city from the airport at one o’clock in the morning by a Somali cabby, and around town by mainly local blacks. These drivers were, without exception, friendly and polite. St. Paul’s business district, where our hotel was located, abounds with foreign faces, languages, and restaurants. We ate lunch the first day at an excellent Thai restaurant, operated by Thais, who like all Thais I have met were soft-spoken and gracious. The place looked prosperous, and the waitress—probably one of the owners—mentioned that the restaurant is a luncheon favorite of employees of the big financial companies housed in the proximate high-rise towers.

We did not spy any suspicious-looking Al Qaeda types about, though we could easily have overlooked them among the pressing crowd at Como Zoo, which offers free admission.

Still, as a contributor to the Star Tribune Sun put it, “It’s a long way from your grandmother’s Twin Cities.”

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(Un)happy Fourth of July!...In The New American Heartland
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