Look at the last paragraph in the Herald’s `Welfare for ISIS‘ humdinger….
`Authorities said Fazeli came to Maine through Catholic Charities Refugee and Immigration Services, but a spokeswoman for the charity said they had nothing to do with his arrival in Freeport and that he sought them out for assistance.’
Wonder if Catholic Charities might have, you know, helped fill out the forms for welfare and foodstamps? You know, assistance.
Please share widely!
The person in question apparently became radicalized while in the US. If the person met the requirements for public assistance I don’t see the problem or how you prevent it beyond blatant religious discrimination (but don’t give Trump any ideas!)
The obvious, and obviously bigoted, assumption is that it is Islam that “radicalizes” people like Mr. Fazeli.
It seems to me that a more accurate analysis will show that blind, crushing poverty — reinforced by a bigoted and xenophic US culture — is, in fact, the culprit. Poor people have been “radicalized” for as long as there have been poor people. During the Great Depression, the bogeyman — and actual threat — was an ideology, communism, rather than a religion. FDR, together with a congress, was able to co-opt the uprising of America’s poor through the New Deal.
We commit a SERIOUS error when we focus on religion or Islam. People who become “radicalized” do so because they are desperate. Desperation is caused by grinding poverty, not religious belief (if anything, passionate religious belief is a coping strategy for desperation).
I suggest that we see an increase in “radicalization” because our skyrocketing wealth concentration is causing a similarly skyrocketing increase in the number of people who are in poverty.
WEALTH CONCENTRATION is the problem, not Islam.
Aafia Siddiqui, who occasionally prayed at the Cambridge mosque, was arrested in Afghanistan in 2008 while in possession of cyanide canisters and plans for a chemical attack in New York City. She tried to grab a rifle while in detention and shot at military officers and FBI agents, for which she was convicted in New York in 2010 and is serving an 86-year sentence.
She graduated from MIT.
• Tarek Mehanna, who worshiped at the Cambridge mosque, was sentenced in 2012 to 17 years in prison for conspiring to aid al-Qaeda. Mehanna had traveled to Yemen seek terrorist training and plotted to use automatic weapons to shoot up a mall in the Boston suburbs, federal investigators in Boston alleged.
He lived in Sudbury Mass.
• Ahmad Abousamra, the son of a former vice president of the Muslim American Society Boston Abdul-Badi Abousamra, was identified by the FBI as Mehanna’s co-conspirator. He fled to Syria and is wanted by the FBI.
Do you really contend that the income he received and the food he had subsidized was inferior to the economic help available in his home country?
Do THEY automatically give new refugees a subsidy while they find their feet?