Over the past week I have been reviewing the terrorism and fraud trials that feature an almost entirely Somali cast of defendants. The continuing case of Rep. Ilhan Omar falls under the same heading — the heading of fraud and deception. Having covered all of these for Power Line, I find a unifying theme.
The unifying theme was articulated by Acting United States Attorney Joe Thompson at the Abdiaziz Farah sentencing hearing in the Feeding Our Future fraud case last week (press release here). As I noted in “Do you hear what I hear?,” Thompson told Judge Nancy Brasel: “Abdiaziz Farah viewed us as suckers.”
Judge Brasel expressed no disagreement. She sentenced Farah to 28 years in prison
The Islamic faith of this cast of characters is also a unifying theme. It permeates these cases, including that of Omar. Does the one theme have anything to do with the other?
In the 2011 National Affairs essay “The Muslim-American muddle,” Peter Skerry expressly raised the question in the form of loyalty. The essay is by turns infuriating and illuminating, but at least it licenses inquiry into the question.
Indeed, Skerry takes the question seriously and provides evidence supporting the concerns of “alarmists.” He writes, for example: “To a non-Muslim observer, the most striking aspect of of these [Islamic Circle of North America and Muslim American Society] gatherings is the complete absence of any acknowledged tie to the United States.”
Skerry contrasts “complacent elites” with “alarmist populists.” I would place Skerry on the complacent side of the divide and myself on the alarmist side, although Skerry places himself (of course) in the middle as the voice of reason mediating between the two camps. But Skerry concludes the essay on what I would characterize as an alarmist (i.e., realist) note.
Along the way, Skerry seems to me to treat several basic issues (including assimilation) in a conclusory and question-begging fashion. He cites the naturalization of Muslim immigrants and their involvement in American politics, supporting Democrats, as factors supporting (I will say) complacency.
Yet the numerous defendants in the Minneapolis terror and fraud cases are naturalized citizens. And CAIR has formed a fruitful alliance with Democrats going back to its days as a Hamas front group (Skerry suggests that those days are behind it). Skerry rightly observes: “It is astonishing, given th[e history of CAIR], that the mainstream American media should routinely describe CAIR as ‘a Muslim civil rights organization.’”
Skerry does not raise the question whether the immigration spigot should remain open while we sort out the serious issues that he addresses in his essay. The question doesn’t even seem to cross his mind. The terror trials and fraud cases in Minneapolis seem to me to raise in an acute form this question and others that Skerry does address in his useful if unsatisfactory and unsatisfying essay.
