CHAPTER FOUR

SOMALI AMERICA: BLACK HAWK NOW

We were on the lookout for Somalis.

Not Somali pirates or AK-47-toting, feudal warlords. And not on the dusty, chaotic streets of Mogadishu. No, my cameraman and I were looking for Somali chicken pluckers. And we were doing it in the heart of the Bible Belt.

Government bureaucrats and social engineers: delight in what you have wrought.

We had traveled to Shelbyville, Tennessee, to investigate a large influx of Somali Muslims into what had been your typical, sleepy southern hamlet—that is, until a few years ago, when waves of Somalis began arriving in Shelbyville from other U.S. cities (a so-called “secondary migration”) to take jobs at the local Tyson Chicken processing plant. It wasn’t long before the Somali population there had gone from zero to as many as 1,100. For a small, agricultural town of only 17,000, where the walking horse industry is king, that is a very sizable—and noticeable—occurrence.

The Somalis arrived faster and in greater numbers than Shelbyville—economically depressed and with limited resources—could adequately handle. The assimilation process, to no one’s great surprise, has not been smooth, and the problems extend far beyond the usual language and communication barriers that most immigrants experience. Shelbyville is also home to a sizable Hispanic population that, after some initial problems, has blended into the fabric of the town relatively well over the past two decades. The Somalis, however, have proven quite a different story.

Back home, the Somalis lived in near Stone Age conditions; many had never even used a toilet or running water. If getting used to their American amenities was difficult for them, the sight of women covered in allconcealing Islamic garb had an even more jarring effect on their new, Christian neighbors. This was middle Tennessee, in the shadow of the country music capital of the world, Nashville, and just a stone’s throw from that decidedly un-Islamic landmark, the Jack Daniels distillery. It doesn’t get more southern or more traditional Americana. So the culture shock, needless to say, was mutual.

Yet as I stood on Main Street on a sunny Friday afternoon, watching a steady stream of residents shuffle in and out of a local bank, I realized there was one thing everyone in Shelbyville could get behind, regardless of their background: payday. Locals had told us a crowd of Somalis begins arriving at the bank at around 3:00 p.m. on Fridays, looking to cash their checks from the nearby Tyson plant. I intended to secure a few on-the-fly interviews with them, first to ask how they were adjusting to life in Shelbyville, and second, to gauge how seriously they took their Islam. I had heard concerns that Islamic radicalism could take root in Shelbyville’s Somali community, and based on rumblings out of other U.S. cities like Minneapolis—where a number of Somalis had recently been arrested on terrorism charges—I was alarmed. I saw Shelbyville as a perfect place to lay low and plot in secret, much like I saw in Willow Spring, North Carolina, and other rural, southern areas that have been used as bases for Islamic jihadists.

As the Somalis began arriving at the bank, I saw that the majority were women covered from head to toe in burqas, with only their eyes visible. They became angry at the sight of my cameraman and shouted at us in a Somali dialect as they rushed into the bank, small children in tow. Several carloads of Somali men arrived soon after and eyed us suspiciously. They, too, wanted no part of us and rushed in and out of the bank, despite my friendly invitations to chat.

One guy in his early twenties did stop and linger, intrigued by the TV camera that was trained on him. While he declined to appear on camera, he briefly shared his thoughts with me on life in Shelbyville. “The people seem very nice,” he said in halting English. “But I am lonely. I miss Somalia.” He added that he didn’t associate with anyone in town aside from his fellow Somalis. He then shot a few nervous glances back at his friends, who were waiting for him in a car parked by the curb, and announced he had to leave. I gave him my business card and told him to call so we could talk further. He never called, and I never did get to have any kind of meaningful interaction with Shelbyville’s extremely insular Somali community, despite repeated efforts. Neither, I soon found out, had most Shelbyvillians.

“They’ve had an impact here. Unfortunately, it’s not been a good impact,” said Brian Mosely, a reporter for the Shelbyville Times-Gazette newspaper.

Shortly after my arrival in Shelbyville, I spent an afternoon getting the lay of the land from Mosely, who won an award from the Associated Press in 2008 for a series of articles he wrote about the town’s Somali population. He said that other than going to work at the Tyson plant or using local stores, the Somalis rarely emerged from the apartment complex where a majority of them lived in a run-down section of town. Their self-segregation and indifference to the norms of their new community had not endeared them to locals.

“I found that there was just an enormous culture clash going on here,” Mosely said as we sat in at the local courthouse, an old building that felt straight out of Mayberry. “The Somalis were—according to a lot of the people I talked to here—being very, very rude, inconsiderate, very demanding. They would go into stores and haggle over prices. They would also demand to see a male salesperson, [they] would not deal with women in stores.”

Sounds like a unique brand of southern etiquette—as in southern Somalia.

Mosely, who was born and raised near Shelbyville, said the problems extend to local schools, where male Somali students refuse to speak to female administrators. Perhaps they learned this demeaning attitude toward women at the local Somali mosque, which has become a central gathering place for the refugees, with about 100 of them converging there each day for prayer, according to Mosely. Since it’s human nature to cling to the familiar when in unfamiliar surroundings, many Somalis in Shelbyville, unsurprisingly, have decided to stick with what they know—and that’s Islam. It’s not a comforting thought for Shelbyvillians, given that Muslims in the West who become “more religious” have recently shown a nasty tendency to drift into jihad.

“We’re talking about people who have not had any experience with Western civilization,” Mosely explained. “They don’t know the language. Things like running water are a miracle to some of these folks. ... You don’t take people from a totally alien culture, put them into a community, and then say, ‘Alright, you must get along.’”

Of course you don’t. Nevertheless, it’s becoming the norm in communities across the United States. As I continued watching the surreal scene of faceless, shapeless, burqa-clad women walking into the bank in downtown Shelbyville alongside good ol’ boys in American flag t-shirts—neither side looking particularly comfortable with the arrangement—I couldn’t help but wonder how all this had happened. I soon learned that the growing Somali population in Shelbyville and other U.S. cities could be traced back to a deeply misguided U.S. State Department program that has increased the Islamic terrorist threat to the United States incalculably.

Ask most Americans what they know about Somalia and they will likely respond with three words: Black Hawk Down. That 1993 incident, which inspired a bestselling book and a hit Hollywood film, represented one of the most frustrating, painful, and ultimately heroic episodes in the history of the American military. Eighteen U.S. servicemen were killed and more than seventy-five were wounded after a raid to capture two senior henchmen of the Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid turned into a massive firefight that raged through the streets of Mogadishu for nearly an entire day.¹ Thousands of heavily armed Somalis—including civilians, Aidid militiamen, and yes, Islamic jihadists—cornered a team of U.S. Special Forces soldiers in a cramped section of the city. Meanwhile, Somali militiamen used rocket-propelled grenades to shoot down two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters, and the lifeless bodies of U.S. soldiers were subsequently mutilated and dragged through the streets by a frenzied Somali mob. Broadcast internationally, these images shocked, appalled, and infuriated Americans. Weren’t these the same downtrodden, starving Somalis that our entire military presence in Somalia was dedicated to feeding? And this is how we were repaid?

Looking back, perhaps the incident in Somalia should not have been surprising. Over the past thirty years or so, when a majority Muslim country has been in trouble—whether the result of a natural disaster or internal repression or unrest—the United States has frequently lent a hand, financially and often militarily as well. From Lebanon and Somalia, to Kuwait and Iraq, to Bosnia and Afghanistan, from earthquakes in Pakistan and Iran to tsunamis in Indonesia, America—more than any nation on earth, including the oil-rich Saudi kingdom—has been there to help Muslim peoples.

Our reward has been ever greater anti-American vitriol and increased international terrorism against U.S. interests. And if you think American generosity to Muslim nations will be returned in kind the next time, God forbid, some natural disaster hits our shores, keep dreaming, you foolish infidel. In the eyes of many Muslims, we are “kaffirs”—unclean unbelievers—cursed in this life and the next and not worthy to breathe the same air as Muslims, let alone merit their assistance.

With such a mindset, is it any wonder that Somalis would turn violently against U.S. troops—a Christian crusader force on Muslim land, and a living symbol of the greedy Western oppressor of Islamic and brown-skinned peoples everywhere? This narrative has long been pushed by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, so it also came as no surprise when bin Laden admitted in later interviews to helping fund and train Aidid’s forces for their assault against U.S. troops in Mogadishu. In his book Holy War Inc., journalist Peter Bergen, who has met and interviewed bin Laden, writes:

In 1993, one of bin Laden’s military commanders, Muhammed Atef, traveled twice to Somalia to determine how best to attack U.S. forces, reporting back to bin Laden in Sudan. An Al-Qaeda mortar specialist was also dispatched to the country. ... A U.S. official told me that the skills involved in shooting down those helicopters were not skills that the Somalis could have learned on their own.

So the Battle of Mogadishu had, in at least some capacity, al-Qaeda fingerprints, according to bin Laden himself. In the end, the greatest impression that al-Qaeda gleaned from the events of October 3 and 4, 1993, was not of the bravery and fighting skills of the U.S. military, epitomized by a group of severely undermanned and outgunned Special Forces soldiers killing, by most estimates, upwards of 1,000 enemy fighters in a legendary display of battlefield courage and proficiency. No, what bin Laden took from the Battle of Mogadishu, he would later say, was that the United States is a “paper tiger” that would cut and run rather than stand and fight. He was referring to President Clinton’s hasty withdrawal of U.S. forces from Somalia in the wake of the battle. As we’ll hear from a former bin Laden associate in a later chapter, al-Qaeda’s view of the United States as a paper tiger was later reinforced on several occasions during the Clinton administration, emboldening the terror group as it planned the 9/11 attacks.

To say that Americans were left with a bad taste in their mouths following the Black Hawk Down incident would be an understatement. Somalia, which has not had a functioning central government since 1991, was rightly viewed as a backward, violent, and barbaric place that was hostile to America and to Judeo-Christian, Western values. And today, eighteen years after the Battle of Mogadishu and in the wake of two decades of non-stop war, famine, lawlessness, and crushing poverty, Somalia is frequently referred to as the most dangerous place on earth.

These days, large swaths of the country—including Mogadishu—are ruled by an Islamic terrorist group called al-Shabaab (The Youth), which has aligned itself with al-Qaeda and pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Like clockwork, al-Shabaab has made sharia the law of much of the land, predictably resulting in stonings, beheadings, amputations, the degradation of women, and bans on music and TV. In addition, the group claimed responsibility for a July 2010 suicide bombing in neighboring Uganda that killed seventy-eight people who were watching a World Cup soccer match.² This attack, combined with al-Shabaab leaders’ repeated threats against Israel and the United States, shows that the jihadist militia’s ambitions now extend outside the Horn of Africa.

Under the Shabaab’s guidance, several terrorist training camps are currently operating in Somalia and have attracted scores of Western Muslims, including Americans. The most notorious of these jihadists is an Islamic convert from small-town Alabama named Omar Hammami. Now known as Abu Mansoor al-Amriki, Hammami is the son of a Caucasian mother and Syrian father who was raised in his mother’s southern Baptist faith until turning to Islam in high school. He grew increasingly radical and ultimately traveled to Somalia in 2006, where he has now become a top military commander and recruiter for al-Shabaab.

His main value to the group, though, is as a propagandist. He has appeared in several slickly produced al-Shabaab videos—including one showing him leading fighters into battle against a hip-hop beat—encouraging Western Muslims to leave the comforts of home behind for the noble, romantic life of a mujahid, or holy warrior, in Somalia. Hammami’s pale skin, fluent English, and use of hip-hop terminology have had their desired effect, inspiring young Islamists in the U.S. like Zachary Chesser, a 20-year-old white convert to Islam from Virginia who idolized Hammami and re-posted his videos online. Chesser was arrested at New York’s Kennedy Airport in July 2010 while boarding a plane to Africa to join al-Shabaab.

The jihadi onslaught in Somalia, combined with the continued proliferation of gangs, warlords, and piracy on Somali soil, has created a hellish state of affairs that comes as no surprise to anyone who watched the events of October 1993 unfold. Yet while most Americans decided back then they wanted to stay as far away from Somalia as possible, the U.S. government thought it would be a grand idea to bring a slice of Somalia to the American heartland. Other Western governments have followed in kind, dismissing the obvious perils of allowing waves of largely uneducated, third-world Muslims from a primitive tribal culture to settle in advanced, industrialized, non-Muslim societies.

Over the past twenty years, the Somali population in the United States, Canada, and Europe has gone from virtually zero to being one of the fastest growing immigrant blocs in the West. Their numbers are steadily increasing in far-flung places that, like in the case of Shelbyville, may surprise you. For example, it is no great shock that there are, according to some estimates, up to 250,000 Somalis living in the Islamo-asylum haven of Great Britain, a country that seems hell-bent on committing national suicide.³ But who would have predicted back in 1993 that more than 50,000 Somalis would settle in Sweden?⁴ Or that more than 25,000 Somalis would lay down roots in Norway,⁵ and another 20,000 in the Netherlands?⁶ How about close to 17,000 Somalis living in Denmark?⁷

It seems that frigid, remote Scandinavia—where suicidal, open-door immigration policies for Muslims are every bit as prevalent as in Great Britain—suits warm-blooded Somalis just fine. The same goes for Canada, where close to 40,000 Somalis currently reside (although unofficial estimates place that number much higher).⁸ And it doesn’t get more far-flung than Australia, yet some 20,000 Somalis have settled Down Under in recent years, with 10,000 alone living in Melbourne, a city that boasts one of the world’s largest concentrations of Somalis outside of Africa.⁹

In the United States, where their population now numbers some 200,000 thanks to a State Department refugee resettlement program, Somalis have settled in cities from coast to coast since first arriving in large numbers in 1992.¹⁰ That they reside in Atlanta, Seattle, San Diego, Boston, Denver, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles comes as no great surprise. But the fact that the frozen tundra of Minneapolis/St. Paul has become the undisputed mecca of Somali America, with some 100,000 Somali residents, is telling.¹¹ So, too, are the large Somali influxes to Portland, Columbus, Cedar Rapids, Nashville, and Lewiston, Maine. These are all small and mid-sized cities that, until recently, had little experience with immigration, let alone of the third-world, Islamic variety—that is, until our government’s irrepressible social engineers decided it would be prudent not only to inundate traditional “gateway” cities like New York and Los Angeles with Muslim immigrants, but to spread the wealth, as their current boss might say, to flyover country.

As a result, a southern, Bible Belt city like Nashville has become a kind of mini-Ellis Island, with tens of thousands of Somalis and Iraqi Kurds being directed there by the State Department in recent years. This has spawned a new reality that has “culture clash” written all over it. Government officials, however, don’t bother taking into account pesky distractions like the potential for social unrest or refugees’ lack of adaptability when deciding who to resettle and where to resettle them. Their single-minded goal seems to be placing Muslim refugees in as much of the United States as possible, encompassing every region of the country, regardless of its predominant ethnic, religious, or economic makeup. Ironically, in its quest to bring sharia to America, the Muslim Brotherhood pursues this very immigration strategy.

This means no longer will large, diverse metropolitan areas like New York City or Los Angeles, with long histories of absorbing immigrants, be the default landing points for government-sponsored Islamic refugees. While some may settle in large cities initially, after a few months in America they are free to move around and resettle wherever they please. These “secondary migrations” have seen droves of Somalis pick up and move, suddenly and en masse, to sleepy small towns like Shelbyville and Lewiston. They are often drawn by work opportunities and cheap housing, which sounds like the American dream in action—until you see the statistics showing that Somali unemployment and illiteracy rates are through the roof across the United States, with taxpayers footing the bills for the inevitable welfare checks.

In March 2009 Senate testimony about al-Shabaab recruitment in America, the Deputy Director of Intelligence at the National Counterterrorism Center, Andrew Liepman, painted a bleak picture of Somali prospects in the United States:

Compared to most Muslim immigrants to the U.S., many Somalis—seeking refuge from a war-torn country—received less language and cultural training and education prior to migration. Despite the efforts of Federal, State and local government and non-governmental organizations to facilitate their settlement into American communities, their relative linguistic isolation and the sudden adjustment to American society many refugees faced has reinforced, in some areas, their greater insularity compared to other, more integrated Muslim immigrant communities, and has aggravated the challenges of assimilation for their children.¹²

Hello, Shelbyville! Liepman continued,

According to data from the most recent census, the Somali-American population suffers the highest unemployment rate among East African diaspora communities in the United States, and experience significantly high poverty rates and the lowest rate of college graduation. These data also suggest that Somali-Americans are far more likely to be linguistically isolated than other East African immigrants.¹³

For the State Department, the solution to this failed sociology experiment is obvious: more Somalis, of course. While State may not control secondary migration, it does decide who gets to enter the country since it, after all, runs the refugee resettlement program. The way it all works is quite simple. The refugees are chosen from UN camps in their home countries—UN involvement being the first red flag that something is not right with the program. They undergo four days of “cultural orientation” and are then on their way to America. Just like that. This means, in some cases, that a nomadic Somali Muslim tribesman who has never seen a toilet, a light bulb, or running water is suddenly plopped down into middle America and expected to make do for himself. The federal government contracts with social welfare groups like Catholic Charities at the local level to help the refugees find apartments and jobs and generally ease their transition. But after a few months, they’re on their own and free to move.

A spokesman for the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration told me in an interview that the program, which is a billion-dollar annual enterprise funded by taxpayers, specifically targets refugees from Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia—Islamic strongholds all.¹⁴ The thinking here is that if the United States continues to help Muslims, they will begin to like us—even though, as mentioned previously, all existing evidence points to the contrary. “It’s one of the best facets of America, that we are a very generous, hospitable country,” the spokesman said, noting that a number of Iraqi Christians have also been resettled in the United States in recent years.

Amen to that last point: I support an influx of Iraq’s beleaguered Christian minority—which is being systematically exterminated by Islamic jihadists—into the United States. Of course, Iraqi Christians do not follow a religious-political system that commands them to wage jihad, slay Christian and Jewish infidels, and impose sharia law until the Day of Judgment comes. Muslims, however—at least those who take their Islam literally, and many Somalis do—follow such a system. Nevertheless, they receive red carpet treatment from the U.S. government.

In fact, the Somali presence in the United States has exploded since 9/11, and is slated to expand further. Here are the figures from the invaluable Refugee Resettlement Watch website on the number of Somali refugees admitted to America, beginning ten years ago:¹⁵

2001:	4,940
2002:	242

The huge dip here shows that the government momentarily wised up after 9/11—but only momentarily, as the annual number of Somali refugees admitted to the United States increased by over 14,000 between 2002 and 2004 alone. Bear in mind also that each Somali family in America has, on average, six children. Here are the figures for the ensuing years:

2003:	1,708
2004:	12,814
2005:	10,101
2006:	10,220
2007:	6,958
2008:	2,523

We see a big dip in 2008, likely due to massive fraud that was uncovered in the family reunification, or P-3, portion of the resettlement program. In a bombshell revelation, the State Department admitted that up to 80 percent of the African refugees that were granted entry to America between 2003 and 2008—tens of thousands of them—had falsely claimed to have family members who were already here. Were any of the Somalis that fraudulently exploited the program covert al-Shabaab operatives aligned with al-Qaeda? Were any of them pirates, warlords, or participants in the Black Hawk Down incident? If the State Department knows, it isn’t saying.

And apparently, it isn’t too concerned, as the number of Somali refugees is now back on the rise, with a combined 9,073 Somalis admitted in 2009 and 2010 despite the family reunification travesty and the growing menace of Islamic jihadism emanating from Somalia, courtesy of al-Shabaab.

Under President Obama, who has made Muslim outreach a top priority, the number of Somali refugees promises to increase further. Obama announced in September 2010 that the ceiling for refugees in 2011 would be the maximum currently allowed under the resettlement program: 80,000.¹⁶ Of that number, well over half will hail from Muslim countries, including Somalia. But don’t worry: that same State Department spokesman said all necessary precautions are taken to ensure that Islamic jihadists are not among the new arrivals, assuring me that State “work[s] closely with the Department of Homeland Security to make sure we vet people coming here. Especially since 9/11, it’s very important.”

I would say so, and forgive me if I’m a bit uneasy that the same administration that failed to connect the dots at Fort Hood and with the Christmas Day underwear bomber is in charge of detecting potential Somali terrorists. And sure enough, even the most cursory investigation shows that, despite the supposedly rigorous screening process for refugees, an alarming number of Somalis in America are turning to terrorism and jihad. Minnesota, take a bow.

For someone arriving at the departure gate of an air terminal, there are few scenes more disconcerting than seeing a dozen men performing Islamic prayers in front of the building. In a post 9/11-world, it’s an unfriendly reminder of the jihadist danger that might be lurking on the plane you’re about to board. So it was with great interest that I observed the concerned expressions worn by pedestrians arriving at MinneapolisSt. Paul International Airport one afternoon in June 2007, as a group of Somali Muslim taxi drivers performed prayers next to a fleet of parked cabs. While some prayed, others sat on the curb and ritually cleansed their feet from water bottles as they readied to face Mecca. It was a public and brazen display of Islamic supremacism, yet the cabbies were none too happy that my cameraman and I had decided to film it. Some shouted at us angrily and others hopped in their cabs and sped away. Unfortunately for them, we had been cleared to film at the airport—but the rules are a mere trifle to the Somali cabbies, who operate a whopping 75 percent of the airport’s 900 or so cabs.

Indeed, I’d come to the Twin Cities, home to the nation’s largest Somali population, to report on the widespread refusal of Somali cabbies at the airport to transport passengers who had alcohol in their possession. So you’ve just arrived in Minneapolis from out of town and want to take a nice bottle of wine from the duty-free store to your parents’ house for Christmas dinner, eh? Forget about it, infidel. Alcohol is haram—forbidden—in Islam, and in the Somali cabbies’ view, to merely transport it in their cars is a grave sin. The same goes for transporting seeing-eye dogs for blind passengers, since dogs are viewed as filthy by Muslims and were detested by Islam’s prophet, Mohammed, according to Islamic tradition.

Since most non-Muslims don’t share these hang-ups about booze and dogs, the Somali cabbies were effectively practicing religious discrimination, not to mention imposing sharia law, in their own creative way. It was no coincidence, then, that they had been emboldened to turn away passengers with alcohol by a fatwa issued by the local chapter of the Muslim American Society, or MAS, that commanded as much. MAS is an American arm of the Muslim Brotherhood that is devoted to imposing sharia law far and wide—and the Somali cabbies got the memo. Thankfully, their efforts at making the Twin Cities’ airport sharia-compliant seem to have failed for the moment, as the Metropolitan Airports Commission eventually ruled that a cabbie’s license can be revoked for thirty days for refusing to pick up a passenger for any reason, with a second refusal bringing a two-year revocation.

Nevertheless, Somali Islamists are making great strides elsewhere in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where their pressure campaigns have led to the installation of ritual foot-washing basins at some local universities and the continued operation of a taxpayer-funded Islamic public school in suburban St. Paul, called the Tarek ibn Zayad Academy, that even the Muslim-coddling ACLU has accused of Islamist indoctrination. In addition, Minneapolis Somalis form a powerful voting bloc that was critical in electing America’s first Muslim congressman, Democrat Keith Ellison, a Muslim Brotherhood favorite who swore his individual oath of office on a Koran.

But the most notorious contribution by Somali Islamists in Minneapolis has been to the global jihad. U.S. officials say that since 2007, at least twenty young Somalis from the Twin Cities area have traveled back to their homeland to fight alongside the terrorist group al-Shabaab in its jihad campaigns against both internal rivals and soldiers from neighboring Ethiopia, which occupied Somalia from 2007 until 2008. In the process, these Somali-American terrorists have no doubt received invaluable jihadi training from their Shabaab overlords that, as FBI director Robert Mueller pointed out in 2009, “raises the question of whether these young men will one day come home, and, if so, what they might undertake here.”¹⁷

The potential magnitude of this danger became clear in October 2008 when Shirwa Ahmed, a Somali-born Minneapolis resident, became the first successful American suicide bomber. Ahmed, a naturalized U.S. citizen, drove a car filled with explosives into a government compound in northern Somalia, killing himself and twenty-nine others. Ahmed and his family had arrived in Minneapolis in 1996 courtesy of—you guessed it—the State Department’s refugee resettlement program. Mueller said shortly after the suicide bombing that Ahmed “was radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota.”¹⁸ Of course, that didn’t stop Mueller and the Bureau from shipping Ahmed’s remains home to Minneapolis for an Islamic burial on the U.S. taxpayers’ dime. As for a potential radicalization spot, a great deal of suspicion has surrounded the Abubakar as-Siddiq mosque in Minneapolis, which Ahmed and several other Shabaab wannabes had attended before trekking to Somalia in pursuit of their seventy-two virgins. (The mosque’s imam, predictably, has denied any involvement.) Sure enough, at least six of them have been killed, including a white convert to Islam who had had hooked up with Somali radicals in Minneapolis.

The prospect of battle-hardened Somali jihadists carrying U.S. passports is a nightmare scenario for U.S. intelligence officials; one former federal investigator told me in late 2010 that Somalis have moved to the top of the list of potential threats to the American and Canadian homelands. It’s not hard to see why:

• In August 2010, the Department of Justice indicted fourteen people from Minnesota, Alabama, California, and Ohio on terrorism charges for allegedly providing financial and material support to al-Shabaab.

• In Columbus, Ohio, Somali Islamists allegedly waged an intimidation campaign against a moderate Somali mosque whose leaders spoke out against the Shabaab. Moreover, a former Columbus resident was killed in Somalia in 2009 while serving as a commander for the terror group.

• Another Somali native, an 18-year-old who lived in Seattle, joined Shirwa Ahmed among the ranks of American suicide bombers when he blew up himself and seventeen African Union peacekeepers in Somalia in 2009.

And Somali Islamist mayhem isn’t limited to the Western Hemisphere:

• Five al-Shabaab sympathizers of Somali and Lebanese descent were arrested in Australia in 2009 for plotting to attack an army base in Sydney.

• A Somali with al-Qaeda links was charged with attempted murder in a 2010 attack on cartoonist Kurt Westergaard in Denmark. The 75-year-old Westergaard had depicted Mohammed with a bomb in his turban in one of the Danish Mohammad cartoons that had provoked deadly rioting throughout the Muslim world in 2006. Since any depictions of Mohammed are a dire offense under sharia, Westergaard’s would-be assailant felt compelled to break into the cartoonist’s house wielding an axe and a knife, looking for blood. Westergaard, who was at home with his 5-year-old granddaughter, narrowly escaped into a panic room he had installed in his home due to repeated death threats by jihadists.

In the June 2009 issue of New English Review magazine, counter-jihad activist Jerry Gordon outlined a chilling scenario of a Mumbai-style attack being carried out on U.S. soil by Somali-American terrorists:

Such attacks could be perpetrated by homegrown Jihadis like those naturalized American Somali youths, alleged to have “disappeared” to join Al Shabaab militia groups in Somalia. Those returnees could constitute cadres to train fellow American Somali youths. They could orchestrate swarming attacks against public facilities in this country using so-called low-tech means: cheap weapons and pickup trucks. These possible swarming attacks could be devastating “mini-9/11 events.” Deadly scenarios might include simultaneous attacks against exposed queues of customers at so-called “big box stores” especially on high sales days like Black Friday, the start of the Christmas holiday retailing season.

Gordon’s article was proven prescient on Black Friday—November 26, 2010—when a 19-year-old Somali-American named Mohamed Osman Mohamud was arrested after attempting to detonate what he believed was an explosives-laden van at an annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon. Mohamud, who was snagged through an FBI sting operation (undercover agents had supplied the phony explosives), told the feds he was aiming to murder as many people as possible—and indeed, such an attack would have potentially killed thousands. He yelled “Allahu Akhbar” and tried to kick agents and police as he was taken into custody. He also made a pre-attack video in which, dressed in al-Qaedatype garb, he denounced America and extolled jihad.

These and other facts of Mohamud’s case no doubt left government officials scrambling for answers. Up until his arrest, their scant public comments about the Somali terror threat in America focused on Ethiopia’s occupation of Somalia or various social ills as the prime motivators for Somali radicalization. Yet in Mohamud’s case, he had never traveled to Somalia or made contact with al-Shabaab (although he did reach out to terrorists in Pakistan’s tribal regions). An engineering student at Oregon State University, he was, by most accounts, well-adjusted to American life and fairly normal, at least on the surface. So forget about social ills. At the end of the day, what has motivated Mohamud and all the other Somali jihadists to emerge from American cities is Islamist ideology, plain and simple.

To the average American, the arrival of tens of thousands of Somali Muslims on the taxpayers’ dime represents a looming cultural and national security disaster—and an expensive one to boot. Yet average Americans are no more shaping such policies in Washington than average Europeans are influencing them in their continent’s capitals. Resettling Somali refugees, not only to major urban centers but to the very heart of America and of European nations, furthers the goal of a multicultural utopia that has long been the dream of academic and government elites on both sides of the pond. After all, these elites believe, no culture is superior to another, and spoiled, sheltered Westerners will be enriched by pre-dawn calls to prayer blaring through their windows from the local mosque, or by the sight of their Somali next-door-neighbors slaughtering a goat in their backyard according to Muslim tradition. Or perhaps they’ll be enlightened by news of local Somali girls being subjected to female genital mutilation, a hellish ritual widely practiced in Somalia that sees part or all of the external genitalia hacked off.

You don’t like it, you bitter, guns-and-religion clinger? Too bad. And hey, the elites reason, in the very least, the new arrivals will provide cheap labor and take on undesirable jobs like chicken plucking. In the case of Europe, home to rapidly aging indigenous populations with fertility rates well below replacement level, Somali and other Muslim immigrants can also help replenish a shrinking workforce and enable Europeans to retire in comfort. Or so the elites’ thinking goes. But what happens when the new arrivals refuse to assimilate and instead demand religious and cultural accommodation, or worse, turn against their adopted countries and embrace jihad?

In Shelbyville, as of this writing, there have been no documented cases of local Somalis turning to terrorism. Demands for accommodation, on the other hand, are already a Somali-American tradition, and Shelbyville is no different. The Tyson Chicken processing plant that employs many of the town’s Somalis stirred national controversy in 2008 when it dropped Labor Day as a paid holiday in favor of the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr. This shameless kowtow to Islam was later reversed amidst a huge outcry, but the writing is on the wall for Shelbyville: things will have to change now that the Religion of Peace is in town.

That suits the folks in the refugee industry, from the State Department on down, just fine. A representative from the Tennessee Office of Refugees summed up their line of thinking when I asked her thoughts on the Somali influx into the town. “I think that Shelbyville ... needs to look at it as a learning opportunity,” she replied. “And a chance to get to know someone that is really different from you and to learn from them. And I think that they would find some really interesting people.”

Perhaps even the next Shirwa Ahmed or Mohamed Osman Mohamud.