Somali Women in Minnesota ‘Praying to Have Daughters’
October 20, 2014 - 12:17 PM
By Barbara Hollingsworth
(CNSNews.com) – Somali women in Minnesota “are praying to have daughters” because they are afraid their sons will be recruited by terrorist groups like Al-Shabab and the Islamic State, says Bethel University Assistant Professor Jay Milbrandt,
“There is concern, I would say generally, in Minnesota. I don’t think anyone that I know of is concerned about having refugees here. I think it’s brought some interesting opportunities and some diversity, and at least in my home town, the diversity is celebrated,” Milbrandt told CNSNews.com.
“But when we see young people recruited or radicalized here, that is a concern. What’s happening? Are we missing or are we overlooking something?
”I know that speaking to my friends in the Somali community, they are scared. My friend told me that women are praying to have daughters because they’re so afraid, here in Minneapolis, they’re so afraid that they might have boys who would be targeted by this and they don’t want to bear that risk and that fear.”
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There are "more refugees in Minnesota per capita than in any other state in the U.S.," according to Arrive Ministries, a non-profit resettlement group on whose board Milbrandt sits. Most of the more than 77,000 Somalis living in the northern state are Sunni Muslims, a third of whom came directly from refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia, he said.
The FBI is currently investigating how two dozen Minnesota Somalis were recruited to fight with Al Shabab and another dozen would up in Syria. Douglas McCain, the first known American to die fighting for ISIS, went to high school in Minnesota before converting to Islam several years ago.
“Minnesota is a very welcoming place,” said Milbrandt, who is also an attorney and author of a new book about Dr. Stanley Livingstone’s successful attempt to halt the slave trade in East Africa. “This part of the nation was rather homogenous, and then we welcomed some very different cultures, with very different practices, and it’s had its tense moments.
“It certainly has changed the culture of the state in some ways over the last decade or two, and there are some challenges,” he acknowledged. But the biggest challenge is terrorist recruiting among the resettled Somali population.
“We don’t know exactly where or how that started and how that’s happening,” Milbrandt said. “But in one of the most recent cases, there was this video showing some Somali young men who had joined the fight in Syria. The video showed a sniper shooting at some targets, and one of the boys turned around and he was wearing a sweatshirt from a local high school. That hits hard, that they’re young enough that they’re still wearing their high school sweatshirt.”
The Department of Justice recently announced that Minnesota's Twin Cities area would be the site of a pilot project aimed at combating terror groups' recruitment of Muslim youth. "The Somali community in Minneapolis and St. Paul will benefit greatly from the additional resources we expect to receive as part of the pilot program," said U.S. Attorney Andy Luger.
Why would young Somalis raised in the U.S., whose ancestors were enslaved by Arabs, be susceptible to recruitment by Muslim terrorists? CNSNews.com asked Milbrandt.
“I think that’s the big question. I think that’s what a lot of people here are trying to understand and comprehend,” he replied.
“My sense would be that, especially with a younger boy, those who give you time and attention are the ones you look up to and follow. If these terrorist groups are giving them time and attention, I can see where they might be making the decision [to join] based not on the ideology, but on who’s showing interest in them.”
Milbrandt says that terrorism won’t be stopped unless Christians take an active role in rescuing thousands of “lost boys” from war-torn countries who have trouble assimilating into Western culture. But only a handful of churches in Minnesota have stepped forward to help newly arrived refugees, he told CNSNews.com.
The Christian church “is not giving that time, and we have the ability to do that. There are people who are arriving here, growing up here, who are impressionable. Who gets to them and shows them that interest is who’s going to influence them in significant ways.”
Milbrandt pointed out that that the current situation in the Middle East has interesting parallels with the “very violent” slave trade in East Africa by Arabs between 1853 and 1873, before the British set up a naval blockade and eventually shut it down.
“Dr. Livingstone is a name so many of us are familiar with, but we don’t necessarily know why,” said Milbrandt, author of The Daring Heart of David Livingstone.
“We’ve historically resigned him to being simply an explorer. But his real ambition was to end the East African slave trade. He gave his life trying to bring an end to that horrific tragedy.
“It’s a really interesting analogue to some of the things we see today because these slave traders were more like terrorists. They were vying for control [of central Africa], and would just go and burn villages for no reason, just to make a statement.”
Most of the captured African slaves were sold to slave owners on the Arab Peninsula and plantation owners on islands in the Indian Ocean.
“The total confirmed victims of that slave trade were over 600,000, but that’s the number they could count coming to the slave trade ports. Livingstone projected that half of them or more weren’t making it that far because it was so brutal. So the number of likely victims is well over a million.
“One of the reasons that the book is subtitled The Publicity Stunt That Saved Millions is that he went into Africa under the banner of trying to find the source of the Nile River. And his reason for doing that was because no one in Britain would pay attention to the East African slave trade. They said: ‘We didn’t start it. We didn’t buy slaves from there. Why should we intervene?’
“And so Livingstone decided that if he could solve what was then the world’s greatest geographic riddle – where does the Nile begin? – he would have this enormous platform on which to speak about the slave trade.
“When Livingstone got lost and [New York Herald reporter Henry] Stanley found him, Livingstone sent back all this evidence of what was happening and tried to build a picture for the rest of the world and convince them to do something. And he ended up dying for that cause,” Milbrandt said.
“The Island of Zanzibar, which is only a tourist destination today, was essentially the epicenter of the slave trade in East Africa. So Livingstone persuaded the British government to blockade the island so no slave ships or any kind of cargo could get there. So the island was essentially starved until they changed the law in East Africa.
“The next step was arresting dozens of slave traders, including those in the sultan’s court, bringing them to Zanzibar and putting them in irons in the courtyards so everyone could see their public shaming, which was part of the culture.
“After they blockaded the island, the slave traders went underground, and they would meet slave transporting ships up in Somalia, of all places, which was just beyond the sultan’s territories. And so the British government took Livingstone’s suggestion to go stand in the way.”
Livingstone never did find the source of the Nile, so he was widely considered a failure as an explorer, Milbrandt told CNSNews.com.
“We are told that Livingstone didn’t amount to much, when we’ve missed the real story that abolishing the slave trade was his true intention, and he accomplished that. He actually passed away from dysentery 36 days before the law went into effect ending the slave trade.
“And it was due to him, but he never knew it.”
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