In my roundup on the home page of June’s misbehaving immigrants, in honor of “Immigrant Heritage Month,” I missed a big one: The trial of Somalis in Minnesota on terrorism charges, which concluded June 3. Scott Johnson of Power Line covered the trial, and presented a summary at City Journal. The defendants, all from recent immigrant families, arranged to go to ISIS-land and wage jihad. On their way to San Diego (whence they planned to cross into Mexico, en route to Turkey), one of the defendants was secretly recorded as saying, “I can’t believe I’m driving out of the land of the kuffar, I’m going to spit on America at the border crossing. May Allah’s curse be upon you.”
Johnson’s impression was that the defendants are not outliers:
Perhaps most shocking to me was what utterly ordinary members of the Minnesota Somali community the defendants and their friends appeared to be. So far as I can tell, Somali culture is alien and hostile to the United States. Many among the local Somali community considered the defendants to be persecuted innocents entrapped by the government. It would be unduly charitable to characterize the attitude as willful blindness.
In an Impromptus-style column at Power Line, Johnson offered a number of final thoughts on the trial, including this sobering observation: “We have imported the members of an alien and hostile Third World culture and plopped them down in the heart of the Twin Cities.”
But I’m sure it’ll all work out fine.
Somali Terrorist Trial in Minnesota