Minnesota Somalis fear backlash after Kenya mall attack [Waah]

Members of the largest ethnic Somali community in the United States expressed frustration on Tuesday, fearing a backlash after the attack on a Kenya shopping mall by a Somalia-based Islamic group that has recruited fighters in Minnesota.

It was unclear whether any of the attackers were connected to Minnesota's Somali community. But Somali-American leaders in Minneapolis were quick to condemn the assault after early unconfirmed reports identified one or more of the attacking al Shabaab rebels as recruits from the United States.

At least 20 young ethnic Somali men have left Minnesota since 2007 to join al Shabaab in Somalia, some dying there, U.S. authorities have said. The Minnesota Somali community has been the focus of a federal investigation since then.

An affiliate of al Qaeda, al Shabaab has been designated a terror organization by the United States. At least 67 people were killed in Nairobi's Westgate Mall, along with five of the attackers.

"This attack has generated a real concern among the Somali communities and fear of backlash," said Omar Jamal, a community activist and former head of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center.

Hmmm.....food for thought, the different strains of populism.

The Mid Western form often called Prairie Populism evokes Robert Lafollette, Hubert Humphrey, & George McGovern (he & I were in Vietnam in 1972; solve that little puzzle). Nazi strongholds like Coeur D’Alene are indeed quite rare. The region was the recipient of huge amounts of New Deal largesse monumented by the enormous dams built during that time. Both the dams & the ideology surrounding them remain.

Southern populism was admittedly racist when its proponents were Eugene Talmadge & Lester Maddox, less so during the candidacies of George Wallace. Southern blacks, for whom FDR’s New Deal had done little to help as he needed those white Southern Democrat votes, were suddenly “weaponized” by the first civil rights movement & perceived as a threat to the established order of every white Southerner regardless of class. Huey Long’s relatively inclusive populism was seen as an aberration.

But nothing in the racial struggles of the past could have prepared America for the current Muslim onslaught, aided & abetted by liberals with a frankly nihilistic streak.

IOW, those Somalis didn’t get here by swimming.

The racism of Southern white populism has not always disqualified it from being considered "left wing." In the late nineteenth century northern liberals (the "Mugwumps" and even former Radical Republicans like Charles Sumner) turned on Grant and called for the end of Reconstruction, the defeated ex-Confederates now actually joining their former slaves as an oppressed group in need of liberal support. Benjamin Franklin Butler, the "beast of New Orleans" himself who had once waved the original "bloody shirt," returned to the Democrat party as a sort of proto-populist and ran for President in 1884 on the Greenback and Anti-Monopoly tickets. His running mate was Absolom M. West, a former Confederate from Mississippi. (The "mugwumps" tended to be proto-left wing New England philosopher types who were radical on slavery but who opposed the economic policies of the old Federalist and Whig parties. They famously supported Grover Cleveland in 1884.)

In the populist era proper, William Jennings Bryan (whom FDR considered the founder of the "modern" Democrat party) was extremely popular in the South. While he wasn't a screaming white racist (he was more indifferent to the plight of Blacks) his supporter "Pitchfork Ben" Tilghman of South Carolina mixed populism and white racism into a homogenized brew. Georgia's Tom Watson actually appealed to Blacks as a young populist politician but became a racial demagogue later (as a Democrat).

Even during the New Deal era Roosevelt was allied with racist Southern whites who often uttered their racial hatred in the name of "the poor." Bilbo and Rankin of Mississippi are two examples here. Reynolds of North Carolina seems to have been an exception to this, as was Long, though Long actually raised the specter of "Negro domination" more than most people today realize (this was in order to keep people from voting Republican, of course).

Meanwhile, in the "left wing" Midwest you had the Germanophilia of the two world wars and "America First" isolationism (something Southern conservatives didn't share in, though today's neo-Confederates do). The Midwest is of course largely ethnically German and Chicago was the center of the America First movement Charles Lindbergh, the son of a "left wing" populist congressman from Minnesota, was its most famous and visible leader.

As an aside here, it's ironic that Chicago Germans, who are regarded as practically demigods by the "palaeos" for their opposition to American entry into World War II, were at least in part lineal descendants of the huge Chicago German immigrant community who supported Abraham Lincoln so strongly. Yet those Chicago Germans are regardes as "Communists" by "palaeos!" I think they would like to imply that all the pro-Lincoln Germans were Jews!

A great deal of the populist left was pacifist and this is where the shift occurred. In the teens and twenties it was "left wing" to oppose war. Suddenly in the late thirties and early forties it was "right wing!" So a lot of the "right wing isolationists" of that era were actually simply left wing pacifists who simply maintained their original position on war rather than changing it! But that's something the libs don't want you to know. Even some of the most allegedly "reactionary" characters of the New Deal era (Father Coughlin, Townshend) were actually "left wing" on economic issues by any honest standard.

And of course, to this very day we have "radical right wingers" whose rogues gallery is identical to that of the left wing populists of the late nineteenth century: the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Mellons, the Whitneys, etc. Only while the old populists considered them capitalist pigs, today's "palaeos" consider them "the real power behind Communism!" Amazing--the ideologies of both sides have changed 180 degrees, but the characters on both sides are the same!

Of course populist anti-capitalism has its roots in opposition to the bourgeois world created by the French Revolution and a yearning for a pre-capitalist "organic society." Both John C. Calhoun in America and Metternich in Europe assumed the role of protectors of the lowest classes from the predations of the recently unleashed (by the liberalism of the French Revolution) laissez-faire economic system. Even on Free Republic some Catholic posters voice this position. (No offense to you, elcid. I'm a Theocrat as well.)

Pinging to wideawake so he can correct my mistakes and make additional points.

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