Somali's huh? Well guess what folks....in Seattle, on 9-11, it was reported the Somali community was PARTYING!!! GOOD WORK by our officials who HOPEFULLY have been tracking these "people."
FBI Terrorizes Somalians in South Seattle
Last month Seattle’s ethnically diverse Columbia City neighborhood roiled with the news of a federal government raid on a building housing four small Somali stores in the district. After learning from the news that the raid was part of a multi-city, countrywide dragnet against businesses with supposed financial connections to Osama bin Laden, anti-war activists at nearby New Freeway Hall, home of Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party, jumped into action.
Market Stripped
Concerned for their immigrant neighbors, half a dozen workers from the community center grabbed picket signs and rushed to the besieged storefront two blocks away. They launched what turned out to be a six-hour picket line demanding respect for civil liberties and the rights of immigrants. They were joined during the course of the day by neighborhood residents, Somalians who saw the protest on TV and Seattle activists alerted by RW and FSP callers, bringing the impromptu picket to about 40 people at its height.
Protesters, local and national media, and a crowd of bystanders watched as agents from the Treasury Department, U.S. Customs, and Immigration and Naturalization Services, plus Seattle police, conducted the ruthless stripping of the Maka Market, cereal box by cereal box. The operation, which began about 7:30 a.m., continued into the night. Early in the raid, officials also stopped, questioned, and demanded identification from a number of individual Somalians who approached the store. The authorities compared photos they carried, presumably of terrorist suspects, against the IDs of the passersby and would-be customers. FBI agents also took photos of demonstrators.
Unjust Roundups
In interviews with the media, protesters criticized the government harassment of poor and working class immigrants who use the store to wire funds to desperate relatives in their famine-stricken homeland and bordering refugee camps. Unintimidated, angry Somalians crafted picket signs on the spot. Said one woman’s sign “My father is 90 years old. I will keep sending him $100. This has nothing to do with terrorism.”
Demonstrators condemned the raid as part of baseless and unjust roundups across the country that since September 11 have led to the detention of more than 1,100 people denied even the most basic rights normally granted to those in custody. Pointing to a retirement home across the street housing many Japanese Americans, they said that they were determined to see that the current, government-fostered hysteria over immigrant ties to terrorism does not result in the domestic internment camps that during World War II imprisoned thousands of innocent men, women, and children and took away their homes, businesses, and farms.
Anne Slater, the organizer for Seattle Radical Women, said this: “Every move that the government makes against immigrants is being done with no proof, and no accountability. The aim of this disgusting witch hunt is not to stop terrorism but to create an ‘enemy’ at home to justify weakening civil liberties for everyone, and to intimidate critics of the U.S. slaughter in Afghanistan. We don’t intend to buy into the scapegoating, and we won’t be scared off.”
Slater said that RW and FSP will continue working with neighborhood people about what action can be taken to defend the Somali community.
Source: press release dated 11/9/01 from Radical Women, 819 N. Killingsworth, Portland, OR 97217. Contact Jordana Sardo, office: 503-240-4462, home: 503-255-5776.