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Islamic law requires a tax on infidels, among other oppressive measures. In Minnesota, that tax (jizya) appears to be approaching 15%, the proportionate share of the state budget surrendered to foreign and domestic Somali pirates waging fiscal jihad on the clueless.
It is noteworthy that the official media arm of the lemmings (the Minnesota Star Tribune) not only continues to downplay the amount stolen but tries to say that the real story is that President Trump overstated the amount stolen, presumably out of some unworthy motive. (If Trump were to announce a new federal war on childhood cancer, would the Strib feel compelled to find some nice things to say about the disease?)
What makes this disaster especially strange is that Somalis are not known for producing clever, innovative plans or even a marginally functional government. The last innovation to come out of Somalia was the domestication of the camel around 4,500 years ago. And yet they have run rings around a people who pride themselves on good government and comprehensive bureaucratic solutions.
Stranger still is the fact that the sheer number of Somali thieves makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the wokerati to criticize. If it were just 3 or 4 bad apples among a large number of non-Somali miscreants, they could be deemed a disgrace to an otherwise law-abiding community. But as it becomes increasingly evident that small-scale benefits fraud is widespread in addition to the large-scale heists, a factually attuned leftist might have to become openly critical of a dysfunctional non-white ethnic community, and that would go beyond mere cognitive dissonance to a state of instant compulsory pathological denial.
Perhaps pre-emptive surrender and paying jizra is better than being led into battle against fiscal jihad by Tim Walz and Keith “X” Ellison. The foreseeable defeat would undoubtedly be greater than the humiliating status quo.
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Discussion (13)
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The representative to Congress from Somalia (Ilhan Omar) has said that the thefts are the fault of those who did not adequately lock up the money.
From which I infer that it apparently is acceptable in Somali culture to take anything that the owner did not make sufficiently theft-proof to prevent the theft.
I know that's a different theory from your suggestion that thievery is a tax on infidels, but sometime the culture and the religion are hard to distinguish. Or maybe theft is the Somali way of exacting the tax.
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I'm so disgusted at the excuses people are making for what has happened.
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Dishonest people can always take advantage of others in a high-trust society. The only way to keep a high-trust society is to punish the dishonest people. Same thing is happening in Maine. Probably most of the blue states have some form of corrupt programs <=> political donation cycle.
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Her outlook may be culturally consistent. My father had a friend, a retired career FBI agent who worked security for IBM. He told my dad that in opening their first African HQ, they had to rethink security entirely. It was less about the relative value of things and more about how easily they could be carted off. Items that an American thief would ignore as having no resale value were readily taken simply because they could be taken.
A Somali man of my acquaintance who used to buy lottery tickets during lunch (when I played our wedding anniversary as a 4-digit straight bet) told me that he was sure the lottery was fixed because it was not possible to protect the game from insiders and if they had the opportunity they would certainly use that edge. It was not just that he was suspicious or all institutions but that he believed corruption was the natural order of things.
So the Ilhan Omar thesis--if you let us steal it, it is your fault--makes perfect sense to a mindset that we should go to great lengths to keep out of our country.
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They need to not only go after the people that directly stole the money, but also come down hard on the people that were involved, allowing their names and their kids names to be used for the fraudulent claims.
Media reports I have seen have been bragging about charges being brought against something like 87 individuals. From my understanding of the structure of the fraud, there need to charges brought THOUSANDS of people, including full restitution of every penny that was stolen in their names.
Followed by deportation.
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