Bachmann: Minnesota learns no lessons from mall attack

Somali refugees get ready to meet with city officials in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2014

Minnesota's St. Cloud community is still reeling from Saturday's knife attacks that injured 10 people and caused panic at the Crossroads Center Mall on Saturday, a day that police chief William Anderson said changed the city forever.

But did it?

The city of 67,000 people sits 65 miles northwest of Minneapolis. It has been pummeled with Muslim refugees, mostly from Somalia, for more than a decade, and its citizens have been brow beaten into a form of politically correct submission to Islam, says former Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.

Former Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann

"I would say that this attack did wake people up in the sense that this was real and it happened in our backyard and people are aware of it. But Minnesota is a state where we have been marinated in political correctness for quite some time, and the pushback against any type of conservatism is extremely intense. So people have no fight left in them," Bachmann told WND.

To say anything negative about Islam immediately gets you branded a bigot, a xenophobe, a racist or an "Islamophobe," she said. It doesn't matter that Islam is not a race or that the term "Islamophobe" was invented by the extremist Muslim Brotherhood as a tool to cast Western Muslims as victims of oppression.

The fact is, Minnesota's top politicians are more interested in pandering to the rights and sensitivities of Muslim migrants than in protecting the taxpaying citizens, Bachmann said.

Democrat Gov. Mark Dayton, for example, responded to citizen concerns at a townhall meeting at the St. Cloud Public library last fall by saying, "white B-plus people" had better get used to living with "diversity" because it's not going away. And if they don't like living among the Somalis, then they "should find another state."

"It's like he's using 'white' as a derogatory term, so we are now bad if we're white, we're somehow evil or racist if we're white? I think he was doing a takeoff from Garrison Keillor's lead-in to his show, 'Prairie Home Companion.' So what he's saying is, all you 'Prairie Home Companion' people, we are no longer a white state, so you need to roll over and let these other people take over. We're told to shut up and take it."

Retired DHS officer Philip Haney's blockbuster "See Something Say Nothing" blows the whistle on traitors within our own government who are more concerned about violating the civil rights of Islamic extremists than protecting Americans against the next big terrorist attack.

This despite the overwhelming generosity of Minnesota taxpayers, who fund the rising costs of mass refugee resettlement – everything from police and fire protection to bloated welfare rolls, educating refugee children, paying for their health care and housing them in subsidized apartments.

Bachmann said the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has been buying up apartments in Minnesota and converting them to Section 8 affordable housing.

"They are literally running out of apartments for refugees. I have had tenants telling me first hand they're getting letters saying their apartment is being converted to Section 8," Bachmann said. "And schools are being dumped with students who don't speak English and don't have an educational background and need an incredible amount of support."

Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Charities, the two private agencies being paid by the government to resettle refugees in the state, earn more money the more refugees they bring in. They get paid $2,025 per head, and they get to keep about half of that amount for administrative costs.

"We've had the highest number of refugees this year easily in the last 10 years. But people have been conditioned in this state to not push back when something bad happens because it is automatically assumed if you push back you must be racist. So you are just supposed to take it," Bachmann said.

"Two days after the attack, our governor went and stood with the Somali community in St. Cloud, and he's standing with the perpetrator's dad calling for unity and how these people are welcomed here and this is not reflective of the community and it was just a one off," Bachmann said.

"What's bizarre is there have been more foiled terror plots in Minnesota than any of the 50 states," she added. "We have more jihadi recruitment than anyone else. We have more refugees who have gone to join the Islamic State than anyone."

And, she reminds her fellow Minnesotans, the infamous "20th hijacker" in the 9/11 attacks was Zacarias Moussaoui, who had attended flight training school in St. Cloud.

"He was the only convicted terrorist of 9/11; he was part of the plot. What more do you need, St. Cloud?" she asked. "Then you have a guy in a mall shouting 'Are you a Muslim?' and making references to Allah as he stabs people. We've got a problem. But all we're gonna be worried about in this state is maybe we're not unified enough and not welcoming enough?"

As for the Minnesota media, they are completely captured by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a spin-off of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, Bachmann said.

In the initial two or three hours after the attack, there was a virtual blackout of any news that even suggested the attack might have been inspired by Islam. The police chief also refused to release the name of the suspect, Dahir Adan, or that he was Somali, until the next day, even though he admitted he knew the suspect's identity.

Newspapers in Minneapolis and Fargo focused more on the fear of a backlash against local Muslims than on the horrific nature of the stabbing spree against 10 innocent mall customers. If it were not for an armed and alert off-duty cop, many more would have been injured and perhaps killed. The officer shot Adan dead.

One of the first articles to appear in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune after the mall stabbing spree was about fears the attack could fuel "anti-Muslim bias."

The newspaper in nearby Fargo, North Dakota, where the 22-year-old Adan was first resettled as a young child, ran similar stories about its local Somali community on high alert for possible retribution.

"The next morning, one of the very first stories printed in the Star Tribune was about anti-Muslim bias, and it gave a listing of the alleged abuses of Muslims, of which there are none," Bachmann said. "The article sounded like it was written by the head of CAIR. You can look, but you won't find any real abuses of Muslims in Minnesota, trust me. So apparently we've lost our rights to free speech now because of what this one-world-order diversity plan has chosen for us, and we're just supposed to lie down and take it."

Local paper blames 'anti-Muslim tensions' for mall attack

In another story, the Star Tribune hinted that "anti-Muslim tensions" in St. Cloud may have been to blame for the jihadist attack at the mall. The article cited incidents ranging from bullying Somali students at St. Cloud Technical High School to women being screamed at in grocery stores, pig intestines wrapped around the door handle of a halal grocery store and offensive billboards.

None of these alleged "abuses" compare to being knifed in the head at a shopping mall, but they have the Somali community enraged nonetheless.

"It was very hard to find anything in the local news the first two hours after the attack, and finally the St. Cloud paper did report that the perpetrator was a Muslim and was shouting 'Allah' throughout the mall as he was going around stabbing people," Bachmann said.

The fact that the local police and the media's first instinct was to hide the attacker's identity raised comparisons to Europe, where rape epidemics perpetrated by Muslim migrants in Germany, Sweden and the U.K. have been covered up or downplayed.

Playing the victim

On the Wednesday before the attack, Bachmann said Somali students at Tech High School in St. Cloud stood out in the school yard to protest the oppression and bullying they are experiencing.

"This is bizarre. This is St. Cloud, Minnesota, where everyone has been intimidated into silence. They held up posters and demonstrated in front of the school," she said. "I thought, isn't that ironic? Because everyone shuts up, because they know if they say anything they're racist, bigoted, Islamophobic and that's the last thing anybody in the United States wants to be right now."

She said the average household income for families in Somalia is $280 a year.

"And this [protest] is from Somalis where the average household income is 280 bucks and their girls have no rights and yet they can come here and say they are oppressed?

"You have an apartment. You are given a car and every federal benefit including the finest health care in the world, and you have something to go stand out in the lawn and protest? They wear Islamic dress. They worship as they wish. There's honor violence and female genital mutilation, yet they protest."

Police in Minnesota toe Obama line on 'violent extremism'

Most city police departments in Minnesota have adopted President Obama's philosophy of "countering violent extremism," or CVE, a plan also adopted by the United Nations' Strong Cities Network of globalized police forces.

"This shuts down the debate before it even starts. It doesn't stop terrorism, it enables it," Bachmann said. "And that's why we're losing this war. They've declared war on American law and on our Constitution, and the people who are supposed to be keeping us safe don't even know there is a war."

Adan, the mall attacker, was from Somalia and spent time in a U.N. refugee camp in Kenya before he was resettled in Fargo, North Dakota, at the age of 2, later moving to St. Cloud.

'Where was the oppression?'

Dahir Adan, the Somali refugee who went on a stabbing spree in a St. Cloud mall, injuring 10, one critically, before he was shot dead by an off-duty cop.

"This terrorist murderer went to a refugee camp in Kenya, then won a lottery and came to the United States, was raised in St. Cloud and at 20 years of age was able to go to college," Bachmann said. "He had a car and an iPhone, so where was the oppression for this kid? Now I'm thinking of all the kids in St. Cloud who would love to have a car but they can't afford one. And they would love to go to college, to own an iPhone, and to travel overseas. It shows us that terrorism has nothing to do with what the Obama administration says, that they just need a job. No, this is about their belief system.

"[Minnesota Attorney General] Andrew Luger failed to understand Terrorism 101. Our governor doesn't understand Terrorism 101. And we have elected leaders and people in our sheriff's departments in Minnesota who don't understand," Bachmann said.

"And that's because the official position of the Obama administration is 'countering violent extremism.' When that is the policy, the community will be defeated because it mandates that they must bring in the Muslim leaders and listen to them tell the community how to look for and fight islamophobia, because CAIR's goal is to push this meme that America is racist and Islamophobic so we don't push back at all or demand any assimilation, we just 'welcome' the diversity in our midst, and all this is doing is furthering the Muslim Brotherhood doctrine of civilization jihad."

Bachmann said the call by media and politicians for more "unity and love" sends the wrong message to the Muslim community. While unity and love are good things, more must be demanded of the Muslim immigrants.

"The message that needs to be sent is there are those coming in from Somalia, Syria and elsewhere who believe it is their duty to uphold Shariah law," she said. "We need to tell them they need to assimilate and follow American law; otherwise, they need to deport themselves out of the U.S. or be deported. Law enforcement needs to be told there can't be any accommodation with Shariah law."