In March 2009, the longtime owner of a Chicago Dunkin’ Donuts was forced to give up his franchise. The owner claimed his Muslim faith forbade him from handling pork, making it impossible for him to serve Dunkin’ Donuts breakfast sandwiches.
Dunkin’ Donuts had willingly accommodated the owner’s faith based restrictions over the course of their twenty-year partnership. But in 2002, the chain issued a sudden ultimatum: offer your customers every Dunkin’ Donuts product -- or none at all. Seven years later, the fast food giant won the case, and the owner lost his store.
Increasingly, large companies like Swift, UPS and McDonald’s have been sued by Muslim employees demanding the right to wear religious garb, pray on company time and refuse to handle pork.
These expensive legal battles do more than just raise prices for customers and drain company coffers. Employee morale suffers (and with it, productivity) as workers view each other with suspicion and resentment.
The number of such cases accelerated in the 1990s, according to an exhaustive 2007 survey by Jeffery Breinholt at the International Assessment and Strategy Center. Historically, he explains, Arabs had been considered “Caucasian”, but in 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court “established that Arabs were an ethnic minority for purposes of our federal anti-discrimination laws.”
Brienholt notes that Muslim employment discrimination claims increased after the first World Trade Center attacks in 1993. He proposes two theories to explain why: the “Innocent Bystander” theory (Muslims felt distrusted and uncomfortable in American workplaces after both WTC attacks); and the “Political Islam” theory (Muslim activists are exploiting U.S. civil rights laws to push an extremist agenda).
He believes the “Political Islam” theory is the correct one, and that many Muslims are engaged in a non-violent campaign to spread extreme Islam through American workplaces as a sort of “stealth jihad” (to use scholar Robert Spencer’s expression for the phenomenon.)
In one extraordinary case, the Saudi government tried to force a pilot working for an American company to convert to Islam if he wanted to keep flying over Saudi airspace.
In an exclusive interview with Examiner.com, Ann Corco of Refugee Resettlement Watch shared her insights about this phenomenon. Her group has been chronicling the spread of “workplace accommodation” for some time. Her comments reflect this expertise and are worth quoting at length.
“At some point,” says Corco, “big businesses like meatpackers discovered they could keep wages low by using immigrant labor. During the Clinton Presidency, the State Department's Refugee Resettlement Program brought in over 100,000 Bosnian Muslims” who ended up working in Midwestern meatpacking plants.
“Somalis are the most obvious group demanding workplace accommodation,” Corco points out. “We have brought to the US over 80,000 Somali refugees in the last 25 years. The State Department has cut off all family reunification because they found through DNA testing that a very high percentage of Somalis lied to get into the US.”
Corco points to well publicized disputes between Somali Muslim workers and meat packing plants in Shelbyville, Tennessee, and Greeley, Colorado.
In Shelbyville, tensions led to interracial conflict. In 2008, “about 500 Swift workers, all Muslim and most Somali, walked off the job and marched a mile to Grand Island City Hall to protest for religious freedom,” according to a news report.
“They wanted prayer time during the holy month of Ramadan.
“The plant’s attempt to accommodate the requests led to counter protests staged by Caucasians, Hispanics, Vietnamese and African-Americans.”
In St. Cloud, Minnesota, Somali Muslim employees were awarded $1.35-million for “discrimination” when a meat packing plant refused to let them pray during work hours.
Is this sort of civil unrest, resentment and disharmony among neighbors really worth the dubious monetary benefits of “cheap labor”?
Ann Corco wonders who is behind it all.
“Some one or some group is organizing the Somalis,” she says. “There is no way on earth, they became that savvy in organizing without being taught the fine art of ‘community organizing’ using the Saul Alinsky playbook. Is it a coincidence that in Greeley and Grand Island, well-educated, English-speaking Somalis, just happened to arrive in those towns and get hired by Swift & Co. in the weeks prior to the demonstrations and walkouts?”
Echoing observations by others that the late Saul Alinsky’s radical theories have shaped the thinking of President Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton and others currently wielding power in the political realm, Corco explains that Alinsky, “taught that you must create chaos to bring about change. A good agitator eventually wears people down. They don't have to win this year or next, it's the wearing down process that will ultimately succeed if we don't counter it.
“And, the Somalis are really good at it because they have an ‘in your face’ personality and they are very very smart.”
Corco warns that the Muslim holiday of Ramadan in August may see another upsurge in workplace demands and unrest, given the daunting requirements placed upon Muslims during that celebration, such as dawn to dusk fasting. In the U.K, some organizations have tried to impose Ramadan fasting rules on non-Muslim employees.
Lately, Muslim demands for workplace accommodation have met with increasing resistance, such as that seen in the Dunkin’ Donuts case. Last autumn, Somali Muslim cab drivers serving the Minneapolis airport lost an appeal in their ongoing campaign for the "right" to refuse to accept passengers who were carrying alcohol. (The city’s cab drivers have also caused controversy over refusals to accept blind passengers traveling with guide dogs.)
Ann Corco believes such developments demonstrate what can happen if non-Muslims vocalize their opposition to “stealth jihad” in the workplace.
“As for what people can do,” she says, “when Tyson's dumped the Labor Day holiday at the chicken plant in Shelbyville in favor of giving the entire plant off for Eid last year, the publicity came out very negative and very quickly. As a result hundreds of calls of complaint went into Tysons and the plan was modified---negative publicity is very important. These big companies can be swayed by negative publicity.”
Comments
Why do we hate them?!
BillyHW;
Ask rather why they hate us, trying to force their customs & religion on us. This is just part of the Global Jihad. Remember ther Islamists first priority is to Islmify America than the world.
Ask yourself again why every Nation on Earth that has Muslims have violence with Law fare to promote Sharia Law.
In the end this will either make us all slaves of Islam or Massive forced immigration from the USA. As violence with civil unrest erupt more from this group as they become more plentiful. Immigration of Islam is like social suicide by Barbarians who want to force us into their mold. The Koran is a book of war not peace.
JMO
So by trying to save a buck these companies ended up having to spend thousands in legal bills and suffer lower productivity. No sympathy from me. These are all the same companies that condone illegal immigrants so they can exploit them.
Hopefully its beginning to sink into these companies' thick skulls that not all cultures are created equal when it comes to getting work done. That's why the immigrants are fleeing their hell hole countries in the first place.
if these folks dont want to do things the way its done here or anyone else for that matter -why the h--- dont they go back where they came from-and oh yes-lets get everyone talkin english-or also leave
England has virtually given into every demand in this area and it has not served their country well. It is fine to have your beliefs but, at the end of the day, America is about coming together not demanding that the state or businesses meet your needs. If they aren't doing what you want and it's not against the law move someplace else or get a new job. Nobody wins when the population is divided into tiny segments.
The problem is not really the Arabs,or even the foreigners. The problem is RELIGION versus democracy, freedom of religion is the right to apply theocracy over democracy. Before decrying the Muslims think about the Christians suppressing rights from the gay minorities. Religious freedom is a pharmacist refusing to sell contraceptives to a person who will have to have an abortion later. Religious freedom is to deny abortion so the unborn is facing the life of an unwanted kid and the prospect of a bleak future this may entice.
The crisis in America is the result of credit,
"Buy now, pay later", America bought Ossama Bin Laden to fight against the Russians, when Ossama defaulted someone had to pay...
fern said: "Religious freedom is a pharmacist refusing to sell contraceptives to a person who will have to <strike>have an abortion later</strike> go to another pharmacist."
Freedom is having options.
Yikes! Would it be too much trouble to have some elementary HTML?
It's not about recognition of religious rights of one or the other, but rather lack of respect for one another in the present day scheme of things in most countries including America. It doesn't augur well in harmonius living for the so-called lead creations of this sad planet in the next millennium, does it? Where is the respect for one another or the humanity at large for that matter?
Quit pampering these racist parasites and playing their antiquated games. A boot in the keister works every time on commie Saul Alinsky's theories of whining and name calling.
Please stop the ignorance, it is unhealthy for your children. If you do not care about yourself and your life expectancies then at least care for them. TWO BOOKS you must read to give them a lick of a chance...Jeruselum Countdown by John Hagee, and Because they hate by Bridget Gabriel. Billy...you are correct.
Kathy...I suppose you have read these books. If we do not stop the empty headed p.c...we are in deep doo doo.
Thanks for your comments, everyone.
I heard Brigette Gabriel speak in Toronto last month. Excellent!
I think a sentence in the article above needs to be corrected. The sentence reads:"Last autumn, Somali Muslim cab drivers serving the Minneapolis airport lost an appeal in their ongoing campaign for the right to "ACCEPT" passengers who were carrying alcohol.
The muslim cabbies wanted the right to REJECT passengers who carried alcohol.
Sorry for the quibble.
Thank you Kathy Shaidle for these type of articles. Also, thank you for your blog. Especially the occasional Dita von Teese pics!
fern:
If your definition of "religious freedom" is as you describe it, you are sorely undereducated and misinformed.
muslims, followers of islam. usless and evil everywhere they are found.
Forget the muzzies. Lets work to stop the FASCIST in Chief Obama. Here is the definition of Fascism. Keep in mind the bailouts and the latest purchase of GM and Chrysler and the handing over of them to the UAW.
s an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day (the 1920s and 1930s), fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie. Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—“blood and soil”—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism.
Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace. Entrepreneurship was abolished. State ministries, rather than consumers, determined what was produced and under what conditions.
www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Fascism.html\\\
In a few short months, from the strongest economy in the world, the economy most countries wished they had, to a Fascist government by definition. In 4 months. Can this country survive as we all knew it for another 3.5 years?
Fascists advocate the creation of a single-party state.
Fascist governments forbid and suppress criticism and opposition to the government and the fascist movement.
Think Napolitano's memos on right wing radicals.
Excellent piece Kathy. I have given up on the Observer newspapers but your article is a glimmer of hope that there may actually still be a few American journalists left with convictions and principles. Please keep digging into this and exposing those who have sold out our nation.
We shouldn't underestimate the role 'progressives' play in this. The leading feminist group in Québec (province) has just recently given the green light to the wearing of islamic attire in the provincial civil service.
This is the same group of 'womyn' who've spent much of the past 40 years bleaching every last aspect of Christianity from the public sphere, in order to put the patriarchy in its place.
It's astounding just how stupid some groups, organisations and individuals can be when confronted with islamist demands.
I and others with similar concerns have written letters of protest to the FFQ ( Fedération des Femmes du Québec) in french that would do Molière proud, but none of us have yet recieved a "réplique".
As though a reply constituted craven capitulation to the patriarchy.
A book I highly recommend is "Islam and Terrorism" by Mark Gabriel.
It is a REAL eye opener.
Robert Moon is spamming The Activity Pit again: twi.cc/lAlq
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