Is it any surprise that the Minneapolis neighborhood dubbed “Little Mogadishu” would seem an awful lot like the real, big Mogadishu?

In Muslim Democrat Representative Ilhan Omar’s district — which has become “the terrorist recruitment capital of the US,” as Fox News puts it — police are struggling with murders, Muslim gangs, and a “tight-lipped” “Somali” community that’s reluctant to talk to law enforcement. Officially, police say the problem is that authorities need better community “outreach.” But a prominent anti-jihadism crusader contends the issue is deeper: Koranic injunctions against trusting non-Muslims.

As Fox News reports, opening their piece with a story about a young “Somali” man who was shot but refused to talk to police:

The national epidemic of shootings involving young African-American men in America’s cities certainly isn’t unique to Minneapolis. But some officers here believe issues of cultural assimilation involving the Somali immigrant community, and a struggle on both sides to better communicate law enforcement’s mandate to protect and serve, makes it a particularly imposing challenge. One that politicians like Omar, they say, could do much more to effectively address.

“When they come here, they come with their own experiences of not trusting the police, and from a place where the police are known to be corrupt. And the challenge for us lies in trying to get them to cooperate,” said one law enforcement officer. “They’ll often call 911 when they need help. But when we come, they often won’t then tell us who is causing the problem so we can take action or stop the crime from happening again.”

“Our goal is to have a good relationship with the community, we try to engage but it’s proving to be a tough egg to crack,” another officer underscored.

According to data compiled last year by the Washington Post, more than half of all homicides statewide in Minnesota go unsolved. And that's in part because Somali-Americans in Minneapolis aren’t talking enough to police, according to officers.

But Jihad Watch proprietor Robert Spencer, who has devoted his life to studying Islam, has a very different view. “They don’t talk to the police because they don’t trust them, because the police are not Muslims,” he writes.

“The Qur’an teaches that Muslims are ‘the best of people’ (3:110) and non-Muslims are ‘the most vile of created beings’ (98:6). But no one will admit that is the cause, and so the police keep trying ‘outreach’ programs to win them over. The result? Disasters such as the police career of Mohamed Noor,” Spencer continues.

Noor was a Somali-descent Minneapolis cop hired due to quota imperatives despite being flagged by psychiatrists as psychologically unfit; he later, in 2017, killed an Australian woman who’d dialed 911 for help in one of the worst “bad” police shootings in memory.

This particular “diversity” push is the result of the large-scale Somali immigration into Minneapolis in the 1990s, which transformed the city’s Cedar-Riverside neighborhood into “Little Mogadishu” and has birthed gangs with names such as the “‘Somali Mafia,’ ‘Somali Outlaws,’ ‘Young n’ Thuggin (YNT)’ and even the ‘Taliban,’” reports Fox.

As for the different conceptions of the problem, while the truth probably lies somewhere between the official police line and Spencer’s warning, I suspect it’s much closer to the latter.

Immigrants bring their mindsets with them, and it’s unsurprising that people from corrupt lands such as Somalia would be suspicious of authorities. That said, since our police are head and shoulders above theirs and given that this is demonstrated in treatment of victims, their extreme unwillingness to cooperate reflects a deeper problem — the one Spencer outlines.

Assimilation: Myth vs. Reality

“Assimilation” has become a buzzword and is often viewed as a panacea. Yet we ignore much relating to it.

First, assimilation is never a one-way affair when large numbers of a given group enter a country. Sure, the Italians, Irish, Germans, Jews, and others came to the United States and largely adopted the dominant culture, but they also changed it; hence the existence of ethnic restaurants, “Oktoberfest,” the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, Chanukah remembrances in media and business, etc. This may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the particular cultural addition — but it is a real thing.

So one question when pondering a species of large-scale immigration always is: Will the cultural changes the newcomers bring be positive? This is never seriously asked today.

The second problem is that incentive to assimilate is now lacking. Not only does multiculturalism encourage retainment of foreign ways, but when a given group arrives in large numbers, they can live in enclaves, in mini-nations within our nation. The result is that in “the neighborhood of Cedar-Riverside, for example, it’s possible to go about day-to-day business without ever interacting with a non-Somali,” as Fox wrote Saturday.

Exacerbating this problem is that, as it long ago became in Sweden, assimilation is starting to become a dirty word in America. Reflecting this, new Democrat face Stacey Abrams claimed in a recent essay that more identity politics would actually make our country stronger.

Third, not understood, and rarely pondered honestly, is that not all groups are equally assimilable. The Germans, Italians, Poles, and many others had to accept a new language upon coming here, but they were of the Western tradition and almost always embraced our foundational faith, Christianity. This generally isn’t true of Third World immigrants, who’ve constituted 85 to 90 percent of our post-1967 arrivals.

Moreover, Muslims come with a religion not at all like Christianity and which has historically been an aggressive rival of it — and of other faiths. Secularist pseudo-elites dominate our culture today and don’t take this seriously; they view religion as mere window dressing. But immigrants often retain even superficial things such as dress and food. Is it realistic thinking they will shed the deepest of things, their “belief system”? Does a communist relinquish his communism upon stepping on American terra firma?

Furthermore, is it rational to claim, as secularists often do, that this doesn’t matter? Note here that Christianity’s and Islam’s moral foundations are radically different. One is the Ten Commandments.

The other is Sharia law.

These passions are reflected in statistics, mind you. As Fox also informs, “More men and boys [45] from a Somali American community in Minneapolis have joined — or attempted to join — a foreign terrorist organization over the last 12 years than any other jurisdiction in the country.”

The last problem with assimilation now lies with us. To wit: You must present something appealing to assimilate into. Yet upon arriving today, what does an immigrant see? Sexual depravity permeating media and entertainment, people prancing mostly naked in “Pride” parades, vice called virtue, frivolity taken seriously, and people who appear to have so little faith in their own culture that they won’t even defend it. So what’s the message?

“Hey, be like us”?

To see what can lie ahead, we need only look at Western Europe with its higher Muslim populations and “no-go zones.” How bad can it get? Well, former Swedish radio journalist Amun Abdullahi — who immigrated to Sweden but dared be politically incorrect — left Sweden in 2013 and “returned to her native Somalia,” as CBN’s Dale Hurd relates it in the video below. “She told Swedish television that Mogadishu was safer than the immigrant suburbs of Stockholm.”

When big Mogadishu can be safer than a little Mogadishu, it should give even an immigrationist pause for thought.

Photo of Ilhan Omar: AP Images