Stealth Jihad: Non-Muslim workers accommodation of Muslims at Swift plant

The transformation of Europe into Eurabia and the plight of non-Muslim Europeans should have been a wake up call, a cautionary wake up call to Americans. Now, we also are being forced to make yet more accommodations. Here is yet another example with commentary at JihadWatch [Don't forget also to read Hug Fitzgerald: Reasonable accommodation and Muslim demands.]

In this we see the inevitable and logical outcome of the allegedly "reasonable" accommodation of Muslim demands in American workplaces: "Somalis are running our plant. They are telling us what to do." The company has "no respect for the Spanish or white people. Many times we are forced to pull extra count... I don't feel that is right."

Although this article frames the controversy in racial terms, it isn't really a racial issue at all. It is a question of to what extent American institutions and organizations are going to change their practices and inconvenience non-Muslims in order to assuage Muslim demands. These Muslim initiatives, I have argued, are part of a larger stealth jihad aimed at, in the words of the Muslim Brotherhood [PDF - For English, scroll down to p.15], "eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Others see this as sheer hysteria. The "Allahpundit" guy over at Hot Air has expressed sneering contempt for the idea that some accommodations of Muslim practices "send us down the path to the 'complete Islamization of American society.'” Likewise some posts at FreeRepublic were recently brought to my attention (thank you, Jason). One commenter said this about my article about the Muslim demands for changes in the janitorial uniform at Sky Harbor Airport:

This is getting ridiculous. And I don't mean the Somalians' request. I'm talking about the fact that every time anybody Muslim happens to request that they be allowed to wear what they want in a non-sensitive position (I mean, we're talking about skirts vs. pants on janitorial staff for crying out loud), we have some idiot flip out and start screaming that this means that "shar'ia law is coming to _fill in the blank_!!!!!"

I don't see a thing at all unreasonable about this request. None whatsoever.

But this incident at the Swift plant shows that what may seem at first like "reasonable accommodation" has much larger implications. I'm sure that when Muslims at Swift began to demand changes in their break times, many said (as many are still saying), "What's the big deal? So they take a break at 7:30 instead of 9! It doesn't mean we're on the road to becoming an Islamic state!"

This article, however, shows what it does mean: it means that -- as was inevitable given the supremacist nature of Islam -- Muslims will accept no compromise, and non-Muslim workers will feel slighted and resentful. There can be no possible compromise with Sharia provisions: they must be adhered to in full, and once the precedent is set that they must be accommodated, there will be no end to the demands. That is why each of these incidents is important: it's a small accommodation it itself, but it reinforces the precedent that American practices must give way to Muslim ones whenever they clash. Once that precedent is set, it does indeed lead to the Islamization of American society, unless at a certain point non-Muslims are willing to draw the line and say "Thus far, but no farther. No more accommodation of Muslim demands." That line will never be drawn, however, as long as Americans continue to fail to see the larger implications and inevitable outcome of these individual incidents.

This incident is the future. We will be seeing much more of this.

"Facing protests, Swift vows to 'balance needs of all employees,'" by Chris Casey in the Greeley Tribune, September 6 (thanks to John):

A complaint by Somali workers earlier this week that they weren't getting early enough break times to accommodate religious fasting snowballed into worker protests at the JBS Swift & Co. plant Friday. Employees from both early and late shifts converged in the afternoon in front of the human resources office at the north Greeley plant.

About 100 employees, some of whom were supposed to be working, protested company officials accommodating Muslims by moving their break time to accommodate those fasting for Ramadan, a Muslim holy month. The company allowed Muslim workers to take their breaks about an hour earlier than normal to break their fasts.

The peaceful crowd milled about behind the plant gates signifying its frustration.

"They have no respect for the Spanish or white people," said Brianna Castillo, a Swift employee of four years. "Many times we are forced to pull extra count... I don't feel that is right."

Castillo, who is white, said every race was represented in the protest with the exception of Somalis. Castillo said employees are frustrated by what they feel is a double standard when it comes to other races and Somalis.

"Somalis are running our plant," Castillo said. "They are telling us what to do."

Swift security guards paced the parking lot helping to break up the crowds. Joann Lopez, who finished her morning shift, said she was threatened with her job if she didn't leave, which didn't happen to Somalis when they protested earlier in the week.

Lopez, who is Latino and Catholic, said she is upset because the new schedule forces the second shift to work more consecutive hours after their break.

"They are working four to five hours without a break and that's wrong," Lopez said. "This is hard work, and to go without a break, we feel it."

The problem began on Tuesday when Muslim workers were told they could not break their fast at 7:30 p.m., but would have to wait until their lunch break. For many that break didn't come until about 9 p.m. On Wednesday, Muslim workers gathered outside the Swift plant to negotiate a solution with management. That night they were told they would be allowed to break at 7:30 p.m.

United Food Commercial Workers Local 7, the union that represents primarily production department workers at Swift, responded Thursday by filing a grievance as directed by its membership. The union said the company may have been in violation of its contract, which states that workers must receive lunch break at the mid-point of their shift.

Jack Shandley, head of global human resources for JBS Swift & Co., said late Friday afternoon that the grievance "is just a procedural issue, and we'll work through it." He said company management will talk about the matter with union officials and "it will be done as expeditiously as necessary and as the facts are available."

Shandley said Swift plants have begun hiring Somali workers, whose religion is primarily Muslim, in the last couple of years as African refugees have sought employment in the United States. The aspects of their religion are "relatively new" to the company, which is trying to adapt.

"U.S. law requires companies to, when they can, make reasonable accommodations," he said. "We, like any good employer, try to balance the needs of all employees in respect to their religions and, to the extent that we can do that without diminishing efficiencies. That's what we're trying to do."...

Shandley said he's confident that all the differences can be worked out between the employee groups. This week's events have not caused notable disruption to Swift's business operations, he said.

"We're working with all parties to try to reach a reasonable accommodation," he said. "We think we're reaching that to balance the needs of everybody."

Good luck with that.

Here is some background that didn't make the Greeley Tribune report, courtesy Jihad Watch reader John:

There's much more to the story than what the Tribune printed. It was not all peaceful, as the Tribune has led us to believe. My neighbor, directly across the street from my home, is a Registered Nurse. She is currently employed at the Swift Meat Packing plant at Greeley in the medical department. She was an eyewitness to the building conflict and post-riot damage within the plant that happened at about 7:30 p.m. on Friday evening, 9-5-08. The Greeley P.D. SWAT Team and many police officers had to come into the plant to stop the destruction by approximately 200 angry Muslims of tables, equipment, and helmets inside the cafeteria at about 7:30 pm last night. My neighbor said that the medical department rendered treatment to one non-Muslim female worker who was assaulted during the melee.

The first Muslim demands came as Ramadan began on September 1. The plant employs about 2,000 workers. The majority of workers in the plant are of Latino descent. The Somali Muslims, my neighbor tells me, constitute a majority of the remaining minority number. They demanded that the union-contract mandated lunch break be moved from 9:00 pm to 7:30 pm.

When management moved the lunch break to 7:30 pm for two days, to accommodate the Ramadan Sharia demands, the majority of workers objected. This is covered pretty much within a racial framework in the Tribune story.

According to my neighbor, there was growing tension within the plant during the swing shift on Friday, 9-5-08. During the afternoon she walked through the plant at the request of management to help identify any Muslims who might be in distress from not eating anything during the day. She told me that there were Muslim men congregated in groups, that she was then asked to attend an urgent management meeting, wherein a decision was made to change the Friday lunch break to 8:00 pm, in an attempt to keep everyone happy.

The announcement was made about the new schedule for the 8:00 pm lunch break. At 7:30 pm the Muslims, about 200 in number, walked off the job, went to the employee cafeteria and began to break tables and equipment. At that time my neighbor was walking back into her medical department. She heard the sounds of the violence and later saw the aftermath of the damage....

I doubt that much of what I am telling you here is going to be printed in the press accounts.

So do I.

The Somalis are bullies. They have no right to demand that non-Muslims accommodate their religious rituals that are both inconvenient and putting the non-Muslims at risk. It's an outrage.

Here is Hugh Fitzgerald's comment:

There is an immediate lesson here: if you don't want to cause disruption in work, internecine strife and resentments that can at any moment become something else, if you don't want morale to fall because you are re-arranging schedules to accommodate Muslims, then for god's sake find other, non-Muslim workers.

There is a larger lesson here. Why are Muslims admitted into Infidel lands? On what grounds, with what understanding of the consequences? How do those in Congress who are supposedly giving the INS oversight, and reflecting the wishes of the American public, doing in reflecting those wishes? All one has to do is to calmly and soberly look, and study, at the contents of the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, and look around the world at how Muslims have behaved,, in time and in space, over the past 1350 years, toward non-Muslims, and how, around the world, they are behaving today, in lands already ruled by Muslims (what happens to Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh? what happens to Christian Copts in Egypt? To Maronites in Lebanon? To Assyrians and Chaldeans in Iraq?) or lands where Muslims have now settled in sufficient numbers to make their aggressive and unceasing demands -- all over, for example, the countries of Western Europe -- even going so far, in some of those countries, to threatening the indigenous non-Muslims with terrible retribution (see the Netherlands, see Denmark).

Who is in the INS? Who is deciding that Somali Muslims should come to this country at all? Whben was this decision made? Who reviews such decisions, or studies the consequences of such a decision, for the inhabitants of Lewiston, Maine (remember that farseeing and perfectly sensible mayor of Lewiston, who was subject to every kind of abuse for his most unremarkable worries about the Somali presence, and how support for Somalis on welfare was using up the city's budget so that little was left for poor non-Somali native Mainers?), or Minneapolis (see those seeing-eye dog, alcohol-rejecting Muslim taxi drivers, breaking the law, and the requirements of their hack license, because Islam comes before any Infidel requirement or decency), or for workers in a Swift meat-packing plant.

Is it silly, is it absurd, to ask the question: why are Muslims from Muslim-ruled Somalia deemed to be "refugees" worthy of admission to this country? Such admission is a precious thing, desired by many, available only to few. Why should Muslims, including these Somalis, be among those few? Are Muslims "refugees" from Muslim lands? Isn't it non-Muslims who are the only true refugees from Muslim lands, and isn't it true that Muslims are treated with perfect decency, and far too accommodatingly, in non-Muslim lands so that they cannot be said to be "refugees" from those lands? Of course they want to come here. Of course they want to take every advantage of an advanced well-run Western non-Muslim state -- but they do not wish to understand how that state, and what makes it tick, comes from a polity and a people who are non-Muslim, and therefore whatever their faults, they do not have inshallah-fatalism, nor the habit of mental submission (which becomes the habit of political submission, in Muslim lands, to the Ruler or the Regime), they do not have any of the problems that come so clearly out of Islam, and what it inculcates. Refugees from Nazi Germany and its misrule did not arrive here to spread Nazism, but to alert others as to its horror, and to help participate in the fight against it. Refugees from Soviet Communist rule, either in the Soviet Union itslef or in the satellite countries of Eastern Europe, were grateful to be taken in by the United States, and like the refugees from Nazi Germany, did not come to spread Communism, but to help suppress it and arouse others who might be insufficiently alarmed to wish to do so.

But is that true with Muslims who arrive from the Islam-based misrule of Muslim lands? No, it is not. They arrive, but with some remarkable exceptions -- the apostates or defectors from the Army of Islam -- they defend Islam, they protect Islam, they spread their Taqiyya-and-Tu-Quoque, they make campus life difficult for those who dare to present other views (try being a prominent pro-Israeli speaker on many campuses today, as at Concorda University, in Montreal, or at San Francisco State, where you will be shouted down and threatened with worse, so that speeches have to be cancelled).

Since Islam is not only or mainly a religion but a politics and a geopolitics, and since part of the Total Belief-System of Islam includes, ideally, a Complete Regulation of Daily Life, any attempt in non-Muslim settings to follow the prescriptions -- what is commanded, what is prohibited -- will wreak havoc with schedules, and with practices established long ago, before any Muslims were present in this country (they have essentially arrived, save for a handful, not only since World War II, but in numbers beyond the hardly discernible, only in the past twenty years, and have played no part in American history, or the development of the American polity, but are now playing a part here, as in Western Europe, of disruption and unsettlement. In Western Europe the large-scale presence of Muslims makes the lives of both the indigenous non-Muslims, and the lives of non-Muslim immigrants (Hindus, Buddhists, Christians from black Africa) more unpleasant, more expensive, and more physically dangerous, than would be the case without such a large-scale presence. There is no reason not to believe, and plenty of evidence to believe, that eventually the same thing will happen here, unless steps are taken to intelligently, rationally, perfectly sensibly, end Muslim immigration, and then to reverse it, in the first place by refusing to yield to Muslim demands, wherever made, for "accommodations" (a term that hides or softens a great deal) to Muslim ways, no matter what this may mean for non-Muslims.

Since a central duty of Muslims is that of furthering the "struggle" or "Jihad" to remove all obstacles -- from exceedingly small (as some pooh-poohers apparently think this kind of request is, failing to see how it fits in, one more tessera in the Muslim mosaic that is under careful construction) to very large, from demanding changes in workclothes that were in place for everyone long before Muslims showed up, to demanding changes in the exercise, and application, of the individual rights guaranteed by the First Amendment -- to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam, the disruptions to our lives are not accidental, or based on any misunderstandings. They are fundamental, and the Jihad has no end, until such time as Islam does indeed spread, and does indeed dominate. This is not a fiction. This is in the texts, and reflected in the tenets, the attitudes, the atmospherics of Islam. Those who deny this simply refuse to read and study those texts, because they don't want to know, don't have the stamina or the intelligence, perhaps, or the imagination, to see a bit beyond the immediate. Nor are they students of history. They live in that immedidate, and they live by Articles of Faith, such as "Everyone Wants The Same Thing" or "All Religions Are the Same" or "Tolerance of Others is the Highest Good" or -- well, you know what those Articles of Faith, those Idols of the Present Age, are. They won't do. Not any more. They fail to meet the case.

Obviously those in the State Department and the Executive Branch, the INS and all the rest did not do their homework, or if they did, they simply didn't care.

But to give them the benefit of the doubt, the Law of Unintended Consequences is at work here. Every action, whether good or bad, has an unintended consequence. Obviously when immigrants are allowed to inconvenience and put American citizens at risk, the decision was flawed.

And all these highly trained individuals had to do was to look at the historical record: Muslims come in and everyone else suffers. It's been that way in every culture and civilization since the 7th century when Mohammed had his cave visions, recruited some resentful Arabs to become Muslims, and went on the rampage until they "convinced" his neighbors to give in ... or die.

There is nothing new in either what the Somalis workers want to achieve, i.e.: to expand Islam as is the duty of all Muslims, and the stupidity of those that appease, even in the matter of these tiny accommodations, because accommodations will pile up, creating from a molehill an enormous mountain. And then we and everything and everyone we love, will be lost.