The Islamization of North Dakota

Three blocks from where Mohamad Barakat opened fire on police officers and firefighters, the Islamic Society of Fargo-Moorhead squats across from a school bus company. Nearby are other elements of the new enclave like the Somali Community Development group which offers English and citizenship classes and the Al Hamdi Restaurant from whose vicinity an eyewitness reported hearing the shots that took the life of one police officer and wounded two others.

“The first thing we always want to know in a situation like this is, ‘Why?”Why would somebody do this?'” Chief David Zibolski wondered. Perhaps he should ask in Fargo’s own Little Mogadishu and inquire of the politicians who turned Fargo into a refugee camp.

It is not even the first Islamic terrorist from Fargo.

In 2016, Dahir Adan, a Somali refugee who penetrated the country along with a massive family that was tragically resettled in Fargo, went on a stabbing spree in a St. Cloud, MN mall. The Somali refugee had gone around the mall shouting “Allahu Akbar” dedicating the violence to his Islamic deity, and demanding to know if potential targets were Muslims before stabbing them.

ISIS claimed credit for the attack after Adam, like Mohamad, was fatally shot and killed, but not until after he stabbed 10 Americans. Fargo Muslims however quickly rushed to play the victim.

“Somali mall workers are afraid to go to their jobs today. I was even afraid to use public restrooms,” Hukun Abdullahi, a local nonprofit leader, had claimed.

Moorhead Mayor Del Rae Williams admitted that her biggest concern from the Muslim terrorist attack was that, “the more we make, you know, these kind of things an issue, the more people are abusive to (refugees) publicly.”

Police Chief David Todd denied, “I don’t have any indication that radicalization is occurring here in Fargo.” Seven years later, Officer Jake Wallin, who had survived Afghanistan and Iraq, was murdered by a Muslim attacker in Fargo. There’s never any indication until someone dies.

The violent attacks by Mohamad Barakat and Dahir Adan may surprise people who still think of Fargo, North Dakota as quintessentially American. Refugee resettlement has changed that.

8% of Fargo is foreign born. Much of that population comes from the Middle East and Islamic areas in Africa like Sudan and Somalia. Even much of the European refugee contingent is Bosnian. The massive influx of refugee resettlement allowed local politicians to boast that Fargo was growing much faster than the rest of the state or the country.

Fargo’s population shot up from 74,000 in 1990 to 90,000 in 2000 to 128,000 today. Somalis flooded Fargo, as did Iraqis, Bosnians and Bangladeshis. Amid the pure snows rose mosques, ethnic welfare nonprofits, Halal markets and other outposts of the new population.

By 2000, six hundred Somali families occupied Fargo, by 2004, Somalis outnumbered Hispanics in the Fargo public school system. Refugee resettlement, led by Lutheran Social Services, continued bombarding the state with foreign migrants, 70% of them embedded into the Fargo area.

“Millennials who are increasingly working in these jobs like to have a multicultural area that has differences in people,” Fargo Mayor Tim Mahoney contended. “We really need a diverse population to be more like a normal American city.”

When Fargo City Commissioner Dave Piepkorn had warned that millions of taxpayer dollars were being spent on refugee resettlement and that the area was becoming more dangerous, Somalis launched a recall campaign. Piepkorn has since been stripped of Deputy Mayor status.

Little wonder that few elected officials have had the courage to speak out against what is being done to Fargo and North Dakota.

Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota, its coffers swollen by dumping migrants from Islamic terror states on the area, suddenly faced a dieback under the Trump administration. The organization filed for bankruptcy and shut down in 2021, but rather than offering any relief, things actually got worse for Fargo and North Dakota.

Under Republican Gov. Doug Burgum, the former head of Lutheran Social Services, became the Executive Policy Director at the state’s Department of Human Services. Burgum, who is now running for president, announced that the state would take over refugee resettlement from Lutheran Social Services. Burgum had previously turned down an offer from the Trump administration to allow governors to end the practice of refugee dumping.

While Gov. Burgum claimed that the state would handle the invasion more responsibly than Lutheran Social Services had, bringing in the head of LSS put the lie to any such notion. Gov. Burgum had proclaimed that April would be Arab American Heritage Month, not to honor the Christian Lebanese, actual refugees who had first fled Islamic terror to move to North Dakota, but those Muslims who “built the first mosque in the United States of America.”

By 2022, the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service North Dakota had taken over for the LSS and 78 Afghans, along with Syrians, Somalis and Iraqis were being resettled in the state.

That same year Rep. Hamida Dakane, who wears a hijab, became the first Somali legislator in the state House of Representatives from a district in Fargo. Dakane had found fame after an alleged vandalism incident at the Moorhead Fargo Islamic Center, holding up a “Hate Has No Home in Moorhead” sign as representatives of “Lutheran, Catholic, Presbyterian and Satanism” movements gathered to help. Then she joined Fargo’s Human Rights Commission.

“I am not representing a Muslim state,” Dakane, who entered this country on a student visa, noted. “There is a lot of things in Islam that doesn’t align with Democrats, but that doesn’t apply to the community.”

Mohamad Barakat may have had less patience waiting for North Dakota to become Islamic.

Fargo is slowly getting there. Somali restaurants, halal markets and ethnic associations are dotting the map. Especially around the area where Mohamad Barkat murdered a police officer. School districts are spending a fortune dealing with non-English speakers, primarily Somalis and Kurds, and a great deal of money goes to subsidize Headstart and food stamps.

Gangs proliferate trafficking in drugs and prostitution. And worse crimes appear and disappear.

Omar Mohamed Kalmio, a Somali refugee who shot and killed his American Sioux girlfriend, her mother, brother and another family member in nearby Minot, is still fighting his life sentence. Kalmio should have been in ICE custody after he and a group of Somalis had previously stabbed a man in the back with a knife.

In Grand Forks, Hawo Osman Ahmed, had allegedly threatened women with a knife. “Come over here I’m going to cut you,” she had warned, “I’m going to slice your neck.”

“I feel like I’m a Muslim woman who’s being attacked because I am a Muslim woman living in Grand Forks,” she later complained.

Authorities generally steer clear of such cases if they know what’s good for them. The prosecution of a sex trafficking ring by the Somali Outlaws gang across the country which allegedly involved girls as young as twelve was shut down by federal authorities, advocates and political pressure amid claims of racism, Islamophobia and cultural differences .

“We are heartbroken by this tragic loss,” Gov. Burgum said in response to the Somali act of violence that killed one police officer and wounded two others. “We also pray for the full recovery of the officers and civilian who were wounded in this horrible incident.”

‘Horrible incidents’ like these could be averted by ending refugee resettlement.

Gov. Burgum refused to end refugee resettlement when he had the opportunity to do so. The blood of the victims of refugee resettlement are on the hands of those who enable it.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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