Outrage over the alleged theft of billions of dollars from American taxpayers by fraudsters in the Somali immigrant community in Minnesota has prompted Muslim organizations in the United States to deploy the “Islamophobia” charge to rally the support of the far left in America. While the “Islamophobia” accusation may have encouraged leftists to hinder the operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis—with tragic results—the allegation was not enough to save the political career of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Walz was forced to drop out of the 2026 race for governor for his apparent failure to stop the alleged fraud, which is currently being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice.
They all sing the ‘racist-Islamophobe’ mantra over and over.
The controversy began the day after Christmas when video journalist Nick Shirley posted a 42-minute video about the alleged fraudulent billing scheme. In the video—which has been viewed on YouTube 3.5 million times—Shirley interviewed David Hoch, co-founder of Minnesotans for Responsible Government, as they toured numerous publicly funded day care centers that appeared to have no children in attendance.
While there was some pushback from mainstream journalists declaring that the duo had come at the wrong time to find children at the centers, the video generated substantial outrage on the part of viewers throughout the United States. The video confirmed what the New York Times had reported in late November—that Somalis had perpetrated massive fraud in Minnesota. The Times even went so far as to signal its readership that concern over Somali corruption was appropriate by reporting that Ahmad Samatar, a Somali professor at Macalester College in Minneapolis, had said that a reckoning over the fraud was “overdue” and that “American society and the denizens of the state of Minnesota have been extremely good to Somalis.”
Paraphrasing Samatar, the Times reported that “Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread,” and that Minnesota was vulnerable to Somali corruption because it is “so tolerant, so open and so geared toward keeping an eye on the weak.” In the December 26 video, Hoch said about the same thing when he complained that Minnesotans were too “nice” to confront the problem.
Hoch reiterated his assessment in a sit-down interview with Shirley that was posted on X on January 6, 2026. “The majority of the people here—they’re afraid of their own shadows,” Hoch said in the interview during which he reported having become an outcast for exposing the fraud. “My life has been threatened multiple times,” he said. “They all sing the ‘racist-Islamophobe’ mantra over and over,” Hoch added.
Self-Criticism Not on the Agenda
Neither CAIR nor MPAC addressed the elephant in the room that Samatar raised with the New York Times. Instead, the CAIR chapter in Minnesota used the controversy as a panic-inducing talking point in a fundraising letter it sent out two days after Shirley’s video was published. “This is a moment of crisis,” the letter, which spoke of anti-Somali rhetoric, declared. On New Year’s Eve, MPAC issued a statement condemning “escalating Islamophobic attacks” against Somali-Americans.
In its letter, MPAC cited an apparent “break-in” at a Somali-run day care, which, conveniently enough, resulted in the disappearance of the center’s financial records, making any investigation into the center’s operations more difficult. MPAC called on local police to determine if “bias or Islamophobia” was a motivating factor.
Then, on January 7, 2025, CAIR published an op-ed in the leftist publication Common Dreams, which stated the anger over the scandal was “driven by a dishonest and largely debunked video circulated by a conservative social media influencer”—a clear attack on Shirley’s video.
Somalis Condemned Corruption, Terrorist Recruitment in Minnesota
Somalis themselves complained about the corruption Shirley highlighted in a letter issued in 2021. As documented by the Middle East Forum in 2024, a group of congregants of the Dar Al-Farooq mosque in Minneapolis complained about the corruption at a youth center in nearby Bloomington where officials, among other things, allegedly gathered the names of participants in a basketball league “to con the federal government ... through a federal Covid 19 food program.” The complaint came to the surface during the prosecution of 70 officials who were accused of stealing millions of dollars of federal funds intended to feed young children during the COVID-19 crisis. Whether CAIR or MPAC want to admit it or not, Somalis themselves are outraged by the theft of public funds by prominent members of their community.
That’s not all. In early 2009, Somali activist Osman Ahmed testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs about how charitable organizations with “hidden agendas” had recruited young Somalis in Minnesota to travel to their homeland and join Al-Shabaab, a jihadist organization. Ahmed reported that officials at one local mosque told families whose children had been recruited by Al-Shabaab that if they “talk about the issue, the Muslim center will be destroyed and Islamic communities will be wiped out. They tell parents that if they report their missing kid to the FBI, the FBI will send the parents to Guantanamo Jail. And this message has been very effective tool to silence parents and the community. They do have a lot [of] cash to use for [this] propaganda machine.”
Some of this cash ended up in the coffers of Al-Shabaab, a terrorist organization in Somalia, the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal indicated in November, declaring, “Somali fraud rings have sent huge sums in remittances, or money transfers, from Minnesota to Somalia.”
Why Do Islamist Organizations Stifle Legitimate Criticism?
Islamist organizations and their allies on the left have a long history of responding to legitimate concerns about the behavior of Muslims in Western democracies with accusations of bigotry and “Islamophobia.”
It happened in 2003, when the FBI instructed its field offices to count the number of mosques in their jurisdictions—a perfectly reasonable instruction, considering the attack on 9/11. In response, the American Muslim Council, an Islamist organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., “characterized the instruction as an act of ‘political repression’ by the U.S. government and wrote a letter to the United Nations pleading for relief from this and other “shameful and undemocratic practices,” Daniel Pipes reported. The complaint prompted the FBI to back off and to declare that it was really trying to document the vulnerabilities faced by the mosques—not the threat that Islamists presented to U.S. security.
Let’s get real: Islamic institutions—mosques especially—have served as bases of operations for individuals who present threats to the security and welfare of Western democracies for decades.
The United Kingdom
For example, in the United Kingdom, London’s Finsbury Park Mosque has served as a center for extremist recruitment and has been the target of multiple police operations.
Speaking of the United Kingdom, the controversy surrounding events in Minnesota sounds an awful lot like the corruption scandal in the Muslim neighborhood of Tower Hamlets in London, where local leaders have engaged in corruption and promoted extremism. Of course, efforts to investigate these problems have prompted allegations of—you guessed it—"Islamophobia.”
France
In France in 2024, authorities expelled Tunisian imam Mahjoub Mahjoubi after determining that his sermons at the Bagnols-sur-Cèze Mosque in southern France promoted jihad, sharia law, hatred of non-Muslims, and contempt for the French Republic—prompting courts to rule that his preaching incited separatism and terrorism and violated the core values of the state. And wouldn’t you know it, Mahjoubi’s expulsion elicited accusations of—do we even have to say it?—“Islamophobia.”
The United States
In the United States, Bridgeview Mosque in Chicago is well known for its financial and ideological ties to Hamas, an organization that has killed numerous U.S. citizens. When these ties caused Illinois State Police to remove the mosque’s imam from a chaplaincy program, a local portrayed the decision as an act of bigotry.
In 2019, federal officials revoked the citizenship of Mohamed Abdirahman Kariye, a Somali-born imam in Portland, Oregon. The Oregonian reported that “the FBI informed U.S. Justice Department attorneys that Kariye had coordinated with Osama bin Laden and other known terrorist leaders and was associated with terrorist organizations...” Interestingly enough, CBS reported in 2015 that Kariye had, among other things, “pleaded guilty to using a fraudulent Social Security number and defrauding the state Medicaid program by lying about his income to receive state-funded health insurance.” Of course, The Nation, a leftist publication portrayed Kariye as the target of an FBI witch hunt motivated by “Islamophobia.”
Loyalty and Disavowal
CAIR’s refusal to condemn the misdeeds of the Somali fraudsters in Minnesota may be fueled by adherence to the Islamic doctrine of “loyalty and disavowal” which prohibits Muslims from taking the side of non-Muslims against a Muslim, reports Australian scholar Mark Durie.
Nevertheless, Durie warns against interpreting the Somali misdeeds in Minnesota as an example of Muslims waging some sort of war against Western governments or non-Muslims.
“Yes, there can be an attitude that ‘The infidels owe us—What is there is ours to take,” Durie reports. “This is theologically influenced, but it’s hard to make that case.And Muslims are often the target.” Stealing is part of human nature and is very widespread in Islamic contexts, he told Focus on Western Islamism (FWI).
“Look at Iran, for example. It’s not just directed against infidels,” he wrote in an email to FWI. “We have seen a lot of cases of corruption in Muslim organizations where Muslims are the ones who suffer.”
That’s the irony of CAIR’s and MPAC’s insistence on raising the “Islamophobia” allegation in the face of reports of rampant corruption on the part of Somali leaders in Minnesota. It is that community that has been so badly damaged by the leaders for whom CAIR and MPAC are running interference.
