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On 25 July 2017, the far-right news and opinion web site Freedom Daily posted an article purporting to give an account of a violent Somali Muslim takeover of the small town of Shelbyville, Tennessee. Despite its surface resemblance to a news report, however, the post (dubiously bylined Prissy Holly) was an ill-informed, opinion-laden attack on the Muslim refugee population of, well ... everywhere. It begins: The text becomes more specific as it continues: From reading those paragraphs, one might easily come away with the impression that Shelbyville experienced some massive influx of Somali refugees in recent weeks or months, but that is not the case. Over the past fifteen years, the U.S. has resettled 51 refugees there, of whom 47 were Somali, according to data from the Refugee Processing Center, which tracks refugee resettlement in the United States. The largest number of refugees to resettle in the town in a single year was 11. With a population of around 20,000, these arrivals represent less than one percent of Shelbyville's total population. Official resettlement isn't the only way refugees arrive in U.S. communities, however. In the case of Shelbyville, already-resettled refugees began moving there in the early 2000s in order to take advantage of job openings in the local meatpacking industry. Exact counts are hard to come by, although, according to a 2010 U.S. Census estimate, Shelbyville had 446 foreign-born residents originating from sub-Saharan Africa as of that year, amounting to 2.3 percent of the total population. In a small town, that could cause a noticeable cultural shift. But it's hardly a takeover. In point of fact, we learned from Shelbyville Police Chief Jan Phillips that the Somali refugee population of the town has dramatically decreased since that time. A 2015 Census Bureau estimate put the total number of residents of Subsaharan African origin at 166 (less than 1 percent of the population). Needless to say, Phillips dismissed the notion that they had taken over Shelbyville as completely false. A later paragraph in the Freedom Daily post describes the culture clash supposedly happening in the town (emphasis in the original): But although these remarks by former Shelbyville Times-Gazette reporter Brian Mosely are accurately quoted, they weren't uttered this year, or last year, or even five years ago. They date from 2009, when Mosely, who had written extensively about the arrival of Somali refugees in Shelbyville during the mid-2000s, was interviewed by the Christian Broadcasting Network. What of the Muslim migrants who Freedom Daily says are targeting local Christians with violent Islamic crimes? Here's the one and only example of such a crime they were able to cite (emphasis, again, in the original): Although it is based on an actual incident, the Freedom Daily account is a bald-faced misrepresentation of the facts. Contrary to what is claimed, the 2016 Shelbyville church shootings did receive a fair amount of press coverage, in which it was, in fact, routinely reported that the sole suspect, Wendell Tobias Buchanan, was a recent convert to Islam, according to his family. What Wendell Tobias Buchanan was not, however, was a Somali refugee. No Somalis were involved or implicated in those attacks in any way. Freedom Daily's attempt to portray Shelbyville, Tennessee as a community torn asunder by violent foreign jihadists does not hold up to even the most basic scrutiny, trading instead on appeals to emotion and based on false reporting. Even the photographs in the article are fake, Chief Phillips told us. He is correct. An image supposedly showing downtown Shelbyville actually depicts the small town of Bell Buckle, 10 miles away. An uncaptioned photograph showing the police response to a public disturbance was actually taken in the aftermath of the 2015 Dylan Roof church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina. Based on the evidence we were able to amass, Shelbyville, Tennessee doesn't have a Somali refugee problem; Freedom Daily, on the other hand, does.
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