For a Tuesday

Quite a bit going on ...




Oh, dear. This must be embarrassing:

The Somali refugee accused of stabbing an Edmonton police constable on the weekend and running down four pedestrians was ordered to be deported from the United States in 2011 by a U.S. immigration judge,  ...

How was this missed, Ralph?
 

And:

Sharif had, as Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale put it Sunday, “had some appearance on a policy watch list.”

We know Sharif is a Somali national who was granted refugee status in Canada.

Two years ago he was investigated by police on suspicion of, as the Canadian Press reported it, “promoting extremist ideology.”

The RCMP told media that there was no peace bond issued and no further action taken because he was not deemed to present a serious threat to Canada.

We’re not blaming the RCMP for not foreseeing this incident. There are many people who show signs of extremism who do not go on to act on them and there are people who show no signs of it who do commit horrible acts.

The real question is why he wasn’t immediately put on track for deportation. If he espoused an extremist ideology then he stopped being a refugee.

Yes, about that:

Previous act: Citizenship could be revoked from dual citizens convicted of treason, spying and terrorism offences, depending on the sentence received, or who were a part of an armed force of a country or organized group engaged in conflict with Canada.

New act: This provision is repealed. Dual citizens living in Canada who are convicted of these crimes will face the Canadian justice system, like other Canadian citizens who break the law. ...

“Canada’s identity has always been shaped by the significant economic, cultural and social contributions of immigrants. Changes to the Citizenship Act will enhance program integrity, while giving more flexibility to eligible applicants to meet the requirements for citizenship so that they can continue building successful lives in Canada,” added Mr Hussen.

(Sidebar: this Ahmed Hussen.)

Also:

About half of the asylum claims heard so far from those who’ve crossed the Canada-U.S.. border since July have been rejected, the Immigration and Refugee Board said Tuesday.

But the actual number of cases the board has heard since then is a mere fraction of the 8,000 or so claims that have been filed to date.

Shereen Benzvy Miller, the head of the IRB’s refugee protection division, told a House of Commons immigration committee hearing that 240 have already been finalized, and a further 373 had been scheduled as of earlier this week, with the rate of rejection around 50%.

That’s in line with the historical acceptance rate for claims by Haitian nationals in past years; the vast majority of the asylum seekers who have arrived in Quebec in particular since the summer are Haitian.

In August, the board set up a dedicated team of 17 members to hear asylum claims solely from the border crossers. The fate of those who crossed before July remains unclear, as those claims were just part of the board’s general caseload and aren’t specifically tracked.

The dedicated team is aiming to hear about 1,500 cases between now and the end of November. After that, claims from the border crossers will go back to being part of the regular workflow.

It’s a case load that has overwhelmed the board, Miller told the committee Tuesday.

The board is funded to hear at most 24,000 cases a year and at present, is anticipating more than 40,000 to be filed in all of 2017.

Seventeen people have sifted through eight thousand cases and must go through fifteen hundred more before the end of November.

This math will the be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back.

Watch for an express move.

There is an election in 2019, after all.




It's not a complete terrorist event unless there is an appeal by an emotionally backward, self-centred, immature and paranoid community of hangers-on who wait in vain for backlash that never comes:

Habiba Abdulle's phone rang off the hook Monday with calls from refugee mothers afraid to send their children to school in Edmonton.

"The question they were asking, 'Is it safe for us to go?' " said Abdulle, an advocate with the Alberta Somali Community Centre. "Because they were afraid of the backlash."

Their concerns were sparked by news early Sunday that police had arrested Abdulahi Hasan Sharif, following two weekend attacks that police Chief Rod Knecht said were being investigated as possible "acts of terrorism."

Oh, poor, poor victims ... 

Five people are nearly killed by someone who obviously should not have been granted residence in this country but they are the true unfortunates.

Because Ibn Warraq:

Most important, Ibn Warraq  describes the “mind-set” of most Muslims as intolerant, self-pitying, stagnant, and trained to blame others for their own failures. He also sees the Muslim “mind-set” as akin to that of people trapped in totalitarian regimes. The need to control thought and to sacrifice individuality characterizes both Islamic and Marxist regimes. Thus, we understand the affinity that Western “leftists” have with reactionary Islamists. Ibn Warraq contrasts this with a Western “mind-set” which is built upon Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, scientific, and Enlightenment foundations and is characterized by intellectual curiosity, genuine interest in the “other,” a sense of irony, the ability to engage in self-criticism, and a concern with finding the truth.

**

An obsession with conspiracies leads to fatalism, a refusal to take charge of one's own destiny or to take responsibility for the manifest backwardness of one's own culture.

(Warraq, Ibn. Why the West Is the Best. Encounter Books, 2011. pg. 159)





Well, this is peculiar:

Suspected Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock wired $100,000 to the Philippines last week, days before committing what's become the deadliest mass shooting in modern United States history, NBC News reported Tuesday.

France may pass whatever restrictive anti-terrorism bills it wishes (or use such bills to violate liberties - one's mileage may vary) but the truth of the matter is that the culture of 4.7 million of its inhabitants does not hold in high regard established liberties or life as the rest of its post-modern inhabitants do. This is why the French must embrace the "new normal" of bombs, stabbings, car rammings, acid-burnings and no-go zones. It's not like anyone is going to do something about those:

French anti-terror investigators are questioning five people over the discovery of a primed bomb at an apartment bloc in one of Paris's plushest districts, amid government warnings that France is "still at war".

The arrests came as four people were seized in Marseille, southern France, in connection with an attack on Sunday in which a knifeman stabbed two 20-year old women to death in the southern port of Marseille. Police also raided buildings as they sought to piece together where he had stayed before the attack.

With the terror threat at maximum levels, the French parliament today overwhelmingly passed an anti-terrorism bill that boosts police powers to search and restrict people's movements but which rights groups warn restricts civil liberties.

It is said that the only poll that matters is the one on election day:

Justin Trudeau's Liberals are statistically tied with a resurgent Conservative Opposition as they near the midway point of their four-year mandate, while the NDP's new leader finds himself facing a familiar electoral challenge, a new poll suggests.

The poll, conducted by Ekos Research and commissioned for The Canadian Press, puts the governing Liberals at 34 per cent and the Conservatives at 33 per cent, while the New Democrats — still smarting from a disappointing 2015 campaign — remain a distant third at 15 per cent.

The Ekos-Canadian Press poll, which surveyed 4,839 people via both cellphone and land line during the last two weeks of September, carries a margin of error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Would this sway voters?

Liberals, with the support of a New Democrat, strong-armed an unwilling Conservative into chairing the House status of women committee Tuesday after they shot down the Tories’ first pick. 

It is not the normal practice for a majority government to pick who gets positions reserved for the official opposition. Conservatives say the move is a sign of Liberal “intolerance.” 

(Sidebar: well, duh.)

 
How about this?

Benjamin Levin, the former Liberal deputy minister of education sentenced to three years in prison for three child pornography-related convictions, was paroled in January, a parents’ rights group has discovered. ...

When Premier Kathleen Wynne and then Education Minister Liz Sandals introduced their sex-ed curriculum in February 2015 for rollout the following fall, they denied Levin had anything to do with it.

But pro-family groups countered the timeline and Levin’s own statements as deputy minister of education between 2008 and 2009 show otherwise.

Who would vote for this? Who?




But ... but ... people are born that way ... or something:

Five years ago, Professor Miroslav Djordjevic, the world-leading genital reconstructive surgeon, received a patient at his Belgrade clinic. It was a transgender patient who had surgery at a different clinic to remove male genitalia – and had since changed their mind.

That was the first time Djordjevic had ever been contacted to perform a so-called “reversal” surgery. Over the next six months, another six people also approached him, similarly wanting to reverse their procedures. They came from countries all over the Western world, Britain included, united by an acute sense of regret. At present, Djordjevic has a further six prospective people in discussions with his clinic about reversals and two currently undergoing the process itself; reattaching the male genitalia is a complex procedure and takes several operations over the course of a year to fully complete, at a cost of some euros 18,000 (pounds 16,000).

Those wishing the reversal, Djordjevic says, have spoken to him about crippling levels of depression following their transition and in some cases even contemplated suicide. “It can be a real disaster to hear these stories,” says the 52-year-old. And yet, in the main part, they are not being heard.

Last week, it was alleged that Bath Spa University has turned down an application for research on gender reassignment reversal because it was a subject deemed “potentially politically incorrect”.

Why, it's like people are rejecting some sort of junk science.