No Country For Anyone

Another reason why this country should hang its head in shame:

On Tuesday, Marc Miller — breathless, voice quaking, and noticeably nervous — told reporters, “I’ve been getting questions about an individual that entered Canada and has been arrested in charges related to an attempt to cross the border for a terrorist plot.” He then confirmed that Muhammed Khan is a Pakistani national who was issued a student visa in May 2023, and waltzed into Toronto’s Pearson airport the following month. Miller had the disposition of someone surprised by the news, but he shouldn’t have been. Our student visa program has always been one of the weakest links in Canada’s national security.

In November 2023, only five months after arriving in Canada on his student visa, Khan began planning the attacks online with what were, unbeknownst to him, two undercover law enforcement officers. He chose Oct. 7, 2024, for the date of the planned attack aimed at “slaughtering, in the name of ISIS, as many Jewish people as possible.”

If Khan had been successful, only 17 months would have passed from the moment he received his student visa, to the time he entered, planned, and carried out the attack he fantasized would be “the largest attack on US soil since 9/11.” Clearly, there are holes in our student visa program, and foreign terrorists have identified them.

This is not, of course, the first time Canada’s student visa program has revealed its shortcomings. In 2013, two men, Raed Jasser and Chiheb Esseghaier, planned to carry out a terrorist attack on a VIA rail passenger train. Thankfully, their attempt was foiled. They were caught, convicted, and sentenced.

Chiheb Esseghaier was a 30 year-old Tunisian PhD student living in Quebec. During his studies at Université du Québec’s nanotechnology lab, he was “threatened with expulsion for his disruptive behaviour and strict religious views that alienated his colleagues.” Esseghaier made it into the country through the student visa program. His colleagues and members of the university administration considered his behaviour to be “off,” and yet no one alerted the government officials in charge of the student visa program. Perhaps some process changes are in order.

No censoring things this time:

Canadian Polish and Ukrainian groups have joined calls for the federal government to release the full list of 900 alleged Nazi war criminals who came to this country after the war.

The list is among documents created by a 1986 federal government war-crimes commission led by Justice Jules Deschenes. For almost 40 years the federal government has refused to release the material to the public.

Library and Archives Canada is deciding whether it will release the records requested under Canada’s access to information law.

Holocaust survivors and some Jewish groups have called for a full release of the 900 names of alleged Nazi war criminals. The list is believed to contain names of Nazi collaborators from eastern European as well as Waffen SS veterans such as those from a Ukrainian division known as SS Galicia.

The Canadian Polish Congress as well as the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians have now joined calls for the identities of the alleged war criminals to be revealed.

“Many members of our community are descendants of victims and survivors of Nazi atrocities, including those perpetrated by SS Galizien,” John Tomczak, president of the Canadian Polish Congress, wrote in a letter to Leslie Weir, Librarian and Archivist of Canada. “The Canadian Polish Congress believes that the greater risk lies in secrecy and omission. The Polish-Canadian community feels that any reluctance to release these names may only deepen existing wounds.”

Tomczak wrote that by only fully confronting the truth of Canada’s history regarding Nazi war criminals can “we can hope to bring a sense of justice and closure to the many families and communities who continue to grapple with the horrors of that period.” ...

Much of the renewed debate around Nazi collaborators in Canada was prompted by a September 2023 event in which MPs of all parties gave two standing ovations to Yaroslav Hunka, a resident of North Bay, Ont. Hunka was described by then House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota as a hero and he was thanked for his military service.

 

 

Churches should do the same:

As police investigate another incident of apparent vandalism at a Toronto synagogue — what looks like a stone or bullet hole through the stained glass of a Star of David — Toronto’s Jewish community has established a new private security agency to protect Jews and Jewish institutions against increasing threats of antisemitic attack.