by arthur Weinreb, associate Editor,
august 18, 2004
Three weeks after winning re-election with a minority government, Prime Minister wrote a letter to Quebec immigration officials at Trudeau International airport in Montreal. In the letter, he told the officers to stop the practice of requiring newly arrived Muslim women to remove their headscarves or hijabs when they were being photographed for Permanent Resident Cards.
The July 23 letter was unusual in that it was written by the Prime Minister himself. Normally, instructions to immigration officers are given to them by their department, Citizenship and Immigration Canada and not by the Prime Minister of Canada. The fact that Martin personally sent the letter means that it has more to do with politics than it does with immigration policies such as security. after all, immigration officers at a Canadian port of entry are entrusted to ensure that terrorists and other criminals are not granted landing in Canada or otherwise admitted to this country.
What was also strange about this letter was that there was hardly any mention of it in the mainstream liberal media. The National Post, which is still alleged to be a conservative newspaper, gave the letter a little blurb under the heading of "multiculturalism", deeming it of little importance.
If the requirement that women remove their hijabs was a multicultural issue as the Post claimed, then the officers at Trudeau should be fired for intentionally humiliating the religious practices of Muslim women. But of course that’s not why the women were told to take their headscarves off. The officers wanted to obtain pictures of their full faces for proper identification. It was a matter of security. But security is a low priority in Paul Martin’s Canada.
It is no secret that the Liberal Party goes out of its way to court the ethnic vote in Canada and Muslims in this country comprise a significant segment of that vote. While Martin feigned ignorance, his handlers did a good job of lining up ethnic communities behind Martin that led to his coronation as Liberal leader last December. Not offending Canadian Muslims is a much higher priority for the Liberals than the security of this country is.
Paul Martin has a history of ignoring terrorism and possible threats to this country. Back in May 2000, then Finance Minister Paul Martin attended a fundraising dinner sponsored by the Federation of associations of Canadian Tamils (FaCT). Martin attended the function with former cabinet minister Maria Minna even though he was warned by Canadian security agencies that FaCT was a front for the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist group that has been waging civil war in Sri Lanka since 1983. The Tigers big claim to fame is that they were the first group to use suicide bombers as a weapon. Martin’s answer to those who criticized his attendance at the FaCT dinner was to call his critics, racists.
Paul Martin also welcomed back the Khadrs--Canada’s first family of terrorism when Mommy Khadr brought little abdul Karim back to the country that she despises for free medical treatment. Her little darling came out on the wrong end of a shootout with Pakistani forces last October. all the PM had to say about the Khadrs was that they were Canadian citizens and had right to come back. If Paul Martin thought that Canada should be free from the likes of the Khadrs, he kept it to himself.
another Khadr son, abdurahman gave evidence last week at the trial of Mahmoud Jaballah who is currently detained in Canada as a suspected terrorist. abudrahman graduated summa cum lauda from four al Qaeda training camps in afghanistan and was called as sort of an expert witness on Canadian terrorists. His testimony was that since he attended all these camps and Canadians often stayed with his family in afghanistan he pretty well knew all the Canadians that were there and Jaballah wasn’t one of them. He may not have been, but if Khadr’s evidence even closely resembles the truth, we have a lot of Islamic terrorists in this country. and we have a government that will allow women to become permanent residents without obtaining proper pictures of them.
Paul Martin simply bent to pressure from The Council on american-Islamic Relations Canada (CaIR-CaN) and the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) and ignored any repercussions on the security of Canada. He obviously bought the arguments of CIC that his Minister of Immigration was "trying to dramatically curb the number of Muslims admitted to our country as immigrants or as refugees-turned-immigrants". Canada may have had a weaker leader in its 137 year history, but it is awfully difficult to think who it is.
The flights that were hijacked on September 11, 2001, originated in Boston, Newark and Washington D.C. But they could have just as easily have taken off from Toronto or Montreal to achieve the purposes of the terrorists.
Martin and his trained Minister of Pubic Safety will continue to say that security is their number one priority.
But they don’t mean it.