Can we know who the Muslim migrants entering the West really are? While the Obama administration and other Western governments say yes, the story of a Canadian poster girl for “refugee” resettlement says no.
As Canada’s first “Afghan-born” minister of Parliament (the equivalent of a congressman), Maryam Monsef (shown) was touted. But now she has been outed — as actually having been born in Iran (although she is of Afghan descent). And while she and her defenders claim she was misled, evidence is strong that she has long known the truth.
As for fiction, “The narrative of Monsef as a successfully integrated refugee and the first Afghan-born MP has been a central one for the Liberal government since it won power last fall,” wrote Global News. “Monsef was even singled out by U.S. President Barack Obama during his address to Canada’s Parliament this summer,” with Obama citing her as “an example of what’s possible when refugees are embraced in this land of immigrants and strangers.”
But what’s possible, apparently, with a mad rush to absorb migrants in a statist get-in-the-vote effort and skids greased with political correctness, is that an improperly vetted person can reach government’s upper echelons. Many also may note the irony of her position. While a prominent Canadian imam has just joined other Islamic scholars in saying Islam and democracy are “absolutely incompatible,” Monsef occupies the post “Minister of Democratic Institutions.” In fact, while she’s also part of a Cabinet committee tasked with “supervising the influx of Syrian refugees,” her primary responsibility is electoral reform; in other words, overhauling Canada’s democratic system.
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Of course, this doesn’t mean Monsef agrees with that imam. But critics might be concerned about an “integration” plan that thrusts unknown quantities into positions of power. In Monsef’s case, she supposedly didn’t even know her own background, yet this 31-year-old who was raised in a Muslim theocracy is supposed to know enough to reform a Western nation’s democratic system. This isn’t to say her elevation to prominence is surprising. Monsef was appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose male-eye-candy status helped vault him to power, with women voters supporting him by wide margins. And Trudeau, more concerned with quotas than quality, made sure his Cabinet was exactly 50 percent female and “looked like Canada.”
As for Monsef’s Iranian birth, she claims she knew nothing about it until approached by the Globe and Mail newspaper. Writes the Mail, “She said her mother, Soriya Basir, never felt it was important to tell Ms. Monsef and her sisters Mehrangiz and Mina that they were not born in Afghanistan.… For years, Ms. Monsef’s mother allowed her daughter to misrepresent her birthplace as she built a political base in Peterborough. Monsef also said that she and her mother have now had conversations “about this and there have been tears. There has been yelling about this and there has been anger and sadness and, she’s sorry.”
Yet critics say this doesn’t quite ring true. As the Mail wrote Wednesday, “It is clear that others knew or claimed to know” of the minister’s Iranian birth, “which is how Ms. Monsef came to be asked about this matter in the first place. After she acknowledged she was born in Iran, but said it was news to her, some former political opponents in Peterborough, where she once ran for mayor, said they were aware of her true birthplace. A former Liberal MP has said the same thing.” As an example, ex-Peterborough MP Dean Del Mastro revealed in a Facebook post, reports Global News, “I have known the truth regarding her birth place as well as many other things as yet unreported for several years. I learned of it all initially indirectly through a person who identified herself as a former close personal friend and confidant of Ms. Monsef with whom Maryam told the truth. I find it stunning that in her explanation … that she scape goated her mother, a person that she describes as her ‘hero.’” So as the Mail sums up, “Could it be that Ms. Monsef didn’t know where she was born, but others did?”
Whatever the case, the bigger story here is statist Western deception and incompetence. When Trudeau’s government was asked how its vetting didn’t uncover Monsef’s background, its answer echoed Monsef’s: “We learned of this information about Maryam Monsef’s place of birth when it was brought to us recently by the Globe and Mail,” said an official. And when the mainstream media does a better vetting job than the government, you’ve got problems.
Yet keen observers have long warned that the recent Muslim migrants are unknown quantities. MacLean’s put it humorously yesterday in a Monsef apologia, writing, “It might help to know that in Afghanistan, citizenship papers and birth certificates and the official registration of births and deaths are the exotica of faraway places. One is born ‘in the time of the pomegranate harvest’ or some such thing.” But the truth is even worse. As I’ve reported previously, countries such as Syria simply don’t have comprehensive, Western-style databases providing soup-to-nuts info on citizens; moreover, in Syria and many other Third World countries, bribery will get you official government documents stating you’re whoever you want to be. And the proof is in the pudding: If a central-government Cabinet minister’s background cannot be reliably ascertained, what are the chances with Mohammed Six-Pack?
But at least we have the media, through which we learned about the poor Monsef vetting. This is generally how we learn about bad vetting, of course — except that, in most cases, the media’s first clue is a terrorist attack.
