“We have terrorists coming through the southern border,” said President Trump early this year. Days later, the New York Times contradicted this, writing that “counterterrorism officials and experts said there had never been a case of a known terrorist sneaking into the country through open areas of the southwest border.” It was a strange assertion since at that very moment a jihadist, who’d illegally crossed our southern border, was facing terrorism charges up in Canada.
In fairness, though, perhaps the Times doesn’t follow the news.
The man’s name is Abdulahi Hasan Sharif (shown), and he likely won’t be getting his 15 minutes of infamy from the mainstream media. The Federalist reports on the story:
In 2011, Sharif had himself smuggled from Somalia through Brazil and Central America. Then he entered the United States over the Mexico-California border and claimed asylum. Sharif went on to Canada, where he allegedly conducted a double vehicle-ramming and stabbing rampage in 2017 in Edmonton, Alberta, that severely injured a police officer and four other people. He was carrying an Islamic State flag in one of the ramming vehicles.
Those who paid attention to this case were too few and far between ever to mention Sharif a year ago when President Trump provoked a denialist media backlash by claiming the border was vulnerable to violent jihadists migrating from distant Muslim-majority countries.
The 32-year-old Sharif is now on public trial in Canada, facing 11 counts of attempted murder, aggravated assault, and dangerous driving. While he occupies a consequential homeland security pedestal of first border-crosser to conduct a jihadi attack in North America, his backstory remains largely unexcavated for learnable lessons to U.S. homeland security.
In fairness again, and returning to the Times’ statement that “experts said there had never been a case of a known terrorist sneaking into the country” through the border, Sharif was not a “known terrorist” when he sneaked in. “Hah! Got ya’, wingnut!”
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Except there’s this: “Only six immigrants in terrorism database stopped by CBP at southern border from October to March,” wrote NBC News — a day before the Times’ piece was published.
(As for “only six,” it took only one terrorist to murder 50 in the Orlando nightclub shooting in 2016.)
Then again, maybe the Times and its “experts” meant that there’d never been a known case of a known-at-the-time terrorist successfully sneaking into our country. Words are playful things. Only, it’s the unknown ones that get ya’ — and you never hear about the successful border jumpers until they do.
And wouldn’t it be great if there were some way to keep the currently successful unknowns out?
(Leaping to mind is a proposal containing the words “securing” and “border.”)
By the way, know that Sharif wouldn’t likely have been a “known” terrorist in 2011 because, as the Federalist points out, anarchic countries such as Somalia don’t have records on most citizens. No criminal database means no criminal record.
This is why President Trump banned immigration from certain terrorist spawning nations, something our Left fought tooth and nail.
Yet there were red flags, rendered irrelevant because the West has waved the white flag to immigrationism. For example, a San Diego immigration judge had ordered Sharif deported, so something was amiss. It didn’t happen, though, “because no civil authority in Somalia had developed enough to accept deportees from the United States,” writes the Federalist. Then there’s this one-two knockout punch:
Not only does law apparently prevent us from just unceremoniously shipping such people back to their native lands, but court rulings prevent the indefinite detainment of such unknowns. So, voila(!), “Sharif was released on an order of supervision,” the Federalist relates.
You can imagine how effective this was. Sharif “skipped town” and — with the aid of a refugee support group called Vive La Casa — made it into Canada.
“Within 36 months of entering Canada, though, in 2015, Sharif was on the radar of Canadian intelligence agencies for espousing extremist Islamist views that included genocidal beliefs related to Islamist teachings,” the Federalist further informs. He’d also expressed support for the brutal Islamic State. Nonetheless, Canadian officials determined that Sharif was “not a threat” to public safety (no “white privilege,” I guess).
The Federalist also presents a list of questions about the Sharif fiasco that should be asked and answered, which you can read if interested.
The bottom line here, however, is that we don’t need experts — who often are most expert at obfuscation — to know the truth:
We’re facing Russian-roulette migration.
The individuals crossing our border are unknown quantities. If one million come through over time, probability dictates that a certain percentage will be criminals (and many such miscreants have already committed crimes) and some smaller percentage will be terrorists. This is why sane nations secure their borders and don’t suppose there’s an acceptable number of violent jihadists to have in your midst in politics’ name. It’s not negotiable.
But the media are playing a game. They latch onto likely exaggerated claims — such as Trump’s assertion that 3,700 “known or suspected terrorists tried to enter into this country” at the southern border in 2017 — and declare, “Nothing to see here, move along.” But while it is the media’s job to point out inaccuracies, they do evil when using them to discredit underlying truths.
The immigrationists here are like children, trying to find a thousand and one excuses to not do what should be done. But even Obama-era Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson expressed concern over border-jumping terrorists who he said could be “potential national security threats.” Only, he called them “Special Interest Aliens.”
Unfortunately, our border is still porous because most politicians are in thrall to special-interest groups and to their own power lust. As for keeping the American people safe, their interests apparently aren’t special enough.
Photo: AP Images
