Mr. Harper, this refugee crisis should be your moment: Former Immigration Minister McDougall

Former Progressive Conservative Minister of Immigration Barbara McDougall:

Although rarely spoken of, the irony that Germany, with its Nazi past, should be the most welcoming of any nation in today’s refugee crisis, is not lost on those with any knowledge of the era, which is just about everybody. Canada has its own stain from that dreadful period, the turning away of the Jewish refugee ship MS St. Louis in 1939. While there are many memories of prime minister MacKenzie King, that stain will remain forever on his reputation.

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper would do well to remember this in the current Syrian refugee turmoil. This is his moment to shine, and it is slipping away fast. Conservative Party followers may be split on this issue, but then Conservative Party voters always are, no matter what the issue. Mr. Harper has done well to hold the Conservative factions together for the past decade, but the coalition, which began to unravel shortly after the last election, is disintegrating at an accelerating rate, with the remnants of the old Red Tories becoming more vocal on the moral crisis the government faces.

It is beyond time for Mr. Harper to recognize that every leader faces an unexpected moral choice that sometimes seems to come out of nowhere – and this is his. The fact that he is in the election campaign of his life makes his situation more difficult, but does not make the choice less compelling. He surely does not want to go into history, whenever that may be, with the heartrending picture of a tragically drowned toddler at the top of his file. And it may well dominate, no matter what his accomplishments in government have been, unless he can find a way to navigate the flood of sympathy now rightly being expressed by Canadians from all walks of life, including many Conservatives. Canadians are looking for a leader to lead – to express the sympathetic outpouring of Canadians and act upon them.

Source: Mr. Harper, this refugee crisis should be your moment – The Globe and Mail

Long term expats find ‘loophole’ in voting ban; but casting ballot costly

A loophole or a test of commitment? Or both?

However, the method costs money, travel, and time, prompting some to argue the rules have effectively made their right to vote subject to financial ability.

“Voting should not be something you must purchase,” said Natalie Chabot Roy, 38, who was raised in northern Ontario but lives in Bonney Lake, Wash.

Earlier this year, the government successfully appealed a court ruling that would have allowed Canadians abroad for more than five years to keep on voting by way of a mailed “special ballot”.

Nevertheless, at least one enterprising expat has already cast his ballot for the Oct. 19 election under another section of the Canada Elections Act that amounts to a barely accessible backdoor around the ban, and others are considering following suit.

That section allows expats who show up in the riding in which they lived before leaving Canada to vote — if they show proof of the former residency along with accepted identification.

….Last week, Elections Canada finally updated its website to confirm the little-known voting information, even though spokesman, John Enright, said it was “not a new position.”

The law barring long-term expats from voting has been on the books since 1993, but it was only in 2008 that Elections Canada began enforcing the rules, catching some Canadians abroad by surprise.

One was former Montrealer Nicolas Duchastel de Montrouge, 43, who went to the U.S. in 2000 for work and now lives in suburban Seattle. The ballot refusal in 2011 prompted him to delve into the rules, where he discovered what he called the “loophole.”

In a letter to the self-described political junkie last month, a senior Elections Canada official confirmed his right to vote — if he could show up in Hull, Que. — where he was “ordinarily resident”, before leaving Canada.

Source: Long term expats find ‘loophole’ in voting ban; but casting ballot costly

Our Radical Islamic BFF, Saudi Arabia – The New York Times

Tom Friedman on Saudi Arabia and its role in spreading extremism:

But if you think Iran is the only source of trouble in the Middle East, you must have slept through 9/11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Nothing has been more corrosive to the stability and modernization of the Arab world, and the Muslim world at large, than the billions and billions of dollars the Saudis have invested since the 1970s into wiping out the pluralism of Islam — the Sufi, moderate Sunni and Shiite versions — and imposing in its place the puritanical, anti-modern, anti-women, anti-Western, anti-pluralistic Wahhabi Salafist brand of Islam promoted by the Saudi religious establishment.

It is not an accident that several thousand Saudis have joined the Islamic State or that Arab Gulf charities have sent ISIS donations. It is because all these Sunni jihadist groups — ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Nusra Front — are the ideological offspring of the Wahhabism injected by Saudi Arabia into mosques and madrasas from Morocco to Pakistan to Indonesia.

And we, America, have never called them on that — because we’re addicted to their oil and addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.

“Let’s avoid hyperbole when describing one enemy or potential enemy as the greatest source of instability,” said Husain Haqqani, the former Pakistani ambassador to Washington, who is an expert on Islam at the Hudson Institute.

“It is an oversimplification,” he said. “While Iran has been a source of terrorism in supporting groups like Hezbollah, many American allies have been a source of terrorism by supporting Wahhabi ideology, which basically destroyed the pluralism that emerged in Islam since the 14th century, ranging from Bektashi Islam in Albania, which believes in living with other religions, to Sufi and Shiite Islam.

“The last few decades have seen this attempt to homogenize Islam,” claiming “there is only one legitimate path to God,” Haqqani said. And when there is only one legitimate path, “all others are open to being killed. That has been the single most dangerous idea that has emerged in the Muslim world, and it came out of Saudi Arabia and has been embraced by others, including the government in Pakistan.”

Consider this July 16, 2014, story in The Times from Beirut: “For decades, Saudi Arabia has poured billions of its oil dollars into sympathetic Islamic organizations around the world, quietly practicing checkbook diplomacy to advance its agenda. But a trove of thousands of Saudi documents recently released by WikiLeaks reveals in surprising detail how the government’s goal in recent years was not just to spread its strict version of Sunni Islam — though that was a priority — but also to undermine its primary adversary: Shiite Iran.”

Or consider this Dec 5, 2010, report on BBC.com: “U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned last year in a leaked classified memo that donors in Saudi Arabia were the ‘most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.’ She said it was ‘an ongoing challenge’ to persuade Saudi officials to treat such activity as a strategic priority. The groups funded include al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba, she added.”

Saudi Arabia has been an American ally on many issues and there are moderates there who detest its religious authorities. But the fact remains that Saudi Arabia’s export of Wahhabi puritanical Islam has been one of the worst things to happen to Muslim and Arab pluralism — pluralism of religious thought, gender and education — in the last century.

Source: Our Radical Islamic BFF, Saudi Arabia – The New York Times