The Politics of Refuge for Fundamentalist Terror

"What you need at the front end are people who know the geography, who know the language, who know the history. The trick is to get the person to tell you who they are, where they're from and what they've been doing recently over the last several years with a particular focus on the conflict. You take their answers and compare that to known knowledge."
"We've got people who are claiming they're Syrian because they know they're going to get  better ride out of the system."
"We had  very rich body of intelligence [in the 1990s with Yugoslavia and Rwanda] we could run answers up against. We knew the countries, we knew who the leaders were ... who was fighting on which side, we knew all that stuff right down to the tactical level. So as soon as somebody started to talk to us and give us answers we'd go, 'well, his answers are at least consistent with reality -- or he was lying through his teeth'. We had that because Canada had been in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia, we had allies there with whom we shared intelligence, the UN was there, NATO was there, so there was tons of information floating around."
"[The problem with Syria and ISIL] is we have no presence on the ground, neither do any of our real allies, and our knowledge of what's going on there is relatively weak."
"These guys [refugee claimants] could come from any one of a number of violent organizations from al-Qaeda, to ISIL, to al-Nusra, to Jemmah Islamiya. Pick any one of the organizations operating out of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, South Sudan, etc."
"The Government of Canada should be extraordinarily careful about who we're taking, and, for young men of fighting age between 16 and 40, we should be 'doubleplus-good' careful about looking at these guys before we let them in the country. Young men are coming from a multiplicity of different, violent factions that have committed some of the most egregious war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Trying to screen them out is going to be exceptionally difficult."
Tom Quiggan, former military intelligence, Terrorism Security Experts of Canada Network

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• Refugees walk on the platform after arriving by train at the main railway station in Munich on Sunday, Sept. 13, 2015. Germany will introduce temporary border checks on the Austrian frontier in a bid to limit the influx of refugees, the interior minister said. (Michaela Rehle/Reuters)

Exceptionally so, given other realities. That among the haven-seekers streaming out of the Middle East, Asia and Africa are those whose service to Islamist jihad is as recruiters, not fighters, but enablers to jihad. Whose contribution to the global jihad that the fundamentalist Muslims who now infect society at every level -- more than eager and willing to abide by their surrender to Islam  through their obligation as Muslims to cede to Allah that which is his alone -- offers their utter and complete service.

Even with the hoped-for assurance that screening will succeed in ensuring that those who have been involved with extremist Islamist groups do not push past the security measures installed to keep them out, there is the living example of those considered to be 'moderate' Muslims wreaking havoc on the societies they have infiltrated as accepted immigrants, let alone refugees. Islam has proven itself to be functionally incompatible with democracy.

The laws that democratic countries of the West have enshrined in their legal codas to uphold assurances of equality and freedoms unknown under the constrictive ideological politics of Islam are rejected by Muslims who favour pressing the governments they become citizens of to allow for Sharia law to represent the rights of Muslims as a parallel legal system. The issue of Islamic clerics preaching and teaching and inciting followers to agitate for special dispensations for Muslims represents another double-tier of entitlements geared specifically toward a minority group aspiring to become the majority.

The countries and nations where Islam rules are infused with a resurgence of militant Islamism, asserting its volatile and mendacious past upon the present. Violence has become endemic throughout the world of Islam, perpetrated first upon Muslims themselves with the repression, oppression and hatred meted out by one sect of Islam toward another, resulting in bloody slaughter and massive movements of people attempting to escape civil conflict, and countless deaths.

Muslims long accustomed to tribal, clan and sectarian violence do not necessarily wish to continue to be preyed upon by their own through the incendiary hatreds fomented by their leaders. Escape from the domineering tyrannies that threaten and oppress them becomes the formulation for settling differences. And since Muslims fleeing violence and death are not finding haven in Muslim countries other than their own who for the most part shun their entrance, they flee to non-Muslim countries for haven.

Their sheer numbers overwhelm the capacity of the countries they flock toward, to handle their demands. And demands they are, because the haven-seekers are impressed with the idea that though privation and death may await them in their countries of birth where violence is never-ending, the soft Western sensibilities of compassion and giving generosity can be relied upon to invoke the consciences of non-Muslims.

The United Nations' refugee programs call upon the free countries of the world to respond to the crisis in Islamic countries, while doing little to impress upon Muslim-majority countries that they have a human-rights obligation to extend a welcome to their co-religionists. In any event, the wealthy countries of the Convention of Islamic Cooperation appear unmoved by the crisis Europe is struggling with. The problems created by dysfunctional Islam have become the inescapable burden of the non-Muslim West.

The Government of Canada is acutely aware of the need to screen Syrian refugee claimants for security issues. To prevent not only ISIL from infiltrating North America, but the countless other vicious extremists as well. The irony is, of course, that pre-ISIL, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood and a score of other violent extremists did have a presence in North America, and continue to do so, covertly working to leverage for position and influence.

Canadian immigration, border and security intelligence officials are arriving in the Middle East representing a government mission to expedite the future resettlement of thousands of Syrian refugees. In a region where hundreds of armed extremist groups have a presence in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Libya and elsewhere in the geography.

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, roughly half of the migrants and  refugees crossing to Europe were actually Syrians; others come from Afghanistan, Eritrea Nigeria and Somalia. Easy access to fraudulent and stolen Syrian passports, drivers licenses and an assortment of additional identity documents are sold on the black market in Turkey and even in Europe. Syrian refugees without documents and migrants coming from elsewhere are able to buy these documents.

Tom Quiggan, who had designed the security-screening tools used by Citizenship and Immigration in the late 1990s speaks of countless organized crime figures and suspected war criminals that were successfully isolated through that process previously, and compares that situation to the present one. And he points out the difficulties inherent in adequately screening for the entry under false pretenses of shadowy figures engaged in Islamist jihad who will strive to make entry to Canada and present as a terrorist danger.

The Western conscience will be its undoing.