The Shafia Case Raises Questions about Canada’s Muslim Immigration Policies.

Shafia family victims: daughters Zainab,19,Sahar, 17, Geeti, 13 first wife Rona Mohammad Amir, 50

The conviction in a Kingston, Ontario courtroom yesterday, of Mohammad Shafia, his polygamous second wife Tooba Yahya and son Hamed of the drowning murders of three daughters, Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, along with Rona Mohammad Amir, 50 his first, but barren wife, was more than just “despicable”, “heinous” and an affront to Canadian and Western values about treatment of women under Islam. See our post on the background of the Shafia case.  It may also prefigure a daunting portent of things to come in the changing demographics of our neighbor to the North.  The honor killing decision in Ontario raises serious questions of how Canada’s immigration policies might have facilitated this horrific honor killing and whether there is potentially more in the offing.  Moreover, there is an underlying question of how Mohammed Shafia acquired and deployed his wealth that enabled the family’s move from Afghanistan in 1997, first to Dubai, hence to Australia and finally receiving permanent resident status in Canada in 2007.

Buried in the CBC account of the Shafia trial decision, “Shafia jury finds all guilty of 1st-degree murder”, was this background:

The Shafias moved to Canada in 2007. They fled their native Afghanistan more than 15 years ago and had lived in Dubai and Australia before moving the family to Montreal and applied for citizenship.

At the time of the deaths, they were all permanent residents, except for Amir who had only a visitor's visa. They told authorities, and initially maintained after the deaths, that Amir was Mohammad Shafia’s cousin.

Mohammad Shafia, by all accounts a prosperous business man, owned commercial property in the Montreal area and ran a business buying used cars in North America and shipping them overseas.

Most likely the Shafia family arrived in Canada under Immigration provisions for wealthy landed immigrants that gave Mohammed Shafia, so-called Merchant status, with the equivalent of an automatic “green card”.  Note, that according to the CBC account of the trial verdict that Shafia engaged in two business pursuits: purchasing commercial properties and wholesaling of used cars for shipment abroad. The latter activity  raised, in our view, suspicions that Shafia may have been involved with laundering drug money profits from either or both Afghan drug lords or the Taliban sending a portion of the wholesaling profits back via Zakat to fund the Jihadi 'project', there. You may recall our post in mid-December on the US DEA raids of more than 30 used car dealers across the country that involved recycling cash from Hezbollah drug profits. That raid was coupled with a complaint filed against the 30 predominately Muslim used car dealers by the US Attorney in the Southern District of Manhattan Federal Court.

We asked David B. Harris, former CSIS officer  and international security analyst in Ottawa for his views.

Harris’ response also raised the prospect of future dangers inherent in recent Canadian immigration policies announced by the Harper government. Dangers that might increase the likelihood of future Honor Killings by opening the door to the increased fundamentalist Muslim immigration that is making its mark on Canada.

Harris responded, thusly:

Given the context, it is entirely possible that authorities have asked whether Mr Shafia's offshore used-car wholesaling could have been associated in some way with drug-profit or other money laundering. I have no information about this, but note that Canada has in the past been used by others in this way. Indeed, the Lincoln Navigator long proliferated in south Lebanon as local Hezbollah chieftains' car of choice -- thanks to the moving of stolen vehicles from Ontario to Lebanon.

On the matter of recent and possible pending changes in Canada Immigration policies:

Remarks made lately by Prime Minister Steven Harper, at the Davos summit, and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, strongly suggest that the public is being groomed to accept -- unbelievably -- even more immigrants. This, in the name of assisting with economic and aging-population pension needs. Yet Canada already has the biggest per capita immigration intake in the world, costing between $16 and $23 billion a year, net, including from some of the most radical Islamist jurisdictions available. Indeed, Pakistan-born moderate Canadian Muslim author-activist Raheel Raza has called for a moratorium on immigration from Pakistan, Somalia and other countries that she considers to be sources of Islamist radicalism. But, pols need to import votes and Immigration Minister Kenney is generally said to harbor leadership aspirations.

One of the consequences of the vote-importing mania that was robust under Liberal governments and has accelerated under the Harper Government, will likely be an eventual sea-change in Canada's Middle East policy. This would be ironic, in light of the Harper administration's pro-Israel and pro-Jewish stance, but would nonetheless seem to flow inevitably from the immigration-driven skyrocketing of Canada's Muslim population. Nine in ten Canadian Muslims were born abroad, and predictions point to Muslims outnumbering Jews by almost 7 to 1 in just 18 years. Should the Harper Conservatives in fact be planning further immigration increases, we must expect these statistical tendencies to accelerate. And as long as unstable countries like Pakistan continue to contribute mightily to Canada's population growth, it could very well be that friends of Israel and of Jews, will, in due course, be unelectable in Canada.

For more of Harris's authorative views on the problems of Muslim immigration in Canada, see, "Canada-Islamism's Happy Hunting Ground", in  Saudi Arabia and The Global Islamic Terrorist Network: America and the West's Fatal Embrace , Edited by Sarah N. Stern.  Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2011.

Canadians and Americans may be ‘shocked, shocked’ by the revelations from the trial and convictions surrounding the grisly drowning murders of the three Shafia young women and Mohammed’s first wife, Rona, in a lock of the Rideau Canal. However, as Harris has commented, Canada’s myopic immigration policies may evince over the next decade more occurrences of honor killings and the marginalization of its Jewish community supplanted by a rising Muslim minority. What is the expression attributable to Arafat, "First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people." The present immigration policy may imperil Canada's future, and the reliability of an old friend and ally.