Earlier this month, a Somali “refugee” plowed a rented U-Haul truck into a crowd of people near a football stadium in Edmonton, Canada. When the truck rolled over on its side, the terrorist, 30-year-old Abdullahi Hassan Sharif, got out and stabbed an Edmonton police officer who had been injured in the truck attack.
The carnage outside of the football stadium was a direct and avoidable result of politically driven malfeasance – primarily on the part of the Canadian government and, to a lesser extent, the American government. Sharif was in Edmonton because two governments refused to take commonsense precautions to prevent him from being there.
How Sharif got to Edmonton is the real tragedy. Sharif first appeared on the radar scope of law enforcement when he crossed the U.S. border illegally near San Diego without a passport or other documentation. Because there is no functioning government in his homeland of Somalia, the United States could not deport him. Instead he was released from custody on condition that he check-in periodically with U.S. immigration authorities.
Guess what? He didn’t. By the time U.S. officials realized he had absconded, Sharif was already in Canada, where true to Justin Trudeau’s policy of welcoming everybody, he had been granted refugee status. Even though Sharif had no passport, his fingerprints and other biometric information had been collected by U.S. authorities when he arrived in this country. At the time he crossed illegally into Canada, Canadian officials knew that Sharif did not qualify for asylum in the U.S. and would have been deported, except for the fact that there was nowhere to deport him to.
But why should that stop Canada from rolling out the welcome mat, eh?
Well, for one reason, five Canadians might not have to consider themselves “lucky” to have gotten away with just being injured in the attack. The lame excuse for allowing Sharif into Canada offered by Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety Mark Holland was that Sharif “had no known criminal history at the time of his encounters with ICE.”
‘No known criminal history’ is an excuse often heard from sanctuary jurisdictions in the U.S., after things go horribly wrong. But as Toronto Sun columnist Candice Malcolm observed, “Common sense tells us it’s possible Sharif had no known criminal history because he came from Somalia, a country with no viable government and thus no one to keep track of crimes.” Or at least it should.
Malcolm’s observation should also remind us that “vetting,” “rigorous vetting” and “extreme vetting,” of refugees from countries without viable governments or functioning civil societies is not as assuring as it might sound.