Tag Archives: Immigration

Italy: Minister says govt must expel immigrants who fail to integrate

Posted on by

andrea-ronchi1

from adnkronos international

Rome, 22 Jan. (AKI) – An Italian Minister said on Thursday that immigrants who did not want integrate must be deported from the country. “We must fight everything that is related to violence, because our will is to integrate, however, in order to integrate we must expel all those that do not want to take part in it,” said Andrea Ronchi, Minister of Department for European Community Policies.

Ronchi made the remarks during a roundtable with members of the Italian Islamic Religious Community (COREIS) in the northern Italian city of Milan. During the meeting, Ronchi attacked the UCOII, the largest Muslim umbrella group in Italy, accusing it of supporting terrorism.

According to Ronchi, the UCOII “supports terrorism and fundamentalism.”

“For example, I have always been a supporter of a register of the imams and muslim prayers in the Italian language. I also enthusiastically support the initiative by Rome’s Grand mosque to publish on its website all sermons preached there ,” said Ronchi.

“I am not against mosques, but I say no to those tied to the UCOII, an organisation whose sources of finance must be clarified.”

Ronchi, whose political career began in the post-fascist political party, Alleanza Nazionale, was sworn on 8 May 2008 as the European Union Affairs Minister in the cabinet of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Toronto man charged for nuke smuggling

Posted on by

The greatest desire of radical Islam is  the ability to hold the world hostage with nuclear weapons. Muslims in all parts of the world are actively searching for the resources and technology to make this nightmare a reality. Additional story from The National Post on same issue is here.

world-held-hostage

from CNEWS -TORONTO – A Toronto man is facing charges after allegedly trying to send nuclear technology to Iran, a country under intense international pressure to curtail its nuclear ambitions because of fears it wants to produce a bomb.

The RCMP, after a joint eight-week investigation with the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security, allege Mahmoud Yadegari tried to procure and export pressure transducers, which are used in the production of enriched uranium.

The UN Security Council banned exports of nuclear-related technology to Iran in 2006 because of what it considers efforts to build nuclear weapons.

The transducers, which are hand-sized, have a legitimate commercial use, the RCMP said, but they can also be used for military purposes.

“They’re critical components used in a larger device in order to enrich uranium for weapons grade product,” RCMP Insp. Greg Johnson said at a news conference Friday.

The man purchased ten of the transducers from a Boston-area company for about $1,100 each, the RCMP said. Police declined to release the name of the U.S. company that sold the transducers or the name of the company owned by Yadegari, who police said is a Toronto businessman in his mid-30s.

The police said the man set off suspicions with the Boston-area firm when he said he planned to ship the transducers to Toronto and then on to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

“We have evidence to support the fact that its ultimate destination was Iran,” said Johnson.

It’s alleged Yadegari took steps to conceal the identification of the transducers so he could export them overseas without the required export permits.

Yadegari is charged under the Customs Act and Export Import Permits Act, and is also accused of violating U.N. sanctions on Iran. He is a Canadian citizen who emigrated from Iran in 1998, and is in custody awaiting a bail hearing next week, police said.

Penalties under the Export Act alone include fines of up to $1,000,000 and up to 10 years in prison.

Iran insists it is enriching uranium to produce nuclear energy for civilian purposes, but the United States and some European countries accuse Tehran of secretly seeking to build nuclear weapons.

Iran has all of the components and required materials for a bomb, said George Webb of the Canada Border Services Agency.

“What they have to do is take it and enrich that material to a very high level,” said Webb. “I don’t personally believe that they are there yet. However, they’re very, very, very close.”

Project American Shield, a program run by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch of Homeland Security, has agents meeting with manufacturers of technologies that can be used in nuclear production in order to alert them to suspicious purchases by foreigners.

“We make them aware of red-flag indicators of suspicious activity and what they should do when they encounter suspicious inquiry from abroad,” said the ICE’s Tim Gildea.

Those suspicious indicators include someone looking to pay cash, and probably too high a price for the technology, expressing an urgent need for the material or proposing a circuitous shipping route.

The charges against Yadegari follow an investigation by the RCMP, Canada Customs agents, The Dept. of Foreign Affairs and Homeland Security.

In February, U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration said it would seek to end Iran’s nuclear ambition and its support for terrorism.

That drew an immediate rebuke from Iran’s envoy to the United Nations, who said Iran has never and will never try to acquire nuclear weapons.

Our armchair jihadists

Posted on by

An interesting look inside London, England’s  Muslim sub-culture.

znews_muslim_in_england_1

Times Online, April 12-2009

After being shot, Sami Yousafzai fled Pakistan for London, thinking he was escaping Islamic extremism. He was shocked by the menacing support for the Taliban he found here

I still don’t know who wanted me dead. I’d been sitting in my car one day last November, not far from my house in the northwest Pakistan city of Peshawar, when a group of strangers walked up. One of them pointed a pistol through my window.

I remember that he wore a turban and shalwar kameez – the tunic and baggy pants common in the area – and that he had a long beard, dyed red with henna.

He shot me in the chest, hand and arm and then fled with his friends.

Miraculously, none of the bullets hit any arteries or vital organs. As soon as a doctor had patched me up, I booked a flight to London, where I planned to lie low for a while to rest and seek further medical help for a bullet that was lodged in my arm.

But more than that, I just wanted to be somewhere calm and safe, far from AK-toting gunmen, the suicide bombers and the daily, random violence of Pakistan’s borderlands.

My sense of relief at being in London didn’t last long. In one of the city’s many south Asian neighbourhoods I saw a tall young Afghan who reminded me of my would-be assassin, striding down the street like a bad dream. He, too, had a long beard and wore a shalwar kameez plus a big, loose turban of white silk.

Anyone dressed like that in Islam-abad would immediately have been picked up for questioning by the police. I had flown halfway across the world to get away from killers who resembled this young Londoner. I stared after him until he was gone from view. Continue Reading →

Algerian jailed for spraying urine, feces on food

Posted on by

 poo-throwing-jihadist2

From CNEWS April 14-2009  LONDON – An unemployed chemist was jailed Tuesday for spraying a mix of urine and feces on food, wine and children’s books in several British stores.

Sahnoun Daifallah was sentenced to nine years in prison after being found guilty of four counts of contaminating goods.

The 42-year-old Algerian carried a mix of his waste in a container of weed killer concealed in a laptop bag, a court found. Using the nozzle, which poked out of the bag, Daifallah was able to spray large areas, leaving a powerful stench and causing tens of thousands of pounds worth of damage.

Daifallah’s first target was the Air Balloon pub and restaurant near the town of Cheltenham, which he visited around lunchtime May 14. Kate Rochead, on duty that day, told The Associated Press she didn’t know exactly what area he sprayed.

“All we know was that it was a horrendous smell that was left behind,” she said.

Daifallah next visited a bookstore in neighbouring Cirencester, dousing hundreds of books – most of them in the children’s section.

Two days later he struck in the nearby suburban area of Quedgeley, where a customer spotting him squirting the frozen french fries at a supermarket. Daifallah then drove six kilometres to another supermarket, where an employee in the wine section noticed him acting suspiciously and reported an overpowering stench. Both supermarkets were closed for two days for cleaning. Shoppers reported suffering from rashes and nausea.

Local police said the products weren’t handled by customers, but Morrisons, one of the supermarkets targeted, said a small number of goods were returned as a precautionary measure. Tesco, the other supermarket hit by Daifallah, declined comment.

Police were able to identify Daifallah using security camera footage. When they raided his home, they found a stockpile of the substance and plans to spread it. Plastic bags containing excrement were marked with the names of cities on them.

Daifallah represented himself at Bristol Crown Court, where he pleaded not guilty.

Judge Carol Hagen said Britain’s security agencies had labelled him a high risk to public safety. Authorities have already begun deportation proceedings.

Canadian Arab Federation taking Jason Kenney to court

Posted on by

anti_semitismJihad through litigation

It’s well known that the president of the Canadian Arab Federation recently called Jason Kenney, the Minister of Immigration, a “professional whore” for supporting Israel and criticizing the presence of Hamas and Hezbollah flags at a recent protest, prompting Mr. Kenney to say he would review the CAF’s federal funding.

But it is less well known that Mr. Mouammar spent the 11 years prior to February, 2005, sitting as a member of the Immigration and Refugee Board, deciding whether refugee claimants from such North African countries as Morocco, Egypt, Algeria and Somalia should be allowed to stay in Canada. It might not be a bad idea to dust off some of those old files and see who did get into the country while Mr. Mouammar worked at the IRB.

By Glen McGregor, The Ottawa CitizenMarch 26, 2009 1:16 PM

OTTAWA — The Canadian Arab Federation is taking Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney to court over his decision to stop funding the group’s language training programs.Kenney had threatened to pull $2 million in federal cash after the federation’s president Khaled Mouammar called him “a professional whore” for his support for Israel.On March 18, the federation was told by an associate deputy minister at Citizenship and Immigration that funding for its Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada program (LINC) would not be renewed, according to court documents filed Wednesday in Federal Court in Toronto.The Toronto-based group was told “its funding for the LINC program would not be renewed because of objectionable nature of public statements made by CAF members,” according to the application.The decision erred in law by breaching an agreement to fund the LINC program and also breached the principle of fairness, the application alleges.
 The federation is asking for an order quashing the decision and has also applied for an injunction to keep the funding coming while the case is heard.The minister has yet to file a response to the application. None of the allegations have been proved in court.
 The federation is represented by Toronto lawyers Barbara Jackman and Hadayt Nazami, who are also acting for controversial British MP George Galloway in his litigation against the federal government over a decision to need him inadmissible to Canada. Kenney is named as a respondent in that case, too.

Kenney nails the language issue

Posted on by

jason-kenny

   Mr. Kenny wants to take a step back in Canada’s immigration policy. He would like to help insure that immigrants coming to Canada will more easily integrate into Canadian society without having to face a language issue on arrival. Being fluent in one of Canada’s two official languages allows the newly arrived persons to more easily explore this great country without having to settle into an area populated by those who speak a similar foreign language. Better opportunities for work and places to live. Being able to meet and greet their new neighbors. Integrating and becoming Canadian instead of being locked into a sub-culture in Montreal or Toronto. So a step back to a policy that was in place when I immigrated here in the late 60’s might be a step in the right direction.

Posted: March 24, 2009, 9:06 AM by National Post  Editor : Original article by Rudyard Griffiths
Jason Kenney, minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism, should be commended for kick-starting a much need public discussion about the language skills and civic literacy of aspiring Canadian citizens.
 
For too long Canada has avoided the kind of common sense dialogue about its settlement policies that Minister Kenney is galvanising. The reality is the “quietism” of successive federal governments about all things related to immigrant selection and recruitment is a public policy debacle of historic proportions: ten of thousands of newcomers languishing in dead end jobs, the out migration of up to 40 percent of professional male immigrants in the last decade alone, and the justifiable hardening of attitudes among visibility minority groups who rightly feel they are being exploited economically.  
 
Minister Kenney is spot on in his assertion that the ability to speak one of Canada’s two official languages is fundamental to an immigrant’s economic success and overall social integration. In fact, detailed multi-decade research shows that language proficiency outstrips job experience and educational background as the factor which has the greatest positive impact on a newcomer’s ability to settle themselves successfully in Canada Continue Reading →

Metock Case Ruling: The Irish Were Right

Posted on by

Metock Case Ruling: The Irish Were Right

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3457
From the desk of Filip van Laenen on Mon, 2008-08-11 21:16

Two months ago the Irish held a referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon, and we all now know how it ended. One of the elements in the run-up to that referendum was the Irish concern for their abortion laws. Not only are the Irish so old-fashioned that they have an abortion legislation that simply doesn’t fit in the mind of most liberal journalists, those islanders were stupid enough to think that the Treaty of Lisbon could liberalize it against their will too. That’s why the Irish voted No, some argue, even after so many explicit promises by politicians that there was absolutely no reason to worry. On 26 July, the Court of Justice of the European Communities (Ecj) proved the Irish were right though: national law is subordinate to whatever would be made up on the European level, and as a consequence, the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen got himself a huge internal problem this summer: after the ruling in the Metock case, the Danish immigration legislation is in effect completely void and worthless.

Here’s a verbatim quote from the press release from the European Court of Justice:

A non-community spouse of a citizen of the Union can move and reside with that citizen in the Union without having previously been lawfully resident in a member state. The right of a national of a non-member country who is a family member of a Union citizen to accompany or join that citizen cannot be made conditional on prior lawful residence in another Member State.

This ruling came after a lawsuit started by four men who had sought asylum in Ireland. Their application was ultimately rejected by Ireland, but in the mean time each of them had married a non-Irish EU citizen, and wanted to appeal to EU law to obtain a residence permit in Ireland. However, the Irish state ruled that the EU law didn’t apply because they hadn’t stayed in another EU country before coming to Ireland, but the European Court of Justice rejected that argument and ruled the four men should be given a residence permit.

Almost immediately after the ruling was made public, a number of couples showed up «spontaneously» at the city hall in Copenhagen to demand residence permits for their respective non-EU spouses. As the reader probably already knows, Denmark has greatly restricted the possibilities to immigrate to the country since 2002, but the ruling in the Metock case threatens to bring the entire Danish immigration legislation down. To make things worse, this ruling comes on top of a small scandal that came to surface last month, when it became known that candidate immigrants had not always been fully informed about all of their rights and possibilities to enter the country and obtain a residence permit by the Danish immigration officers.

But let’s go back for a while to the background of the current –or should I write former?– Danish immigration laws. Just like most other Western European countries, Denmark has a considerable group of immigrants that doesn’t exactly always slip in seamlessly with the rest of its population. Forced marriages at a very young age with cousins or nieces from the home country that depend on social welfare programs for years once they’ve moved to Denmark were unfortunately all too common, hence the Danish government introduced a few concrete conditions into its immigration legislation over the last couple of years to tackle the problem. Not much of these conditions is left now, and even the Indvandringsprøve (Immigration test) that was planned for 2009 and that can be compared to the German Einbürgerungstest, but for immigrants, now comes into question.

For the sake of clarity, the Danish public radio DR summarized the situation like this:

  1. Until now, spouses or children who wanted to use family reunification had to have a permanent residence permit in another EU country prior to their arrival to Denmark. The Metock case ruling removes this condition.
  2. A Dane who comes back from abroad together with his non-EU spouse had to have been working as an employee or freelancer during his stay abroad. This condition has been reduced to a period of just a couple of weeks.
  3. Upon his return to Denmark, the Dane had to be able to support himself and his or her spouse. This condition was already removed in December last year due to the ruling in the Eind case, also delivered by the same European Court of Justice.
  4. Moreover, the EU also allows family reunification without having to consider the Danish rules like the minimum age of 24, the presence of stronger ties to Denmark than to the home country of the spouse, good living conditions and sufficient income, financial guarantees and the nephew-niece rule.

In practice all this means that a Danish immigrant now can rely on his European rights to circumvent the entire Danish immigration legislation. To make things clear: it suffices to spend the honeymoon on the other side of the Øresund in the Swedish town of Malmö having some simple job –cashier at a supermarket or taxi driver will do– and that’s it: you’re ready to import your bride or groom into Denmark.

Needless to say that the Metock case caused quite a stir at the right side of the Danish political spectrum. Pia Kjærsgaard from the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti, DF) said the government should simply ignore the ruling from the European Court of Justice. The conservative Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen from the Liberal Party (Venstre) replied that the Danish People’s Party should perhaps rather cool down a bit from the recent summer heat. According to him it would be irresponsible to defy the judges of the European Court of Justice, because on a longer term, it would lead to many chaotic situations in the EU. It should be noted that Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s minority government usually relies on the oppositional Danish People’s Party to get a majority in parliament.

But what do the people in the street think about this? An opinion poll for the newspaper Jyllands-Posten showed that a majority of 57% disagrees with the Prime Minister, and wants to keep the Danish immigration legislation as it is. Only 33% of the people interviewed said they wanted the Danish legislation to be adjusted to the European. These results are in sharp contrast to the results of another poll though, conducted for the business newspaper Børsen , that suggested there is still a solid majority to abolish Denmark’s four so-called EU exceptions to the Maastricht Treaty. Anders Fogh Rasmussen now wants to try to solve the problem using diplomacy, and joined forces with nine other EU countries, including Ireland, Finland and Great-Britain, to convince his other European colleagues to detail the rules on the free movement of workers more precisely.

And that’s exactly the core of the problem: the rules for the free movement of workers weren’t detailed enough, thus giving the judges of the European Court of Justice the possibility to interpret them as broad as they wanted. This also means that when the Danish politicians promised their voters that Denmark wasn’t giving up its sovereignty by joining the European Union and then implementing a whole series of treaties and other «non-constitutions», they probably did so in good faith. And to link back to the Irish referendum: if the Danish immigration legislation could be wiped out like this by a simple European Court ruling, who says the Irish or Polish abortion laws won’t be next in turn to be brought down by some European judges?

By the way, the U-turn Maria Wetterstrand from the Swedish Green Party (Miljöpartiet de Gröna) did earlier this year is very illustrating. Officially, the Green Party still wants Sweden to withdraw from the European Union, but personally Maria Wetterstrand came to the conclusion that Swedish EU membership isn’t so bad at all. The reason? The way one can work with environmental issues in the EU, and that the EU isn’t afraid to use all its means at its disposal to force solutions down on its member states. They probably don’t need any further explanation with that in Denmark right now.

For those who do need one though: the European Commission seemed to be pretty excited about the Metock case ruling. But why on earth the Irish had to vote No to the Treaty of Lisbon so massively is still a complete mystery to them though.