Hell or Jail or Canada

Margo says that Rudy Felsh is a nasty vulgar kid.
Someday he’ll go to Hell or jail or Canada.

         — Shel Silverstein

As I reported earlier today, the Canadian government barred Dr. Srdja Trifkovic from entering Canada yesterday to speak at the University of British Columbia after being invited by the Serbian Students Association.

Dr. Trifkovic has posted an account of what happened at the Chronicles website:

Banned From Canadistan
by Srdja Trifkovic

On Thursday, February 24, I was denied entry to Canada. After six hours’ detention and sporadic interrogation at Vancouver airport I was escorted to the next flight to Seattle. It turns out I am “inadmissible on grounds of violating human or international rights for being a proscribed senior official in the service of a government that, in the opinion of the minister, engages or has engaged in terrorism, systematic or gross human rights violations, or genocide, a war crime or a crime against humanity within the meaning of subsections 6 (3) to (5) of the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act.”

It appears that my contacts with the Bosnian Serb leaders in the early nineties make me “inadmissible” today. As it happens I was never one of their officials, “senior” or otherwise, but the story has been told often enough (most recently in one of my witness testimonies at The Hague War Crimes Tribunal). The immigration officer at Vancouver decided that what was good for The Hague was not good enough for Canada; but her decision evidently had been written somewhere else by someone else well before my arrival. (She was so out of her depth that she asked me if President Vojislav Koštunica had been indicted for war crimes.)

I’ve visited Canada some two dozen times since the Bosnian war ended; ironically, one of those visits, in February 2000, was to provide expert testimony before the Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa. Why should the Canadian authorities suddenly decide to keep me out of the country now, and for transparently spurious reasons? Well, because the Muslims told them so. The campaign started when a Bosnian-Muslim propaganda front, calling itself The Institute for Research of Genocide of Canada, demanded to have me “banned” from speaking at the University of British Columbia on February 24. The ensuing campaign soon escalated into demands to keep me out of Canada altogether. The authorities have now obliged.

Dr. Trifkovic goes on to remind us of what Ambassador James Bissett said last week:

During the war in Bosnia, the Muslim leadership in Sarajevo became furious when General Mackenzie—who was representing the UN—was not deceived (as many journalists were) by the blatant propaganda generated by the Muslim side and by his insistence at remaining impartial. In an attempt to have him replaced, the Muslims concocted false charges of rape and misconduct against him. These charges were so obviously fabricated they were summarily dismissed by responsible authorities. As the general was able to prove, he was not even in Bosnia when many of the alleged offences took place. Despite the facts, the “Genocide Institute” continues to slander the good name of General Mackenzie. Its web site contains a long list of so-called rape victims who relate in lurid detail how they were raped … by the Canadian officer. They even claim that during some of these rapes the general was “protected ‘— not by UN troops but by heavily armed “Chetniks.” The stories are so obviously fabricated that to those who know the General personally—as I do—can only wonder at the seriously psychotic nature of individuals who would repeat these lunatic charges.

There’s more at Chronicles.

Writing about this atrocious incident at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer summarizes what is at stake:

I strongly believe that we have to reply energetically to all such charges; the “hate speech” weapon is increasingly used by the thuggish Leftist/Islamic supremacist axis to silence its opponents, and if we ignore the false charges made, they will be assumed true by those who are naive and unaware of what game is being played.

The Harper government has shown admirable backbone from time to time, as demonstrated by its recent insistence on screening Iranium at the National Archives in Ottawa. Yesterday’s events in Vancouver, however, are a reminder that prime ministers may come and go, but the leftist state bureaucracy is forever.