Gorgeous or Furious (take your pick of the adjectives) George Galloway has been officially barred entry to Canada. The UK's Channel 4 News on March 20 reported that "after an open letter of protest from Canada's Jewish Defense League, he's been declared inadmissible under the country's immigration act" — not that he has any intention of immigrating. (In the second half of the video you can see George debating a representative of the above group who thinks that being friendly with Israel's enemies is a perfectly valid reason not to be allowed into Canada.) For the Government, though, apparently it's on national security grounds, but worse than that, according to the Guardian, a Canadian government spokesman said that the decision would not be overturned for a man regarded as an "infandous street-corner Cromwell". Obviously the spokesman was an educated man — for a Canadian! And for those of us with a more pedestrian vocabulary, "infandous is an obsolete adjective meaning "Too odious to be expressed or mentioned," [from the Latin: infandus; pref. in- not + fari to speak]. Perhaps now the word will get a well-merited revival. After all, there's certainly no shortage of infandous little oiks about these days.
Checking up on the identity of this unusually articulate civil servant brought me to MetaFilter, which gave his name as "Canadian Immigration Spokesman Alykhan Velshi" and provided a link to his own Wikepedia page. (Even I haven't got one of them, as far as I know.) And by all accounts, Velshi is an odious little toad himself. Born in 1984, which makes him just 25 years old, he is:
a lawyer, writer, policy analyst, and senior aide to a Conservative cabinet minister. He is currently the Director of Communications and Parliamentary Affairs for Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney. Previously, Velshi was a foreign policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute and manager of research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and co-founded the latter organization's Center for Law and Counterterrorism with Andrew C. McCarthy.
Velishi is just the type of young buck the forces of neo-conservatism are looking for these days to help push through their agenda of stomach-churning Decency. As the Wiki entry goes on:
Velshi has written extensively about American and Canadian foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Middle East. In a December 2002 letter to the National Post newspaper, he called on the Canadian government to ban the political wing of Hezbollah. While attending the LSE, he wrote an academic piece defending George W. Bush's argument for preemptive war in Iraq as being grounded in both "original texts on international law" and several historical precedents. Just before graduating, he wrote an article for the National Review entitled "Choosing Sides: The challenge for Muslims", in which he argued that moderate Muslims were often reluctant to counter what he described as "Islamist extremism". In January 2006, he criticized the Globe and Mail newspaper for referring to Israel's separation barrier as a "wall" rather than a "fence."
Lexicological talents apart, the boy wonder is not exactly infallible, as this rather cute example, again from Wik, attests:
Velshi was the official contact on a late 2007 government press release commemorating the Jewish celebration of Hannukah, wherein the festival was erroneously described as marking "the triumph of the Jewish people against tyranny more than two million years ago". He explained that the document went through several revisions before its release, and that the word "millenia" was accidentally changed to "million years" somewhere along the way.
Oh for the halcyon days when fences were made of privet, wood or linked chain, barriers built of concrete were called walls, traveler to Western nations were allowed to express political views openly, while civil servants were obliged to maintain a certain decorum and keep their own views to themselves!
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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