|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Waseem Ramli is a well-to-do Montreal businessman who harbours an infamously unapologetic loyalty to the blood-soaked Baathist regime in Damascus. He’s often seen driving the streets of the city in his bright red Humvee, with its 1SYRIA custom licence plates, and its rear window emblazoned with the flag of the Syrian Arab Republic and the country’s Hawk of Quraish coat of arms. A side window is obscured with a portrait of Syrian mass murderer Bashar Assad.
Among the thousands of Syrian refugees who have settled in Montreal since 2015, the Kuwaiti-born Ramli is a notorious character. To many, his Humvee is an unsettling, menacing sight. Even so, Ramli, the director of his own management consultancy and proprietor of the popular Cocktail Hawaii restaurant on Rue Maisonneuve, has held little sway over Montreal’s Syrian community.
Until now.
On October 1, with Ottawa’s blessing, Ramli will become perhaps the most powerful Baathist regime official in North America. As Montreal’s “honorary consul,” Ramli will control the consular affairs of tens of thousands of people in the Syrian diaspora in Eastern Canada and much of the United States. The only other Syrian honorary consul in North America operates out of an office in Vancouver.
All this came to pass in a manner that you could call sketchy in the extreme. And it all happened quickly and quietly.
[…]
See Also:
(1) An awful realization — a Liberal minority government means the end of Trans Mountain
(2) Trudeau’s first debate will be on racism, just not when it’s in French
