The Democrats like to call President Trump and his supporters bigots because they are concerned about the potential for terrorists arriving here from places like Iran. It’s smearing all Muslims, the lefties claim, to even suggest the nationals of six particular terror-producing nations may bear closer watching, or might not belong here at all.
Enter Dr. Mohsen Dehnavi. The 32-year-old Iranian cancer researcher flew into Logan International Airport on Tuesday to work at Boston Children’s Hospital, with a J-1 work visa the State Department had granted him. But Customs and Border Control detained him and then put him on a plane back to Iran, without saying why.
Children’s Hospital, The Boston Globe and others lost no time playing the violins for Dehnavi and his young family. The cold-hearted ill-considered injustice of it all! As usual, it’s about the children.
Enter the facts.
The Associated Press now informs us Dehnavi was a leader in the student branch of the Basij, a volunteer paramilitary group linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The AP got it straight from Iranian TV: “TV footage showed that Dehnavi was the same man who was featured in a years-old report by the semi-official Fars news agency on his being named the head of the student branch of the Basij at Iran’s Sharif University in September 2007. The Basij is a volunteer militia that is linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.”
Dehnavi later served on the 2013 presidential campaign of a prominent Iranian hard-liner, former nuc-lear negotiator Saeed Jalili.
Now, there is nothing to indicate Dehnavi is a terrorist. But he has chosen to affiliate himself with a group that is hostile to the United States — let alone the Iranian people. The Basij, you’ll recall, made headlines for brutally beating pro-democracy demonstrators in Iran in 2010.
Accompanying the AP’s story was a photo of the Basij re-enacting the 2016 capture and humiliation of American sailors: A bunch of bound men in American uniforms with sacks over the heads being paraded through the streets. Nice.
And once you consider those awkward facts of Dehnavi’s prior associations — whatever his current ones may or may not be — he clearly doesn’t belong here. Dehnavi protested on Iranian media that his trip here was about science. There are kids with cancer in Iran who could probably use his services. And no doubt somewhere in the vastness of the educated world, Children’s Hospital can find another researcher whose resume doesn’t include membership in an America-hating Iranian militia.
