{"id":2934,"date":"2012-02-03T13:33:17","date_gmt":"2012-02-03T18:33:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/1001harf.com\/W3\/?p=2934"},"modified":"2012-02-03T13:33:17","modified_gmt":"2012-02-03T18:33:17","slug":"the-beauty-queen-activist-dating-peter-mackay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1001harf.com\/the-beauty-queen-activist-dating-peter-mackay\/","title":{"rendered":"The beauty queen activist dating Peter MacKay"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<ul>\n<li id=\"tabarticle\">\n<img decoding=\"async\" id=\"ts-main_article2_image_IMG\" src=\"http:\/\/media.thestar.topscms.com\/images\/07\/03\/158d4ed541fca761b6acd26ebefc.jpeg\" alt=\"Defence minister Peter McKay with his friend and date Nazanin Afshin-Jam, at the 2010 True Patriot Love Tribute Dinner, Nov. 10, 2010 in Toronto.\" \/><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"dataTabarticle\">\n<div>\n<p>Peter McKay with date Nazanin Afshin-Jam, at the 2010 True Patriot Love Tribute Dinner, Nov. 10, 2010 in Toronto.\u00a0<!--more--><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div>OTTAWA\u2014She has rubbed her gorgeous elbows with political prisoners, royalty, the prime minister, the Dalai Lama and even a billionaire online gambling tycoon who boasts of staying a step ahead of the law.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Now Nazanin Afshin-Jam, 31, is the new girlfriend of one of the most highly recognizable serial monogamists in the country.<\/p>\n<p>That would be Defence Minister Peter MacKay, who she met six years ago when she came to Ottawa to speak about human rights abuses.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMr. MacKay was very helpful and they became friends,\u201d her spokeswoman Valentina Medici wrote in an email Thursday before declining to share any more details.<\/p>\n<p>Her curriculum vitae might just be more impressive than his.<\/p>\n<p>Afshin-Jam is a human-rights activist who devotes unpaid full-time hours to saving children in her native Iran from execution.<\/p>\n<p>She has a degree in international relations and political science from the University of British Columbia, studied at the prestigious\u00a0<em>Institut d\u2019\u00c9tudes Politiques de Paris<\/em>\u00a0and is working on a master\u2019s degree in diplomacy with a concentration in international conflict management.<\/p>\n<p>She is fluent in English, French and Persian and speaks some Spanish too. She started flying planes when she was a teenager. She had a bit part in the movie sequel to\u00a0<em>Scooby Doo<\/em>. And she is beautiful. No, really beautiful. She won contests for it.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/people\/Nazanin-Afshin-Jam\/678272535\" target=\"_blank\">Afshin-Jam<\/a>\u00a0immigrated with her family to North Vancouver, B.C., after having fled Iran for Spain when she was just a baby.<\/p>\n<p>Her father had been general manger of the Sheraton Hotel in Tehran where music, alcohol and the mingling of men and women \u2014 all forbidden by the Islamic fundamentalists who came into power with the Iranian Revolution in 1979 \u2014 was just part of the routine.<\/p>\n<p>So, he was thrown in jail, lashed and was headed for death by firing squad when a friend managed to secure his release. Afshin-Jam was still in grade school when she saw the scars on his back. Championing human rights became her calling.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDo you ever think about what your life would be like if your family stayed there?\u201d she was asked in an April 2006 interview with the\u00a0<em>National Review Online<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAll the time,\u201d she replied. \u201cThis is why I am so dedicated to helping those stuck in such a repressive regime.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Her fight to end the most severe form of female oppression \u2014 state-sanctioned death \u2014 began in earnest, oddly, with beauty pageants.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI always go back to what are the blessings God has given me and how can I best use them,\u201d Afshin-Jam told the\u00a0<em>Vancouver Sun<\/em>\u00a0in October 2008. \u201cBeauty is a blessing and it shouldn\u2019t be something that\u2019s looked down on . . . [But] I always have to prove myself because [my body] is just a shell. It\u2019s not who I am.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She won the title of Miss World Canada in 2003 and placed as first runner-up in the global version of the competition, a high-enough level of fame that it spurred a French human rights activist to send her a letter that changed her life.<\/p>\n<p>It was about the case of another young woman with the same first name \u2014 Nazanin Mahabad Fatehi \u2014 an Iranian teenager who was sentenced to death by stoning for killing one of three men who were trying to rape her and her niece.<\/p>\n<p>Afshin-Jam took up her cause and circulated a petition that garnered more than 300,000 signatures worldwide and has been lauded as instrumental in saving the girl from a barbaric end.<\/p>\n<p>Her efforts also caught the attention of former MP Belinda Stronach, another famous girlfriend of MacKay who he claimed \u2014 publicly in a television interview at home with his dog \u2014 broke his heart when she crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals to help save the government of Paul Martin in 2005.<\/p>\n<p>Stronach in fact used her first opportunity in Question Period after the Conservatives came to power to ask MacKay, who was then foreign affairs minister, whether he had received assurances from the Iranian embassy that Fatehi would receive a new trial.<\/p>\n<p>His sarcastic tone as he remarked on her \u201crecent interest in the case\u201d was duly noted at the time, although it was nothing compared to the uproar he caused when Stronach alleged he had called her a dog while muttering in the House of Commons later that year.<\/p>\n<p>A generous donation from Stronach also helped pay the bond that got Fatehi released from Islamic court.<\/p>\n<p>The ex-girlfriend of her future boyfriend was not the only unexpected person to help champion her chosen cause.<\/p>\n<p>The other, at least indirectly, was Calvin Ayre, a self-described farm boy from Saskatchewan who became a billionaire by launching the Internet gambling empire Bodog and bragged to<em>Forbes<\/em>\u00a0magazine in 2006 that he gets around U.S. laws by being based in other countries.<\/p>\n<p>His Costa Rica mansion was raided by local authorities not long after the story was published. They were looking for an illegal poker game but found only a wrap party for a poker championship reality television series.<\/p>\n<p>Afshin-Jam was there the night of the raid as a host of the series.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNews media sensationalized the event,\u201d said Medici, who said the raid stemmed from a noise complaint and noted Hollywood celebrities and even children were there at the time.<\/p>\n<p>Medici said Afshin-Jam met Ayre only a handful of times at corporate events and to discuss some charity initiatives. His charitable organization, for example, produced and funded a documentary about Fatehi featuring Afshin-Jam in 2007 and put out several press releases about her activism.<\/p>\n<p>She also recorded an album \u2014 and accompanying music videos \u2014 for the music arm of the company after it bought out her previous label, featuring a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=1wYPA02mheI&amp;feature=related\" target=\"_blank\">political song about Iran<\/a>\u00a0but also<a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ahNKyrHEw_8\" target=\"_blank\">another<\/a>\u00a0that at one point features her running in a red d\u00e9collet\u00e9 dress and at another smacking the tip of her tongue against her palate as she stares into the camera and says \u201cyou were my lover.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It might be worth noting that, according to the 2008\u00a0<em>Vancouver Sun<\/em>\u00a0article, Afshin-Jam also believes the Conservative government was wrong not to demand that Omar Khadr be sent home to Canada from the U.S. detention centre in Guantanamo Bay.<\/p>\n<p>A spokesman for MacKay declined to comment for this story and a spokesperson for Ayre said he was travelling in Asia and could not be reached.<\/p>\n<div>DAVID COOPER\/TORONTO STAR Nov 12 2010<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Peter McKay with date Nazanin Afshin-Jam, at the 2010 True Patriot Love Tribute Dinner, Nov. 10, 2010 in Toronto.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1170],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1001harf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2934"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1001harf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1001harf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1001harf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1001harf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1001harf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2934\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1001harf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1001harf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1001harf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}