Skeptical American politicians who see Canada's ultra-liberal immigration and multi-cultural policies as creating the perfect threshold for terrorists to enter the United States last week received powerful reassurance that they are right.
The arrest in Toronto of 17 Muslim males, most of them teenagers, in an alleged plot to bomb a big downtown tower, capture the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, hold to ransom the members of Parliament and behead the prime minister disclosed a conspiracy so amateurish that al-Qaida could claim libel if it were identified with it.
But as the evidence dribbles out, it appears that al-Qaida was not identified with it, except perhaps inspirationally. Rather, it was entirely a homegrown idea, involving homegrown Canadian Muslims planning to make homemade bombs out of garden fertilizer.
However, it does have loose connections with similar homegrown Muslim movements in Britain, Sweden and Bosnia. It's this "homegrownness" that has long worried Canadian security officials and should focus American attention on the penetrability of the Canadian border. These people talk, look, work and dress like other Canadians, said a spokesman for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. This makes them much harder to find.
Muslim leaders in Toronto hastened to distance themselves from their youthful fellow religionists now in jail. Terrorism is not about faith, but about politics, they declared. Islam is not involved. Muslims are being persecuted. When the Globe and Mail's specialist in candor, columnist Christie Blatchford, called this effusion "a sea of horse manure," Toronto Star columnist Antonia Zerbisias compared her with the Nazis and called her column "tantamount to a hate speech."
However, the mass arrests made the Muslim contention that terrorists are altogether unknown in their congregations considerably less convincing. One leader decided to give up making such a case. "So many people of our community think it [terrorism] is nothing to worry about," he said, "but more than 80 percent of our mosques are being penetrated by these guys."
When reporters sought out the parents of the accused, one after the other said that while they realized their son was becoming unusually religious – faithful in prayer, reading the Quran, closely associating with other young men of similar devotion – they had not the faintest suspicion of terrorist involvement..
One young man, for instance, told his parents he was attending an outing for bank employment applicants. Instead, he apparently went to the large tract of craggy rock and swampland on the borders of cottage country near Washago, Ontario, 150 miles north of Toronto. There, the accused conspirators are said to have set up a military training camp, with obstacle courses and firing ranges. In camouflage dress, they practiced using automatic weapons, local farmers said.
But the gunfire made such a racket the farmers complained to local police, who told the RCMP, which with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service put the property under constant surveillance, photographing the exercises from a score or more hidden cameras.
The conspirators knew they were being watched but kept on anyway. Finally, they took delivery of some three tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer – triple the amount used in 1995 to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. They didn't know it. but it was the Mounties who were delivering the fertilizer, having replaced the ammonium nitrate with something non-lethal.
The arrests, said some Muslims, did not come as a surprise to them because the Mounties had kept checking on various individuals before the arrests were made. Even so, one Muslim spokeswoman complained last week that the police should have announced their intention to the Muslim organizations before they made the arrests, to lessen the shock.
In other words, the arrest of suspected terrorists should be announced in advance. This is the sort of expected entitlement and divorce from reality embedded in ethnic communities by years of Liberal multiculturalism programming.
"A clear sense of denial exists in Canada about the degree to which terrorist activity occurs," commented Tom Quiggin, former jihadist expert with the RCMP, now senior fellow at the Center for Excellence for National Security in Singapore. "Political correctness is wielded as a weapon against anyone who dares to speak out. Yet some of the world's most infamous terrorists have operated for years in Canada, almost unhindered. As a result of the highly suppressed political discourse in Canada, the domestic response to this growing problem has been limited."
Absolutely true, I would say, and that means that the American border with Canada is not safe.
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