Grim Recognition

A report to the Parliament of Canada by the head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service warns against complacency. Canada is no more immune to viciously hostile attacks by Islamist jihadists than were Britain, Spain, Indonesia and the United States. And where once the fear lay in the apprehension that foreign-born jihadists would find their way into the country to wreak the bloody destruction their ideology exemplifies, that focus must now be turned inward.

CSIS head Jim Judd has issued a grave warning: "Homegrown cells will continue to develop and ... attacks using a variety of tools, from firearms to explosives, will be planned in the hopes of executing such attacks within Canada". This, contained in a new CSIS report, tabled in Parliament. What CSIS finds extremely concerning is the speed of radicalization taking place among Muslim youth; their indoctrination into jihadist-inspired hatred of the very West that they're most familiar with.

"The al-Qaeda threat has not disappeared, despite the successes by intelligence and security forces in targeting and neutralizing much of the group's pre-9/11 leadership" according to the report. "The organization has shown itself to be resilient, operationally imaginative and technologically adept. It has also proven to be a remarkable marketing machine with respect to using the international media and the Internet to disseminate its beliefs and celebrate its attacks."

CSIS, this country's major intelligence and fore-warning arm has its work cut out in its operational priorities, inclusive of monitoring and investigating:

Espionage and foreign interference, such as clandestine work of foreign governments in Canada;
Threats against Canada's information systems and critical infrastructure from hackers, terrorists and foreign countries;
Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, including foreign efforts to obtain Canadian 'dual-use' technologies;
Terrorist funding.

Aside from warning Parliament of the ongoing threat to the safety and security of the country, its institutions and its citizens, one wonders whether sufficient priority is given to monitoring the many instances where young Muslims are introduced to concepts geared to the religious imperatives of resistance against the purported threat to Islam posed by the very democratic institutions that guarantee them freedom of association, speech and religion.

Tarek Fatah, in his recently-published expose on radical Islam, "Chasing a Mirage" outlines many instances of young, educated, Canadian-born and -educated Muslim men and women flourishing emotionally in the idea of rejecting the very freedoms they've grown up with, and embracing in their stead rigid fundamentalism. He writes, among many other instances of corrupting the minds of the impressionable young at a conference he attended in Toronto.

Taking place at the Toronto Convention Centre - anything but a secretive, underground location - a conference arranged by groups with connections to the World Assembly of Muslim Youth based in Saudi Arabia. A Kuwaiti politician spoke heatedly of his fanatical reality: "Western civilization is rotten from within and nearing collapse ... it will continue to grow until an outside force hits it and you will be surprised at how quickly it falls." His statements received loud acclaim by the audience.

The speaker, Tareq Al Suwaidan, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, spoke before a respectful audience of over two thousand young Canadian Muslims, many representing the Muslim Students Association. Mr. Tarek wrote also of a Friday sermon that took place a month after 9/11 at York University mosque, where the imam, a radicalized Islamist student preached: "We Muslims should not be friends with Jews and Christians ... they'll never accept us ... only Muslims will go to heaven and Jews and Christians to hell."

Mr. Fatah writes of the school texts used in Canadian Muslim madrases and social centres, those funded so generously by Saudi Arabia. The Saudi-supplied school texts geared to teach young people the ideals of Wahhabist Islam with its timely reminder: "As cited in Ibn Abbas: The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus", as well as these instructions:

* The clash between this [Muslim] community [umma] and the Jews and Christians has endured, and it will continue as long as God wills.
* It is part of God's wisdom that the struggle between the Muslim and the Jews should continue until the hour [of judgement].

So much for the Canadian ideals of tolerance and good citizenship, for our vaunted multiculturalism and our hushed self-praise for our accepting values of citizenship of a proudly pluralist society. We've become so freedom-loving and tolerant that we've undercut our own liberal democratic traditions in our rush to insist that alien traditions and cultural underpinnings take precedence over Canadian social and political cohesion.

Need we really be surprised that the Canadian proclivity to encourage multiculturalism diversity over the need to encourage the divergence of multiplicity into a common value system and appreciation of Canadian priorities has resulted in a youth so disaffected, so infected with the pathology of separateness and enmity that we now must look over our shoulders at the anti-Canadian antipathy of our own?