"It's Quite Scary, Actually"

"Once the radicalization process has begun, individuals start to find diverse ways to develop their extremist beliefs in Canada. They do so through a variety of networks, both real and virtual. These individuals appear to be part of Western society. In fact, they appear so Canadian that they are difficult to detect. such individuals then move on to a series of radical activities, ranging from propaganda and recruiting to terrorist training and participation in extremist operations." Classified 2007 CSIS study

It's dreadful when you're young, male and bored. Looking for some excitement. Those without imagination roll drunks, threaten prostitutes, rob mom-and-pop stores, and get their juvenile kicks that way. It's quite possible they will grow and mature and become solid citizens. Possible, but doubtful, since the allure of that kind of excitement usually leads to eventual arrest, incarceration and further indoctrination into the psycho-anti-social club.

That's the run-of-the-mill kind of 'disaffected youth' that plague society with their 'acting out' performances in the process of graduating to the small-fry criminal underclass. Every society has them, deplores them, has to put up with them. They don't, generally, aspire to mass murder. They don't adhere to any religion, and the ideology they cling to is that of the psychosis of anger against society.

We don't lose much sleep over them. They exist as a underbelly of society, always there, rarely noticed, keeping court appearances, being sentenced, in a round of continual offences that ensure they're circulating at one moment, confined the next. They're bloody pests, sucking the blood out of decent, normal communities.

So let's set them aside for the moment. Or forever, until and unless they repent and no longer reject the norms of society. There's bigger, more dangerous fish to fry in them there waters of Canadian society. Al-Qaeda-inspired excitement, luring restless 'youth' who've slavishly bought into an ancient and dreadful version of Islam. And who aspire to become blessed martyrs slavering after 72 virgins.

In the process toward achieving martyrdom, as honoured shaheeds, they vow to extinguish the lives of as many kuffars as inhumanely possible. And if those 'others' are decent, innocent people among whom they have lived, however restively over the course of their lives as Canadians, so be it. Who cares, since they support wrongs done against Islam.

It's called radicalization, the corrupting of a weak mind toward belief in the holy services due to Allah, who is believed to demand of the faithful that they struggle to become better Muslims and to achieve that status they must devote their miserable lives to the practise and performance of mass slaughter.

Some learn to excel at it, and others do their best.

In Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ramadan is celebrated by bombing mosques and marketplaces and army posts and police stations and government offices, spewing sinew, blood and muscle lavishly about the environment - mostly the blood and guts of innocent Muslims; those are the jihadists who learn to excel at it.

Those who do their best usually, after training in terror camps in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Somalia, or Yemen, return home to Europe, to North America, and connive and practise at terror in remote areas where they also store their weapons of choice until called upon for use.

Canada, with its superlative reputation as a haven for refugees, a refuge for immigrants seeking a better life, has its share of easily-led 'youth'. Disaffected with the society that is most familiar to them because, well, just because.

Because it's not fair, because it's not quite on to send troops to pacify a terror-riven country, because of the injustice of the West's investment in Islamophobia. Islamophobia? The reaction of people (including many Muslims) to the gratuitously vicious bloodshed so generously spilled, calling to mind primal barbarism.

So these are not really 'youths', after all, although they may have begun their descent that way, to eventually become respected members of Canadian society as engineers, doctors, technicians, IP specialists. Hard-working, dependable, respectful of others and dedicated to making a life for themselves within the Canadian framework of freedoms and opportunities.

Viscerally harbouring a deep and abiding loathing for the country in which they live, and to which they appear dedicated, as part of the pluralist, multicultural stew of ethnicity, religion, culture, heritage, and ideology.

"It's quite scary, actually."

What's scarier, is that all these investigations, the evidence, the arrests point to 'alleged' crimes against Canada. Alleged? Bloody hell!