Canada's Anti-Terrorism Act and Momin Khawaja

Momin Khawaja, through his lawyer, has appealed the sentence given him as a convicted terrorist. This happens to be his second appeal. His original sentence when found guilty of the charges levelled against him reflected a rather lenient view of what this Canadian citizen was involved with. A violent group whose leaders he visited in Britain and whom he assured his work on a device to would trigger explosives was nearing completion.

And while Mr. Khawaja, through his lawyer, claimed that his involvement as a jihadist was only for the purpose of achieving Islamist revenge against Western troops stationed in Afghanistan, he was found to be guilty of planning to assist in a series of atrocities planned to take place in London, England. The venue seems hardly the issue. His motivation for acting against the West in a conspiracy to wreak havoc and mass slaughter was as a representative of violent Islamism.

In the original appeal after his conviction of participating in, contributing to, financing and facilitating a group of Islamist extremists whose plots to bomb London and construct additional wider-ranging plots to target the West, the Ontario Court of Appeal was singularly unimpressed. They took the rather unexpected step of increasing his 15-year prison term to a life term with the addition of 24 concurrent years. As a deterrent to others.

Now the Supreme Court of Canada has announced it will look at the case, to deliberate and reach a decision about the Act that helped convict the man. Mr. Khawaja's lawyer, Lawrence Greenspon, would like the Supreme Court to set the conviction of his 'misguided' client aside, claiming motivation under the existing Anti-terrorism Act has been misconstrued and as a result his client should be freed or, at the very least, his original 15-year term reinstated.

For it would appear, according to his lawyer, that Momin Khawaja is experiencing a 'very difficult' time in the super-maximum prison where he has been installed. Surely not because he is encountering frustration in spreading the word of Islam and his interpretation of violent jihad? Mr. Khawaja, after all, merely would appreciate the high court to reverse the Ontario Supreme Court's tediously unreasonable sentencing.

He was duped into believing that his bomb-detonation device was meant to be used in Afghanistan. He had no knowledge of any dastardly plans to bomb London. Assisting the Taliban in their highly successful efforts to blow Western troops and Canadian soldiers in particular to smithereens by the use of increasingly-more-sophisticated IEDs was an innocent-enough diversion for a young man bored with his complacent life-style, finally taken with loathing for the kuffar.

The issue the Supreme Court will decide is whether to permit the Anti-terrorism Act to revolve around the threats comprised and motivated by political, ideological or religious beliefs, and whether, permitting that, basic freedoms are being impacted. One issue is whether a Canadian whose ethnicity, culture and religion binds him to a country of origin like Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Somalia, Afghanistan, and who departs to take an active battle role abroad, should be considered a domestic terrorist.

The Act may be changed on instruction from the Supreme Court, and the manner in which it may be altered may see a more mature understanding of the extent of the problems faced by the West in the threats posed against it by hostile forces intent on avenging what they believe is a war by the West against the religion of Islam which also happens to have surfaced as a political movement and an ideology of violence to achieve universal supremacy.

Claiming that allowing the Act to stand as it is written (amended from the immediate post 9/11 original), Khawaja's lawyer claims it to "promote fear and suspicion of targeted political or religious groups, and will result in racial or ethnic profiling by government authorities at many levels", which just happens to be the Islamists' own labelling of opposition to their agenda as "Islamophobia".

So be it. We can expect lawyers to play their games of one-upsmanship, as though something as critical as terror and the pursuit of terrorism for a religious/political cause can be treated as a trifling irritation. It is not; it represents a serious threat to the stability and peaceful aspirations of liberal democracies.

And it should be treated as such, with all the arresting tools at our disposal.