Infiltration and Threat

Canadians are now aware that yet another planned assault on their peace and security has been apprehended. Because the plotters had designed their attack to involve passenger trains that are meant to travel from Canada to the United States and back -- VIA rail to AMTRAK -- the situation drew in agencies representing both countries, determined to conduct a joint investigation, track the situation and stop a plan to destroy innocent lives.

TORONTO, CANADA – APRIL 22: A VIA Rail train leaves Union Station, the heart of VIA Rail travel, bound for Windsor on April 22, 2013 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) report they have arrested two people connected to an alleged Al Qaeda plot to detonate a bomb on a VIA Rail train in Canada. Credit: Getty Images

A 30 and a 35-year-old man, one living in Quebec, the other in Ontario, legal residents of Canada. A maze of threads will have to be unwound to understand how, what and why two unalike men - but for their ideology - separated by geographical distance, study and work experience, were brought together to plan an event that would shock their host country out of its innocent complacency.

Residents of the country, without citizenship, but able to take advantage of all the social embellishments of the social contract, who pursued their unabashed rejection of Canadian values and social mores, entitled to live however they preferred, and planning to punish Canadians for being Canadians. A quasi-military attack on as large as possible a civilian contingent of the country that agreed to further their ambitions.

One a blue-collar worker, the other an academic, scientist, professional, and both wholly committed to the pure Islam of jihadist honour. Political Islamism demands of its adherents the strict separation of believers from non-believers; contempt for the degraded condition of those who refuse to surrender to Islam and its holy precepts. No humanitarian consideration may be wasted on infidels.

This is not an ideology absorbed and celebrated by ignorant, unschooled, naive Bedouin. This is the supreme ideology of the educated, the wealthy, the scions of Islamic scholarship and clerical calling who thunder from their mosques of the infidelity of moderate observers no better than kuffars and the evil incarnate within all those who refuse the call to worship the only true religion.

Chiheb Esseghaier, Tunisian-born, a doctoral student at a Universite du Quebec nanotechnology laboratory, a disruptive presence whose fundamentalist religious foundation proved alienating to his colleagues considering him "a brain-washed person, basically", who insisted on the provision of a prayer room he felt entitled to, destroying symbols of western values that offended his propriety.

A professionally, technically brilliant mind, a man who wrote impressive papers on his work on electro-chemical biosensors, in Canada on a student visa, and with the INRS Bio MEMS Bionanotechnology Lab since 2010. His Linkedin persona illustrated with the black flag of al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq. Clues in abundance for security to linger over and to parse.

Courtroom sketch of Jaser.

And then there is Raed Jaser, a Palestinian with landed immigrant status living in Toronto for 20 years. Both men face charges of conspiracy to commit murder in association with a terrorist group. Mr. Jaser and his wife lived quietly, inconspicuously, if being bearded and wearing traditional flowing robes and a burqa floating about his wife, along with an societal-alienated unwillingness to acknowledge the presence of neighbours could be termed that.

A group of other young, muscled and extremely religiously-garbed young men moved in with the couple, often noted in the neighbourhood for their obsession with weight-lifting. Living together as a family unit, completely disenfranchised from any casual contact with any neighbour, refusing to even acknowledge their presence; confined and aloof, set apart and alien.

Some members of the Muslim community are claiming that it was thanks to someone among them alerting security to the presence of suspicious activity on the part of these ultra-conservative extremists that notice was taken and the hatching plot to commit mass murder come to detection and apprehension.

At the RCMP briefing that laid out the bare details of the arrest of the two men and their aspirational activities was Mohamed Robert Heft, head of Paradise Forever. A self-explained critic of extremism. Who said he hoped that the arrests would elicit a measure of debate within the Muslim community leading to the future detection of any aspiring to become involved in extremism and radicalization.

This is also a man who encourages new adherents to Islam through his website, willing to accommodate casual requests and lead those interested into the conversation process, growing the worship of Islam within Canada. Who had, as it happens, helped to convert a Canadians later suspected of having taken part in violent jihad.

Completely at odds with his years-long campaign to fight extremism from within.