Just Typical High School Kids

There is nothing typical about naming kids in such a way as to lionize the honour of war, of guerrillas, of weapons, of jihad, and that most ubiquitous nomenclature of all, a man whose name is revered for having brought religion to warring Bedouin tribal society, a man known and celebrated for his brutal military conquests, bringing glory and adherents under duress of slaughter, to the worship and total surrender to Islam.

It's the way of Islam. To honour the past by surrendering the present to it and bringing the past into the future. Conquest. Raging battles. Fearlessly delivering the verdict of death and destruction on those contemptible infidel degenerates who refuse to surrender to Islam. Islam was born in battle, it spread through warfare, it glories in the slaughter of the 'other', the non-believer.

"There's no way he'd be going to that place unless he was told to go to that place, unless somebody identified him here. There's lots of places to learn the Koran and Islamic scholarship rather than to go there. To me this has all the hallmarks of somebody in Canada who would have directed him there", observed a former Canadian intelligence officer, with complete confidence that his background in intelligence led him to the correct conclusion.

The 'him' in question happens to be a young Canadian of Korean descent, a boy who hung out at the high school he attended, London South Collegiate Institute, with other boys, not Koreans  but members of a minority immigrant group. And with them he felt comfortable; minorities tend to feel more free, safe in each  other's company assuming that the majority lumps them together as pejoratively unlike them, in any event.

Aaron Yoon did not die with his friends Xristos Katsiroubas, another convert to Islam like himself, but of Greek heritage, and Lebanese-born Ali Medlej, though they had all travelled to Africa to steep themselves in the mystique of jihad and the attractive adventure that it represented. While Xristos Katsiroubas and Ali Medlej joined Mokhtar Belmokhtar's breakaway al-Qaeda associate group to take part in an armed attack on the In Amenas gas plant where they died in the process of slaughtering foreign workers there, Aaron Yoon chose to remain in Mauritania, to study the Koran.

Not just any seat of Islamic learning, but one known as a radicalizing centre inducting new prospects into violent jihad. Which is where the Mauritanian authorities, in search for known radicals posing a danger to their society, made some arrests, among them Aaron Yoon, who maintained cellphone contact with his family, without informing them that he was incarcerated for a two-year sentence in view of his jihadist credentials.

This would be the same Aaron Yoon who scornfully assured his concerned family when he converted to Islam that violent jihad does not represent Islam, and that he would never, ever become involved in anything of that nature. Consular officials have visited Aaron Yoon in prison. The RCMP is appealing to Londoners, including the sizeable Muslim community there, to inform them if they have knowledge of anything unusual that might lead to possible recruiters to jihad within the area.

And the RCMP is searching for the current address of yet another, a fourth London Muslim, a young man who attended the same high school, was personally friendly with the other three, and whose name is Mujahid Enderi, for his purported and seemingly obvious role in radicalization and departure to distant foreign sites to play his part in the larger scheme of jihad and the ummah.