Threats Aplenty

"I have no other identity other than Muslim and yes, I'm the guy that ripped my passport in the video."
"I have anger against my government for entering Muslim countries on false pretenses."
"When we see our brothers getting slaughtered it is mandatory for us to go support them."
"CSIS are idiots. I had a meeting face to face with an agent five days before I left and they let me walk outta the country."
Farah Mohamed Shirdon/Abu Usamah, Calgarian jihadi

ctvnews.ca

Abu Usamah (which means, at age 20, that he has fathered a first son by the name of Usamah/father-of-Usamah) claims to be among "hundreds" of other westerners in Syria. They have arrived on a mission to fulfil a religious duty. His honour as a jihadi is wrapped up in joining the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant to aid them in building that fabled Islamic caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

His delusion that the West is responsible for killing pious Muslims rather sidelines the reality that fanatical Muslims are engaged in slaughtering other Muslims in the name of Islamic purity, a return to the origins of Islamic dominance when the mission was to spread Islam by the sword. The sword has been exchanged for rocket launchers and Kalashnikovs. They are far more efficient, although the sword still has its exquisite usefulness in beheadings.

Oddly enough his uncle, Abdi Farah Shirdon was a former prime minister of Somalia who survived numerous assassination attempts by al-Shabab terrorists, fighting under the al-Qaeda banner for the creation of an Islamic state in Somalia. His mother and sister live in Calgary and, pious Muslims in their community, they say they are "confused and pained by Farah's choice."

A journalist for Vice magazine on the online news site Motherboard published an interview with Mr. Shirdon, aka Abu Usamah, Calgary Islamist. Calgary has become somewhat infamous as a recruiting site for jihadis. There have been ample reports of Calgarians travelling internationally to join the extremist groups that have distinguished themselves so graphically and viciously of late, offering their credentials as jihadis bent on slaughter in the name of Islam.

Any who don't join them are against them and in Islam, it is permissible to destroy such deviants as those who deny the supremacy of Allah.

Dr. Aaron Hughes, whose doctorate is in Islamic studies, recalls returning to his University of Calgary classroom several years ago to discover a message written in Arabic on the chalkboard celebrating Islamic Jihad and Hamas. This was a message that Dr. Hughes felt was directed specifically at him, as a Jew. It wasn't the only encounter Dr. Hughes described having with students who professed radical Islamist views while he taught there.

He resigned from his tenured position when university officials refused to acknowledge, much less respond to his concerns. "I would have to go teach this class as a victim staring my aggressor in the face", he said. He now teachers at the University of Rochester, in New York.

In the case of Mr. Shirdon, Syria's gain is also Canada's; glad to be rid of such scum, we must now be vigilant he never returns, and the government's new legislation that will remove citizenship rights from undeserving candidates such as he should be implemented with the full force of the law.

In the case of Dr. Hughes, while his loss is not permanent, his absence in Canada is a blot on our consciousness and a win for academic freedom in the United States.