Typical Canadian Boys Recruited to Jihad

"I was one of you: I was a typical Canadian. I grew up on the hockey rink and spent my teenage years on stage playing guitar."
"I had no criminal record. I was a bright student and maintained a strong GPA in university. So how could one of your people end up in my place? And why is it that your own people are the ones turning against you at home? The answer is we have accepted the true call of the prophets and the messengers of god."
"How can I sleep with what is happening in Syria...and Palestine?"
"We live in a world where all the minor signs of yawm-al-qiyyamah (the day of reckoning) have passed. We're just waiting for the major ones."
John Maguire, akaYahya, Abu Anwar al-Canadi, Islamic State jihadist

"The impression I got was that his identity shift was dramatic. It was a complete, complete change."
"He mentioned once that he felt Islam confirmed what he learned in the Book of Revelation."
"He had an immense interest in eschatology. He definitely thought the end of times were coming: that was what characterized him."
Stephane Pressault, Islamic convert

Khadar Khalib, 23, left, John Maguire, 24, centre, and Awso Peshdary, 25, were charged by RCMP on Tuesday, February 3, 2015 in an alleged terrorism conspiracy.

Not so much a complete, complete change. More that Stephane Pressault, for all the assumed friendship with the man who preferred to be referred to as Yahya conveyed, it did not reveal the essential inner core of belief of the man. That was an impression driven deep into the core of his very being that his father endowed him with. Yahya, who appears to have been recruited into jihad as a student in the U.S., (Los Angeles City College) absorbed his father's legacy beliefs.

He had found the spirituality he was looking for five years ago when he converted to Islam, after his father left Canada to live in Russia, when young John Maguire was left to his own devices. Charges were laid by the RCMP of terrorism against him, along with Khadar Khalib, 23, who also travelled to fight with ISIS in Syria and Awso Peshdary. John Maguire, an alumnus of the infamous American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, however is assumed to have been killed near Kobani, in a U.S. air strike.

He was a bright student with a mordant sense of humour; self-contained, strong-willed, an iconoclast. His father, Peter Maguire was a Holocaust denier, who was satisfied that 9/11 was a well-deserved result of America's aggressive intervention in foreign countries, interfering with their policies and their governments. The apple that fell from that tree was patterned on his father's values; his fascination with the argument that the evolution of man was accelerated by alien intervention.

A controlling man, hard-edged and unforgiving, according to his wife, John Maguire/Yahya's mother who separated from her husband who took his 12-year-old son under his wing, while his wife was left in custody of their daughter. Peter used child support payments and a disability income to live on, but encouraged his son to play hockey, race motocross and play the guitar in a punk rock band. When he left for Russia to teach English in Siberia, his son decided to continue his eduction in Canada.

Yahya/John Maguire returned to Canada to study business at University of Ottawa. His friend and fellow convert, Stephane Pressault, who remains convinced to this day, that he was a sad and misunderstood figure who could have been saved had those around him fully understood his covert attraction to jihad, described an occasion when Maguire was listening to his iPod. "I'm listening to a lecture by Awlaki" Maguire informed his friend.

It's the loss of young men such as John Maguire who lend themselves as effective propaganda tools to Islamic State, perhaps more than the threat they pose to the stability of Canada and the safety of its citizens that inspire people like Imam Syed Soharwardy to insist that the federal government and its security agencies undertake an investigation. A federal inquiry is required, he says, to expose the recruitment process and identify those who finance the travel of Canadians to the Islamic State.

"We need to discover who are these elements. There are many boys who have been killed in Syria and Iraq -- and they've been recruited here", insists Soharwardy. He should know. "We know there are elements who are recruiting, who are brainwashing people. There are people who are recruiting these young Muslim boys. For sure, they are recruiting in our communities: in mosques, in universities, through lectures, through community events," he says.

Really? It's just occurred to him? Other Imams passionately deny that Canadian mosques are used to recruit Muslim youth to jihad, however. They are incensed that their mosques are said to be hotbeds of Islamist propaganda. But Canadian prisons are not the only venue where Muslims who appear disproportionately to their representation in the population are imprisoned, and are not the only places where radicalization takes place.

The Toronto-based broadcaster and journalist, Pakistan-born Canadian Muslim Tarek Fatah has been shouting all of this from the rooftops for years. And for his pains in attempting to alert Canadians and government authorities, he has been pilloried, threatened by Islamists, his warnings ignored and considered by other Muslims to be nothing less than a threat to Islam, a turncoat, a traitor.