Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence Proposal

"Radicalization occurs among Muslim youth when identity politics facilitates their indoctrination into jihadi politics by Islamist preachers and activists in the community."
"If you are not prepared to tackle radicalization and those who radicalize our youth, we will always be playing catch-up."
Dr. Salim Mansur, professor of political science, University of Western Ontario

ISIS Leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi: Video still

"Under the notion of freedom of religion, the state has legally funded religious schools and centres and placed the children under religious dogma and tradition. With money pouring from Saudi Arabia, Iran and other states, and with [mullahs] and imams being imported to Canada, the result is very obvious."
"The state has paved the path for more segregation, isolation and discrimination."
Homa Arjomand, Iranian refugee

"There are people preaching open intolerance in this country. [It is this] intolerance ideology that makes a person become a potential recruit for the terrorist organization. This ideology opens the door for recruitment."
Imam Syed Soharwardy, Calgary, Alberta

SITE  A screengrab from ISIS propaganda video showing John Maguire, a former University of Ottawa student.

What all three witnesses testifying before the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence have in common is that they are all practising Muslims living in Canada. From their vantage point they have been able to observe through the lens of Islam today, the presence of recruiters to jihad persuading young Muslims of their reverential duties to Islam which demands of them that they participate in jihad by travelling abroad or by plotting in Canada how they may best contribute to global jihad.

Their testimony helped form the basis for the conclusions reached by committee members when they wrote and released their preliminary report. It is a report that has been widely criticized, not only by the Canadian Muslim community in their aggregate for singling out Muslims within the greater community, but by leftists and 'human-rights' activists who find it similarly offensive to point a finger of suspicion at any Canadian community comprised of religious adherents.

Somehow each party of complainants finds it serves their interests to overlook the single cogent fact of Islamist violence being perpetrated in the world of Islam against their own with an unspeakable slaughter ongoing and the cause of the world's largest refugee trauma now taking place and growing, and the threat common to all Western democratic countries that have absorbed Muslim immigrants and refugees who in their numbers seek to impose Islamic values upon the existing cultures they infiltrate.

A survey taken in the last year indicates that Muslims make up roughly 2.7 percent of the Canadian population; 940,000 citizens, with the number anticipated to rise to 2.7 million, 7 percent, within a decade. An earlier survey found about 4 percent of Muslims in Canada which amounts to 100,000 identify with extremists and jihadists, that violence in the name of Islam is justified. Professor Mansur in another arena pointed out that as the Muslim population increases the number that relate to jihad also increases and with them the pool of potential terrorists.

We have the example of European countries attempting to cope with the pressure of Muslim immigration. Some of which have succumbed to the demands to accommodate cultural values reflective of Islam and even some practices which deny and offend secular traditions and law. The very same pressures to relent and seek conciliation with what will in time be a very large segment of the Canadian population through reluctant agreement in the installation of Sharia law may well assail Canada in due time.

The Netherlands, since 2004, in a late push-back against the situation prevailing there, has passed laws that prohibit foreign imams from practicing clerical performance in the country. Belgium, France, Austria and Germany now require imams be trained and certified within the countries they liv in. France last week reported it had deported 40 foreign-trained imams since 2012. In Tunisia the government has announced its intention to shutter 80 Salafist/Wahhabi mosques. Even Algeria, another Muslim country with secular rule has restrictions on foreign-trained imams.

Bland Canadians pride themselves on nothing so much as their relaxed attitude toward ethnicity and religion and invite the many cultures whose traditions are vastly different than those of Canada's own, to proudly display their differences. We don't want to impose on others our core values, nor expect that immigrants immerse themselves in Canadian culture to become fully Canadian. But when people emigrate from a country of origin to an accepting country of immigration, they should be prepared to meld with the prevailing culture and accept its laws and its values.

Senator Daniel Lang, chair of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence wrote of a member of the Muslim community testifying before his committee. Her family was affected directly by radicalization, and it was her intention to warn that foreign-trained imams are "blurring the line between traditional Islam and their politically motivated ideology, which opens the door to violence and strife".

Her son Luqman Abdunnur, under national security investigation, had been radicalized at a mosque in Ottawa, and arrested three days following the October 2014 Parliament Hill attack. This woman called on the Committee to "create a certification or licensing standard for clergy and religious leaders in Canada". Former Liberal cabinet minister and ex-premier of British Columbia Ujjal Dosanjh urged the Committee to consider greater security relating to religious institutions.

Several other Muslim witnesses warned of the hazards integral to religious/political interpretations of jihad, pointing out the doctrine serves as the justification and impetus to Islamist terrorism. With "jihad" as a religious duty demanded of all Muslim faithful to consider terrorist violence justified by their belief that Islam is under attack by the West, and it is incumbent upon them as the faithful to respond in Islam's defence by killing its detractors.

Farah Mohamed Shirdon appears in a passport burning video released on YouTube. In English, Shirdon issues threats against the West before burning his passport and stomping on it. (YouTube)