We're so polite that we can't see a danger hiding in plain sight
CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
June 20, 2008
You know what is the really sobering thing about that ongoing terror trial in Brampton?
Clue: It's not that there was a plot to attack Canadian targets. And of course there was; the court has heard evidence up the ying-yang that there was just such an enterprise afoot. Was it the finest plot ever? Oh hardly. Were its members variously bumblers, what those who hang around courts call “yutes” or raving hotheads? Absolutely. But there was a plot.
It's not even the hate, chiefly for Jews and Americans, that one of the group leaders preached at the drop of a hat and the top of his lungs with almost magnificently ungrammatical, near-illiterate, Koran-ignorant hysteria.
It's that he felt so free to preach it.
It's that he felt comfortable enough to hand out jihadist CDs outside at least one Toronto mosque and to occasionally turn up in combat fatigues at another. It's that he giddily talked to one of his alleged co-conspirators about the obligation to kill Jews whenever one finds them. It's that the leadership of the group regularly met at a half-dozen mosques in the GTA, usually on Fridays, the day of communal prayer. It's that within minutes of meeting Mubin Shaikh, a fellow Muslim-turned-CSIS informant-turned-paid-RCMP agent, he was openly verbally indulging his bloodlust and “recruiting” Mr. Shaikh: Their shared religion was enough.
It's that one spring day in 2006, the leader played for a group of young men a nauseating beheading video on his laptop in a restaurant on Danforth Avenue, a main Toronto drag. The restaurant had a big picture window. Even if it was otherwise empty, presumably the owner or someone in authority was present. Yet no one appears to have uttered a word in protest.
It's that up at the much-maligned winter training camp held in December, 2005, near Orillia, Ont., members of the group regularly went to the local Tim Hortons wearing their camos – as Mr. Shaikh put it, as a bunch of predominantly brown-skinned, bearded young men, they were hardly the picture of subtlety. Yet they did it anyway.
The leader knew however blatant he might be, however crazily he might talk, however boldly he would zero in on the vulnerable young men who were his target group – and however a few brave souls in the Muslim community might try to talk sense into him or warn others away from him, as some did – nobody would actually stop him, or ban him from their premises, or outright blow the whistle on him.
And, because most of the group were born-and-raised Canadians, they also knew, it seems, that however suspicious someone catching a glimpse of them in their military gear might be, the odds were damned good the authorities wouldn't be called.
Where I feel fairly confident that such a group appearing at the Timmy's in Red Deer or Timmins or Rouyn would prompt a phone tip or 10, most Torontonians are crippled unto paralysis by the unique combination of innate Canadian politeness and the racial politics of their city, and these guys knew it.
As evidence of what I mean, let me tell you the true story of a neighbour of mine who once came home in the middle of the day to discover a young black man rifling through his things; it was perfectly plain he had broken in and was in the midst of robbing the joint. But my neighbour merely gently pointed out that the young man was “in the wrong house” and kindly saw him out. The young fellow proceeded to move a few houses over and rob that place blind. I believe I may be one of a few people on my street to find this wildly amusing – and telling.
And remember how, when the arrests in the Toronto 18 investigation were made two Junes ago, the authorities at a huge press conference primly described those arrested as coming from a wide variety of backgrounds and never uttered the word “Muslim” – allowing the Toronto Police chief to brag at a second press conference “that there was not one single reference made by law enforcement to Muslim or Muslim community” at the first presser?
Well, guess what? Seven of those arrested that day have since had their criminal charges stayed or dropped, one is on trial now, and 10 others remain charged. Recent convert or raised in the faith, white or brown or black, guilty or innocent – the one sure thing is that they are all Muslims and that faith was what bound them together.
While some of this certainly illustrates the group's lack of sophistication and smarts (one of my favourite of Mr. Shaikh's stories is how the leader, paranoid that a building was bugged by CSIS, insisted instead on having a conversation in Mr. Shaikh's van, which actually was bugged), what it reveals is that, whatever else, this gang was hiding in plain sight, most often to fellow Muslims.
As Tarek Fatah writes in his new book, Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, “While the overwhelming majority of Canada's Muslims were stunned by the discovery of alleged terrorists in their own backyard, few can honestly deny that they had not seen this coming.”
Even Mr. Shaikh, whose actions I consider principled and courageous despite the fact that he was a paid RCMP agent (he earned $300,000 for his undercover work) and who I hesitate to praise only because I suspect it will hurt his reputation, considers himself first a Muslim. He may be as integrated a Muslim-Canadian as there is, and has always been an active participant in secular Canadian life (less so now than when he was a wild young man), he is a good and proud Canadian, yet he answers first to faith.
One day, the trial in Brampton heard of Muhammad Robert Heft, who runs a group called p4e, a sort of support group for Muslim converts with questions; the accused apparently had gone there but was deemed too young.
Anyway, I never heard of Muhammad Heft before, but Googled him, and what came up but an interview he'd done with the fifth estate on CBC some time after the arrests of the Toronto 18.
Mr. Heft appears to be, for lack of a better term, one of the good guys. He tried to counsel some of the accused, including the hysterical leader, and steer them away from extremism, at least on Canadian soil.
According to the CBC interview transcript, the leader once talked to him about the “martyrdom operation of Sept. 11,” so Mr. Heft said, “I was telling him that it hasn't even been proven that Sept. 11 was actually done by 19 hijackers. That was just the alleged story of the U.S. government. All I tried to explain to him is that whoever did it was wrong … And then I started to just talk to him about how we haven't even proven that the people who had actually did it were Muslims.”
You see? 9/11 was wrong. But it hasn't been proven it was carried out by Muslims.
If I weren't an agnostic, I'd be on my knees, praying. |
