This Is For Real
These are not innocent instances of young men in a state of arrested adolescence, fantasizing heroic acts of resistance against Western powers who have sought to degrade the reputation and international standing of Islam. These are home-grown Canadians and Britons whose parents emigrated from their countries of birth to find a new life away from Islamic-dominated countries of the world.The parents appear to have adapted to some degree to the status of citizen of a pluralist society, while at the same time continuing to honour their culture and heritage and regularly attend mosque. While the offspring, picturing themselves as outsiders yet, resentful of the majority and finding grievance against the country that succours them, educates them, and advances their interests of equality, appear easy recruits to jihad.
Canada is anticipating the trials of nine of the original 'Toronto 18' jihadists apprehended in 2006 before they could embark on their ambitious project of wreaking havoc and death in a bloody paroxysm of Islamist revenge against the infidels. Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan reminds Canadians that the threat of covert terrorist activities is not only ongoing, but serious.
That a now-embattled Afghanistan-Pakistan breeding ground for terrorism-related activities and training camps has find it conducive to their longevity to remove to a less problematical location, in Yemen, and likely lawless Somalia. Canada's security agencies, he says, are experiencing considerable success. (In detecting and isolating would-be jihadists? In pin-pointing the new areas of unrest and jihadist training?)
"But there still continue to be cases of people flowing to - we don't know for sure [they are] gaining terrorist training - but certainly some of the destinations and the countries that people are going to, there are strong implications that people are still going and meeting up with known terrorist organizations." (Let's hope intelligence is more coherent than his statement.)
Minister Van Loan, in charge of both the RCMP and CSIS, said he felt a tougher sentence than was handed out to recently-convicted-and-sentenced Saad Khalid, would have been welcome and appropriate; however: "there is also a clear message here that terrorism won't be tolerated and a clear message to Canadians that we do have a real problem with homegrown terrorism."
Unfortunately, neither the kindly sentence, given the gravity of the conviction, nor the affirmation that 'we do have a real problem with homegrown terrorism", give real confidence to Canadians that things are taken quite seriously enough; neither the threat, nor the punishment meted out to those anxious to carry out the threat.
That the threat of a successful jihad attack against Canada might occur, might elude the attention of our security agencies has real potential cannot be denied. Britain arrested three jihadists in 2006, also. And the trial of the three arrested, convicted of involvement in a suicide bomb plot that would have blown up international planes heading to international destinations was taken seriously.
Seven flights taking off from Heathrow airport to San Francisco, Washington, New York, Chicago, Toronto and Montreal were to have been destroyed over the Atlantic, by the three convicted jihadists. The massive death toll would have been in the thousands. It will be instructive to see what kind of sentencing will be brought down, commensurate with the plot to commit bloody jihad on this grand a scale.
Labels: Canada, Justice, Terrorism
posted by Pieface @ Monday, September 07, 2009
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