Of the seventeen Canadian terrorist suspects, five are Young Offenders, meaning, in legalspeak, under 18 and can’t be identified by the media. What has come out, is that of the adults, Qayyum Abdul Jamal was, to be charitable, an extremist.
Another of the suspects, Steven Chand, or, as he wants to be known, Abdul Shakur, is the one quoted as being quite happy to storm the Parliament buildings, take the politicians hostage and behead the Prime Minister, if Canada didn’t pull out of Afghanistan immediately. There were the usual other demands too: Play nice, say bad things about Israel, and everyone in Canada must convert to Islam by Thursday afternoon.
There were allegations that the group wanted to blow up the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation HQ in Toronto and the CN Tower. Steven Chand’s lawyer said the charges against his client were “very serious”. Oh? No kidding. I’m not a fan of most politicians, but I think voting them out of office is sufficient. The CBC, I like and the CN Tower isn’t good or bad; it is simply tall. I think we can agree the aims of the suspects are extreme and seriously out of kilter.
Other things have been whispered. First of all, most of the suspects are young, as in late teens, early twenties. They seemed to be enthralled with the concept of radical fundamentalist Islam as posited by Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. The interviews with the friends of the younger suspects have said that the guys were normal, Canadian boys, who suddenly went off the rails when they started taking instruction from Qayyum Abdul Jamal at the Ar-Rahman Islamic Centre, a storefront mosque, in Mississauga.
The Toronto Star had a very sensible article in today’s edition. Some of the evidence presented by the police has included five pairs of camouflage boots that the suspects used, along with a cell phone, a voltmeter, some batteries, a door with paintball marks on it, a set of hotdog tongs, a computer and one lone 9mm handgun. This was the evidence of the ‘terrorist training camp’ north of Toronto. To précis the article, it sounds like a bunch of young men went into the woods to play soldiers and be jerks, as young men tend to be from time to time.
It is also alleged that several in the community knew the suspects were under surveillance and quite possibly that the suspects themselves knew they were under surveillance. This also makes them incredibly stupid terrorists in training, as well as jerks.
I am vitally concerned about a backlash that will hurt everyone. Several local Imams have roundly condemned the actions of these people. They have tried to explain that Islam does not condone, or support, or encourage this kind of fundamentalist violence.
Much like fundamentalist Zionists, or fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalist Islamists can come up with strange stuff in the name of religion. Examples: Shooting Palestinians as invaders of the Promised Land, killing abortion doctors because the Bible said so, or flying planes into the World Trade Centre. Any fundamentalist group can find justification for any kind of violence in their respective holy books. Intolerance is a hallmark of fundamentalism and it isn’t the way God meant us to act.
I am also vitally concerned that some extraordinarily stupid white people are going to go off the deep end. Some already have, breaking the windows of a local mosque. I’m sorry for that. Just as not all Muslims are terrorists, not all White folks are narrow-minded racists. Like every other group, white people have our share of people with shit for brains.
I’m not going to make any apologies for these suspects, nor condemn them just yet, as the whole story is not out. It will take time to work through the court system, as it should.
But I am going to ask two hard questions: Why did seemingly ‘normal’ Canadian young men think that this behavior is acceptable? Why did they feel so disassociated from mainstream Canadian society that they felt more sense of belonging with a religious extremist group that could best be described as nuts?
Answer those questions and you have the answer to home-grown terrorists. Then, we, meaning all Canadians of all colours and heritages, have to fix it, together.
RoadDave 