Does Terror Grow in Our Garden Too? - Q-News July 2006, Issue 367

The idyll of Toronto’s middle class suburbs was shattered last month with the arrest of 17 young Muslims accused of plotting to bomb Parliament, take over the national television network and behead the Prime Minister. It looked like the ‘war on terror’ that Canada had so carefully avoided - by refusing to participate in the Iraq invasion - had finally come home. Veteran journalist Nazim Baksh has been on the trail of global terror for over a decade. Now he’s searching for answers in his own backyard. The drama is now an all too familiar story. Hundreds of police officers, armed with enough fire-power to take out a small town, move in with stealth to arrest 17 young Muslim men. It happened in Toronto, Canada on Friday June 2, the same day as the Forest Gate debacle was going down in London. But Toronto is not Madrid, Paris nor London - it more multicultural than all of the above and unused to its suburban streets being the scene for the prosecution of international terrorism. That’s why the arrests sent shock waves rippling right across the ‘Great White North’. Terror was averted and leaders in the Muslim community lined up to express gratitude for a job well done by Canada’s security agencies.

The Americans were delighted. Republicans and Democrats have long sounded alarm bells that Canada has been a haven for all kinds of would be terrorists. Elected officials in Washington gleefully attacked Canada’s “lax” immigration policy not realising that all of the men arrested were ‘homegrown,’ that is, they were either born or had spent most of their lives in Canada. Some US politicians used the arrests to demand the construction of a barbed-wire fence along Canada’s 4,000 mile border with the United States - the world’s longest undefended boundary in the world.

The hawks in the Bush administration called Ottawa to thank Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper on a job well done and then they put their border patrols on high alert, beefed up security and stepped up inspections traffic coming in from Canada. All of a sudden Canada was on par with Mexico.

The arrests sparked a media frenzy. It was as if September 11, 2001 had happened all over again. The Toronto Star led the pack. The newspaper was given advance notice about the take down and the next day it squeezed every ounce of suspense out of the story’s many uncertain legal permutations.

In all, 17 men were taken into custody. Among them were five juveniles, boys under 18 years-old, whose names can’t be mentioned here. The adults have names like Fahim, Mohammed, Mustafa, Shareef. There’s also a Steven and a James, converts to Islam searching for a spiritual identity only to end up in the company of some apparently radical young men lost, like so many in Britain, in the labyrinth of a seething Muslim sub-culture buried in a rhetoric of hate, vengeance and well-crafted conspiracy theories.

Days passed with little detail disclosed to the public about the alleged plot. Public anxiety mounted. Anxiety gave way to fear when Gary Batasar, a seasoned lawyer representing Steven Vikesh Chand (whose Muslim name is Abdus Shakkur), dropped a bomb outside the fort-like courthouse in the Toronto suburb of Brampton, and instantly gave the media their headlines.

Surrounded by an army of journalists stuffing microphones into his face, Batasar blurted: “The allegations are that my client is alleged to have been part of a plot to blow up parliament buildings in Canada, storm the CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corp.], take over the CBC, as well as, among other things, behead the Prime Minister.”

Many of those who witnessed Batasar’s comments believe that he meant to make the announcement in an incredulous sort of way, but for some reason his tone didn’t match his intention. Batasar came under intense fire from his colleagues, junior defence lawyers all of them hungry for a big break yet unsure of exactly how to navigate their way in the legal unknown of Bill C-36, Canada’s newly minted anti-terrorism legislation. They accused him of making statements that were irresponsible. He charged back that these were “extraordinary times and extraordinary allegations call for an abnormal response.” He said niceties had to go out the window and argued that “this is not a case that calls for hush-hush.”

As his words entered the public square, Canadians, much more reserved than their neighbours to the south, came closer to making up their minds. The accused men, they reasoned, must be guilty.

Thus, when Batasar launched a complaint to the media about tight security and restricted access to his client proclaiming that “this is not Guantanamo, this is Toronto, Canada,” most Canadians merely shrugged their shoulders. Based on polls in both Canada and the United States, most people are willing to sacrifice civil liberties when they perceive a threat to their personal security.

Arif Raza, a lawyer representing one of the men, complained that his client was held in solitary confinement, in chains and handcuffs and that “two guards, completely camouflaged, completely masked, and carrying guns, literally held him up as they brought him to me. And the handcuffs were so tight it was a difficult manoeuvre for him to hold the phone that he needed to communicate through the glass.” This too fell on deaf ears.

Because cameras are not allowed inside Canadian courts, the media were forced to contend with whatever they could get outside. As the female family members and friends of the accused men appeared in their black robes and niqabs, accompanied by bearded men dressed in kurtas, jallabas and kufis who provided the muscle, the media swarmed to them like bees to pollen. What made it to air rivalled anything you could witness in the heart of Peshawar or downtown Kabul. It made things seem distant, from another place and time, and yet it was here - at home.

Then there were questions about the timing of the arrests. In politics, it is said, timing is everything. Some of the defence lawyers accused the minority Conservative government led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper of fear-mongering and of orchestrating the arrests. Authorities were watching the men for two years. Lawyers charged that comments coming out of Ottawa were aimed at causing public fear. The outspoken Batasar sent this blunt message to the Prime Minister: “keep out of the case.”

A week after the arrests the Supreme Court of Canada was going to hear a challenge of Canada’s notorious National Security Certificate (NSC). Since it was introduced in the early 1990s the certificate has allowed Canada to arrest and indefinitely detain immigrants or refugees using ‘secret evidence’ on grounds that they pose a threat to national security. So far, some 30 men, mostly Muslims and Arabs, have been slapped with NSCs. Five of them have been sitting in detention for years.

Looming in the shadows of the arrests was the soon to be released report of the ‘Arar Inquiry’ commission. Maher Arar, a Syrian-Canadian, was detained by the United States in 2003 while in transit on his way home from holidays. Although he was travelling with a Canadian passport, the U.S. deported him to Syria where he was tortured for a year before being released and given safe passage back to Canada. Politicians familiar with the work of the commission told this reporter that when the inquiry releases its report ‘heads in the intelligence community were going to roll’ and there will be structural changes to organizations involved in the area of intelligence gathering and sharing.

Given all the back-slapping of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Services (CSIS) among politicians and in the press following the Toronto arrests, it is highly unlikely now that any heads are ever going to roll or that any significant changes will occur, whatever the Arar Inquiry ends up recommending.

In the United States a Lebanese immigrant from Michigan was about to get his day in a federal court in Detroit. His case, supported by a host of civil liberties groups and criminal lawyers, was the first attempt to test the constitutionality of the Bush administration domestic spying program.

His argument is that by targeting some phone calls for electronic surveillance without first seeking a warrant before a special court set up by Congress, the government is violating rights to free speech and privacy under the First and Fourth amendments. The government’s response is that the case should not be heard because it will reveal state secrets that may affect - surprise, surprise - national security.

It is not clear exactly what role the National Security Agency in the United States played, if any, in the Canadian arrests. What is known is that two men from Georgia were arrested in connection to the Toronto ‘plot’. Several Muslim men were also picked up in Britain, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Denmark and Sweden, although their connection to the Toronto group remains ambiguous.

A unique feature of all the arrested men is their age. Except for two, they are all between 15 and 23 years-old. 43 year-old Qayyum Abdul Jamal stood out from the rest and he was automatically seen as the leader, although he is not. His age and marital status did not dampen his youthful spirit. He appeared to have plenty of time to hang out with the youth, playing soccer and inviting them out for pizzas. Abdul Jamal seemed to have an insatiable appetite for all things radical and in his pursuit of a ‘pure version’ of Islam, he didn’t let facts interfere with his sermons. He often preached that since Canadian troops - ‘the kafirs’ - are in Afghanistan, and because Afghanistan is a predominantly Muslim country, Canadian men must be raping Muslim women in Afghanistan. The fact that he was allowed to preach inside of a mosque means that someone in leadership found nothing wrong with this message.

Since the arrests took place terrorism pundits have bandied around the term ‘homegrown terrorists’ to describe men like Abdul Jamal and his cohorts. At one level, homegrown applies to individuals who are Canadians with no direct connection to Al-Qaeda and yet they embody the ideology often associated with violence. Homegrown also means that even though the alleged terrorists have not fought or trained in a foreign country they have cultivated rudimentary destructive skills at home. Yet another feature of “homegrown terrorism” is that while the alleged terrorists may behave as amateurs, they are highly motivated in carrying out acts of terror.

This all boils down to the fact that ‘homegrown’ is a shorthanded label for ‘divided loyalties.’ In this context it refers Muslim youth - and to some extent it includes other ethnic minorities living in the West as well - whose loyalty to a foreign cause, group, movement or country is greater than loyalty to their country of citizenship.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone that Fahim Ahmed, one of the men arrested, was liberally handing out free DVDs at his local mosque. The message on a 37 minutes DVD obtained by this reporter, was evidently an attempt to get the youth he targeted to shift their loyalty by buying into the message of Al-Qaeda. The video glorifies Osama Bin Laden, praises the suicide bombers of 9/11 as martyrs who have earned their place in paradise. The film serves up a message that essentially says America, Britain and Israel are evil and any Muslim leader who supports either of them is a taghut - wretched, evildoer.

Millions of dollars were recently committed by the federal government to McGill Uiversity in Montreal to study this thorny issue. The McGill project, led by Dr. Cécile Rousseau, director of the Transcultural Child Psychiatry Clinic at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, will be working closely with parents, teens and children from local Muslim communities to explore how negative images and stereotypes of Islam affect young people’s sense of self-worth and ‘belonging;’ i.e. their national identity.

There is no doubt that negative images and stereotypes pose one set of problems for young Muslims coming of age in North America. However, the conclusions would be incomplete without an analysis of the internal dynamics in the Muslim community. This includes the role local Imams and visiting lecturers played over the years in fostering a culture of victimization.

Victimisation is a two edged sword. On the one hand, it cultivates a sense of guilt in people for not doing anything to help their fellow Muslims in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan, India, Somalia (the list is long and it spans two decades). Guilt is the magic wand that helped Islamic movements fill their coffers with millions in the 70s, 80s and early 90s. On the other hand, victimization also cultivates a feeling of shame: ‘How will you face your Lord on the Day of Judgement when your women are raped and your land is occupied?’

While working parents are able to make significant financial donations and thus lift the sense of guilt from their hearts, their sons and daughters, stronger and able-bodied, prefer to lift both burdens. Jihad is to them the most effective means of doing so. That’s the distinguishing feature of ‘Generation Jihad’. These men didn’t embrace Jihad because negative images and stereotypes of Islam and Muslims affected their self-worth and national identity. They embraced Jihad out of shame and guilt. ‘Jihad’ is the victim’s response to his perceived victimisation.

The boys hung around mosques in the Toronto area for months spinning their message of hate and alienation right under the noses of administrators. They were ignored, even tolerated and nothing was done to engage nor educate them. And yet when they were arrested these same leaders could offer little other than play the blame game. They said it was all a set-up, entrapment, a big mistake, just like Project Thread in 2003 when 19 Pakistani men on Canadian student visas were arrested on grounds that they posed a security threat to Canada and then deported on grounds that they had lied to extend their stay in Canada. The allegations of terrorism were never proven.

Muslim leaders blamed the media, American and the Israelis for orchestrating the entire affair and when that started to sound a bit stale, they resorted to blaming Tarek Fatah, the darling of the Canadian mass media and a proud member of the now defunct Progressive Muslim Union, for keeping the limelight on a diseased patient.

It has been only a few weeks since the arrests in Toronto and already there are more than a dozen new organizations and ad-hoc committees dotting the Muslim Canadian landscape. It is frightening to see how downright nasty Muslims can be to each other when trying to gain legitimacy from federal and provincial politicians. But as they jostle each other for advantage and funding the very factors that contribute to divided loyalties are allowed to continue unchallenged. It is no wonder that CSIS and the RCMP have said there may be other arrests in this case. The file on this one is not yet closed.