Sigh … not learning or mislearning the lessons of history:
A spokesman for a major super PAC backing Donald Trump said Wednesday that the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was a “precedent” for the president-elect’s plans to create a registry for immigrants from Muslim countries.
During an appearance on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show, Carl Higbie said a registry proposal being discussed by Trump’s immigration advisers would be legal and would “hold constitutional muster.”
“We’ve done it with Iran back awhile ago. We did it during World War II with the Japanese,” said Higbie, a former Navy SEAL and a spokesman for the pro-Trump Great America PAC.
Kelly seemed taken aback by the idea.
“Come on, you’re not proposing we go back to the days of internment camps, I hope,” she said.
“I’m not proposing that at all,” Higbie told her. “But I’m just saying there is precedent for it.”
Higbie’s remarks came a day after a key member of Trump’s transition team, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, said Trump’s policy advisers were weighing whether to send him a formal proposal for a national registry of immigrants and visitors from Muslim countries. Kobach, a possible candidate for attorney general, told Reuters that the team was considering a reinstatement of a similar program he helped design after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks while serving in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush.
Known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS,) the program required people from “higher risk” countries to submit to fingerprinting, interrogations and, in some cases, parole-like check-ins with authorities. The program was suspended in 2011 after criticism from civil rights groups who said it targeted Muslims.
When an NBC News reporter asked Trump last year whether he would require Muslims to register in a database, he said he “would certainly implement that — absolutely.”
In his appearance on Kelly’s show, Higbie, a frequent political commentator, said noncitizens were not protected by the same constitutional rights as citizens. He said he believed most Muslims were “perfectly good people” but argued that a small percentage of them adhered to an “extreme ideology.”
Four years ago, a lawsuit was filed by an Orthodox feminist group called Kolech, which means “Your Voice” in the Hebrew feminine. It was one of the biggest class-action lawsuits in Israeli history, and it targeted what was then an all-male, ultra-Orthodox radio station called Kol Barama, founded in 2009.
“There were no women interviewing. You wouldn’t be able to hear a woman on this radio channel,” says Kolech’s executive director, Yael Rockman. “Not only that. This radio channel is not private. They get money from the government. ”
The discrimination lawsuit went all the way to Israel’s highest court, and in late 2014, the women won.
With a birth rate double that of the national average, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community is growing — and so is its political power. Feminists are girding for more legal battles over women’s rights.
In recent years, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox have lobbied to omit women’s faces from advertisements on the side of Jerusalem buses that circulate in religious areas. During recent Jewish holidays, signs appeared in a religious neighborhood of Jerusalem, Mea Sharim, instructing women to keep off the main road and use side streets for the sake of modesty.
“Radicalization is getting worse, for sure. At the same time, the vision of equal rights, equal participation and women’s power — all of that is getting stronger around the world,” says gender sociologist Elana Sztokman, author of a book called The War on Women in Israel.
Despite the feminists’ legal victory against Kol Barama, Sztokman believes not enough is being done to protect women. She says that because the ultra-Orthodox tend to vote as a homogeneous bloc, they have achieved disproportionate political power and the Israeli government caters to them in an unprecedented way.
Until now, “Jews have never gone to the government authority and said, ‘Let’s make sure that the public spaces fit the needs of our most radical views on women, because it offends our most extreme strict men,'” Sztokman says. “That has never happened until Israel [in the] 21st century.”
The idea has become a commonplace: that Saudi Arabia’s export of the rigid, bigoted, patriarchal, fundamentalist strain of Islam known as Wahhabism has fueled global extremism and contributed to terrorism. As the Islamic State projects its menacing calls for violence into the West, directing or inspiring terrorist attacks in country after country, an old debate over Saudi influence on Islam has taken on new relevance.
Is the world today a more divided, dangerous and violent place because of the cumulative effect of five decades of oil-financed proselytizing from the historical heart of the Muslim world? Or is Saudi Arabia, which has often supported Western-friendly autocrats over Islamists, merely a convenient scapegoat for extremism and terrorism with many complex causes — the United States’s own actions among them?
Those questions are deeply contentious, partly because of the contradictory impulses of the Saudi state.
In the realm of extremist Islam, the Saudis are “both the arsonists and the firefighters,” said William McCants, a Brookings Institution scholar. “They promote a very toxic form of Islam that draws sharp lines between a small number of true believers and everyone else, Muslim and non-Muslim,” he said, providing ideological fodder for violent jihadists.
Yet at the same time, “they’re our partners in counterterrorism,” said Mr. McCants, one of three dozen academics, government officials and experts on Islam from multiple countries interviewed for this article.
Conflicting Goals
Saudi leaders seek good relations with the West and see jihadist violence as a menace that could endanger their rule, especially now that the Islamic State is staging attacks in the kingdom — 25 in the last eight months, by the government’s count. But they are also driven by their rivalry with Iran, and they depend for legitimacy on a clerical establishment dedicated to a reactionary set of beliefs. Those conflicting goals can play out in a bafflingly inconsistent manner.
Thomas Hegghammer, a Norwegian terrorism expert who has advised the United States government, said the most important effect of Saudi proselytizing might have been to slow the evolution of Islam, blocking its natural accommodation to a diverse and globalized world. “If there was going to be an Islamic reformation in the 20th century, the Saudis probably prevented it by pumping out literalism,” he said.
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The Seoul Central Mosque in South Korea, one of hundreds of mosques around the world built using Saudi donations.CreditChoi Won-Suk/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The reach of the Saudis has been stunning, touching nearly every country with a Muslim population, from the Gothenburg Mosque in Sweden to the King Faisal Mosque in Chad, from the King Fahad Mosque in Los Angeles to the Seoul Central Mosque in South Korea. Support has come from the Saudi government; the royal family; Saudi charities; and Saudi-sponsored organizations including the World Muslim League, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth and the International Islamic Relief Organization, providing the hardware of impressive edifices and the software of preaching and teaching.
There is a broad consensus that the Saudi ideological juggernaut has disrupted local Islamic traditions in dozens of countries — the result of lavish spending on religious outreach for half a century, estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. The result has been amplified by guest workers, many from South Asia, who spend years in Saudi Arabia and bring Saudi ways home with them. In many countries, Wahhabist preaching has encouraged a harshly judgmental religion, contributing to majority supportin some polls in Egypt, Pakistan and other countries for stoning for adultery and execution for anyone trying to leave Islam.
Limits of Influence
But exactly how Saudi influence plays out seems to depend greatly on local conditions. In parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, for instance, Saudi teachings have shifted the religious culture in a markedly conservative direction, most visibly in the decision of more women to cover their hair or of men to grow beards. Among Muslim immigrant communities in Europe, the Saudi influence seems to be just one factor driving radicalization, and not the most significant. In divided countries like Pakistan and Nigeria, the flood of Saudi money, and the ideology it promotes, have exacerbated divisions over religion that regularly prove lethal.
And for a small minority in many countries, the exclusionary Saudi version of Sunni Islam, with its denigration of Jews and Christians, as well as of Muslims of Shiite, Sufi and other traditions, may have made some people vulnerable to the lure of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and other violent jihadist groups. “There’s only so much dehumanizing of the other that you can be exposed to — and exposed to as the word of God — without becoming susceptible to recruitment,” said David Andrew Weinberg, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington who tracks Saudi influence.
Exhibit A may be Saudi Arabia itself, which produced not only Osama bin Laden, but also 15 of the 19 hijackers of Sept. 11, 2001; sent more suicide bombers than any other country to Iraq after the 2003 invasion; and has supplied more foreign fighters to the Islamic State, 2,500, than any country other than Tunisia.
Mehmet Gormez, the senior Islamic cleric in Turkey, said that while he was meeting with Saudi clerics in Riyadh in January, the Saudi authorities had executed 47 people in a single day on terrorism charges, 45 of them Saudi citizens. “I said: ‘These people studied Islam for 10 or 15 years in your country. Is there a problem with the educational system?’ ” Mr. Gormez said in an interview. He argued that Wahhabi teaching was undermining the pluralism, tolerance and openness to science and learning that had long characterized Islam. “Sadly,” he said, the changes have taken place “in almost all of the Islamic world.”
In a huge embarrassment to the Saudi authorities, the Islamic State adopted official Saudi textbooks for its schools until the extremist group could publish its own books in 2015. Out of 12 works by Muslim scholars republished by the Islamic State, seven are by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the 18th-century founder of the Saudi school of Islam, said Jacob Olidort, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. A former imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Adil al-Kalbani declared with regret in a television interview in January that the Islamic State leaders “draw their ideas from what is written in our own books, our own principles.”
Small details of Saudi practice can cause outsize trouble. For at least two decades, the kingdom has distributed an English translation of the Quran that in the first surah, or chapter, adds parenthetical references to Jews and Christians in addressing Allah: “those who earned Your Anger (such as the Jews), nor of those who went astray (such as the Christians).” Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University and the editor in chief of the new Study Quran, an annotated English version, said the additions were “a complete heresy, with no basis in Islamic tradition.”
Accordingly, many American officials who have worked to counter extremism and terrorism have formed a dark view of the Saudi effect — even if, given the sensitivity of the relationship, they are often loath to discuss it publicly. The United States’ reliance on Saudi counterterrorism cooperation in recent years — for instance, the Saudi tip that foiled a 2010 Qaeda plot to blow up two American cargo planes — has often taken precedence over concerns about radical influence. And generous Saudi funding for professorships and research centers at American universities, including the most elite institutions, has deterred criticism and discouraged research on the effects of Wahhabi proselytizing, according to Mr. McCants — who is working on a book about the Saudi impact on global Islam — and other scholars.
One American former official who has begun to speak out is Ms. Pandith, the State Department’s first special representative to Muslim communities worldwide. From 2009 to 2014, she visited Muslims in 80 countries and concluded that Saudi influence was pernicious and universal. “In each place I visited, the Wahhabi influence was an insidious presence,” she wrote in The New York Times last year. She said the United States should “disrupt the training of extremist imams,” “reject free Saudi textbooks and translations that are filled with hate,” and “prevent the Saudis from demolishing local Muslim religious and cultural sites that are evidence of the diversity of Islam.”
Looks like the Kanishka Project, one of the previous government’s rare and good “committing sociology” initiatives, will continue albeit in different form:
As the Liberals prepare to launch their signature anti-terrorism initiative, they have closed the door on a previous one by the Conservative government.
On Thursday, Liberal Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale released a report on the terrorist threat to Canada that said the Islamic State is the main concern. The report also said that a five-year initiative by the Tories that had delivered $10-million, mostly to academics researching terrorism in hopes of finding ways to understand and fight it, had ceased operations in March.
The initiative, known as the Kanishka Project, began in 2011, and the Conservatives promised last year to renew it if they were re-elected. The Liberals pledged a more hands-on approach. Last week, Mr. Goodale said that by the end of the summer, he will appoint an official to advise the government on de-radicalization.
The office of the adviser is expected to cost $7-million to $10-million a year, and the government says it is intended to get civil servants, academics, religious and ethnic communities to work together to find ways to deal with extremists.
The Liberals are calling this a wholly new approach for Canada, but experts say this office may absorb the function of the Kanishka Project.
“In a sense, the new office will be the successor of Kanishka. … There is more continuity than discontinuity,” said Lorne Dawson, a University of Waterloo professor who studies terrorism. The one big difference, he said, is “that there is now a stress on actually doing something in terms of [countering violent extremism].”
In 2012, Dr. Dawson co-founded the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, which got hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from Kanishka. Saying the old program blazed a trail for serious study of terrorism, he anticipates the new government office will also finance such work.
The terrorism report said Kanishka was not renewed when its five-year funding ran out in the spring. “Public Safety and its partners continue to publish results and build on the program’s research,” it said, adding that the new counterradicalization office will “foster research on radicalization to violence” among other functions.
Old story, but one that raises interesting issues:
One year ago, the Senate defence and security committee issued a report saying some foreign-trained imams had been spreading extremist religious ideology and messages that are not in keeping with Canadian values, contributing to radicalization.
The committee has urged the government to explore imam training and certification in an effort help curb radicalization, one of 25 recommendations it made in the interim anti-terrorism report.
When the report was released, an Ottawa imam, Mohamad Jebara, raised questions about its key recommendation.
“Who is going to do the certifying?” asked Jebara. “Islam is so diverse, like many religions. So what sect or school of thought are you going to certify?
“It is extremely complex,” he said. “It’s like having certification for Christian clergy. The question is: Would the Catholics, Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons agree on requirements for certification? Obviously not.”
Targeting Muslim clergy exclusively could backfire, said Jebara, and result in further marginalizing Muslims.
The committee report called on the government to work with the provinces and Muslim communities to “investigate the options that are available for the training and certification of imams in Canada.”
The report was not supported by Liberal senators on the committee. It was denounced by the National Council of Canadian Muslims as stigmatizing and failing to offer effective solutions to the challenge of violent extremism.
Appropriately, this trial and verdict are getting considerable attention:
The monsters of al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State probably never will be held to account the way the Nazis were at the Nuremberg Tribunals after World War II. The snarled red tape and convoluted politics of today’s international organizations will frustrate such grand designs for justice, even after the self-proclaimed “caliphate” is reduced to dust on the ground and unread footnotes in history.
But the trial going on at the International Criminal Court in The Hague this week gives us a hint of what can be done, and, indeed, what must be done.
The defendant, Ahmad al Faki al Mahdi, served the branch of al Qaeda in North Africa that very nearly took over all of the nation of Mali in 2012, until French troops intervened. The terrorists’ greatest prize was the ancient city of Timbuktu, al Mahdi’s hometown, and he did everything he could to show he supported his fanatical mentors’ gruesome diktats.
But al Mahdi is not on trial for the amputations, beheadings, torture, and rapes associated with the “holy war” waged by al Qaeda, ISIS, and their offshoots.
Al Mahdi is on trial for massacring history.
We have seen a lot of savage iconoclasm over the last 15 years. In 2001, the Taliban brought down the towering twin statues of Buddha in Bamayan, Afghanistan—a prelude to the operation by their allies in al Qaeda, who brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York only a few months later.
These would-be holy warriors claim to have a direct line to God, a unique and exclusive understanding of His Truth. They are determined to destroy anyone and anything that does not fit their view, and they do all this in the name of Islam.
So it is worth noting that al Mahdi is on trial, specifically, for leveling the mausoleums of Muslim saints in a city that was one of the cradles of Islamic civilization, and that the prosecutor who leveled the charges against al Mahdi in court on Monday, Fatouh Bensouda, is a Gambian woman from a large Muslim family. She knows where this guy is coming from, which may account in part for the power and passion of her opening statement.
This trial, said Bensouda, is about answering “the destructive rages that mark our times, in which humanity’s common heritage is subject to repeated and planned ravages.”
The mausoleums al Mahdi destroyed were “the embodiment of Malian history, captured in tangible form, from an era long gone yet still very much vivid in the memory and pride of the people who so dearly cherished them.”
“Your honors,” Bensouda told the judges, “culture is who we are.”
Bensouda has been criticized for failing to make the ICC a new Nuremberg. But the criteria she has to work with are suffocating and contradictory.
The court has no jurisdiction over territories where the government is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the court in 1998. So the court has no territorial jurisdiction over the ISIS heartland that straddles Iraq and Syria, neither of which signed on.
Ottawa needs a more humane approach to effectively deal with terrorism cases, including court-ordered therapy for at-risk individuals and counselling — not just criminal charges — for those coming back from Syria and Iraq, according to a new report.
The recommendations are contained in an in-depth account of how a group of young Muslims from Quebec were, according to police allegations, radicalized by charismatic preachers, peer pressure and polarizing political debates, and attempted to flee the country in 2015 for the ranks of Daesh, the terror group also known as the Islamic State.
Eleven of the people who are the focus of the report — six females and five males — attended the same school, Montreal’s Collège de Maisonneuve. Four of them were among 10 stopped at the Montreal airport just before boarding a flight for Turkey, which borders Syria, police have alleged. Two others are facing criminal terrorism charges in Quebec.
But five students who disappeared in January 2015 made it to Syria and Iraq and some of them now regret their decision and want to return home, said Benjamin Ducol, head of research for the Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence, which prepared the report.
“That leaves us with some issues in terms of how we are going to bring them back. Do they pose a security threat? I’m sure some of them have been really traumatized by what they have seen and what they have done there,” he said.
The report, which was commissioned by Collège de Maisonneuve, is based on interviews with family, friends and acquaintances of the students, as well as officials at the school.
The report estimates that up to 250 Canadians have travelled to Syria and Iraq, including up to 30 from Quebec.
Some may want to return because of remorse or family pressures, disillusionment with life in a war zone, fear of injury and death, or due to more nefarious plans to conduct attacks in Canada, the report says.
But they may waver out of fears they will be arrested or killed by the groups they try to desert, or the likelihood of arrest upon their return to Canada, the report said. Others may be worried about being labelled a national security threat or having to pay back the financial debts incurred to fund their initial voyage, it read.
There must be legal consequences, the report said, but it is folly to prosecute young radicals without also trying to reason with them and offer rehabilitation.
“The conviction of radicalized individuals cannot be society’s end goal,” it says. “Our system of justice has long recognized the importance of working towards the social reintegration of offenders.”
Sensible initiative, one that the government can learn from, whether it succeeds or not:
Le collège de Maisonneuve, qui a été aux prises avec l’extrémisme religieux au cours des derniers mois, s’apprête à embaucher cinq professionnels dans l’espoir de désamorcer les idées « radicales » des étudiants.
Selon ce que Le Devoir a appris, la direction du collège prépare l’embauche de trois travailleurs de corridor et de deux autres spécialistes de la radicalisation en vue de la rentrée scolaire. Les cours commencent lundi prochain, mais le processus de sélection des cinq professionnels sera terminé dans deux semaines.
Ce projet-pilote de 400 000 $ survient après une série de cas de radicalisation d’étudiants du collège. Certains ont tenté d’aller faire la guerre en Syrie pour le groupe armé État islamique, classé comme terroriste par le Canada. Sabrine Djaermane et El-Madhi Jamali, deux anciens élèves du collège de Maisonneuve arrêtés en 2015, font face à la justice pour avoir planifié un attentat à Montréal, en plus d’avoir cherché à aller faire le djihad en Syrie.
Des tensions, des bagarres sont aussi survenues entre des groupes du collège au cours des derniers mois. De jeunes musulmans se sentent exclus et stigmatisés.
«Les travailleurs de corridor seront sur le terrain pour recueillir la parole des étudiants. Leur défi est de se faire accepter, de gagner la confiance des jeunes pour les aider», dit Line Légaré, porte-parole du collège de Maisonneuve.
En plus des trois travailleurs de corridor, deux autres professionnels seront embauchés pour appuyer les étudiants et le personnel du collège. Ces experts, formés en relations interculturelles ou qui ont un profil de psychologue ou de travailleur social, aideront la communauté du collège à comprendre et à réagir aux idées «radicales».
Gare aux dérapages
Cette initiative est un bon point de départ pour rétablir un climat serein au collège de Maisonneuve, estime Cécile Rousseau, pédopsychiatre et directrice de l’Équipe de recherche et d’intervention transculturelles (ERIT) de l’Université McGill. Il existe tout de même un risque : il faut éviter que ces travailleurs de corridor deviennent des informateurs de la police, prévient la spécialiste.
«Le pire qui puisse arriver, c’est qu’on invite un jeune à s’ouvrir et qu’il se sente trahi. Le programme sera un échec si des jeunes se retrouvent fichés par la police ou par les services de renseignement après s’être confiés à un travailleur de corridor», explique Cécile Rousseau.
A new study based on interviews conducted over social media with foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria raises doubts about the commonly held notion that young men in North America and Europe who are drawn to violent Islamic extremism must be marginalized loners looking for an alternative to their dead-end lives.
Three university researchers who contacted dozens of jihadists from abroad in Iraq and Syria, including some Canadians, say they seemed to be drawn mainly by the religious ideas—“no matter how ill-informed or unorthodox”—behind jihadism. Rather than being isolated individuals who self-radicalized in front of their computer screens, the report says they usually found mentors and, at least in the case of the Canadians, joined the fighting in “clusters.”
In the working paper entitled Talking to Foreign Fighters: Socio-Economic Push versus Existential Pull Factors, the researchers caution against assuming that radical Islam appeals only young men on the edges of society, those without good job prospects or supportive family and friends.
They suggest previous academic studies have put too much weight on those “push” factors—the problems and frustrations in the lives of young men who turn to extremist Islam and, ultimately, terrorist violence. “Based on what we are hearing in interviews with foreign fighters—more interviews than anyone has yet to report on—we think more attention and significance should be given to the repeated affirmations of the positive benefits of being jihadists,” they say.
From mid-December 2015 to Feb. 29, 2016, the researchers put questions to 40 foreign fighters, 60 family members, friends and associates, and 30 online fans, recruiters, and potential fighters. (Among the Canadians the interviewed was Aaron Driver, the would-be terrorist killed last week in a confrontation with police in Strathroy, Ont.) Those fighting in Syria and Iraq were interviewed through “extended social media dialogues.” But their working paper, posted recently on the website of the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, is based on an initial analysis of just 20 interviews with foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq.
The researchers are Lorne Dawson of University of Waterloo’s sociology and legal studies department, Amarnath Amarasingam of George Washington University’s program on extremism, and Alexandra Bain of St. Thomas University’s religious studies department. Dawson told Maclean’s by email that they plan to eventually publish a more complete paper on their research in a peer-reviewed journal, and are also “being pressed to write a book in short order.”
In the working paper, they write that the foreign fighters they contacted “run the gamut from troubled youth with personal problems to accomplished young men and women from stable backgrounds.” In the 20 interviews they analyzed, not one of their subjects suggested “directly or indirectly” that being marginalized socially or economically pushed them onto such an extreme path. “Anger and frustration have their role to play in the process, but it is the positive investment in an alternate world-saving role that matters most, no matter how strange it may appear to outsiders,” they say.
As well, the paper points to the importance of influential radical voices who carry some form of religious authority. “In most cases, we would say the help and encouragement of some other outside mentors is required to complete the process of radicalization, to turn wannabe terrorists into deployable agents or independent martyrs for the cause. The process of self-radicalization needs to be legitimated to be complete.”
To probe the views of radicalized young men directly, the researchers had to assure them that they were not seeking “operational information” that would put them at risk. The questions focused on personal and family background, their sense of identity, and how they became fighters.
Along with information about the individuals, the researchers assembled a sort of group portrait of the Canadians fighting for various terrorist and radical factions in Iraq and Syria. “It is extremely difficult to verify any of this information, however, and for the most part we are merely reporting what one or more individuals have told us,” they admit. Still, the outline they sketch is intriguing.
They say Canadians tend to be radicalized in “clusters” and travel to the conflict zone in small groups. Of those who have made the journey, at least 19 Canadian men have died fighting in Syria and Iraq, five or them converts to Islam, the rest from Muslim backgrounds. Eight were from Ontario, eight from Alberta, and three from Quebec. The researchers say they “have good reason to believe” most of the radicalized Canadians in the war-torn region have joined ISIS, but others are fighting for less well-known groups, like Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar as-Sham, while at least 15 have fought with Kurdish or Christian militias.
The paper estimates that between 10 and 15 women have gone from Canada to Iraq and Syria to back ISIS, often marrying terrorists. “We know that three have given birth to babies as a result of their marriages to ISIS fighters, who are usually other foreign fighters,” they say.
Throughout the report, the authors repeatedly note that they are summarizing only preliminary findings. “Things may change as more of our existing interviews are analyzed and more interviews are undertaken,” they say. Still, they assert that their interviews with actual fighters have been more extensive than those relied on for previously published scholarly studies.
Apart from the Kanishka Project which funded some needed research, the previous government relatively under-invested in counter-radicalization given their reluctance to “commit sociology” and focus on hard security measures:
Canada’s counter-radicalization efforts have “little national coherence,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said Sunday in a statement reflecting on the killing last week of an ISIL supporter allegedly about to conduct an attack.
Saying the police response had “prevented a much more terrible outcome,” Goodale called for an improved response to the threat of extremism. While some work is underway in cities such as Montreal and Calgary, Canada has no national strategy.
“Our goal is to begin fixing that this year,” he said. “We need to get really good at this — ;to preserve our diversity and pluralism as unique national strengths. …We need to access the best global research. We need to develop more of our own.
“We need to generate and co-ordinate talent and expertise. We need to mobilize and support community-based outreach agencies. We need to know how to identify those who could be vulnerable to insidious influences that draw certain people — especially young people — toward extremism leading to violence.
“We need to understand what positive messages can counteract that poison. We need to know how to intervene with the right tools at the right time in the right way — all to head off tragedies before they happen, as much as humanly possible.”
A fast-paced RCMP investigation into a martyrdom video recorded by a masked man who vowed to attack Canada led police Wednesday to the Strathroy, Ont., home of Aaron Driver, a radicalized Muslim convert and ardent supporter of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
….Goodale said the his top concerns were “lone wolves who get sucked into perverse and extreme ideologies that promote violence.” The Liberals were “committed to meaningful national security consultations” that would intensify in the fall, he said.
Multicultural Meanderings 