The mayor of Toronto, David Miller, is puzzled. "Why are they so angry?" he asks the CBC-type interviewing him. "We need to find out why people get sucked into this type of activity."
The type of activity the mayor is talking about is playing al-Qaeda. It entails smuggling guns into Canada, then dressing up into army-type fatigues and going into remote areas to train. It entails plotting (or at least talking about) blowing up things in this country, while shopping around for the means to do so. In short, it's setting up to engage in what the investigators characterize as terrorism, in the name of what the suspects have reportedly characterized as Islam.
The Crown, of course, will have to prove its case in court. A judge and jury, or possibly several judges and juries, will decide whether the 17 accused were actually preparing themselves for mass-murder and not just playing a sort of extreme game. No court will speak to the contention of the defendants that whatever they tried to do was for Islam. That is something strictly between them and their Maker.
"Why are they so angry?"
Mayor Miller wants to know why these Muslim Torontonians and suburbanites -- not agents smuggled in from abroad, not foreign students, not visitors, not even recent immigrants, but home-grown fellow citizens -- would conspire, as they're alleged to have done, to blow up their own town? These people were born and/or raised here. They weren't aliens, but Canadians, for crying out loud. The neighbourhoods they were allegedly plotting to destroy were their own.
"Why are they so angry?"
The mayor is a man of the Left. Implied in his question is the concern that perhaps we didn't make it clear to Quattum Abdul Jamal, 43, Asad Ansar, 21, Shareef Abdelhaleem, 30, or Fahim Ahmad, 21, that he's one of us. Perhaps we weren't sufficiently inclusive and didn't welcome them plainly and decisively enough. Perhaps we left them in some doubt about their own proprietary interest in the nest they were about to foul. After all, if we had disseminated the multicultural ideal more effectively, published more glossy pamphlets about the joys of diversity, with merry ethnics smiling on the cover, or paid higher property taxes so as to have more money for dialogue between communities, Admad Mustafa Ghany, 21, Abdul Shakur, 25, and Amin Mohamed Durrani, 19, might not have got sucked into the kind of activity the Crown believes they did -- such as plotting to turn Toronto into a replica of Baghdad.
The implication of mayor Miller's question is that such deep-seated anger must be warranted somehow. It's really us, isn't it? We're driving fine young men to desperation by our attitudes and policies, aren't we? We're turning them into terrorists, driving them into the camp of Osama bin Laden. If only...
If only what, mayor?
It's no mystery what makes young men (and not so young men) of Islamist militancy angry. They never cease telling us. It's what we are.
If we ceased being secular, Western-style democracies; if we changed our creeds, policies, abandoned our friends, embraced our enemies, it might mollify the young men, at least temporarily. Announcing that 9/11 was organized by Jews and letting the Taliban have the run of Afghanistan would be a start. Returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein and throwing in Kuwait for good measure would be another step in the right direction -- not because Islamists like Saddam but because it would humiliate the Great Satan and its allies. Oh, and there's another thing: We'd have to let Hamas push Israel into the sea. Or, better still, help Hamas -- because, God knows, it would need some help.
A few years ago all this would have been a Monty Python joke. Imagine a society where people stopped saying "Merry Christmas!" to each other so that non-Christian minorities shouldn't feel excluded -- and in response some of those minorities, children of refugees from places like Somalia, started plotting to blow up the sensitive host who took in their parents.
This is the point where my hackles begin to rise. The trouble with the 17 young men and their type isn't that they come from Somalia or wherever: The trouble is they haven't come from Somalia; they brought it here. The question for Toronto's mayor when such people plot to blow up his city isn't "why are they so angry?" The question is why isn't he angrier?
© 2006 George Jonas
Can West Publications
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