Storm Alert Disinformation: The Bonfire of the Ostriches

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Monday that Canada's open and diverse society is its greatest weapon against terrorism.

The ostriches are preaching again.

Harper noted that Canada has been criticized by some U.S. politicians who claim the country is vulnerable to terrorist attacks because of lax border security and immigration laws. That criticism has been heightened in recent weeks with the arrest of 17 terror suspects in the Toronto area.

"I believe exactly the opposite is true," Harper said, rejecting calls for Canada to be less open to immigration as a way of curbing terrorism. "I believe, actually, the opposite is true," Mr. Harper told the opening session of the United Nations' World Urban Forum here. "Canada's diversity, properly nurtured, is our greatest strength."

The terrorists and their vision will be rejected "by men and women of good will and generosity in all communities," Mr. Harper affirmed to loud applause. "And they will be rejected most strongly by those men and women living in the very communities that the terrorists claim to represent, as we have already seen in Canada since those arrests."

Let’s talk about “nurturing” and “rejecting” in the Muslim community of Canada. In fact let’s hear from Robert Spencer on the subject. In his article on FrontPage magazine entitled ‘The Complicity of Muslim Silence’, Spencer points out how the defense against nurturing and rejecting played out in the Muslim community as it pertained to the terrorist plot by 17 Canadian born jihadists.

• There is mounting evidence that many Canadian Muslims did know – and yet did nothing to notify Canadian authorities of the plot. The Toronto Star reports that another suspect, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, actively spread the jihad ideology at the Ar-Rahman Islamic Center for Islamic Education in southern Ontario. But by the account of mosque officials, because Jamal unlocked the mosque for daily prayers and they valued his services as a caretaker, they did nothing to stop his preaching.

• Yet another imam in Toronto, Sayyid Ahmed Amiruddin, noted that three of the plotters, Saad Khalid, Zakaria Amara and Fahim Ahmad, “would enter into the mosque to pray, and they would pray in a very aggressive manner, and they would come in military fatigues and military touques and stuff.”

• According to the CBC, “Amiruddin, a Toranto iman said many mainstream Muslim organizations in Canada are really part of the problem, standing by as extremist propaganda spreads in the mosques.” But while Amiruddin points out that these young men would attempt to win others over to their point of view, he says nothing about having done anything to stop them, or about resisting jihadist recruitment in general -- much less working with authorities to help them apprehend jihadists.”

• According to the Star, some of the plotters belonged to a school Muslim association in which they “discussed at an association gathering whether suicide bombing was permissible in Islam. Their views were so violent that the other association members threatened to have them banned.” But they apparently did not actually have them banned, or alert anyone to their violent views.

• Likewise another Toronto Muslim, Mohammed Robert Heft. Heft said that one of the plotters, Fahim Ahmad, “believed the 19 people involved in the World Trade Center bombings were martyrs and he was handing out DVDs openly of wills and testimonies of those 19 people suggesting what they did was right.” “For the last two years I’ve been involved in this mentality. I was dealing with it on a grassroots level. All it takes is a little education and sorting out who to take religion from.” Yet he too apparently did nothing to alert Canadian authorities to Ahmad’s views.

So we ask the question again, Mr. Harper, if believe the open, no-questions asked immigration policy that embraces the sacred cow of multiculturalism is the answer to terrorism, why didn’t it work in the case of the jihadi 17? Where were the “men and women of good will and generosity” who should have “rejected most strongly by those men and women living in the very communities that the terrorists claim to represent”?