Guest
Column: Terror's Virus on the Northern Border
by David B. Harris
Special to IPT News
October 7, 2014
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 Ever since
full-blown cases of the disease hit the United States, Canadians have
dreaded the contagion's arrival north of the 49th parallel.
Its effects: blindness and a deadly incapacity to recognize and adapt to
reality.
The malady? The White House's refusal to identify the leading terrorist
enemy by name and combatant doctrine.
President Obama began his administration by avoiding counterterror
language likely to link Islam with violence. This reflected a civilized and
practical impulse to avoid alienating Muslims at home and abroad.
But perhaps influenced by the demonstrable fact that President Obama, as
former terror prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy put it, "made Islamic supremacists key
administration advisors," this effort quickly got out of control. Now
the White House fetishizes and enforces on its security agencies, a refusal
to identify the doctrine underlying the bulk of the world's terrorism woes:
radical Islamism.
Remarkable, considering that Muslims sounded the alarm years ago.
"Obviously not all Muslims are terrorists but, regrettably, the
majority of the terrorists in the world are Muslims," wrote Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed in a 2004 Al-Sharq
Al-Awsat article flagged by the Middle East Media Research Institute
(MEMRI).
Despite this, the Obama White House banned words like
"Islamists," "Muslims" and "jihad" from
security documents, even from FBI and other government agencies'
counterterror training manuals.
Lawyer and retired US military intelligence officer Major Stephen C.
Coughlin exposed the censorship's extent at a February 2010 conference. In 2004, he noted, the 9/11 Commission
Report made 126 mentions of "jihad," 145 of "Muslim,"
and used the word "Islam" over 300 times. No surprise.
But Washington later purged such terms completely from the FBI
counterterrorism lexicon (2008), National Intelligence Strategy (2009) and
even the 2010 panel reviewing jihadi Nidal Malik Hasan's 2009 Fort Hood
massacre – except as unavoidable parts of names of terror organizations or
the like. The practice seems to continue.
Consequences?
Understanding the threat – extremist Muslims, in this case – requires
understanding their doctrine. If terrorists were invoking Christianity – it
has happened – security and intelligence organizations would focus on
problematic churches and related facilities connected to radical preaching,
funding and recruitment. Christian holy literature would be scrutinized, in
order to anticipate terrorists' plans, targets and attack-dates. Redouble
the guard on Christmas or Easter? Could atheists, Muslims or Jews be
targets? Regardless whether extremists' interpretations should, in any
objective sense, be true or false representations of the ideology in
question, serious intelligence must look at these things in order to
understand and master the threats posed by all extremist strains of
religion or other ideologies. Politicians and the public must discuss them.
Public education, transparency, democracy and our defense, demand this.
Anything else is misleading, self-deceiving and likely self-defeating.
Northern Exposure
So it was that, three years ago, the Canadian government published the
first of its annual series of public threat reports. This straight-talking
assessment pinpointed "Sunni Islamist extremism" as a primary
menace to Canadians.
But, tragically, the D.C. disease had overtaken Canada's security
bureaucracy by the time August brought the 2014 Public Report On The Terrorist Threat to Canada.
This report expunges all direct references to Islamists, other than in
terror-organization names.
Take, for example, the latest report's warning about Canadians joining
terror outfits abroad. Gone are terms like "Islamist extremists"
and even "violent jihad." The report's authors – apparently
burdened by "advice" from misguided outreach to Canadian Islamists
– slavishly substituted generic terms like "extremist travellers"
for language revealing the religious claims, affiliations, motivations and
doctrines of our enemies. "Extremist travellers" appears dozens
of times to the exclusion of meaningful nomenclature – an editing
embarrassment, on top of a national-security one. From the 2014 report:
Europol estimates that between 1,200 and 2,000 European extremist
travellers took part in the conflict in Syria in 2013. There appears to
be an increase in extremist travellers. This suggests that the
threat posed to Europe by returning extremist travellers may be more
significant than the threat facing North America because greater numbers of
extremist travellers are leaving, then returning to Europe, than are
leaving and later returning to North America. This difference between
Canada and Europe in numbers of extremist travellers can be
attributed to a variety of factors. Regardless, Europe and Canada face a
common, interconnected threat from extremist travellers. [Emphasis
added.]
In just one paragraph, Canada's self-censoring report says that many
Europeans are "fighting abroad as extremist travellers";
"they attract extremist travellers … and continue to draw European
extremist travellers"; there were "European extremist
travellers in Syria and other conflict zones"; the "influx of
these extremist travellers into Syria" increases the European
terror risk; "an extremist traveller who returned from
Syria" allegedly slaughtered several Belgians. (Emphasis added.)
This doubletalk undermines public awareness, public confidence in
authorities and the ability of officials and citizens alike to recognize,
assess and confront terrorist and subversive enemies and their doctrine.
We saw the absurd far reaches of this self-blinding mentality a few
years ago when Canadian police officers at a terrorism news conference
thanked "the community" for facilitating an Islamist terrorist
take-down. When a journalist asked which community they meant, the
officers – not daring to say "Muslim" – all but froze, thawing
only enough to become caricatures of stymied stumbling. Because paralyzing
PC protocols banned the M-word, the conference ended without the officers
having been able explicitly to thank the deserving "Muslim
community."
How has Canada come to this?
Among other sources, Canadian security officials get advice from their
federal government's Cross-Cultural Roundtable on Security. Prominent
member Hussein Hamdani reportedly campaigned to drop language implicating
things "Islamic." Meanwhile, Hamdani, the subject of a
just-released report by Canada's Point de Bascule counter
extremist research organization, remains vice-chair of the North American Spiritual
Revival (NASR) organization. On its website, NASR boasts – as it has done
for years – of sponsoring an appearance in Canada by U.S. Imam Siraj Wahhaj,
frequently tagged a radical and a 1993 World Trade Center bombing unindicted co-conspirator. Fellow American Muslim
Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, executive director of the Center for Islamic
Pluralism, once said of Wahhaj: "He's the No. 1 advocate of radical
Islamic ideology among African-Americans. His stuff is very appealing to
young Muslims who are on a radical path."
Hamdani's NASR also brought American Imam Ziad Shakir to Canada. His disturbing ideology, as I've written elsewhere, "was condemned by moderate American
Muslim leader and retired U.S. naval Lt. Cmdr Zuhdi Jasser, and by the
American Anti-Defamation League." Some have other concerns about Hamdani.
Now comes word that Hamdani, squired by Angus Smith, a Royal
Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) analyst sometimes linked to the censorship policy, will appear on a
Montgomery County, Md. panel tomorrow to enlighten Americans about
radicalism and the ISIS terror threat.
THE RCMP JOINS FORCES
This isn't the least of it. Days before the scheduled visit, it was
discovered that RCMP outreachers inconceivably had collaborated for months
with the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) in producing "United Against Terrorism," an erstwhile
counter-radicalization handbook. Inconceivably, because NCCM is the renamed
Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN), the Canadian
chapter of CAIR, a Saudi-funded U.S. unindicted co-conspirator group. (In its July 2013
name-change announcement, NCCM admitted, with respect to CAIR-CAN, that
"We remain the same organization," leading to suspicions that the adjustment was a cosmetic attempt
to kick over documented CAIR-CAN traces to radicalism.)
As for CAIR-CAN/NCCM's U.S. mother organization: "The [US]
Government has produced ample evidence," concluded the relevant U.S.
district court's decision, "to establish the associations of CAIR,
ISNA and NAIT …with Hamas."
In addition, several senior CAIR staffers and affiliated persons – including CAIR's
former national civil liberties coordinator – have done pen-time for
terrorism-related offenses. But the Canadian chapter has yet to condemn
publicly and by name the U.S. organization and these convicts, or reveal
fully the nature of past or present financial and other dealings with CAIR.
The Islamic Social Services Association (ISSA), led by Shahina Siddiqui, joins the NCCM and RCMP in authorship
on the handbook's cover. Canada's outreach counter-radicalization world
seems to be a small, if not inbred, one, for Siddiqui happens also to be a
member of both the NCCM's board, and the RCMP's national and Manitoba
"diversity" committees.
Another curiosity of authorship involves the only named RCMP official
identified in the book's "Consultants & Contributors"
section: "TASLEEM BUDHWANI, PHD, C.PSYCH, Federal Policing Strategy,
RCMP." A profile has this psychologist busy "enhancing
partnerships between law enforcement and various sectors including NGOs …
in the prevention of individual radicalization to violence." It is not
known what Budhwani's views would be about national police force
involvement with NGOs of the NCCM sort.
As for the handbook, it would ban all the usual terms, even declaring verboten
the expression "moderate Muslims," because, said the authors, the
expression is meant to imply that Muslims are not uniformly moderate.
Parents are warned to be on the lookout for "External and overt
expression of hyper-religiosity that is uncharacteristic of family culture,"
although one can only guess what to do, should this hyper-religiosity be
altogether characteristic "of family culture." Elsewhere, the
handbook seems a bit too eager to divorce radicalism and intense
religiosity from the risk of religious violence. There was also rather too
much emphasis, for some tastes, on Muslims' legal right to avoid
cooperating with the RCMP. Readers would also recognize a continuation of
the hallmarked NCCM/CAIR-CAN and CAIR campaign to push the generally
unconvincing – and increasingly alienating and dangerous – Muslim
victimhood narrative. This came replete with familiar attempts to propagate
the word "Islamophobia," a term condemned by moderate Muslims as
too-often wielded by Islamists to silence debate.
As Tarek Fatah, a well-known Pakistani-Canadian moderate, wrote, a few years ago:
Canada is a country where Muslims are respected and accommodated like in
no other land on Earth, including Saudi Arabia and Iran. It is immoral for
the Islamists to slander my country with the slur of Islamophobia. As
Statistics Canada has shown, incidents of racism in Canada are far more
likely to affect Christian black Canadians and Jewish Canadians than
Muslims. …
"However," he concluded, "truth is the first casualty in
this propaganda war being waged against Canada by its own Islamists."
For all this, the NCCM-ISSA-RCMP handbook then managed to go one better.
"Whom do we consult to gain an accurate understanding of our
faith?" it asked. The answer was a list of scholar-interpreters of
Islam who could apparently be relied upon in the delicate
counter-radicalization context. The list reveals that it is not merely in
the censorship department that Islamists have put one over on unduly
compliant – and perhaps intimidated – RCMP outreach officers.
Among the recommended scholars, there's the startlingly hardline Ingrid Mattson (name misspelled in the handbook),
former head of the Islamic Society of North America, an unindicted
co-conspirator organization that was connected by the already-mentioned
district court to Hamas. Mattson's Islamic chair at Huron University
College, Ontario, notoriously benefits from significant radical-Islamic endowments. The scholar was last seen fending off complaints from a student claiming to have been
jettisoned from Mattson's tax-funded classroom because he was non-Muslim.
Then there's the distinguished Imam Siraj Wahhaj, of the World Trade
Center Wahhajs. His patchwork record involves alternately condemning
violence and appearing to lust after it. Plus, the unappetizing Ziad
Shakir. Not to mention the inevitable Jamal Badawi, former long-time
CAIR-CAN/NCCM official. He's an unindicted co-conspirator his own right,
someone who sat on ISNA's executive board (majlis). Badawi advocates
light physical sharia discipline for errant wives. It remains unclear how the Badawi
matrimonial approach aligns with the high-thinking and good works of
handbooker Shahina Siddiqui and her Islamic Social Services
Association.
Such are the moderate sherpas who guide the perplexed up
counter-radicalization's gentle slopes.
No wonder many members of the public reacted with disbelief and disgust
to the handbook fiasco. Or that RCMP ranks fell into a mass of
post-publication panic and confusion. The day after the handbook's
roll-out, a blushed-out RCMP, getting desperate enquiries from Canada's
now-mortified Office of the Minister of Public Safety, scrambled out a news release. It said that the force was responsible
for only one (benign) section of the handbook, and claimed improbably that
the "tone" of some of the publication had caused the RCMP to pull
out of the project at the last minute. Awfully "last minute,"
considering it was the day after launch that the RCMP news release emerged.
Thus, Mountie supremos regard bad "tone" as the actionable
offense, rather than content prescribing self-hobbling wartime censorship
and jihad-happy fire-breathers as counter-radical consultants. And no
explanation why, days later, the handbook still bears the horsemen's name
and logo. Or why the force hadn't publicly threatened legal action to have
their name removed from it. Nor was there a commitment that RCMP HQ would
at long last heed warnings, quit self-defeating, hardline-Islamist
outreach, and publicly condemn the NCCM and its ilk – in the same way the
Canadian prime minister's own director of communications had condemned NCCM for alleged Hamas-type connections, in
January.
Especially in light of the contretemps between the prime minister's
office and NCCM, there is floating over the handbook the unmistakable odor
of a settling of accounts, an odor that might make the RCMP commissioner and
his boss, the Public Safety minister, queasy about their continuing
government employability. It was, after all, their diligence-free outreach
that gave NCCM and ISSA the chance to make a fool out of the Prime Minister
of Canada. For deep within the little handbook (p.34), comes a warning that
law enforcement should never use the term "Islamicism." In
Canada, this ungainly word – never in common use elsewhere,
"Islamism" instead prevailing – is almost exclusively associated
with a remark by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, one that was condemned by
Islamists. "[T]he major threat," said Harper, in a
headline-making 2011 CBC television interview, "is still Islamicism." The
Islamists were riled up by Harper's effrontery, at the time, and so seem to
have incorporated a touch of revenge in the handbook. This would not be the
first RCMP outreach-driven embarrassment for a Canadian government, including a
mess-up that may have involved an Iranian government operative.
In any event, the more nasty of observers looked at the RCMP's follow-on
news release and wondered. Why, given the embarrassment and damage – and
knuckle-rapping insult to their prime minister – did the release pull so
many punches? Could this restraint mean that certain senior officials,
compromised by outré outreach, were now scared to bear down? Was
there a belief that Islamist "partners" should not be alienated,
lest they be tempted to expose details of years of misguided interaction
upon which certain RCMP executives had built careers?
The answer remains a mystery. But skeptical interpretations became more
plausible to some, when the force's non-condemnatory news release came out
more or less simultaneously with an NCCM release saluting RCMP cooperation
with the Islamist group. Had all the loose liaising achieved the ultimate
inversion, with the RCMP – and through it, the government – being turned
into strange victims in a counter-radicalization Stockholm syndrome? Why,
for that matter, are reliably moderate Canadian Muslim organizations like
Muslims Facing Tomorrow and the Muslim Canadian Congress, enjoying hardly a
fraction of the reinforcing, and capacity-building attentions splashed all
over Islamists?
So, did the RCMP realize that it would be taken to the cleaners, and
wind up helping NCCM and ISSA launder language and radicals via a
counter-radicalization handbook? Maybe. But perhaps self-stifling in
national security is now so internalized in the United States and Canada
that it never occurs to some that certain people are radicals, and that
radicals are not always our friends. Or the best guides to counter
radicalization.
Burgeoning threats mean that citizens must press Washington and Ottawa
to return to good sense, and put a stop to the deadly contagion of
self-censorship and self-deceit – and worse – now hazarding national
security and public safety.
Americans and Canadians must defeat the disease by curing their
thinking.
A lawyer with 30 years' experience in intelligence affairs, David B.
Harris is director of the International Intelligence Program, INSIGNIS
Strategic Research Inc, Ottawa, Canada. The author is not responsible for
the accuracy of, or views conveyed in, material in the links provided.
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