• Thanks for stopping by. Logging in to a registered account will remove all generic ads. Please reach out with any questions or concerns.

Islamic Terrorism in the West ( Mega thread)

Any legislation we tried to enact on that front would quickly be the subject of a Supreme Court challenge.
 
ModlrMike said:
Any legislation we tried to enact on that front would quickly be the subject of a Supreme Court challenge.

That's ok. Parliament creates the laws, the courts interpret them in relation to the charter. So, dot all the i's and cross all the t's, fill in all the squares to limit the misinterpretation of the law..... :2c:
 
GAP said:
That's ok. Parliament creates the laws, the courts interpret them in relation to the charter. So, dot all the i's and cross all the t's, fill in all the squares to limit the misinterpretation of the law..... :2c:

Then when the terrorists lawyers and Supreme Court strike the law down, invoke :


NOT WITH STANDING CLAUSE - in other words SCOC - we don't give a crap what your interpretation is, we're doing it our way

FJAG needs to weigh in on this.
 
I suspect that some sort of legislation will come about, either through changing existing laws or creating new ones, but it will be a weak sister effort, just enough to get past the 2015 election.

Playing to the masses man, playing to the masses.....
 
Another nut who should be stripped of her UK passport...

Source: Agence-France Presse

British 'jihadist' mum threatens to behead Christians: reports

London (AFP) - A middle-aged British mother-of-two and former rock band member has joined jihadists in Syria and wants to behead Christians with a "blunt knife", British media reported.

The reports identified the woman as Sally Jones, 45, from Kent in southeast England, and said she now goes by the name Sakinah Hussain, or Umm Hussain al-Britani.

Security experts estimate that hundreds of Britons have gone to the Middle East to join the Islamic State (IS) militant group, the most brutal to emerge out of Syria's bloody civil war and the most successful.

(...EDITED)
 
Just a look at one case among many of failed integration across Europe:

Business Insider via Yahoo News

Why So Many Jihadists Come From Belgium
Business Insider
By Ben Winsor – 1 hour 21 minutes ago

AP / Thierry Charlier
A group wearing T-shirts reading "Stop Islamization" protest during a demonstration in Brussels on Sept. 11, 2007, regarding what some believe as the Islamization of Europe.
As more than a thousand Westerners have joined the conflict in Iraq and Syria, the most per-capita have come from Belgium,  according to  an analysis by Business Insider .

Between  250  and  400  jihadists in the area are thought to have come from the small European nation, which has a population of 11 million.

Although the trend may seem surprising from a highly developed state known for waffles and EU bureaucracy, a closer look at Belgium's fractured society shows this may have been a long time coming.

Failed Integration

Muslim immigrants are not well integrated into Belgian society d espite decades of immigration there from countries like Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey, and Algeria.

While Muslim Belgians make up only 4% to 6% of the country’s population, some politicians say their very presence threatens the Belgian way of life.


(...EDITED)

In 2013, the Minister for Integration and current leader of the Flemish government, Geert Bourgeois, spoke about a report showing that less than a third of young Muslims felt accepted by Flemish society.

"That so many young people are discriminated against or feel rejected means we have a lot of work to do as a society," he said, " but another way of looking at it could be that we think young Muslims do not belong to because they do not want to belong."

With a population so divided, Belgian Muslims tend to live in close-knit communities with seperate social circles. Without integration, radical groups can take root.

Belgium is home to the banned extremist Salafist group, Sharia4Belgium, which remains active underground. The group supports ISIS and is accused  of recruiting fighters for the war in Syria.

(...EDITED)
 
Muslim immigrants are not well integrated into Belgian society d espite decades of immigration there from countries like Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey, and Algeria.

While Muslim Belgians make up only 4% to 6% of the country’s population, some politicians say their very presence threatens the Belgian way of life.


Some, too many, Muslims have difficulty integrating into any Western society. Most of the ones I know do not have that problem, but they came here for a change, they wanted something that Iraq, Syria, Egypt and so on did not and could not offer: personal liberty. Islam 'offers' a complete socio-economic and political "solution" but many people do not want that.

          (Anecdote: My friend Sabah (BEng in Iraq, MEng in UK, PhD in Canada) is a wholly secular man, he goes to Mosque a few times a year; he raised his daughters to be 'free thinking,' independent Canadians.
          When a junior engineer, Reema, joined our group she was still a "good" Muslim. Sabah told her, quietly, privately, that there is nothing in the Qur'an that requires her to wear a veil. "Modesty," he told me he explained
          to her, "is a state of conduct, not dress." Reema, gradually, became less visibly "Muslim" and, it seemed to me, happier. When she married she told me that she explained to her new husband that she was still a good,
          believing Muslim but she refused to cater to foreign, 19th century social customs in the 21st century Canada. At my retirement party she thanked me for being part of a "team" that helped her "grow." I know she was
          talking mostly about Sabah's influence. Both Sabah and Reema are fully 'integrated' Canadians who happen to be Muslims.)

Too many Muslims, especially refugees, are neither socially nor culturally 'ready' to integrate into Western society. (That is just one of the reasons our refugee programme is broken.)




 
This problem has always existed with other immigrants as well, it's just very visible with Muslims.
When my parents immigrated to Canada in the late 60s, they stuck with the Greek community and had almost no dealings with the outside world. My dad worked in restaurants so he did deal with anglophones and francophones, but do you know we had 1 family in our outer circle that was not Greek? jJust one!  We lived surrounded by Greeks for the first 20 years of my life. We resisted integration for 2 decades at least.
My circle was exclusively Greek friends except for one Japanese guy that we considered an honorary Greek. Only when I was in university did i start to hang out with non-greeks and that was only for projects and papers.
Until i was 26ish, I would say I was Greek Canadian, not Canadian, and would love to move to Greece and had started planning for it.
Now (and for the last 10 years at least) I proudly say I'm Canadian and would fight to defend the greatest nation in the world. I never left, and will probably never leave here. I'm married to a francophone and my kids speak English and french, with just a bit of Greek thrown in. One of the most beautiful things that happened to me was when my son was learning the Canadian anthem in pre-k and asked me to sing with him. hell I cried back in 2006 when the oilers where playing in the playoffs and the crowd took over the anthem. I was standing and signing with pride.
So imagine, if a white christian group has such a reluctance to integrate imagine the visible muslim's reluctance to integrate.
What else can the gov't do?
 
The enclaves of like minded people make it unnecessary to make a large effort to integrate....this has gone on down through history....Greeks, Irish, et al.

Some of what the difference is what they look like....the Chinese looked different thus were left alone in their own communites and discriminated against, as were most Asians....now the influx is from African/brown nations and the same thing is happening. In addition, the conflicts these people are running away from are not so easy to avoid anymore as the communications through the internet bring it here in a flash.

In short, nothing has changed.
 
The problem lies not in the pot, but rather in the melting. Or lack thereof.
 
There IS a problem with the pot, too, I think.

We say we are a bilingual/multicultural country but I'm not sure how true that is, outside of few 'pockets.' Ask a Francophone how much "at home" they feel in, say, Richmond BC or, say, Richmond Hill, ON (p. 12 on the link).

We do have some multicultural places, Richmond BC, for example, is "home" for about equal numbers of English and Chinese speakers (Cantonese and Mandarin, mainly) and for folks of Indian ethnicity, but it doesn't look too "friendly" for Arabic speakers ... but then neither does Richmond Hill, ON.

I think we have one very large melting pot: Toronto, and one medium sized one: Greater Vancouver. My reading of the data is that Montreal is actually getting less and less "multicultural" while Calgary, Winnipeg and so on are growing in "multicultural" status but are still overwhelmingly English while smaller cities in Quebec are resolutely French.


 
Expanding a bit on the points being made here, many people are not assimilating. Now we could follow the Saudi solution and encourage them to go abroad, cancel their passports and wait for them to catch a Hellfire or JADAM courtesy of the USAF (which is ruthless enough to actually work), but I suspect that won't go over very well here. OTOH, based on the social media chatter, I think these people "self identify" fairly easily. Identification, careful watching and being swift to move in the first sign of activity beyond posting noxious messages on FaceBook should be acceptable solutions.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/387188/foreign-legion-losers-jonah-goldberg

A Foreign Legion for Losers
Many of the Westerners flocking to the Islamic State are middle-class misfits for whom jihad is a radical pose.
By Jonah Goldberg

On the Internet, you’re never really alone. Name any fad, any cause, any hobby or passion — Shaker furniture? Dungeons and Dragons, Bolivian tree frogs? — and you’re only a few clicks away from someone who shares your obsession.

That’s great. It’s also horrible. Because while there’s no harm in tree-frog fans sharing pictures and stories that inspire others to fly to the Andes to take pictures of exotic creatures, the Internet also lets evil people share stories and pictures that inspire others to cut off the heads of various infidels and apostates.

Though I’m perfectly comfortable with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and similar platforms doing what they can to undermine the PR campaigns of fanatical murderers, my point here isn’t necessarily that such things should be banned or censored (even if that were technologically feasible). I weary of reflexive responses to barbarism that involve curtailing the freedoms of Americans in order to avoid offending savages.

Rather, my point is that to a considerable extent, the Islamic State — and groups like it — is a modern Foreign Legion for losers. When discussing people who openly boast of rape, murder, and torture, “loser” is hardly too harsh. But invective is not my intent when I call them losers. These men — and a few women, too — are losers in a more significant sense. They are losers at Western civilization.
Recently the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) posted transcripts from Facebook and Twitter conversations among various French and British supporters of the Islamic State. They enthusiastically chatted about the exciting news that you can buy slave women in areas controlled by the Islamic State. The terrorist group reportedly captured an unknown number of women from the ethnic minority called Yazidis. They aren’t Muslims, so they can be used as chattel.

The men in the discussions asked all sorts of questions about the rules for sexually abusing (i.e., raping) the women. One British Muslim asked, “I have 3,500 dollars to spare, I am going to buy ten, who wants one?” A French man joked that 180 dollars must be the “price for the ugly ones.” There were plenty of “LOLs” in the thread. Because, you know, collecting the female survivors of mass murder and raping them is just so Laugh-Out-Loud funny to cretins who can bed women only at sword-point.

Many of the Westerners flocking to Syria and Iraq for “jihad tourism” don’t have any of the usual excuses one hears for terrorism. Just like the 9/11 hijackers, they are often middle-class, educated, and technologically adept.

What they are not is assimilated. They may have passports identifying them as American, French, or British, but they are not American, French, or British in their hearts. These labels do not give them the meaning and mission in life they crave. And Western democratic capitalism bores them. Often the children of immigrants, they are literally misfits; they don’t fit in with their parents’ native culture, but they also haven’t connected to the society in which they now live.

And that is nothing new. The French intellectual Olivier Roy observed over a decade ago that many of the violent Islamists in Europe were in fact “born-again Muslims” who adopted Islam not so much as a sincere religious conversion but as a radical pose against the West. In previous generations, they might have joined Marxist terror groups.

In other words, the ideology of radical Islamists is a convenient uniform in their crusade for power, sex, vengeance, excitement, whatever. The Telegraph’s Tim Stanley notes that one poll in France finds that more people in France, compared with residents of the Gaza Strip, support the Islamic State.

NBC News reports that since the release of the video showing the beheading of American journalist James Foley, some 28,000 pro–Islamic State Twitter accounts were created.

There have always been isolated losers. But that isolation often inspired its own remedy. People want to belong to a community. That desire fuels assimilation and civilization. The horrifying challenge of today is that thanks to the digital age and an ideology and a culture that often sees assimilation as incompatible with “multiculturalism,” the losers no longer have to stop being losers to cure their sense of isolation. They can join a huge virtual rape gang on the Web and have their evil desires confirmed and celebrated. And some of them, weary of puncturing their masturbatory reveries by pecking out LOL on a keyboard, have the option of hopping on a plane.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2014 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Now another potential solution exists based on the highlighted line, but it would require some heavy duty work and getting hands quite dirty to change the "attitudes, perceptions and behaviours" of these people and neutralizing the negative influences. Do we have the willpower and resources for that project?
 
"Ottawa revoking passports of Canadians who join extremist groups: Alexander"
Canadians who travel overseas to join extremist groups can expect to have their passports revoked, the government is warning.

Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander said Saturday that Ottawa has begun revoking travel documents for those who travel to places such as Iraq and Syria to fight with the Islamic State and other militants groups.

“If we have evidence – and I mean substantive, incontrovertible evidence – that someone has left Canada with the intention of committing what would be an indictable offence here, including terrorism, then we can revoke, suspend or invalidate their passport,” Alexander told CTV News.

The minister said the Islamic State is not just a problem in the Middle East, but a global threat.

“Given the barbaric nature of the groups operating now in Syria and Iraq, and their unscrupulous tactics, we need this kind of measure to prevent people from going down this misguided path, and to deter young people from even thinking about it,” he said.

The measures are “serious, strong legal safeguards,” that Alexander said will “only ever going to apply, we think, to a small group of people.”

Alexander said the power to revoke travel documents was already established under the Canadian Passport Order, and that it had been used in the past. He said “multiple people” have already had their passports revoked in light of recent situations, but declined provide specific numbers ....
 
And, according to this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail, the RCMP (and, presumably, other LE agencies in other countries) is using the full range of laws and regulations to "bust" would-be terrorists:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/rcmp-using-new-measures-to-stop-high-risk-travellers/article20712700/#dashboard/follows/
gam-masthead.png

RCMP using new measures to stop ‘high-risk travellers’

COLIN FREEZE AND CARRIE TAIT
The Globe and Mail

Last updated Saturday, Sep. 20 2014

Ali Abubaker and Naomi Mahdere were talented teenagers. He was a hip-hop poet, riffing about inequality and injustice; she was a polished singer, mimicking pop stars such as Beyonce. In 2011, Ms. Mahdere won a talent competition put on by Calgary’s Afrikadey Arts & Culture Society. Mr. Abubaker placed second.

Ms. Madhere, now 19, wanted to study biochemistry and become a doctor. Mr. Abubaker, now 22, was studying civil engineering at Mount Royal University.

At some point, a romantic relationship between the two blossomed. Ms. Mahdere, an Eritrean-Christian by heritage, converted to Islam. Those who knew Mr. Abubaker, whose parents hailed from Eritrea and the Philippines, were alarmed by his religious stridency, which began surfacing in his poetry.

Ms. Mahdere’s mother became so concerned about Mr. Abubaker’s views on Islam that she called the RCMP’s national security team last year. She told investigators she believed her daughter and her boyfriend were going to Syria to fight in the war. The couple applied for new passports in October, 2013, wanting the paperwork rushed. In November, they presented passport officials with one-way tickets to London, England.

That’s when the police stepped in. Working with Passport Canada officials, they picked up Mr. Abubaker, Ms. Mahdere and their friend Hamza Omer, on charges of passport fraud, keeping them grounded in Canada and off a flight to London. All three pleaded guilty. Their combined fines will likely total around $3,000 – a small sum considering the Crown prosecutor argued their actions could have brought the integrity of the entire Canadian passport system into disrepute.

The couple – who couldn’t be reached through lawyers, listed addresses or family members – have paid their dues, and are still together. But the case remains important: not just because of what the Mounties allege they could prove, but because of what they couldn’t.

Without the ability to amass the proof beyond doubt they need to lay more serious charges, officials are increasingly leaning on other measures and investigative partners for help to disrupt “high-risk travellers” from getting on planes.

The threat of homegrown terrorism isn’t new, but the manner in which the RCMP zeroed in on this couple represents a fresh gambit in the fight to identify and stop prospective terrorist recruits before they leave Canada. These techniques, which have attracted the ire of civil liberties advocates, are being deployed amid a growing sense of urgency: Officials are warning that more than 100 Canadians are suspected of involvement in terrorism activities around the world.

“Into that fanaticism”

Tunde Dawodu, who works at building a sense of pan-African identity among creative Calgary youth through the annual Afrikadey weeklong festival, met Mr. Abubaker around 2010. And he has known Ms. Mahdere since she was a little girl. Mr. Abubaker, he said, was a talented artist, but his poems increasingly included religious terms like Allahu Akbar – Arabic for God is great.

Mr. Dawodu worried about the teenager and tried to talk to him about it. “He was just too much into that fanaticism,” Mr. Dawodu said in an interview in Afrikadey’s basement office in Calgary.

Mr. Abubaker, in the program guide for the 2011 festival, described his poetry with a softer spin. “Speaking and writing about the injustice, that is what inspires me,” Mr. Abubaker said.

Ms. Mahdere described the “rush” she felt when singing in front of an audience. “You go on stage and at first you are nervous, but then you start to feel comfortable and you can really feed off the energy the crowd is giving you,” she said in her bio.

In the accompanying photo, Ms. Mahdere is wearing a denim vest, short skirt and fringed boots. Her Facebook profile photo, prior to being removed this week, featured a woman in black niqab with only her eyes visible.

The pair is now “married under Islamic sharia,” according to court documents.

Mr. Dawodu tells a story that shows how Ms. Mahdere’s religious transformation coincides with her romantic relationship.

Ms. Mahdere phoned him out of the blue last year with an odd request given she had once wanted to tour the world as a pop singer. She wanted her old pictures deleted from the Afrikadey’s website. “I don’t want my body to be exposed,” he recalls her saying.

In the midst of this conversation, an angry man grabbed the phone. “Listen, this is Naomi’s husband,” the man said, according to Mr. Dawodu. He, too, demanded the photos be removed.

“He was threatening me with violence,” Mr. Dawodu said. The husband never identified himself, but Mr. Dawodu recognized the voice as Mr. Abubaker’s.

Undermining “the integrity of the Canadian passport system”

The passport fraud case against Mr. Abubaker and Ms. Mahdere began with a phone call to the RCMP’s integrated national security team on Oct. 28, 2013. It was her mother.

“Ms. Mahdere’s parents were concerned that Mr. Abubaker and Ms. Mahdere planned to go to Syria to fight in the war,” prosecutor Steven Johnston told the court.

The mother’s theory was based on her concerns about “Mr. Abubaker’s perceived views on Islam.” She noticed her daughter’s debit card had been used twice on the same day at Passport Canada.

RCMP co-ordinated with Passport Canada. They found that Mr. Abubaker, Ms. Mahdere and their friend Mr. Omer all relied on the same guarantor as they sought to rush their passport applications. The RCMP spoke with the guarantor and determined he did not meet the requirements. He knew neither Ms. Mahdere nor Mr. Omer and had been out of contact with Mr. Abubaker, who pushed him to sign all three applications.

This was enough for police to charge the three with passport fraud. “What Mr. Abubaker and his cohorts did undermines the integrity of the Canadian passport system,” Mr. Johnston, the prosecutor, told the court. Such illegal acts could tarnish Canada’s reputation to the point that all citizens would “end up on visas to travel to the United States.”

Defence lawyers said the three had no intention of going to the Middle East. Instead, they had planned to attend an Islamic conference in London.

Ms. Mahdere addressed the court during her hearing, disputing any notion that she and her husband ever harboured “radical views.”

“We follow mainstream Islam, we don’t follow any fringe group or any extremes,” she said.

“Disrupting” suspects

Police in Canada often talk of “disrupting” potential terrorism suspects, language that makes civil libertarians nervous. Critics of the RCMP want police to proceed in open courts. They point out Mounties were faulted by separate judicial inquiries, in the 1980s and early 2000s, for unlawful conduct in their fight against terrorism.

“You don’t want some committee in some hidden office in Ottawa making these kinds of decisions that would interfere with someone’s right to liberty,” said Paul Cavalluzzo, a lawyer who acted as commission counsel during the 2004 Maher Arar inquiry.

But the Conservative government is promising Canadians that authorities will get better at preventing terrorism – and the term “high-risk travellers” (HRT) has gained currency, applied to cases in which officials are long on fears but short on evidence. A senior Mountie chairs Canada’s HRT “case management committee,” where security officials meet every few weeks to discuss who they need to keep off outbound planes.

Superintendent Wade Oldford, the RCMP’s top counterterrorism detective, says the committee was “born out of necessity,” especially after “the number of individuals brought to our attention leaving the country started to increase significantly as the events in Syria started to unfold.”

The police gold standard for any national-security investigation remains arresting, charging and prosecuting suspects in open court on Anti-Terrorist Act offences. But when they can’t reach that standard, they turn to other means. Supt. Oldford, in an interview, gave a hypothetical example.

“If we knew there was an individual discussing planning to leave Canada for Syria and we didn’t have enough information to lay a charge,” he said, “then is there something from a Passport Canada perspective they could do under their own legislation?”


Good for them ... when you cannot win "gold standard" a silver or bronze is still better than sitting on the sidelines and wringing our collective hands.
 
Now there's reports that ISIS is calling for their loser fan base in western countries to conduct strikes.  Canada is mentioned.

ISIS audio urges attacks on 'unbelievers' in Canada

Coalition members among those targeted in latest ISIS propaganda speech
CBC NewsPosted: Sep 21, 2014 9:48 PM ET|Last Updated: Sep 22, 2014 6:41 AM ET

In an audio recording distributed widely on social media Sunday, Islamic extremist group ISIS urged attacks on civilians in member countries of the U.S.-led coalition opposed to their violent spread through areas of Syria and Iraq.

In the nearly 42-minute long meandering propaganda speech uploaded to Twitter, ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani encourages Muslims to kill “disbelievers” in countries, including Canada, currently supporting American and French-backed military action against the group in Iraq “in any manner.”


"If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State … kill him in any manner or way however it may be,” said Adnani.

In a statement released Sunday evening, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's spokesman condemned the recording and said Canada will continue to support efforts to defeat ISIS.

"ISIS represents a threat not just to stability in the Middle East, but to global security," said Jason MacDonald.

"We will continue to work with allies to push back against this threat. Like our allies we will not be cowed by threats while innocent children, women, men and religious minorities live in fear of these terrorists."

Threats made in the audio recording mirror those ISIS has made in other propaganda releases, including during the grisly beheading videos of two American journalists, James Foley and Stephen Sotloff, and British aid worker David Haines.

The United States is building an international coalition to combat the radical Sunni Muslim group, which has seized swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria and proclaimed a caliphate in the heart of the Middle East.

U.S. and French warplanes struck Islamic State targets in Iraq and on Sunday the United States said other countries had indicated a willingness to join it if it goes ahead with air strikes against the group in Syria too.

Adnani blamed Western allies for instigating a war against the terrorist group, and said the ongoing air incursions against ISIS positions in Iraq will be “the final campaign of the crusaders.”

Address mocks Western leaders

Unlike other terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda, ISIS has established a widespread presence on social networks, using highly produced videos and audio recordings in an effort to recruit new fighters from abroad and intimidate those opposed to their murderous agenda.

In his statement, Adnani mocked Western leaders over their deepening military engagement in the region and said U.S. President Barack Obama was repeating the mistakes of his predecessor, George W. Bush.

"If you fight it (Islamic State), it becomes stronger and tougher. If you leave it alone, it grows and expands. If Obama has promised you with defeating the Islamic State, then Bush has also lied before him," Adnani said, according to the transcript.

Obama, who has spent much of his tenure extracting the United States from Iraq after its costly 2003 invasion and occupation, is sensitive to charges that he is being drawn into another long campaign that risks U.S. soldiers' lives.

While Obama has ruled out a combat mission, military officials say the reality of a protracted campaign in Iraq and possibly Syria may ultimately require greater use of U.S. troops, including tactical air strike spotters or front-line advisers embedded with Iraqi forces.
With files from Reuters

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/isis-audio-urges-attacks-on-unbelievers-in-canada-1.2773636
 
Makes me think of the SgtMaj from When We Were Soldiers as the NVA is about to over run the LZ

"Prepare to defend yourselves"

While I doubt the local "radicals"  are brave enough to carry anything out, it would be an extreme wake up call to our society if they did; and put the whole fantasy of multiculturalism in serious debate.
 
http://www.torontosun.com/2014/09/13/trudeau-opposes-revoking-canadian-passports-of-would-be-terrorists

Trudeau opposes revoking Canadian passports of would-be terrorists


By Jessica Hume, National Bureau, September 13, 2014

TORONTO - Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau confused holding a passport with citizenship - but doesn't think the government should be able to take away either from Canadians suspected of being involved in terrorism.

The issue of homegrown terrorists has been in the spotlight since the onslaught of terror group Islamic State (ISIS), which claims to have established a caliphate - or Islamic state - in parts of Syria and Iraq and which has had alarming success in recruiting Western youth to fight for its cause.

Speaking with reporters Saturday at the Liberal Party of Ontario's annual general meeting in Markham, Trudeau said he believes the Canadian justice system is currently well enough equipped to handle homegrown terrorism.

Legislation passed in June allows the federal government to strip citizenship from dual citizens who are convicted of terrorism at home or abroad.

Trudeau and his Liberals opposed the legislation. He has often expressed his concern the bill creates a "two-tiered" system of citizenship.

Asked for his thoughts on revoking or denying passports to would-be terrorists, Trudeau appeared to conflate citizenship with having a passport, but ultimately said he believes the Criminal Code is the best tool to fight terrorism.

"I think that a lot of Canadians, including very conservative Canadians, should be worried about the state willing to, and taking the power to, arbitrarily remove citizenship from people," he said. "That's a slippery slope that I don't think we want to go on."

The government for many years has had the authority to deny or revoke the passports of citizens who "assist in committing an indictable offence in Canada or a similar offence abroad," among other reasons.

British Columbia immigration lawyer Richard Kurland says that's what any "practically minded head of government" should do.

"You can guard the world against 'bad Canadians' by ensuring they can't leave our borders," he said.
 
Halifax Tar said:
Makes me think of the SgtMaj from When We Were Soldiers as the NVA is about to over run the LZ

"Prepare to defend yourselves"

While I doubt the local "radicals"  are brave enough to carry anything out, it would be an extreme wake up call to our society if they did; and put the whole fantasy of multiculturalism in serious debate.

That's a good way of putting it.  One of the thoughts that came to mind when I read the news of this video, calling for these fanatics, to attack random people in their own countries, is if it were to happen, would that be enough ammo to loosen the iron fist the various CFO's have regarding CCW permits.
 
Back
Top