{"id":6331,"date":"2015-12-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/2015\/12\/01\/terrorism-in-canada\/"},"modified":"2015-12-01T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-12-01T00:00:00","slug":"terrorism-in-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/2015\/12\/01\/terrorism-in-canada\/","title":{"rendered":"Terrorism in Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n\tOn October 20, 2014, 25-year-old Martin Couture-Rouleau slammed his car into a group of soldiers in the parking lot of a Canada shopping center in<br \/>\n\tSaint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, killing two. In the pursuit that followed, he was shot and killed when he got out of his wrecked car and brandished a<br \/>\n\tknife. Then two days later Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, age 32, shot and killed a reservist standing guard at the war memorial in Ottawa. He then quickly made his<br \/>\n\tway to the Parliament, storming in with rifle in hand. One staffer managed to push the barrel down, suffering a shot in the foot. Then during a firefight,<br \/>\n\tthe sergeant-at-arms shot and killed him. Members of Parliament were cowering behind barricaded doors during the attack.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tThe two men had some things in common. Both were converts to Islam in an extreme form. Both, Zehaf-Bibeau more than Couture-Rouleau, had mental health,<br \/>\n\tpetty criminal, and substance abuse problems. Zehaf-Bibeau sometimes committed crimes in the hope that he might shake his addictions while in jail.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tCouture-Rouleau converted in 2013, while Zehaf-Bibeau said, in one version, that his conversion occurred seven years ago. He was raised as a Catholic. His<br \/>\n\tparents are divorced. Zehaf-Bibeau\u2019s father is at least nominally Muslim. He owned a bar and other property in Montreal. The son\u2019s Islam appears to be at<br \/>\n\tleast somewhat influenced by Evangelical Christianity. He told people in the homeless shelter where he was staying that they should pray five times a day<br \/>\n\tbecause we are living in the end-times. Both men were lone wolves, not affiliated with any group, though the Islamic State was happy to claim them.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tMuslims in Canada have generally been horrified by the acts of this pair of converts. Zehaf-Bibeau disrupted services in the al-Salaam Mosque in Burnaby,<br \/>\n\tBritish Columbia, because he did not like the mosque\u2019s interfaith outreach. They told him to go elsewhere. In Ottawa a group of imams and other Muslims<br \/>\n\tcarried a wreath to the war memorial to express condolences for the death of the reservist who was shot and killed. One imam pointed out to the reporter<br \/>\n\tfrom the Ottawa<em> Citizen<\/em> that in 2005, 120 Canadian imams issued a declaration condemning terrorism.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tLike the United States, Canada has had its share of fanatical killers. In 2012 Richard Henry Bain, an English-speaking Quebecer who feels repressed by his<br \/>\n\tFrench-speaking counterparts, shot and killed a guard at a convention of the separatist Parti Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois. On June 4, 2014, Justin Bourque, whose views<br \/>\n\tmirror those of right-wing U.S. survivalists, shot five Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers in Moncton, New Brunswick, killing three of them.<br \/>\n\tMuslim extremists in Canada have done far less damage than other extremists have.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tThe actions of these two converts are leading the Conservative government to introduce new anti-terrorist legislation, this despite the fact that<br \/>\n\tprovisions that they are considering already exist as part of an anti-cyberbullying bill. For example, the bill provides for greater cooperation with<br \/>\n\tforeign intelligence organizations and increased powers of surveillance. Incidentally, that bill has been criticized by the Canadian Bar Association,<br \/>\n\topposition parties, and the Canadian Privacy Commissioner as being overly intrusive.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tThere are other kinds of measures that have been proposed to deal with the problem. For example, it has been argued that there should be a common command<br \/>\n\tstructure for security on Parliament Hill, where there are now four separate security forces. Justice John Major, who headed the Air India bombing inquiry<br \/>\n\tin 1985, proposed in his report that there should be a single national security advisor. Alex Neve, of Amnesty International, called for better oversight<br \/>\n\tof security operations, citing the case of Canadian Maher Arar, falsely labeled as a militant extremist and transferred from the United States to torture<br \/>\n\tin Syria. Then there was the incident in 1972 when the RCMP burned down a barn in Quebec because they thought that there was to be a meeting there between<br \/>\n\tQuebec separatists and members of the U.S. Black Panthers.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tIn any case, it is extremely difficult to stop lone-wolf terrorists before they act. And when Muslim extremists are caught and imprisoned, the Conservative<br \/>\n\tgovernment is giving their reformation less-than-adequate attention. Imam Yasin Dwyer, who was a full-time prison chaplain, developed a program to aid in<br \/>\n\trehabilitation. He resigned from his position because the government put the chaplaincy out to competitive bidding.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tJustice Minister Peter MacKay is toying with the idea of making it illegal to glorify terrorism. Such a law might prove embarrassing for his government.<br \/>\n\tPrime Minister Stephen Harper took a large group of rabbis and others with him on an official visit to Israel. One person was a member of the Jewish<br \/>\n\tDefense League, listed by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization that has promoted murders and attempted murders in the United States. In Israel,<br \/>\n\tBaruch Goldstein, a member, slaughtered Muslim worshippers in Hebron. If Jewish Defense League members go to his shrine or in other ways glorify him, would<br \/>\n\tthey be prosecuted?<\/p>\n<p>\n\tIn apparent reaction to the killings, mosques have been vandalized. A man was caught on camera on October 29, 2014, smashing windows in an Ottawa mosque.<br \/>\n\tIn Cold Lake, Alberta, someone smashed windows and painted slogans on the outer wall, telling Muslims to go home. In response, a business owner in town put<br \/>\n\ta sign in his window: \u201cLove thy neighbor.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\n\tOver the November 8, 2014, weekend, there were four attacks on Quebec mosques, three in and around Quebec City. Someone plastered posters on the front<br \/>\n\tdoors of the three mosques with an inscription that roughly translates, \u201cIslam, out of my Quebec.\u201d They were signed by \u201cQu\u00e9bec Identitaire,\u201d Quebec<br \/>\n\tIdentity. The fourth incident occurred at the Centre Culturel al-Imane, in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, the town where Couture-Rouleau drove his car into the<br \/>\n\tsoldiers. Someone threw a rock through a window.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tThere are other ways than what MacKay proposes to respond to Muslim extremists. Three Muslim university students in Ottawa are producing a YouTube program<br \/>\n\tridiculing the Islamic State (otherwise known as ISIS). Their program has viewers in Canada and in the Arab world. Then there is the pungent advice of<br \/>\n\tWesley Wark, a Canadian expert on intelligence and security: \u201cTake a deep breath and practice normalcy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On October 20, 2014, 25-year-old Martin Couture-Rouleau slammed his car into a group of soldiers in the parking lot of a Canada shopping center in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, killing two. In the pursuit that followed, he was shot and killed when he got out of his wrecked car and brandished a knife. Then two days later<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[309],"tags":[141],"class_list":["post-6331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-november-december-2015","tag-november-december-2015"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6331\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}