Anti-terror advocate faces deportation

Jason Pippin was an idealistic 18-year-old when he went to a conference in Dearborn, Mich., and heard a speech about how the Indian army was treating Muslims in the disputed Kashmir region.

Believing it was his religious duty to help, the Muslim convert made his way to a camp in Pakistan run by Lashkar-e-Tayiba (LeT), an armed Islamist group that staged cross-border attacks against Indian forces.

Since then, the Toronto resident has disavowed extremism. He testified as a prosecution witness at a terrorism trial and has helped de-radicalize two former members of the terror group that plotted to bomb downtown Toronto.

But his militant youth has now come back to haunt him: he was recently ordered deported from Canada on the grounds he was a former LeT member and had engaged in subversion by force of the Indian government.

“In 1996, at the age of 18, Mr. Pippin went to Pakistan to engage in jihad,” the Immigration and Refugee Board wrote in its ruling. “He wanted to protect Muslims who were being victimized by Indian authorities. This idealistic goal, however, required him to potentially kill Indian soldiers.”

The case, unreported until now, touches on an issue likely to become more widespread as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant continues to suffer losses: what to do with ex-foreign fighters.

Officials have said there are already about 60 “returnees” in Canada. Among them are former ISIL members in Alberta and Ontario. Returning extremists mean “the presence of trained and connected terrorist actors within Canada,” according to a Green Paper released by the government as part of its public consultations on national security.

“After talking to him, it became crystal clear that education and maturity eradicate the extremist ideology in one’s mind,” Saad Gaya, a convicted member of the Toronto 18 terrorist group, wrote in a letter of support for Pippin.

A U.S. citizen married to a Canadian, Pippin is not facing any criminal charges but immigration authorities brought a case against him to the IRB alleging he was inadmissible to Canada because of his past militancy.

During two days of hearings held in Toronto in February, the 39-year-old spoke at length about his transformation from a trained jihadist who thought the 9/11 attacks were justified to a deradicalization advocate.

After converting at age 14, Pippin said he became enamoured with the idea of fighting in Bosnia. He said the “Islamic legal arguments” he was taught portrayed it as an obligation because Muslims there were being oppressed.

He missed his chance when the Bosnian conflict ended in 1995 but after meeting a conference speaker who invited him to Pakistan, he made his way from his Atlanta home to the compound of Markaz Dawat-ul Irshad. The hardline Islamic preaching group, based near Lahore, sent him by bus to a camp run by its armed wing, the LeT.

Eventually he was sent to the Indian border but nothing was happening and winter was coming so after three months he decided to go home.

He soon began raising money for a return journey with two friends. They arrived in April 1997 and Pippin was sent to the town of Kotli but once again he become frustrated. He realized that, because of the language barrier and the LeT’s suspicion of foreigners, he would never be allowed to fight in India.

He left Pakistan in August and travelled instead to Yemen to study Arabic, theology and literature, he testified. He returned to the U.S. in the summer of 1999 and became even more radicalized following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, buying into the argument they were justified and the victims were “collateral damage.”

In about 2003, Pippin underwent what he called a spiritual crisis. “I saw that the understandings that I had were untenable, that they were leading to nothing good. So I reviewed these understandings … And I came to a more traditional spiritualist understanding of the Islamic tradition.”

Beginning in 2006, his new calling became translating religious books into English that he said addressed “misunderstandings that lead to these extremist understandings and interpretations of Islam.” Among those works he translated was a 500-page religious edict against ISIL.

Pippin arrived in Toronto in 2009 and became active in the de-radicalization counselling scene. He made repeated visits to Millhaven prison in Bath, Ont. to visit Gaya and Saad Khalid, also a convicted Toronto 18 member.

They spoke about how they had justified their terrorism and “we went back and forth and showed that these understandings were wrong from the Islamic tradition itself, and convinced them that this is a betrayal of the true Islamic tradition,” he said.

Canadian authorities began to question Pippin in 2013. Although he denied ever being a member of the LeT, which in 2008 conducted the deadly Mumbai terrorist attack, the IRB ruled he was “fully committed to the group” and was willing to risk his life fighting Indian forces.

The CBSA has not yet removed him and he remains in Toronto.

Jason Pippin