20 YEARS AFTER 9/11, IS ISLAMIST SHADOW FADING?
ISLAMOPHOBES, INCELS CANADA'S NEW THREAT
When Islamist terrorists flew two planes into New York's World Trade Center and another into the Pentagon 20 years ago, Mubin Shaikh had an epiphany.
The 26-year-old had spent the previous five years as a would-be jihadist in the Toronto area but suddenly began to question the dark turn his young life had taken.
Soon enough, he was on the other side, working undercover for security services and helping prosecute more than a dozen young men planning a spectacular bombing campaign.
The “Toronto 18” case turned out to be the most dramatic in a string of arrests and incidents that for years made Muslim-extremist violence seem to be a clear and present danger in Canada, not merely a distant foreign menace.
But on the two-decade anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Islamist terrorism now appears more like an afterthought in this country. Barely any high-profile arrests or attacks have taken place in five years, as farright, Islamophobic and misogynistic violence dominates the terrorism conversation.
“There has been a big drop since the peak in 2015 or 2016,” says Amar Amarasingam, a Queen's University professor and radicalization expert.
As recently as 2019, a Public Safety Canada report still suggested individuals inspired by groups like ISIS and al-Qaida were among the principal threats.
But what the government now calls ideologically motivated violent extremism — including far-right and misogynistic attacks — has killed 21 Canadians since 2014, more than any other form of terror, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) said in April.
It is “our most deadly extremist threat,” Vincent Rigby, the prime minister's national security and intelligence adviser, stressed in a recent speech.
Analysts note that Islamist militants — who espouse a harsh brand of the religion rejected by the large majority of Muslims — remain highly active around the world and just took over a country of 38 million people. Last year, an avowed ISIS supporter bludgeoned to death a random bystander in Toronto.
But they suggest Canada has been somewhat immune to jihadism lately because of various factors, from better policing to weeding out of online propaganda and the end of the war against ISIS.
With his unique undercover experience, Shaikh cites a more intangible dynamic: Canada's relative embrace of diversity.
In countries like France and the U.K. — where Islamist terrorists continue to periodically wreak havoc — resentment lingers over a colonial past in Muslim lands, he noted. Even today, Muslims in those societies are more likely to feel alienated and unwanted, argued Shaikh, now a professor of public safety at Toronto's Seneca College.
“The social inclusion and upward mobility of Muslims here is much higher, much better,” he said. “There is still the perception that Britain is racist ... Muslim people (in Canada) are like, `We're actually not that bad off here.'”
Still, it would be wrong to write off the threat altogether, says Phil Gurski, a former CSIS terrorism analyst and author of The Peaceable Kingdom?, a new history of the phenomenon in this country.
Terrorism generally is a fairly minor “blip” in the story of Canada, he argues. But the Taliban's victory in Afghanistan has already invigorated jihadists and, despite the group's claims to the contrary, is likely to make the country a greater haven for extremists, he said. Extremists who could then turn their attention on us.
“The Jihadi forums are going ballistic, saying `We won again. We defeated the Americans, just like we defeated the Soviets. It proves once again that Islamism is superior to Western ideology,'” said Gurski. “I'm not convinced that the jihadi threat is nearly as minimal as people think it is in 2021.”
It was the 9/11 attacks that definitively woke Canada up to Islamist violence, a phenomenon fuelled by radical religious views and grievances over the West's treatment of Muslims.
But it had already become an issue 18 months earlier with a case that garnered relatively limited attention at the time, but took on new life after Sept. 11. Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian member of al-Qaida living in Montreal, was arrested in December 1999 while on his way to detonate a massive car bomb at the Los Angeles airport.
Canadian police and intelligence agencies intensified their focus on the problem and in 2006 arrested members of the so-called Toronto 18. The group had carried out paramilitary training in rural Ontario and aimed to kill the prime minister, blow up Parliament and a CSIS office and take MPs hostage.
Seven years later, another undercover operation resulted in charges against two men inspired by al-Qaida to plot the bombing of a Via Rail train. Three others in Ottawa were charged with cooking up another jihadist plot.
Then in 2014 came the two most high-profile Islamist-branded attacks that were not headed off by law enforcement. A Muslim convert in Quebec ran over two soldiers with his car, killing one, while two days later in Ottawa, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau shot dead a soldier on Parliament Hill before storming inside the Centre Block and dying in a shootout with security officers. Though he professed Islamist sympathies, ZehafBibeau also had a history of mental health problems.
A Somali immigrant angry at Canada's military involvement in Muslim countries stabbed soldiers in an army recruitment centre in 2016, but a terrorism conviction was overturned on appeal, the judges citing the attacker's schizophrenia.
As ISIS built its so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq, hundreds of Canadians left to fight with the brutal group.
A southern Ontario convert who had pledged allegiance to the so-called Islamic State, Aaron Driver, was shot dead in 2016 in the midst of planning a bombing. And a year later another ISIS supporter rammed people and stabbed a police officer in Edmonton.
But by then, the death toll in Canada had been far surpassed by extremists with much different motivations.
An Islamophobic attacker shot and killed six people at a Quebec City mosque in 2017.
A self-professed member of the misogynistic “incel” movement used a van to mow down and kill 10 people on a Toronto street in 2018. The next year a man claiming to be inspired by that stabbed and wounded a woman and her baby in Sudbury.
A 17-year-old youth was charged last year with killing one woman and injuring a second in a machete attack on a Toronto massage parlour that police labelled another incel-driven crime, and a type of terrorism.
Then in June a man in London, Ont., allegedly motivated by hatred of Muslims, pulled his pickup truck onto a sidewalk and ran over a Muslim family, killing four of them.
That certainly doesn't mean the jihadist threat has vanished worldwide. On the contrary, the Global Terrorism Index compiled by Australia's Institute for Economics and Peace identifies Islamist extremism as still the deadliest form of terrorism.
But for various reasons it has waned in Canada and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere in the West, said Amarasingam.
The end of the U.S.-led war against ISIS — a key motive for Canadians to join the cause — has helped, as has the imprisonment of existing foreign fighters, he said.
Closer to home, police got more adept at identifying and stymieing plotters, while popular social media platforms that at one time were a blank canvas for jihadists have managed to stamp out much of that material, said Amarasingam.
“The recruitment apparatus that existed in the online space is basically no more.”
But if the far-right in its various iterations is the rising threat, even it has a link back to 9/11, he suggests.
The attacks ignited racist and xenophobic sentiments that were exploited by extremists, said the Queen's professor, while in a strange way the success of al-Qaida, ISIS and the Taliban has been something of an inspiration itself.
“After what happened in Afghanistan last month, there's been a lot of praise (among white supremacists) toward the Taliban,” he said. “`Look what these guys are able to accomplish. How come we can't do the same with our movement?'”
More might be coming, in fact. Shaikh, who has advised various intelligence and police agencies in the U.S., said American sources tell him that joint investigations are ongoing into anti-government militias training in the woods of Western Canada.
“You have guys right now who I believe are much further along than the Toronto-18 guys were,” he said. “Why aren't they being arrested?”
He said he'd like to see those far-right groups prosecuted in the same way that law enforcement went after would-be jihadists in the years after 9/11.
In the end, said Shaikh, the forces that draw young Caucasian men into those outfits is remarkably similar to what motivated the suspects he helped expose 15 years ago.
“It's the exact same process, just expressed in a different cultural context,” he said. “One is talking about a caliphate, the other is talking about a white ethno-nationalist state ... They're mirror images.”
ONE IS TALKING ABOUT A CALIPHATE, THE OTHER IS TALKING ABOUT A WHITE ETHNO-NATIONALIST STATE ...
THEY'RE MIRROR IMAGES.