Riding a knife’s edge
Curbing radicalization while upholding democratic rights is no easy task Violent jihadism is not a human right. It is an act of war
When news broke that the Moroccan-born imam Hamza Chaoui was opening a Montreal centre to preach his fervent brand of Wahhabism to local youth, reaction was swift. From the Quebec legislature to Montreal city hall, politicians labelled him a danger and said he had to be stopped. “He’s an agent of radicalization, period,” Mayor Denis Coderre said this week.
The east-end borough where Mr. Chaoui planned to open his Ashabeb Centre invoked zoning rules to block the project, as politicians brushed aside concerns about possible infringements on free speech and freedom of religion. On Thursday, the leader of Quebec’s second opposition party, François Legault of the Coalition Avenir Québec, even called for a change to the provincial rights charter to prohibit religious preaching that contradicts “Quebec values.”
The latest attempt to counter religious fundamentalism in Quebec coincides with the introduction last week of federal anti-terrorism legislation inspired by the fatal attacks last October in Saint-Jeansur-Richelieu, Que., and Ottawa. Motivated by the same impulse as Quebec policy-makers, the federal Conservative government says it is protecting Canadians from violent jihadists. However, critics of the law warn the proposed protection carries a high cost in eroded civil liberties.
Mr. Chaoui, who had served as an imam at Quebec City’s Université Laval while studying engineering there, remained mostly under the radar until La Presse reported last week on his plans to open the Ashabeb Centre. He was prolific on Facebook and YouTube, offering his fundamentalist interpretations of everything from World Cup soccer matches (too much flesh on display) to women driving (not forbidden by the Koran and preferable to being crammed together with strangers on public transit).
He preaches that women require a guardian and that men must wear beards. In a Facebook posting last February, he wrote that democracy and Islamic law “are on two parallel lines that will never intersect.” Among his complaints about democracy was the fact that a non-believer or a homosexual can be elected to office.
When he announced the upcoming opening of the Ashabeb Centre and sought donations to cover renovations and rent, he described it as a place where “young people can come together to pray to Allah and study science.”
But Quebec politicians have suggested there would be something more sinister going on. Immigration Minister Kathleen Weil said Mr. Chaoui should be stopped because his writings are “dangerous” and “a deformation of our values.” After Mr. Coderre and borough mayor Réal Ménard announced that Mr. Chaoui would be denied a permit to occupy his centre, Mr. Ménard said he was motivated by security concerns. “We have information that leads us to understand that the imam is part of a network that is bigger than him,” he told Radio-Canada, declining to elaborate.
Julius Grey, a Montreal lawyer who has fought several high-profile religious-rights cases, said the attempt to shut Mr. Chaoui down violates his rights. “There is a particular danger with prior restraint, preventing people in advance [from speaking],” he said. “Preventing it in advance means you never know what would have been said.” If there are legitimate security concerns about a firebrand preacher, by all means assign police to infiltrate his mosque and monitor his activity, Mr. Grey said.
But he said silencing speech that is merely offensive, not dangerous, is unacceptable. “Our society doesn’t have an official ideology,” he said. “In our society, you can’t tell somebody that undemocratic or anti-feminist or anti-gay views cannot be expressed. They cannot be expressed in the form of hate, but short of hate they can be expressed, however deplorable they might seem.”
Indeed, nobody has unearthed an essay or sermon by Mr. Chaoui that could be seen to be endorsing violence or meeting the standard of criminal-hate speech. Mr. Chaoui, who did not respond to requests for an interview this week, announced on his Facebook page that he is considering legal action against the city. “I never called for hatred or violence against an identifiable group in my preaching or my courses,” he wrote. “On the contrary, I always encouraged young people to harmoniously integrate in Quebec society.”
Haroun Bouazzi, co-president of an association of Quebec Muslims in favour of secularism, said he could not disagree more strenuously with Mr. Chaoui’s interpretation of Islam. But his shocking comments should not make people lose sight of basic democratic principles.
“Either there is a security problem and we address it through the law,” he said, “or there is no security problem and we cannot allow politicians to silence people’s freedom of expression on the pretext they have information they do not want to share with us.”
Some of the criticism being voiced over authorities’ handling of Mr. Chaoui is echoed in the debate over Ottawa’s multi-pronged new anti-terror legislation, Bill C-51. For one thing, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been accused of overheated rhetoric singling out members of one religion. In announcing the bill on Jan. 30, he said it was needed because Canada is at war with jihadi terrorists who hate Canadian values. Apparently anticipating criticism from civil-liberties defenders, he said judicial oversight would protect constitutional rights. “Violent jihadism is not a human right,” he added. “It is an act of war.”
Craig Forcese, an expert in national security law at the University of Ottawa, identified at least two elements of the proposed law that threaten the protection of rights. New powers would allow the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to expand from intelligence gathering to actively disrupting threats to national security. The bill stipulates that actions causing physical harm, obstructing justice or violating an individual’s sexual integrity are prohibited, but beyond that, the spy agency could contravene the Charter of Rights and Freedoms or other Canadian law if it obtained a judicial warrant.
“So for the first time really, as best I know, in Canadian history, we’re going to have a court deciding, for rights other than search and seizure rights, that the intelligence service can violate the Charter,” Mr. Forcese said.
Canada, obviously, is not the only country grappling with the threat of jihadi terror, and Mr. Forcese said Bill C-51 avoided excesses seen elsewhere. For example, it stops short of sanctioning people for glorifying terrorism, as has been legislated in France. Following last month’s attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris, police questioned an 8-year-old boy who told his class that he supported the terrorists not Charlie Hebdo. Anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonné was fined for a Facebook post suggesting sympathy for the supermarket attacker.
The Canadian bill “still reaches very far, though,” Mr. Forcese said. Its provision making it a crime to advocate or promote a terrorist offence could sweep up people who were never at risk of turning to violence. He gave the hypothetical example of a Muslim participating in an RCMP program to counter extremism, who in front of other participants parrots the al-Qaida line that violence in defence of Islam is just and religiously justified. “That could be a crime,” Mr. Forcese said.
He said the new law will make it harder for police to reach out to the Muslim community to combat extremism. “We have very sweeping speech crimes at present,” he said. “What we’ve done now is essentially piled another speech crime on top of speech crimes. We’ve gone so far that we’re now going to target people with radical views in circumstances where it’s unlikely they’re going to make a turn to violence. Is it really useful for us to put them in jail?”
Aurélie Campana, a political science professor at Université Laval and holder of the Canada Research Chair on Conflicts and Terrorism, said countries around the world are seeking the proper balance between respecting freedoms and thwarting radicalization.
“We are all walking a tightrope, whether in Quebec in Canada or in other countries confronted by these problems,” she said. “I don’t think anyone has found a miracle solution yet.”
But turning the danger of radicalism into an emotional political issue is a recipe for increased social tensions, she said.
“In Canada, through multiculturalism, there is a relative social peace that is not found in other countries — in France, for example,” she said. “The risk is that this law indirectly calls into question the existing social balance, and that the Muslim community is stigmatized.”
Mr. Bouazzi said he hears regularly of young Montrealers leaving to join ISIS but argues that, in the short term, the best counterweight is to appeal to Muslim families. “They do co-operate,” he said, citing the recent example of a father who called in police after his son robbed a variety store to finance a trip to join the jihad.
He said a tough law that restricts freedoms is counterproductive. “We are really in front of a dilemma: Because we want to fight terrorism that does not agree with democracy, we’re actually destroying our democracy,” he said. “It’s very important to stay strong in these situations, because we don’t want them to win.”