TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS

Monday, February 19, 2007

From National Post February 17, 2007:

"About 50 invited guests and a few gatecrashers gathered for eight hours last Sunday at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Toronto to pose questions to the city's top RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service counterterrorism officials. It did not begin well.

The first speaker, Ahmed Motiar, started off by sharing his curious theories of the 9/11 attacks, claiming that "Muslims were not involved and seven of the alleged 19 hijackers are alive and well!"

Then Cheryfa Jamal complained about a Canadian military exercise she said was held outside her children's Islamic school. (Her husband is one of the 18 men charged with belonging to an al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist group that was allegedly plotting truck bombings in downtown Toronto.)

"You're asking us here to have a dialogue, to bring our communities together, yet this is the kind of actions that we're facing every d ay," she said.

"My children came home upset. They thought the Americans had landed."

[...]

The CSIS outreach efforts have four goals: to ensure the various communities understand what CSIS does; to get a better sense of their concerns and try to address them; to develop an ongoing dialogue between the communities; and to recruit.

But the Toronto round table meeting highlights the barriers that officials still face three years on...

"How long are you going to vent for?" said Salma Siddiqui, a Muslim who sits on the round table. She said she is frustrated that government officials who come to meet community members have to listen to insults, finger- pointing and 9/11 conspiracy theories rather than introspection and constructive suggestions.
[...]
The Canadian Arab Federation complained about Canada's Middle East policies and the "Muslim brothers" being deported for terrorism. It wanted to know whether CSIS was investigating Christians, Jews and Canadians serving in the Israeli Defence Forces.

A speaker accused the RCMP of instigating last summer's terrorist plot by planting an informant inside the cell.

Another complained that police had used "Hollywood action movie" tactics to arrest the Toronto terror suspects. "The humiliating way which has been used in arresting them, it really hurts the community. It annoys us and it make Muslims feel we are unfairly targeted."

[...]

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Labels: 9/11, canada

| Posted at 02:39 | PERMA-LINK |

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