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| Great White North |
| Pakistani factor in Canadian arrests |
| 2006-06-05 |
| This is from the main editorial in the Daily Times, a Pakistani paper we've all grown to know and love over the last several years. Amazing how an op-ed in a majority Muslim country is far more up-front about what's going on here than our own Western press. Twelve Pakistanis and Bangladeshis have been arrested in Canada before they could allegedly cause an explosion three-times bigger than the one in Oklahoma by the American terrorist Timothy McVeigh in 1995. The police recovered three tonnes of ammonium nitrate fertiliser from the suspects in a Toronto suburb. Some members of the group had allegedly attended a âtraining campâ north of Toronto where they had made a video imitating military warfare. The suspects had allegedly acquired weapons and decided upon their targets in Ontario. The group is being charged under new anti-terrorism legislation introduced into the criminal code in December 2001. It has been revealed that the explosive material was planted on the would-be terrorists as part of an elaborate sting operation by Canadian police. No matter. It is saddening that the Pakistanis were planning on using it for purposes of terrorism. A Bangladeshi angle has existed ever since the Afghan jihad and the training of Bangladeshi mujahideen in camps located in Afghanistan and on the Pak-Afghan border. On May 29, a Bangladeshi court sentenced two such trainees to death. The convicting tribunal ruled that âBangla Bhaiâ and Abdur Rahman were responsible for killing two judges in a bombing in the south of the country in November last year. The two were also believed to have been the masterminds of a series of other attacks, including a coordinated terrorist attack in August last year in which 500 tiny bombs exploded almost simultaneously in 63 out of 64 districts of Bangladesh. The two were veterans of jihad with credentials from a Karachi seminary and were now âTalibanisingâ Bangladesh. On Saturday, London police attacked a house with a 300-strong anti-terrorist posse to catch a Bangladeshi family making a âchemicalâ bomb similar to the one planned in Toronto, but thankfully found that its intelligence on the house was faulty. Earlier, two Muslims were indicted in London for trying to make a fertiliser bomb. This year London also put behind bars Abu Hamza Al Masari, the Egyptian-born former imam of the Finsbury Park mosque who had gained notoriety for his fire-and-brimstone preaching against the ânon-believersâ and for his links with terrorists. When detectives raided the mosque in January 2003 they found an arsenal of suspect items, including a stun gun, CS spray, chemical warfare-protection suits, blank-firing pistols, false passports, knives, radio equipment and an encyclopaedia of terrorism associated with Al Qaeda. Among the protesters against his arrest were Pakistanis carrying the banner of the Al Fuqara organisation whose chief in Pakistan was allegedly involved in the murder of Daniel Pearl. Canadians need to worry but anything they do will have a negative fallout for Pakistanis needing to do business or visiting their relatives in Canada. In 2004, Abdur Rahman Khadr testified in a court hearing in Canada that he and his father were linked to Al Qaeda. Khadr, a 21-year-old Toronto man who underwent weapons and explosives training at four camps in Afghanistan, said that he had given CIA agents the names of several Canadians who had trained at camps in Afghanistan. His father Ahmed Khadr was the central figure in the Canada-based Al Qaeda and raised huge amounts of money for Abu Zubayda, the Al Qaeda number three caught in Faisalabad, Pakistan. Ahmed Khadr himself was caught in Pakistan for blowing up the Egyptian embassy on orders from Al Zawahiri but was sprung from jail by the then Canadian prime minister after an appeal to his Pakistani counterpart. Ahmed Khadr was finally killed in Peshawar in 2003. Two of his sons have landed in Guantanamo Bay. Pakistan needs to worry too because of the image its Islamists are giving it. Pakistanâs ârich manâs preacherâ Farhat Hashmi, after making a lot of money off the penitent upper crust, has landed in Canada and bought property for her big Islamic institution. The school is the latest extension of Al-Huda International which Dr Hashmi founded in Pakistan in 1994 after graduating with a PhD in Islamic studies from the University of Glasgow. The school now counts more than 10,000 graduates and she has offered lectures to women in Dubai and London. She has moved to Toronto with her husband and family âin response to demand from young women in the city to gain a deeper understanding of Islamâ. For a nominal fee of $60 a month, students attend classes four days a week for five hours a day. The moderate Muslims of Canada call her Wahhabi because of her unbending doctrines. âHardlineâ political Islam has been leveraged in Canada with Saudi-Wahhabi funds. A 2004 study found that millions of dollars were funnelled to extremist Islamic institutions. It said Saudi Arabia spent hundreds of millions of dollars to fund 210 Islamic centres and 1,359 mosques around the world, including in Canada. It cited an official Saudi report in 2002 that stated âKing Fahd donated $5 million for the cost of an Islamic Centre in Toronto, Canada, in addition to $1.5 million annually to run the facility.â The Saudi factor has since faded away but the âzone of contactâ of Pakistanis with their Arab brethren remains the mosque, facilitated by the English language, not available as effectively in the Arab world where a large number of expatriate Pakistanis live. Pakistan is trying hard to clean up its international image so that it can get its economy to move forward and its trade gap to narrow. In Canada there is a strong moderate Muslim organisation, which protects the rights of Muslims while opposing the extremist elements among its own community. It has thanked the Canadian authorities for capturing the latest gang of alleged terrorists and for their vigilance, and assured them that âsuch elements do not represent the Muslim community or Islamâ. Its leader was fearful that âunless we eliminate from among our ranks people with such distorted thinking and utterly erroneous interpretations of Islam, I fear the future of Muslim communities in the West is riddled with uncertaintyâ. It hardly helps if the extremist in Pakistan is pacified but expatriate Pakistanis and Muslims remain radicalised because of the conditions in which they live and the hardline ideologies that are still being instilled in them by the proponents of Wahhabism. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #2 Amazing how an op-ed in a majority Muslim country is far more up-front about what's going on here than our own Western press Pak newspapers have always been quite upfront about the jihad. There is none of the "The Pakistan government denies the claim" stuff that you see in AP, Reuters, AFP. The Pak military support for the terrorist training camps is quite open and Pakistanis come across them, or know people in them, or donate money to terrorist groups quite frequently. It is no surprise that their newspapers report these facts. The Nobel Laureate VS Naipaul has commented that Indians can read the true history of the islamic conquest of the subcontinent, not in their own textbooks, but in Pakistani ones. Indian textbooks, written by marxist historians, present a whitewashed and sometimes fabricated account of history, inspired by marxist notions of class warfare and a desire to avoid anti-muslim sentiment. Pak textbooks are far more open. They reproduce actual historical accounts - noting with relish the numbers of temples burned, the numbers of hindus slaughtered and enslaved. |
| Posted by: john 2006-06-05 06:42 |
| #1 Oh Pakistan! The biggest pain in the ass of every civilized nation. If you deal with the devil, you have to pay for it. Arent we doing the same for this two mouthed snake? |
| Posted by: Annon 2006-06-05 02:44 |