Mubin Shaikh, the informant who foiled the Toronto 18 terrorism plot, on the need to act on Islamic self-radicalization

Source: macleans.ca

Paid RCMP informant Mubin Shaikh in 2009. (Colin Perkel/The Canadian Press)

That a shooter got past security at the Centre Block of Parliament, sending MPs and staff scuttling for their lives, came as a shock to Mubin Shaikh, the police informant who infiltrated the so-called Toronto 18 back in 2005.

That a Muslim raised in Canada might launch such a suicide mission didn’t surprise him one bit.

“I know how these people think and how they operate,” he says. “Yes, I’m shocked that they got past security. But this just shows us that we need to get our act together. We have all these discussions about this issue as if we’re inside a bubble. As public safety policy, it’s just disastrous.”

Shaikh says Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies have consulted him repeatedly in recent months, as the pattern of self-radicalization he witnessed nine years ago repeats itself among young Muslim Canadians—many spurred on this time by the militant group Islamic State. Governments are now scrambling, he says, to catch up to the new paradigm, where Canadian youths sign up to fight in Islamic State’s wars abroad. “From what we’ve just seen,” Shaikh adds, “it might be too late.”

Shaikh, a former Islamic activist, was invited to join the al Qaeda-inspired plot of the Toronto… read more at macleans.ca

(On the question of religious ignorance, many Muslim leaders agree: “These acts of terror have no basis in any religion,” leaders of the religious revival movement Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at Canada said in a statement Wednesday night. “Our thoughts and prayers are with the deceased and we offer our heartfelt condolences to the family and friends of the soldier who gave his life in today’s attacks in Ottawa as well as the soldier who was killed earlier in the week in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu”).