Canada must clamp down on radical activities
The terrorist attack in the Canadian capital of Ottawa on Wednesday is proof that no country is really safe from the rotten ideology of militant jihad that has spread its poisonous tentacles far and wide. In the post-9/11 era, even as major cities like london, Madrid, Bali and Mumbai came under fire, Canada had remained largely unscathed — until now. On Wednesday, 32-year-old Michael Zehaf-Bibeau went on a shooting rampage in Ottawa, first gunning down a guard at the National War Memorial and then attacking the Canadian Parliament. In the process, he also threatened some of the country's most high profile leaders including Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Notably, the attack came less than 48 hours after another Canadian terrorist, 25-year old Martin Couture-Rouleau, ran down two soldiers in Quebec. Though the two attacks aren’t comparable in scale, the similarities between the attackers tell an eerie story that resonates around the world. In both cases, the attackers were young men who were born and raised in Canada; they had embraced radical Islamist ideology in recent years; both had previous records of petty crime; and both had sought to travel to Syria and fight with extremist groups there. There is no evidence yet of either them being part of any major jihadi group — they were possibly ‘lone wolves’, radicalised online. In this regard, they bear an uncanny similarity to the Tsarnaev brothers, the two Americans of Chechen-origin who bombed the Boston Marathon in April 2013. less than a month later in london, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, two young British men of Nigerian origin, hacked a British soldier to death in broad daylight. The killers had recently converted to Islam.
Connect the dots and a disturbing picture of global radicalisation emerges. What lies at the core of this problem — immigrants alienated from the mainstream, the narrative of victimhood that is commonly heard in Muslim communities, the lure of blood and gore for disillusioned youngsters, or perhaps some combination of all these factors — is for the sociologists to figure out and accordingly recommend corrective steps for the long term. In the short term, however, there is only one way to respond to this problem: Raise your guard and clamp down on any and all radical activities. For example, in the Ottawa case, Zehaf-Bibeau should have been on the authorities' watch-list, given the red flags around him. Also, security at Parliament and around the war memorial was inexcusably lax. Such a laidback approach may have been the hallmark of the Canadian way of life, but as Wednesday's attack shows, times are changing. In India, thankfully there haven't been any such incident yet (though there have been foreign-sponsored terror attacks galore), but there are reports of young Indians fighting in Syria and the black flag of the Islamic State being waved in Kashmir. The Ottawa attack is a reminder that none of us can be complacent.