Mohammad Momin Khawaja, a Pakistani-Canadian, has been convicted of terrorist crimes by a Canadian court and is likely to receive a stiff sentence on 18 November.| Khawaja has been convicted of seven offences, including that he was a bomb-builder; that he had trained as a terrorist; and that he had financed terrorism through an intermediary. |
Sentencing on the individual counts ranges from 10 years to life. Justice Douglas Rutherford of Ontario Superior Court found that Khawaja, whose day job was to fix computers for Canada's Foreign Affairs Department, felt it was his calling to do whatever he could to help a band of British Al Qaeda sympathisers whom he had met on the Internet. Last year, five of these men were convicted of plotting to bomb packed nightclubs and busy shopping malls around London, in hopes of creating a panic that would force the British government to pull its soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan, the Globe and Mail reports.
Tarek Fatah, co-founder of the progressive Muslim Canadian Congress, said in a statement that Khawaja's conviction comes "after this terrorist had been portrayed by Islamist groups in Canada as a victim of so-called Islamophobia and racial profiling". The conviction should serve as a wake-up call to self-styled leaders of the Muslim community who painted the picture of Momin Khawaja as a victim and the Crown as the enemy. May be Islamists in Canada and the West will now come to their senses and cease spreading a sense of false victimhood among young Muslim men.
Security experts are urging the federal government to crack down on Islamic extremists who may be preaching hatred in Canada's mosques, following the stunning arrest of 17 Toronto residents on terrorism-related charges. "That is, not allowing extremists to come here so easily, and asking those who are preaching extremism to get out of here -- making sure they are removed," Martin Collacott, an immigration analyst, told CTV News.
In the days following the London transit bombings at the hands of "homegrown" terrorists last summer, then-public safety minister Anne McLellan stepped forward with a message to the Canadian public: you are not ready. She suggested repeatedly that Canadians, having not experienced a terrorist strike in over 20 years, had become apathetic and weren't ready for an inevitable attack here. "I do not believe that Canadians are as psychologically prepared for a terrorist attack as I think probably we all should be," she said at the time. "I think we have perhaps for too long thought that these were things that happened somewhere else. But Canadians are not immune to what we see happen in London, Madrid, 9/11."
The majority of al-Qaeda recruits in Canada are being trained at home, not abroad, making the terror network a direct threat to Canada, according to a recently declassified intelligence report. The homegrown recruits are highly prized for their familiarity with Western societies, says the Canadian Security Intelligence Service report, obtained by the Toronto Star. The group once trained recruits in the hills of Afghanistan, but the camps were dismantled as the U.S.-led "war on terror" became firmly established.