Blame Canada

I'm starting to worry about Canada.

Not all of Canada, really. There are two Canadas; the West, a place that any North Dakotan or Coloradan would recognize, and the East - Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes - which are vying to become part of Europe.

In more ways than one.

Canada has a nascent terror problem:

On September 11th, at Montreal’s now famous Conqaedia University, Muslim students bayed and whooped as the twin towers came down and spent the rest of the day celebrating or brawling with those boorish enough to be offended by their good cheer. Are those students as reliably passive in their anti-Americanism as Christopher Hume? Or would some of them be willing to serve as part of a support network for Islamists? Just small things, you know – providing references, loaning their addresses to applicants for driver’s licenses, etc. And, if you think some of them would, what percentage does it have to be before it becomes significant? Two per cent? Five? Ten?

Right now the Province of Quebec, for reasons best-known to jelly-spined federalists, controls its own immigration policy. That means new Quebecers come mostly from the francophone world – Haiti, Syria, Algeria, French West Africa. Furthermore, about a third of the “refugees” “processed” into Canada hail from terrorist-producing countries and they too tend to gravitate to Montreal, where they can blend into sympathetic local populations a mere half-hour from the US border. I was told by an RCMP guy recently that roughly three-quarters of Canada’s counter-terrorism effort is concentrated on the Montreal area.

What are these people doing?

Maybe lots:

Police found a large stash of weapons and explosives yesterday after an investigation of a suspicious minivan tied up traffic through downtown streets for several hours.

Montreal police sent in a robot to examine several pieces of luggage after SWAT team members in full protective gear investigated the vehicle.

They seized about 15 firearms, including automatic weapons like machine guns, and also found 90-135 kilograms of explosives.

Right.

Now read this:

Police couldn't say what type of explosives were involved, or who they belonged to. "We cannot confirm any organization at this point," said Alston.

Read that, and then go back to Steyn's piece on Quebec's weak, hands-off attitude on refugees from hotbeds of terror.

And then remember that Montreal is just hours from the northeast seaboard.

And then read this piece...:

A captured al-Qaeda operative has told Canadian intelligence investigators that a Montreal man who trained in Afghanistan alongside the 9/11 hijackers was responsible for the crash of an American Airlines flight in New York three years ago.

Canadian Security Intelligence Service agents were told during five days of interviews with the source that Abderraouf Jdey, a Canadian citizen also known as Farouk the Tunisian, had downed the plane with explosives on Nov. 12, 2001..."In discussions, Abu Abdelrahman mentioned AL QAIDA was responsible for the assassination of Massoud, the Northern Alliance leader," the report says. "According to the source, Abu Abdelrahman added that the 12 November 2001 plane crash (btb American Airlines flight 587) in Queens, New York was not an accident as reported in the press but was actually an AL QAIDA operation.

...which I stress still needs some confirmation.

So we have:

• A nation with a province that handles its own immigration, but a national government that both handles national foreign policy and is clogged with socialists that distrust the US
• Terrorists who have always been adept at exploiting weaknesses like Quebec's

So is Montreal to today what Athens was to the eighties?

Posted by Mitch at August 30, 2004 07:39 AM | TrackBack