Both of John Nuttall's hands shivered with adrenaline, sweat beading from his palm lines like two dammed rivers barricaded within his clenched fists. In manic, “hokey and harebrained” detail, Nuttall propounded ideas ranging from the hijacking of a nuclear submarine to launching rockets at a Vancouver Island military base (Omand). Searching his name on Google Images—algorithmically organized to create somewhat of an impromptu photo album complete with a haunted nostalgia for what's dead in another's life—paints a horribly incomplete retrospective of a friendly, yet tragic, naivety. In most of the photos, his hair is short and casual. In any average setting, he wouldn't notably stand out from a crowd. In others, taken covertly during the RCMP sting operation (Omand), his hair is gruff and Mohammedan, even Christ-like. In the backdrop is a woman—garbed in a black hijab—gazing outward with the same glazed expression of deadpan naivety etched across her face. Amanda Korody is the second half to this husband and wife duo, both of whom—egged on by a ring of undercover police officers posing as big-whig international terrorists—conspired to detonate pressure cookers stuffed with C4 explosives in front of the B.C. Legislature buildings in Victoria, BC, on July 1st, 2013 (Omand). Both Nuttall and Korody were recent converts to Islam, sporting a childishly binary worldview in which they believed they were involved in a holy war with the West. Their plan ultimately failed, as it was actually a plan concocted almost entirely by the undercover officers involved. Though both husband and wife existed in delusional idealism and newly adopted dogma, it will now never be known if their violent aspirations were truly preexisting, or simply the result of the entirely intentional encouragement they received from the state. In either regard, the case as to who's the real terrorist in this situation presents itself as an easy origin point for the thesis of this essay. In recent years, Canada has become a greater source of national and international terrorism due to numerous diverging factors, not least of which has been the spectacle of regressive Conservative politics on the international and domestic stages fueling so-called 'eco-extremism,' as well as Islamaphobia and the misled persecution of predominently non-Anglo cultures in a country built as a settler state.
In early 2014, a surprisingly adept and well-equipped group of Wahhabi militants in Iraq and Syria—the local branch of the al Qaeda brand—split with their forefathers and founded the so-called “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant,” conceding to the world that they, and they alone, were the rightful heirs to a model of Islamic imperialism based on the Rashidun Caliphate (Mandhai) of the 7th century (Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica). Thus was born a modernised medievalism relying on globalised economics as well as global communications to both fund itself, and create a public relations (or, propaganda) umbrella under which it wields the unprecedented ability to attract the disenfranchised as recruits from all corners of the globe. One such corner has unfortunately been western Canada in the form of both British Columbia and Alberta, a potent example of which is Collin Gordon, a former student of Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC, who—alongside his brother, Greg Gordon, both originally from Calgary—fled to join ISIS in the summer of 2014. Both recent converts to Islam as Nuttall and Korody had been, they were brought into the ISIS enfold via a recruitment ring active in the Calgarian Muslim community at the time (CBC News). Both Nuttall, Korody, and these brothers exmplify how reactions to the proselytizing project of Western modernity are not an overseas process long distilled and removed from Canadian society, but something which hops back and forth regardless of physical distance, allowing a proverbial form of geopolitical and historical 'karma' to project its inevitable effect directly back on to us at home and abroad. The challenge for the communities affected by these unforeseen departures will be to discourage and—if necessarry—physically block other individuals from following their example. The unfortunate reality is that there is not enough of a moral grounding to Canadian society lending itself to a halfway-decent example of anything that could be considered a cultural or political antithesis to extremist ideology. In fact, the genuinely well-intentioned colonial manifestation of Christian religious extremism—the residential schooling system—only came to a final end in 1996 (Fisher). As written by Alan Fisher in a June 3rd blog-post for Al Jazeera: “[a]cross Canada, for more than 100 years, children of the indigenous population [...] were taken away as part of the policy of “aggressive assimilation”, or as one survivor put it, "They tried to beat the Indian out of us.””(Fisher). During as well as because of this process of “aggressive assimilation” (Fisher), it has been found that at least 4,000 abducted native children died from such causes as neglect, severe beatings, and malnutrition; but this is only a conservative estimate—one that will continue to grow as research deepens (Kennedy).
As a founded settler-state explicitly established on the repression, conversion, and attempted eradication of native North American's and their cultures, Canada—along with most of the colonial “New World”—has made strides in terms of democracy and general equality, though within the ideologically violent framework of predominant preference for Anglicized culture and appearances. Even in 2012, during the introduction of a new series of banknotes, a focus group charged with evaluating the graphical content of the bills reportedly found that a woman shown to be looking through a large microscope on the new $100 note appeared too 'ethnically Asian.' As such: “[t]he [Bank of Canada] immediately ordered the image redrawn, imposing what a spokesman called a "neutral ethnicity" for the woman scientist who, now stripped of her "Asian" features [...] appear[s] to be Caucasian” (CBC News). Though attempting to veil such blatant partiality as objectively neutral, the racially Anglicized tilt of this decision is obvious. In reality, an acceptance of “Canada” as the petri dish of the world should come as the natural instinct of justice in those not deceived by the fiction of national identity, as both the racial and cultural precedents for this entire continent were established long before the arrival of European colonists or the colonial establishment of democracies not at all unlike that of ancient Greece: with suffrage extended only to men— and, in the case of both the American Revolution as well as the democratization of Canada, only white men of European origin (University of Texas at Austin). Though the scope of democracy both north and south of the border increased dramatically during the 20th century, unwarranted wars of terror (claiming to fight terror), deliberate ignorance of environmental responsibilities, and painfully blunt movements towards totalitarian democracy—often justified by the phantasmagorical threat of a specifically 'jihadist' terrorist attack—has left Canada (as well as the United States) with little in the way of moral validity. Contrary to the popular idiom, you cannot fight fire with fire without the blaze growing exponentially larger and slipping out of control. The delusions of Western universalisms may have begun the fire, but a plethora of delusional reactionaries—such as militant Islamism—believed they could fight this fire with their own flame. Unfortunately, the West's claims to wisdom, tolerance, and intelligence didn't stop it from responding with further fire—physically, via the careless invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan, during the latter of which at least 174,000 civilians died as a direct consequence of the war according to statistics compiled as of April 2014 (Costs of War); and legally, via dystopian legislation such as the U.S. Patriot Act and Canada's newly implemented Bill C-51.
Canada's international regression on the world stage under the Harper Government—such as our unilateral withdrawal from the Kyoto Accord and the enforced removal of Islamic hijabs in courts of law—has worked to polarize activists concerned with social and environmental issues to such an extent as to make them vulnerable to radicalization; it has also worked to marginalize already mentioned minority groups such as Canadian Muslims, paving the way for self-justified extremism. Bill C-51—introduced following the inspired lone wolf attacks in Ottawa and Quebec (Reuters)—came as hazy, verbose legislation aimed at widening the state's room for interpretation. This came as the culmination of years of prior negligence and polarization under which the dialogue of democracy turned into a desperate attempt by activists to shout C-51's existence from the rooftops. Undoubtedly, it has contributed to a deepening of tensions usually resulting in said marginalizing circumstances and thus tremendously increases the potential for radicalization across the board. Bill C-51 (and all similar legislation) effectively adds oil to a hot bed of coal: it's boiling, dirty, and now it's on fire. It seems obvious that Parliament Hill treats terrorism and its omnipotent phantom as a cultivatable tool for political leverage, using C-51 to mow the lawn and keep the semi-manufactured crisis 'presentable,' avoiding a removal from the roots as this would make the declining acceptance of the settler-state further open to offensive approach.
In the end, the immediate threat of ruthless expansion and genocide by groups such as ISIS is nothing the world can reasonably close one eye to without risking the loss of both. It isn't strange that we should desire to avoid and combat such an unprecedented global phenomenon that grows with every passing day, leaving its fingerprints—both physical and electronic—across the breadth of the globe. The danger comes in the form of the precedent we have set in our conceited perception of righteous superiority, toying with the world in a way not at all unlike the 'terrorists' we so quickly denigrate as almost less-than-human in their barbarous sadism. Canada is built on the destruction of indigenous populations; it is founded on a moral base capable of such horrors as physical and cultural genocide. It's a country founded on a land very openly stolen from others, victim of an expansionism so irrationally absurd that its claimed national landmass is greater than the entirety of the European continent. If we're to lend ourselves any sense of moral validity—not only on the world stage, but also historically—we must set a new precedent. There must be a full capitulation to the demographic and historical realities of Canada by the political settler-structure, one which will allow every culture with a stock in Canadian society the freedom to grow and evolve on an equally recognized basis. Doing so will prevent the development of marginalization and will thus dramatically reduce radicalization and its attractiveness thereof. In setting this new precedent, we leave nothing to retaliate against, pulling the rug out from under the extremists' feet as any validation in their rhetoric against Canada dims until it disappears entirely. Both of John Nuttall's hands shivered with adrenaline. “Whose plan is this?” an undercover officer—posing as an international terrorist—asks in regard to the proposal to place pressure cookers stuffed with C4 in front of the B.C. Legislature buildings in Victoria. “It's kind of all of our plan," Nuttall replies, referring to the other undercover officers involved in the sting (Omand). The same undercover officer later writes off Nuttall's plan as “hokey and harebrained” (Omand), seemingly unaware of the perversely extreme nature of his own operation.
You can't fight fire with fire unless you're ready to burn yourself in the process.
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