Here is a lengthy article from The Star about five Somali youths (just like our former refugees turned jihadists) who Canadian security services believe have gone to Jihad training with Al Shabaab in Somalia. We mentioned the story earlier here as well.
They hung out at a Somali restaurant in “Little Mogadishu” [cute, they have a Little Mogadishu just like we do!] in the northwest corner of the city, played basketball together, and worshipped at a North York mosque.
The five friends, in their early to mid-20s, grew up and attended schools in Toronto. They spoke English and Somali. At least two of them were university students.
That is, until all five disappeared.
[….]
The overwhelming fear is that – like at least 20 young Somali-American men in Minneapolis who have disappeared in the past two years, and others from Australia, Sweden and Britain – the young men are en route to Somalia to fight alongside al Shabaab, an Islamist youth militia aligned with Al Qaeda.
Basically the story follows the same pattern as our Somali missing youths (five or six of ours are dead and accomplices have been indicted). There is one bit of news in here I didn’t know. We caught four trying to slip out of Chicago just two weeks ago.
But it hasn’t stopped other young Somali-Americans from trying to join the Shabaab. About two weeks ago, four young men, two under the age of 16, were stopped while trying to fly to Kenya through Chicago.
Just like in Minneapolis, the Toronto mosque is under suspicion.
In Toronto, the North York mosque where the five Toronto men worshipped has come under scrutiny since they disappeared.
Then there is the usual ‘crisis of belonging’ excuse that we hear all the time. Or, that the young men live in poverty and have no future. But, let me ask readers, what do all these young men have in common whether they are going to Pakistan (as in the DC Five) or to Somalia? The call of Islam, the Jihad and Islamic supremacism! And, to a man they are not poor, but well-educated with bright futures!
There are stories of how mothers have hidden their grown-up sons’ passports while other family members keep an eye on them. Some mothers are even trying to monitor their sons’ Internet activities.
It sounds over-the-top but Jibril said, “It’s an extraordinary situation.” There’s a fear there may be an exodus of more young men from Toronto as happened in Minneapolis, he said. Toronto is now home to almost 50,000 Somali-Canadians, he points out.
In Little Mogadishu, an area bounded by highrises along Dixon Rd. and between Kipling and Islington Aves., families run thriving restaurants and grocery stores. Yet Somalis remain one of the GTA’s most disadvantaged, scoring near the bottom in household income, employment and education.
Mohamed Gilao, executive director of Dejinta Beesha, a settlement agency, said young people find it difficult to integrate; some drop out of school and fall prey to crime, drugs and gangs. And now, it seems, radicals, too.
But the five missing men were raised in middle-class families and none had a run-in with police, say community leaders.
Warsame, the youth leader, talks of the crisis of “belonging” that plagues all young people from war-torn countries, especially if they still have relatives there.
That reminds me. I wanted to mention a few lines in a Ken Timmerman Newsmax article, here, to demonstrate how hopeless our war on terror is when this notion that poverty and not belonging begets radicalization—-that it has nothing to do with Islam.
Also addressing the conference was Clinton-era official Daniel Benjamin, the Obama administration’s counterterrorism czar.
Newsmax asked Benjamin how the Obama administration could wage war against global Islamic jihad if it didn’t mention the word “Islam.”
Benjamin said the administration felt it was “counterproductive” to look at global terrorism as primarily a Muslim phenomenon.
“Al-Qaida has appropriated texts of Islam, but there is nothing to be gained by describing this as an Islamic problem. That is not going to get us where we want to go,” he said.
He said the goal of administration policy was to “undermine the al-Qaida narrative” and to attack the sources of “real or perceived deprivation” by focusing on the “underlying conditions” that lead to extremism. “When children have no hope of education, and young people have no hope for a job, this pushes people to radicalization,” he said.
You gotta laugh! I just went back to see if the word “Islam” or “Muslim” appeared at all in the Toronto article. Only the word “Islamist” appears in describing Al Shabaab.
