Foreign Affairs Committee on Feb. 3rd, 2015

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Good morning.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), this is our study of Canada's response to the violence, religious persecution, and dislocation caused by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL. We will get started.

I want to explain the way that we're going to work with our witnesses today.

Right now, joining us here in Ottawa, is Tarek Fatah, who is a founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress. Welcome, sir. We're glad to have you here today.

Sitting next to him is Salim Mansur, associate professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario. Salim, welcome to you, sir.

And joining us by video conference is Sami Aoun, who is a full professor at the University of Sherbrooke.

Mr. Aoun can only be with us for the first hour. We will go quickly to get another witness who will join us by video conference from Virginia.

We'll go with our three opening statements, and then we'll start our rounds of questioning. As I said, after one hour we will change our video conference and then continue with the questions. I mention that so that if there are any questions for Mr. Aoun, we will make sure we do that in the first hour.

Mr. Fatah, we're going to start with your opening statement. Then we'll move over to Mr. Mansur and finish with Mr. Aoun.

Welcome, sir. I'll turn the floor over to you.

[Tarek Fatah, Founder, Muslim Canadian Congress]

Thank you very much.

Members of the committee and ladies and gentlemen, thank you for inviting me to share my views on a subject that's very close to the hearts and minds of those of us who are Muslim Canadians and who came here to flee the hell that's unfolding in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, or wherever.

Unfortunately, we Muslims are a majority community. Some of us are canaries in the mine. We have been warning the democratic world, whether it was India, Israel, Australia, or Canada, of the danger of Islamo-fascism, Islamism, radical Islam, or whatever one wishes to define this death cult as, and whose prime victims, by the way, are fellow Muslims.

Unfortunately, very few in the west have cared to admit that they do not understand the challenge they face and, in their overconfidence, have at times been taken to the cleaners by those who seek the end of civilization as we know it. Allow me to share the words of America's top general in charge of special forces units in the Middle East and whose task is to combat the self-declared Islamic State that's the ISIS terror army. Major General Michael Nagata is reported to have twice confessed last year that the Obama administration has no idea what the group ISIL or ISIS is all about. He's quoted as having told a group of outside experts during a conference call in August, “We do not understand the movement, and until we do, we are not going to defeat it. We have not defeated the idea.” Then he said, “We do not even understand the idea.”

The continued popularity of ISIS in Iraq and Syria and throughout the Arabian Peninsula, and in South Asia as well as Central Africa, has perplexed American military strategists. Some have compared the death-seeking jihadists of ISIS to the militant animal rights activists or environmental lawbreakers, while many apologists of Islamism try to trivialize the dangers we face by comparing ISIS to Timothy McVeigh, the cultists of Waco, Texas, or even the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Italian Red Brigades of the 1960s.

ISIS, in fact, is a far more deadly foe. That is what General Nagata as a military man found wanting in the briefing he received from those who are highly paid consultants and ensure that presidents and prime ministers in many western countries keep repeating the mantra that Islam is a religion of peace and that Islam has nothing to do with Islamism. If General Nagata found ISIL's capacity for rallying teenage and twentysomething Muslim men and women to its cause baffling, he was not the only one, though I must say he's probably the only one honest enough to admit it.

I'm here to thank the Canadian government for the measures it has taken to fight the good fight. I'm not a Conservative and have never voted Conservative, but my critique comes from the left. Of course, we are aware that we in Canada are a mid-sized power and cannot steer the ship of counter-jihad on our own, and at a time when the United States is paralyzed by the inaction or ill action of two successive presidents from both sides of the political rainbow, both of whom have shown abject subservience to the primary power that has given birth to the death cult of Islamo-fascism. Be it Boko Haram, the Taliban, al Qaeda, or ISIS, it's the same halal wine in different bottles, meant to confuse all of us in the west.

On the surface, these countries—or this country that I'm referring to—are our allies, but in reality, it is the opposite. My finger of accusation is pointed at the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its foundational doctrine of what is popularly known as Wahhabism of the 18th century, but which in reality is centuries older. It is based on a very simple idea, which is that life on earth is a fleeting phenomenon and real life actually begins after death. They say that this world is best treated as an airport transit lounge where we wait to catch the flight to our final destination that's paradise—but only after an end-of-time scenario that will not happen until the entire world is ruled by a single Islamic caliphate and after even the stones and trees will join Muslims in an effort to wipe out non-Muslims, especially Jews.

To some of you this may sound like a kindergarten fantasy, but trust me, ladies and gentlemen, this is not because of a lack of education; I have never met an uneducated or illiterate jihadi. No farm or factory worker has blown himself up. It's the educated who are leading ISIS. It was a student of the prestigious London School of Oriental and Asian Studies who beheaded Daniel Pearl when beheading was not such a common phenomenon. It is Islamist Ph.D.s from Oxford, UCLA, U of T, and McGill who believe in the supremacist and racist view of the world. It is Islamic studies departments of Ivy League universities where the most radical of Islamists prowl. For them, this quest for Islamist supremacy on earth as a precondition to the end of times is a serious matter of fate and politics.

Without confronting these academics and imams of Canada's mosques, those who lead and those who lead Islamist organizations, and having a vigorous debate that denigrates the doctrine of armed jihad and rejects sharia law as outdated and unfit for a nation-state, we will not succeed no matter how many men and women we send overseas to defeat ISIS. However, having said that, not sending any military to fight this evil will be seen as an act of surrender by our enemies.

Members of Parliament, the war against malaria can only be won if you drain the swamps where mosquitoes breed. Shooting down one mosquito at a time will not work. I will suggest to you five steps that need to be taken in conjunction with our war effort in the Middle East.

One, we take away the charitable status of mosques where imams pray every week, in every mosque, for Muslim victory over non-Muslims.

Two, we refuse to permit mosques that put women at the back of the bus and that preach death for gays.

Three, we suspend immigration from Somalia, Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia until we are assured that the men and women coming here are committed not to the Muslim Brotherhood of Shabaab, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Jamaat-e-Islami, but to a separation of religion and state, gender equality, liberal democracy, and, dare I say, social democracy and the equitable use of a nation's resources for common development.

Four, Canada initiates with its allies work for the expulsion of Turkey from NATO. We are in a situation where our most secret endeavours are monitored by our worst of enemies right where we plan.

Finally, and above all, we need to send a message that Canada will not move back to medieval times simply to accommodate a group of people desiring to live in a medieval environment. To do this, may I suggest we follow what the French have done and ban the burka in public. Only when we are seen as being strong and not afraid of the terrorists of ISIS and the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood will our troops be successful in defeating the enemy. Otherwise, the failure of America in Iraq and Afghanistan awaits us.

War without understanding the enemy can only inflict casualties and damage on the enemy, leaving it on a higher moral ground amongst its own base. But when war is waged as part of an ideological offensive that exposes the fascists and hate-mongers for who they are, we will succeed, just as we overcame the Nazis in the Second World War and the Communists in the Cold War.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much, Mr. Fatah.

We'll now move over to Mr. Mansur.

[Dr. Salim Mansur, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Western Ontario, As an Individual]

Mr. Chairman and honourable members, I want to begin by thanking you for inviting me to speak to you as a Canadian who happens to be a Muslim.

As an academic with a focus on international relations studies and area studies of the Middle East and south and southwest Asia, I have been writing and speaking as a public intellectual on matters related to what the late Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard so presciently warned about in his book The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington’s warning was made in the early 1990s. More than a dozen years after radical Muslim terrorists attacked New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the western powers, including Canada, remain in various stages of denial of the war that Islamists declared against the west and have been waging across the Arab-Muslim world.

The issue at hand is Canada’s role as part of the U.S.-led coalition to degrade the Islamist terrorist organization ISIL, or IS. Operation Impact, while politically and militarily significant, is nevertheless relatively small and of limited duration. I support the mission. I laud Parliament for authorizing this mission. We need to be cautiously realistic, however, given the scope and terms of the mission. There have been some concerns and criticisms raised in regard to how the mission has handled its task within a fluid situation of an ongoing war in the region, and these, therefore, in my view, lack credibility.

Realism demands a more forthright assessment of not only this mission but also beyond it, an assessment of the manner in which Canada has evaluated the nature, capacity, and objectives of radical Islam, political Islam, or the Islamist threat regionally and globally. Canada is not alone in demonstrating a lack of coherent assessment of the threat of Islamism, or political Islam. The striking fact is that a coherent threat assessment of Islamism is missing in the foreign policy of all the major western powers. There is reluctance, even fear, to describe who the enemy is, against which the western powers, including Canada, have deployed military force.

ISIL is not simply a terrorist organization that has carried out with shocking audacity heinous atrocities in the region historically known as the Fertile Crescent. ISIL is not simply the most recent version of Hulagu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, the Mongol leader of a ravaging army that laid waste to this region and its capital, Baghdad, in the 13th century. ISIL, or now IS, gleefully, capriciously, and mockingly has gone on a rampage, destroying religious sites of immense historical interest and systematically plundering, raping, and slaughtering men, women, and children in ancient communities of Christians, Yazidis, and minority sects in Islam. We are witnessing genocide not for the first time in this region.

ISIL is fuelled by the ideology of Islamism. We need to fully grasp the meaning and objective of this ideology, as we in the west once did when confronted with Soviet Communism. This is essential if we are to put forward a coherent policy instead of band-aids to contain and defeat what ISIL represents. Islamism is the ideology of armed jihad, of waging war by any means available to enforce sharia rule in Muslim majority countries and seek sharia compliance by democracies in the west for Muslim immigrants.

ISIL is the latest incarnation of Islamism, the ideology of political Islam constructed by the Egyptian founder of Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna, in the 1920s, and by the south Asian founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, Abul A'la Maududi, in the 1940s. In effect, Islamism is the third surviving totalitarian movement from the 20th century that confronts the modern world of freedom and democracy.

ISIL has risen from the ashes of al Qaeda in Iraq. Its current leaders, including Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-declared caliph of the IS, were al Qaeda warriors and henchmen of the maniacal murderer Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was tracked and killed by American forces in 2006. The difference between ISIL and al Qaeda is that the former, unlike the latter, has managed to carve out a shell state over an expansive territory that spills over the borders between Syria and Iraq as a nucleus of a future Islamist state.

Given the limited time I have, I want to draw your attention to the following facts.

Some 14 years since 9/11 and the war on terror initiated by the American-led coalition in Afghanistan and Iraq, the reality on the ground in the greater Middle East and beyond is Islamist terrorism remains robust and expansive. The claims made by the Obama administration in Washington following the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, that al Qaeda had been effectively destroyed, were unreal. Islamist terrorism as a globally oriented movement has proven to be highly adaptive, flexible, and opportunistic organizationally in recruiting jihadists and using modern technology, arms, and the media for broadcasting its terrorist activities and goals. Islamist parties and militias, as in Pakistan or Nigeria and elsewhere, have shown their efficacy in infiltrating and degrading institutions of governance in their respective societies and pushing forward their agenda of sharia rule.

The Islamist ideology of ISIL is shared by a large segment of Arab and Muslim populations and can hardly be differentiated from the Wahhabi and Salafi ideology of the ruling elite in Saudi Arabia. Compulsion and religion, Islamic triumphalism and non-compliance or rejection of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights are a commonly shared value of ISIL and most Arab states, including non-Arab member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, or the OIC.

Finally, the relative success of the global Islamist movement based on the organizing principles of Islamism as an ideology, as once the global communist movement was based on the ideology of communism or Marxism-Leninism, has spawned homegrown terrorism in the west among second- and third-generation immigrant Muslims and non-Muslim converts enticed by Islamism. This phenomenon of homegrown Islamist terrorism since 9/11 poses clear and present danger to the domestic security of western democracies, as we have witnessed recently in Canada, Australia, and France. Consequently, we in Canada and the west need to urgently recognize the lack on our part of a coherent understanding of Islamism and Islamist terrorism as a means by which Islamists seek to advance their aims.

The absence of a coherent understanding of Islamism makes for the absence of a coherent strategic policy to contain and defeat it. Such a coherent policy if adopted would be somewhat akin to the policy that the west, led by the United States, adopted soon after the Second World War ended in 1945 to contain and eventually defeat the Soviet Union. This was a containment strategy or policy conceived by George Kennan and adopted by the Truman administration. Canada was an important partner of the western alliance led by successive American administrations, Democratic and Republican, during the nearly five-decade-long strategic commitment to contain the former Soviet Union.

You urgently need to take a page from that history if you are serious about the threat Islamism poses to the Middle East and beyond and if you're going to commit yourselves, provided we truly care about freedom and democracy, to contain and defeat the forces of this totalitarian movement in our time. If the west, including Canada, is unwilling to invest in a coherent strategy to contain and defeat Islamism, then the public needs to know.

In our contemporary world, the west is not insulated against the war raging within the world of Islam. Islamists and apologists for Islamism are in our midst and have duly infiltrated western institutions to degrade and subvert liberal democracy. They have been skilful in manipulating the west's liberal democratic values for their aim. They have exploited multiculturalism to push their agenda of sharia rule in Canada, Britain, France, and elsewhere in the west.

We may not want to be involved against Islamism and declare that none of this is our problem. History, however, is merciless in pointing out that those who appeased the enemies of freedom and democracy in the hope that they would be saved from the impending peril—for instance, of Nazism or Communism—only made the cost of eventually defending freedom and democracy immensely greater than it would have been, had more robust actions been taken sooner rather than later.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much, Mr. Mansur.

Via video conference, we'll now go to Professor Aoun in Montreal, Quebec.

Welcome, sir. The floor is yours.

[Sami Aoun, Full Professor, Université de Sherbrooke, As an Individual]

Mr. Chair, honourable members, ladies, gentlemen, dear colleagues who have just testified, thank you.

In reply to the question submitted by the committee, here is the perspective I propose: let us try to see why the Canadian reaction at the international level was and is limited in its consequences, and is subject to the constraints of the choices made by its allies, especially those of the Obama administration. However, the sovereign reaction here in Canada remains open and promising. It can perhaps affect matters in a more interesting way, thanks to the credit and more positive balance sheet Canada has to draw on.

Firstly, with regard to the dual Canadian reaction, i.e. both diplomatic and military, there has been an unfortunate shift in Canadian diplomacy. At the start of the Arab Spring, and even in the beginning of the Syrian conflict and the Iraqi political deadlock, Canadian diplomacy was much more focused on containing what has been called the emergence of the Iranian superpower and its expansion into Iraq, Syria and all of the Levant.

Secondly,this may have provoked or helped the attempt to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria by impacting its legitimacy, which explains the Canadian diplomatic decision to declare Iranian and Syrian diplomats personae non gratae.

However, since the emergence of the Islamic State group, we have noted a fairly important shift in the direction of Canadian diplomacy, which is now more focused on this barbaric situation. That said, it must be understood that the Islamic State group, despite its horrors and barbaric nature, was born of regional and local frustrations, whether in Syria or in Iraq. It is an unfortunate, blinded and blinding attempt to respond to a certain remodelling of the Iraq and Syria borders along ethnic and sectarian lines.

In that sense, the Islamic State group, with all of its attendant horrors, is a late product of the relative and current failure of the Arab Spring and its attempt to bring about modernity and liberal democracy. In fact, in Syria and Iraq, rather than seeing liberal and democratic reform, Sunnis et Shiites are embroiled in a sectarian war, commonly referred to as the fitna. Moreover, there is something even more destructive and menacing going on. In Iraq, in Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East, a proxy war is raging between the two great powers in that region, that is to say Saudi Arabia, representing Arab Sunni rather fundamentalist and antidemocratic positions, which played a counter-revolutionary role during the Arab Spring, and Iran, which supports and works to strengthen the Shiite communities and has the imperial ambition to dominate that space, that Arab Muslim territory.

In that sense, Canadian diplomacy is limited and constrained in dealing with that situation, since Canada is not an important or powerful actor in the Middle East.

There is also another important point. It is highly improbable that on the Middle East in general, and against the Islamic State in particular, Canada will have its own distinct and independent policy, separate from that of the Obama administration.

In that sense, the Obama administration has a clear choice: it can change its strategy and let the conflict in Iraq and Syria expand, let the situation deteriorate, provoke conflicts among all of these enemies, whether we are talking about pro-Iranian Shiite militias, Hezbollah or the Asaib Ahl al Haq group, or Al-Nosra, al-Qaeda or its latest version, which may be the most barbaric, the Islamic State group.

Canada is caught in that situation. In addition, Canadian diplomacy is limited because what is happening appears to be a multi-level war among Muslim factions.

As I said, the first level involves Shiites and Sunnis, Iran and Saudi Arabia and others, but especially, the allies of the United States and the strategic west. I will mention the rivalry between Turkey and Egypt as an example. On the one hand, there is Turkey and Qatar that support the Muslim Brotherhood and political fundamentalism, and on the other, there is Saudi Arabia and Egypt that support another political Salafism. This may be described as a cold war or a hot one, but it is taking place among Muslim fractions, which means that the Canadian intervention is limited by definition.

The Israeli government, which is the main actor in the region, also has the choice of letting the self-destruction rage on in Syria, in order perhaps to avoid the strategic threat the Syrian regime had become at a certain point. For the moment it prefers to play according to the perspective that the Syrian conflict is becoming self-destructive and that the Islamic State group, according to Israeli strategic and military assessments, is not a direct threat, but a potential one. For the Israeli government, the most important thing is that the conflict remain in its theatre, i.e. Iraq and Syria. It has not really chosen to adopt a policy that would seek to overthrow the Assad regime or to intervene directly in some overt way.

The Islamic State and fundamentalists in general currently have the wind in their sails, and as such millions of Arabs have been subjugated by the fundamentalist and sectarian ideologies, from Yemen to Bahrain, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, and others. The arrival of the Islamic State group and of the political fundamentalist ideologies destroys the social link among citizens and provokes the collapse of the states and borders, even artificial ones, that exist between countries.

Allow me to say here that internally, Canada certainly has some major obligations to respond to this phenomenon, which has global, expansive ambitions.

Canada is caught in what is referred to as Karl Popper's well-known paradox of tolerance. If people show absolute tolerance even toward the intolerant, and do not defend the tolerant society against assaults by the intolerant, the tolerant will be annihilated, as will their tolerance. This idea helps me to submit measures, observations, approaches or recommendations.

First, Canada has the obligation to consolidate the pillar of the Canadian social contract, built on the reciprocal independence of state and religion, with tolerance toward both, by consolidating civic values.

Secondly, in a public debate between citizens and Canadian elites, there has to be a discussion to put an end to the double exploitation of politics and Islam. That is a crucial point. To do so, we have to encourage debate between Canadian elites and others elsewhere in the world, especially those of the Muslim world, regarding the importance of democratic values and the peaceful value of civic, liberal democracy, os opposed to getting embroiled in fundamentalist wars.

I will also point out that in the debate in Canada a distinction is not easily and readily made between terrorism, despotism, and authoritarianism. These three elements can feed into each other, and that is why they must be defined separately.

As to interpreting the ideologies at play, the understanding of Salafist jihadism is accurate. It is threatening, it is barbaric, and it is inhuman.

However, one must hope that Islam will tolerate another school of thought that will be more rooted in liberal democracy and modernity. On the legal front, perhaps we need to close any loopholes the terrorists may take advantage of in terms of human rights. We have to apply policies and possibly create observatories or more well-defined chairs on the issues of radicalization and deradicalization, and put an end to the legal uncertainty in Canadian culture with regard to the glorification of violence, exclusion and hate.

The terrorism practised by the Islamic State group, and the horrors of despotism which may be considered by Canada as a tactical, non-existential threat—and that is a debatable point—are an existential, strategic threat for the people of Iraq and the Levant. In that sense, Canada cannot remain impassive and not rise to the defence of the values of modernity.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much, Professor Aoun.

Just as a reminder, colleagues, we have Professor Aoun with us for this hour only.

We will now start off our first round of questions.

Madame Laverdière, you have seven minutes, please.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I also thank the witnesses for appearing before the committee.

Thank you, Professor Aoun. I have two questions for you. One concerns the situation in the Middle East, and the other relates to what Canada can do.

Concerning the situation on the ground, in the Middle East, all of us are of course concerned by the funding that comes from governments, organizations and individuals and is feeding the conflict in Syria and Iraq. I would like you to tell us more about the funding and the arms being provided to the Islamic State group.

Do you have any comments to make on the issue of borders in that region? Since they are quite porous, there is traffic in weapons and oil. I would like to know your opinion about that.

[Sami Aoun]

Thank you, Ms. Laverdière.

In this regard, funding certainly plays an important role. It comes from two or three external sources, especially from Arab Sunni governments. I am referring here more particularly to the Gulf countries, whether it be Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates or Kuwait. That is well known. It is an open secret. On the other hand, Turkey provides quite extensive logistical support. As you said quite correctly, the borders are porous.

That said, they do have some resources, oil in particular as well as the revenue from taxes and ransoms. In that sense, there is a certain funding. However, I should make a brief comment about that. The Islamic State group is barbaric, but you have to see the situation as it is perceived in the street and by Arab Sunni governments. They are disoriented by the break in the American strategy and what was the hobby horse during the cold war, i.e. political fundamentalism, especially combative, jihadist fundamentalism.

Moreover—this is an observation and not necessarily a value judgement— unless I am mistaken, I think that a large majority sees this conflict as a just cause. Their Arab Sunni brothers are in their opinion mistreated by the Alawite Assad regime and its alliance with the Persian-Shiite Iran regime, as well as by the allies of Shiite Iran who govern Baghdad, and have marginalized certain Sunni leaders and parties.

As I was saying, the Islamic State group was born of that sectarian, denominational frustration. Some could accuse western countries, including Canada, of applying a double standard. On the one hand, they declare that the Islamic State group is barbarian or terrorist, but on the other, they ignore the activities of other militias, in particular those of Asaib Ahl al Haq. That is how things are seen from the inside.

As concerns your question on the porous borders, there is a lot of pressure on borders drawn up at the San Remo Conference of 1920. One hears more commonly about borders defined by the Sykes-Picot accords of 1916.

For the Islamic State group and its supporters, as well as a very well known and measurable political trend in the Iraqi and Syrian Arab Sunni communities, there is a de facto Kurd state. An Alawite state is being created, as well as a Shiite state. So they are wondering where their state is. In that sense, the Islamic State group caused borders to fall long after other countries did so, whether we are talking about Hezbollah militias or those of Asaib Ahl al Haq, or Sunni fighters from Lebanon, Iraq or elsewhere.

On that point, borders are indeed porous. According to the most prevalent utopic visions, i.e. pan-Arabism or pan-Islamism, those borders are seen as having been drawn by the west. So it is not considered a great tragedy when they fall. In that sense, the Islamic State group responded to expectations. You have to look at its constitution. First, there are former officers of the army of Sadam Hussein. There are also tribes and clans with Naqshbandiyyah or mystical tendencies, as well as the successors of al-Qaeda such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, heirs of all of that Islamic jihadism that is well known.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

As you know, United Nations resolutions 2170 and 2178 ask us to counter incitement to terrorism by working, among others, with educational, cultural and religious institutions.

In your opinion, what can the Government of Canada do to support that effort?

[Sami Aoun]

It could certainly work on helping newcomers to understand citizenship and democracy. Sometimes there is an open wound within communities of the diaspora in general, and especially, in the case at issue, in Muslim communities. Because of their origins or their conception of politics, they find it hard to believe that they have the status of equal and free citizens. On this point, there is still what might be called an apologetic attitude. These people are always on the defensive and do not easily tolerate self-criticism.

On this, we can say that the Canadian values of liberalism in general, as well as those of democracy as an outgrowth of modernity, mean that Canadian priorities do not always align with those of traditional cultures, especially those where religion is dominant. I would like to make the following points about that, which are important. The primacy of individual liberty is not necessarily accepted. Indeed, it may be considered a community freedom, but it can also happen, depending on the political culture involved, that liberation is considered superior to liberty.

Moreover, the Canadian state is in fact secular, noncommittal concerning religious matters. Even if its Constitution includes a quote on the existence of a divinity, the other parts of it mean that in Canada one has the right to believe or not believe, and to promote one's belief or lack of one.

This allows for criticizing the sacred, and religious texts and institutions. In terms of priorities, there is an important difference when it comes to criticizing that which is sacred. Sometimes we do not know on which aspects of the sacred practitioners in general and believers, especially Muslims, will not tolerate criticism, and which can according to them be criticized or subject to debate.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Aoun.

Mr. Anderson, go ahead for seven minutes.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I also want to thank our guests for being here with us today.

Given some of the news we have heard recently and what you said, Mr. Mansur, the goal or the objective needs to be to isolate and contain. Here in Canada, is there a need to isolate and contain? We've talked about this at committee. Is radicalization taking place in any mosques or teaching facilities in Canada, in your opinion?

[Dr. Salim Mansur]

The short answer is yes. A great many mosques right across Canada, North America, and Europe are basically the incubators of political Islam. They support, in a sense, the values that ISIL represents.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Mr. Fatah, would you agree with that?

[Tarek Fatah]

Absolutely.

In fact, I would go a step further. If you have, say, 1,000 mosques in this country and at every Friday congregation all the imams are praying for the defeat of non-Muslims at the hands of Muslims—and we as the taxpayers are contributing to the upkeep of those charitable institutions, and members of Parliament are quite willing to attend these events at the mosques—then 14 years is a very long time for people to wake up. It is happening every day.

On the morning when Jews were slaughtered in Paris, a Toronto imam was talking about the supremacy of Islam defeating all other religions in Canada and, needing no translation, he said that is why the disbelievers hate us. That was in English.

The Muslim Association of Canada was recently exposed through a number of reports in the Quebec press. It has a network of properties; it is a major landlord; and it is directly connected with the Muslim Brotherhood ideology of Hassan al-Banna as openly stated on its website. Many of us who are Muslims are astounded that the rest of Canada is simply walking in a minefield ignorant of what's happening. Every one of us knows, even those who act as if they don't. There is not a single Muslim who doesn't know what is going on not just in mosques but in every academic institution that we have from urban high schools to universities. Every office of the MSA is a Muslim Brotherhood office in Canada. MSA is the Muslim Students' Association.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

So if I were to suggest to you that you should apologize for suggesting there is radicalization in Canada, what would you say to me?

[Tarek Fatah]

I would say whoever made that suggestion should see a physician, not come to me.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Okay, thank you.

I just want to talk a little bit about containment internationally. We heard this morning even in the testimony words like “extreme expression of Islam” and “barbaric” when referring to ISIL, but also the professor pointed out that many people in the area see ISIL as a just cause. I am just wondering, again starting with Mr. Mansur, when we see polls in these countries that seem to indicate there is strong support for the principles of ISIL if not for a specific activity, and when it is often supported by governments, how we deal with this. You're talking about isolation and containment. The example you used took several decades to be successful.

Do you have any suggestions?

[Dr. Salim Mansur]

I'm glad you picked up on the idea of containment. The issue here, in a very short space of time, is that the Arab Muslim world and the region where ISIL is, at the heart and the core of the Arab Muslim world, is in huge, immense historical turmoil. There are all sorts of cross-cutting cleavages and relationships. Sectarian inter-tribal warfare has exploded. States are decaying or have failed. We are witnessing that. If you look at it and at the failed states indexes, we can see that the top 20 failed states in the world are basically Muslim states in this region.

What does that mean? There is no centre there holding the states together, and anarchy has been let loose.

The ideology of ISIL, the political message of ISIL, is wrapped in religious colours or in religious language, and that's what the people in the west are having difficulty understanding. But any student of Islam and Islamic history and Islamic politics, as we are, can clearly see that the ISIL ideology takes them back to the Middle Ages and, even beyond, to the earlier period in which we talk about the Salaf, the ancestors of Islam, the first few generations of Islam. They are committed to taking the world back to those ideas. These ideas are not simply those of ISIL.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

I'm going to need your solution quickly here, because the chair is going to cut me off in a couple of minutes. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but the solutions, from our perspective—

[Dr. Salim Mansur]

With regard to the solution, the containment idea is that we cannot change the direction of this war that is going on inside the Arab Muslim world. They have to work it out. This is their problem. What was containment in 1947-48 when the Berlin blockade took place? We couldn't go inside eastern Europe and change it, but we had to contain them so they did not infect us. We are talking about the whole gamut of containment. We have to think about that. It is not our interference that is going to bring about democracy and secularism and liberalism. This has to be worked out by the Muslim world itself.

This is an intergenerational problem. We have to be honest with ourselves that we cannot do anything about it. We have to then think about what we must do, and containment is the idea of sealing ourselves off from that part of the world.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Mr. Fatah, do you agree?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Be very quick, please.

[Tarek Fatah]

I would take very practical measures. As I have suggested, we need to suspend immigration from failed states. When I say “failed states” I mean states that exist: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and Somalia. We need to identify very clearly any religious institutions in which men, dressed in medieval garb, are attacking non-Muslims under the cover of religion. We need to shut down charitable status to send the message. We know what has worked in France, and we know what has not worked in the U.K.

Unless we follow the French example, we will have a serious problem over here in educated, upper-class Muslims pretending that they are being discriminated against and blaming the United States, Israel, and the Jews for all the problems they have.