Mr. Chair, good morning. Good morning to you as well, my fellow panellists and everybody else there.
My name is Haras Rafiq, and I'm the managing director of the Quilliam Foundation, one of the world's major think tanks looking at combatting extremism and terrorism. I want to bring to this gathering today anecdotal, academic-based research, and evidence-based research, as well as observational research and analysis as to why this study into the impact of terrorist financing is not just important but vital and crucial.
Within the organization, we have tens of years of experience on the part of people who have been on the other side, people who have been jihadists and terrorists in the past, have done their time in prisons, and have now come out disavowing the whole ideology and theology that drove them there in the first place. From that, we know what these terrorists are doing from an Islamist-terrorist perspective and how they're doing it. I want to touch a little on that today.
The other part of the experience that I bring today is that after the terrorist attacks of 7/7, I was on the U.K. government task force that came up with preventing violent extremism, which is now our old strategy of combatting radicalization and extremism and terrorism, which in North America has been adopted by the U.S.A. and Canada. Whether that will be effective or not is a different issue.
I want to talk about two main things. First is individual pathways and why finance is important to them, and second is strategic radicalization and why finance is important to that as well. If we just focus purely on terrorist financing and ignore the financing of recruiting and facilitating people to become terrorists, as well as those who may have sympathy and empathy for terrorists, we're only doing a partial job, so I urge the committee to widen the scope of this study it's undertaking.
In terms of the personal pathways, there are pathways that involve grievances that may be partial, genuine, or perceived. These individuals need to be looked at through a lens of extremist recruiters to Islamist ideologies that are operating. Those include groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which have now declared combative jihad in places like Egypt, and others that are operating to a large extent within Canada and North America and around the world with support from many people who may not consider them to be terrorist organizations. They ultimately provide people with solutions to become terrorists through this belief in the utopian Islamist caliphate and the theological justification that underpins that. Only by looking at this whole process and at how finance is used to take individuals through this grievance-based process and this ideological change can we really combat terrorist financing and understand the impact it has on Canada and around the world.
The other thing I want to touch on is strategic radicalization. In order to move a society as a whole, and in this case it will be Muslims in the west, people who have an Islamist agenda must teach individuals that their parents practised a particular version of Islam that is no longer legitimate and that the society doesn't want them there, and that therefore they must fit into a different society and change their practices. The way they do this is no different from the way fascism or communism has been spread. They build a number of entities within different spaces in our society, whether they provide education or pastoral care, and so on. Then by building their own individual capacity and education, they persuade them to come and join their gang or their club. They then, obviously, move them along through the grievance-based process.
Open-source documents available from certain intelligence agencies around the world say that certain countries have spent hundreds of billions of dollars so far helping this strategic radicalization, which ultimately leads to terrorism. All this now requires funding, so we have NGOs and charities and a whole number of other organizations that will fund these activities through other shell companies. One way we identify these organizations is by looking at the directors and the trustees and their ideological values. What do they aspire to? I think that has to be part of the study if you're going to be effective.
The last thing I'd like to say is that this is something that needs to be done more, not just in Canada, but around the world as well. There is very little work and research being undertaken in terms of the Islamist extremist organizations that will ultimately fund terrorism. We know there are cases from Canada. We know there are cases from North America, in Britain, yet we still, as governments, are dragging our [Technical Difficulty—Editor] and I urge the committee to undertake this study, this research, as a matter of urgency. If the Quilliam Foundation or I as an individual can provide any assistance or play any role or part, we'd be more than happy to do so.