Mr. Chairman, I want to begin by thanking you and the members of the committee for this invitation to provide you as an independent expert my views on Bill C-51. I will express these from the perspectives of political philosophy and history, and from that of a lifelong devotion as a Muslim to the study of Islam, Muslim history and society, and comparative religion. I want to stress this point since criticisms of Bill C-51 are unhelpful when abstract notions of freedom and their impairment are discussed narrowly or exclusively from a legalistic point of view with insufficient attention to the contemporary reality in our world.
The preamble of Bill C-51 states the purpose of this proposed anti-terrorism legislation. There is the need to equip Canada to deal adequately and effectively in terms of security threats from violent Islamist jihadists that loom larger and larger in our post-9/11 world, and that Canada is not insulated from this threat-filled reality.
The third paragraph of the preamble in Bill C-51 reads, “there is no more fundamental role for a government than protecting its country and its people”. This is a succinct statement of what has been amply discussed in classical liberal political philosophy from Hobbes and Locke to Raymond Aron and Hans Morgenthau.
From the perspective of classical liberalism, it is understood that the freedom we enjoy in a society such as ours is the fruit of security, or that there can be no freedom in the absence of weakness in security. This relationship between security and freedom was expressed by the founding fathers of the United States in terms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the same was expressed by Canada’s founding fathers in terms of peace, order, and good government. The central concern of liberal democratic order is in keeping the balance right between security and freedom.
The authors of Bill C-51 are cognizant of this naturally given tension between security and freedom. They acknowledge that measures such as sharing of information within government of activities that undermine Canadian security are to be consistent with requirements of the Canadian charter. Bill C-51 in my reading is not designed to turn Canada into some version of Hobbes’ Leviathan or Orwell’s 1984, despite at times the fevered imagination of its critics.
Bill C-51 is directed against Islamist jihadists and to prevent or pre-empt them from their stated goal to carry out terrorist threats against the west, including Canada. The threats are real, not hypothetical, and they have multiplied ever since 9/11 brought Islamic terrorism into North America.
The most recent worldwide threat assessment of the U.S. intelligence community presented by James Clapper, director of U.S. national intelligence, informs us of the growth of multiple threats to our security, and the most ominous is that of violence emanating out of the Middle East following the rise of ISIS in the midst of the Syrian conflict that erupted in 2011. This U.S. intelligence report states, “Since the conflict began in 2011, more than 20,000 foreign fighters—at least 3,400 of whom are Westerners—have gone to Syria from more than 90 countries”. According to Canadian government sources, in 2014 there were some 130 individuals with Canadian connections who were abroad and who were suspected of terrorism-related activities. These numbers have likely increased during the past 12 months.
In terms of the debate on Bill C-51, some 130 individuals with Canadian connections involved in jihad-related terrorism might not seem much to justify the measures being proposed. In my view, however, these numbers are going to grow as the situation in the Middle East and the surrounding region worsens, as the IS, or Islamic State, expands its control of territories in the Levant and attracts more Muslims from the west to assist in building the newly declared caliphate.
As the number of jihadists increases, so will the threats of violent terrorism, and the likelihood that despite the best efforts of our security intelligence agencies, the jihadists will succeed in striking us, as in the case of the bombing at the Boston Marathon in April 2013, or the massacre at Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015.
We are at war, a war dramatically and radically different from past wars, and this war was declared against the liberal democratic west by Islamists well before 9/11.
The reason that the United States was taken by surprise on 9/11, as were subsequently Spain, Britain, and France, and as we Canadians were taken by surprise last October, is that we did not take this Islamist declaration of war against the west seriously.
From the perspective of the Islamists, both Sunni and Shiite Muslims, there are two fronts, the near and the far, and these are linked. Consequently, the conflicts of the Middle East, or the Muslim world, are global and therefore they reach us.
Canada is not insulated from the madness, barbarism, or savagery of a war that Canadians might not comprehend or deny having anything to do with. But we Canadians are affected, whether we like it or not, because of the nature of our open society, of the flow of immigrants from the Middle East and the larger Muslim world, and the history of our relationship with that part of the world.
It would be naive on our part not to take seriously the reality of the jihadist sleeper cells and Islamist fifth columns in our midst. Long before 9/11, the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood planned and put into place their operatives within the public institutions of western democracies. Documents detailing the modus operandi of Muslim Brotherhood operatives were found by intelligence agencies and submitted as evidence in some of the terrorist trials held in the U.S. after 9/11.
I will end by pointing out that the bitter Shia-Sunni conflict in the Middle East, which is more than a millennium old, will intensify and worsen. The theology and politics of the IS are exterminationist, and its Sunni-driven Shia hatred will invariably elicit similar Shiite response with far reaching consequences.
This conflict will reach the west and will spark sectarian tensions within western democracies, as has occurred as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict. We only need to read Dabiq, the official magazine of the IS, as they revive nostalgia among a segment of Muslims with the appeal of the caliphate, and thereby deepen the nature of the declared war between the IS version of the house of Islam and the rest of the world.
They are driven by visions of the end time, of apocalypse, and their fanaticism will crash over their heads eventually. In the meantime, however, we need to take them seriously, for we know from history that politics driven by eschatological visions end dreadfully.
In this context, the measures proposed in Bill C-51 to deal with the nature of threats that Canada faces, I believe, are quite rightly and urgently needed to protect and keep secure the freedom of our citizens.