The reaction of the British government was also measured. The army was not called in. The police described their work as a criminal investigation. A G8 summit meeting continued at Gleneagles, Scotland, with Prime Minister Tony Blair back at the negotiating table after a quick trip home to London.
The British had been bombed before. At the height of the Blitz in September 1940, German aircraft dropped more than five thousand tons of explosives on London in just one month. Later that year, Coventry was hit by nearly nine hundred incendiary bombs during a single night. For three decades, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) maintained a terrorist campaign against London, claiming more than one hundred lives. In 1973 alone, thirty-six bombs were detonated in the British capital. I remember taking the Underground on February 9, 1996, the day that a truck bomb exploded at Canary Wharf, killing two people and destroying a six-storey building. Yet the foundations of British democracy remained unshaken. Catholics or people of Irish ancestry were not collectively blamed. The IRA taught the British an all-important lesson: if you are fighting to defend your way of life, you must not give up your way of life.
In contrast, our American neighbours had little experience with terrorism prior to September 11, 2001. Many aspects of their response were excessive. They detained U.S. citizens without charge or access to lawyers, conducted a widespread and illegal electronic surveillance program, produced spurious legal opinions justifying torture, then invaded an uninvolved sovereign country on the basis of trumped-up evidence. Much of the response was counterproductive, as George W. Bush finally admitted in May 2006. At the same time, the president expressed regret at his own choice of language—including the memorable “wanted dead or alive”—in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
In June 2006, almost five years after 9/11, the Canadian police and intelligence services arrested seventeen men and youths in Toronto who they alleged were conspiring to commit terrorist acts. In the public sphere, the response was a strange mix of American hysteria and British coolness. Right-wing commentators immediately began chortling “we told you so.” For them, the arrests were proof positive that radical Islamic terrorists were targeting all Western democracies, a situation that demanded unwavering support for U.S. foreign policy, stronger anti-terrorism laws and tighter security, including much closer scrutiny of Canadian Muslims. The following excerpt from a National Post column by Andrew Coyne is typical of what many said and wrote that week:
The Canadian Security and Intelligence Service currently has on its watchlist at least 50 other terrorist cells in Canada, similar to the one alleged in the present case: young Muslim men who subscribe to an extreme interpretation of Islam, coupled with an even more extreme agenda of apocalyptic mayhem. For every cell the security forces know about, they estimate there are another 10 they do not know about.
Everyone is talking about how this case is a “wake-up call.” But if we are led to believe that, because this particular (alleged) attack was thwarted, the danger is past—or that it is possible to prevent all future attacks—we are little further ahead. The chances that the authorities can detect every last one of these plots in time to defuse them are remote. We can “harden the targets,” we can lengthen the odds, but the likelihood approaches certainty that some time, somewhere, one of them will break through.
What then? Rather ask: What now? We are about to undergo one of the greatest tests our society has yet had to endure— that is, whether we can remain a coherent society, different social groups sheltering under the same broad set of beliefs, in the face of an existential threat originating from within one particular group.
For a week or so, it seemed as if I were living in the United States again, with Canadian media outlets having morphed into imitations of Fox News, the Washington Times and freerepublic.com. Fortunately, the Canadian people exhibited considerably more restraint. In one poll conducted by Ipsos-Reid for CanWest Global just ten days after the arrests, 66 per cent of Canadians said they lacked sufficient information to tell whether the suspects were guilty or not. It seemed as if, having watched Americans overreact to 9/11, most Canadians were not about to jump to conclusions. The foiled plot was disturbing, but there was as much reason to feel secure as there was to worry; after all, the police and intelligence services had done their jobs. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who undoubtedly reads the polls, wisely chose not to exploit the arrests as the basis for a major speech or policy change.
There is no disputing that terrorism—commonly defined as any action intended to cause death or serious injury to civilians in order to intimidate a population or compel its government to act—is a bad thing. The police and intelligence services deserve our thanks for having identified and arrested the alleged plotters before they posed a danger to anyone. Moreover, Coyne is correct to assert that Canada will likely suffer a terrorist attack at some point. Eighty-eight Australians died in October 2002 when a car bomb blew up outside a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia. Nearly two hundred Spaniards died in March 2004 when bombs exploded on four commuter trains in Madrid. The attacks on the London Underground followed one year later. It would be surprising if Australian, Spanish and British involvement in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was not a factor contributing to the attacks. Today, with more than two thousand troops engaged in a war in Afghanistan, Canada is almost certainly on a target list somewhere.
Yet terrorism is not new to Canadians. In 1970, Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act to counter what he called “an armed, revolutionary movement that is bent on destroying the very basis of our freedom.” Fortunately, the threat was not as serious as the prime minister thought: only one person died during the October Crisis and most of the nearly 500 people detained were soon released without charge.
In June 1985, Air India Flight 182 was blown out of the sky over the Irish Sea. The bomb had been placed aboard in Vancouver and 280 of the 329 people who died were Canadian citizens. The October Crisis and the Air India bombing demonstrate that terrorism can arise from internal grievances or from grievances carried here by immigrants who feel no particular animosity towards Canada or other Canadians. Islamic fundamentalists do not have a monopoly on terrorism. And eventually, like all previous waves of terrorism, the current wave of Islamic terrorism will gradually fade away.
Most Canadians know this. Millions of us have roots in countries that have been subject to terrorist attacks. Vancouver’s Punjabi community, which bore the brunt of the Air India bombing, was already scarred by terrorism in Kashmir. Toronto’s Singhalese and Tamil communities are haunted by the continuing violence in Sri Lanka. Montreal’s Jewish and Arab communities cringe every time a bomb explodes in the Middle East. Just about every immigrant community in Canada has been marked by terrorism in some way. This sad heritage does work to Canada’s benefit in one respect: thanks to one of the highest rates of immigration in the world, this country has acquired a built-in sense of perspective and resilience concerning terrorism.
Those of us who call for cool heads are not naive. In addition to my time in Britain, I have visited Egypt and Israel during periods when both countries were subject to terrorist attacks. I taught in the United States during September 11, 2001, and its aftermath. An aunt and uncle of mine live five kilometres from the Bali nightclub where the October 2002 bombing occurred. Another of my aunts lost her boss, the CEO of the Deutsche Bank, when the Red Army Faction blew up his car outside Frankfurt, Germany, in 1989. Many other Canadians have more painful stories to tell.
Keeping calm after the Toronto arrests was made easier by the fact that the putative terrorists were amateurs. They had been tracked for two years and only acquired a (supposed) capacity to act when the police sold them bogus ammonium nitrate. Their apparent leader spoke openly about his violent intent, in one instance to a member of Parliament. The Hells Angels are much more professional and probably more dangerous.
Some commentators tried to provoke fear by focussing on reports that the conspirators had been inspired to violence by Web sites that celebrate the activities and ideology of Al-Qaeda. But why should this come as a surprise?