Moderate muslims and family ties

I just finished reading this article by Robert Fisk, a well-known journalist who writes for The Independent in the United Kingdom. It's called The Fearful Lives in a Land of the Free, and demonstrates why it's a good idea for all interested citizens of any grouping to actively seek out and find perspectives from outside their own sphere... as I like to argue to my friends in the United States 'we are your best friends, whether you realise it or not; when we start telling you something is a bad idea (like the idea of invading Iraq was a bad idea) it's not smart to just reject it out of hand.' At the same time, it behooves us as Canadians to also think carefully about what others say about life and situations here.

I have heard many people in our media through articles, columns, and letters to the editor complain about why they don't hear "moderate muslims" excoriate the leadership of jihadist organisations for their positions and actions. This article goes a long way to explaining this in the context of our multicultural country. It is actually quite complimentary of Canada, except for certain institutions: in particular, CSIS and the RCMP. This article contains some very serious food for thought about how we are handling our responsibilities to our citizens in the Global War on Terror, in particular our intelligence agency's credulous reactions to information sourced from the secret police of anti-democratic corporatist regimes from the Middle East, and considering the West's wider support for many of these regimes because of how they help some of our institutions I am forced to ask what and how we are to react.

The explanation offered by some of Mr. Fisk's companions on his trip to Canada call the prosecution of some of our own "home-grown jihadis" into serious question, and the secrecy shrouding their prosecutions beg some questions... if in fact the majority of the evidence against them has been sourced from the secret police of countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia (an autocratic military state and an autocratic monarchy, respectively), how are we to know that this evidence does not originate in a regles des comptes from within their own communities in Canada?

One of the basic foundational ideas of our justice system is that justice must be done, and that justice must be seen to be done; it is the basic idea behind some of the oldest and most important of our civil rights such as habeus corpus, and the transparency of our justice system. With such important proceedings being kept from the eyes of the public due to the oft-cited importance of national security, how are we as citizens to judge that our institutions have lived up to their own stated ideals?