How is it that a man who held obviously “extreme” sentiments could have gotten a place on a mosque Board? Is it possible that the majority in the mosque were and are “extremists” also? Why do authorities never consider this, but constantly pretend the contrary in the teeth of whatever evidence? A slightly better article than the one noted below from the New York Times:
MISSISSAUGA, Canada, June 4 “” Several of the people arrested by Canadian authorities in a huge counterterrorism sweep over the weekend regularly attended the same storefront mosque in a middle-class neighborhood of modest brick rental townhouses and well-kept lawns.
The police announced the arrests yesterday in Toronto.
The eldest of the 17 Canadian residents arrested in the sweep, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, was described by his lawyer as an active member of the mosque, the Al-Rahman Islamic Center for Islamic Education, though not its leader.
“He’s on the board, he’s there regularly, but he’s not an imam,” said Anser Farooq, the lawyer representing Mr. Jamal and three other people from this Toronto suburb who were arrested Friday night and who also attended the same mosque. “He’s one of about a half dozen people who lead prayers at the mosque.”…
Canadian officials said the arrests foiled a series of planned terrorist attacks in southern Ontario. None of the targets were identified, but Canadian authorities said the Toronto city subway system had not been among them.
Police and intelligence officials made the arrests late Friday night and early Saturday morning after the group accepted delivery of three tons of ammonium nitrate, a common fertilizer than can be explosive if combined with fuel oil.
The same type of fertilizer was used in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people. In that explosion, one ton of ammonium nitrate was used to make the bomb….
At a news conference on Saturday, Luc Portelance, the assistance director for operations at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said the men “appear to have become adherents of a violent ideology inspired by Al Qaeda.” But Canadian officials said there is no evidence linking the two groups.
“A violent ideology inspired by Al Qaeda.” Hmmm. What could that be? Why does Luc Portelance think he has to dance around the truth with circumlocutions like this rather than say they were jihadists?
Islamic community leaders in the Toronto area were surprised by the arrests and raised concerns that some of the younger men picked up in the sweep may have been led to participate in a suspected plot by older, more radical Muslims, like Mr. Jamal.
“I do not think of him as an imam,” Tareeq Fatah, the communications director of the Muslim Canadian Congress, said. “People like him are freelancers. I don’t fear imams. I fear freelancers who are creating a Islamacist, supremacist cult.”…
It doesn’t matter if he was an imam or a “freelancer.” He was on the Board, which gave him a certain weight in the community. His views were, in other words, not held up as heretical and rejected by the mosque leaders. He was one of those leaders.