This Canadian Press story (thanks to Michelle Malkin) is entitled “Suspects from ‘broad strata’ of Canadian society,” and focues on everything except the obvious thing that links together the suspects. And they’re “model citizens,” unknown to the Muslim Students Association. The obvious fact that they are Islamic jihadists is swept under the rug. Even “Steven Chand” is introduced several paragraphs before we discover he is “Abdul Shakur”:
TORONTO — From an unmarried computer programmer to a university health sciences graduate and the unemployed, the 17 suspects charged in a foiled terrorist plot represent a “broad strata” of Canadian society.
“Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed,” RCMP assistant Commissioner Mike McDonell said Saturday.
The 12 men in custody range in age from 19 to 43 and are residents of Toronto, Mississauga and Kingston, Ont., while the five youths cannot be identified under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
Rocco Galati, lawyer for two of the Mississauga suspects, said Ahmad Ghany is a 21-year-old health sciences graduate from McMaster University in Hamilton. He was born in Canada, the son of a medical doctor who emigrated from Trinidad and Tobago in 1955.
Shareef Abdelhaleen is a 30-year-old unmarried computer programmer of Egyptian descent, Galati said. He emigrated from Egypt at the age of 10 with his father who is now an engineer on contract with Atomic Energy of Canada, the lawyer said.
Galati said neither of his clients have criminal records and are both “model citizens.”
“Both of their families are very well-established professionals, well-established families, no criminal pasts whatsoever,” Galati said. “That’s why we’re anxious to see the particulars of the allegations against them.”
The middle-class east-end Toronto neighbourhood that terror suspect Steven Chand calls home is filled with children, lined with two-storey homes and rich green, well-maintained lawns.
Area resident Casey Grenier, 32, stood with two neighbours enjoying a beer on a porch next door to Chand’s residence were unmarked cars and police officers were parked.
“It’s a real quiet neighbourhood,” Grenier said. “You get up in the morning and you hear the crickets chirping.”
Grenier said police pulled up at the residence around 4 p.m. with forensics trucks and a SWAT team and blocked off the street. Police were seen by neighbours leaving the residence carrying sealed Ziploc bags containing unspecified items.
Neighbours said Chand, also known as Abdul Shakur, rented a basement apartment in the home, owned by Mohammad Attique, a father of five.
Attique operated an Islamic bookstore from the home, but neighbours drew up a petition last year calling for the business to be shut down because it was being operated in a residential neighbourhood.
Neighbours said the owner had built a two-level garage behind the home to house the bookstore, and was allegedly dumping debris into an electrical field with power lines behind the house.
Grenier said residents of the home kept to themselves, but he noticed unusual activity in the early morning hours.
“You never see them during the day, always deliveries late at night, early in the morning,” said Grenier, a Toronto Transit Commission employee. “I get home at about 2:30, 3 o’clock (in the morning) and you always see people coming in and out, but you just assume it’s books coming out.”…
“I have been asking around and no one seems to know them,” Hafizur Rahman, president of the Islamic Centre of Kingston told the Ottawa Sun.
Taking into consideration the men’s ages, Rahman told the Sun they may be students at Queen’s University.
However, Haseeb Khan, president of the Muslim Students’ Association at Queen’s, also didn’t recognize the men’s names.
After asking members of his executive and several students at the school Saturday, he was still unsure whether they attend the university.
“We don’t seem to know those people at all,” he said.
Likewise the New York Times (thanks to all who sent this in) speaks about “Canadian residents” and hardly at all about their Islamic identity. It also quotes the McDonell “broad strata” business. The word “jihad” does not appear; Steven Chand’s Muslim name is not given; the only way anyone would get an idea of what is going on here is from references to “Islamic extremists” and “Al-Qaeda,” buried deep in the story.
The Times has never more richly deserved the “New Duranty Times” label. Imagine a 1938 story about Kristallnacht that spoke of “German youths” representing “broad strata” of society, and never once mentioning Hitler or National Socialism. There would have been no excuse then, and there is no excuse.