If the suspects were smart, they would shoo them away. “A gathering of familiar faces at Brampton courthouse,” from the Globe and Mail, with thanks to Sr. Soph:
BRAMPTON “” Canada’s hard-line Muslims can seem a pretty tight-knit group at times. As a long line of completely new terrorism suspects were being shuffled in and out of the prisoner’s box, there were many familiar faces looking on in the courtroom.
In the visitors’ gallery Saturday morning sat Zaynab Khadr, the sister of Abdullah Khadr, who is fighting extradition to the United States. He is accused of supplying weapons to al-Qaeda.
Ms. Khadr, who once expressed an admiration for suicide bombers on national TV, sat looking at the prisoner’s box, speaking Arabic with Aly Hindy, a controversial fundamentalist preacher.
Having had many of their own run-ins with the RCMP and CSIS, Ms. Khadr and Mr. Hindy were intent on doing what they could for the families of the newly accused.
One such man was Tariq Abdelhaleem.
“Hello,” he said, looking shattered beyond words, as a reporter approached. “It’s my son.”
This was stunning. I had gotten to know Mr. Abdelhaleem last year, after he issued a controversial fatwa against too much innovation in Islam.
The imam was worried that Toronto’s Muslims were not sticking to scripture and were also becoming unmindful of the real problems in the world.
“Our Muslim brothers and sisters are dying in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Chechnya and other parts of the world,” he had written at the time on his website.
“The puppet systems that are in power in the Islamic world are collaborating with the Crusaders and Zionists to keep the ummah [Muslim community] under oppression.”
Read it all.