But if their views really upset their Muslim classmates, why didn’t those Muslim classmates go to authorities? From the Toronto Star, :
At least three of the youths charged after Friday’s series of terrorism arrests expressed militant views and had misguided ideas about the Muslim faith, say some older men who pray at their musalla, an informal place of worship.
Hisham Syed, who considered himself a spiritual advisor to them, said he worried about one young man in particular “” Amin Mohamed Durrani, 19 “” who had come under the influence of a fiery preacher at the musalla. The five youths arrested who are younger than 18 cannot legally be named.
“I know he (Durrani) was reading a lot of twisted stuff on the Internet,” he said. “There’s a lot of nonsense on the Net that messes up people’s heads.”
Syed added that he would get into political discussions with the young man that would become quite heated.
Durrani, who has been charged with training and recruiting for a terrorist group, would often spend time with two younger friends at Stephen Leacock Collegiate who were also taken into custody. “They all hung out together,” said Syed….
Another of the high school friends who went there was a recent convert to Islam, whose parents were apparently upset when they’d caught him praying in the washroom at home and, according to some acquaintances, had an angry confrontation with people at the musalla.
It was there that the friends gathered to listen to fiery sermons by an amir, or preacher, that were full of anti-American talk and literalist interpretations of the Qur’an….
But Syed worried that they weren’t really learning about Islam. “They didn’t do research or read their history books.”…
What books should they have read, Syed?
Meanwhile, one of the youths arrested was known for his piety:
The popular youth also started talking about his faith more openly.
“Everything that happened to him, he’d explain through his religion,” said Tang. “Even when he couldn’t make it to prayer, he’d say it was God’s will.”
When kids taunted him, Tang remembers, “He kept his cool, he’d just say something like, `One day, God will punish you for what you’ve done.'”
One source who had prayed at the musalla a few times with the amir and the youths said the inflammatory rhetoric made him too afraid to come back. And he noticed the youths had stopped thinking for themselves.
This group of friends got very involved with the Muslim association at school and would often forcibly introduce their viewpoints into discussions.
“They started to bring their own views and interests,” said the source. “Often they would bring lengthy printouts from the Internet to discuss issues from these printouts.”
Once they discussed at an association gathering whether suicide bombing was permissible in Islam. Their views were so violent that the other association members threatened to have them banned.
Threatened to? Why didn’t they do it? And why didn’t they go to police?