Does ISIS fade to the background of Canada’s thoughts too easily?

By Laura Bohnert

On December 7, 2014, a new video was released from ISIS, this time featuring a former Ottawa citizen turned extremist, and he had some interesting things to say to Canada.

The six-minute long video was posted on Twitter and Jihadi web forums by John Maguire who identifies himself as Abu Anwar al-Canadi. In the video he accuses Canada of “waging war” against Muslims.

According to a transcript released by the SITE Intelligence Group, Maguire states, “It should not surprise you when operations by the Muslims are executed where it hurts you the most — on your very own soil — in retaliation to your unprovoked acts of aggression towards our people.”

“You have absolutely no right to live in a state of safety and security when your country is carrying out atrocities on our people,” Maguire argues. “Your people will be indiscriminately targeted as you indiscriminately target our people.”

Maguire is a former University of Ottawa dropout, originally from Kemptville, Ontario, who converted to Islam before becoming radicalized as an extremist and vanishing last year.

In the same video, Maguire prompts further attack on Canadian soil. He argues that Muslims have the obligation to either join ISIS or to “follow the example of the attackers who struck in Ottawa and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec. You either pack your bags or prepare your explosive devices. You either purchase your airline ticket, or you sharpen your knife.”

The video was produced by a propaganda group that has been linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham, and it has found little support within Canada; in fact, Canada’s major Muslim organizations have all denounced the terrorist group outright.

Maguire, while offering an extremist view that is horrifying and threatening to both Muslims and Canadians, does have one point worth noting (I probably just got flagged as a flight risk for that one, but I’ll continue): Canada has been launching attacks on ISIS, and has participated in the war on Iraq and Afghanistan –we’ve fired our weapons, and we’ve claimed lives. We are not peacekeepers anymore; we are complicit in the war. We can’t complacently sit back in partial denial that the “conflict” is even happening, and react with horror when a remnant of that violence washes up on our shore. There are, after all, innocent people (not quite the point Maguire is going for but I, in no way, support his actual message) dying “over there,” at the hands of this conflict, too.

We need to be aware of the atrocities more than simply when they directly threaten us at a war monument or through a propagandistic video. And, we need to be informed about why Canada is participating in the first place — what the real motivations at work are — about what the real threat is, and about why we can’t allow a terrorist threat to become justification for racially profiling an entire cultural group as the enemy, either.