Stewart Bell on Terrorism in Canada at Book Launch

Katherine,
Thanks for coming to my book launch, but your blog is not a very accurate account of what I said.
For starters, I gave five examples of Canadians involved in terrorism, not two, and I never said this was an exhaustive list. It isn't, there are many more. I would have gladly explained that to you had you asked.
And, as I explain in my book, there is nothing wrong with radical ideas. But those who facilitate terrorism have crossed a line. In fact, Canada already has laws that recognize that - the hate crimes law and the anti-terrorism act.
Also, I am hardly thankful that Canadian terrorists have traditionally (Air India aside) conducted their operations abroad. In fact, I have written an entire book, Cold Terror, about why we should not turn a blind eye to it.
I could go on but at least we agree on one thing - terrorism is a problem. I appreciate your trying to give it some serious thought by writing about my lecture. I just wish you had reported what was said more accurately.
Regards,
Stewart Bell

Stewart-

Thanks for writing back, it's nice to know authors are reading their reviews, and I appreciate your response.

My concern with your arguments is not the expression of the need to maintain awareness of and prevent, in some way, the involvement of Canadians in terrorist action, but the lack of rational questions that must be posed in a situation where civil liberties are at stake while finding a feasible solution.

What constitutes faciliating terrorism? You say there's nothing wrong with radical ideas, and yet speak of hateful websites as if it is a crime. What line have they crossed? When does hate speech become hate crime, and who makes that decision?

During your presentation, you also spoke a great deal about 'Canadian values' - what values are these, and whose are they, really? Canada's population is wonderfully diverse, and while I'm sure the majority agree that murder and terrorist acts are bad, those are already illegal and, as you say, there are already laws addressing them.

I would hope there is a way to live in a society where all ideas are openly tolerated, even hateful ones, without fear of those ideas or the actions they would encourage. Hating people for no reason is legal, and as long as CSIS and the police have their eyes open for actual plans of violence, we can't ask for more without endangering our own right to speak.

A book launch such as the one at Holy Blossom was an ideal opportunity to start a real discussion about these issues, rather than emphasize a kind of 'them' vs. 'us' mentality which is ultimately unhelpful. Paranoia does not tend to result in the kind of rational and complex thinking this issue deserves.

Katherine,
I'm afraid you have misunderstood what I said.
The "idea" I was referring to is the ideology of terrorism, i.e. the belief that it is acceptable to deliberately blow up civilians to advance a cause.
It doesn't matter what you believe, it is simply not acceptable to try to advance those beliefs through acts of random violence against civilians.
I think you will agree that terrorism is not a Canadian value. We believe in resolving our differences through dialogue.
That is what I was talking about.
SB
p.s. for a more informed view of what the book is about, you might want to read the Globe and Mail’s review.

A Canuck in al-Qaeda
The Globe and Mail ^ | Sept. 17, 2005 | TOD HOFFMAN

The article is a book review, of the book The Martyr's Oath: The Apprenticeship of a Homegrown Terrorist, By Stewart Bell

A decade ago, when I was investigating counter-terrorism cases for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), our targets were just as murderous as today, but they were decidedly less suicidal. However twisted, their operations were designed with at least enough pragmatic restraint that the terrorist could hope to emerge unscathed. The current generation of terrorist embraces martyrdom, that oddly archaic end that suggests dying for a cause is equivalent to achieving it.

Who chooses terrorism and the hope for death over anything this life has to offer?

In pursuing the answer to this question, National Post reporter Stewart Bell tells the story of Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, a Kuwaiti-Canadian who decided at the age of 14 to become an Islamic holy warrior. The portrait that emerges in The Martyr's Oath is frequently obscure, but nonetheless captivating.

Jabarah was not the product of some squalid refugee camp or an oppressive regime. He grew up in middle-class St. Catharines, Ont., his father a service station owner, his mother a lawyer. He hadn't suffered any traumatic discrimination. He spoke English and was at home in the West. He held the promise to be anything he wished. Bell proposes, "He would have made an excellent addition to the Canadian military, intelligence service or police." Fluent Arabic-speakers who understand Muslim culture are prized recruits.

But Jabarah would choose a path to the extreme opposite pole, falling under the influence of a radical cleric during his summer visits to family in Kuwait. In 2000, he made his way to Pakistan and on to the al-Qaeda training camps across the border in Afghanistan. There, he was so successful that he was given advanced training offered only to the very best students. He met with, and reportedly impressed, Osama bin Laden. After brief exposure to the fight against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, Jabarah moved on to Karachi, where he was given a mission by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the infamous mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

Jabarah's assignment was to conduct surveillance of the U.S. and Israeli embassies in Manila in preparation for a bomb assault. But the targets were deemed too difficult, and the scheme abandoned. Following 9/11, he landed in Singapore, where he became the key logistician for a plot to detonate six suicide bombs at six different locations associated with Western embassies, businesses and military facilities. However, he and his co-conspirators caught the attention of Singapore's ubiquitous Internal Security Department. Though he got away, the authorities were on to him and he was eventually arrested in Oman.

Because of his citizenship, he was deported back to Canada, where CSIS was anxious to speak with him. He was courted by an officer to whom his father bitterly refers as "the cunning Mike." In truth, as Bell relates it, Mike performed masterfully, building rapport, winning Jabarah's trust and extracting reams of intelligence about al-Qaeda before convincing him to turn himself over to U.S. authorities. For Jabarah had committed no indictable offence against Canada. However, by conspiring to kill Americans, he was prosecutable in the United States. Today he sits in a Manhattan detention centre, facing an indeterminate sentence.

Bell has done an admirable investigative job in amassing so much detail about Jabarah's terrorist recruitment and activities. He accessed classified material and spoke at length to Jabarah's father, who sways pathetically between lamenting the decisions made by his son and blaming intelligence officials for his fate. It's unfortunate that Bell was denied the opportunity to speak with Jabarah, but given the letters he quotes at some length, I suspect such conversations would have yielded only self-righteous soliloquies about perceived injustices in place of genuine insight.

Jabarah did not turn to jihad out of desperation, but as a deliberate expression of his ideals and dreams. He was raised in Canada, but pledged allegiance to bin Laden. We don't really know that he was prepared to die, but we are certain he was ready to kill. I came away from the book feeling that there is still a deep void at Jabarah's core, which is not a negative reflection on the book so much as reinforcement of the sense that hardcore terrorists are so alien to the values most Westerners are raised to cherish as to be incomprehensible. Resourceful reporters like Bell can meticulously reconstruct a chain of events, but the essence of the character, the configuration of the synapses that compels the behaviour, remain inexplicable.

Tod Hoffman is a former Canadian Security Intelligence Service officer. The author of three volumes, he is at work on a book about Chinese espionage.

From your description of Jabarah's evolution from just some 14 year old to terrorist during the event and the article, I'm sure you follow his story in great detail, searching for the moment he decided the ideologies of terrorism matched his worldview and represented acceptable behavior.

However, as your G&M reviewer points out, despite an excellent reconstruction of events, "the essence of the character, the configuration of the synapses that compels the behaviour, remain inexplicable."

His ostensible belief in terrorism is sociopathic.

During the event you noted the ideas introduced to him in Kuwait were 'nurtured' in Canada. The difficulties, as your reviewer notes, are that Jabarah committed no crime in Canada and since we cannot divine the reason/rationale behind his acceptance of terrorist ideologies, there is no clear way to prevent cases like his in the future.

MJ was caught, and moreover, various intelligence and policing agencies were aware of his activities.

Absolutely I agree that terrorist acts are horrific and antithetical to the idea that problems can and should be resolved through dialogue. However, in our tolerant society, it is not a crime to believe terrorism is the only solution, nor to say so. It is the actions (or the conspiring of said action) by which people may be judged.

Are there other terrorists who have been raised in Canada? Probably. Are there people espousing hateful ideas? Sadly, yes.

Naturally I feel it's imperative to prevent terrorists from harming anyone. The distinction I make is between the idea and the action. Who's to say what would be different if Jabarah or those like him were arrested before traveling to Singapore? Before going to the training camps? And yet, before the action is planned and taken, they are innocent of any crime.

It's a delicate balance - and intel groups like CSIS and the CIA exist to keep an eye and ear out for people who are preparing to move from hate speech to criminal action.

Any attempt to stifle speech for fear that it promotes certain behaviors is dangerous, in that it infringes the liberties not just of potential criminals but of people exercising their right to express their point of view verbally.

There is a critical difference between someone who is a hateful, bigoted jerk and someone who is a murderer. The prior, however obnoxious, does not deserve to be treated as the latter.

Katharine,
Here's another review, this one from The Vancouver Sun, that offers a bit more of an informed view of what the book is about.
Regards,
Stewart

The terrorist next door: *Stewart* *Bell* examines how a Canadian
teenager fell under al-Qaida's spell
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Page: I13
Section: Books
Byline: Jonathan Manthorpe
Source: Vancouver Sun

There has been a blithe assumption that young Muslims living
in open and inclusive countries like Canada, away from the seething
cauldrons of the Islamic Middle East and Asian heartlands, are
inoculated against radicalism.

The error of this view was well known before the July 7 suicide
bombings in London by four British-born Muslims. But that attack,
which killed 56 people, was the clearest demonstration yet that
young men and women anywhere, even from privileged middle-class
backgrounds, can be indoctrinated with deadly religious fanaticism.

Journalist *Stewart* *Bell* has tracked the story of one such young
man: Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, now 23 years old. The result is a
compelling and often enlightening book, The Martyr's Oath: The
Apprenticeship of a Homegrown Terrorist.

The trail Bell followed begins with the family's emigration to St.
Catharines, Ont., from Kuwait after the first, 1990, Gulf War. It
ends with Jabarah facing indeterminate imprisonment as Inmate
06909-091 in New York City's Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Along the way, Bell finds the spoors of Jabarah's radicalization by
fanatical clerics in Kuwaiti mosques during summer vacations
starting when he was 14. After that, he was spotted by a jihadi
recruiter as a likely candidate for training as a holy warrior.

The process was completed in Ontario, when Jabarah was in his late
teens, by travelling clerics from Saudi Arabia. That country's
government-funded exporting of its puritanical view of Islam is the
common thread in much of today's ideological unrest in Muslim
communities worldwide.

Bell keeps on Jabarah's trail when, at 18, he travels the jihadi
recruit's well-worn route through Pakistan and into Afghanistan to
the al-Qaida training camps of Osama bin Laden.

Jabarah's first assignment as a full-fledged jihadi was as part of
the al-Qaida team assigned to detonate six truck bombs outside
embassies in Singapore in late 2001. But the Singaporean
authorities, watchful over social order even in balmy times, were
especially vigilant after the September 2001 al-Qaida attacks on New
York and Washington.

Tips from the public put Singapore's security services on the track
of the al-Qaida group and several were rounded up before the attacks
could be launched.

With the plot abandoned, Jabarah escaped just ahead of the dragnet.
He fled through Malaysia, Thailand and Dubai, but was detained in
Oman.

After debating where to send Jabarah, the Omani authorities
returned him to Canada in the custody of Royal Canadian Mounted
Police officers. Here he was seduced by the Canadian Security
Intelligence Service (CSIS) into what amounted to house arrest.

Jabarah was easily persuaded to talk about his experiences with
al-Qaida, but the Canadian authorities quickly discovered a
technical problem. Although he was clearly a terrorist, his offences
had been committed before the December 2001 Anti-Terrorism Act.
Thus, there were no crimes he could be charged with in Canada.

The solution was to coerce Jabarah into agreeing to go to the
United States, plead guilty to criminal charges, go into detention
and provide information and testimony against other terrorists.
Astonishingly, he agreed to this deal, although the benefits he
would receive for his cooperation were never spelled out.

Clearly, Bell received significant help from both Canadian and
American security agencies in the preparation of this book. It's
easy to understand why: The capture and debriefing of Jabarah was a
significant intelligence coup in the battle against al-Qaida and
Islamic extremism.

But Bell is a fine journalist and on to this framework of Jabarah's
story he has draped his own insightful work into the question of how
and why a St. Catharines high-school student becomes a fanatical
disciple of bin Laden.

Bell's diligent hunt, through interviews with Jabarah's relatives,
friends and contacts, is all the more impressive because he never
actually gets to speak to the subject of his book.

Although Bell shrinks somewhat from assigning responsibility for
what happened to the young man to his family, he makes it clear that
even in a middle-class immigrant Kuwaiti family living in St.
Catharines, there is an undercurrent culture of Muslim victimhood on
which bloody-minded clerics prey.

That said, all young men, of any religion or none, are suckers for
simplistic and romantic causes. The impulses that took Jabarah to
Afghanistan, and tens of thousands of other recruits to the
mujahideen during the Soviet occupation of that country, are very
similar to those that propelled thousands of young Canadians to join
the International Brigades in Spain's civil war of the 1930s.

The true merchants of evil in such stories are the indoctrinators,
whether they be Saudi clerics or leaders of the evangelical
Christian Taliban, such as Pat Robertson, advocating the murder of a
foreign head of state. It is they who pervert to their own ends the
easily led enthusiasms of youth.

Bell's book reminds me of lines from a poem written by G.K.
Chesterton in the early years of the First World War:

From all that terror teaches,

From lies of tongue and pen,

From all the easy speeches

That comfort cruel men,

From sale and profanation

Of honour and the sword,

From sleep and from damnation,

Deliver us, good Lord.

Sun International Affairs Columnist

jmanthorpe@png.canwest.com
Idnumber: 200509100034
Edition: Final
Story Type: General
Length: 850 words
Illustration Type: Colour Photo
Illustration: Colour Photo: Mohammed Mansour Jabarah at Niagara Falls
(above) in April 2002, just before travelling to the U.S. to
cooperate with the FBI, and as an adolescent playing with his
younger brother.

Colour Photo: Mohammed Mansour Jabarah at Niagara Falls in April
2002, just before travelling to the U.S. to cooperate with the FBI,
and as an adolescent (above) playing with his younger brother.

Colour Photo: (The Martyr's Oath: The Apprenticeship of a Homegrown
Terrorist)

Back to Archives Article

Here's one more review from Quill and Quire, by someone who has a better perspective on the issue.
SB

The Martyr’s Oath: The Apprenticeship of an Al Qaeda Terrorist
Stewart Bell; $36.00 cloth 0-470-83683-0, 240 pp., 6 x 9 , John Wiley & Sons Canada , Sept.

September 2005

A few years back, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about suicide in the Pacific islands of Micronesia as a kind of phenomenon that “tipped� and became an epidemic. A few kids killed themselves. Then a few more. And then suicide became socially acceptable, among youth at least, and kids started doing it all the time, killing themselves because a parent scolded them or a love interest wasn’t interested.

Reading journalist Stewart Bell’s The Martyr’s Oath, which examines the growing allure of terrorism, brought that sad blip in Micronesian history to mind. To his credit, Bell doesn’t have Gladwell’s knack for populism or his fetish for big ideas. Instead, The Martyr’s Oath is careful, investigative, and entrenched in fact, clearly showing Bell’s roots as a journalist. Bell struggles with that single, all-important question: Why do so many young men and women give up their lives and become terrorists?

The book focuses on Al Qaeda member Mohammed Jabarah, his childhood in Kuwait and Canada, his recruitment into Al Qaeda, his apprenticeship as a terrorist, and finally his capture by a coterie of policing agencies around the world. Bell traveled to the same places as Jabarah and took good notes while he was there. He mines such primary sources as transcriptions of recruiting videos, interviews with Jabarah’s father, Mansour, and translations of Jabarah’s letters from prison. Some of the best parts of the book are glimpses into the most foreign and strange aspects of the extremist life cycle: terrorist training camps, the working networks of terrorist cells, CSIS investigations, and FBI interrogators.

Most importantly, Bell is able to look at terrorism’s allure from different sides. Sometimes terrorism breeds in isolation or loneliness. Other times the recruitment messages are just irresistible, offering simple, all-encompassing (and often populist) answers to life’s big question. Such answers appeal to society’s most vulnerable citizens – the misfits, the poor, the disillusioned – who need only a small nudge in the wrong ideological direction. Bell’s investigative temperament leads the book beyond simple answers, or even an overarching thesis.

Terrorism is, literally or figuratively, a form of suicide. It is, at worst, the physical taking of life; at best, just another form for the extinction of the self, a surrendering to fear, hate, terror, despair. Mohammed Jabarah was not killed and did not become a martyr, yet he still lost his life to terrorism. The Martyr’s Oath takes us through that so-human impulse to search for some sort of meaning in terrorism’s waste.
– Andrew Kett

Stewart,

Two things. Firstly, I reviewed the event- your presentation of the material there, not the book, as I haven't read it, and have not at any point questioned the inherent quality or value of your book or writing.

Second, posting positive reviews of your book is blatantly self-promoting and isn't endearing you to anyone. I suggest you knock it off.

I have read Stewart Bell's 'Martyr's Oath' and have heard him speak recently at the University of Toronto.

The book is a very reflexive one that manages to capture the history of one man's journey into the world of Al Queda in the backdrop of greater questions regarding terrorism. By no means do i agree with all, or even most, of Bell's ideas. he is indeed hard-lined when desacribing the concept of terrorism (and why military offenses are not to be considered terrorism), vague when referring to 'Canadian values', and perhaps a bit lackluster in his description of the legal and civil rights questions posed by Jabarah's arrest in Canada and agreement with the United States.

And while the book appears to be value - driven, its merits should not be dismissed. Bell raises various important questions regarding international terrorism and the 'homegrown terrorist', and suggests a relationship between immigration, isolation, and radicalism that make one suceptible to becoming a terrorist.

A Martyr's Oath is in fact without an overarching thesis (as an above review suggests) and claims that the author pushes a particular perspective excessively are misleading. His discussion on 'Canadian values' does not focus on what those values may be, but rather on what they are not - essentially, killing innocent people is not a Canadian value. Such a statement is a fair one - i didn't see anyone celebrating after 9-11 here as in Palestine for instance.

Suggesting that promoting non-violent resolution to counter radicalism is a means by which terrorism can be combatted is a fair suggestion as well. It is in this context that the book spoke of 'Canadian values', not in terms of assimmilation and an end to multiculturalism. Some of the other 'bloggers' seem to be misleading in their reviews, by placing Bell's discussion on 'Canadian Valuess' in a different light

Oh, i didn't realize this Katherine girl hadn't read the book, so responding to her criticism of Bell may have been a bit unfair. But then again, isn't writing negatively about someone's ideas without having read his book unfair as well?

REad the book babe

Stewart,

Please do not feel as though you have wasted any time responding to Katherines postings as she has not read your book, for you have at least intrigued those of us who have not yet read it to pick it up.

I think today we are all seraching for the answer to why young men and women become terrorists. If we only had this answer then maybe we could find a solution and stop mass murder.

Katherine, has posted the necessary questions, while freedom rights in many counties also in EU are more and more taken away. One doesn't have to read the theories of self-acclaimed "experts" on terror to regard that. The normal citizen is made anxious and lets himself be treated as a suspect.
While these experts cannot define what terror is: bombing civilian houses in Bhagdad or Ghaza and Lebanon not also? by the US and Israel that is. Though one doesn't justify the other it's clear this has to stop before I'm going to read such books, that regard reality selectively. Thanks and keep on questioning..