Terrorists share deadly disconnect from reality

Americans who are shocked at the idea of young Canadian Muslims plotting to blow up Toronto landmarks should not be. It has already happened in the United States, the only difference being that the radicals were fewer in number and did not pray to Allah.
America's most infamous homegrown terrorist was Timothy McVeigh, who considered himself a Christian patriot, avenging, among other grievances, the deaths of David Koresh and his followers at Waco, Texas. McVeigh and a few accomplices blew up the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 167 men, women and children.
What McVeigh and the Canadians had in common was a need to see themselves as larger-than-life messengers. They would stop at nothing to send a message to a government that they had come to despise. What they also had in common was an ability to disconnect their planned evil deeds from reality.
McVeigh was a decorated Army veteran, having served in the Gulf War, where he was awarded a Bronze Star Medal. He had no grievance with the men and women who reported to work that morning at the Murrah building, and certainly none with the children in the building's day care center.
In Toronto, the conspirators included five minors about whom no information was released and 12 men ranging in age from 19 to 43. Most were middle class and came with the families from Egypt, Somalia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Trinidad and Tobago.
Ungrateful whelps
They were greeted in Canada by a nation that welcomes immigrants and respects diversity. Certainly, nothing Canada had done to them warranted their plans to kidnap and behead the prime minister and blow up government buildings and landmarks.
They are said to have planned their attacks in retribution for Canadian support of the Iraq invasion. But while Canada did participate in the U.N. coalition in Afghanistan, it did not support the invasion of Iraq and Canada is not part of the coalition forces there.
The figurehead of the group was 43-year-old Qayyum Abdul Jamal, a father of three with a reputation for reaching out to young men at the Al-Rahman Islamic Center and preaching a particularly strident and hateful strain of Islamic fundamentalism.
The irony, of course, is that in Canada he was free to speak, to accuse the government of outrageously false wrongs and to plant seeds of violence in younger minds. Had he tried to preach hate for authority in any of the countries from which his converts came, he would have been imprisoned -- at best.
Canadians are now re-examining some of their nation's laws on immigration and asylum and their attitudes on the value of multiculturalism over assimilation. Shouldn't immigrants to a secular democracy learn about the values of such a society before they are thrown to wolves such as Jamal?
The one word answer to that question is yes.
But Canada, the United States, Great Britain or any other free and open society can never consider themselves safe from terrorists. The best they can do is be more alert to the potential enemies in their midst and to punish those -- such as these 17 -- to the greatest extent that the law will allow when a plot is uncovered.