Top Mountie worried about radicalization of Canada's Somali community

OTTAWA — Islamic radicalization of Canada's Somali community is becoming a national security concern, RCMP Commissioner William Elliott said Friday.
The potential of Somali-Canadians adopting the extremist ideology of the Islamist insurgency ravaging the failed state is on an evolving list of national security issues and threats Elliott outlined in a sobering speech to an Ottawa conference of security intelligence specialists. Despite such recent successes such as thwarting the Toronto 18 and Momin Khawaja terrorism plots, he said the current threat environment remains severe, from a resurgent al-Qaida and fugitive Tamil Tigers to nuclear technology smuggling and border concerns.
Success in countering the dangers will require police to take on more of national security role and "put more terrorism cases before the courts and more terrorists in jail." That includes possibly arresting people involved in the trafficking and use of Afghan heroin, a major source of Taliban revenue, and charging them under Canada's terrorism financing laws, he said. "The Taliban survives, and is able to continue to kill Canadian soldiers, because it is funded by the Afghan drug trade," he said. Arresting those involved in Canada "would help send a strong message to the world that we are serious about prosecuting accomplices to terror."
While disrupting credible and imminent threats without sufficient evidence to justify criminal charges is sometimes necessary, he said, "counter-terrorism measures based exclusively on intelligence that falls short of the evidentiary threshold are fraught with danger and difficulty."
Without mentioning the federal government's now-discredited security certificate regime for jailing and deporting immigrants suspected of terrorism that relied on secret intelligence rather than open criminal courts, Elliott said "I believe that law enforcement and criminal prosecutions will be the new paradigm of national security in democratic nations the world over.
"Most democratic nations have realized that infringing on the very rights and freedoms we seek to protect from terrorism is ultimately untenable. It is also not very effective in countering terrorist threats." Canada hosts one of the largest Somali diaspora communities in the western world. Somali-Canadians are at risk of being radicalized and recruited to fight with Islamist al-Shabaab (the youth) extremist movement in Somalia's civil war...more..http://www.montrealgazette.com/news