Abu Wabu

The latest news is that the Toronto 17 were planning to do more than unleash six thousand pounds' worth of murderous fury-by-truck-bomb on such targets as CSIS HQ and the Toronto Stock Exchange. They were also going to storm Parliament and behead Prime Minister Stephen Harper:

BRAMPTON, Ontario (Reuters) - One of 17 men accused of plotting bombings in major Canadian cities and of training militants also faces an allegation that he sought to behead Prime Minister Stephen Harper, his lawyer said on Tuesday.

Steven Chand, 25, was among 15 members of the alleged terrorist ring who appeared in a heavily guarded courtroom north of Toronto to set dates for bail hearings. The Muslim men, five of them under the age of 18, were arrested on Friday in Canada’s largest counterterrorism operation, and police said more arrests are possible.

Chand’s lawyer, Gary Batasar, said his client faced several serious charges and was concerned that intense media interest in the details of the case in Canada and the United States could jeopardize Chand’s chances of a fair trial.

Allegations include plans for the “storming and bombing of various buildings,” Batasar told reporters. “There’s an allegation apparently that my client personally indicated that he wanted to behead the prime minister of Canada,” Batasar said. “It’s a very serious allegation — he’s said nothing about that. My client retains the right to silence.”

Members of the group are alleged to have considered plans to take hostages and to attack Canada’s parliament in Ottawa, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. building in Toronto and power grids, according to a synopsis of charges Batasar said he saw.

An interesting revelation appears in a related National Post story: Joint Task Force 2 special ops were stationed near the jihadis' camp north of Toronto in case things got out of hand during surveillance, demonstrating not only the seriousness Canadian authorities brought to the investigation, but also the probability that the case is quite solid.

The commandos of Joint Task Force-2 (JTF-2), Canada's elite special forces unit, were put on standby a short flight away from where suspected terrorists were conducting ''training camps'' at an isolated site north of Toronto, sources told the National Post.

A ''troop'' of about 25 of the unit's highly trained assaulters, part of JTF-2's counter-terrorism unit, were at a nearby military base with their helicopters ready to swoop down should police decide they were needed, said a military source.

''They were within a few minutes flying time of this training camp,'' said the source, who is familiar with JTF-2's operations. ''Basically they were on standby in case things got out of hand and the police couldn't handle it.''

Hot Air has an interesting tidbit gleaned from an FBI affidavit filed in the case against one of the Toronto jihadis’ American acquaintances:

Agents found, concealed in the lining of SADEQUEE’s lone suitcase, two CD-ROMs. One CD contained encrypted files that FBI technical experts remain unable to decode. The other CD contained an apparent bootleg copy of a hard-core ############ film.

Why don't they just state the obvious? We're talking porn here. When Muslim Islamofascists aren't busy making Islamoporn, they watch the other kind. Ace was all over this weeks ago. The disturbing part: the FBI can't crack the encrypted CD. Gotta fix that.

One fact has long been clear in this and other news about Islamist terror: with each new case, police, politicians and the media do their damnedest to ignore the elephant in the room:

As Cliff May and I noted here on NRO, and Roger Simon detailed on his website, readers of the New York Times were told that the 17 men arrested “represent the broad strata of our society … Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed.” In point of fact, however, they represent a very narrow stratum of Canadian society: They are Muslims, many of whom attend the same mosque, the Al-Rahman Islamic Centre for Islamic Education in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga.

Not only were all those arrested Muslims. The reported evidence against them fits to a tee the shopworn pattern of Islamic terrorism repeated for much of the last two decades. Young men were radicalized at the local mosque and its companion school by elders preaching from the Koran. They participated in paramilitary training in rural outposts. The training involved firearms and communications equipment. The plotters may have conducted surveillance on specific targets. And they ordered prodigious amounts of explosives components—in this case, tons of fertilizer in preparation for the construction of crude but deadly effective ANFO (ammonium nitrate and fuel oil) bombs.

Nonetheless, the rigorous media practice in Phase One is to suppress any reference to Islam, the single thread that runs through virtually all modern terrorism—from New York, to Virginia, to Bali, the Djerba, to Baghdad, to Mombassa, to Tel Aviv, to Nairobi, to Dar es Salaam, to Ankara, to Paris, to Riyadh, to Amman, to Sharm el-Sheikh, to Aden, to London, to Madrid, and, now, to Toronto.

Consequently, the piece of information most obviously pertinent to the public’s understanding of what could be catalyzing this global savagery is consciously withheld. Such a revelation might, after all, lead people to ask the sensible question: What is it about Islam that makes it such a fertile breeding ground for this pathology?

Instead, we are given the defendants’ nationality, or, even more vaporously, the continental region from which they emigrated to wherever they happen to be making mischief at the moment. The Times relates that the “17 men” arrested in Canada “were mainly of South Asian descent and most were in their teens or early 20’s.” Apparently, some of them had contact with two suspected Islamic terrorists who have been arrested in the United States. At least that’s the inference one draws, since we’re not exactly told whether these two were Muslims either … just that they happen to be “two people from Georgia[,] … Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, 19, an American of Bangladeshi descent, and Syed Haris Ahmed, 21, a Pakistani-born American.”

Phase One of the Canadian story nicely dovetails with the Phase One reporting of another story from last week. This one involved the interruption of Islamic terrorists who may have been plotting chemical-bomb attacks in London.

Last Friday, the initial report from Sky News was careful to say only that two arrested men were “both of Bengali origin.” On Saturday, the New York Times followed with a story which grudgingly uttered, toward the very end, that the two—a pair of brothers apparently associated with a “known terrorist group”—just might be “of Pakistani descent.” Such is the state of contemporary political correctness that it’s now safe to flub a once salient multicultural distinction—whether a particular South Asian was Pakistani or Bengali (or the even more hip Bangla)—as long as it’s for the greater good of obscuring that an apparent terrorist is a Muslim.

Read Andrew C. McCarthy's The Elephant In The Room, and pray that one day these PC buffoons will finally get honest with the people under threat from Muslim fanatics and acknowledge the nature of Islamofascism.

Sixty years ago today, ten thousand men died fighting this very same evil, then in the form of Hitler's Nazi Germany. We should speak that evil's name clearly today just as they did then. Its name is fascism. It works its evil today through Islam. And in the names of those ten thousand men and their millions of brothers in arms, it must be overcome yet again, with overwhelming force.