What drove seven young Quebeckers into the arms of the Islamic State?
LES PERREAUX AND VERITY STEVENSON
The Globe and Mail
Last updated Saturday, Mar. 21 2015
The disappearance of seven young Montreal students came as a shock to Quebeckers, but not for the same reasons. As Les Perreaux and Verity Stevenson report, there is a growing fissure that sets small-but-growing Muslim communities who hold fast to faith against a majority population that prefers religion to remain entirely private.
Quebec’s growing divide
The recruitment of seven CEGEP students to the Islamic State has highlighted a difficult issue across the province: How do Muslim youth find a place when they’re stuck between two cultures that don’t understand one another?
Young Bilel Zouaidia was a laid-back sort, more obsessed with computers than his Muslim religion, really. Or so it seemed to classmates.
Yahia Alaoui Ismaili and Mohamed Rifaat didn’t accomplish much in school. Mr. Rifaat had tons of friends and he was devout, once posting online an artful video of himself singing a call to prayer atop Mount Royal. But neither man advertised interest in jihad. Mr. Ismaili even took the occasional drink, breaking a cardinal rule of Islam.
They were part of a group of seven young Montrealers going about the business of launching adult lives. And then one night they were gone.
On the evening of Jan. 16, some of the seven told family they were off to visit friends. Instead, they all went to Pierre Elliott Trudeau airport in Montreal, where they boarded a flight bound for Istanbul and eventually Syria; authorities say they were to join the ranks of Islamic State fighters there.
A few lingering online clues point to discontent overlooked: Shayma Senouci promoted a petition to stop the Quebec Charter of Values that would have cracked down on religious symbols, like the veil she wore, in the public service. She raged against civilian casualties in the Palestinian territories. Mr. Rifaat posted photos of him protesting Islamophobia with controversial Muslim teacher Adil Charkaoui.
But when news broke of their departure, it floored nearly everyone. Their families, friends, former schoolmates and teachers, and Montreal’s Muslim community, all came under intense scrutiny but were at a loss to explain. Bilel Zouaidia’s mother answered a recent call this way: “We’ve given all we have to give, we cannot speak about this anymore. We need to heal and be with ourselves.”
Collège de Maisonneuve, where many of the Montreal seven studied, was questioned about the teaching in its classes. With police and parents helpless to do anything, the school took one of the few actions by anyone in a position of authority: It suspended a rental agreement with Mr. Charkaoui, a man once accused of being a terrorist-in-waiting who taught Islamic courses and led other weekend activities in school space. Some of the Montreal seven were among his students.
With no evidence Mr. Charkaoui did anything wrong, those classes resume this weekend.
Alienation from mainstream society has long been a key factor luring young people to join foreign wars, from the Spanish Civil War to the ISIS offensive in the Middle East. But misguided former college students lured off to jihad are only part of this story.
The disappearance of the Montreal seven has added urgency to a painful discussion taking place in Quebec for more than a decade. A fissure is growing between Muslims and the Quebec society that aggressively courted French-speaking North African immigrants, part of a plan to maintain a francophone bastion in North America. The conflict sets small-but-growing Muslim communities who hold fast to faith against a majority population that prefers religion to remain entirely private, or to appear only as mere historical vestige.
The Quebec experience serves as a cautionary tale to other Canadians who face problems with homegrown terrorists, along with the recent resurgence of the same hardening rhetoric, political opportunism and outbursts of bigotry over Muslims that have plagued Quebec. The province shows it is easy to start questioning how religious practice fits in a secular, democratic society, but in an era of terror it’s not so clear how it ends, or what damage may be done along the way.
“We feel like we are stuck between two chairs,” said Rima Demanins, a 21-year-old who speaks French and English at home with her Lebanese-born parents and prays five times a day but does not wear a veil.
“We’re stuck between Quebec culture and our countries of origin, our religion and our parents, our culture. And every time something happens, the first thing I actually think is, ‘Please don’t let it be a Muslim, please don’t be a Muslim,’ because they’re going to stick it to us and we’re going to look bad.”
Most of three dozen Quebec Muslims interviewed by The Globe and Mail in recent weeks, from liberal students to controversial conservative elders, say they are facing the most hostile atmosphere they have seen since the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Recent polls showing a spike in hostility toward visible minorities and immigrants across Canada tends to support them.
The recruitment of the Montreal seven comes on the heels of a series of events that have thrust Islamist terror to the top of Quebec consciousness. The attacks in the fall in Ottawa and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu shocked all Canadians, but the January assault on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo hit Quebec particularly hard. Many francophone Quebeckers, especially in the province’s intellectual and media circles, have deep connections to France.
Muslims, global experts on jihad and de-radicalization, politicians, police and scholars warn of expanding alienation. Muslims seem at a loss for how to gain trust in their Quebec homeland. In the words of Gérard Bouchard, the eminent sociologist who co-chaired a provincial commission on the place of religion in Quebec society, Muslims are being pushed toward isolation.
“Unless the trend is reversed, we will finish by creating ourselves what we wanted to avoid at all costs – a minority that through stereotype and discrimination gives up little by little on integration and ghettoizes itself,” Mr. Bouchard said in a recent interview. “Do we not recognize here the rich soil that produces radicalization?”
Muslims comprise about 6 per cent of Montreal’s population and 3 per cent of Quebec’s – putting the city behind Toronto’s 7.7 per cent and the province right in line with the national average. But Quebec Muslims have faced outsized scrutiny and harassment with the fear of Islamic radicalism.
Women are accosted on the street for wearing veils, and in one case, even in court by a judge who felt religion had no place in her courtroom. Media investigate community organizations suspected of being radical hotbeds; often they turn out to be ordinary worshippers bewildered by the attention. Any special status, from gender-segregated fitness and health classes to requests for prayer spaces, becomes headline news. Vandals have targeted a dozen Islamic centres since the start of 2014, including one that had windows shot out late last year.
“I call it a witch hunt, a new form of McCarthyism,” said Mr. Charkaoui, the onetime terror suspect turned controversial Montreal Muslim leader. With his gift for snappy rhetoric, he occupies a lot of space in the polarized Quebec secularism debate.
Mr. Charkaoui’s voice booms from the other side of a full shoe rack at the Centre Islamique de l’Est de Montréal. It’s a Saturday night and a stream of men come and go. Mr. Charkaoui was giving an Islamic history lesson in French to a group of about 100 young faithful. Little is known about what motivated the seven Montreal-area jihadis, but at least three attended these kinds of lectures given by Mr. Charkaoui. He disputes a fourth reported connection.
Mr. Charkaoui was arrested under an immigration security certificate in 2003 on suspicion he was an al-Qaeda sleeper agent. Among the unproven allegations were that he trained in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda in the 1990s. He was released from custody in 2005, and a court dropped electronic monitoring on him in 2009 after Ottawa refused to provide evidence. He has since launched a lawsuit against the federal government while obtaining Canadian citizenship.
In an interview, Mr. Charkaoui was good-humoured as he explained connections to some of the students – a far cry from most of his Quebec media appearances where rage often surfaces. He said Mr. Rifaat came to his protests “like thousands of others. He came with his dad, and participated in a lot of activities. I saw no sign of anything wrong. The fact his name came out like that was a total shock to us.”
Mr. Zouaidia came twice to his classes, before he was pulled out by his father, who had concerns he was being radicalized. “Even though the social climate is heavy, we just did not see it coming,” Mr. Charkaoui said. “We encourage our youth to participate in our activities, in protests, so they see an alternative. They don’t want ‘blah blah blah,’ they want action.”
After students left for jihad and Collège de Maisonneuve briefly suspended Mr. Charkaoui’s rental contract, he threatened to sue the school. The school decided to allow him to return this weekend, on the condition it can monitor his teachings.
Mr. Charkaoui, who runs an anti-Islamophobia activist group in addition to leading Islamic classes at several venues, said “everything we do is public. Everything we do is open because our goal is to make Quebec an open place.”
But openness has limits. A few days after the interview, Mr. Charkaoui attended a screening of The Secret Trial 5, a documentary about the detention of him and five other men under security certificates. He spotted a Globe reporter who had contacted some of his students looking for information about his lectures and the Montreal seven. He accused the reporter of harassing his students and of collaborating with CSIS and the Montreal police. In fact, the reporter’s source was the students’ own Facebook pages.
“A teenager comes to my classes twice – I don't even know him – and a media circus is after me,” Mr. Charkaoui said, surrounded by a small group of supporters who joined in badgering the reporter.
Salam Elmenyawi, another Montreal Muslim cleric, asked for understanding. “Adil Charkaoui is a very good man who has suffered immensely, and he has more right than any of us here to fight for our freedom,” Mr. Elmenyawi said. “I don’t believe he had anything to do with those people leaving at all.”
Mr. Elmenyawi points out that with all the scrutiny Mr. Charkaoui faces, it’s unlikely he’s promoting illegal foreign fighting to his charges. Students who have attended Mr. Charkaoui’s courses say they’ve never heard him speak of jihad or Osama bin Laden or ISIS in a positive light. One described his class as “super normal, like going to the movies” for Muslim kids in Montreal.
When he’s asked for his view on ISIS, Mr. Charkaoui deflects slightly, saying he’s against all forms of violence, before usually switching to a list of offences the West has committed against Muslims. “Why are we forced to answer for ISIS?” he said. “Why are we forced to justify ourselves?”
While the students’ departure was a shock to friends and family, a recent convert who was part of their network says the discrepancy between their attitudes online and in real life foreshadowed their brash decision to leave.
Minh Qasim Vo, a 24-year-old criminology student who converted to Islam more than four years ago, met several of the students who left, but was mostly exposed to their social feeds, where they were more vocal about politics than at home or at school. “The way they expressed themselves, it was very arrogant, impulsive,” he said.
Mr. Vo experienced firsthand what it’s like to take the ancient scriptures too literally when he first converted. He watched YouTube videos to learn the religion. “It’s a double-edged sword because they bring you so much, and at the same time, you can interpret them very literally,” he said.
He thinks a feeling of marginalization has made the students open to recruitment. “It’s nature and nurture, but it has to do with character as well,” he said, likening joining Islamic State to joining a street gang.
Many experts agree. Young adults yearn to belong to a cause greater than them and to take action, according to Amy Thornton, a researcher in radicalized youth in Europe and North America from the department of security and crime science at University College London.
Skinhead groups, gangs, cults along with sports teams and the military recruit based on that need, she said. “Young people are looking for a narrative to their lives. They are looking for a transcendental justification, that thing that is bigger than you,” she said. “In this case, it’s the chance to defend their faith and to save women and children from the evils of [Syrian dictator Bashar] al-Assad.”