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Mubin Shaikh: You're dealing with a social movement. It's beyond a terrorist group. And social movements have grievance narratives. The reason why those grievance narratives resonate is because they are based in fact. It might not be complete fact and it might be their way of interpreting world events, but the reality is that when they say that their grievance is about Western foreign policy, particularly the bombing of Muslim countries—they're not wrong when they say that.When I was around in 1995, we would watch videotapes [of jihadist propaganda], and then [DVDs] came out and we watched DVDs. But what modern day social networking has done is it's accelerated that exponentially. You're sitting there at a television screen or computer screen, you're watching these images over and over and over—it's traumatizing you. Your eyes will be overwhelmed with visual images of death, destruction, killing, torture, oppression [of Muslims].
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Isolation and marginalization. The context is different in North America versus Europe. In Europe it's far worse, especially in France. France was a colonizer of North Africa, of Algeria in particular. Usually, colonizers tend not to be able to integrate the colonized populations very well in their own host societies. And so [there are] very high levels of unemployment, lack of opportunity—that's really what it comes down to. It's not that poverty causes terrorism, but what is poverty other than a lack of opportunity? So for those who have a lack of opportunity, the only options they have really is the criminal underworld, things like that. It's very easy for most of the youth who are in those conditions to be very vulnerable to recruitment by violent extremists. And it's no accident that France has the highest number of foreign fighters in Syria.You're involved right now in efforts to stop Muslims from being radicalized, how do you go about that? What do you tell them and what do they tell you?What I've been doing is micro-engaging with these individuals on a one-to-one basis, and my approach is what I call "pro-Islam, anti-terrorism." We say very clearly, the Islamic sources never ever permit the violence on civilians in public spaces. There's just no exception to that rule. It's unequivocally prohibited.
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Yeah, I do find it ironic that ISIS and New Atheist types, or anti-Muslim types, quote the same verses in the exact same way. They say, "Islam is about terrorism, and here are the verses to prove it." So I remind them that I also used to believe this stuff. I also used to cherry pick and misquote the verses the same way both of them do it. So in Chapter 9, Verse 5, I used to say the same thing. I said, "Look, the verse says, 'Kill the kuffar, wherever they are.'" Now, in fact, that's not what it says. I mean, it's a portion of a longer verse. And that portion actually says, "Al-Mushrikin," it talks about polytheists. So when the scholar in Syria was trying to de-radicalize me, he said to me, "Tell me, do you normally begin reading chapters from verse 5? Maybe you should start with verse 1. I don't know, it's just a thought."So Verse 1 talks about "The polytheists… This is in regards to the polytheists with whom you made a treaty and have violated the treaty." If you look at Verse 4, which directly precedes Verse 5, it says, "Not included in these instructions are those polytheists who kept the covenant, the treaty, and did not assault you and participate in violence against you. Then keep the term of your contract with them." So it makes it very clear. The content is very specific, it's those people who are actually fighting you unlawfully, because you're a Muslim. Because, in that context, the polytheists were fighting the Muslims just because they were Muslim, because they believed in one God and they made the call to one God. So looking at that context and, as opposed to what they're doing today, you can see that [the Islamic State] has completely [distorted it]. Now they've applied this verse to include even Jews and Christians.
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It is definitely part of their deliberate strategy. They wrote it in a manifesto called the Black Flags from ROME, where they said, we'll eliminate "the grey zone of coexistence" and create life so difficult for Muslims, have retaliation by militia groups on the Muslims to further isolate, marginalize, anger them so that they do turn to violence. This is their stated objective. The sad reality is, you have people on the right who might as well directly take the marching orders from ISIS because they're doing the work for them.
Related: Watch our interview with Eagles of Death Metal about the Paris Terror Attacks
There was a study by two Lebanese social workers who were interviewing Islamic State prisoners inside a Lebanese jail. And one of their findings was that: "Almost all the people we interviewed have some type of an 'absent father syndrome.' They were all either extensively humiliated and abused or abandoned by their fathers at a young age."
This is one of the reasons why I refer to my life history as protective factors. The reason why I didn't cross over into violence is because I did have both parents. There was tension of course when I was a teenager, but it was largely a positive relationship and I had some religious training, I had good schooling, I wasn't humiliated or bullied or picked on. So it's no surprise to me that you see this with these guys. These are largely overwhelmingly [people with] a dysfunctional family setting. The absent father syndrome we see is common in youth crime across the board: white, black, Asian, you name it. It transcends races and cultures and religions. Where the father is not there you're going to find truancy, you're going to find delinquency.
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It can help, but I note that in the Senate hearing that looked at radicalization, in Quebec especially, lo and behold, 75 percent of extremism cases were not religiously motivated—they were white supremacist extremists. So I think the de-radicalization center has a wide enough approach that will look at that, and is able to deal also with far right extremism, but also religiously motivated extremism. We don't want to pick on only one group. If we are really, truly interested in countering violent extremism, then we have to include all the groups that fall into that category.
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The Quebec context is very closely connected to the French one. And the Quebec government has control over its own immigration policy. They bring in French-speaking Muslims who are largely coming from North Africa, the Arab states that the French colonized. So there is that grievance narrative that's still there and this is what feeds and drives some of those radicalized individuals, and there's most definitely a group of people who are like that in Quebec. It doesn't help when you have the symbiotic union with anti-Muslim hatemongers, because each of them feed into one another.You've worked as an operative for Canadian Intelligence, helping break up a plot. What did you do for them?
I was an operative with Canadian Security Intelligence Service on a number of investigations, some of them actually online, looking at chat rooms to see who are the recruiters, who are being recruited, identifying threats in that context, of course, on the ground in a human intelligence context, infiltrating groups, reporting back on what people were up to. So, in many cases, it was absolving people of false accusations of involvement with extremism.Working as an operative, did that hurt your credibility with your community?
The Canadian public in general and Muslim community in general were largely in denial over radicalization of Muslim youth. We couldn't imagine it would happen here because Canada's such a great place, we're so tolerant, so welcoming. Bad things don't happen to good people, right? But they do and even in the most tolerant societies you're going to get people who are disenfranchised and who latch on to an ideology that gives them a sense of purpose and a sense of belonging and identity, and you really can't compete with that so you have to deal with it. I understand completely the siege mentality that the Muslim community feels. I think that it explains why they were in denial over what happened in the Toronto [18] case. There's a lot of misinformation that was put out. I was accused of entrapment, and it's physically impossible that that could've happened because they had already had the plot in mind, they had already scoped out a location for their training camp, they had already invited all the people who were going to the camp. That's all before I was sent in to infiltrate the group.I learned in a court disclosure two years after that CSIS knew about all this stuff 12 days before I was sent in. So it's impossible that there was any entrapment along those lines. But I will say, seven people got off of charges because of my testimony. The government wanted to depict [them as] these are hardcore Al-Qaeda trained guys. And they were not. They were bumbling amateurs, their reach exceeded their grasp. Yes, they had all these lofty ideas of storming the Parliament building and kidnapping members of Parliament and cutting their heads off, but there was no way for them to realize that plot.The Muslim community now understands. They're realizing that, "Listen, we're going to lose our kids. And we're going to always have to answer every time there is an attack, we're always going to have to say 'Islam doesn't have anything to do with terrorism.'" But now what's needed is for the Muslim community to close ranks in that sense, to understand that we are at the forefront of this, we are its number one victims—from both sides—and we are the ones that can bring a better solution than anyone else.This interview has been edited for context and length.Follow Aaron Maté on Twitter.