Under a cloud: everywhere in the Western world Muslims are under suspicion because of the terrorist attacks carried out against Western targets in the name of Islam.

Police and security people are edgy. In May 2006, 250 law enforcement officials swooped on a house in London, England. They had a tip that two brothers, both Muslims, were making a "chemical device." One of the brothers took a bullet in the chest during the raid, but a week later both were released without charge. The police said "Sorry. It was a mistake."

Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair then pointed out, "If the police and the security agencies had failed to act on the intelligence they received, then people would quite rightly have been critical."

A few days later, 17 Muslims were rounded up in and around Toronto on suspicion of being involved in an alleged terror plot. Since those Toronto arrests, many of the people in custody have been tried and found guilty--by the media.

The young men have been routinely referred to as "homegrown terrorists," though no evidence against them has so far (late summer 2006) been tested in court. Relatives have been interviewed by the media and their comments sifted for "evidence" the accused are Muslim extremists.

Christie Blatchford wrote in The Globe and Mail that, "The accused men are mostly young and mostly bearded in the Taliban fashion. They have first names like Mohamed, middle names like Mohamed, and last names like Mohamed."

This drew angry complaints about racial stereotyping.

Then, up popped Mubin Shaikh. A devout Muslim, he went public with the news that he was paid by police to infiltrate the group of young men who were later arrested. The media gobbled Mubin Shaikh up. Front page treatment, an "exclusive" interview on CBC's The Fifth Estate. The story he told was that the Toronto 17 were up to something bad. Again, this is all just allegations; stuff normally not revealed until a judge and jury are sworn in.

Robert Fisk reported in The Independent (U.K.) that, "after the arrest of 17 Canadian Muslims on 'terrorism' charges, the Toronto Globe and Mail and, to a slightly lesser extent, The National Post, have indulged in an orgy of finger-pointing that must reduce the chances of any fair trial and, at the same time, sow fear in the hearts of the country's more than 700,000 Muslims. In fact, if I were a Canadian Muslim right now, I'd already be checking the airline timetables for a flight out of town. Or, is that the purpose of this press campaign?"

Heather Mallick, who writes a Viewpoint column for CBC News, commented that Mr. "Fisk noted that the accused were described as 'Canadian-born' and that there is a subtle difference between this and 'Canadian' even when they describe the same person. Thus, they are Canadian-born (Muslim) as opposed to Canadian (the rest of us), wrote Fisk.

"On that same Globe and Mail front page, an eyewitness in a news story was quoted as describing two 'brown-skinned young men' who had rented the unit next to him. I have never heard these words used this way in a Canadian paper. Most of the world is brown-skinned, most of Toronto's citizens are brown-skinned. No one points this out ever but now apparently we must beware the brown-skinned."

The Toronto 17 may turn out to be terrorist wannabes; they may turn out not to be. The point is our legal system is built on the sacred idea that everybody charged with an offence is presumed to be innocent. It is for a judge and jury in a properly conducted trial to decide on guilt or innocence, not the media, and not the public at large. The presumption of innocence has been tossed aside because of the widespread belief that if a group of young Muslim men meet regularly they are probably up to no good.

The Canadian Council of Refugees (CCR) has certainly noticed this. "Some Canadian media contribute to dangerous stereotyping," CCR says on its website. "They serve a diet of distorted images which promote the false notion that Islam as a religion condones violence, and associate Muslims and Arabs with terrorism. When the media prominently identify individuals who are suspected of wrongdoing as being Muslim or Arab, they unfairly imply that all Arabs and Muslims are collectively responsible for the actions of certain individuals."

The frenzy over the Toronto 17 has brought racism to the surface. It echoes what happened after the terror attacks of 9/11. A few knuckleheads trashed Islamic places of worship in Canada as though the people who prayed there had something to do with flying planes into buildings in New York and Washington. There were even some people not bright enough to be knuckleheads who damaged a Hindu temple.

For these and other reasons, Muslims in Canada feel threatened. With some justification, they fear they may suffer the same fate as Jean Charles de Menezes. Two weeks after the July 2005 terrorist bombings on London's Underground, the somewhat "brown-skinned" young man boarded a subway train in that city. Police who had been following him thought he was a suicide bomber. He wasn't. He was an electrician. From Brazil. But, the police shot him dead before discovering his innocence.

Canada's own Maher Afar suffered a horrible fate. Mr. Arar fell under suspicion because of a loose connection to another man suspected of having links to a terror group. Based on this flimsy relationship he was arrested while passing through the United States in September 2002. Using information supplied by the RCMP, Mr. Arar was shipped off to Syria, where he was jailed and tortured.

Under torture, as most people would, he admitted to connections with al-Qaeda. He spent almost two and a half years in a Syrian jail before being released. He was guilty of no crime; but he was "guilty of being a Muslim."

Non-Muslims might view what happened to Maher Afar as an isolated incident. Muslims see it differently. They see it as part of a pattern that includes Operation Thread (see sidebar), the detention under secret security certificates of half a dozen Muslim men, and a variety of other unfounded suspicions of terrorism links.

The level of official mistrust crosses the line into absurdity. Just as hundreds of thousands of other Canadians have done, Kassim Mohamed videotaped Toronto's CN Tower. This brought him to the attention of Canada's spy agency, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS). Questions were asked and information shared with other spy agencies around the world. When Mr. Mohamed visited his children in Egypt, where they go to school, he was arrested and held in jail for two weeks. The Egyptians wanted to know why Canada's spies were so interested in him. Along with the CSIS agents, they had a hard time believing he was simply a father making a tape of Toronto landmarks to show his kids. No. He had to be a terrorist doing reconnaissance of future targets. If Kassim Mohamed had been a white-skinned man nobody would have paid the slightest attention to him.

In Canada's heightened state of tension, all Muslims have fallen under suspicion. According to the Nova Scotia-based magazine Shunpiking, CSIS tactics include "infiltrating places of worship, knocking on doors in the early morning hours, showing up at Muslims' places of work, bullying Muslims into spying on their communities, and jailing those who refuse to cooperate."

The attitude of the authorities spills over into the wider community. Why hire a Muslim or rent an apartment to one when this might cause a hassle with the authorities?

Now is not a good time to be a Muslim in Canada.

FACT FILE

In 2004, CanWest Global Communications told editors at its newspapers, such as The Ottawa Citizen and The National Post, to change the word "militant" to "terrorist" in stories from the Reuters news agency dealing with Middle East conflict. Reuters complained that the objectivity far which it is famous was undermined.

After 9/11 in the United States, the government closed down three prominent national Islamic charities, citing alleged ties to terrorists.

DEFINED BY THE FRINGE

There would be a bit of an outcry if all Christians were defined by the teaching of Rousas Rushdoony. His followers, called Dominionists or Christian Reconstructionists, want to convert the world to their way of thinking. Should they succeed, we would live in a very different society.

* The death penalty would be applied to: adultery, blasphemy, heresy, homosexual behaviour, idolatry, and prostitution, among many other things. The method of execution would be stoning or burning to death:

* Following any religion other than Christianity would be punishable by death;

* Women would be the property of their fathers until marriage when they would become the property of their husbands;

* Slavery would be re-introduced, and a slave owner could beat his slaves without penalty as long as the slave lived for at least a day before dying of the thrashing;

* A father would be permitted to sell his daughter into slavery.

The Dominionists believe that God's word is so powerful that everybody will accept it happily. It just needs to be explained to them properly.

OPERATION THREAD(BARE)

The Mounties said they had got their men--23 of them, all allegedly associated with al-Qaeda. All the men were Muslims from Pakistan and India. After the arrests in August 2003, the RCMP said it had cracked open an al Qaeda sleeper cell; Operation Thread was called a success. One of the young men, a student pilot, had flown near the Picketing nuclear plant east of Toronto, for goodness sakes.

The cloak of suspicion stitched together by the authorities soon turned out to be threadbare. The "suspected terrorists" were nothing more than a group of lads who had broken some immigration rules. They were sent home without being charged. But, by then the damage had been done.

A reporter for The Toronto Star went to check on the deported men a few months later. The "terrorist suspect" label had followed them home to Pakistan. Several said they were unable to find work and one man said his marriage had been dissolved by his in-laws.

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES:

1. Scan media reports of Islam in Canada. Decide whether each shows a negative or positive portrayal of Muslims. Are people identified as Muslim when the issue of religious affiliation is irrelevant to the story? Do you think the media are generally fair or unfair to Muslims?

2. In April 2005 an official biography of Queen Margrethe II of Denmark was published. In the book, the queen is quoted as saying: "We are being challenged by Islam these years. Globally as well as locally. There is something impressive about people for whom religion imbues their existence, from dusk to dawn, from cradle to grave. There are also Christians who feel this way.

"There is something endearing about people who give themselves up completely to their faith. But, there is likewise something frightening about such a totality, which also is a feature of Islam.

"A counterbalance has to be found, and one has to, at times, run the risk of having unflattering labels placed on you. For there are some things for which one should display no tolerance. And, when we are tolerant, we must know whether it is because of convenience or conviction."

Discuss.

Websites

Maher Arar Inquiry--http://www.ararcommission.ca/

Muslim Canadian Congress--http://www.muslimcanadiancongress.org/index.html