Islamism — the threat to Canada you won't hear uttered by the Liberals

The dangers posed to Canada’s cultural health and national security by Islamism have been known for decades

 

Since the October 7 pogrom by Hamas in southern Israel, Canada has seen a staggering surge in antisemitism, up 670 per cent in 2024, and in terrorism charges, up 488 per cent from April 2023 to March 2024. In both cases, the salient factor is Islamism.

Islamists, a small but influential fraction of Muslim communities, harbour the profound conviction that they “should deploy the necessary efforts not only to rule according to Sharia law but also to Islamize society, laws, governance, and all aspects of life…. across the Muslim world and beyond.”

Scholars in various fields, ranging from history to security studies, consider Islamism to be an existential threat to the security and cultural health of all western nations with rising Muslim populations. But “Islamism” is not a word you ever heard uttered by former Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau, or are likely to hear uttered by his successor, Mark Carney.

The principal vector for Islamism’s organized expression is the powerful Muslim Brotherhood — not a conspiracy theory, as some skeptics believe, but a genuine and successful conspiracy with a near-global reach. A useful resource for information on the Brotherhood’s formation, ideology, funding sources and activities can be found at the Sawab Center, a research group dedicated to combating the ideology of religion-based extremism.

The Brotherhood, or in its parlance the “Ikhwan,” outlined its purpose and strategy for conquering the West in an internal document, discovered by the FBI and submitted in evidence at the 2008 trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, “the largest terrorism financing prosecution in American history.”

The document, which describes what came to be known as the “stealth” jihad, as opposed to the hard jihad of Al Qaeda, ISIS and similarly violent groups, is titled, “An Explanatory Memorandum for the MB’s Goals in North America.” This is the memorandum’s most eye-opening paragraph:

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. …. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny.

The memo specifies America, because the movement takes different forms according to the local political conditions. In the Middle East, violence is the norm. In the West, stealth — using the West’s own democratic processes and “rights” discourse in order to erode their democracies — has become the norm. The ballot box, not the bullet. Its public-facing advocates aren’t scary-looking militants in face masks, but sympathetic, often charming apologists for Hamas, always available for media appearances.

The day before it was announced that Mamdani had won the New York mayoral election, Linda Sarsour told attendees at CAIR’s 2025 Leadership & Policy Conference in Washington, D.C.,“I want to say, make the point, that the Unity and Justice Fund PAC, which is the CAIR super PAC, was the largest institutional donor to the pro-Zohran PAC in New York.”

The Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) is a Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Arab-American “civil rights” group. It’s unclear whether other U.S. candidates and seated representatives in municipal, state, and federal elections receive similar support from CAIR.

In Canada, a 2011 Macdonald-Laurier Institute survey and analysis of the views of Canadian Muslims found that “while respondents overwhelmingly disapprove of al-Qaeda, they nonetheless moderately approve of other proscribed terrorist groups (such as Hezbollah and Hamas) along with the Muslim Brotherhood.” The sample size (455), however, wasn’t very large, and unsurprisingly, the response rate for this particular question was low, making it impossible to generalize these findings for the country.

Writing for the Middle East Forum about Canada’s federal election last winter, security analyst Joe Adam George observed that “several Islamist groups have stepped up efforts to solidify their influence over Muslim votes,” noting that Muslims — whose population has doubled since 2001 to become 4.9 per cent of Canada’s population — have the potential to influence anywhere between 60 to 80 of 343 federal ridings.

The dangers posed to Canada’s cultural health and national security by Islamism have been known for decades. During a 1998 Senate committee hearing, Ward Elcock, former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), testified on terrorist organizations raising funds in Canada. Mr. Elcock bluntly warned that Canada “cannot become, through inaction or otherwise, what might be called an unofficial state sponsor of terrorism.”

But such warnings flew under the public’s radar until October 7 unleashed the “from the river to the sea” and “by any means necessary” Islamists in the West, many of whom howl incessantly in our city streets with little fear of law enforcement, thanks to appeasement-oriented mayors and other authority figures. Most everyone knows Islamism is a grave societal toxin, but the megaphone given to Islamophobia coupled with the cone of silence over Islamism in the corridors of power — a form of gaslighting — makes citizens doubt their own legitimate fears. In this see-no-evil charade, Canada is becoming increasingly isolated.

As evidence, while frank and troubling studies are popping up in other Western nations beset by Brotherhood-aligned threats to cultural health and national security, you would search in vain for any such comprehensive, dedicated, declassified Government of Canada reports. You’ll hear about religiously motivated extremism and youth, but the word Islamism as a motivating ideology is nowhere to be found in the latest CSIS report tabled this year, and the Muslim Brotherhood is not mentioned once.

A 2016 U.K. House of Commons report, for example, found that aspects of Brotherhood ideology and tactics in the U.K. and abroad were “contrary to our values and have been contrary to our national interests and our national security.”

In France, a 2025 Internal Security report on the Brotherhood – which should be essential reading for Canadian officials – found it engaged in “entryism,” infiltration of institutions with a view to subverting France’s secularism, which “poses the risk of undermining the associative fabric and republican institutions — local authorities in particular — and, more broadly, national cohesion.” From where I sit, any objective study commissioned by the Canadian government would reach the same conclusions.

Islamic “entryism” is a grave Canadian problem in virtually all our political, cultural and educational institutions. Even if the government won’t talk about it, fortunately independent researchers do. Foremost in this regard is the above-mentioned Macdonald-Laurier Institute, under the banner of its Center for National Security and Prosperity project.

To update and refine my own research on the Brotherhood in Canada, I turned to Joe Adam George, mentioned above, MLI’s national security analyst, who has joined the team at ISGAP, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, headed by Canadian-born Charles Asher Small. George’s work is cited in ISGAP’s recent groundbreaking report on Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood’s growing influence “on politics, academia and civil society in Canada,” a wake-up call that is ignored at our peril.

George has written frequently on this issue in these pages and elsewhere. He says that “Canada’s permissive environment, shaped by a fragile national identity, a culture of victimhood, vote-bank politics, and unchecked immigration, has made it the ideal incubator for Islamist expansion.” Indeed, Canada has “become ‘ground zero’ for their soft-power operations, from campaigns to criminalize ‘Islamophobia’ to the indoctrination of children under the banner of ‘anti-Palestinian racism’.”

there is bipartisan political support in Congress for legislation that will designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist entity. According to George, Canada’s apathy on this file is an irritant to the Americans, who fear that our negligence could compromise their borders and financial system. As one senior U.S. official told George recently, the administration has determined that, having “let in way more undesirables than we would have liked,” they view Canada as less of a “strategic partner” and more as a “dependent.”

In 2008 the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) warned the RCMP that Hezbollah was using Canada as a hub for money-laundering and fentanyl trafficking. And in its criminal indictment of TD Bank during Joe Biden’s tenure, the U.S. Treasury determined that the ledgers and transactions of Canada’s financial system actively enabled extremist violence.

“From fentanyl and narcotics trafficking, to terrorist financing and human trafficking, TD Bank’s chronic failures provided fertile ground for a host of illicit activity to penetrate our financial system,” declared Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo. (In a first for a major North American bank, TD pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit money laundering; they paid 3-billion dollars in fines.)

And last week, CSIS director Dan Rogers informed Canadians that nearly one in 10 terrorism investigations at the agency now involves a minor under the age of 18.

As far as Canada’s Islamism problem is concerned, youth radicalization and “white-collar” Islamist extremism will remain the two dominant issues in the near to mid-term, according to George. He defines “white-collar” Islamist extremism as a concept in which influential individuals such as lawyers, imams, not-for-profit executives, and teachers hold extremist views in support of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, but do not necessarily espouse them in public to protect them from scrutiny. These individuals, he says, are the real enablers of the Muslim Brotherhood’s brand of “non-violent” jihad in the West by influencing government policies, creating environments that foment domestic radicalization, and sometimes even providing material support for violent extremism.”

George offers recommendations. Designating the Muslim Brotherhood and ideologically-aligned groups as terrorist entities in alignment with the U.S. would be a start, but not sufficient. The CRA and federal security bodies should be granted autonomy to investigate “organizations with opaque finances or extremist ties” without political interference. Blacklist those entities and persons who violate anti-money-laundering laws to prevent them from re-emerging under new names or charitable fronts. Dismantle performative positions like the “Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia,” which deepens divisions and helps empower networks undermining our democracy. No entitlements or preferences to any group, religious or not, in government, schools or public life.

These are reasonable and feasible actions Canada could take to suppress the “civilizational-jihadist process” America is committed to vanquishing. Inaction to date suggests our prime minister has little appetite for the unpleasantness a similar commitment would entail. But what’s the alternative?