Sunday, June 4, 2006.

People arriving at a Toronto mosque discover that the building has been vandalized overnight. Several windows have been smashed and the front door is broken.

Hamid Slimi, who leads the International Muslims Organization of Toronto mosque, says it's a "logical assumption" to link the vandalism and the news of the arrests of 17 people under Canada's Anti-terrorism Act.

No one was hurt, nothing inside was damaged and there was no looting or spray-painting, he said. But Slimi said the vandalism came as a shock at the mosque, which is in the northwest Rexdale neighbourhood and has as many as 20,000 members.

When police announced details of the arrests at a news conference a day earlier, they made it clear that they were investigating individuals — and not a community.

RCMP Assistant Commissioner Mike McDonell, right, speaks as CSIS Assistant Director of Operations Luc Portelance looks on during a press conference in Toronto on June 3, 2006. (Aaron Harris/Canadian Press)

"It is important to know that this operation in no way reflects negatively on any specific community or ethnocultural group in Canada," Luc Portelance of CSIS said. "Terrorism is a dangerous ideology, and a global phenomenon. As yesterday's arrests demonstrate, Canada is not immune from this ideology."

Hours after the vandalism was discovered, Toronto police Chief Bill Blair met with representatives of the Muslim community.

"There are always uninformed ignorant idiots who will go out and try to express some anger and misdirect it against totally innocent people, and any anger directed at the wider Muslim community in Toronto would be totally misdirected and based on ignorance," he told the gathering.

Among those in attendance was Husain Patel of the Canadian Council of Muslim Theologians. He said: "The accused are innocent until proven guilty but if they are proven guilty after given due process, then this is a wake-up call, especially for Muslim leaders."

Most of the accused are Canadian citizens. Those who aren't, have lived in the country for a long time.

Days before the raids, Jack Hooper, the deputy director of CSIS, told a Senate committee that Canada has homegrown extremists. "We know who and where some of them are."

Raheel Raza

It comes as no surprise to Raheel Raza, author of Their Jihad, Not My Jihad. She says a warped ideology of hate that has nothing to do with Islam, has erupted in many parts of the West.

"It had been happening here in Canada to the extent that hate was being spouted through places of worship and by people who make it their day job to incite young people in this hatred. Towards what they perceive to be the imperial powers, the western occupation of parts of the world."

Raza says parents are the first line of defence when it comes to making sure their children aren't susceptible to an imported hatred of Canadian values.

"We should be desperately concerned [about domestic extremism]," David Harris, former chief of strategic planning for CSIS, told CBC News. "We've seen a trend in the western world especially of young folk who have citizenship or long-time residency, you would have thought they would have grown up with the liberal, democratic pluralist values of our charter system. Yet, again, as we saw in Britain, there are large questions about whether there isn't a radicalism growing deep within Canada."

Harris says with Canada absorbing more than 200,000 immigrants and thousands more refugee claimants every year, it's difficult to ensure we are weeding out extremists.

"When we bring people in large numbers, if there should be strains of radicalism within those numbers, those groups can become self-isolating and cut themselves off from the general population, and therefore not be exposed to the more progressive ideas that we are used to."

These groups then can become a magnet for disaffected youth. Jordan Bernt, a University of Toronto sociology professor, notes that most of the suspects are in their teens or early 20s.

"Young men are particularly status hungry, and belonging to a political movement — especially one that's on a mission — is one way of obtaining group identity and also of knowing where you are and what you're doing."

Hussein Hamdani is with the Ihya Foundation in Toronto, a grassroots organization that tries to promote a better understanding of Islam. Part of his mission is to work with young people, so they don't become radicalized.

"For many of them, they think that Canada, their own country, has declared war on them or their people," Hamdani told CBC News. "And they think that Canada has aligned itself too closely with the United States and U.S. foreign policy, and that the war on terrorism is a war against Islam.

"And many of them have these grievances and they don't know how to express them in a non-violent way."

Hamdani is suggesting a three-pronged effort:

• A review of Canadian laws and policies to make sure they don't affect one community more than another.
• Greater support for Muslims who are trying to ensure that there is zero tolerance within the Muslim community for any hate language or anything that could be considered anti-social behaviour.
• Encourage all Canadians to get to know one another a bit better.

It's easy to demonize someone you don't know, but it's much harder to do so when you get to know them," Hamdani said. He adds that he's encouraged that in this case, the RCMP received some of its information from people from within the Muslim community.

Mubin Shaikh

One of those people was 29-year-old Mubin Shaikh, a prominent member of Toronto's Indo-Canadian Muslim community. He describes himself as an "observant Muslim" and was born in Canada to immigrant parents. In July 2006, he told CBC's The Fifth Estate he worked as a paid informant for CSIS for more than two years, spending much of that time with the suspects in the alleged bomb plot.

The former army cadet and Canadian Armed Forces reservist described them as "fruitcakes … with the capacity to do some real damage."

Shaikh said he heard about their alleged plans and became a CSIS informer because he was concerned about the potential impact on all Canadians, especially on the country's Muslim community. After consulting the Qur'an and senior Muslim religious leaders, he went undercover. "God says in the Qur'an that we must value one life," he said. "I was guided, I had my licence."

Khalid Baksh

Khalid Baksh, a member of the Muslim Lawyers Association, concedes there may be some fear within the Muslim community that it will become "the target for some intolerant people out there in our greater community."

But, he says, intolerance won't last.

"Every time something like this happens, in fact, what we see is that there's a greater understanding about Islam. Because people want to know more about the religion, want to know more about who we are."