Machine summary:
Editorial As if to give the lie to my last editorial, in which I argued that the “war on terror” was a smokescreen covering the imperial ambitions of the United States’neo-conservative political elite, on the day that the issue went to press, Toronto’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) announced the arrest of seventeen young Muslim men on terrorism-related charges.
While we do not know the veracity of the evi dence, and while it may be admirable that the belief is so strong that Islam prohibits terror that we cannot conceive of fellow Muslims doing such a thing, it ultimately harms the community that this kind of response is so widespread.
During an interview with the CBC 3 Editorial about how the CSIS and then the RCMP had recruited him, as well as his role in the arrests, he stated: So I met with the CSIS guys and they were very interested in me now, so basically they put to me the prospect of working with them,” he said … [I was asked to find out about] certain people, certain groups, getting close to leaders of certain groups, talking to them, seeing what kind of views they had and reporting on those views, what I thought those views to be, were they nefarious, weren’t they nefarious.
Most importantly, Schumm recognizes the disastrous impact that this abuse is having on the United States’ relations with the Muslim world and offers the following very moving apology that deserves widespread publicity: If it were possible for me to apologize to the entire Islamic world for our errors and pray for their forgiveness, I surely would, though it would not be deserved and perhaps not likely to be granted.