Canadian terrorism arrests legitimized the Afghanistan war and normalized racialized citizenship distinctions

Evidence

In the month of June 2006, there were ‘terror sweeps’ of seventeen young Muslim men in Toronto who were allegedly planning to blow up the CN Tower and the headquarters of Canada’s security services. The young men, five of whom are teenagers, were brought to the courtroom in leg irons, surrounded by the heavy presence of police snipers, a spectacle of ‘dangerous’ Muslim men whose meaning few could fail to grasp. Uncharacteristically naming race, Canadian newspapers covering the June terror arrests openly referred to Muslims as ‘brown-skinned’ and were at pains to make the distinction between those who were merely ‘Canadian-born,’ as the seventeen accused are, and those who are truly Canadian by virtue of possessing Canadian values, if not Canadian skin. Few reporters bothered to consider the presumption of innocence. At the same time as four hundred Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers in battle fatigues were engaged in arresting the seventeen young men, the Supreme Court was getting ready to hear challenges to the constitutionality of security certificates, a legal mechanism contained in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that permits the detention without due process of non-citizens suspected of involvement in terrorism and, more significantly, those considered to have the potential to commit terrorist acts. The Canadian government contemplated extending similar provisions in the Anti-Terrorism Act, which applies to citizens and non-citizens alike. In the same month, the government was also seeking support for sending more troops to Afghanistan and those already present there were beginning a major offensive against the Taliban. Terror arrests at home undoubtedly invested these latter activities with greater legitimacy, particularly when the bodies of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan began coming home. Canadians are reminded daily that we are a nation at war, and even hockey games can now begin with soldiers parachuting on to the ice. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 26

Categorization

• SEED: An article/excerpt on how domestic ‘terror sweeps’ function as propaganda legitimizing foreign war actions, using the June 2006 Toronto case as the concrete anchor.
• XREF: Connects to work on racialized citizenship and the ‘war on terror’; parallels Agamben’s state of exception framework and Canada’s security certificates.