Triumph Over Terror

Aside from the questions about the timeline and who knew what when and should have told whom, the bottom line is that last week, our police prevented innocent people from getting hurt or killed. To say that the people of nearby Strathroy were shocked by the detonation of an explosion and the killing of Aaron Driver on a residential street, is like saying Michael Phelps is a pretty good swimmer. The RCMP limited the tragedy to one life, instead of whoever was unlucky enough to be in London’s City Centre that night. (Driver died inside a cab and had told the driver that’s where he wanted to go.) 

On news/talk 1290 last week I interviewed Dr. Wagdy Loza, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at Queen’s University. He has done extensive research in the Middle East and at home on radicalization and extremism. His views differ from many others. He repeated a phrase that gets me hate texts when I say it on air; not all radicals are Muslim. There are Christians and those of other faiths who also radicalize but as Dr. Loza said, ‘the Middle East is the hot-spot right now.”

We know that the Imam at the London Mosque was aware of Driver’s extremist views and was trying to “counsel him” toward peace. Dr. Loza said that never works. We also know that Driver was out on a Peace Bond that prevented him from accessing the Internet and isolated him further. Dr. Loza says that was a mistake. He acknowledges that people are trying their best, but their efforts are largely wasted. The Trudeau government did some hand-holding on Monday, that didn’t offer a lot of concrete methods for stopping terror in its tracks. Details are apparently forthcoming.

Dr. Loza said Driver fit the profile of a home-grown terrorist. His mother died at age 7, he was a loner for most of his life and one thing he was looking forward to – the birth of his child – ended tragically when the baby was stillborn. He felt isolated and shunned. His family didn’t know how to communicate with him so most of them wrote him off. His growing allegiance to jihad needed to be interrupted when he was a kid, before he grew to believe it was his life’s purpose.

I gave Dr. Loza the analogy of becoming a Big Sister. A teacher notices that a little girl isn’t speaking or raising her hand in class. She’s timid, her parents don’t come to school events and it seems like no one is watching out for her. So the teacher contacts Big Sisters and says she has a girl she feels is at risk and could benefit from having a Big Sister. That’s how I met Tabitha.

Dr. Loza agreed that’s the kind of alertness that teachers, family members, doctors and others need to develop for kids with extremist views so that, like finding them a Big Sister, there can be an intervention. They need a community, not to be ostracized. By the time Driver was sent to live with his sister in Strathroy, it was way too late.

This approach reminds me of a group of nuns in Hamilton who look after sex offenders when they’re released from prison. If the offender truly wants to change his life, the nuns find him an apartment, a job and furniture. They give him a social and family structure and someone he’s responsible to. Someone who will be disappointed if he messes up. He has people to call and talk to as candidly as needed. You can’t shock these nuns. Isolating these people creates stress and stress prompts them to go back to familiar behaviors. For the new behavior to stick, they need to feel like they belong.

I told Dr. Loza that his beliefs were kind of depressing. There seems to be no will to implement this kind of widespread teaching and society seems stuck on laws (which are proving ineffective) and seeing terrorists as demons rather than people who are damaged and can actually be stopped. He agreed but warned that if we don’t change our approach, we’re doomed to have mass casualities caused by jihadists over and over and over again. The RCMP caught their man this time. Next time, well, I shudder to think about it.