Justin Trudeau and the Wahhabi Lobby

I'm sure by now you've heard about Justin Trudeau's visit a few years back to a radical Wahhabist mosque in Montreal, and about the licking that's being meted out. Oh, not to Justin for pandering to Islamic supremacists (who, after all, comprise one of his prime voter pools). To the "mean" conservatives who dared to expose Trudeau's alarming naivete. Here's Robert Spencer on the ensuing kerfuffle:

Canada’s Leftist media establishment hit back hard. Jonathan Kay, who for years has been trying to efface all signs of his previous opposition to jihad terror, sneered in the National Post that the whole controversy had been cooked up by the conservative Sun TV network, “and since many Sun viewers already suspect that Trudeau was born in Kenya along with Barack Obama, its Muslim Menace programming presumably plays well to the network’s base.” 

Then Kay pounced:

In fact, the network botched the story: In the clip that Sun News had loaded on its web site as of 2pm on Thursday, the host reads out an old statement from the U.S. government, declaring that the mosque is among nine institutions where “known al-Qaeda members are recruited, facilitated or trained.” But the statement actually didn’t say “are.” It said “were.” (You can actually see the text in the printed version of the U.S. memo, which appears on the screen as the Sun host misquotes the key word.) As this CBC report from 2011 indicates, the reference relates to several jihadis who passed through Montreal in the late 1990s.

Warren Kinsella piled on in the Toronto Sun: “The Conservative kids in their dark suits are all ecstatic. After Trudeau visited the mosque – note that word, AFTER – a U.S. intelligence report came out and said that some men had passed through the mosque a decade earlier.” 

The U.S. report came out after Trudeau visited the mosque! And it just involved information about “some men had passed through the mosque a decade earlier”! The title of Kinsella’s piece summed up the liberal response: “Tory attack on Trudeau mosque visit backfires.” 

There was just one problem with this: it didn’t backfire, but actually raised important questions about Justin Trudeau’s awareness of the jihad threat, as well as his resolve to resist it. Sun News explained in an editorial that the problem with the mosque didn’t just involve some people who “passed through,” but some who lingered. One was “an admitted member of al-Qaida, who swore bayat (oath of allegiance) to Osama bin Laden” and “was the imam at the mosque during the month of Ramadan one year.” 

What’s more, even if the U.S. report came out after Trudeau visited the mosque, in July 2011, three months after Trudeau’s visit, the mosque’s website still featured this: “We hold that whoever claims that there is, besides Islam, a religion in existence today that is acceptable to Allah – whether it be the religion of the Jews, Christians or others – is an unbeliever (kaafir). His repentance should be sought; if he refuses to repent, he is to be killed as an apostate (murtad) because of rejecting the Qur’an.”

No doubt Kumbaya boyo Justin would view that in the context of our glorious multiculti tapestry, which, lest we forget, is a legacy of Trudeau père.