Cold Terror is a frightening book, and I am genuinely afraid for the safety of Stewart Bell who is Canada's leading reporter on national security and terrorism. He has bravely produced an important book warning Canada, and indeed the Western World, about "the terrorists who use Canada as a base; the carnage they cause around the world; and the political leaders in Ottawa who let it all happen." This is a timely and well researched book which exposes the world's deadliest terrorist organisations and how they have used Canada as a base. The powerful Canadian Islamic Congress has already labelled Bell as being "anti-Islamic"; and he has to date survived numerous threats by the secretive terror networks operating inside Canada. I am certain that this book will further intensify dangerous focus on the author's life. He is a brave man who takes us not only into the secret working of the Armenian and Sikh groups of the 1980s but to the present day Tamil Tigers, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda. Bell has also followed the trail of terror travelling deep into Sri Lanka, Israel and Afghanistan to report on the carnage caused by Canadian terrorism. Indeed the trail has already led us from the 1985 Air India bombing to the assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India in 1991; the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing in New York; and the assassination of Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993. The 1995 bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad; the 1998 blasting of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam; and the horrific 2002 Bali night club bombings add to the gruesome list of bloody consequences.
More and more roads to terrorism start and finish in Canada, and Bell gives full details of some of the terrorists who have taken advantage of Canada's liberal immigration and refugee policies. The first two chapters of this terrifying treatise deal with the domestic wars that characterised the early days of Canadian terrorism. In these two chapters the extraordinary stories of two Canadian Sikhs: Talwinder Singh Parmar and Ajaib Singh Bagri are discussed with the events that led to the Air India disaster in 1985 when 329 people died. The second chapter deals with Marickavasagar Suresh-the notorious Canadian leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (known as the LTTE or Tamil Tigers)-certainly one of the world's deadliest terrorist groups, and the only one to have assassinated two world leaders: Rajiv Gandhi of India and Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa.
Bell's third chapter examines the Canadian activities of Middle East terrorist groups, focusing on Hezbollah. In it Bell recounts the unnerving story of how Mahmoud Mohammed Issa Mohammed, a member of The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)- known as "Triple M" had somehow slipped through the CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) security barrier and settled in Ontario with his family, despite having taken part in a deadly assault on an El Al passenger plane in Athens in 1968.
The final four chapters of Bell's book deal with the rise of the Canadian Al Qaeda network. Bell provides terrifying details of Fateh Kamel and the organisation of a base for Algerian extremists in Montreal; and the poisonous Kassem Dahar, a now imprisoned theatre owner in Western Canada who is almost certainly tied to one of the most important branches of the Canadian Al Qaeda network, the Egyptian wing. An important chapter is devoted to the Almed Said Khadr Canadian family who have exploited CIDA (The Canadian International Development Agency)-the humanitarian aid arm of the Canadian government, to raise money to finance the formidable Al Qaeda terrorist force in the mid 1990s as well as world-wide jihad violence. Curiously, the then Prime Minister, Jean Chretien, was the key influence in Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's 1996 decision to free Khadr, then imprisoned in Pakistan, without charges, allowing his safe return to Toronto where he continued to his Afhganistan involvement with the Taliban regime.
In a final chapter entitled "White Meat"-the Al Qaeda code name for Americans-Bell recounts the story of the two brothers Mohammed and Abdulrahman Jabarah who operated their radical Islamic group in support of Al Qaeda out of St. Catherines in Ontario. Abdulrahman was killed by Saudi security authorities following an attempt on a housing complex in Riyadh. However his elder brother, now imprisoned by CSIS agents and brought back to Canada in 2002, decided to give full details about the extent of Al Qaeda's terrorist operation in Canada rather than face criminal charges for terrorism, extradition, and a lengthy prison term. Thus "one of the most dangerous terrorists to emerge from Canada became one of its most valuable contributions to the war on terrorism."
Canada has a new Prime Minister now, Paul Martin, who was re-elected with the narrowest of minority governments earlier this summer. He succeeds Prime Minister Jean Chretien whose nave liberal regime never displayed any understanding of the terrorist threat in Canada. However Paul Martin's own record is far from unblemished. As Finance Minister, he "oversaw heavy cuts to Canada's military and intelligence capabilities and, when asked to defend his government's approach to counterterrorism, he repeatedly shut down the debate by calling his critics racists. In fact Martin, hungry for votes, supported and attended a FACT (Federation Association of Canadian Tamils) dinner in Toronto despite being warned by CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) that FACT was an LTTE (Tamil Tiger) front. The Liberal Government's plan in Canada is "to fight Al Qaeda with humanitarian aid." Prime Minister Chretien repeated this theory to the United Nations as recently as September 2003, arguing that, to fight terrorism, the world had to "reduce the growing disparity between rich and poor. Global security and stability today depend on greater equity." This, as Bell points out, is a ridiculously nave approach. Islamic fanaticism is not about money. Far from it. "Osama bin Laden is not poor. He is worth $300 million. He could have spent it on the poor. Instead he used it to finance jihad. The 9/11 hijackers were middle class, university educated professionals. They were not short of cash, nor were they motivated by poverty. They were driven by hatred and the twisted ideology of radical terrorism."
Bell's conclusion to Cold Terror gives further serious warning-particularly to those nations that are most open and least attuned to the terrorist threat. He feels that they will become the most likely havens just as Canada is today-a country that "takes in immigrants and refugees from all over the world-many of them from zones of conflict." An RCMP intelligence report, concerned with the recruitment of terrorists from within Canadian ethnic communities, alarmingly notes that "17 percent of Canada's population is foreign born, as opposed to 9 percent in the United States"-making Canada much more vulnerable to harbouring terrorist activities than other developed nations. "Canada" the author feels "has tried to smother terrorism with kindness . The mistakes that contributed to the "made in Canada" bombing by militant Sikhs in British Columbia in the 1980's are now being repeated with the Tamil Tigers, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda."
Stewart Bell's book Cold Terror is a demand for immediate action. Every responsible resident of Canada, America, Britain and in fact the Western World, should read this meticulously researched warning and learn the truth about the imminent danger facing them from Canadian based terrorists. And I include Britain with intent because the recent lenient government immigration policy there may well have already spawned a safe haven for terrorists in that country as well.
Bell's book, if nothing else, is a chilling indictment of Canadian government policies and its irresponsible attitude towards harbouring terrorist organisations.