Juno News - July 26, 2018


Terrorism？ Gun violence？ Mental illness？ Looking at the Toronto shooting


Episode Stats

Length

52 minutes

Words per Minute

177.94456

Word Count

9,310

Sentence Count

568

Misogynist Sentences

9

Hate Speech Sentences

23


Summary

In this episode, Andrew Lawton talks about the tragic Toronto shooting and the media's handling of the story, including the treatment of Faisal Hussein and the way he is being treated by the media and others on the left.


Transcript

00:00:00.480 Hello everyone and happy Thursday. This is Andrew Lawton, fellow with the True North Initiative, back for yet another Facebook Live.
00:00:10.460 This time with a lot to talk about and a lot of different themes of the same story.
00:00:15.920 And that story is unfortunately the tragic Toronto shooting that took place Sunday night.
00:00:21.740 Police, we now know, have named Faisal Hussain as the shooter, the SIU specifically.
00:00:27.520 Hussain, 29, killed two women, a girl and a woman, a 10-year-old girl and an 18-year-old woman and injured 13 others.
00:00:37.060 And it's so challenging for people in the media to respond to something that is so breaking and so urgent and to not have the facts.
00:00:47.680 People fill in the blanks. And this is one of the biggest problems whenever a tragic event like this happens.
00:00:53.100 It's that if you read or listen to anything in the first 24 hours, you're probably going to be misinformed.
00:01:00.720 And in some cases, in some cases, this is just the normal run-of-the-mill, we're still trying to find our sea legs sort of response to this thing.
00:01:10.840 And other people will take a wait-and-see approach. Cable news doesn't.
00:01:14.760 I mean, one of the most spectacularly bad examples of this was the Boston bombing, the Boston Marathon bombing a few years back.
00:01:20.800 You watch CNN, and I think they probably named like 37 different people as the suspect by the time we actually found out it was the Tsarnaev brothers.
00:01:29.180 But apart from that normal response to something imminent, there is another dimension to it of how coverage gets skewed.
00:01:38.340 And that is when agendas start to be at work here. Agendas to stop the truth or agendas to craft a new truth.
00:01:49.120 And you've heard the expression in the past, I don't know who coined it, it might have been Glenn Beck or someone else, that truth has no agenda.
00:01:55.660 We had this shooting happen Sunday night. By Monday morning, about 12 hours later, Mayor John Tory in Toronto had decided to make it about gun violence.
00:02:06.160 That was what it was, gun violence. Not even 24 hours, 12 hours after the shooting.
00:02:12.120 And it was about how, in his words, why does anyone in this city need to have a gun?
00:02:17.840 We'll talk about that in a little bit.
00:02:20.540 And then that gun narrative unfolded even further as of Tuesday night when City Council in Toronto passed a motion banning handguns.
00:02:28.660 Well, they don't actually have the jurisdiction to ban handguns, so all they did was pass a motion saying that they want someone else to ban handguns.
00:02:36.780 Again, I'll get into the gun component here.
00:02:39.320 But then we have what is the most fascinating dilemma here.
00:02:42.360 And that is the way that Faisal Hussein is being treated.
00:02:47.520 He's dead, and I have no love lost over that.
00:02:50.180 But the thing that's interesting here is that he's being given this glamour treatment by a lot of people in the press and a lot of people on the left.
00:02:58.920 And it's not even just that he's been – it's not that the evil has been glossed over.
00:03:04.300 It's that instead of saying this is a bad guy and the bad guy did something bad, we start trying to explain away the reasoning.
00:03:13.900 And that's where the one tweet that I – I think it's up to like 1,500 retweets now – was a Toronto Star headline where it was talking about his complicated past filled with family misfortune.
00:03:25.880 Now, if I were to not tell you anything else about the story, but I were to say, okay, today, folks, on the True North Initiative Facebook page,
00:03:32.760 I'm going to talk about someone who had a complicated past and a family full of misfortune.
00:03:37.740 You'd think that I was telling you a story about some comeback kid, a story of someone who overcame the odds to do something great.
00:03:45.100 You wouldn't think I was talking about a potential terrorist or at the very least a murderer.
00:03:49.400 You just wouldn't because those are the terms that we use to describe people that are troubled and disturbed and people that are actually conquering the odds.
00:04:00.100 And that language is very important.
00:04:02.540 And I don't believe for a second that the Toronto Star headline writers aren't aware of the power of that type of language.
00:04:08.780 And you see this happening in so many ways where we can't just accept that there is a difference between good and evil.
00:04:16.680 And by the way, that good and evil even exist.
00:04:18.800 That in and of itself is a challenge in many respects.
00:04:22.020 But when we look at the bad guys of our age now, the bad guys of our era,
00:04:26.300 we have to try to find something other than the painfully obvious answer.
00:04:31.140 And in this case, I have no idea if Faisal Hussein was in conversation with ISIS.
00:04:37.700 ISIS has claimed responsibility through a release that was distributed through the propaganda agency, AMAC.
00:04:43.000 That is not irrelevant.
00:04:45.320 Is it something that we can take as a singular piece of evidence and say, ergo, he was a terrorist?
00:04:49.900 No.
00:04:50.680 But this fits the profile.
00:04:52.060 And oftentimes, there is a difference between the, we don't know if it's terrorism, so we're going to wait and see,
00:05:00.720 and the, there's no way this is terrorism, look somewhere else.
00:05:03.520 And the problem is that we see an increasing number of examples of people falling in willingly to that second category of refusing,
00:05:11.160 even when all evidence is pointing to terrorism, to accept that something was terrorism.
00:05:16.480 And a great example of that was the Torontonian a few years back, maybe two years back,
00:05:21.820 that went in and stabbed people at the soldier, stabbed people at the soldier recruitment center.
00:05:27.200 And he said, Allahu Akbar.
00:05:28.860 He said, I'm doing this in the name of ISIS.
00:05:30.460 And what did the Toronto Star say?
00:05:32.020 He was disturbed.
00:05:33.440 Well, yes, he was disturbed.
00:05:35.040 But again, we are even telling terrorists that they're not terrorists now.
00:05:38.680 That's how much there is a refusal and an unwillingness to accept that terrorism is actually a reality.
00:05:46.480 Is that even when someone says, yes, I am a terrorist, yes, I'm doing this in the name of Allah, we say, oh, no, you're not.
00:05:52.320 What was another example of that?
00:05:53.600 The woman who took a knife out at Canadian Tire, I think it was in Scarborough, and then started beating employees with a golf club.
00:06:01.120 She was in court.
00:06:01.960 She was like begging the judge to let her be a terrorist.
00:06:05.200 She was begging the judge.
00:06:06.400 I'm a terrorist.
00:06:07.060 I'm a terrorist.
00:06:07.720 I'm doing this for ISIS.
00:06:08.640 I'm doing this for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
00:06:11.260 And then they're like, no, no, no, she's unwell.
00:06:13.340 She may well be unwell.
00:06:14.880 But here's the problem is that when we look at the two silos of this discussion, or three, let's look at all three examples, mental illness, terrorism, gun violence.
00:06:24.980 Those are the three major excuses, depending on what your agenda is, that we're seeing unfold in the Toronto Danforth shooting.
00:06:33.500 So if we accept that mental illness is the culprit, what the Toronto Star wants us to believe, what the Toronto police right now want us to believe, is that that completely nullifies every other part of the discussion.
00:06:49.780 It's that if we say Faisal Hussein had a mental illness, he definitely wasn't a terrorist, and it wasn't really a gun violence problem because, well, he was mentally ill.
00:06:58.140 He would have gotten the gun whatever way he wanted.
00:07:00.500 And if we accept that terrorism is the answer, you have to believe that the mental illness excuse is a hoax.
00:07:06.700 He never had mental illness.
00:07:07.920 He never had any psychological conditions.
00:07:10.020 And if you believe it's gun violence, it's just, you know, you respond with gun control, and that's that.
00:07:16.180 So let's look at all the stakeholders in this discussion.
00:07:18.680 John Tory and his cronies on Toronto City Council say it's gun violence.
00:07:22.960 That's it.
00:07:23.400 It's a gun violence problem and nothing else.
00:07:26.080 You've got a lot of people that are taking a very hard line stance.
00:07:28.920 This is terrorism.
00:07:30.020 And then you've got people like the Toronto Star and Toronto Police, mental illness.
00:07:34.380 I don't think mental illness and terrorism are mutually exclusive in this area.
00:07:38.840 In fact, if we do accept, and this is, I would say, a very compassionate viewpoint, but if we are to accept that people with mental illnesses are sometimes susceptible to radical ideology, and I say sometimes because mental illness is a wide range and mostly nonviolent.
00:07:58.380 I mean, when I was mentally ill, I at best wanted to kill myself, no one else, and even then I failed at it.
00:08:03.400 But the problem is, when we start talking about mental illness as an explanation and as a catch-all to these sorts of things, what we're actually saying is that mental illness is inherently violent, which it isn't, whereas radical Islamic ideology is inherently violent.
00:08:20.240 And that's the difference, is that not all mentally ill people want to kill others, most don't.
00:08:25.920 When you're talking about radical Muslims and the radical ones, the Islamists, most of them do believe in violence.
00:08:33.720 Most of them do believe in a violence that will overthrow the infidels and instill a caliphate.
00:08:39.780 That's what they want.
00:08:41.240 So we have to take them at their word when they say that.
00:08:44.640 So I have no difficulty at all believing that radical Islamists are a little bit unhinged and are a little bit insane, but that doesn't matter.
00:08:55.480 Because we still have to deal with the ideology itself.
00:09:00.660 And if some mosque can preach, we must slay the infidels one by one, and then someone who's there who's not mentally ill will go, no, whatever.
00:09:10.180 And someone who is will go, yes, and now I'm going to go out and do that.
00:09:13.660 That still is a radical Islamic ideology problem.
00:09:17.780 You can't separate the two.
00:09:20.000 So when I'm looking right now at this discussion here, I believe that Faisal Hussein had mental health issues.
00:09:26.740 We had a source tell Global News that he had been arrested twice, at least under the Mental Health Act, which means that police were concerned either for his own well-being or for the people around him.
00:09:37.960 And when his parents put out a statement saying that he had had depression and psychosis, that statement, which Anthony Fury of the Toronto Sun, also a True North Initiative fellow, found out was actually done at the hands of a spin doctor, of a PR person.
00:09:52.720 I believe it.
00:09:53.520 I believe that there were mental conditions there, which means that it's all the more important for the people around someone in that situation to realize, okay, I think this person is probably at risk of violence.
00:10:05.760 I think this person is probably at risk of doing something that is going to be a danger to themselves or to the people around them.
00:10:16.100 This is not rocket science, but it becomes so difficult when stakeholders and institutions refuse to engage in these discussions.
00:10:24.600 So what's the response when ISIS claims responsibility to this?
00:10:30.660 You get the Toronto Police saying, no, no, no, nothing to see here, nothing to see here, it's not there, look away, folks.
00:10:36.520 And then we had the other media report, CBS actually.
00:10:39.860 CBS reported that he had been spoken to by authorities for what he was doing online.
00:10:45.860 Now, I do think there is a concern here that a lot of this story has been driven by unnamed and anonymous sources.
00:10:55.500 And, or I said in a column I wrote, maybe just one really chatty anonymous source who's doing the rounds.
00:10:59.940 But you always have to be very leery of who it is that's actually driving these discussions, who it is that's actually advancing an agenda.
00:11:07.960 But I would stress that this is an issue that we're probably going to, even in three or four weeks, still have a great many unanswered questions.
00:11:19.240 And this is one of the biggest problems with Canada's counterterrorism efforts is that we tend to just move on very quickly.
00:11:28.060 And I'll give you a great example of this.
00:11:29.560 Look at even the Las Vegas shooting.
00:11:31.460 Everyone, for days and days and weeks, was like, how did this guy learn to shoot?
00:11:35.860 How did he get all these guns?
00:11:37.020 How did he do this?
00:11:37.860 And then everyone just moved on.
00:11:39.420 Everyone just forgot about it.
00:11:41.020 Now, I don't have a conspiracy theory about that Las Vegas shooting, nor do I have a conspiracy theory about this shooting.
00:11:49.560 I want to see where the facts go.
00:11:51.840 And I think that's what every law enforcement agency should want.
00:11:54.660 I think it's what every media outlet should want.
00:11:56.640 I think it's what every head of government should want.
00:11:58.560 But if you look at the actual connections, the actual connections between all of these different incidents, even if people are dealing with mental illness issues, what is it that lets them, in their mind, justify violence?
00:12:14.540 It's the ideology.
00:12:15.740 And I'm not saying that's the case with Hussein, because we actually don't know.
00:12:20.360 We don't know.
00:12:21.580 And there are people that will draw a great many more conclusions from his name being Faisal Hussein than they would from his name being John Smith.
00:12:30.260 But there's a reason for that, because we've seen far too many Faisal Hussein-type names that have been involved in these types of things.
00:12:38.720 And it's terrible.
00:12:40.360 And if you are, like the vast majority of Muslims, completely uninterested in violence and, in fact, opposed to violence, I get why you are so distraught when you see an incident like this, when you see someone hijacking your faith and committing violence.
00:12:57.000 And I'm sympathetic to that.
00:12:58.200 But we also have to be very clear to not make every one of these acts of terror or potential acts of terror into a moral lecture about Islamophobia.
00:13:09.420 Because that is the equivalent of saying all lives matter in response to whether someone says black lives matter or someone else's lives matter.
00:13:16.720 Like you're not actually dealing with the subject matter at hand.
00:13:20.660 So we do know that Faisal Hussein's family was going to a mosque.
00:13:26.160 We do know that he was, by all accounts, a practicing or at the very least believing Muslim.
00:13:33.060 What we don't know is the extent to which that had a role in this particular shooting.
00:13:39.160 And there are lots of people that are going to say, oh, well, of course it did.
00:13:41.340 No, I'm not going to make assumptions.
00:13:43.400 I'm going to see where the evidence goes.
00:13:45.140 I'm not going to ignore what is painfully obvious, though.
00:13:48.760 And that is that I cannot think of a single case where someone who did have a Muslim background committed a mass act of violence and then we found out it had nothing to do with their religion.
00:14:01.320 I honestly have not seen a single case where that has happened.
00:14:04.360 I've had cases where people have been trying to make that claim, like Omar Mateem in, I think he was the Pulse nightclub shooter in San Bernardino, California, where people have said, oh, well, you know, it wasn't the religion.
00:14:16.700 It was this.
00:14:17.040 But the person themselves, the actual killer, thought it was their religion.
00:14:21.100 And I'm not going to tell a killer that, oh, they're wrong when they say they're doing it for whatever reason they say.
00:14:27.320 Okay, so this is where I would take a long-term viewpoint of this, which is that we have to start having these discussions in a more frank and open way.
00:14:38.320 But if you look at official Twitter right now, and if you're not familiar with it, official Twitter is a bunch of people with blue checkmarks.
00:14:45.660 Now, I have a blue checkmark.
00:14:46.680 Not all people with blue checkmarks.
00:14:48.420 But a bunch of people in Canada with blue checkmarks.
00:14:50.580 They spend all day, every day, retweeting each other, and they have this obsession with the right side in Canada.
00:14:57.820 They have this obsession with conservatives, with people like Candace Malcolm and Anthony Fury and Ezra Levant and even me to some extent.
00:15:05.280 And all of these people are consumed not by wanting to know the truth about what actually happened,
00:15:12.440 but they're consumed by wanting to call out the response from people that are asking, hey, what happened?
00:15:19.420 And this is just such a despicable display, and they're deliberately obfuscating.
00:15:27.060 Like, they're either incompetent or malicious, and I'll let you decide which one.
00:15:31.500 But the problem is these people are too concerned with how conservatives respond to potential terrorism
00:15:39.860 that they don't actually care about the incident themselves.
00:15:43.600 They want to view every single one of these cases as an isolated incident.
00:15:49.420 You know, I remember in math, I was never good at math, but I remember in math class in some grade,
00:15:53.840 we had to put, you know, these little dots on a chart, and then eventually you had to find that, oh, well, you know,
00:15:59.140 if you look at all the dots together, there's kind of a line that goes through the middle of them,
00:16:03.180 and they call that, I think, the average or the mean.
00:16:05.440 And they want to believe that there is no clustering.
00:16:09.260 There's no grouping.
00:16:10.400 There is no similarity whatsoever between this Faisal Hussein that shoots some people in Toronto
00:16:16.160 and that Faisal Hussein that drives a van through a crowd
00:16:19.260 and that Omar Ma team who shoots people and that Mohammed Mohammed who's stout.
00:16:24.700 They want to believe that there's no connection between that.
00:16:26.900 And trust me, I wish there was, I wish this wasn't an issue.
00:16:31.500 I wish, and by the way, most Muslims wish, almost all Muslims wish this wasn't an issue.
00:16:37.120 But we have to look at the ones who are causing the problems.
00:16:41.780 And is it because they are unwell and this religion gives them justification, they feel?
00:16:48.560 That's still a problem.
00:16:50.120 That's still a problem.
00:16:51.140 And I wonder where this is going to go when you have the media deliberately trying to say,
00:16:58.820 there's nothing to see here.
00:17:02.080 And quite frankly, I mean, the mosque that the Hussein family went to was one I was familiar with
00:17:08.060 because seven years ago, back in 2011, it was the mosque that was at the center of the controversy called the Mosketeria.
00:17:15.900 And it was fascinating because this Mosketeria was at Valley Park Middle School,
00:17:21.940 which was just, I think, like a kilometer or two from where the Husseins lived.
00:17:25.800 And every Friday, the school cafeteria would convert into a mosque.
00:17:30.260 And you think, oh, well, you can't pray in school, but you can have a mosque in school.
00:17:33.720 That seems a little weird.
00:17:34.780 And the reason was they found that at the school, like half the students were getting up and leaving
00:17:38.940 every Friday for a few hours to go to the mosque for prayer.
00:17:42.700 So they figured, all right, let's just bring the mosque to the school.
00:17:44.840 Not the solution, but whatever.
00:17:47.600 And it was actually the mosque in Thorncliffe Park that the Husseins went to, Dar es Salaam,
00:17:53.840 that organized this.
00:17:55.960 And it was a very conservative and very strict mosque.
00:18:00.200 And its practices were that boys had to go through one door in the cafeteria.
00:18:04.620 Girls had to go through another door.
00:18:06.160 And that in and of itself, you may find weird.
00:18:08.460 It's common in Orthodox, some Orthodox synagogues for Jews.
00:18:11.740 It was weird to have it in a school, but whatever.
00:18:17.060 No, it was that there was a further subdivision where girls who were menstruating, these are
00:18:22.540 middle schoolers.
00:18:23.320 So, you know, all the grades six, seven, eight girls, you find out which ones of them are
00:18:26.240 on their period.
00:18:27.080 And they have to sit at the back of the room and they can't participate in prayers because
00:18:31.000 they are unclean.
00:18:31.780 And this was at a public school in Toronto.
00:18:33.960 And I'm not rehashing that big because it's still going on.
00:18:38.200 No, I mean, you had all of these, you know, do-gooder Toronto liberal trustees that were
00:18:42.900 like, oh, well, you know, we want to look tolerant and open and all of that stuff.
00:18:46.180 But it was that this mosque was the one that drove that.
00:18:48.840 This was the mosque that thought it was okay to, you know, haul the menstruating middle school
00:18:54.860 girls to the back of the room and basically presume that this is a way that you can foster
00:19:00.900 a good public school environment moving forward.
00:19:03.140 And that was this mosque.
00:19:05.060 So we know that it's a mosque that is probably on the wrong side of most Canadian issues or
00:19:11.180 what most Canadians would say are their positions, such as, for example, equality of women.
00:19:17.780 Now, I see no evidence that is concrete that says the shooting in Toronto was gender-based.
00:19:26.200 I know there was a news article that was circulating that said, you know, eight of the, I think it
00:19:30.600 was eight of the 15 people he shot were women.
00:19:33.140 But that also means seven of the 15 weren't.
00:19:35.680 So they were trying to make it seem as though there was a gender lens, and I'm not sure.
00:19:39.600 There was a witness, though, that said it looked like he was targeting the women.
00:19:43.620 So we don't know.
00:19:44.940 People have already tried to make this about the toxic masculinity debate.
00:19:49.980 There was another Toronto Star article about that.
00:19:51.900 They were one, this was awful, 1,000-word article about basically trying to draw a line between
00:19:59.680 this guy and that incel, that involuntary celibate thing that we started talking about
00:20:04.660 after the Toronto van attack.
00:20:06.360 And it was baffling because they said in like the second paragraph, we may never know the
00:20:12.540 true extent of this.
00:20:13.700 And then they spent the next 950 words saying, well, but I wonder if it's toxic masculinity.
00:20:18.280 And it was great.
00:20:18.860 I would love it if I could do that as a broadcaster.
00:20:21.060 You know, I say at the beginning of something, I have no idea what it is, but for the next three
00:20:24.880 hours, I'm going to talk about it as though it's this, as though it's this.
00:20:28.780 Now, I'm talking about options right now.
00:20:30.460 I'm not speculating, I'm actually talking about where the facts are taking us in this
00:20:35.660 case.
00:20:36.880 And the facts right now are the hardest to find if you look at mainstream media coverage.
00:20:42.460 And it's not surprising, but it is quite disheartening that it's only through American media coverage
00:20:48.800 that we're getting a lot of the information, and then Canadian media coverage picks it up
00:20:52.760 along the way.
00:20:53.840 And the ISIS claim was a great example of this.
00:20:56.320 Reuters was the first one to say, hey, here's this announcement from ISIS.
00:21:00.460 They're claiming responsibility.
00:21:02.680 And even if ISIS did not orchestrate it, the fact that ISIS thinks, yeah, this is the type
00:21:08.280 of thing that we can say falls within our mandate.
00:21:11.520 The fact that ISIS was saying that in and of itself is newsworthy, but Canadian media were
00:21:17.840 asleep at the switch on.
00:21:19.160 They either weren't paying attention, which I have a hard time believing because I've worked
00:21:22.540 in Canadian newsrooms, or they didn't care because this didn't fit into the narrative
00:21:27.680 that they were trying to craft in this story.
00:21:31.460 And if you don't think there is a narrative at stake here, look at the words that have
00:21:35.480 been used to describe Mohammed Hashim, the man that Anthony Fury in the Toronto Sun pegged
00:21:40.800 as the architect of the family, the Hussain family statement.
00:21:45.100 And he, in his own words, had actually said that his goal is to craft a narrative that paints
00:21:49.760 Muslims in a better light in Canada.
00:21:51.680 That's his agenda.
00:21:52.620 That's his goal.
00:21:53.660 And look, if you're a Muslim in Canada, I don't blame you for wanting to do that, just
00:21:56.900 as I want to, you know, put conservatives in a good light.
00:21:59.480 But it means that you have to view things that this man says and writes and is involved
00:22:03.660 in with a grain of salt.
00:22:05.760 And you need to view it through that lens of this is his end game.
00:22:08.960 This is what it is that he's trying to do.
00:22:10.840 So I'm looking at now the way forward for this case and the fact that we will not, we will
00:22:20.720 not be able to get to the bottom of anything if we don't break this pattern.
00:22:25.700 If we don't break this pattern of actually trying to view things only through the lens
00:22:32.080 of siloing, it was either just mental illness, it was either just gun violence, it was either
00:22:38.320 just terrorism.
00:22:39.360 I moved around the silos.
00:22:40.640 I'm like playing that cup and ball game here live on the True North Initiative Facebook
00:22:44.200 page.
00:22:45.120 But I want to talk about the gun component because this is one of the more particularly insidious
00:22:50.500 examples of this.
00:22:51.580 There is a cultural battle about Islamic terrorism.
00:22:56.120 And we know that culture war exists.
00:22:58.060 When it comes to guns, it's less of a culture war and more of an actual lobbying effort.
00:23:04.040 More of an actual lobbying effort that exists here because there are a number of gun control
00:23:08.560 groups that are just sitting at the sidelines waiting for anything, anything they can use
00:23:14.060 to justify pouncing.
00:23:16.060 And we see these groups, the Canadian Coalition for Gun Control and all of these others.
00:23:20.180 And they spared no time whatsoever in getting involved in this case.
00:23:27.340 And John Tory, the Toronto mayor, went along with it.
00:23:29.840 This guy's had an axe to pick because there are no guns in his house.
00:23:32.700 He's had an axe to grind, rather, for guns for quite a while now.
00:23:36.700 And when John Tory took less than 12 hours, the bodies weren't even cold yet, and he steps
00:23:45.420 up and says, we have a gun problem in Toronto.
00:23:48.700 Toronto has had 29 fatal homicides this year.
00:23:53.260 29 in basically seven months that they've had.
00:23:57.320 And if you look at those, the vast majority were gang-related and, as such, using illegal
00:24:04.920 firearms.
00:24:06.660 If you look at this case, the question that everyone was asking was, okay, how does a guy
00:24:11.980 with mental illness get his hands on a firearm?
00:24:14.980 And that was the question.
00:24:15.860 It's a reasonable question.
00:24:16.980 I put out a video explaining a little bit about the process.
00:24:19.880 And I had people that clearly weren't watching the video that were responding and saying,
00:24:23.940 well, duh, it was an illegal gun.
00:24:25.740 Yeah, and I know that.
00:24:27.180 And I knew that it was most likely going to be determined to be an illegal firearm.
00:24:32.580 And that was why I put out the video that I did.
00:24:35.540 Because I wanted people to understand how strict and rigorous the actual licensing procedures
00:24:40.860 are to get a gun, especially if you've had a mental illness.
00:24:44.860 Because I wanted people to understand that there was only one way this was ever going to
00:24:48.780 end.
00:24:49.020 And that was with the determination that this was an illegal gun.
00:24:53.520 And that's what the sources are all telling us now, an illegal firearm.
00:24:57.520 And this is fascinating.
00:24:59.320 Because to get a gun in Canada, you need to get a license.
00:25:01.920 You need to get what's called a possession and acquisition license.
00:25:05.200 And that entitles you to go and get a rifle.
00:25:08.460 Most rifles are a shotgun.
00:25:10.300 And if you have a PAL, you walk into a store, you show your license, they write it down in a
00:25:16.260 little book, they give you the gun, you take it, and you go home.
00:25:18.620 It's easy.
00:25:19.680 And ammunition is the same.
00:25:20.900 You show your license, they write it down, you take your ammo, and you go home.
00:25:24.740 If you want to buy a handgun or other select guns like an AR-15 or like some rifles that
00:25:33.160 have been designated rather arbitrarily, but that's another discussion, by the government
00:25:38.000 wants to be restricted, you need what's called an AR-PAL, a restricted possession and acquisition
00:25:43.680 license.
00:25:45.120 And the thing about an AR-PAL is that it's harder to get.
00:25:48.120 There are a million in Canada, as opposed to, I think, two million PALs.
00:25:52.260 So only half of the gun owners in Canada have restricted licenses.
00:25:55.500 And in a lot of cases, when you get one of these, well, actually, in all cases, the government
00:26:00.420 wants to know why you want a restricted license.
00:26:03.660 They're going to ask why.
00:26:04.740 And there are basically two correct answers to that question.
00:26:08.160 One is for target shooting.
00:26:09.940 And that's why I have my restricted.
00:26:12.060 One is restricted or the other is collecting.
00:26:14.060 And if you are a collector, you can't really transport it.
00:26:17.140 You can't go to the range.
00:26:18.140 You can't do all these other things with it very easily.
00:26:21.500 And so if you want a restricted license, you have to give a reason.
00:26:24.900 You have to go through a great many steps.
00:26:26.960 So you have to take a firearm safety course for the restricted and the non-restricted.
00:26:31.000 You have to go through a reference check and a background check.
00:26:34.840 And in my case, and this is what I shared with you in my video this week, I actually do have
00:26:39.520 a mental health history.
00:26:40.640 I survived a suicide attempt from 2010, and I had to disclose that.
00:26:46.020 And they interviewed my family.
00:26:47.400 They wanted to get a doctor's note.
00:26:48.900 They wanted to make sure that no one in my immediate circle was against the idea of me
00:26:54.420 having a gun, and no one was.
00:26:56.500 So there was a pretty rigorous and stringent process there.
00:27:00.660 And when I got my license, that put me in this category of Canadians who are subjected to
00:27:06.460 daily background checks.
00:27:07.940 This is what people don't know about gun owners.
00:27:09.440 If you have a firearms license, you are actually screened every single day.
00:27:15.700 More importantly, the police could knock on my front door right now, come in, and without
00:27:20.180 a warrant, do an inspection to make sure my guns are stored properly.
00:27:23.760 They haven't, but they could.
00:27:25.460 And thankfully, if they did, they would find that they are.
00:27:27.420 They're stored exactly the way they're supposed to be.
00:27:29.660 But this is the way that the process in Canada works.
00:27:33.240 And there are a number of areas where I think we could streamline the process and improve
00:27:37.280 it.
00:27:37.860 But generally speaking, our process is strict enough to weed out people with violent mental
00:27:43.020 health issues, to weed out people with criminal pasts, even people with anger issues conceivably.
00:27:47.560 So when we found out that Faisal Hussein's parents were saying, yes, he's had these mental health
00:27:52.940 issues, medications haven't worked, psychiatric treatment hasn't worked.
00:27:56.980 This, to me, told me there's no way he was actually a licensed gun owner, because his parents never
00:28:04.500 would have given him the reference to get a license.
00:28:07.480 And more importantly, if he had been arrested by police under the Mental Health Act, then
00:28:11.700 his guns would be taken away.
00:28:13.700 And that's that.
00:28:15.060 So I laid out the facts for people.
00:28:17.340 And the conclusion, and we've now heard this from a number of media reports, is that the
00:28:21.420 gun was illegally owned.
00:28:23.300 Now, how did he get it?
00:28:24.340 We don't know.
00:28:25.360 There was a story, I think it was in the Toronto Star, where like buried in one of the last
00:28:30.300 paragraphs was what's called burying the lead, where like the most important part of the
00:28:34.600 story is actually at the bottom of it.
00:28:37.180 And what was interesting is that it was that he was living at a house in, I think it was
00:28:42.160 Pickering or Scarborough or something, that his brother was living in that had been raided
00:28:48.120 and had 30 guns seized or something.
00:28:50.600 So it sounds from that like there was a familial connection to the illegal gun trade, which
00:28:57.160 again, is a very, very relevant part of the story here.
00:29:00.800 And one that's a lot more subdued if you look at the coverage about it.
00:29:05.660 So the reason that I share all of this with you is that the access to the firearm had absolutely
00:29:13.540 nothing to do with Canada's gun control regime.
00:29:17.720 Absolutely nothing.
00:29:19.500 But John Tory gets up there and says, we have a gun problem.
00:29:22.260 Ask the question, why does anyone need to have a gun in this city?
00:29:26.700 Very simple answer to that, John Tory.
00:29:29.100 None of your damn business.
00:29:31.680 None of your damn business.
00:29:32.740 That's the answer.
00:29:33.960 I don't need to justify any legal activity that I want to partake in.
00:29:40.060 I don't need to justify why I need two or three computers.
00:29:44.200 I don't need to justify why I need a flat screen TV.
00:29:47.540 I don't need to justify why I need to go on a vacation.
00:29:50.780 If I want to, I can.
00:29:52.360 That's the hallmark of a free society.
00:29:55.280 More importantly, firearms ownership in Canada is not about need for a lot of people.
00:30:00.600 For some it is.
00:30:01.420 If you look at people in northern or remote communities, people that are hunters, it is
00:30:04.920 in fact a need.
00:30:06.040 But in a lot of people, it's sport shooting.
00:30:08.740 Why do I need a bow and arrow?
00:30:10.260 Why do I need to be a competitive archer?
00:30:12.040 I'm not, but if I were.
00:30:14.120 And that's the biggest problem here.
00:30:16.280 But Toronto, even the so-called conservatives in Toronto, have this fear of guns, which is
00:30:22.300 so drastically misunderstood.
00:30:25.000 And I'll give you a great example of this.
00:30:26.800 David Miller, who was the mayor of Toronto before Rob Ford, before John Tory, was quite
00:30:33.300 baffled when he found out that there was a gun range in Union Station.
00:30:38.700 So if you've ever been in Toronto to Union Station, you've walked through that main concourse.
00:30:42.920 And if you are in that main concourse, you know, trying to buy a train ticket, and you
00:30:46.720 look up, and it's that big, huge ceiling, up there somewhere was a gun range.
00:30:53.220 And it was indoor.
00:30:54.300 It was a handgun range, formally used, I think, by either CBSA or RCMP.
00:30:59.020 And eventually it became a private gun club.
00:31:01.520 It was the oldest gun club in Canada, or one of the oldest gun clubs in Canada.
00:31:07.260 And guns had been going through the Union Station concourse for years, for years, and
00:31:14.780 no one was any the wiser.
00:31:16.160 It was a smaller club, but people had, anytime they were shooting there, they had to have
00:31:20.040 their handguns, you know, in a little case they were walking through, and there were handguns
00:31:24.480 probably every day in Union Station, and no one, including David Miller, was any the wiser.
00:31:29.020 David Miller found out about this, lost his mind, and quickly passed a bylaw, not just
00:31:36.360 shutting it down, but making it so that no gun range could ever exist in the city of Toronto.
00:31:43.120 And it was quite disheartening, because the rationale they used is, oh my goodness, someone
00:31:47.920 could get shot.
00:31:48.660 Well, no one had been.
00:31:49.480 For, you know, 80 years, no one was getting hurt here.
00:31:51.840 Why are you concerned now?
00:31:53.800 And John Tory is doing something very similar.
00:31:55.960 He sees something, and decides that he's going to offer a solution for a problem that
00:32:01.280 simply does not exist.
00:32:04.220 A solution for a problem that's nowhere to be found.
00:32:07.120 And that was Monday.
00:32:09.640 Tuesday night, Toronto City Councilors get together, 41 to 4.
00:32:15.460 41 to 4, they pass a bylaw banning handgun sales and ammunition sales in Toronto.
00:32:21.920 Except they can't actually do that.
00:32:25.100 They can't actually ban anything of the sort.
00:32:27.900 So what they're doing is passing a bylaw, calling on the federal and provincial governments
00:32:33.040 to ban it.
00:32:33.680 Calling on the federal government to ban gun sales.
00:32:36.340 Calling on the provincial government to ban ammunition sales.
00:32:39.160 And to then make Toronto a handgun-free city.
00:32:43.480 What I don't know if this would impact is private gun sales.
00:32:47.160 For example, I want to sell my handgun to someone.
00:32:50.460 I can do that.
00:32:51.180 If they're licensed, I can call up the government and say, verify this license, initiate a transfer.
00:32:55.560 I can sell them.
00:32:56.320 If I lived in downtown Toronto, would I no longer be allowed to make a private sale to
00:33:01.200 my gun-owning friend?
00:33:04.000 I don't know.
00:33:04.700 And I don't even think John Tory knows.
00:33:05.960 Because I don't think John Tory actually understands the laws that he's trying to add.
00:33:11.680 There's no way he does.
00:33:12.680 Because in his quote, and I wish I could play the clip for you right now, but we've posted
00:33:16.660 it on the True North Initiative Facebook page.
00:33:18.640 Don't watch it now.
00:33:19.500 Watch it later, because I'm still talking.
00:33:21.520 But he said, oh, there's people carrying around guns.
00:33:26.040 There's people carrying around guns.
00:33:27.460 Well, if that was actually true, these people have already shown a blatant and brazen disregard
00:33:32.980 for the law.
00:33:35.620 If there are people walking around Toronto with firearms, they're proving that they're ignoring
00:33:40.840 the law, because you cannot, there are very, very few exceptions.
00:33:44.160 You cannot walk around with a handgun.
00:33:45.840 So if you're walking around Toronto with a handgun, you are already in that category of
00:33:50.080 being a non-law-abiding gun owner.
00:33:52.640 You are behaving illegally, and it stands to reason your gun is probably illegally owned.
00:33:57.900 Because those are the types of people that actually illegally buy guns.
00:34:01.700 The ones that are using them illegally.
00:34:03.220 So if Toronto manages to succeed in banning legal gun ownership, then all that will happen
00:34:11.980 is the people like me who have guns legally will not be able to buy from a Toronto store.
00:34:18.000 And here's the thing.
00:34:19.060 My first handgun actually came from a Toronto store.
00:34:21.720 My first handgun came from a Toronto store.
00:34:24.180 They had a sale.
00:34:24.900 It was a Ruger 2245, and it's a great gun.
00:34:29.220 And the reason I find this so saddening is because now government is actually targeting
00:34:33.760 a business that has done absolutely nothing wrong, a business that has ingrained itself
00:34:38.620 in the gun community nationwide.
00:34:40.960 And they're doing it all because of a knee-jerk reaction, or as one person said in the comment
00:34:45.160 section, just a jerk reaction.
00:34:46.780 I think either one's appropriate.
00:34:48.380 But a knee-jerk or a jerk reaction to a tragedy.
00:34:52.720 And what does Ralph Goodale, the federal public safety minister, say?
00:34:55.440 That the federal government will entertain proposals to ban handguns.
00:35:01.280 They say they'll entertain proposals.
00:35:02.780 So the federal government actually might listen.
00:35:05.820 The federal government might actually listen to these calls to do it.
00:35:10.520 That doesn't mean they will, but they'll at least entertain the discussions.
00:35:14.800 And that's really dangerous because now we have the federal public safety minister making
00:35:20.480 a proclamation in response to a knee-jerk reaction.
00:35:23.440 It's a ripple effect here.
00:35:25.900 And the end of this could be handguns being banned in Canada.
00:35:30.080 That's essentially the direction that the gun control advocates are trying to go here.
00:35:35.980 But when we have a gun that we have 99.9% certainty was illegally owned, how would any of these
00:35:44.520 laws have prevented this?
00:35:46.480 They wouldn't.
00:35:46.980 A federal handgun ban would not have prevented Faisal Hussain from getting his gun.
00:35:54.460 A provincial handgun ban would not have prevented it.
00:35:57.160 A ban on the sale of handguns and ammunition in Toronto would not have made a difference.
00:36:03.940 And there are two possibilities here.
00:36:05.880 Either the lawmakers that are passing these restrictive gun bans don't know that these things
00:36:12.980 wouldn't make a difference or they don't care.
00:36:14.680 And I think it's the latter.
00:36:15.780 I think they know, but I think they don't care.
00:36:17.940 I think they know that they're just creating the illusion of action, the illusion of doing
00:36:22.740 things, the illusion of responding to a problem with a solution when they're doing no such
00:36:28.140 thing.
00:36:29.860 But the longer, and this is where it gets very important.
00:36:32.680 And if you want to weigh in on this, have a chat in the comment section at the True North
00:36:35.840 Initiative Facebook page here.
00:36:37.100 The longer that politicians can keep the discussion about gun control, the less they have to talk
00:36:43.780 about terrorism.
00:36:45.560 So if everyone's looking over here at guns and gun control and handgun ammunition bans
00:36:51.400 and handgun bans, then no one's looking over here at ISIS claiming responsibility.
00:36:56.240 No one's looking at the mosque that's preaching radicalism potentially.
00:37:00.240 No one's looking at any of these other factors that could have and very likely did have a stake
00:37:07.460 in this.
00:37:08.500 And when we see terrorists and terrorist incidents that involve knives and that involve vans and that involve
00:37:19.820 homemade explosives and that involve any of these other things, the gun is irrelevant to a terrorist.
00:37:26.900 The gun is irrelevant.
00:37:28.140 They're going to use whatever tool is at their disposal.
00:37:31.400 In this case, if it was in fact terrorism, it was a gun.
00:37:34.020 Whatever it was, the guy wanted to kill, he used a gun.
00:37:39.240 He used what was available to him, as it is to anyone else who wants to break the law.
00:37:42.720 If he didn't have the gun, does anyone think, oh, well, I guess that's not my thing?
00:37:46.120 No.
00:37:46.600 Then it would have been a van attack.
00:37:47.880 It would have been a knife attack.
00:37:48.960 It would have been any number of these things.
00:37:50.600 Because the problem is not the tool.
00:37:52.680 And I can't stress this enough.
00:37:54.580 The problem is the people.
00:37:56.580 The problem is the group of people that wants to actually commit violence.
00:38:02.420 We can't ban the tool and expect that this motivation in these people's distorted and deranged minds is going to go away.
00:38:12.700 It's not the case.
00:38:15.120 So these knee-jerk reactions to ban things are irrelevant.
00:38:20.640 And I made a comment.
00:38:21.900 This was a couple of years ago on a radio show I was doing.
00:38:24.980 And it was taken so wildly out of context during the last election.
00:38:28.600 And I had said, you know, that this is no more sensible to ban guns because one person committed a violent gun crime than it would be to ban bungee jumping because of an accident that happened there,
00:38:41.280 or ban cars because of a car accident, or ban Islam because of an Islamic terrorism attack.
00:38:46.780 And that was then misquoted as Andrew Lawton said, let's ban Islam.
00:38:50.500 That'll save a few lives.
00:38:51.640 What I was doing was mocking the idea that we should ban anything because of how an evil person chooses to take advantage of it.
00:39:00.060 And that's true with guns.
00:39:01.420 That's true with van rentals.
00:39:03.020 That's true with any of these other things that we're talking about here.
00:39:06.060 So when I look at the direction that we're likely to go forward with this case, we have to start with a return to sensible policymaking by the government on counter-radicalism, on actually identifying terrorism.
00:39:26.380 But we need more culturally, in law enforcement and in politics and in the media, a sense of willingness to talk about and discuss these issues.
00:39:36.260 Because if we don't talk about these issues, we are signing our own death warns.
00:39:41.420 If every time a case like this comes up, we try to find every possible reason, other than the one that's staring us directly in the face, to rationalize or explain, who are we helping?
00:39:58.060 Who are we helping?
00:39:58.880 Are we protecting the feelings of the Muslim community?
00:40:01.920 No.
00:40:02.300 Because the moderate Muslim community is our greatest ally in this.
00:40:05.120 They want to purge the radicalism from within their own midst as well.
00:40:08.620 And the ones that condemn radicalism, we must support.
00:40:11.980 The ones that don't condemn radicalism, we must expose.
00:40:15.800 But you can't do that if you don't actually have the discussions.
00:40:19.660 And you look at people like Tarek Fatah and Raheel Raza and Selene Mansour, incredibly brilliant people that have been sounding the alarm about these issues for years.
00:40:28.960 And about the lack of a willingness within the media to engage on these files.
00:40:34.920 And people on the left have been splitting hairs, I found, over the idea of whether ISIS claiming responsibility means that it's an ISIS attack.
00:40:48.080 And I wanted to address that for a few moments here.
00:40:51.940 Because ISIS is not like Al-Qaeda.
00:40:54.380 Al-Qaeda, which had a centralized operation, they had a little control room, and they were organizing and funding and doing all of this.
00:41:01.760 ISIS is as much an institutional force as it is a set of ideas and a set of values.
00:41:09.040 I mean, ISIS is a religion in and of itself, you could argue.
00:41:11.640 And when ISIS has its formal operations, ISIS also has its people that it's calling to violence through propaganda.
00:41:23.720 People that it's saying, we are motivating you and urging you and telling you how to do this, and then you're going to do it on your own.
00:41:30.940 So, even if this guy had never talked to an ISIS organizer, that doesn't mean it's not an ISIS attack.
00:41:39.280 Because the problem is the ideology more than or at least as much as the infrastructure itself.
00:41:47.320 And that's where I think a lot of the, actually pretty much all of the liberal media in Canada are missing the mark.
00:41:53.820 Is that ISIS is about the ideas and the ideology that's driving people to commit these attacks.
00:42:00.540 And this is where, to go back to the discussion about mental illness, we need to understand that if someone is dealing with depression or psychosis,
00:42:07.840 and their outlet for that is radical Islam, that doesn't mean it's not a radical Islam discussion.
00:42:16.560 It's a mental illness discussion and a radical Islam discussion.
00:42:19.980 If someone who is mentally ill has the risk factors of an ISIS extremist or an ISIS motivated extremist,
00:42:28.620 then we need to deal with both issues.
00:42:32.160 We have in Ontario, across Canada, but in Ontario specifically where this happened,
00:42:37.420 we have an infrastructure where police can arrest anyone who is at a risk of harming themselves or others.
00:42:45.140 And this is probably where police had arrested Faisal Hussain in the past for, under the Mental Health Act.
00:42:54.720 We don't know whether it was for wanting to harm himself or wanting to harm others,
00:42:58.680 but we do know that they had arrested him under that provision in the past.
00:43:03.900 So someone at some point was concerned that this guy was someone who needed to be taken off the streets,
00:43:11.640 at least for a time.
00:43:12.760 And then we had another report that said he had, at one point, told someone that he wanted to kill.
00:43:20.160 These are not risk factors that can be ignored.
00:43:24.260 These are not risk factors that we can just shrug our shoulders and say,
00:43:27.260 ah, he's probably just melting off, he's probably just letting off steam.
00:43:30.320 These are things that are important.
00:43:31.640 So once again, we have a case where the lone wolf was actually the known wolf.
00:43:37.400 And by the way, we don't even see the use of the term lone wolf anymore.
00:43:43.040 I have not seen in any reasonable media coverage this call a lone wolf attack,
00:43:48.400 because lone wolf people associate with terrorism.
00:43:52.300 People associate the term lone wolf with terrorism.
00:43:54.860 So to even use the term lone wolf, which used to be kind of the way that people would try to dilute the impact of terrorism,
00:44:01.260 we now don't even say it, we just say shooter or killer.
00:44:05.620 And it's valid, it's completely accurate to say that he was a shooter or a killer,
00:44:10.140 and a human scumbag and walking fecal matter, whatever you want to call him.
00:44:14.120 But he was actually a killer.
00:44:17.040 And when you start seeing the obliteration of words like lone wolf,
00:44:22.180 it's because they're further trying to dilute that there could be terror motivations
00:44:26.720 and terror influences on crimes like this.
00:44:32.800 So the next question, an ethological question, is does it matter?
00:44:37.220 Does it matter if this is terrorism?
00:44:39.840 It does.
00:44:40.920 It does.
00:44:41.660 Because people have argued, and you see on the Twittersphere this discussion,
00:44:45.760 that, oh, well, it doesn't really matter what the reason was.
00:44:48.560 It matters if we want to talk about prevention.
00:44:51.920 If we want to talk about prevention, it matters.
00:44:54.080 If it's mental illness exclusively, well, that means mental illness is something
00:44:58.500 that we need to take seriously in society, which I think we do.
00:45:01.500 If it's terrorism exclusively, then countering extremism is something we need to do
00:45:05.540 and have a much better track record of doing.
00:45:08.300 If it is in that mushy middle there, mental illness and terrorism, which I suspect it is,
00:45:14.060 and I would contend very fervently that it probably is, then we still need to deal with both issues.
00:45:21.940 But you have those with an agenda that are trying to push this into someone else's space.
00:45:28.120 So you have those with the agenda that, you know, radical Islamic extremism doesn't exist
00:45:33.280 that are trying to push this to mental illness,
00:45:35.300 and you have those who are on the gun side of things saying,
00:45:39.980 it's not a gun control issue.
00:45:41.300 No, no, no.
00:45:41.900 It's not a gun control issue, by the way.
00:45:44.280 Because the tool is always secondary to the motivation.
00:45:47.100 So if you want to tackle this, the motivation is where you actually have to identify the problem.
00:45:53.860 So what are we likely to see unfold from this moving forward?
00:46:01.420 I don't love making predictions because there's a human factor,
00:46:05.780 and at some point when confronted with more information,
00:46:08.660 people will have to stop viewing this only through their own agenda.
00:46:12.560 But I also think that on this particular case,
00:46:16.700 we're seeing a lot more deliberate obfuscation by the people who are supposedly leading the ideas game on this.
00:46:26.400 We had Gerald Butts, the principal secretary to Trudeau,
00:46:30.960 retweeting a few days ago a tweet that called the National Post a hate publication or something.
00:46:37.020 I mean, the left is trying to cleanse the country of any even marginally critical coverage.
00:46:46.160 I mean, when the National Post, you may not like every column in the National Post,
00:46:49.160 but to call it a hate site, to put it right up there with, I don't know, Stormfront or whatever,
00:46:54.420 it is just so disgusting.
00:46:55.920 And for the guy who is the right-hand man of the prime minister to say that is absolutely disgusting.
00:47:01.380 And then you have the Canadian Twitterati going around and mocking the coverage of Anthony Fury
00:47:08.740 and Candace Malcolm and the True North Initiative and other groups as well.
00:47:12.740 And it's shameful.
00:47:13.900 And I hope it's transparent.
00:47:15.600 I hope people are actually seeing through this and identifying it for what it is.
00:47:20.600 But it's not going to be easy.
00:47:22.520 We need to break through that, which is why it is so important to share.
00:47:25.820 It is so important to become a club member over at the True North Initiative.
00:47:28.760 It's important to actually combat and push back against that narrative.
00:47:34.460 And just another example of this, if I may, and this is some very good news.
00:47:39.280 We know that Caitlin Coleman, who is the wife of Joshua Boyle, is now back in the United States.
00:47:47.420 She is an American.
00:47:48.220 I think she's from Pennsylvania.
00:47:50.000 She has, as of yesterday or two days ago, returned to the United States.
00:47:54.440 She is living with her parents and her three kids, and she's pregnant with a fourth child,
00:48:00.360 presumably Joshua Boyle's.
00:48:02.600 Caitlin Coleman was the one who I really thought was the victim of the kidnapping and abduction
00:48:10.360 of Joshua Boyle and Caitlin Coleman.
00:48:13.080 They had three kids in captivity in Afghanistan and then later in Pakistan.
00:48:18.000 And no one had ever answered the question of why they had gone there.
00:48:24.560 I mean, Joshua Boyle gave some very creepy interviews.
00:48:27.480 And this is the guy who was married to Zainab Khadr, the jihadi sister of Omar Khadr.
00:48:33.220 And Joshua Boyle had gone to Afghanistan backpacking with his pregnant wife, as we all do.
00:48:38.540 I mean, I can't even take my wife to Walmart if she doesn't want to go there.
00:48:42.340 But, you know, he can manage to bring his pregnant wife to the foothills of Afghanistan, and then
00:48:47.920 they get kidnapped, it's said, and were held by the Haqqani Network.
00:48:53.300 And Joshua Boyle wouldn't say whether he was a Muslim, but their kids all had Arabic Muslim
00:48:58.820 names.
00:48:59.840 Caitlin Coleman was wearing a full hijab and a very tight hijab and did an interview in
00:49:05.960 which she wouldn't say whether she was a Muslim or not.
00:49:08.680 And then Joshua Boyle was charged with sexual assault and administering a noxious substance.
00:49:16.240 And the details of this are under a publication ban, so media cannot report who the victim of
00:49:22.860 this was.
00:49:24.000 But regardless of that, we know that Caitlin Coleman later left Joshua Boyle.
00:49:30.120 And now she's gone back to the U.S.
00:49:32.160 And there was a photo of her with her family, no hijab.
00:49:36.560 She looked happier than she had in any other coverage or photos I had seen.
00:49:41.500 She was visibly pregnant, and she was with her parents, and she was smiling, and it was
00:49:47.180 actually great.
00:49:47.800 And I really, really hope that she does well.
00:49:50.200 I don't know anything about her.
00:49:51.620 I know that she's always been a bit of a nerdier woman.
00:49:54.480 She, you know, met Joshua Boyle.
00:49:56.700 They fell in love.
00:49:58.280 They went on, you know, a true love story to the foothills of a terrorist-controlled region
00:50:03.060 in Afghanistan.
00:50:03.680 And now she's back home.
00:50:07.000 And this story was, again, one where the media was trying to paint Joshua Boyle as a victim
00:50:13.240 when he was anything but.
00:50:16.280 And at the very least, he was questionable.
00:50:18.360 At the very worst, he was, and then when he got charged, there was more speculation to
00:50:22.840 say that he was a perpetrator, at least, of some wrongdoing, allegedly.
00:50:26.760 And what was fascinating is that the media was still giving this guy the glamour treatment.
00:50:34.480 And it's the same as with Faisal Hussein now, where he is given this treatment as being
00:50:39.900 the victim of this.
00:50:41.940 When of all the people you could point to who are actually victims, he is not one I would
00:50:46.780 put anywhere but at the very bottom of the list.
00:50:49.740 He is not the victim.
00:50:50.580 Joshua Boyle was not the victim.
00:50:53.860 Now, there's a case to be made that Faisal Hussein's family are being victimized by this.
00:50:58.560 His parents are being victimized.
00:50:59.940 I don't know anything about them.
00:51:01.260 They haven't done any interviews, nor will they.
00:51:03.420 They haven't even been named.
00:51:04.680 This is interesting.
00:51:05.560 They put out a statement, and the media will not report their names.
00:51:09.260 The media knows their names, but the media will not report the names of their family.
00:51:15.020 And even knowing the mosque that they went to, the reason that we know was not because
00:51:20.040 journalists did the actual digging.
00:51:22.660 It was because the emam of the mosque decided he would do a sit-down interview with CBC because
00:51:27.840 he wanted to talk about how his concern was, in his words, backlash.
00:51:33.920 This is what he said.
00:51:34.820 The emam of the Dar es Salaam said, yes, mental illness care is important.
00:51:40.360 Mental health care is important.
00:51:41.320 But he said his first concern was backlash.
00:51:46.460 When you are more concerned about the impact of a tragedy on you than you are about the
00:51:53.060 actual victims of it, there is a serious priority question that Canadians need to ask and the
00:52:00.460 Canadian media needs to ask, and that is not happening.
00:52:04.820 We're going to have lots more on this throughout the day and the week.
00:52:08.060 If you want to weigh in on this in the comments section, please do.
00:52:11.480 If you want to email me, my email address is andrew at andrewlotton.ca.
00:52:16.140 For the True North Initiative, I'm Andrew Lotton.
00:52:18.140 Have a great rest of the week.