A Condition of Transgression: The State Sphere of Influence

Abstract

From September to December 2010, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) conducted a study using the twenty-four people charged and/or convicted under provisions contained with the Anti-terrorism Act (ATA) as a control group to analyze the factors that led to the political transformation of these individual actors. This study, which is entitled “A Study of Radicalisation: The Making of Islamist Extremists in Canada Today,” reaches some of the following conclusions: the majority of Domestic Islamitic Extremists demonstrate a high degree of integration in mainstream Canadian society; these same actors possess heterogeneous ethnic, family, and socio-economic backgrounds; the majority of these actors are highly educated and have no history of violent criminality; and, ultimately, that there is no reliable profile of Domestic Islamitic Extremist actors.¹ As a result, according to this study, the identification of readily discernible “patterns and trends on radicalisation remains elusive.”² Subsequent to the public release of this study, Doug Saunders, in an article entitled “We’re looking for terrorists in all the wrong places,” makes the following observation after synthesizing the findings of the CSIS report and similar reports conducted by MI5 and the New York Police Department (NYPD):

“Be true! Be true! Be True! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred”

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.