We still don't really know very much about the shooting that took place at the Canadian parliament building in Ottawa yesterday, leaving a courageous Canadian soldier named Nathan Carillo (just 24 years old) dead, and ultimately bringing about the death of the shooter at the hands of the parliament's sergeant-at-arms. Nice work, sir.
We also know, via the Toronto Globe and Mail this morning, that shooter Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was not only a recent convert to Islam, but was being watched by Canadian authorities because they considered him a threat:
Sources told The Globe and Mail that he was recently designated a “high-risk traveller” by the Canadian government and was unable to secure the appropriate travel documentation, thus blocking his attempt to travel abroad. The circumstances are similar to that surrounding the case of Martin Rouleau-Couture, the Quebecker who was shot Monday after running down two Canadian Forces soldiers with his car.
Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau was born in 1982 and was the son of Bulgasem Zehaf, a Quebec businessman who appears to have fought in 2011 in Libya, and Susan Bibeau, the deputy chairperson of a division of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board.
Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau has a record in Quebec in the early 2000s for petty crimes such as possession of drugs, credit-card forgery and robbery. He was also charged with robbery in 2011 in Vancouver.
Much of the media are characteristically low-keying the Islam connection, since they are more concerned with following PC rules about "profiling" than they are about telling us the whole story.
It's impossible to know at this point whether Zehaf-Bibeau was acting on his own, perhaps having been inspired by his ISIS heroes, or whether he was coordinating with someone else. Either way, it wouldn't be downplay the terrorist nature of the act, as governments are want to do. One of the most horrifying scenarios is the one in which a lone wolf simply gets ahold of a gun (by the way, a lot of good Canada's gun control laws did here, huh?) and simply opens fire. There's almost no way to anticipate it because it doesn't require any sort of planning or collaboration that can be detected, and there's almost nothing you can do to stop a guy like this from wandering wherever he wants to wander and going for it.
If he has no fear of his own death - and I'd guess that in this case he didn't - he'll just unleash as much mayhem as he has time for. That's terrorism by any measure.
Kudos to Canada, by the way, for their decision to return to normal business today. The right way to respond to terrorism is to do what you would normally do. To this day the left is having fits because George W. Bush told American to go shopping after 9/11. They can't believe he didn't "ask us to sacrifice." But Bush told people to go shopping because that is what they would normally do, and his point was that you can't let them disrupt our way of life.
At least the Canadian parliament seems to understand that.
