CANADA AND TERRORISM: We’re so polite that we can’t see a danger hiding in plain sight:

You know what is the really sobering thing about that ongoing terror trial in Brampton?

Clue: It’s not that there was a plot to attack Canadian targets. And of course there was; the court has heard evidence up the ying-yang that there was just such an enterprise afoot. Was it the finest plot ever? Oh hardly. Were its members variously bumblers, what those who hang around courts call “yutes” or raving hotheads? Absolutely. But there was a plot.

It’s not even the hate, chiefly for Jews and Americans, that one of the group leaders preached at the drop of a hat and the top of his lungs with almost magnificently ungrammatical, near-illiterate, Koran-ignorant hysteria.

It’s that he felt so free to preach it.

It’s that he felt comfortable enough to hand out jihadist CDs outside at least one Toronto mosque and to occasionally turn up in combat fatigues at another. It’s that he giddily talked to one of his alleged co-conspirators about the obligation to kill Jews whenever one finds them. It’s that the leadership of the group regularly met at a half-dozen mosques in the GTA, usually on Fridays, the day of communal prayer. It’s that within minutes of meeting Mubin Shaikh, a fellow Muslim-turned-CSIS informant-turned-paid-RCMP agent, he was openly verbally indulging his bloodlust and “recruiting” Mr. Shaikh: Their shared religion was enough.

But Canada’s “human rights” kangaroo courts will make sure to silence the Mark Steyns who point out that this sort of thing is going on. So that’s something.