Canadians were shocked Wednesday when Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a mentally disturbed convert to Islam with a criminal history, shot and killed a soldier standing guard at the National War Memorial in Ottawa.
Bibeau’s subsequent armed assault against the Canadian Parliament was mercifully ineffective, thanks to the heroic and quick-witted security staff. Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers personally dispatched him with his service pistol.
The attack was especially disturbing because, just a day earlier, a Quebec man with known Islamic terrorist ties had run down two soldiers with his car, killing one. Both that driver and Bibeau are now dead. But their respective rampages serve as a reminder that terrorist threats are real, and that the danger they pose goes beyond just international terrorist groups.
The experience in Ottawa highlights the threat of home-grown terrorism — specifically, the kind inspired by but not coordinated by well-known international terrorist networks that the U.S. and other western nations have been fighting in the Middle East.
An organized terrorist group can pull off far more dramatic and higher-casualty attacks, to be sure. But in some sense, those attacks are easier to prevent by disrupting networks through intelligence-gathering, surveillance, the monitoring and freezing of financial assets, and the use of military force. On the other hand, people who are merely inspired by the ideologies of groups such as al Qaeda or the Islamic State may have fewer resources for causing damage, but they are far more likely to remain under the radar until it is too late. And the threat they pose is also taken less seriously.
For a time, there were fears during the attack in Ottawa that it was a coordinated effort involving multiple shooters. Fortunately, this was not so. But even poorly organized terrorist plots by amateur al Qaeda or Islamic State wannabes can do tremendous damage and cause great loss of life. The United States has suffered several small attacks like this. The Fort Hood shooting and the Boston Marathon bombing are the two most notable ones.
The heart of the problem is that open societies are vulnerable for exactly the same reasons they are desirable. Americans feel genuinely inconvenienced by the new security procedures used in airports and government buildings since the Sept. 11 attacks. They would certainly not tolerate the spread of prison-security procedures to all other parts of their everyday routines, nor should they.
Nor would the authorities be capable of defending all threats through even the most draconian security measures that grossly infringed Americans’ rights. Only recently, the Secret Service was unable to prevent a crazed fence-jumper from actually entering the White House — presumably one of the nation’s most secure buildings.
This week, sadly, Canadians feel violated in their own placid country. Two of their own — Cpl. Nathan Cirillo and Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent — join the long list of victims of terrorism. Neither Canada nor America can afford to be complacent, because the threat persists.
