Diaspora Communities and Phil Gurski

Canada Afghan: The authors examined four diaspora communities in Canada — Afghan, Somali, Syrian and Tamil — and found them to be willing allies for rooting out extremism among their often young and isolated members, according to CBC. Phil Gurski, a former CSIS analyst, says trust between Muslim communities and security officials was damaged by Harper government measures last year. "More resilient diaspora communities represent the best line of defence against violent extremism," says the March 30 report, obtained by CBC News under the Access to Information Act. "Diasporas are not a threat, as some of the mainstream discourse on counterterrorism has often implied, but rather Canada most valued asset in the fight against terrorism." The authors found a mutual distrust between these communities and security agencies, driven partly by news media and academics who have "framed diaspora communities as partly complicit in terrorist activity, a source of threat for host countries like Canada." "It has fostered suspicion and even discrimination against certain diaspora groups." The research says security agencies such as the RCMP and CSIS need to build trust, especially among Muslim groups in Canada who can often alert police to potential terror activity. "Dispelling Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination should be a centrepiece of any community engagement strategy surrounding anti-radicalization, as it has fuelled distrust of the state and wider Canadian society in Muslim diaspora communities." Helps restore balance The $180,000 study for Public Safety Canada was carried out over a year by the Kitchener, Ont.-based Security Governance Group, a private consultant firm. The research, ordered by the Harper government in 2014, appears to repudiate Conservative measures that alienated Muslim communities in the months before last year election. Former Canadian Security Intelligence Service analyst Phil Gurski, a specialist in homegrown radicalization, applauded the findings, saying they can help restore the balance between "hard security" — surveillance, arrests and charges — and "soft security," or building trust within ethnic communities. "We had the balance fairly good a couple of years ago, and then some unfortunate things happened towards the end of the Harper government that kind of maligned the trust we had built with communities and put us back a few steps," Gurski said in an interview. The removal resulting from "baseless allegations" was "the biggest blow to the government relationship with the Muslim community," said Gurski, who was Hamdani colleague and friend. "It had a chilling effect." Hussein Hamdani, a Hamilton-based corporate and real estate lawyer, was removed last year from the Canadian government Cross-Cultural Roundtable on National Security after unsubstantiated allegations by a blogger. It had a chilling effect.'- Former CSIS analyst Phil Gurski on the Harper government removal of a Muslim community leader from a federal panel Among those setbacks was the government removal of Hussein Hamdani in April 2015 from the Cross Cultural Roundtable on National Security, after a Quebec blogger alleged Hamdani harboured terrorist sympathies. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.