After the July bombings in London last year, a conviction settled in many quarters that the young Muslim men who turned themselves into human bombs to blow as many of their fellow citizens as possible to kingdom come had been radicalised by Britain’s participation in the war in Iraq. Last Friday night, Canadian police arrested 17 suspected Islamist terrorists who were said to have amassed enough explosives to have committed an atrocity three times the size of the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

The similarities with Britain are striking — so much so that Jack Hooper, deputy director of operations for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, who on May 29 presciently warned the Canadian Senate defence committee of an increasing threat to Canada from home-grown terrorists added:

I can tell you that all of the circumstances that led to the London transit bombings, to take one example, are resident here and now in Canada.

How interesting. Because of course there is one difference between Canada and Britain. Although it has troops in Afghanistan, Canada has no troops in Iraq. Canada is not part of the coalition of the willing. Canada has refused to fight in Iraq. Indeed, Canada is one of the most liberal, politically correct, human rights obsessed, immigration-friendly, multicultural, appeasement–minded countries on the globe. Yet it was still included on al Qaeda’s list of targets for the jihad.

As an editorial today in the National Post remarked:

Because our government refused to fight in Iraq, and has postured against American ‘unilateralism,’ most Canadians liked to think Islamists would leave us alone. Now, everyone in Canada knows better.

Ummn...do they really? I think not. This mindset isn’t overturned by a little thing like demonstrable, literally explosive reality; good heavens, no. Plenty of room in Canada for further culturally suicidal delusions. We in Britain should know.