Of course not. Because the entire affair is little more than a dog and pony show designed to convince Canadians local Muslims pose a threat to the country. Meanwhile, some Canadians have responded in the desired manner. “The vandalizing of a Toronto mosque on the weekend could be part of a reaction against Islam after police arrested 17 Muslim men and youth in southern Ontario amid accusations of an al-Qaeda-inspired bombing plot, an imam says,” reports CBC News, making sure to link “al-Qaeda” to the suspects, who are of course guilty until proven innocent.

Naturally, the corporate media and “experts” on such matters are clueless. “A Canadian terrorism expert said the type of fertilizer ordered by the group—34-0-0—is the highest grade and the best for making explosives,” reports the neocon National Post, not bothering to mention the fact Canadian police arranged the delivery of the fertilizer. “This would indicate that they had done their homework,” Tom Quiggin, a senior fellow at the Centre of Excellence for National Security in Singapore, told the discredited newspaper, basically a neocon propaganda tool. In fact, it appears the RCMP “had done their homework,” not the patsies.

In order to demonize the suspects, or rather patsies, the National Post and other newspapers in Canada have gone out of their way to establish, at best tenuously, an “al-Qaeda” connection. “Fahim Ahmad, 21, and Zakaria Amara, 20, are being described as the key figures among the 12 adults and five juveniles charged over the weekend with terrorism-related offences…. Both had been followers of Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, a senior member of the Al-Rahman Islamic Centre in Mississauga and the oldest of the 17 accused.” Jamal, according to the National Post, quoting Aly Hindy, imam at the Salaheddin Islamic Centre in Scarborough, “was upset at the way some in Toronto’s Muslim community have distanced themselves from the Khadrs, the Toronto family that once lived in Osama bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan.”

In 2004, the Khadr family was at the center of an effort to amend Canada’s Citizenship Act after they supposedly admitted “patriarchal links to Osama bin Laden,” as CTV put it. “It’s very regrettable that the Conservatives would exploit the fear of terrorism to identify an individual or two individuals and somehow suggest their citizenship should be revoked,” Peter Kormos of the NDP said at the time. “It’s very dangerous to use a single instance like that to set a precedent or paint a broad sweep.” But then, of course, the “conservatives” (neocons) in Canada and the United States are all about “broad sweeps” and obviously sting operations, if they forward the agenda.

Meanwhile, so-called “counter-terrorism officials” have admitted “that lethal chemical devices they feared had been stored at an east London house raided on Friday may never have existed,” the Guardian reports. “Confidence among officials appeared to be waning as searches at the address continued to yield no evidence of a plot for an attack with cyanide or other chemicals. A man was shot during the raid, adding to pressure on the authorities for answers about the accuracy of the intelligence that led them to send 250 officers to storm the man’s family home at dawn.” But then the idea here is not “a duty of care to the general public,” as officials claim, but rather to create irrational hysteria and animosity toward Muslims.

It does not matter a chemical attack never occurred, or the police are unable to find chemicals or deadly substances, because simply mentioning “cyanide or other chemicals” and the same sentence with “terrorists” is enough to provoke a stampede, almost the same as an actual attack occurring. It worked famously in the lead-up to the neocon invasion of Iraq. How many people still believe Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, even though there is absolutely no evidence of this? How many people, thanks to misrepresentation and outright lies parroted by the corporate media, cannot tell the difference between Saddam is Osama? How many people believe the United States invaded and occupied Iraq in response to nine eleven? Millions.

And now millions believe there are Muslim terrorists in our midst, even though the latest incidents are farcical and obvious set-ups engineered to ramp up the paranoia and fear in preparation for the next phase of the “long war” against Muslim society and culture. The Straussian neocons, firmly entrenched in the Pentagon and foreign policy establishment, are only peripherally interested in consensus, although a bit more paranoia, fear, and anger—the latter resulting in vandalism at the International Muslims Organization of Toronto—is helpful in creating the appropriate domestic conditions for the commencement of criminal mass murder in Iran.