TORONTO, March 23, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) — Canada’s pro-life movement wasted no time dismissing as “absurd” a Canadian Security Intelligence Service internal memo asserting that 8 percent of so-called “lone wolf” terrorism attacks are the work of extremist pro-lifers.
The claim was made in a briefing note prepared for CSIS second-in-command Michael Peirce before his testimony last October to the Senate national security committee. It was obtained by the Toronto Star through a freedom-of-information request.
Recently published CSIS documents have identified both the environmental movement and First Nations activists as potential threats to national security, specifically to petroleum production and pipeline transmission. But the latest document obtained by the Star focused on “lone wolf” terrorists acting on their own. “Lone actors tend to create their own ideologies that combine personal frustrations and grievances, with wider political, social, or religious issues,” the briefing note states.
The note blamed white supremacy and other ideologies of the extreme right for 17 percent of “lone-wolf” attacks, Islamic extremism for another 15 percent, left-wing radicalism and “black power” for 13 percent, and “anti-abortion” extremism for eight percent, citing, as the Star put it, “recent academic research” rather than any inside intelligence.
Paul Lauzon, a policy researcher with the Campaign Life Coalition, which organizes the March for Life that brings around 20,000 pro-lifers to Parliament Hill each May, said the note was “absurd,” and a mistake, “characterizing us for everything that happens in the U.S.” While the last serious act of anti-abortion violence in Canada came in 2000, with the second murder attempt against Vancouver abortionist Garson Romalis in six years, violence continues in the U.S., committed both against abortionists and by them, and by their supporters against pro-lifers.
Lauzon told LifeSiteNews that CSIS’s views on the hypothetical existence of “lone wolf” pro-life terrorists is a threat to the pro-life movement because of Bill C-51, the proposed new security law that would, according to the VICE website, give “law enforcement new powers to detain suspects who they think ‘may’ rather than ‘will’ commit a violent crime, and to ‘preventatively’ detain suspects for up to seven days without charges.” Bill C-51 would put the movement under scrutiny and the scrutiny would hurt its reputation, he says.
Lauzon said Campaign Life went through the same business in 1994 with the RCMP, who grudgingly provided a retraction. Now he wants CSIS to declare it does not believe the Canadian pro-life movement is a security risk.
Brian Clowes, research director with the Virginia-based Human Life International, says the CSIS report perpetuates a popular falsehood. “Far more violence is perpetrated by abortion supporters than its opponents,” he told LifeSiteNews. HLI’s abortionviolence.com collects data on violent acts by abortionists and their supporters not only in the U.S. and around the world, but in seven Canadian provinces. In British Columbia, for example, Campbell River abortionist Mark Stewart was convicted in 2002 of 10 sexual assaults on different female clients, but his abortion practice escaped the notice of the news media.
In 1985 Ximena Bourne won an $8.7-million settlement from Vancouver General Hospital for treating her at birth as if she were an aborted fetus, neglecting her to the extent she suffered irreparable brain injury.
In 1996 two pro-life nurses, Cecilia von Dehn and Peggy Holland, were assaulted while attending a World Women’s Day conference in Vancouver. The Crown attorneys decided a prosecution of the assailants was not “in the public interest.” When pro-life activist John Hof was assaulted on a pro-life picket line in 2003, in front of police witnesses, the Crown decided again not to press charges.
The report cites several acts of vandalism and destruction against pro-life activists at various universities, with no charges ever laid, despite culprits boasting about their crimes on the Internet. In 2002 a Victoria man was convicted of sexual assault after raping his stepdaughters and forcing one who was thereby pregnant to have an abortion to hide the evidence.
Ontario’s list is twice as long, and involves murders and botched abortions ending with infanticide by drowning, a boyfriend holding his girlfriend down while her mother killed the fetus with a coat hanger, and dozens of acts of assault and vandalism against pro-life groups.
Clowes said, “For every act of extreme violence committed by a pro-lifer, there are 80 committed by pro-choicers.” But the news media suppresses the bad news about abortionists, and only the pro-lifers’ crimes. For pro-abortion reporters in the U.S., Clowes wrote in a report on pro-life and pro-choice violence, “someone like abortionist Brian Finkel, who sexually molested more than 100 women and is now imprisoned, cannot exist. The same goes for abortionists like Bruce Steir, who was convicted of manslaughter after letting Sharon Hampton bleed to death; John Baxter Hamilton, who was convicted of murder after beating his wife to death with a brick; and Alicia Ruiz Hanna, convicted of murder after killing Angela Sanchez and trying to stuff her dead body into the trunk of her car in full view of her Sanchez's four children.
“In the tidy little pro-choice universe, all women smile happily after their abortions, all ‘Anti-choicers’ are dangerous fanatics, and all abortionists are distinguished heroes, incapable of anything but the most noble of actions and thoughts,” Clowes wrote.
The question is whether CSIS will operate in that world as well. Neither CSIS nor the Minister of Public Safety’s office responded to LifeSiteNews’ questions by publication.
Contact:
Hon. Steven Blaney
Minister of Public Safety
House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
Telephone: 613-992-7434
Fax: 613-995-6856
[email protected]