Instead of frantic calls for vigilance after this weekend’s revelations that a horrific terrorist attack had been foiled in “multiculturally correct” Canada, there was…denial: denial of extremism and potential terrorism festering from within and tied to religion.

Most notoriously, an official Canadian spokesman, in pronouncing the 17 members of the apprehended terrorist cell to be from “a variety of backgrounds,” passed over the fact that every one of them was Muslim.

Less notorious was the exhortation by the Canadian Islamic Congress, a Muslim group with clout, to “fund legitimate academic research” to aid in discovering “why and how imported extremist ideologies are finding their way to some vulnerable Canadian Muslim youth.”

However, as Canadian author Adam Daifallah writes in The New York Sun:

The vast majority of the suspects were Canadian citizens. They were educated in Canadian public schools. It appears many were young Muslims who fell under the influence of superiors who indoctrinated them into the extremist Wahhabi ideology at a Toronto Islamic center.

Daifallah aptly concludes:

Canada must…find out what’s going on in these mosques. We know hatred is being preached. But those who are doing so must be identified, as must those who are funding them. They must be stopped.

It is suicidal not to face up to the indoctrination of young Muslims in mosques–and on some campuses–both in Canada and the U.S. Deflecting from this imperative by papering over the role of Islamic extremists, and by denying they are in our midst, simply enables the terrorists.