Are we focusing on the wrong border?
The arrest last Friday and Saturday of 12 adults and 5 youths in Ontario in connection with terrorist activities, including buying three tons of bomb material (ammonium nitrate fertilizer), gun smuggling, running terrorist camps and other Al Qaedaish activities should alert us to where the real terrorist threat might come from.
Mexicans are here for the money. They want to support the American way of life and make some cash. No danger here.
But out of the 600,000 Muslims in Canada, there is a tiny percentage - maybe one tenth of one percent - who harbor evil thoughts toward this country.
In 2000 an Al Qaeda terrorist named Ahmed Ressam tried to infiltrate the border between Vancouver and Seattle. He had bomb components, a fake passport, and detailed plans to blow up the Los Angeles Airport.
The US-Canadian border, 4,000 miles long (the longest unmilitarized border in the world, more than twice as long as the US-Mexican border), has only one tenth of the border patrol agents assigned to the Mexican border: 1,000 to 11,000.
Representative Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, expects more terrorist threats from Canada because of their liberal immigration laws and easy political asylum.
Why should Muslim terrorists trudge through a hot and barren desert in Mexico when the northern border is so porous?
There are many completely unmonitored roads and paths from Canada to the US. One crossing, Jim's Corner operates on the honor system. Just drive on through!
The big danger comes from local homegrown terrorist cells and plots with no international connections, much like we have seen in London and Madrid.
We cannot close the border with Canada, or even logically put up a fence, but we can apply the economic screws on Canada to make sure that they aggressively investigate Muslim threats. We closed the border for two days after 9/11 and the Canadians were petrified by the possible economic consequences.
Canada has liberal asylum, and immigration policies and tolerates much political/cultural diversity -- all good things in normal times. But these are not normal times. Maybe Canadians are too wussified. The Mounties have to get tough.