Canucks admit "lone wolf" shooters "were influenced by ISIS"

Fancy that! Walt no sooner posted "Why the Australian terrorist wannabe did it" than Agent 3 sent us a link to a story from the online edition of the Toronto Star, headlined "Parliament shooter may have been in contact with Islamic State, Peter MacKay says".

Mr. MacHackey is Canada's Minister of Justice. (Before that he was Minister of Defence, until he got rather too fond of being photographed sitting in jet fighter cockpits and making vroom-vroom noises.) The Star's reporter says that Minister MacKay told him, at the Halifax International Security Forum (sic) in November, "They were influenced by ISIS there is no question."

He (MacKay) was referring to Michael Zehaf-Bibeau and Martin Couture-Rouleau, Canadian converts to Islam. Zehaf-Bibeau was the one who killed a Canadian soldier standing on ceremonial guard at the War Memorial in Ottawa. Couture-Rouleau had, just two days earlier, driven a car into two soldiers near Montreal, killing one of them.

At the time (as Walt told you) the Harper government's politically correct line was that the cowardly killings were caused by a "mix of personal disaffection and jihadist zealotry" -- the same syndrome now ascribed to Man Haron Monis, the perpetrator of Sunday's hostage-taking in Sydney, Australia.

"But," writes Josh Rogin-Bloomberg, "sometimes, early reports are later proved wrong. Several weeks after the Ottawa attack, Canada’s top law-enforcement official now says the gunman was not only inspired by Islamic State, he may have been in direct contact with the group.

"[MacKay] said that Canadian intelligence and law enforcement agencies were still trying to pin down exactly what sort of back-and-forth might have occurred between the homegrown terrorists and Islamic State. 'I don’t know that for certain, we have that suspicion, let’s put it that way,' he said, referring to “statements both of these individuals have made to others.

"In the case of the Parliament Hill shooter, there is also evidence contained in a video that Zehaf-Bibeau made before carrying out his suicide mission. The Canadian authorities have not released the video to the public. MacKay said the attacker’s statements in it are 'consistent with our belief that his motivations were very much as a result of being radicalized by the Islamic State.'"

Will the linkage between these attacks and the involvement of Canada and Australia in the "degradation" of ISIS result in any change in their government's foreign policy? Errr, no!