An outlandish video of a man with his face fully wrapped in a scarf appears to be a “casting call” for radicalized persons in Canada to stage some sort of shopping mall atrocity like the one committed in Nairobi, Kenya in 2013. In the video the man asks: “What if such an attack was to occur in the Mall of America in Minnesota, or the West Edmonton Mall in Canada?” The video is purportedly issued by the al-Qaeda-linked group al-Shabaab. The RCMP have said they have no sense that such an elaborate attack is possible much less planned. As we know, such cries for ISIL-type killing parties have generated a handful of usually lone individuals. They are dangerous but usually not very well organized. The video seems to be an advertisement or casting call to such misfits as much as anything else. However it underlines the concern about the means by which people are radicalized, or perhaps more precisely co-opted into such bloodthirsty behavior. Terrorism specialists have recently tried to focus on the best way to detect such radicalization before it goes too far.
