Disaffected Muslim youth + ammonium nitrate = terrorist threat?

The Toronto Star reports that the discoveries that led to the arrest of 12 men and 5 boys in Canada began with surveillance of Internet chat rooms:

…mix ammonium nitrate with the inflammatory rhetoric of an Internet chat room, and it instantly acquires the potential to become something entirely different, needing only the addition of a little fuel oil to turn it into a lethal bomb.

So when a shadowy group of disaffected urban youth began talking in an Internet chat room in the fall of 2004 espousing anti-Western views, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service was listening. The spy agency, and an alphabet soup of other security agencies across the continent, closely monitor such sites, where talk may sometimes turn to buildings and bombs and bringing global jihad home to North America, to Canada.Often it’s just that — talk — but when CSIS began monitoring the sites allegedly used by some of the 17 men and youths arrested on terrorism-related charges in a sweeping series of raids across the GTA Friday evening, the Canadian spy agency heard enough to remain interested, and increased surveillance of the group.

I continue to have the same misgivings I expressed yesterday about this incident. I really feel that I need to know a lot more about the details of what actually went down before I’ll be able to make a reasonable judgement about it.

But, if the equation in my title is what’s being demonstrated by this story, we have a much, much bigger problem than I think we’re prepared to tackle.

UPDATE:  Dan Darling, the blogosphere’s resident expert on Al Qaeda, provides some support for my misgivings, albeit from a slightly different angle:

You do not get terrorists emerging as a result of spontaneous generation no matter what the level of political animosity. To give a parallel example, there is a lot of political animosity here on the issue of immigration but there’s a very good reason that nobody outside the lunatic fringe is actually getting ready to fight a race war with anything other than keyboards. Trace the connections all the way back to the source and you’ll understand full well that this was far more than just a couple of guys in a chat room.