Canada PM Stephen Harper: Biggest security threat to Canada a decade after 9/11 is Islamic terrorism

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper understand the threat still posed by al-Qaida and other Islamic radicals. As for out president Obama, not so much.

(CBC) — In an exclusive interview with CBC News, Prime Minister Stephen Harper says the biggest security threat to Canada a decade after 9/11 is Islamic terrorism.

In a wide-ranging interview with CBC chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge that will air in its entirety on The National Thursday night, Harper says Canada is safer than it was on Sept. 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda attacked the U.S., but that “the major threat is still Islamicism.”

“There are other threats out there, but that is the one that I can tell you occupies the security apparatus most regularly in terms of actual terrorist threats,” Harper said.

Harper cautioned that terrorist threats can “come out of the blue” from a different source, such as the recent Norway attacks, where a lone gunman who hated Muslims killed 77 people.

But Harper said terrorism by Islamic radicals is still the top threat, though a “diffuse” one.

President Obama thinks "lone wolf" gunmen are the biggest threat to America now. Notice how the words Islamic and Muslim are not even mentioned.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Tuesday that a “lone wolf” terror attack in the U.S. is more likely than a major coordinated effort like the Sept. 11 attacks nearly a decade ago. 

With the nation preparing to observe the 10th anniversary of hijacked airliners crashing in New York and Washington and along the Pennsylvania countryside, Obama said the government is in a state of heightened awareness.

“The biggest concern we have right now is not the launching of a major terrorist operation, although that risk is always there,” the president said in an interview with CNN.

“The risk that we’re especially concerned over right now is the lone wolf terrorist, somebody with a single weapon being able to carry out wide-scale massacres of the sort that we saw in Norway recently,” he said. “You know, when you’ve got one person who is deranged or driven by a hateful ideology, they can do a lot of damage, and it’s a lot harder to trace those lone wolf operators.”