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As a member of the school board’s faith advisory committee who had supported the policy, Hindy has been targeted online as a radical and criminal. He was told he was being watched and that he should have stayed silent.

Hindy knows that kind of extremism better than most. Although reluctant to talk about it, he alluded to it in Tuesday’s Facebook post, disclosing that he had once been “exposed to the dangers of extremism and seen its destructive face.”

In an interview with the National Post, he spoke publicly for the first time about those experiences, which he said began during a 1999 trip to Peshawar, the city in northwest Pakistan that had served as a base for al-Qaida.

The son of controversial Toronto imam Aly Hindy, he said he had just turned 15 when Abdurahman Khadr came to Toronto. Khadr lived in Peshawar with his father Ahmed Said Khadr, who was officially a Canadian humanitarian worker in Afghanistan and, unofficially, an al-Qaida bagman.

Hindy said Abdurahman told him how good it was over there, how the Khadrs lived an Islamic life, helping Afghanistan’s war orphans. He was invited to come see for himself. Hindy was home-schooling at the time and he was bored. “And I said okay,” he said.

He flew to Karachi and then on to Peshawar, straight into the vortex of the Khadr family. It wasn’t what he had expected. They watched a lot of movies, Hindy said, “but then I started to get introduced to other people who were there.”

The men Hindy met looked and behaved like spiritual people, and they constantly quoted from scripture, but they spoke in harsh, strident tones about a dark world that was conspiring against them as Muslims.