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One month into the semester, undergraduate and graduate students taking John McCoy’s Modern Terrorism course at the University of Alberta received a learning opportunity in their own backyard.

The class is participating in the Peer-to-Peer Facebook Global Digital Challenge program, countering hateful or extremist narratives responding to local issues.

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McCoy said their campaign aims to tone down hyper-partisan rhetoric, and instead speak to people individually in a calm, positive, factual manner in hopes of changing hearts and minds.

After the Edmonton attacks on Sept. 30, the class decided to focus their campaign, “Our Alberta,” as a response to the anti-refugee and anti-Muslim sentiments that have appeared in its wake.

“There are a number of social movements who are very opposed to the presence of refugees, especially Muslim refugees, especially Somali refugees in Canada and the identity of this individual was going to be a bit of an ‘I told you so’ moment for those movements,” McCoy said.

In actual fact, McCoy said, since Sept. 11, 2001, you could count the terrorist attacks committed by refugees in North America on one hand, with more than one million refugees coming into Canada and the United States.