Dr. Katherine Bullock is the President of the Islamic Society of North America – Canada (ISNA-Canada) and a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto at Mississauga.

On November 27, 2014 Bullock, who was born in Australia and converted to Islam in 1994, took part alongside Professor Faisal Kutty and Imam Yasin Dwyer in a panel discussion at York University in Toronto titled “ISIS, Violence and the Politics of Deradicalization.”

Here is an excerpt from Katherine Bullock’s statements in this event (00:24:13-00:25:28):

So let’s turn to Canada. I think the domestic policy is slightly different from the foreign policy, but again there’s this cultural and this approach, and it begins with the whole, even the word radicalization is wrong. It’s a problem. Because radicalization is being defined through this culturalist approach. In the United Kingdom, anyone who supports the Sharia is considered to be an extremist. There was a U.K. think tank that with the help of Public Safety Canada did a series of interviews in Canada with Muslim youths about radicalization. They defined a radical as this: 1. someone who desires to install a Caliphate. 2. Someone who wants to impose for an Orthodox Sharia; and 3. the use of force, for example, resisting coalition forces in Iraq. So if you’re an Iraqi nationalist who doesn’t believe that the United States should be occupying your country and you fight against them, and you believe in the Caliphate, and you believe in Sharia, you are a radical you’ve been radicalized. But from an Islamic point of view this absolutely nothing radical about wanting Caliphate or wanting Sharia. These are completely normal traditional points of view.

ISIS, Violence and the Politics of Deradicalization from Osgoode Digital Commons on Vimeo.