Canadian police bent over backwards to pander to the Islamic community, in the most politically correct terrorism bust in history: Authorities confronted ‘wall of silence’.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the RCMP met with members of the Canadian Muslim community every month for a year to discuss security concerns before last Friday’s 17 arrests. But the outreach program took an unprecedented turn during an 8 a.m. meeting last Saturday — two hours before authorities briefed the world about the arrests — when Toronto-area Muslim community leaders were told the details of the most high-profile terrorism sweep in Canadian history.

“It was a form of pre-emptive outreach, for lack of a better word,” said spokeswoman Barbara Campion.

Canada’s secret security apparatus has been putting serious effort into softening its image for much of the past year, conscious of the fact that for many Muslim immigrants, the phrase “secret police” is synonymous with violence and coercion.

Hussein Hamdani, a lawyer and member of the government’s cross-cultural roundtable on security, said he and others tried to explain to police why they had to engage the Muslim community.

“We would say, ‘Look, you’re doing a negative job when doing outreach because you have this wall of silence,’ ” he said. “I don’t think they listened for a long time.”

But recently, CSIS has been listening. Under the tenure of Jim Judd, who took over as director in November of 2004, the spy agency has taken specific steps to bring the Muslim community onside.

For example, the agency has dropped phrases such as “Sunni Islamic extremist threat” from its lexicon. At last Saturday’s news conference, agents very deliberately avoided using the words Muslim or Islamic when describing the arrests. …

But even though Canada’s security apparatus has become much more savvy, it remains unclear whether the Muslim community’s response will ultimately prove different.

The police deliberately refuse to look at the nature of the threat, or identify it to the public, and Canadian media thinks this is “much more savvy.” Wow.

And then we get the obligatory quote from a dissembling Muslim leader:

Muslim Canadian Congress representative Tarek Fatah, who was at Saturday’s meeting, said imams brought up a number of concerns after being told what had happened. One asked why authorities hadn’t told them sooner about the suspects, so the religious leaders could have put a stop to their plot, Mr. Fatah said.

According to Mr. Fatah, another imam asked whether the authorities could keep the meeting a secret. “If bishops were meeting regularly with the RCMP, what do you think their congregations would think?” Mr. Fatah said.

Tarek Fatah was featured earlier this week at LGF after the terror arrests, when his Islamist front group released a statement saying “Al Qaeda and the Taliban are nothing more but a creation of the CIA.”

Oh yeah. That’s exactly the guy the “savvy” police should work with.