Canada is trying to reach out to Muslims, to encourage them to help fight against terrorism. (Never mind asking why they need to be “encouraged” to help prevent mass murder attacks.)

But the “outreach” program isn’t exactly working out like they planned: The sound and the fury of ethnic outreach.

TORONTO - The Cross-Cultural Roundtable on Security had a noble mission when it was set up three years ago: to engage the country’s ethnic communities in Canada’s fight against terrorism. Some now call it the “circus.”

The round table’s meetings, which bring together national security officials and community representatives, take place behind closed doors, but a leaked tape recording of a marathon session held last weekend suggests that its nickname is not entirely undeserved.

About 50 invited guests and a few gatecrashers gathered for eight hours last Sunday at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Toronto to pose questions to the city’s top RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service counterterrorism officials. It did not begin well.

The first speaker, Ahmed Motiar, started off by sharing his curious theories of the 9/11 attacks, claiming that “Muslims were not involved and seven of the alleged 19 hijackers are alive and well!”

Then Cheryfa Jamal complained about a Canadian military exercise she said was held outside her children’s Islamic school. (Her husband is one of the 18 men charged with belonging to an al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist group that was allegedly plotting truck bombings in downtown Toronto.)

“You’re asking us here to have a dialogue, to bring our communities together, yet this is the kind of actions that we’re facing every day,” she said.

“My children came home upset. They thought the Americans had landed.”

“Good lord,” sighed another participant, before the meeting digressed into a shouting match between rival Muslim factions.