That is the conclusion of Toronto-based Chris Mathers, a crime and risk consultant, and author of Crime School: Money Laundering and a speaker at a recent gathering of the ASIS International Toronto chapter. In his lively 45-minute presentation, he pointed out that there have been some very unsuccessful attacks by terrorists including one in Syria against fortified American military positions. However, while these may be examples of terrorism at its most ridiculous, there is a real threat to governments, businesses and the public in general.

He says professionals in the field of corporate security need to keep themselves educated on the issues and realities of terrorism and use their knowledge to raise awareness in their own organizations of the threats that can rapidly come up to their front door.

“This isn’t the threat of terrorism, this is the promise of terrorism,” says Mathers. “It’s going to happen. We’re lucky they were able to interrupt the last one (June 2 to 3, 2006) but I know for a fact that there are other organizations out there that are sufficiently motivated and singular of purpose to lay a device in public. It’s not about being American or not, they want us dead because we’re not them.

“The main tenant of my book is that organized crime and terrorism are two horns of the same goat,” he says. “Organized crime usually gets its start by pursuing an ideology. The problem is that you need to do crimes in order to afford your activity like selling drugs, money laundering, extortion, and others.

“As organized crime develops, it loses touch with its ideology and moves toward the goals of wealth and power,” he says, citing what is now commonly recognized as the Mafia, for example, may have started with Italian resistance to invaders, which some say started as an acronym from an Italian phrase that meant “death to the French” but might have other sources. Other terrorist organizations have also used criminal means to fund their activities.

Mathers says, with organizations like Al Qaeda and Hamas, “we’re seeing the first infant steps of Islamic organized crime. With Al Qaeda, it’s the same thing with links to narcotics, kidnapping, extortion and war taxing and human smuggling. You need to be able to pay the bills when terrorists operate.”

And this is a problem for Canada because the country looks like an attractive location to open up operations, Mathers says, in part because of Canada’s relaxed approaches to immigration and criminal prosecution and because it is adjacent to both one of the largest markets and the largest target in the world — the United States.

He says the public can’t see all the activities that are underway to deal with the threat of terrorism in the intelligence, law enforcement and military agencies but there is a lot going on, in part to prevent public backlash against Canadian Muslims, not involved with terrorism but who could be tarred with the same brush.

Mathers says many companies that send people abroad are aware of the threats that are out there and are taking precautions.

“Most of the clients I have are pretty hip to it. They don’t put their people in harm’s way. They have ransom insurance and they make sure they give their people good in-country briefings,” he says. “And if it doesn’t make sense to do business there, then they’re not going to do the business there.”