Whoa! Not Bloody Likely...

Canada's notorious first family of jihad-bent terror's very presence in this country is sufficiently problematical, offensive and embarrassing in the light of current world events to cause us to wonder why on earth we would tolerate their ongoing residence here, as citizens. Khadr pere, posing as a social worker, a indefatigable raiser-of-funds for philanthropic measures to assist the poor and the underprivileged in the Middle East surprised us all with his revealed allegiance to and close association with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

Canadians are such push-overs, so intent on doing the right thing, so given to anguished self-examination, so geared, it would seem, to shooting ourselves in the forehead when it comes to a choice between proceeding with caution in possession of full disclosure, and opting generously to take any opportunity to believe implicitly in the good intent of those who claim to be what they are not, that we even pressured our then-prime minister, Jean Chretien, to plead on behalf of Khadr when he was imprisoned in a Pakistani jail, accused of that which he was truly guilty.

When the Khadr family decamped to parts geographical better suited to their rigid religious ideology morally virtuous servitude expressed through jihad, it was with the intent of fully immersing their children in the cult of Islamic military superiority, for the purpose of the great struggle; to bring fundamentalist Islam forward to begin to replace the corrupt ideology of democratic capitalism. That they lived with their wider family, in peace and prosperity with freedom to pursue their futures meant little to this family.

They despised and decried what they saw as Western religious decrepitude, moral collapse, socially-ethical lapses, capitalist-triumphant injury of the role of God and the life-enhancing obeisance to the strictures laid down by sacred scriptures; in total of societal values inured against the path of righteousness. There would be, they felt, nothing lost, and everything to be gained by guiding the world, by any means at all, including bloody violence, toward Allah.

As he sowed, so did he reap, and the father died in holy battle. This family, so utterly, subliminally and outwardly steeped in their beliefs, so indebted to the bold initiatives of their friend, neighbour and mentor, Osama bin Laden, that they were completely intent in seeing their young boys taught the precepts of jihadist Islam, sent them to military training camps, prepared to sacrifice their lives and those of their children to the greater determination and dream of a global caliphate, have not altered their allegiance one iota.

With the father dead, the older sons implicated in terrorist activities, the youngest incarcerated as an enemy-combatant by the U.S. military for his witnessed grenade-tossed killing of a U.S. medic, the mother and daughter were permitted to return to Canada, as citizens of Canada, all the while publicly and proudly asserting that they were fervent supporters of al-Qaeda and its larger aims. Then we allowed the two older sons to return, one of whom claims to have left his jihadist roots behind.

Now the youngest of the tribe, still held at Guantanamo Bay prison, where the government of Canada has no part in his defense, instructs his lawyers to obtain a court order to force the federal government (Canadian tax payers) to fund his legal team representing his interests before a military commission. To order the Department of Foreign Affairs to pay "a reasonable level of costs" to enable Mr. Khadr to retain counsel of his choice. Is this justice unbalanced, or have we all simply gone mad?

Pay a known enemy combatant - however youthful in his act of militant murder - to launch a defense, when his pursuit and that of his family was to assist in the re-ordering of world politics, religion, society, geography by violent means. Someone who acted with free will to destabilize Western society, kill those he perceived as the enemy. In the process violently and with full intent representing an alien religion, a foreign and aggressively-militant ideology meant to be forced upon an unwilling world.

To begin with, this is not an instance of aggression meeting aggression, in the first degree. The situation is that of a larger community of communities, the world of Western democratic polity, of secular governance, of a free and enlightened society having their security compromised very directly by the hostile and murderous intent of a dangerously fundamentalist segment of a recognized world religion.

It is not as though the West had the option of ignoring the febrile demands of the Islamists for the foaming-at-the-mouth Islamists brought carnage and terror to the West.

And for someone who willingly engaged in this onslaught on Western culture, tradition, politics, religion, social structure, we, the Canadian people are to countenance a move by a handful of "socially responsible and responsive" lawyers to fund the defense of such a one?

To say that this family and its activities and its mind-set are not much admired by Canadians is to mealy-mouthed social-correctness an understatement of monumental proportions. This is not a matter of Canadian citizens wishing for fair and appropriate treatment in an obviously unfair and unappropriate venue and situation.

The fundamental flaw in the argument of the lawyers pushing for funding for Omar Khadr is blatant and unacceptable. The man, young though he is, is an instrument of Islamofascism, a quasi-religious fundamentalist jihad-bent group of psychopath-malcontents. He neither needs nor requires a defense, for his purpose was to achieve martyrdom in the cause of Islam. Let him speak eloquently in his own defense.

Much as his actions have already done.

There is such a thing as free will. We are all given opportunities throughout our lives to make measured, or alternately, bad choices. To even entertain the faintest thought of funding Mr. Khadr's defense would represent an egregious Charter violation. That of Canadian citizens to live in freedom from oppression and violence.

Should Mr. Khadr and his larger cadre of terrorists have been successful in their avowed and demonstrated purpose, the guarantee implicit in our Charter rights would be beyond imperilled.

Nathan Whitling, et al, go away - find refuge and opportunity for your politically driven, celebrity-notorious, wealth-acquiring ambitions rummaging through another garbage can of human detritus.