Put Out The Welcome Mat

Doubtless there will be some doing just that.  But it's a fairly safe bet that they're a distinct minority.  A group of people convulsed with the agonizing thought that a great wrong was done to a helpless young boy who had no other option but to react as he was programmed to.  After all, who could be more influential in a young boy's life than his father?  His mother, presumably, but perhaps not quite to the same extent.

In the Khadr family it was Ahmed Said Khadr, the confidante of Osama bin Laden and staunch supporter and funding agent for al-Qaeda who insisted that his three sons be schooled in jihad, taking his family to Pakistan where they could be further indoctrinated into the war against the West and then on to Afghanistan where they could turn their practical training into practise.


And it was Omar Khadr's mother who scorned the values of the West and particularly Canadian society, while taking advantage of all the social welfare values that are so helpful in raising a family without extending oneself too laboriously.  It is in Canada that one finds the freedom to excoriate societal values while absorbing all the useful hands-up offered to all equally without distinction or favour.


At fifteen, taught in the fine art of close combat, the use of artillery and how to construct explosive devices he was prepared and ready to embark as a mujahadeen, on a mission alongside others he had trained beside, meeting American troops head on, in Afghanistan.  It was an auspicious meeting, for far from killing him, American medics treated his grievous wounds and restored him to life.


So he could fester as a prisoner at Bagram and then Guantanamo, while the United States figured out what they could do with him when bringing him to trial as an 'illegal' combatant.  As if he wasn't steeped enough in the hatred of religious fanaticism and the ideology of East versus West, there among other prisoners he could continue to study the Koran and mark its passages, interpreting those that held the messages he sought.


The U.S. government, post-trial, post a year served of his final eight-year sentence, is prepared to restore this Canadian citizen back to the country of his birth.  Now there is an anomaly; Canadian-born, Egyptian heritage, fanatical religious-political-social commitment, exposure to hardened jihadists, time spent as a prisoner of an ideological war, and returned to a country where all of that should be completely foreign.


But it is not; three generations of Khadrs resident in Canada, awaiting the return of the youngest of the Khadr brothers, whose sister and mother spit venomous spite on Canada and its social contract, its shared values of civility and humanity, to take him to their bosom once more.  The Government of Canada as it is currently represented, has no wish to restore him to Canada, but must, legally.


He is a Canadian citizen. Was a Canadian child when his father and mother spirited him elsewhere.  Irrespective of whatever he was committed to, and the crimes he committed, he has Canadian citizenship and as such is guaranteed haven.  The forty years imprisonment he was sentenced to evaporated on a plea of a child soldier and a circumspect guilty plea.


The U.S. wishes to be rid of him, Canada wishes he would disappear - anywhere but not Canada.  But he will be welcomed, for want of a better word, back 'home', to the country where he was born, to parents who despised the country but were advantaged by its benefits.