A Kafkaesque Dilemma

What a conundrum, a vexing, troublesome and troubling paradox. Is Omar Khadr a wrongly vilified, manipulated youth, torn by his familial upbringing and loyalty, helpless to have acted otherwise than in the manner he was exposed to, or is he a deliberately dedicated jihadist? Well, that's a ridiculous question, since he's both, of course. His youth, at the time of his capture and when the charges were levelled against him, is upheld as a reason to excuse his actions.

His indoctrination into jihad, his exposure to the searing hatred by Islam for the West, was not of his doing, his supporters claim, but that of his father. And, by extension, his mother. Who is on public record as excoriating the corruption and random uselessness of western values and civilization, in comparison to the purity and godliness of Islam. She spits her utter disdain for democratic freedoms, yet sequesters herself in its protective clasp.

His youth should excuse him from complete culpability. Yet a child soldier from the First World War has recently passed away at the venerable age of 100+. There were many child soldiers who enlisted in armies in the past, who claimed they were several acceptable years older than their true age, and who were recruited for action at face value. They fought for their countries voluntarily.

There are the forcibly conscripted child soldiers of Sierra Leone and other African countries who were forced initially, then became compliant, in meting out the most horrendous of tortures and atrocities at the behest of their commanders. During the Cultural Revolution in China young people were exhorted by the leaders of the ruling Communist Party to turn on their parents, their teachers, their elders. Millions were sacrificed to that ideology of hatred.

Omar Khadr's life was salvaged by American medical expertise when he was seriously injured during a raid in Afghanistan when he was stationed there with other militia members fighting U.S. soldiers. He was doing his duty as he saw it and as he was taught to do, in protection of his ideological soul-mates, his religion. If you happen to be on the wrong end of the winning combination there's always a price to pay.

Yet he was, chronologically speaking, still a child when that incident took place and he was severely wounded, and he was exposed to a frightening and threatening interrogation when what he needed, as a child, was to be protected and reassured. His plight would not fail to melt the resolve of any adult to consider himself responsible for his fate. His anguished mother, witnessing video footage of her then-15-year-old child weeping in self-pity, mourned for him.

Yet what kind of mother is it who is complicit with her jihadist-bent husband in abandoning her young sons to a war zone as combatants? "I think if it was any child, if it was any child from anywhere, I wish I can do anything to help", she said. "If it was somebody else's child, if it was an American child begging for help, I would scream at everybody and say: Please do something."

She's right. Most people would react exactly the same; they would plead for help for that child exposed to such a miserably nasty disappointment in life, frightened and alone, pleading for assistance from anyone to help take him away from the nightmare his life had become.