Irremediably Tainted

"I am here in prison, but there are millions of people outside. What's happening to you is not for nothing. God will take ... revenge" on the United States.

There is nothing to rescue in the character of Omar Khadr. What makes him a citizen of Canada? A piece of paper that his family disdains as the symbol of a corrupt society. Not too corrupt, however, as a useful resource for social services; universal medicare, and social welfare. They, like so many others, certainly not all Muslim nor Arab, have discovered themselves to have an abiding need for Canada to protect their mortal carapaces just as Islam does their sanctified souls.

Omar Khadr's protectively loving mother aided and abetted her husband, her children's father, to carefully and deliberately prepare their children for Islamic jihad, and not of the soulful variety. The family's sons were exposed to that very dark side of Islam's war with the non-Muslim world, and specifically that of the West, and symbolically the United States of America. Supposedly, Canada was only marginally exempt.

It was to Pakistan they decamped when their sons were deemed old enough to be directly involved in jihad, each of them having been more than adequately pre-groomed to the task. It was the technical, mechanical end of things, acquiring prowess as Soldiers of Allah, tutelage in bomb-making, instruction in marksmanship, that was to follow. There was no proscription due to age; the teen years deemed quite sufficient unto the task at hand.

Omar Khadr, now at last facing a military court of justice, still refers to himself as a "child combatant", and he does so judiciously, with the full knowledge of the western-conscience baggage that weights that phrase down so neatly in his favour. Mind, al-Shabab is the violent Islamist Somali militia comprised of young men, some very young, engaged in spreading terror and horror in Somalia and exporting it abroad.

Charged in the United States with five war crimes the sitting military judge has ruled a damning personal admission of guilt admissible at his trial, deeming it not a product of torture. Mr. Khadr claims himself to have been physically and mentally abused, citing as just such an instance an episode where guards attempt to persuade a physically reluctant Mr. Khadr to quietly submit to standing on a weigh scale for his medical records.

He has become a skilled manipulator while awaiting justice, knows just how to prick the conscience of those who find fault in prosecuting a 'child soldier'. That child soldier was fully capable of proceeding as he was taught to do; among other things manufacturing and planting land mines. In the 2002 firefight in Afghanistan against U.S. soldiers he is accused of having thrown a grenade that killed an American medic.

Omar Khadr has his many supporters, decrying the horribly errant decision of the government of Canada not to make an effort to return this son of Canada to his home country. He may very well be found guilty of the crimes he is accused of. Even newspapers in this country which are generally held to be conservative in nature call for him to be returned to Canada, to live out his sentence here.

Close to the comfortable presence of his loving family. That same mother and sister who hold that al-Qaeda is a meritorious freedom movement, that violent Islamist jihad is simply returning to the West what it deserves. That until Sharia is imposed within Western democratic countries they will never be anything but socially, politically, religiously degraded places of contemptible existence..

Fundamentalist Islam is the way to freedom, enlightenment and the path of righteousness and justice.