Omar Khadr is set to receive an official apology from the Government of Canada and $10.5 million in compensation for his years behind bars at Guantanamo Bay. |
Two news stories concerning terrorism should make Canadians realize that not only are we being governed under the doctrine of “sock and awe,” but that our values have turned upside down in a bizarro world, one of our own making.
First to Israel, where on Monday the government revealed it has filed a precedent-setting lawsuit against the family of a terrorist who drove a truck into a group of military personnel killing four Israeli soldiers.
Attacker Fadi al-Qunbar was shot dead shot and killed in January, and the matter would have rested there. But this time Israel has made the landmark decision to sue against any inheritance the terrorist left to his family. The lawsuit, which is expected to be the first of many similar cases, demands a total of more than $2.3 million.
Israel’s Minister of the Interior Arye Dery told the Haaretz newspaper, “From now on, anyone who plots, plans or considers carrying out a terrorist attack will know that his family will pay a heavy price for his deed.”
Not so in Canada.
On the same day as the terrorist Fadi al-Qumbar was being penalized by Israel, in Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government announced that convicted terrorist Omar Khadr, who in October 2010 had pleaded guilty to “murder in violation of the law of war, attempted murder in violation of the law of war, spying, conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism,” was to receive a $10M “compensation"for his troubles and an official apology from the Government of Canada.
Mr. Khadr, now 30, was 15 in July 2002 when he lived in an Afghan compound with a group of bomb-building Islamic jihadis planting roadside explosives. Afterwards, U.S. troops stormed the house and this is where a grenade thrown by Khadr killed Sergeant Christopher Speer, a medic who was helmet-less and dressed in Afghan clothing.
ISIS child soldiers in Raqqa, Syria, 2015. |
It is true that at the time Omar Khadr committed his act of terror and murder, he was only 15 years old, but in the context of the war against civilization by Islamic terrorists, be they from the Taliban, ISIS, Al-Shabab, or Boko Haram, the vast number of volunteers who have taken up arms and carried out war crimes are in their teens.
For bleeding-heart liberals whose guilt-ridden frame of mind cannot comprehend beyond the storybook picture of the child soldiers hired by African war lords, this may be a shock, but the ultimate hero of Muslims in the part of the world Omar Khadr was photographed making IEDs, is the 8th century 17-year old Arab invader of India called Muhammad Bin Qasim, and from Kabul to Karachi every child jihadi wishes to emulate the rape and plunder of this Arab jihadi. We are not dealing with the God’s Army in Uganda or the Liberian child soldiers of the 1990s.
The Muslim boys who go to fight jihad do so not under any pressure, but for the lure of entering Paradise and meeting the opposite gender for the first time. This may sound bizarre to the non-Muslim, but trust me, this is not fiction nor propaganda.
But there may still be some poetic justice in the end.
Tabitha Speer, the widow of Sargent Speer, moved to finalize a default civil-suit judgment against Omar Khadr. The court granted the plaintiffs a total of US$134.1 million in damages.
It would be sweet revenge if the $10M “compensation” went straight from Omar Khadr’s pockets to Sgt. Speer’s widow.
Tarek Fatah, a founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress and columnist at the Toronto Sun, is a Robert J. and Abby B. Levine Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
