POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
"The integrity of the Canadian judicial system would be better served by extraditing Mr. Khadr to face charges in the U.S."
A genuinely morally obtuse statement, that.
There is a long history of men going abroad to fight for causes in which they believed. And there is a long history of men going abroad as paid mercenaries.
Men went by the thousands to fight in the Spanish Civil War. They went in the thousands to fight in parts of Africa during the 1960s. Some went to South Africa as mercenaries during Apartheid.
Indeed, Jewish Canadians and Americans have gone to Israel to fight in that country's many wars of aggression and participate in its long occupation and abuse.
In all these cases, and in many more over time, we do not afterwards illegally arrest, imprison, and torture the people involved.
The only genuine difference here is the highly questionable use of the word "terrorist," a witches' brew of a word which truly defines nothing.
If you claim “terrorists” are evil people who kill innocent civilians for their cause, then what in God’s name are the United States and Israel? Decades of bloodshed, most of it civilians. Only last week the U.S. bombed and killed 54 civilians in Afghanistan. And we just celebrated the anniversary of Hiroshima – a non-military target in which only civilians died - an absolute black spot on America’s soul.
And we must never forget America’s glorious record of killing 3 million people in Vietnam, most of them civilians, by the most horrifying methods, and the legacy of an earth soaked in poisonous Agent Orange – a true holocaust by any definition of the word.
And then a million victims in Iraq and at least two million refugees created.
Of course, those horrors are not all. The U.S. is far and away the world’s biggest procurer of arms, supplied to everyone from dictators to murderous juntas all over the world for decades.
And the Globe frets about a judge’s correct and lawful treatment of Abdullah Khadr, a mere suspect at arms procurement who had been terribly treated owing to U.S. blood money paid out?
The editorial writer here needs, as they say today, to get a life.
And thank God for fair and decent judges.
