Romancing the Jihadi: A Selection of Bollocks From "Omar Khadr, Oh Canada"

No I didn't buy it. I got it from the library.

Editor Janice Williamson, a University of Alberta professor, writes in her intro:

The cover of this anthology pictures a sharp dialogue - a twinned trajectory investigating Omar Khadr's experience and the Canadian world to which he expects to be realeased. We have gazed at images of Omar in photographic portraits and court drawings, but the screen-captured shots of his Guantanamo interrogation in 2003 provide an especially disturbing trace of the story - a diptypch that displays the prisoner's gestures of despair in a freeze-framed record of traumatic breakdown.

Omar Khadr's critics look at this picture and see a man justifiably treated. Neither an innocent nor a victim, his is for them "the enemy" whose punishment cleanses us all. But others see Omar Khadr as a man - at first a boy - whose last decade has been barely a life. Canadian citizen and child soldier, Omar Khadr speaks back to many of us in the troubling echo of our national anthem's opening words. In the title of this collection, the phrase "Oh Canada" is a direct addres that asks us to reflect on what ha been done in our name during the era of Omar Khadr, not only to the person but to our country. "To what world am I being released"? Omar asked in 2010 - and, we might add, to what country?

 Yeah, Omar is much too good for the likes of us, living as we do in a degraded country that would permit such horrors to be wrought on one of our own. And in "his" era, yet.

In an essay called "Politics Over Principles," CAIR-CAN founder and Globe and Mail op-ed contributor Sheema Khan writes:

So, what are we to make of government complicity in a proce that is widely recognized as a travesty of justice? Is it simply a combination of racism and Islamophobia, as some sugget? The evidence indeed indicates that suspicion of the "other" has played a role in the suspension of civil liberties of Muslim and Arab men by Canadian security, intelligence, and political officials.

Actually, Sheema, I'd impute government complicity" to a fear of having our urban infrastructure blown up Allah's holy warriors in a prelude to their posthumous escapades with scads of virgins. But, hey, that's just me. Bleeding-heart activist Craig Kielburger, whose essay documents his close encounter with a nine-year-old Omar in Pakistan way back when, would blame it on Omar's rotten luck in having been born into his family. Craig reflects that

For years the Canadian government has been unwilling to risk his repatriation after his father's betrayal. His mother only worsened the sentiment by appearing to denounce Western democracy.

The twenty-four-year-old Omar we see in the news today bears little resemblane to the nervous nine-year-old I saw accepting Canada from Chretien' political aide. Instead he looks more like his father. It's unfair for any kids to have to live up to their parents. It's especially so if you're a Khadr.

The heart bleeds. Oh, not for Omar's crappy luck. For the widow and kids of his victim, American medic Christopher Speer, whose choices were also constrained, and whose lives were turned upside down, because through no fault of their own, they were born into their family. A family victimized by the deranged and hateful ethos of jihad.

And now a poetic interlude courtesy George Elliott Clark. In an Amiri Baraka-like ode to Omar's mistreatment and the white man's inherent racism, the poet draws a sickening, mind-boggling parallel between the American Speer and the famous Nazi one:

Gitmo is the X-ray Spandau,
and you, O.K. -
though you prefer dynamite to architecture -
are still posed as the kiddy Albert Speer
a stand-up stand-in for he once unkillable
Osama bin Hitler,
our ex-ally,
who loved to martyr all but himself....

Did you set our to whack us -
to behead us "alcoholics and adulterers,"
or try not to be exploded
or decapitated?
Answer yes, either way:
(Blame is sticky:
A Tar Baby.)...

Let's say,
honesty, they're false -
those reports (guns, grenades, guilt) ...

Yet, while our amigos were strafing your hideout,
Kid Omar
(and our witnesses swear you swore martyrdom),

Clearly, you misundestood facts.

Our job is to kayo
your type, okay?...

In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo--it sure ain't.

Monia Mazigh, wife of Maher Arar, writes in a brief essay, "From Congo to Guantanamo: Omar Khadr, the Invisible Child Soldier" that

the following sad fact has now been recorded by history: Omar Khadr is the first convicted child soldier since World War II. His convinction came at an end of a shameful military trial where not a single basic principle of transparency and justice was followed and where the torture and abuse he endured was simply brushed away.

It wasn't brushed away, Monia. It never happened. But maybe poor Omar will yet be able to parlay it into a huge payday, like your tortured-in-Syria hubby did.

Zeroing-in on the racialist aspect of the case, McGill prof Yasmin Jiwani asks

why Omar Khadr and not anyone else? Why a Muslim youth and not someone else? The matle of the "War on Terror" has cast a shadow of suspicion on all Muslim bodies, and Omar is no exception. His mediated representation and his continued confinement provide a window through which we can see how the very framing of different bodies as worthy or unworthy, victim or perpetrator, galvanizes both public sympathy and the state's response.

The state and the media often deploy discursive strategies of colour-blind racism where racism is disavowed. Instead, a "common-sense" belief that all are equal before the law and equal within society is promoted as the basis for a purported democracy. Within this social world of presumed equality, the "reasonable" person would not be caught in the kind of conditions in which Omar Khadr was apprehended.

Er, she does know he was "apprehended" because he killed an American medic, doesn't she? And that the reason a "reasonable" person would not be caught a la Omar is because we "reasonable" folks are not violent, murderous jihadis? Or is that far too simple an explanation for the Foucalt-infatuated/intellectually-inclined?

Finally (because I've slogged through this muck long enough, thanks very much), well-known hard lefty Rick Salutin writes in his essay "Omar Khadr as Canadian Icon":

Omar Khadr is a survivor. Survival is a primal Canadian therem, if you take Margaret Atwood's theory of Canadian literature seriously. He was tortured, broke under it, and survived. He told the military tribunal in Guantanamo that he'd fired his lawyer. When the tribunal presed him about this, he said,"If I wa in a formal courts, I wouldn't be doing this." Asked by a juded if he'd ever studied law, he said, "This is a military commission. You don't need to study the law." When the judge asked about his education for this task, he said: "Five years in the military commissions." He'd begun by reading a handwritten statement. He sounded even more articulate in the dialogue with the court on his feet than in the statement he read. The accounts are a little disjointed, and the parties seem to talk past each other, but Khadr gave as good as he got. It' as if something positive happened during the awful year of incarceration and he'd begu to take possession of his fate. That would make him a kind of survivor-plus, which is how we'd like to think of ourselves...

And calling Omar Khadr, hardened, unrepentant jihadi, a Candian icon makes Salutin a kind of poseur/useful idiot-plus.

As for dragging in that Margaret Atwood "survival" stuff when discussing a guy who is "Canadian" solely by virtue of his passport--that's about as nutty as it gets.