Un-Canadian by Graeme Truelove

Author:Graeme Truelove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Islamophobia, Canada, Muslims, Social conditions, Islam, Ethnic relations, Race relations, politics
ISBN: 9780889713635
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Published: 2019-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

The Head of the Spear: How Everything Went Wrong for Omar Khadr

This book has charted incidents of harsh or questionable treatment of Muslims by the media, the government and the Canadian public at large. It has analyzed how Muslims in Canada have been victims of an unfair application of the law, and how at times they have been failed by the rule of law itself. While there are many examples, there is one particularly famous case involving both Liberal and Conservative governments in which each of these issues intersects. It is the story of Omar Khadr, the Canadian Muslim notorious for being the last Western citizen held in the us military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Competing political activists have portrayed him as a demonic poster child for the evils of extremism, or a tragic symbol of the injustices of the War on Terrorism.

Omar Khadr was born on September 19, 1986 at Centenary Hospital in Toronto. Before Omar was born, his parents, Maha Elsamnah and Ahmed Khadr, had moved their growing family several times between Canada and the east. Before the end of the fall, with newborn Omar in tow, the family moved back to Peshawar, Pakistan, where Ahmed worked with a relief organization. Around this time Ahmed befriended Ayman al-Zawahiri, the man who would one day succeed Osama bin Laden as leader of al-Qaeda. The family bounced back and forth between Canada and Pakistan throughout Omar’s childhood. “Omar, like all the Khadr children, was comfortable in both worlds,” wrote Michelle Shepherd in the superb Guantanamo’s Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr.

In 1992, Ahmed visited a refugee camp in Afghanistan and stepped on a land mine. Badly injured, he returned to Canada and spent a month at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. “People who knew the father say he was committed to creating a puritanical Islamic state in Afghanistan. And when a landmine crippled his arm and leg in the early nineties, he attempted to turn his sons into instruments of his unfulfilled dream,” suggested the cbc’s Nazim Baksh. In 1994, he sent Omar’s older, pre-teen brothers to an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, entwining his family’s destiny with that of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

On November 19, 1995, terrorists set off a bomb at the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. Three separate extremist groups claimed responsibility. Ahmed was suspected of involvement and arrested by Pakistani authorities. For weeks, he was held without charge and subjected to aggressive questioning and threats. In protest of his mistreatment, he began a hunger strike. Because Ahmed was a Canadian citizen, media took notice and sympathetic coverage appeared on the front pages of Canadian newspapers. When Prime Minister Jean Chrétien passed through Pakistan on a trade mission, he met with Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and raised Ahmed’s case, demanding her word that Ahmed would get a fair trial. Privately, some Canadian security officials felt that Chrétien had been duped into sticking up for a Canadian they saw as unworthy of his rights. They called it the “Khadr effect.

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