Da brief is da brief
By Mark Steyn
If you’re tired of all those sneers about Canadians being a bunch of wussies who like to sit out the great conflicts of the age, the Khadr family provide bracing evidence that it’s not so. Indeed, the Khadr cadre is Canada’s most vigorous contribution to the war on terror. True, they’re on the side of the terrorists, but that’s one of the great benefits of multiculturalism – celebrating your distinctive cultural identity ensures that, even as our official armed forces rust away, Canada’s likely to be represented somewhere among the warring parties. And say what you will about the Khadrs but at least they’re getting our name out around the world: in the tribal lands of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier, the family patriarch, Ahmed Said Khadr, is known simply as “al Kanadi” – the Canadian.
As it happens, I wrote about Mr Khadr ten months ago, when I noted that he is “believed to be the highest-ranking Canadian citizen in al-Qaeda (at least until the late Osama’s Canadian passport is found in the ruins of one of those caves).” He's now back in the news because he and one of his offspring (Canadian born and bred) were thought to have been killed in a run-in with Pakistani forces in Waziristan the other day. It now seems that's not the case and the Canadian corps escaped to fight another day.
Three of Mr Khadr’s four sons are known to be al-Qaeda members. One is with him on the run. Two are being held at Guantanamo. In The Boston Globe this year, Colin Nickerson told how the youngest, Omar (born in Scarborough, Ontario in 1986), fell into American hands at the end of a bloody battle in the Afghan village of Ayub Kheyl:
Sergeant 1st Class Christopher J. Speer - a Special Forces medic who days earlier had risked his life to retrieve two injured Afghan children from a minefield - walked into the compound, seeking wounded. Suddenly a skinny figure rose from the rubble with a pistol in one hand and a grenade in the other. Omar Khadr, howling defiance, pitched the grenade.
The blast felled Speer, who would die of his wounds on Aug. 7. Omar took two bullets to the chest. He begged to be killed. ‘Shoot me,’ he screamed, according to Morris, but was instead saved from bleeding to death.
A couple of things stand out about all this. I don’t mean the usual excuses from “moderate Muslims”: “Ahmed Khadr made his boys into his own image - a fanatic driven by hate for the West and wrong ideas of Islam,” said a Muslim cleric in Ontario. But – and you knew there was a “but” coming - “But if we blame the father, we must also be blaming the Americans, who have defiled the holy places with their tanks and smashed Afghanistan with their bombs.” Whatever, mullah dude.
But forget him and ponder instead the way Canada’s Foreign Ministry has been tireless in its efforts to save young Omar from the Yank torture camp in Gitmo, in striking contrast to their insouciance over Zahra Kazemi and Bill Sampson vis a vis the Iranians and Saudis. Even if the Government has an instinctively greater concern for prisoners of the Bush terror than of Middle Eastern despots, you’d have thought that in this case even the Liberals would be wary of going to bat for the Khadrs one mo’ time. The only reason Khadr pere is on the loose and doing such a sterling job with al-Qaeda is that in 1996 M Chretien got him sprung from the slammer in Pakistan.
Mr Khadr had been arrested by the Pakistanis in connection with an embassy bombing that killed 17 people. Outraged at the detention of a Canadian “aid worker”, the Prime Minister personally intervened with the government in Islamabad, and Mr Khadr resumed his, er, “aid work”, culminating in the unfortunate events at the World Trade Center.
Understandably perhaps, M Chretien no longer regards his triumphant freeing of al Kanadi as a central part of his legacy. He now says he had “not been fully briefed” about Khadr before raising the matter with Benazir Bhutto. That sounds about right: “Waal, you know, da brief is da brief and when you get da good brief dat da brief. So I hear da Canadian been arrested and he one o’ da ethnic type dat all vote Liberal nice an’ multicultural, so, natural, he mus’ be da innocent…”
But who exactly did brief M Chretien and talk him into signing up Canada as guarantor of al Kanadi? Well, it was mostly Canadian Islamic groups and, celebrating his diversity, the Prime Minister took them at their word.
The other thing that stands out is the lack of interest by the Canadian press about the Khadrs’ terrorist activities. This is in marked contrast to the coverage old Pop Khadr got back when he was just an “aid worker”. “PM Plans To Raise Case of Aid Worker” (Canadian Press). “Caught In A Muddle: An Arrested Aid Worker Appeals For Chretien’s Help” (Maclean’s). And once he was out of his “muddle” The Toronto Star’s Rosemary Spiers hailed the Prime Minister’s intercession as evidence of a newfound Chretien commitment to human rights.
But now that Mr Khadr is no longer a quaint multicultural “aid worker” the Canadian media are curiously incurious about him. These days, you have to look south of the border to find out much about him. For example, two weeks ago Richard A Clark testified in Washington before the Senate Banking Committee:
Human Concern International (HCI) reportedly received at least $250,000 in funding from the Canadian government. The Pakistan office of HCI was headed by Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader and al Qida founder Ahmed Said Khadr. Khadr has been described by Canadian intelligence services as a close associate of Usama bin Laden and senior al Qida money man. Khadr and HCI convinced Canadian government funding agencies to sponsor "charitable projects" for "Afghan refugees" when in fact the funds were used to provide financial and operational support to Jihad forces.
I know 250,000 bucks would be chump change for the Privacy Commissioner or at the Federal Gun Registry. But, unlike the Canadian government, al-Qaeda knows how to make a quarter of a million go a long way. And, by way of comparison, when it was revealed that the Queen’s ceremonial dropping of the Golden Jubilee puck in Vancouver had cost taxpayers a hundred grand, it was a story of such outrageous fiscal irresponsibility that Canadian dailies from coast to coast put it on Page One. Happily for Mr Khadr and his network, the funding of Islamic terrorism by Canadian taxpayers doesn’t have that kind of hold-the-front-page “sexiness” (as the BBC would say).
How many cadres of Khadrs are there in
Canada? Probably very few, in the sense of whole families willing to spend
months in crappy camps in the Hindu Kush learning to kill infidels. But how many
people are there in the west prepared to provide financial backing and
employment cover and a support network to terrorists? Two years after September
11th, that’s still unknown. What we do know, though, is that, while Britain,
America, Australia, France and Germany have all produced their share of western
jihadi, Ahmed Said Khadr remains the only one fortunate enough to have a G7 head
of government as his personal sponsor.
STEYNONLINE November 7th
2003