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National Affairs by Claire Hoy — Rewarding terrorist at widow’s expense

July 18, 2017   ·   0 Comments

You may recall an old tea commercial where the plaintive catch phrase had an English tea connoisseur lamenting, “Only in Canada, you say? Pity.”
Well, that same phrase could aptly be applied to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s appalling decision to write a $10.5 million cheque to convicted terrorist Omar Khadr.
It is extremely unlikely that any other country in the world would reward a man who left his country and joined a terrorist group fighting against it, actually video-taped converting land mines into improvised explosive devices to be used against NATO forces in Afghanistan — which included Canadian forces — and at one point pleading guilty to tossing a grenade which killed U.S. Army Sergeant Christopher Speer.
In a move that makes Donald Trump look classy by comparison, Trudeau’s government — waiting until Trudeau himself was out of the country — quickly and secretly sealed the deal in order to stop an effort by the widow of Speer to freeze any payment to Khadr pending their attempt to have our courts enforce a wrongful death suit against him.
So much for Liberal concerns about widows and children. Better to pay off a man who was trying to kill our guys than accommodate the widow of one of his victims.
To compound their sleeze, the Liberals have claimed — and much of the mainline media have sadly echoed it — that the 2010 Supreme Court rulings that Khadr’s rights were violated during his incarceration at Gitmo meant they had no choice but to compensate him.
This is a bald-faced lie. The Court made no mention whatsoever of compensation. None.
The court did indeed suggest that Khadr should have been repatriated to Canada to serve the rest of his term for his crimes — some of which, by the way, he later recanted, claiming to have been trying to avoid further torture, a plea of innocence widely accepted by his legion of apologists.
Last week, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale — apparently oblivious to the irony of his cabinet title in rewarding a convicted terrorist — tried to blame Stephen Harper’s former Tory administration.
In fact, Liberal Jean Chrétien was prime minister when Khadr — who was wounded in battle and saved by the American fighters — was taken prisoner and sent to Cuba.
Goodale is quoted as saying, “Despite the Supreme Court of Canada, the Harper government refused to repatriate Mr. Khadr or otherwise resolve the matter. They could have but they didn’t.”
This too is a lie. Harper, albeit reluctantly, did indeed patriate Khadr, a fact that current Tory Leader Andrew Scheer correctly points out met the court’s requirements. “That’s where this story should have ended,” he said. Absolutely.
Much has been made of the fact that Khadr — the spawn of a dedicated terrorist family — was 15 years old at the time of the firefight. His supporters claim that as a “child soldier,” he was due special privileges not available to others.
This would be true of course if Khadr had met the technical UN definition of a “child soldier.” But once again, the fact are at odds with the constant claims. He was not a member of a recognized uniformed fighting force at the time and therefore does not qualify. Nor was he dragged kicking and screaming by the bad guys and forced to try to kill NATO troops. He went there on his own and, even if you accept his revised version of events, there’s no changing the video showing him happily making bombs designed to kill our guys.
Perhaps the most distasteful part of this whole episode was it was done in secret and in undue haste in order to stop a widow from collecting compensation for the death of her husband.
You’d think even politicians would cringe at the notion of rushing to judgment in order to do a widow out of compensation. But there you are. These Liberals apparently see no shame in giving money to a convicted terrorist and at the same time making it almost impossible for the widow and her lawyers to enforce a U.S. civil court ruling in their favor.
The good news is that while the Liberals and most of the mainstream media —although not the National Post — are buying into the false rationale offered by the Liberals, it seems that the general public is genuinely outraged over the fact that they’re paying for a man who was fighting against us to become rich at their expense.
Only in Canada. And only under the Trudeau Liberals.

         

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