If you’ll forgive my self-indulgence, I’ve been thinking a lot about Omar Khadr as both a human being and a political symbol.
As a human being, Omar has suffered terribly. At a level of basic decency, I simply can’t understand how some folks support, even relish, that suffering. (Well, yes I can: it’s called racism and/or the internalization of colonialist values.) Torturing a 15-year-old strikes me as an especially depraved version of imperialist depravity.
A few observations:
–quit calling the man a “convicted war criminal.” He was tortured at Gitmo into a confession. The story he told in his confession has proved to be apocryphal.
–any nation-state that imprisons and tortures teenagers forfeits the right to lecture anybody else about anything else.
–Omar didn’t firebomb the Pentagon. US and Canadian troops were in a foreign country they had invaded, one of many such incursions.
–the notion that only Muslim youth can be radicalized is a wonderful example of the typical self-deifying nonsense of the metropole. What can we call societies that torture children, invade multiple geographies, unleash police on citizens, bomb civilians with remote-control devices, and so easily martyr nincompoops like Pamela Geller if not radicalized into profound violence?
–Canadians are all over social media threatening to kill Omar. It seems that white Christians can’t handle political cartoons, particularly those of their own making.
–if any Canadian deserves to be in prison, that person is Stephen Harper, not Omar Khadr.
Finally: it’s not just Omar. There are child prisoners all over the world. For instance, Canada and the US’s darling client, Israel, imprisons 500-700 Palestinian children each year. Many of these children are kidnapped from their beds in the middle of the night. Their parents have no idea where they’re held. They have no access to lawyers. Sometimes they are never charged with crimes.
This story, sadly, doesn’t end with Omar’s release. We need to inhabit a system that doesn’t conceptualize torture and imprisonment as repositories of justice. Our current system doesn’t merely accommodate the prison and the harm it inflicts on human minds and bodies; it relies on them. There are many reasons for this tragic reliance, but none of them has a damn thing to do with Omar Khadr.