Canada PM is alone among Western leaders in holding to the post-9/11 view that separates the world between good and evil. But his black-and-white moral universe isn't alien to Canada. In fact, it speaks to something dark in the national soul Stephen Harper is one of the last holdouts still fighting the war on terror. That dualistic concept of a global struggle between good and evil is now discredited across most of the world as overly simplistic. Even the phrase itself has gone out of use But not in Ottawa. To the prime minister and his government, the verities spelled out by former U.S. president George W. Bush still ring true: There is a primal battle raging, one that pits us against them.We are good; they are bad. We love freedom; they hate it. We are generous; they are devious, attempting to worm their way into our society in order to destroy us. How else to explain the Harper government's deliberately callous approach to Canadian citizens, like Suaad Hagi Mohamud, arrested in Kenya because officials there thought her lips didn't look right, or Abousfian Abdelrazik, stranded for six years in Sudan because Ottawa refused to renew a passport that had expired while he was incarcerated – and allegedly tortured – in prison there without charge? How else to explain Harper's obdurate refusal to at least ask the U.S. to repatriate Guantanamo Bay inmate and former child soldier Omar Khadr? Critics have charged that the Conservative government's approach in these cases betrays its racism. But that's not quite it. Harper shuns Khadr. Yet he has publicly, if unsuccessfully, pressured China to release Muslim-Canadian Huseyin Celil, now serving time in prison there on terror-related charges.In Harper's world, there is no contradiction here. Celil is worthy of support by simple virtue of the fact that he criticizes Communist China, which by definition is part of "them."Mohamud, Abdelrazik and Khadr, however, do not belong to Harper's us. They are the other: Toronto-born Khadr, because at the age of 15, he was caught up fighting in the Afghan war on the Taliban's side; Sudanese-born Abdelrazik because the U.S. claims, without providing proof, that he supports terrorism; Somali-born Mohamud because ... well, just because.Other Western political leaders are disavowing this Manichean view of the world. British government officials no longer use the phrase "war on terror." In the U.S., Bush's successor, Barack Obama, is attempting to rebuild America's damaged relationship with the Islamic world.Here in Canada, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has publicly recanted his earlier support for Bush's invasion of Iraq. As well, the former essayist no longer muses on the virtues of "coercive interrogation" techniques (which the United Nations and others call torture).
Indeed, anyone listening to the outrage of the Liberals as they attack Harper's human rights record might forget that it was their government that first concluded that Abdelrazik should be left moldering in Sudan and Khadr in Guantanamo.The then Liberal government even downplayed Khadr's age when he was imprisoned without trial seven years ago, lest the public be reminded that, as a child soldier, he was eligible for special consideration by his U.S. captors.It was also on the Liberal watch that an overly zealous RCMP anti-terror unit contributed to the jailing and torture in Syria of Canadian Maher Arar. As a judical inquiry eventually found, Canadian officials working for that same Liberal government were complicit in the torture abroad of three other Canadians: Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El-Maati and Muayyed Nureddin.But with the public increasingly skeptical about the war on terror, the notoriously slippery Liberals are moving with the times. So too Obama, who plans to appease the new mood by excoriating low-level U.S. interrogators for behaving inappropriately while he quietly continues the odious practice – first begun by Bill Clinton – of shipping terror suspects abroad to be tortured...more..http://www.thestar.com/article/687556
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