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The following is excerpted from The Chronicle Herald review of Janice Williamson's Omar Khadr, Oh Canada.
Who is Omar Khadr? Why has he been incarcerated for a decade in American detention? What roles do racism and anti-Islamic sentiment play in his treatment? And why did the Canadian government allow him to be tortured and then imprisoned in a foreign country for so long?
Williamson’s book attempts to answer these very questions. The 30 or so written contributions document, analyze, interpret, and speculate upon Omar Khadr’s story and its lessons. We are treated to an ecclectic mix of commentaries, poetry, imaginative essays, and even a screenplay.
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The informative introductory essay by Williamson proves that the general editor has done her homework. It’s a valuable compendium effectively grounding the entire collection and it comes accompanied by a very useful timeline from the Khadr family’s arrival in Canada until the state of legal limbo in mid-February 2012.
George Elliott Clarke’s poetic verse, Re: The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, is a real eye-opener. Khadr’s firefight at Ayub Kheyl is likened to an “Afghan O.K. Corral” evoking images of Wyatt Earp in the American Wild West. Our current prime minister is described as both a “lawn-jockey” and a “Quisling” for acting at the behest of a “belligerent and repugnant” President George W. Bush.
Clarke makes it abundantly clear that he has little use for the war makers. “The true nature of disgrace is,” he writes, “U.S. — who dispatch flying squads, of death bringers … and shackling down babies, in wars we got no guts to declare, and then sobbing ‘Unfair’ when drones are downed or ‘heroes’ are crowned by lead fragments or flame.”
One of the most moving pieces, Romeo Dallaire’s How to Unmake a Child Soldier is a well-chosen excerpt from They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children, his 2010 best selling book. “The Khadr case,” Dallaire writes, “is a black mark on my own country’s reputation and standing in the fight for child rights and human rights as a whole.”
Several contributors seize the opportunity to address the Khadr affair by riding familiar hobby horses. Carleton University feminist historian Deborah Gorham is properly outraged by the appalling torture, but then proceeds to connect war with masculinity, rape, and misogyny. Toronto Star columnist Rick Salutin attempts, in a wild leap of imagination, to portray Omar Khadr as a “Canadian icon.”
The book’s most profound statement comes from Janice Williamson, citing an astute observation of philosopher Simone Weil. For years, in his lonely exile, Omar Kadhr has remained far too distant from the concerns of ordinary Canadians. Why is it that humans tend to look away when confronted by such plaintive cries for help? The answer, according to Weil, in a word: “Gravity.”
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