Time Immortal

I’m telling you, O Reader: mandatory physical sterilization (e.g. penis removal) would be a great deterrent.

An intelligent, well-travelled senior living in a wealthy neighbourhood was a serial rapist’s latest target, cops say.

Det. Melanie Grace said an early morning rape Saturday was likely committed by the same man who assaulted three women in the Garneau area earlier this year.

“We do believe it is possibly the same suspect,” Grace told reporters yesterday. “It may not be location that is connecting these sexual assaults.

“The concern is that it’s happened again.”

It happened to a 68-year-old woman living alone in a home near 122 Street and 40 Avenue, an upscale area called Aspen Gardens.

I’ve got family that doesn’t live too far from there, now that I think about it.

I don’t pretend to understand why people rape, nor do I pretend as though I care to understand; it is a disgusting act, and I don’t think Canada punishes people for it to any sort of sufficient degree. I do indeed believe in forgiveness, of course, but I also believe that some actions have legitimate temporal consequences, and I think that rape is definitely in that category.

My wife often remarks that it would be a fitting punishment to render such criminals unable to assault others in the same way again via physical removal of whatever appendages were their preferred “weapon” in the attacks they’ve perpetrated. I can’t say I disagree.

I’ll take “You’re a sick, sick man who should be locked up indefinitely” for $400, please, Bob.

Raping a young boy who disclosed the abuse while reading the Biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorra with his father has landed a Calgary man a seven-year prison sentence.

Provincial court Judge Sandy Hamilton yesterday said the repeat assaults inflicted on the boy by Khatab Ismail has left the victim permanently psychologically scarred.

“The victim presented as a very troubled young boy,” Hamilton said, noting he now lives in a group home and has twice attempted suicide.

There’s no way to adequately communicate how damaging — physically and psychologically — this sort of crime is. I know nothing of Mr. Ismail, not even where he is from in the world. Perhaps he’s from one of those cultures where bacha-bazi is commonplace and the norm. Even if so, over here, child molestation and rape is just plain wrong.

And we don’t punish it severely enough in Canada.

Of course, we don’t really punish much of anything severely enough. But really…seven years for multiple acts of rape? That’s it? This man will live to see the light of day again, without bars as an impediment to the view? And he still has his penis attached to his body?

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

Shaukat Khawja is not the only person posting content at the IslamUnity website; on the site’s main forum, a poster named Hamed has alerted the forumites to the existence of a Christian terrorist.

And admittedly, it’s a heinous crime — a freelance pastor stands accused of having murdered his wife. Technically, it’s not an act of terror (according to the accepted definition of the term), but it is a wretched and terrible crime all the same, and I hope they throw the book at the guy; his actions do not serve or give glory to Christ.

The forum post was made, according to its timestamp, at 3:24 AM on July 31st, 2008. Okay, so Hamed was up early…or late, as the case may be.

In the time since that forum posting was made, three people have died in acts of terror perpetrated by Muslims — a policeman and a civilian were shot dead in Somalia, and a schoolteacher was gunned down in Thailand.

The freelance pastor, Anthony Hopkins (no relation to the actor), was arrested on July 29th or 30th. In the time since police took him into custody, between as many as 11 people were killed (and another 4 injured) by acts of terror perpetrated by Muslims in five different countries around the world.

In the news article about Hopkins’ arrest, it is mentioned that nobody had seen or heard from his wife in over three years. Let’s call it…summer of 2005, then. Since that time…well…here’s the list for 2007, here’s the list for 2006, and here’s the list for 2005. I don’t have time to add up the number of dead and wounded that attacks perpetrated in the name of Islam have racked up in that time frame…but it numbers in the thousands.

Does the Reader suppose that even one such attack — even one of the two most recent recorded Islamic attacks, both of which killed at least as many people (one) as did Mr. Hopkins — has been mentioned on IslamUnity and labeled as an act of terror?

Cue crickets chirping.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Frankly, I’m not surprised.

It’s still a bit early to tell, but it would appear that Jim Adkisson — charged with first-degree murder after a shooting at a Unitarian Universalist church that left two dead and several wounded — was something of an anti-religious bigot.

The man being questioned by police in a deadly church shooting was a “nice guy” who became upset when the subject of religion came up, according to his neighbors.

Jim Adkisson’s neighbors in a Knoxville suburb described him as quiet and helpful, but sensitive about certain topics.

“I was telling him about my daughter graduating from Bible college and I was a Christian and stuff, and he just automatically almost turned angry,” neighbor Karen Massey told WVLT-TV, a CNN affiliate.

“He was angry with his parents because they had made him go to church all his life,” she told the station.

“When the subject of Religion came up, it set off like a light in him or something I noticed,” Massey told WATE-TV, another CNN affiliate. “And at that point I thought I’d never bring up religion again.”

Adkisson, 58, is charged with first-degree murder after the shooting at a Unitarian church during a children’s play Sunday morning, officials said.

Oh, and yeah…he was a quiet loner and a “nice guy” (let’s leave aside the fact, I suppose, that nice people don’t typically shoot other people in cold blood). But it would appear that he harboured a deep-seated hatred of all things religious as well. One wonders if his manifesto, found in his car at the site of the attack, will read like an excerpt from God Is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens?

That seems to be the tactic at work here, at any rate.

EDMONTON - A law student representing one of the young men charged in connection with a violent group assault on an Edmonton soccer dad says the teens may take the case to the Alberta Human Rights Commission.

Gurpreet Gil says the parents of opposition team members made inappropriate comments to the players in the moments before alleged assault.

“There were some racist remarks,” Gill said outside court.

Of course, the allegation of Racism on the part of the victim totally justifies the fact that five people associated with an under-18 soccer team from Mill Woods swarmed and viciously beat Dean Smith, the father of one of the players on the LaPerle soccer team (which, by the way, the Mill Woods team defeated in a match). Indeed, the allegation of racism totally removes any culpability the five young men might have had in the beating of Mr. Smith, which required his jaw to be wired shut and has resulted in vision damage in one of his eyes!

I suppose it would be racist of me to observe that the only named attacker (the only one who is older than 18 years of age) has a vaguely…Arabic, or possibly Indian subcontinental, name?

This is a markedly better tactic than the insanity plea: if successful, the five attackers will probably be cleared on all charges. Meanwhile, Mr. Smith will be tarred and feathered as a racist hatemonger, and might even be made to pay damages to the youths who attacked him.

Justice, at last thou hast come!

I haven’t really been commenting much on Omar Khadr, mostly because until recently there wasn’t much to comment about. Khadr, as I understand it, comes from a Canada-based family that has been investigated numerous times for ties to Islamis terrorism. In fact, aren’t some other members of the Khadr family currently incarcerated for their connections to terrorism?

Be that as it may, Omar is a dutiful son of this family, and signed on some years ago with the Taliban in Afghanistan vis-a-vis his father, who had moved to Afghanistan in 1996 and who later (in the wake of the September 11th attacks, in fact) moved into the mountains of that country, where it is thought that he closely associated himself with Osama Bin Laden (to such a degree, in fact, that the bin Laden and Khadr children were playmates).

Omar received weapons training at some point, produced videos for the Taliban, and was even photographed handling explosives for them. He looks like a fresh-faced youth, but it would seem that at every turn he has chosen to align himself with Islamic terrorists.

Khadr was captured after a firefight between Taliban militants and American soldiers worked out decidedly in favour of the Americans. The battle was fairly intense, requiring air support, and the Americans had thought that all of the Taliban fighters had been killed. Khadr, however, had survived. Confilcting reports exist, but it appears that Khadr took one last opportunity to throw a grenade at approaching U.S. troops before being subdued, mortally wounding Sergeant Christopher James Speer.

Recently, footage of Omar Khadr being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba was released to the Canadian public. In it, two CSIS officers interview Khadr about his condition. He appears wounded in the video, and complains of his injuries. Information coming out of Guantanamo isn’t exactly the most reliable, but what evidence is available suggests that Khadr was tortured by U.S. interrogators at various points, using methods such as short shackling and stress positioning, as well as sleep deprivation and a few other methods.

Which, if true, is disgusting. Torture is a grave moral evil, regardless of how depraved the recipient thereof might also be. Yes, Omar Khadr seems to be neck-deep in terrorist connections, and he evidently has no small measure of blood on his hands as well. That doesn’t mean it’s right to torture him.

Now, a brief tangent. I like Matthew Good’s music, for the most part. When he wants to rock, he rocks, and then very well. And his subject matter, while often strange, tends to be a bit deeper and more thought-provoking than one might typically expect of alt-rock and post-grunge music.

That said, I don’t entirely agree with his stance on the Khadr issue:

Legally, Khadr should never have been taken to Guantanamo. International law dictates that he should have been classified a child soldier and treated as such. Instead he was shipped off to the world’s foremost black hole and has been a prisoner there ever since, subjected to God knows what. If FBI documents released this year are any indication, entirely unethical interrogation practices were certainly on the menu.

International law is actually not on the side of Omar Khadr in this matter. For the record, Khadr was 15 when the firefight in which he was captured took place. With that in mind, it should be noted that the UN convention on children’s rights stipulates that “state parties shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons who have not attained the age of 15 years do not take a direct part in hostilities.” Of course, there are two obvious problem with applying this principle to Khadr’s situation: first, the Taliban are not a “state party”, in that they do not represent a national government but are, rather, a terrorist organization attempting to violently overthrow the government of Afghanistan. The second, of course, is Khadr’s own age at the time of his capture.

There is an optional protocol to the aforementioned UN convention which stipulates that state parties “shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons below the age of 18 do not take a direct part in hostilities and that they are not compulsorily recruited into their armed forces.” Note that this does not explicitly prohibit people between the ages of 15 and 18 from voluntarily participating in hostilities. From what evidence we have available, Omar Khadr very gladly and freely participated in the cause of Islamic terrorism.

Moreover, as has been noted, the Taliban (and, by extension, al-Qaeda, which Khadr has also been associated with) are (again) not “state parties”. One could argue that this is a semantic objection, and that while the letter of the convention’s stipulations is perhaps left unsatisfied, the spirit thereof still applies. This, I think, is true. But even in that case, by the UN’s own definition a “child soldier” must be under the age of 15 years. Khadr did not meet this criteria at the time of his capture. So if one wants to appeal to UN conventions to decry Khadr’s situation, one is (sorry to say) out of luck.

Of course, the question can be raised as to whether a UN convention is really the foremost international legal authority in this matter. It might be better to look at the International Criminal Court’s statutes instead, since (unlike the UN), the ICC actually has power to prosecute “war criminals” to some degree.

With that in mind, the ICC’s Rome Statute stipulates that “conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years into the national armed forces or using them to participate actively in hostilities” is a war crime.

So here again, international law does not work out in Omar Khadr’s favour: at the time of his capture, he was (just) old enough to not be designated, under international law, as a child soldier.

Note that I’m neither agreeing with Khadr’s being incarcerated at Gitmo. Given that prisoners there are often tortured, I can’t really say that I support sending anyone there. However, I do dispute Matt Good’s appeal to international law on this matter; unfortunately, as regards young Mr. Khadr, the law is inapplicable here.

Of course, your average kill-em-all pundit thinks it all pathetic, that the video demonstrates that the CSIS agents that questioned Khadr displayed a semblance of compassion. But let’s remember one thing — they left him there. In fact, they, and the government of this country at the time, and currently, are just as complicit as those holding Khadr.

So what does that make us, exactly?

Well, it doesn’t say much about the moral fortutide of the Canadian government, admittedly. But then, neither does the fact that Henry Morgentaler is still apparently going to be receiving the Order of Canada. And unfortunately, Mr. Good is also over-simplifying matters somewhat in his statement here: it’s not as though the CSIS agents could have just escorted Mr. Khadr out of the prison at their leisure. Yes, he’s ostensibly a Canadian citizen, but he was arrested in the course of engaging in hostilities against American soldiers in Afghanistan. Under the same international law that Mr. Good erroneously appealed to earlier on, the U.S. does have a right to detain him in a facility of their choosing.

We can add to this observation the Chestertonian wisdom that to have a right is not at all the same thing as to be right in exercising it. Equally, though, Matt Good’s charge of Canadian “complicity” in the Khadr affair is off-base and incorrect; under the applicable laws, there’s actually not much the Canadian government can do. And now that Mr. Khadr is 21, the question also might be asked why anyone should feel that the Canadian government is obligated to do anything at all for an open supporter of Islamic terrorism whose own direct actions led to the death of a U.S. medic.

And in typically left-wing fashion, Mr. Good can’t resist implying that those with whom he disagrees are irrational, uncompassionate, and “back woods xenophobes”. Oh, and “Conservative mouthpieces” — leaving aside the fact that Mr. Good is himself something of a mouthpiece for Amnesty International, an organization that I (for one) no longer support because they now include abortion advocacy in their mandate.

Well, if you’re a Conservative mouthpiece from rural Saskatchewan that adorns their blog with the picture of a deal animal, it makes us noble allies in a xenophobic war against a religion of evil. If you’re a rational and compassionate human being that has the ability to view the complexities and personal history of Khadr’s situation, one that isn’t some back woods xenophobe and has grown up in a highly diverse multicultural area, it makes you sick to your stomach. If you’re a Canadian that believes that this nation is not the sort of nation that stands shoulder to shoulder with those that have been responsible for holding individuals for years only to discover that many of them are innocent (see the McClatchy reports from June), despite the fact that they’ve been denied their rights under the law and international conventions while, at the same time, those holding them profess to be globally instilling the virtues of the rule of law, then you have cause for serious concern. Because that is not what my grandfather and two of my great uncles fought to defend sixty some odd years ago, and that is certainly not the nation in which I want to die.

With respect to Mr. Good, I grew up in a fairly “diverse multicultural” environment, but this is not what makes me sick to my stomach regarding the issue of Mr. Khadr. Quite frankly, I don’t care what the colour of his skin is; I care that he chose to side with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and I care that he killed a U.S. medic with a grenade. What makes me sick to my stomach is the fact that he has been tortured, but I have no problem at all with the fact that he has been captured and incarcerated.

Were he Caucasian, I would say as much. Were he Catholic, I would say as much. Were he my own kin, I would say as much. In each case, I would say as much because I believe that people must accept the consequences of their actions, and I note that Omar Khadr’s documented actions were, at every turn, antithetical to the very principles that Mr. Good’s grandfather and two great uncles fought to defend.

I have traveled across this country almost seventy times, coast to coast, and seen more of it, and its people, than the majority of Canadians ever will. And I can honestly say, given my experiences, the acceptance, and even the participation, in such criminality is not what this country stands for.

If CSIS agents interviewed Khadr that means that our government has been complicit in condoning US detentions and all that they entail.

I agree that Canada should not be complicit in torture. But equally, I don’t think Canada should be complicit in releasing known terrorists back into the wild, so to speak. I don’t think it’s right that Omar Khadr has been tortured — that is, as I have said, a grave moral evil. But by saying that, I in no way mean to suggest that he should be released from custody.

If Canada stands for human rights, if Canada stands for freedom, and if Canada stands up for what is right, then Canada should work to ensure that known supporters and agents of terrorism are captured, tried, and incarcerated accordingly, with every bit as much vigour as she should work to oppose the use of torture against same.

In saying as much, I suppose that I do disagree, somewhat, with Small Dead Animals, the blog that Mr. Good is directing his ire against. Generally, on political matters, I agree with SDA to one degree or another, and it is one of my daily reads. But as far as I know, the operator of SDA, Kate, is not Catholic, so obviously I don’t agree with her sentiments that Omar Khadr “deserved to be dispatched then and there” (i.e. on the battlefield, by the surviving U.S. troops).

Count Roland writes in with a comment about this article, concerning one Chaudhry Rashid, who stands accused of the honour killing of his own daughter, Sandeela Kanwal.

Rashid demanded to be served a halal meal in prison, to which I remarked that some of the cooks I know, upon hearing of the man and his request, would go out of their way to fry his every meal in bacon grease.

Writer, from our legal heritage one is innocent until proven guilty. This man is only, as of yet, accused of the murder. Now, it may be very clear he did it, but he is not guilty, legally, until a judge or jury says so. As such, as a legally inocent man, he ought to get the same rights any other legally innocent but accused man gets. That may not include control over dietary options, but we ought to defend the presumption of innocence if we are to defend our classical liberties. Is not the abandonment of the legal presumption of innocence one of the bugaboos we rail against as it respects our kangaroo court HRCs?

The good Count has a point, but I would suggest that any (ahem) “guest of the state” — whether merely accused or formally convicted of a crime — is in no place to demand control over his or her dietary options. Presumption of innocence is paramount, but that by no means implies that the kitchens at the institutions at which such men as Rashid are incarcerated should necessarily cater to every obscure culinary demand that comes their way.

I’m a fan of being tough on crime, and I believe that the experience of incarceration — before, during, and (if it comes to that) after the trial — should be humane, but not pleasant. The government is obliged to feed each person in its charge, but that in no way implies that the cooks at the jailhouse are obligated to take requests.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!