Ezra Levant - The Enemy Within: Terror, Lies, and the Whitewashing of Omar Khadr

ALSO BY EZRA LEVANT

Shakedown: How Our Government Is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights

Ethical Oil: The Case for Canadas Oil Sands

COPYRIGHT 2011 BY EZRA LEVANT

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Levant, Ezra, 1972
The enemy within : terror, lies, and the whitewashing of Omar Khadr / Ezra Levant.

eISBN: 978-0-7710-4621-6

1. Khadr, Omar, 1986. 2. Political prisonersCubaGuantnamo Bay Naval BaseBiography. 3. Political prisonersLegal status, laws, etc. United States. 4. CanadiansLegal status, laws, etc.United States. 5. CanadaPolitics and government2006-. 6. War on Terrorism, 2001-2009. I. Title.

HV9468.K53L48 2011 341.650973 C2011-906029-9

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

All details contained in this book are current at the time of printing, September 2011.

Published simultaneously in the United States of America by McClelland & Stewart Ltd., P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011936582

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v3.1

To the memory of Sgt. Christopher Speer

Omar Khadr stated in an interview with U.S. officials that a Jihad is occurring in Afghanistan and if non-believers enter a Muslim country then every Muslim in the world should fight the non-believers.

Confession of Omar Ahmed Khadr, October 13, 2010

M illions of Canadians know who Omar Khadr is. Hes that handsome schoolboy with the peach fuzz and the black polo shirt weve seen innocently looking back at us from our morning paper for nearly a decade now. He seems so harmless. So young. So Canadian.

And that is what the morning papers, and the nightly news, and the left-wing websites, and Khadrs lawyers, political opportunists, and his family wanted you to see.

That famous photo, which appears to have come from his school yearbook, has been at the forefront of the Omar Khadr propaganda effort. It features large on the front cover of Guantanamos Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr, a book whose very title frames the moist biography by Khadrs most ardent spin doctor, Michelle Shephard, a Toronto Star correspondent, who admits in the opening pages that far from being objective about the case even though she was the Stars reporter covering the Khadr case since 2003 she considers Khadr a victim of the injustice of the U.S. government that arrested and tried him for murdering an army medic, a victim of retribution. How adorable. How pitiful.

Seriously: that photograph, showing Khadr years younger than he really was when he joined al Qaeda, began building bombs, and then killed U.S. army medic Christopher Speer, was given to journalists like Shephard, and every other news outlet in the country, by Maha Khadr, his vile, hateful, terrorist-supporting mother. And they all accepted it and they all reprinted it, over and over again, deliberately passing over the far more recent and far less innocent-looking photographs.

Theres the photo of Khadr posing next to an AK-47 assault rifle, dressed in the traditional kameez tunic and kufi hat preferred by Afghanistans al Qaeda fighters. Theres another one in which Omar is building bombs improvised explosive devices ( IEDS ) the same bombs that have killed nearly one hundred Canadian soldiers and Calgary Herald reporter Michelle Lang.

Those photos somehow never make it into the press coverage. Strangely, no matter what shocking and terrible facts have emerged over the years about Omar Khadrs commitment to terrorism, his deep dedication to killing Christians and Jews, and his passion for murder, editors across Canada have made the decision, time and time again, to run the photo of him in which he looks like an average Toronto pre-teen, the one handed to them directly from his mom. Some journalism.

From almost the moment Khadr was captured, Canadas liberal journalists have worked overtime to spin his story into something entirely detached from reality. No doubt it began as part of a media campaign to discredit the U.S. president at the time, George W. Bush, and the allied War on Terror, a journalistic instinct so visceral and overpowering that it resulted in the editor of the United Kingdoms Daily Mirror Piers Morgan being fired after printing fake photographs of allied soldiers supposedly abusing Muslim inmates. To the end, Morgan (now a primetime talk-show host on CNN , proving that crimes of leftist bias do pay in journalism) defended his fraud, insisting that the photos were sufficiently valid since he was sure soldiers were abusing Muslims somewhere.

The hatred that journalists have for Americas and Canadas War on Terror, coupled with their insecure need to seem progressive and morally nuanced and, thus, sympathetic to Islamist terrorists, especially Omar Khadr, is what coloured their coverage of his imprisonment and trial as well. Every allegation of torture or abuse, no matter how baseless, was reported as if it had grounds; every threadbare claim by his family and lawyers about his innocence was given maximum play, while every solid piece of evidence proving the depths of Khadrs depravity and the convictions of his terrorism was buried thats if it got reported at all. As youll see in this book, there are scores of details about what Omar Khadr was really all about that never made it into the media.

This book will reveal the actual untold story of Omar Khadr untold because it was so wantonly ignored by journalists across Canada. It will show you, with proof not accusations, allegations, sob stories, or fabrications that Khadr is anything but the immature, exploited little wayward lamb that his cheerleaders and propagandists have tried to portray him as. And it will show you why those corrupted portrayals have been every bit as dangerous as Newsweeks fake Koran story, ensuring that Khadr was given a sweetheart deal so he could return to Canada even more radicalized than he was when he made the very conscious and deliberate decision to commit himself to jihad, to fight a holy war on the infidels. Khadrs own defence lawyers acknowledge that their client has yet to be de-radicalized; he will return to Canada, after serving just a year of his sentence in Gitmo, as devoted to his bastardized, bloodthirsty interpretation of Islam as ever.

And even Omar Khadr himself admits things that the media wont. Forget the farrago of nonsense his lawyers have spread, with the medias eager complicity, about abuse at Guantanamo: Khadr has admitted that hes been treated gently by his American guards and interrogators, and evidence shows that far from being abused, he was actually coddled there. He confessed that he trained as an elite terrorist, and his study of poisons and political assassinations were clearly part of his plan to become a high-ranking international terrorist. He acknowledged that he supported and joined the worldwide terror campaign of al Qaeda, and that he did so on his own, not because his father wanted him to. Khadr admitted to leaping at the chance to kill Americans when it was offered to him, even when he could have just as easily opted out, and boasted that the proudest moments of his life were when he was building explosives to murder NATO soldiers. And he admitted that he was glad he got to kill an American and that, whenever he feels a bit gloomy, he cheers himself up by reminiscing about the joy he feels about that murder.