My Dinner with Omar

Craig Kielburger recalls a real-life meeting with the young Khadr, and Dan Gardner arranges a fictional tête-a-tête with 'the American Taliban.'

There has been a lot written about Omar Khadr recently following news that he’s expected to plead guilty to war crimes and spend seven years in a Canadian jail. Opinions abound as to whether this is good or bad, but all the speculation has spawned a pair of the most original opinion pieces we’ve seen in recent months.

The National Post’s Dan Gardner, perhaps pining for creative writing class, penned a fictional letter of introduction on Khadr’s behalf to John Walker Lindh, the ‘American Taliban.’ “Omar Khadr, meet John Walker Lindh. John, Omar,” he writes. Lindh and Khadr were both allegedly abused while in custody, but sympathy in North America is pretty low for both of them because they were “on the wrong side.” “If Russians had treated you and John the way Americans did, and if you and John had been involved with a terrorist group people had never heard of, everyone would agree that you had been horribly abused.” But in a world of Us vs. Them, Gardner correctly tells Omar he has been labeled Them, and “lots of Canadians would be happy if you never left prison.”

In the Toronto Star, Free the Children founder Craig Kielburger recalls an incredible moment when, at the age of 13, he met Khadr at a meeting in Pakistan with then-prime minister Jean Chrétien. Khadr, 9 at the time, was there with his mother, who was trying to win the release of Omar’s father after he was imprisoned on terror charges. Many have defended Khadr on the grounds that he was a child at the time of his alleged crimes and didn’t know the difference between right and wrong. But at the same age Khadr was when he turned jihadi, Kielburger knew enough about right and wrong to found a charity to help oppressed children. Despite this contradiction, Kielburger defends Khadr because while his own parents spent their time volunteering, Khadr’s father spent his blowing things up. “(T)he two of us are products our environment,” Kielburger writes. “Omar is just being punished for his.”