Sunday, November 29, 2009

The Oppressor, the Oppressed

Canada's first convicted Islamic terrorist, Mohammad Momin Khawaja, sentenced by an Ontario judge to a 10½ year stay at a maximum prison under the Anti-terrorism Act for financing and facilitating terrorism on the basis of evidence that clearly demonstrated his commitment to violent jihad, has his defenders. Unsurprisingly, they are the members of his family.

After his arrest in March 2004, Mr. Khawaja spent five years in secure custody awaiting trial and sentencing. While incarcerated, he studied the Holy Koran, taught Islam to others in the same prison - it has been assured by those who have such information that he taught a fanatical brand of Islam - and doing physical work-outs to keep himself in physical shape. He has also enrolled in continuing education, sharpening his mind as well.

Neither wasting away, wasting his time entirely, nor wasting opportunities to speak for the Islam of jihad. Yet his father, Mahboob Khawaja, claims his son to have been badly misunderstood, and erroneously charged by a vengeance-seeking government, wreaking terror on Muslims in general and his innocent son in particular. The family head bemoans his family's social, emotional and financial state of collapse.

All due to a vindictive and oppressive government practising a "racist policy adventure aimed exclusively at terrorizing the Muslim people and nobody else." One imagines his view not to be widely held among Ottawa's large Muslim demographic, since he also makes mention of the distance between his family and other members of the Muslim community since the sensational revelations at his son's trial.

The Government of Canada, he claims bitterly, has decided to inflict terror on Muslims. Due to the unfortunate "ignorance, misinformation and incompetence on the part of the intelligence police apparatus". All the evidence gained in the initial search of the Khawaja household revealing the eldest son's dedication to radical Islam and violent jihad were simply coincidental to a curious young man's innocent playing with fire.

The Khawaja family is "law-abiding", and always has been. Involved with their local mosque, decent members of Canadian society, whose 'immature' son simply took it upon himself to explore his parents' culture and traditions a little too deeply, succumbing to the Internet glamour of active intervention against the kuffars slaughtering innocent Taliban and members of al-Qaeda. Obviously making light of the decent values imbibed at home.

In his own emailed words to a fellow jihadi, he described Osama Bin Laden as being "...like the most beloved person to me in the whole world, after Allah". However, his indulgent father, knowing how malleable and romantic young men are, explains that his naive son was simply confused, vulnerable to exploitation by British conspirators who drew him into a plot he knew no details of.

"Momin is friendly, disciplined, honest and the embodiment of superb creative thinking, morally strong ... and dedicated to do good to society." Quite the fond description of a man who plotted to help destroy countless lives through his creative tinkering with cellphones in a disciplined determination to build a bomb detonator, among his other friendly and honest exploits.

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