Readings: Globe and Mail Review of New Omar Khadr Books

The Globe and Mail has a review of two new books about the Omar Khadr case. Reviewer Terry Glavin isn't crazy about either of them, objecting to one from the Left and the other from the Right. About one, Glavin writes:

facts aren’t really the point of Omar Khadr, Oh Canada. The point is to allow Williamson, a professor of English and film studies at the University of Alberta, to bring together nearly three dozen poets, professors, lawyers, pundits and others to express the many ways they are appalled with and dismayed about the many undeniable injustices associated with Khadr’s confinement and trial, and to address the big questions they reckon the Khadr case raises. In this way, the anthology provides a useful service as a kind of historical and cultural artifact of the received wisdom in Canada in regard to the past decade’s American-led “war on terror,” and the way it calcified around Omar Khadr’s sad and confounding story. The book’s got everything from thoughtful analysis and reflection to the comical weirdness that is indelibly associated with postcolonial studies.

About the other, by Ezra Levant, he writes:

Levant is a flamboyant lawyer-activist, author and faintly clownish but maddeningly astute Sun News Network personality, and he ends up providing a similarly useful service to Williamson’s anthology. The Enemy Within provides a helpful one-stop-shopping deconstruction of Omar Khadr’s celebrity, and a compendium of arguments intended to relegitimize the “war on terror” and all else Williamson and her cohorts set out to unfavourably contextualize and deconstruct. But like Williamson and her crew, Levant does harm to his own arguments by getting his facts wrong. It is true that most of the Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan were victims of precisely the kind of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) Khadr was so skilled in manufacturing. But it’s not true that the first Canadian casualty fell victim to an IED “planted by a teenager.” The first Canadian casualties were the four soldiers killed and eight wounded on April 17, 2002, at Tarnak Farm, near Kandahar, when an American F-16 fighter pilot dropped a bomb on them by mistake.

In the end, he concludes:

It says something about the polarization over the “war on terror” that you could end up understanding less about its complexities after reading either of these books than you understood before you started. To get any useful sense of the facts and arguments involved, especially as they relate to the saga of Omar Khadr, you’d be better off reading both of these books, or neither.