BONOKOSKI: Kill them before they come home? Too un-Canadian
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As the front line war against ISIS appears to be nearing its end, a British cabinet minister knows exactly what should be done with Britons who joined the barbarism and now want to come home.
And that’s kill them before they set a foot back on British soil.
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“I’m afraid we have to be serious about the fact these people are a serious danger to us,” said Rory Stewart, a former diplomat and Britain’s minister of international development.
“Unfortunately, the only way of dealing with them, in almost every case, is to kill them.”
In fact, according to a report recently published in the Sunday Times, commandos within Britain’s elite Special Air Service (SAS) have been given a “kill list” of 200 British jihadists who hooked up with ISIS in Syria, and who are now on the run.
As Stewart put it to the BBC, “These are people who were executing people, who have held women and children hostage, who were torturing and murdering, and trying by violence to impose their will.
“Our response has to be, I’m afraid, to deal with it.”
Compare that with Justin Trudeau, who on the day he became leader of the Liberal Party, sat down for an interview with the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge, coincidentally at the time two home-grown terrorists in the U.S. killed three and injured hundreds by setting off pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon.
Asked for a response, Trudeau was at his progressive best.
“There is no question this happened because there is someone who feels completely excluded, and completely at war with innocents,” said Trudeau, pulling out a page from Sociology 101.
“And our approach has to be, where do these tensions come from?”
Add to this Trudeau’s statement when he later became prime minister that “a Canadian is a Canadian,” and that convicted terrorists, even if dual nationalists, will not have their Canadian citizenship revoked, and there is a huge chasm between Canada and Britain when it comes to homesick jihadists.
The Americans, meanwhile, also take a hard line.
Brett McGurk, one of the few Obama-era appointees retained by the Trump administration, was recently in Syria as the U.S.’s special envoy in the fight against ISIS.
“Our mission,” he said, “is to make sure any foreign fighter who is here, who joined ISIS from a foreign country and came into Syria, that they will die in Syria.”
Canada’s position? It is likely not one of wiping out the remaining ISIS recruits abroad with Canadian passports.
In fact, it is quite the opposite. Of the 130 guesstimated to have left Canada for Iraq and Syria, approximately 60 have already returned home, and are supposedly being “closely monitored.
At the peak of ISIS’s popularity with disenchanted youth, the Trudeau government’s response was to promise funding for a new Canadian Office of Community Outreach and Counter-Radicalization.
It was the terrorist-era equivalent of hug-a-thug.
Back in June, for example, word got out that a sniper with Canada’s elite Joint Task Force 2 stationed in Iraq had made the longest kill shot in military history, taking out an ISIS insurgent from a staggering distance of 3,540 metres.
Instead of kudos for the kill, politicians of all stripes were demanding to know why our military personnel were on the front lines in Iraq when their sole mission was to train Kurdish troops.
The sniper, however, was not on the front line.
The front line was where his bullet ended up, and where one ISIS terrorist drew his last breath.
The sniper was 3.5 kilometres away — which is hardly up close and personal.
Pity if that ISIS combatant was a Canadian.
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