Mohamed Fahmy doesn't get it

Mohamed Fahmy still seems to be under the impression that the Canadian government should be working feverishly behind the scenes to get him out of Egypt. He is, after all, a Canadian citizen.

Obviously, they haven’t been, or he’d be free by now. Problem is, the vindictive racists in Harper’s Ottawa don’t see him as a Canadian at all. They see him as an Egyptian, and not a “good” Egyptian like Generalissimo al-Sisi, but a highly suspect Egyptian who most likely harbours thoughts sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and, God forbid, Palestinians.

While he may technically be a Canadian, he’s not really one; he’s just one of those “Canadians of convenience” who keeps a Canadian passport in his back pocket as an insurance policy of sorts. The Middle East is full of those kind of Canadians, and frankly, the Harperites are sick of them.

Unlike the many folks who successfully hold dual Canadian-Israeli citizenship, Arab Canadian loyalties must always be suspect. It’s another manifestation of what, over the last ten years, has become the dominant characteristic of the face Canada shows to the world; our hypocrisy.

Omar Khadr is another sterling example of that. A lot of worthy-sounding do-gooder initiatives get serious traction in Canada, and the campaign to free and rehabilitate child soldiers was one of them, at least so long as the problem of child soldiers was seen as confined to primitive nations teeming with barbaric brown people. Then a 15 year old Afghan-Canadian kid gets caught in a fire-fight with US troops in Afghanistan, and all that compassion flies out the window faster than you can say “just kidding,” and the Harper gang have spent untold millions blocking every legal move aimed at freeing and rehabilitating our own child soldier.

Again, it’s because while he may have been technically a Canadian, he wasn’t considered a “real” Canadian, because his daddy was a terrorist and his mommy wears a Niqab, and the dirty little shit personally threw a hand-grenade that killed a US soldier in Afghanistan, and any Afghan defending Afghanistan from the tender mercies of the US/NATO liberation is not worthy of inclusion in a modern civilized society like Canada.

Now this most virtuous of the Nations of Virtue has committed to spending half a billion dollars bombing Syria, a mission with only the fuzziest of rationales, no explicit goals, and no exit strategy. What we’re seeing is Harper using foreign policy and the Canadian Forces to paint himself as some ersatz Warrior King in time for the coming election.

Let’s hope enough voters see through the hypocrisy.