Maher Arar's dual citizenship

A Challenge to Canada Free Press

Dick Field at Canada Free Press has come out with a particularly snarky article that makes a really big deal out of Maher Arar's dual citizenship, implying that Arar had divided loyalties, is not really committed to Canada, and brought his misery on his own head.

First, and exceedingly strange, is the fact that our media has persuaded the public that Mr. Arar is an ordinary immigrant Canadian of Syrian descent. No, he is not an ordinary Canadian like most of us. He is a citizen of Canada and a citizen of Syria. For months this writer has tried verify this fact by listening to every newscast and reading every newspaper possible in order to find out if Mr. Arar was indeed a dual citizen but no luck, nary a mention. Why the silence? Why the mystery? Apparently, the fact was discussed early in the O'Connor Inquiry and then dropped, so there is no excuse for the media.

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Mr. Arar knew the torture practices in his own country, so we should ask Mr. Arar why he risked keeping his Syrian citizenship. Certainly by retaining his Syrian citizenship, Mr. Arar must be partly responsible for his own misfortunes, even if he is totally innocent.

I have a lot of pet peeves and dishonest, nasty journalism figures high on the list. You may remember that I participated in my own small-scale way to helping to spread the fuss about the CBC's skewed report on Prime Minister Harper.

This article raised my ire in a similar fashion. While Field castigates the media for not doing their homework, he (un)studiously neglected doing his own. So I did it for him. And sent Canada Free Press the results.

Syria makes it very difficult for expats to renounce their citizenship.
http://www.opm.gov/extra/investigate/IS-01.pdf

LOSS OF CITIZENSHIP:

VOLUNTARY: Though voluntary renunciation of Syrian citizenship is permitted by law, the Syrian Information Office stated that it is so complicated that it is best not to attempt the process. In effect, according to that Office, the process is complicated in order to discourage renunciation of Syrian citizenship. Former citizens of Syria probably maintain an unofficial dual citizenship status and would be subject to Syrian law as citizens should they return to Syria.

Therefore your rant on Maher Arar (http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/field100406.htm) is highly inaccurate. Are you going to publish a retraction?

Two days later, no answer, no acknowledgement of receipt, no posting of my letter on their "letter blog" (about one letter a week, none negative), no apology to Arar, and of course, no retraction.

The Syrian Information Office itself, in correspondence with the American government states baldly that they make it deliberately difficult to renounce Syrian citizenship. I have heard it rumoured, though I can't confirm it, that relatives remaining in Syria are targetted if you try to renounce your Syrian citizenship.

I can handle highly partisan media if they stick to truthful reporting. Canada Free Press does not seem to feel obliged to live by those standards. Smearing a man who has already endured much with shoddy, unprofessional journalism and pretending not to hear when you are called on inaccuracies is not the way to win my respect.

Dick Field and/or Canada Free Press is invited to respond.

Technorati tags: Maher Arar, Dick Field, Canada Free Press

Killing Amish schoolgirls

Charles Carl Roberts is an enigma. The milk truck driver, up until yesterday a law-abiding man, devoted husband and father, and apparently all-round nice guy, invaded an Amish schoolhouse and executed the schoolgirls. Few are expected to survive.

Police are scrambling to determine a motive. He did leave suicide notes, apparently outlining a 20-year old desire to molest girls and an anger with God. Police also speculate that the latter was fueled by the death of a newborn daughter in 1997. Evidence of the former comes from his suicide notes and the sexual lubricant he brought with him to the school siege, but which he apparently had no time to use.

There were virtually no advance warning signs, only a shift in moods reported by coworkers.

Roberts' co-workers said his mood had darkened in recent weeks, but suddenly brightened over the weekend, [State Police Commissioner Jeffrey B.] Miller said.

"A few days before the shooting a weight was lifted," Miller said Tuesday.

I am struck how easy it is to not know the people we work and even live with. There are things under the surface that can be incredibly powerful - for good or for evil - and yet remain completely hidden. Evil things in particular grow better in the dark. Most of the deranged killers in recent memory have been loners or very quiet men, turned in on themselves, or at the very least, keeping locked rooms in their souls that no one else was allowed to enter.

So what can be done about it? We can't exactly start reporting our coworkers to police every time they fall into inexplicable funks. Perhaps we need to be more sensitive to the people around us and probe gently if they make strange, uncharacteristic remarks. I've been guilty in the past of timidly backing away from topics that might get weird or messy. Maybe I shouldn't. Sunlight and fresh air are great disinfectants.

But our first responsibility remains ourselves. What are we nurturing in our own hidden rooms? It might never erupt in the spectacular evil of the Nickel Mines schoolhouse, but we could very well spray the acid of our bitterness, or the putrid stench of our sick obsessions on the people around us, wounding them or - even worse - encouraging their own evils. It is perhaps time to go talk to a friend, a pastor or priest, or a help line and let the air in.

Maybe if only one person confronts his own evils as a result of this slaughter, those little Amish schoolgirls will not have died in vain.

In the meanwhile, my heart and prayers go out to the families of both the victims and the killer.

[Correction] The references to molestations in the past that CCR claims to have done were made in a phone call to his wife during the siege.

[Update] See here for the reaction of the Amish.

Technorati tags: Charles Carl Roberts, Nickel Mines

Christian Arguments Against Torture

That bastion of left-wing ideology, the magazine Christianity Today (founded by Billy Graham), came out in February in no uncertain terms against the legitimizing of torture in the war against terrorism. The article "5 Reasons Torture is Always Wrong" is available online, as well as a longer version on the website of the author, David Gushee.

In the article, Gushee lays out the moral problem, and the question of the definition of torture. He dismisses the idea that 9/11 justifies a modification of the long-standing American opposition to torture and outlines his five reasons, which I shall recap briefly here.

1. Torture violates the dignity of the human being.

2. Torture mistreats the vulnerable and violates the demands of justice.

3. Authorizing torture trusts government too much.

4. Torture dehumanizes the torturer.

5. Torture erodes the character of the nation that tortures.

And his conclusion:

We are tempted to follow the logic of a July 11, 2005, Time magazine cover story that said, "In the war on terrorism, the personal dignity of a fanatic trained for mass murder may be an inevitable casualty."

Yet we are queasy enough about this "inevitable casualty" that we do not want to call torture what it is. We do not want to expose our policies, our prisons, or our prisoners to public view. We deny that we are torturing, or we deny that our prisoners are really prisoners. When pushed against the wall, we remind one another how evil the enemy is. We give every evidence of the kind of self-deception that is characteristic of a descent into sin.

It is past time for evangelical Christians to remind our government and our society of perennial moral values, which also happen to be international and domestic laws. As Christians, we care about moral values, and we vote on the basis of such values. We care deeply about human-rights violations around the world. Now it is time to raise our voice and say an unequivocal no to torture, a practice that has no place in our society and violates our most cherished moral convictions.

I would urge any religious person (or non-religious person, for that matter) who thinks there is a justification for torture to read this article carefully. It is vitally important that we as Christians do not fall prey to moral seduction and betray Biblical standards.

Further Christian arguments against torture can be found in the post Truth About Torture on Ochuk's Blog, in which he summarizes and links to a Christian symposium on ethics that addressed the issue of torture.

Technorati tags: David Gushee

The morality of war

At Sideways Mencken, Takhallus is asking a very difficult moral question: was the American incendiary and nuclear bombing of Japan moral or not? If yes, would a similar bombing of Teheran be moral today? And he wants answers to go beyond a simple yes or no; he wants justification. Why or why not?

This is a very uncomfortable question and it's making me squirm, quite honestly. But I'll do my best.

War is always and inevitably a morally equivocal act, at best. In absolute terms, it can never ever be right. Horrible things will be done, even in "just wars". Innocent blood will flow. All of this is wrong.

Sometimes though, in a world where evil walks, it is sometimes necessary. Allowing an evil man at the head of an evil regime to go unchecked can result in even greater evils. And those who stand back and allow it to continue are complicit. In other words, there are cases where you are damned if you do, damned if you don't. The only moral solution is to go for the lesser of damnations.

It's pretty hard to rally the troops around a war cry of "the lesser of evils," so the justification of war is seldom framed in those terms. My uncle, a WWII navigator with the RCAF probably participated in the bombing of German civilians. I don't know, because he won't talk about it. I know for a fact he did do bombing runs over Germany. This was one of the few wars in history where good and evil appeared with some clarity, but even so, men of honour sleep uneasily sixty years after the fact.

It was necessary to bring Germany to its knees, it was necessary to bring Japan to its knees, because the alternative was even more horrific. Sometimes the lesser of evils is the only moral response, even when innocents have to die.

But when the euphoria of victory has had its day, and the rubble is cleared and the cities rebuilt, perhaps the only moral response is to weep for our victory. Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel, famously said at a 1969 press conference in London: "When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons."

Genetics and morality

Sometimes you get fortunate on a plane. A recent flight I took from Toronto to Philadelphia was one of those times. I found myself sitting next to a sociology professor, a psychoanalyst and a Christian. And it was all one person.

We had a glorious free-ranging discussion that touched on everything from raising teenagers to Durkheim's problematic atheism to sociopaths and free will. And it's this last idea that I'd like to expand on a bit today.

Recent research has shown that there is a genetic component to sociopathy, the newer preferred term for psychopathy. Sociopaths are people who fully understand the difference between right and wrong, but who just don't care. They can nonetheless be exceedingly charming people, because they have understood that charm is a very important element in manipulation. And they are manipulators par excellence. They can be extremely cruel manipulators too, as they are utterly indifferent to the suffering of others and can even delight in it. Empathetic is not a word applied to sociopaths.

Some of the most horrific crimes are committed by sociopaths. I won't give any examples; I'm sure you've got a list in your head already, and probably from this week's news, whenever you are reading this. But not all sociopaths go on to be mass murderers or pedophiles, as my flight companion pointed out. They have learned to curtail their impulses, whether through fear of retribution or, perhaps, the simple intellectual recognition that they are wrong. Many of them will content themselves with merely being the coworker from hell.

We demand of sociopaths that they curtail themselves and punish them severely if they do not. Yet, if genetics is as all-determining as some would have us believe, they are only doing what comes naturally, indeed what they are programmed to do. But I don't believe there is anybody willing to stand up and argue the position that they should be allowed to do so without any adverse consequences.

But what about alcoholics? Or homosexuals? Or people with short tempers? All of these behaviours can have genetic components. And I use the word "component" very deliberately. Human behaviour is far too complex to be reduced to a single factor.

Case in point: Seventh Day Adventists. According to their very strict doctrines, which an astonishing number of them put into practice, alcohol and a good number of foods are verboten. The result? The lowest alcoholism rate of any identifiable group in the United States, as well as the longest life expectancy. Nobody has ever suggested that the genetic component for alcoholism is less prevalent among them, but a combination of nurture and free will succeed in trumping nature, to their great benefit.

My point is this: a genetic predisposition to a certain behaviour does not make it morally acceptable or even neutral. It certainly doesn't mean that the said behaviour is advisable, if you are of the morally nihilistic persuasion. I, for example, have a genetically predetermined tendency to overweight. That doesn't make it any less harmful for me to be overweight. It does mean I have to fight much harder to avoid it than people of lean and lanky parentage.

So when we determine if a certain behaviour is desirable, acceptable, or moral, we are going to have to use other criteria than genetic determinism. No matter how widespread, how "natural" or "normal" a behaviour may be, it doesn't necessarily follow that it is right.

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Pat at Stubborn Facts has chosen this very day to expand on the idea of natural not necessarily being synonymous with good. At least he didn't discuss genetics...