Conservative politicians flock to U.S. media to whip up ignorance and bile: Neil Macdonald [View all]

https://www.google.ca/amp/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4218915

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Kent, a former TV anchor now employed as a Conservative member of Parliament and foreign affairs critic, took part recently in what was clearly an orchestrated effort to discredit the Canadian government abroad.

Furious about the reported $10.5 million paid to former Guantanamo Bay inmate and Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, Kent turned not to a Canadian media outlet, but to the Wall Street Journal, one of America's most influential newspapers.

Under the headline: "A terrorist's big payday, courtesy of Trudeau," Kent accused the Canadian government of falling all over itself to turn a terrorist into a multimillionaire. He called the settlement – it was paid to settle a $20-million lawsuit Khadr had filed – a subversion of Canadian values, and an affront to the family of Sgt. Christopher Speer, the U.S. Delta Force soldier Khadr was accused of killing on an Afghan battlefield in 2002.

Kent's piece was a masterpiece of nuance-free populism – it never mentioned, for example, that Khadr was taken to Afghanistan by his extremist father at the age of 10, or that he was 15 when he allegedly tossed the grenade that killed the special forces soldier, who was dressed as an Afghan and was in the process of entering the house in which Khadr had been sheltering – a house that had just been bombed to smithereens by an American warplane, killing nearly everyone else inside.



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