Former ISIS Soldiers - What to do With Them?

What should Canada "do " with its citizens who left Canada, usually surreptitiously, to join ISIS? According to the U.S., we should repatriate them and when appropriate charge them with participating in ISIS. While it can be clearly argued that given what some of those individuals did - specifically those who created videos aimed at radicalizing/recruiting more soldiers need to face consequences for their actions. For those who committed a documented crime, they too need to face trial. I am less clear as to whether or not those who joined and fought within some loose definition of what is allowed, should face punishment.

This is not the first time that Canadians who fought in foreign wars have been deemed to be criminals. Individuals from Canada who in the 1930s went to Spain to fight Franco's fascists were judged by many to be criminal. By 1937-38 it was illegal for Canadians to go to Spain to fight. They were labelled as Communists, initially prevented from returning to Canada, investigated by the RCMP and in some case became unemployable when they returned. Some were not allowed to enlist in the armed forces in WWWll because they were politically unreliable. Six or seven decades later - we see those men as heroes who had the courage to fight against oppression.

I am not in any way supporting ISIS. Their existence has only caused destruction and death. Millions of people have become homeless as a result of their insistence that their interpretation of the Koran was the right one. The suffering that their regime and the resulting war has caused is incalculable The damage their ideology has caused will last for decades. But do all of the Canadian's who supported ISIS by participating need to be punished and who should do the punishing?

It would seem to me that if an individual who fought for ISIS is judged to have broken the law in the lands that they fought it - then that country, if it so wishes, needs to press charges. Assuming that the individual was a competent adult when they left the country - then whatever consequences derive from that decision are their responsibility. It will, however, feel profoundly unfair to friends and family that the consequences might be death. I am not sure why they, after the fighting has finished, become Canada's problem to prosecute.

The issue becomes far more complicated when one discusses what to do with those individuals who did not break the law (other than fighting on the losing side) and say that they want to/need to come home. There may be as many as 200-300 Canadians somewhere in Syria or the neighbouring countries who sided with ISIS and who have been or are about to be arrested by the victorious forces. Not all of them have changed their minds as to the rightness of their cause, some of them may think that what they did was the right thing to do. A few of them might come back to their families and continue to advocate for a separate Muslim state - regardless of the strategies used to achieve it.

Clearly, the Canadian government will need to something. Human rights advocates will demand that it is not a legal problem but rather that sufficient supports and funds be allocated to ensure a successful re-integration; others will demand justice (vengeance) for those Syrians who have been killed or forced to live in refugee camps and therefore prison sentences will need to be handed out to the majority of those who are repatriated. There will be others who don't particularly care what happens to the returning individual as long as the individuals live somewhere else other than in their neighbourhood.

The Canadians in Syria are Canadian citizens. If they are not being held by the authorities for significant crimes than they should come home - on the assumption that they agree to live by Canadians rules and Canadian culture. If they are committed to living in an Islamist state - then they need to immigrate to one.

Canadian Values and the Rest of the World

I used to take some pride in Canada's stance on such things as bribery. It seemed to me that it was important to stand up and say, as a country, that we thought such practices were wrong and perhaps even anti-democratic; that we believed in a level playing field where everyone had an equal chance to succeed. It seem, therefore, quite appropriate that we would lay criminal charges against Canadian companies that used such practices to further their commercial dealings in other countries. I thought that until yesterday morning when I read Neil Macdonald's(*) opinion piece on the CBC's website.

Macdonald was commenting on the corruption and fraud charges facing SNC-Lavalin and two of its subsidiaries as a result of their activities in Libya. He started his piece by confessing that, in his capacity as a news reporter, he had bribed numerous officials in a variety of countries to ensure safe passage through borders or to retrieve equipment from a country's custom operations. He was quite clear - it was the only way that he could have done his job; that bribery/baksheesh was not just common, it was all-pervasive.

As I thought about his story that discusses the economic impact of such policies on the Canadian economy - I started to wonder if we, as Canadians are setting a standard that was not just unrealistic for our companies but that in fact it was inappropriate for us to do so. I am not suggesting that we start to create a culture in Canada where everything cost just a little bit more because we have to bribe the receptionist at the doctor's office to get an appointment or some government clerk so that we can get our licence or health cards renewed, but rather to suggest that the imposing of our values upon another country is as paternalistic or as colonialist as any activity perpetuated by the British or Canadian governments in the 1800s.

In fact, it sounds extraordinarily pompous to suggest that we know the right way - in fact the only way to be ethical in our dealings. It is arrogant of us to tell other cultures that part of their culture is wrong and even worse, that it is criminal. I can think of nothing that gives me the right to judge other people so harshly for an activity that, while it may feel as if it is harmful to that country's population, does nothing to harm me. Bribery may be a harmful practice - it may make the playing field so uneven that the majority of people in that country cannot succeed, but is it my place to pontificate upon the failings of that region's culture?

There are some cultural practices such as genital mutilation or forced marriages of young girls that feel so wrong to me that I am quite content to have my country refuse to deal with regions that allow or perhaps even encourage such activities. But if I am going to sound like some pompous, arrogant 19th century European, at the very least, I should understand that am trying to enforce my values on someone else because I think my values are better than theirs.

I perhaps should not be surprised when they are offended.


(*) https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/libya-snc-1.5014939

Jail Time - What is Enough?

Last week, two Canadians were sentenced for murdering a number of their fellow citizens. Their crimes were different in terms of who they murdered, and why. Their sentences also were different. At least one of the sentences has drawn the ire of one community.

Bruce McArthur, a self-employed gardener had plead guilty to the murder of eight men over a period of years. He was by his own account a serial murderer of gay men. One has to wonder if there were, in fact, more murders - men who have gone missing but their bodies will never be found. The judge sentenced him to eight terms of life imprisonment (concurrently) with no parole possible for 25 years. McArthur will be in his mid 90s before he can apply for parole.

Alexandre Bissonnette plead guilty to murdering six men (and injuring a number of others) in a violent attack on a mosque. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 40 years. Bissonnette will be in his mid-60s before he is eligible for parole.

There are some Muslims who are suggesting that Bissonnette's sentence was not harsh enough, that it does not recognize the violent and anti-Muslin nature of the crime. I understand - how can 40 years be enough to punish an individual for going to a place of worship and randomly killing people that he did not know, that he had never met? There could never be enough years left in someone's life to punish them for this kind of crime. In reading some of the comments from people who had been affected by these senseless murders - it feels as if they were looking for vengeance, that they were hoping that the judge would impose a sentence that would ensure that the individual never got out of prison.

As I have suggested elsewhere, the function of a prison sentence has three components. One is to clearly punish the individual for the crime. In both of the above cases - there is no adequate punishment for intentionally taking another person's life. Even if there was capital punishment in Canada - how could executing one person be adequate payback for killing six individuals? While there may be some individuals who would not mind losing their freedom - forty years in jail for me would be a punishment beyond imagining. Adding another twenty years on the sentence would have little effect.

The second reason for a sentence is to act as a deterrent to other individuals contemplating a similar crime. I cannot ever envision a serial murderer or some near mentally ill mass murderer ever considering what the consequences of murder would be. Deterrent may work for those thinking about robbing a bank (although banks keep on getting robbed) - but not for those who are afflicted by some sort of pathology.

The final reason for incarcerating is to keep the community safe. McArthur's sentence clearly does this. He will in all likelihood die in prison. If by some medical miracle he does live until the end of his sentence and is granted parole the first time he applies - he will not be a risk to the community.

In Bissonnette's case, it is less clear. After forty years in jail, it is unlikely that any rehabilitation will have been effective. It is possible that he will be as angry and as bitter (and as mentally ill) when he is 67 as he is now. Keeping him in jail forever would save the children of the murdered men from having to go to a parole hearing and explain to the tribunal why he should not be released. But what if something happens to him prison and there is a change. Maybe, after forty years he will have shown that he has the capacity to be an agent for positive change. Should he not have a chance? But in all likelihood, if he ever leaves prison, he will leave as a person so heavily institutionalized that he will have lost all capacity to live independently or in any way contribute to his community.

There can be no sentence that would be an adequate response to intentional murder. The families of the victims will never be healed by the consequences given to the offender. That is not the role of the court.

Given the limits of our legal system and our collective need to work towards a society that is less violent - the sentences - the two men will most likely spend the rest of their lives incarcerated. That is all we can expect. The healing is the job of those of us who are free to live in the community.

Strange Times Indeed part two

There are times when I do a blog that I know exactly what I want to say and the initial words just bubble out with relatively little work; there are times when I only have a glimmer of what I want to express and it can take well over an hour to get out a measly 500 words. Then there are times when I think I know where I want to go - but somewhere along the thought process I go in a completely different direction - one that frequently leaves me feeling dissatisfied. My last blog was like that.

I wanted to talk about how absolute in our judgements our society is becoming; of how we seem to be unable to look at the whole person, but rather we fixate on one event and assume that we know the person. It feels as if we will never be able to forgive the people who use to be our role models, our idols, our elected leaders.

It needs to be stated clearly that there is no doubt that all of our politicians in the last 200 years have been both racists and sexists. Even the most enlightened suffragette was racist. It was how the elites were educated - and those who aspired to be of the elite - copied their manner and attitude. I do not think we should ever forget how their beliefs and their mind-set shaped the policies and actions that they were engaged in. It does not particularly matter that they may not have done it intentionally or with malice - their acts were damaging to people different than them - people they deemed to be less than them. Those acts have had long-lasting consequences, consequences that we need to deal with and is some fashion remediate. But I am not convinced that we need to toss those public figures away, to tear down their statues or in the case of current political figures to bar them from ever running for office again.

My high school had for a number of years in the early 1960s a "Negro Minstrel Show". While I was too young to participate, I do remember attending at least one or two of the shows. In all honesty, if I had been older when the concerts were happening and if I could sing - I would have probably been delighted to be a performer. Should those high school students - some of who would be in their 80s now, be condemned for dressing up in blackface and singing what we referred to as negro spirituals almost 60 years ago as a racist? It clearly would have been profoundly offensive to anyone who was black, it clearly was inappropriate. But before we evaluate those young people, do we not need to look at their lives in the past 60 years? Have they by act and word atoned for their misguided acts.

Similarly, I am willing to bet that the vast majority of young men who went away to university in the mid to late 1960s had very little sensitivity to issues that now consume us in terms of race or gender. There is no doubt that young men like me said things that were horrific. We used language to describe people that would have been offensive (I have never used the "n" word) to those people. The fact that we did not realize it was wrong - is irrelevant. We said it and we should be ashamed.

My attitude and responses to women were no better.

But if you are only going to judge me by my participation (and enjoyment) of a concert 60 years ago where high school students wore black face, or by my use of language (and the attitude/lack of sensitivity that went with it) then you will have missed who and what I am. Instead, I would rather you judge me by my friends, the people I have worked with and the vocation I chose to devote my professional life to. Perhaps even more importantly - judge me by my children and their friends.

Don't judge me by what my parents and community taught me about what is okay or not - judge me by what I taught my children.

Strange Times Indeed

There can be no doubt that we are living in strange times. Never before in the history of the world have anonymous, uninformed or just not very intelligent people been given the power to direct and control both what information we are given and how to value it. The news we have been given has always been controlled by people who have biases. Whether it was the print media, or radio/television, the people who controlled those news corporations - controlled what news and from what perspective that news got discussed. Those who write the history books have always got to decide what happened. But most critical thinkers and informed readers/viewers knew that there was a bias. There were always other formats that allowed a different level of discussion of the facts.

Social media has in some ways levelled the playing field. One no longer needs to be rich to have a platform to disseminates one's views. Unfortunately one also no longer needs to be capable of thinking outside of a very small box or to be aware of the consequences of that view. Given the all-pervasiveness of social media, the general inability for people to think and their overwhelming fear of appearing to be different than anyone else - one person can make a statement and everyone agrees.

Liam Neilson disclosed that he had clearly violent, racist thoughts over a specific incident 40 years ago. He acknowledged that it was wrong and said that he had gotten help to understand what had happened. Was he wrong - of course, he was. It is clearly racist to blame every person of a certain colour for a specific act. There is now conversation amongst the media and on social networks as to whether or not Neilson's career is over because he acknowledged his behaviour in a very public way.

There has been no suggestion that Neilson has, since that event, continued to have violent racist thoughts, there is no indication that he has ever acted out that rage. If there was a rational dialogue happening - one could explore how those thoughts were formed in a young man in Northern Ireland in the midst of the "troubles". We could learn from those experiences, thereby understanding both how to prevent others from feeling that way and why and how he realized it was wrong. But instead, it is much easier to castigate a well-known celebrity because he admitted that he is human.

In my mind, the primary problem with social media is that it uses a very wide brush to taint everyone with the same attitude regardless of why or when. It is fine to label a person's behaviour as racists but surely context is important. While it might be essential to recognize a behaviour, it seems to me far more important to ask what did that person learn and did the behaviour reoccur?

It is as if some of the commentators on social media believe that we should all leave our mother's womb without faults. However, it is not how a person starts out - it is how they grow that is important.

The Absurdity of Cryptocurrency

I have almost no sympathy for people who think they have found a short cut to getting rich and then lose their money. I have even less sympathy for those who think that one of the paths to getting rich is to avoid paying taxes on their income. I have therefore taken some delight in reading about those who invested their money in one specific cryptocurrency and now appear to have lost access to their money. The person who ran the company has died without telling anyone how to access the accounts. Given that the cryptocurrency prides itself on its ability to ensure that the accounts are absolutely safe from hackers - it may never be possible for people to gain access to the accounts. I find it rather interesting that some investors in the semi-underground cryptocurrency economy are now demanding that the government regulate the industry so that investors are protected.

Someone needs to tell those investors that you can't have it both ways. You cannot plan on making money in a process that celebrates its lack of government regulation or monitoring - in fact, argues that cryptocurrencies are better than "regular" money that is issued and controlled by the government because it exists in a totally free market - and then ask for help to create regulation when it all goes bad. It boggles my mind that people would think that one could give "real" money to someone who would invest it in something that had no value - and in fact never really existed and then be surprised when a problem appeared.

Cryptocurrency has always seemed to me to be a bit like investing in alpacas or some other exotic animal. It only has value when someone says it does. The alpaca, for most Canadians, has no value. Its fleece is nice but there is a fair amount of processing required to make it useful and there are a limited number of people who want to use it. The real money was in selling the breeding stock. Once everyone had an alpaca who wanted one, the value of the breeding stock became significantly less and alpacas no longer were being touted as a way to get rich. Similarly, cryptocurrency has no value except what one can buy with it. The seller will always control the value of the currency. The value of the specific cryptocurrency is not tied to any specific item or economy. It floats somewhere in the cloud finding what value it can find. Trying to regulate or monitor the activities of private individuals who intentionally work outside the banking system utilizing something that cannot be defined or measured seems a pointless and perhaps impossible task.

If investors want some security - then they need to invest in systems that are regulated and monitored by agencies that are created using our tax dollars. If you want to get rich quick by gambling - feel free but don't come whining to me when you need assistance.

On a secondary note, the cryptocurrency economy uses a huge amount of electricity to run the computers. CBC noted that " A new study investigated how the energy consumed by these two processes compared, and found that crypto mining can use more than four times as much energy, for value produced, as mining for real resources like gold, copper, and platinum.". (1)

All in all, cryptocurrency seems like something the self-proclaimed elite use just to prove that they are different and therefore better than the rest of us. Pretty typical - use our collective resources (e.g. energy) to make money for themselves but then demand that someone protect them when it doesn't work out the way that they planned.

(1) https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/bitcoin-s-energy-costs-beatboxers-invent-new-sounds-wind-farms-change-lizards-and-more-1.4897314/bitcoin-mining-uses-more-energy-than-mining-for-real-gold-1.4897333

Venezuela - What to Do?

It may be that I am getting older and therefore less intellectually alert, but the political situation in Venezuela is confusing to me. Or rather any solution to the mess that country is in - is beyond me

It seems inconceivable that a country that is sitting on one of the world's greatest reserves of crude oil - is so far in debt and is so unable to meet the most basic of needs of its citizens. There is no doubt that the production of oil has been mismanaged. There appears to be a myriad of possible causes including the big multi-national oil companies who took out countless of billions of dollars of profits in the late 1960s and early 1970s did not contribute enough to the national economy. Others blame the Socialist government of Chavez who nationalized those companies and perhaps lacked the expertise to manage the oil reserves. It is clear that the world economy could not sustain the ever increasing cost of oil that the Venezuelan government depended on to maintain its programs and that the growth that the Venezuelan middle class demanded. The more cynical of us would wonder if there had been some not- so-subtle interference in the Venezuelan economy by some western countries and their multi-national corporate allies who opposed the concept of a Socialist government.

Every news site from Al Jezerra to the BBC to the Globe and Mail has suggested answers but it is difficult to ever imagine finding a solution to a crisis if one cannot agree on the causes of that crisis.

There would appear to be two factions within Venezuela. Both leaders are arguing that they have a legitimate right to control the resources and the military. Both are supported by various governments around the world. Neither leader, from what I have read - have a clue as to how to reverse the crisis that is Venezuela.

I am unclear as to why my Canadian government has decided to be such a verbally active advocate of Juan Guaidó - the head of the National Assembly who has declared himself interim president. The stated reason - that of being concerned for the human rights of the Venezuelan people, rings hollow to me. There are numerous other countries with whom Canada has trading relationships with, who have an abysmal record of human rights including Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, the Philippines, China, Russia and perhaps on occasion, even our neighbour to the south of us. I have no problem Canada providing some leadership on the issue of human rights. The world needs countries to call out other countries that ignore the most basic protections for their citizens. But we need to be sure that we are getting our own house in order and that our condemnations of other countries are applied equally. We must not "cherry pick" which countries we pick on.

It would seem to me that we could be far more effective if we offered some expertise to assist Venezuela in dealing with its problems. We seem to have lots of experienced, professional oil field workers and managers who, according to the press, are scrambling for work - perhaps we could pay their salaries for six months and offer their expertise - free and without strings to the Venezuelan people. But we should not be loudly advocating for the military of one country to desert to support another leader. Encouraging armed insurrection should not be what we are known for.