Juno News - August 22, 2018


Welcome Back, Khadr


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

179.13043

Word count

515

Sentence count

27

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the wake of Omar Khadr's $10.5 million payout from the federal government, a conservative senator questions why a convicted terrorist should not be allowed to walk into secure government facilities like the Parliament of Canada. Andrew Lutton explains why.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.900 Liberal Canada's favourite terrorist turned folk hero is back in the news.
00:00:04.600 Who else am I talking about but Omar Khadr?
00:00:06.920 Basking in the glory of his 10.5 million dollar payout from the federal government not too
00:00:10.920 long ago, Omar Khadr recently took a trip to Ottawa with his lovely wife.
00:00:15.840 And well in Ottawa they decided to visit Parliament of Canada, it's a national landmark.
00:00:19.920 Why wouldn't anyone want to go there?
00:00:21.640 They didn't just walk around the grounds, they actually went into the building.
00:00:25.600 Khadr was spotted in the Senate gallery, the public gallery for visitors to the Senate
00:00:29.840 to go by a staffer to a conservative senator who decided to look into this and shockingly
00:00:35.200 found that Omar Khadr and his wife were able to waltz through security despite him being
00:00:39.640 convicted of terrorism and murder.
00:00:42.960 He confessed to it.
00:00:44.360 And despite all of the questions that people raised about his treatment at Guantanamo Bay,
00:00:48.840 on the record right now, by the letter of the law, he is a convicted murderer connected to terrorism.
00:00:56.360 How does someone like that walk into Parliament Hill?
00:00:59.480 Jonathan Hill has clamped down a fair bit on security since the shooting a few years
00:01:03.240 back of Nathan Cirillo.
00:01:04.840 But the fact remains that to walk in there you've actually got to be screened.
00:01:08.360 Your ID has to be run.
00:01:09.840 Omar Khadr is very recognizable.
00:01:11.680 His name should have, without putting it through a computer system, tripped some radars of the
00:01:16.480 people who are working security.
00:01:18.840 Now, we do know that the Liberals tried to block Khadr from an event where several Liberal dignitaries
00:01:24.200 were in attendance.
00:01:25.200 They obviously didn't want the PR battle to go on there. 0.67
00:01:27.720 And this is not me accusing Omar Khadr of being a risk or a threat, but the fact remains
00:01:32.840 he is a convict of a serious violent offense, the type of which that you would think would
00:01:37.960 preclude you from walking into secure government facilities.
00:01:41.720 So, this is a discussion that was started by Senator Leo Houssakos, a conservative senator.
00:01:47.040 And in response to these concerns, which are entirely valid, former lawyer Dennis Edney,
00:01:52.560 former lawyer to Omar Khadr said that this is Islamophobia.
00:01:56.480 To criticize a convicted terrorist and murderer walking into Parliament Hill is Islamophobic.
00:02:02.060 So, the wide-reaching implications of M103, the anti-Islamophobia motion, are that you
00:02:06.980 can't criticize murderers walking into secure government facilities like the Parliament
00:02:11.280 of Canada.
00:02:12.900 Moreover, Khadr's team has said that this is a constitutional liberty, the constitutional
00:02:18.060 right to walk into Parliament Hill.
00:02:20.020 Now, I agree that Parliament needs to be there for all Canadians.
00:02:23.200 But we are talking about significant security breaches if convicted criminal offenses, documented,
00:02:29.740 convicted, and by the way, confessed, do not preclude you from entering.
00:02:34.700 This is where, as Canadians, political correctness can actually risk lives.
00:02:39.500 It isn't just a theoretical on-paper battle about which words you can or can't use.
00:02:44.140 There are security consequences to being politically correct, and this is what we're seeing at Parliament
00:02:49.780 Hill.
00:02:50.780 For the True North Initiative, I'm Andrew Lutton.