For Canadians who go off to fight ISIS there is only one thing to say: Good hunting and come home safe. Those who left to fight for ISIS there is also only one thing to say: Good riddance.
It doesn't take much to make the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) come over all faint sometimes, but the news in mid-November that former Canadian soldiers were joining Iraqi Kurdish groups to fight against ISIS seems to have done it again.
Several CBC news anchors intoned in grim tones: “This could mean that Canadians will be fighting Canadians.”
Two responses come to mind: ‘Not really’ and ‘Ya think?’
Canadians – or more properly – notional Canadians who happen to have one of our passports – have been slipping away to fight for al Qaeda, al Shabaab, the Chechens and other elements of the Salafist Jihad for years. By siding with the Jihad that is determined to topple Western civilization and subjugate all of us, perhaps, just maybe, one has to assume they really are not that Canadian in their hearts.
Given that Ottawa is contemplating pulling the passports of these so-called Canadians who go off to join the Jihad, they might not have much of a legal case for being Canadians either. One can also look at the slow shuffling reluctance with which Canadian officials accepted the repatriation of Omar Khadr from Guantanamo Bay (and the popular support for this reluctance) and conclude that pulling the citizenship of AQ members should be a no-brainer.
However, the civic spirit of somebody who has volunteered to put their own body between all of us and the desolation of war is almost unquestionable. Somebody who volunteered to serve in the Canadian military is assuredly Canadian. Enlisting in the Armed Forces does not necessarily imply a starry-eyed patriotism in the recruit, but most of us who did so might quietly confess – with a proper Canadian modesty – that it was among our considerations at the time.
If some former member of the PPCLI or the Queen’s York Rangers is doing some varmint hunting alongside the Kurds in Northern Iraq and bags somebody whose last listed address was somewhere in Brampton, it is not necessarily a given that a Canadian was fighting a Canadian.
Would such an act be moral? Of course it is! ISIS – reflecting a widely expressed set of opinions in the Salafist Jihad – has reintroduced concubinage and slavery to the world, literally crucifies those who stand up to it, and proudly slits the throats of aid workers on social media. How could taking up arms against them possibly be wrong?
If, however, somebody is charitable enough to think that volunteering to fight for the Jihad should not necessarily entail a legal loss of citizenship, then a ‘Canadian’ terrorist operating against our citizens is an example of a Canadian who is fighting against other Canadians. This is exactly what the core of the ‘Toronto 18’ were contemplating and what the two late homicidal ‘lone wolves’ of last October accomplished.
Canadians have fought other Canadians before – and usually over ideological considerations. We exchanged musket-fire with each other in 1837 and the 1885 Riel Rebellion could also be seen as an exchange of rifle fire between Canadians.
While the ‘Mac-Paps’ of Republican Spain’s International Brigades got a lot of good press, there could have easily been Canadians fighting for Franco too – the Nationalists had volunteers from 11 different countries fighting in their ranks and support from many others. Ultra-Catholics and anti-Communists around the world rallied to Franco, and many prominent writers and artists did so too.
The fight against ISIS might be considered as a foretaste of a wider conflict against the Salafist Jihad too. After all, ISIS is only the most successful of the children of al Qaeda; and al Qaeda is only one of the creations of the Muslim Brotherhood – which functions almost openly in Canada and around the world. Despite our persistence in thinking of ISIS as a specific phenomenon, the Salafist Jihad is a global problem with many fronts. It is still growing.
Those who volunteered – on both sides – to fight in the Spanish Civil War were those who sensed a wider conflict was coming. It turns out that the anti-Fascist/anti-Nazi war came first, although right up until June 1941 when Hitler turned on Stalin, it could have also been a war against Soviet communism too. That war turned into a Cold War and ran its course from 1945 to 1990.
There is a fairly diverse lot of volunteers coming in to help the Kurds against ISIS – former American, British and French soldiers are picking up arms, so are Danish and German bikers, and many others. Most of them have experience with the Jihad in Afghanistan and Iraq, or on the streets of their cities at home. Perhaps they sense a wider conflict is coming or are simply content to pick up the sword and battle against evil when and where it becomes as manifest as it has with ISIS.
For those Canadians who go off to fight ISIS there is only one thing to say: Good hunting and come home safe. For those who left Canada to fight for ISIS there is also only one thing to say: Good riddance.
