They arrested a 19-year-old kid at O’Hare airport last month. Mohammed Hamzah Khan is an American citizen who grew up in Chicago but he’s had it with western culture.
“I don’t want my kids being exposed to filth like this,” he wrote to friends. So he was off to join the Islamic State in Syria to rape, shoot, bomb and otherwise terrorize infidels, maybe even cut off a few heads.
Instead, he’s in a Chicago jail, charged with attempting to provide material support for a terrorist organization. He could get 15 years.
I say put him on a plane with a box lunch and a free ticket.
ISIS loves foreign Jihadi wannabes like Khan. They’re young, stupid and eager to please — ideal candidates for suicide squads and exploding vests. They don’t last long but they go out with a bang.
Let him go. It’s what we should have done with those home-grown lunatics who bushwhacked and killed two Canadian soldiers last month. Both of those losers had tried to leave Canada but were denied passports.
Big mistake. Give them passports. Then revoke them the moment their planes’ wheels leave the runway.
We’ve been sending peacekeepers, advisors, armed personnel and equipment to fight in the Middle East at enormous expense when all along we’ve had this contingent of would-be volunteers who were willing to go for free.
According to UN intelligence reports foreign fighters are pouring into Syria and Iraq from all over the world at the rate of a thousand a month.
Most of them are unskilled and delusionary which means that Islamic State must feed, arm, clothe and house them — and teach them not to stick their fingers in their gun barrels. That’s a big drain on enemy resources.
The number of foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq is somewhere north of 15,000 and rising. Most of them come from the Middle East and North Africa but more than 2,000 have come from Europe.
The number of fanatics leaving from North America is much smaller — thanks to a moat called the Atlantic Ocean — but still significant.
And every misbegotten one of them is toting a passport that will allow them to pop back home once they get tired of smelly colleagues and army rations.
Providing they’re still alive, of course.
One thing about war: just about anyone can play. In the Netherlands there’s a biker gang called “No Surrender.”
They want to send some of their boys to Syria to fight against ISIS. Against ISIS, for ISIS — who cares? I say go, boys. The world can always use one less biker gang. Hell’s Angels, please copy.
For this is a war that’s even dumber than most. Consider: American forces are fighting ISIS troops which are armed with U.S. military equipment which they captured from useless Iraqi forces made even more useless after the U.S. disbanded Iraqi’s professional military in the last Iraqi war.
Meanwhile the Kurds (good guys) are using crappy Russian weapons captured when the Russians bailed thirty years ago.
And terrorists are ensconced in Syria because the U.S. declined to arm moderate Syrian rebels to fight against... oh, never mind.
Here’s a radical thought: how about a new law that says any Canadian civilian who elects to go overseas to kill people — any people — gets a free one-way ticket, but can’t come back to Canada? Ever.
Seems to me that would be the civilized thing to do.
— Arthur Black lives on Saltspring Island. His column appears Tuesday in The NEWS. E-mail: arblack43@shaw.ca.