Posted on 07/14/2008 12:08:29 PM PDT by USFRIENDINVICTORIA
On the surface, a Winnipeg mother who risks losing her two children to the state because of her neo-Nazi beliefs might not seem to have much in common with Omar Khadr, the Canadian who has spent nearly six years at Guantanamo Bay after being captured on an Afghanistan battlefield. But both cases essentially are about the indoctrination of young people into despicable, fascistic ideologies, and the question of how our society treats them.
Let us start with the Winnipeg family, whose identity remains undisclosed in the media. The mother drew a swastika on her seven-year-old daughter's arm be-fore sending her off to school, and then redrew it when a teacher rubbed it off. It was an astonishing gesture of hatred: The swastika symbolizes a Nazi regime that exterminated millions of Jews, gays, Gypsies and disabled individuals -- along with other hideous crimes too numerous to catalogue. To fasten that symbol to anything -- let alone the arm of an innocent child -- bespeaks a profoundly twisted creed.
But is being a historically ignorant hatemonger grounds for losing your children? If government social workers are going to start taking custody of every child whose parents express outrageous, hateful views, our provincial governments are going to have to start building thousands of new children's homes.
According to the latest estimates by our security services, there are only 3,000 white supremacists, neo-Nazis and skinheads in Canada. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. What about the thousands of Muslim children being raised in Canada who believe that mass murder on the scale of 9/11 is a perfectly reasonable way to deal with Jews and other infidels? Are our child services workers going to learn Arabic and monitor the sermons of Mullahs -- and then seize every child in the mosque if the talk turns to genocidal eschatology?
And what about extremist Jews who regard Arabs and Muslims as filth? For that matter, what about those old-school communists who bring up their children to worship Stalin or Mao? Is this a road we want to go down? As Canada's out-of-control human rights tribunals show, bureaucrats should never be trusted in the role of ideological guardian.
Having children is a basic human imperative. Forcibly separating a child from his or her parents is therefore a fundamentally inhumane intervention, one that a state agency should embark upon only when what is at risk is an extreme scenario such as sexual predation or severe physical abuse. To expand the purview to include matters of political outlook represents an extraordinarily dangerous expansion of government powers. In a free society, no agent of the state should ever be able to seize our flesh and blood on the basis of our privately held beliefs -- even when the beliefs being propagandized from parent to child are noxious.
Which brings us to Omar Khadr, another victim of parents who propagandized a toxic ideology.
Mr. Khadr's father was Ahmed Said Khadr, an Egyptian-Canadian al-Qaeda lieutenant who brainwashed his family into the radicalized, murderous version of Islam that he began embracing as a member of the University of Ottawa Muslim Students Association in the late 1970s.
The brainwashing worked: The man's family travelled with him to central Asia and joined him in jihad. As a result, one son is now a paraplegic, and two (including Omar) are in U. S. custody. (The father died in 2003.)
The example is worth citing in the context of the Winnipeg tragedy: If one is looking for a cautionary tale of murderous ideology being transmitted from parent to child, you could find no better example than the Khadr family. Yet Omar Khadr, far from being reviled as a willing conduit of his father's hatred, is in fact a cause celebre in Canada. Why?
A thought experiment: Would those who support the decision of Manitoba's child and family services case workers to take away the Winnipeg woman's children also have supported an intervention to strip the Khadrs of their children when they were living in Ontario in the 1980s and 1990s?
The fact that such an intervention would be unthinkable should make us wonder at the motives of Winnipeg's child-protection workers in this case. They clearly are not acting on any universal child-protection principle that they would dare apply in most instances of parental hatemongering. Rather, they are acting in this case only because it so happens that the hatemongering mother happens not to be a member of any politically correct minority group. That is to say, she's a white Christian. How's that as a basis for permanently separating a mother from the child she bore?
Canadian parents might want to take a hard look at what's going on in Winnipeg. If a family's politics make them fair game for removal of their children, whose kids will the thought police be coming for next?
I admit that I'm a bit conflicted over this. There's no way that I can condone a parent drawing a Nazi swastika on the arm of a child. The mother should be set straight about some things. However, as the article points out -- if that were reason enough for the government to intervene, then there would be many thousands of children "taken into care".
Neo-nazis or paleo-nazis? Perhaps she represents “true” nazism rather than reform nazism?
Why do journalists feel the need to use a term along WITH Nazism? Can’t we all agree that all nazism is bad and that there is little ideology difference that could possibly separate those who subscribe to nazism?
As opposed to the neo-Communists indoctrination of their kids?
The mother says she just stands for “white pride” — and points out that only whites would be considered racist for expressing pride in their race. However, if that were the case, why use all the Nazi symbolism? Her story isn't credible — but, the question still remains: is that enough reason to grab her kids? If the state grabs her kids; why not take those of (e.g.) radical Muslims? Where does this end?
Good point. Che was a mass murderer — what a role model for a tyke.
Ours. Our own party has been attempting to marginalize conservatives as a voting block for years. How much of an excuse will the thought police on the left need to take away our kids in order to "de-program" them?
>> On the surface, a Winnipeg mother who risks losing her two children to the state because of her neo-Nazi beliefs might not seem to have much in common with Omar Khadr, the Canadian who has spent nearly six years at Guantanamo Bay after being captured on an Afghanistan battlefield.
I’d say, on the surface, they have a LOT in common. Seething hatred isn’t a particularly commonplace political ideology.
>> However, as the article points out — if that were reason enough for the government to intervene, then there would be many thousands of children “taken into care”.
True. I am more hesitant than many to withdraw children from their parents (even in cases such as the Mormon polygamist compound). But, in a few extreme cases, I can see how ideology could be possible grounds for such removal. To the extent that any ideology can be reasonably considered the corruption of a minor or the incitement of minor criminal activity, I would support the removal of a child.
Neo-nazi homes, and Islamic fascist homes are possibly the only examples I can think of.
I do agree that this is a slippery slope, but such is the nature of such regulation. The line between free speech and sedition is hazy, as is the line between family ideology and intentional corruption of children.
H
On the slippery road to FASCISM.
“.......And what about extremist Jews who regard Arabs and Muslims as filth?........”
This is where they lost me.
She's a Christian AND a Nazi? That sounds like a difficult trick.
This mother is a bit reprehensible but compared to the muslims sending kids into mosques for training on the mass murder of civilians using suicide bomb techniques she is pretty tame.
>>> .......And what about extremist Jews who regard Arabs and Muslims as filth?........
>> This is where they lost me.
True. To my mind, there is a distinct difference between regarding someone “as filth”, and advocating murder, criminal activity, the overthrow of the government, etc. Run-of-the-mill hate (not that Jewish objections to fundamentalist Islam necessarily qualify as “hate”) is certainly not actionable.
I’m not sure there’s a particularly prevalent string of Jews who regard anyone “as filth”. I am quite sure there are a large number of Jews that justifiably object to the militant imperialist fascist sebset of Islam.
H
Parental rights cases need to be considered in light of the whole picture. Perhaps if this mother was keeping her daughter isolated in some neo-Nazi cult compound while teaching her this crap, there would be grounds for some degree of state intervention. However, given that the mother is apparently sending her daughter to public school, the girl is clearly getting plenty of exposure to viewpoints different from her mother’s, as well as whatever the state considers an appropriate basic academic curriculum. Presumably, growing up with exposure to these divergent viewpoints, the girl will probably ultimately reject her mother’s neo-Nazi kookery. If the alternative viewpoints found in the school system can’t successfully compete with what this girl is learning at home, then the viewpoints promoted by the school system are in urgent need of revision.
By inference, it seems you would have supported some advance intervention in the Khadr case.
Whether or not the viewpoints promoted within the school system need revising — it seems to me that they don't seem to have a lot of faith in their own ability to indoctrinate the children in their charge. I suspect that the child has been traumatized by the events & will now be distrustful of all state authorities. It's hard to imagine a worse way to convince the child that her mother & her associates are kooks.
What kind of sick parent would put that on a child?
The Canadian government hates nazism and will do all it can to stamp it out. The Canadian government loves jihadism and will do all it can to promote it.
That is my inescapable conclusion from this article.
And I suspect that if they’d just let her stay with her mother, she’d soon have decided that the reception she kept getting at school for showing up with swastikas on her arm was traumatizing, and that it was her mother’s fault. Basically the conclusion we’d all want her to reach. Now at that point, if she starting objecting to her mother’s drawing swastikas on her, and the mother trued to punish her for objecting, THEN the state should definitely step in, and most likely either the mother would lay off or the child would happily waltz off into state care.
Does the school even have the authority to challenge what the girl is being taught at home? At what point is diversity education "political re-education"? At what point is the school "teaching morals" when they oppose at every turn "teaching morality" on issues like same sex attraction and premarital sex.
Political correctness strives to squash dissent. It isn't about tolerance of all ideologies, religions, politics, or heritage. It has a pretty limited list that is "approved".
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