To Tabitha Speer, Omar Khadr is her husband’s killer.

To Layne Morris, Omar Khadr is the cause of his partial blindness.

To Roméo Dallaire, Omar Khadr is a “magnificent gentleman.”

That undeserved characterization was surely a gut punch to the veterans outside a theatre at Dalhousie University last week, where Khadr was held up as a beacon of “courage” before a crowd that gave him a standing ovation.

The stars of the evening: a convicted terrorist, a sycophantic moderator, and an audience of fawning fans who don’t just see Khadr as a victim, but inexplicably as a hero.

The moderator, Shelly Whitman, promised “hard questions” that may be “challenging” and even “triggering,” though no such questions were posed. Unless, that is, you count Khadr being asked about the weather, or about a happy childhood memory.

Far from being an open dialogue, Whitman told the audience at the outset that questions about “the incident that happened in Afghanistan” were off-limits, as well as questions about Khadr’s $10.5 million payout from the federal government.

It takes a miraculous about of chutzpah for a convicted terrorist to get credit for ‘speaking out’ without actually addressing the terrorism bit.

That “incident” was the firefight that killed Speer and wounded Morris. Khadr confessed to and was convicted of throwing the fatal grenade, though he’s since amended this position to one of uncertainty.

Morris’ name was never mentioned at the forum. The moderator made only a passing reference to Speer as she alluded to his death “allegedly” being at Khadr’s hands.

The parodic forum revealed how successful Khadr’s rehabilitative public relations efforts have been.

While Khadr found some outright support from the fringes of the Canadian left when he was repatriated to Canada in 2012, much of the sympathy towards him was focused not on downplaying his past, but taking aim at his treatment by the American and Canadian governments.

Some people were uncomfortable viewing him in black-and-white as a hardened terrorist, and resigned to accept that there were shades of grey in his story.

This has dramatically shifted to the point where those formerly fringe voices have succeeding in casting a narrative Khadr is an example to which we should all strive. Activists now condemn as racist any view of Khadr that isn’t explicitly laudatory.

Those of us in the audience at Dalhousie last week were told to accept Khadr as being “magnificent” and “courageous,” though it was never explained why that is.

Even if we view Khadr as a victim, that hardly justifies extoling such positive attributes. Especially when no one is prepared to explore the glaring discrepancies in the victim narrative and Khadr’s own actions since being released from custody.

If Khadr was a victim, it was not of the Canadian state but rather his own family. He was just a young and innocent bystander to their radicalism, the story goes.

The Khadrs got the nickname as being Canada’s “first family of terror” for a reason. Khadr’s father, Ahmed, was an al-Qaeda financier and confidante of Osama bin Laden. Khadr’s sister and mother notoriously expressed support for bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and even Speer’s murder.

Yet Khadr, in a 2015 Toronto Star interview said he doesn’t believe his father was in al-Qaeda.

This would come as a shock to Khadr’s brother, Abdulrahman, who said in a CBC documentary, “We are an al-Qaeda family.”

Omar Khadr also downplayed his mother’s and sister’s comments, saying he has “a million other influences” so people shouldn’t be worried.

Khadr’s supporters blame the Khadr family for putting him on the battlefield, but Khadr himself defends and downplays his family’s extremism.

Shining the light on the Khadr family exposes the biggest liability to the Khadr-as-a-victim narrative: if his family was so complicit, why has he not renounced them?

After his release, Khadr successfully went to court on numerous occasions to ease the restrictions on communicating with his family. He fought to have unsupervised contact, and eventually to get a passport to visit his sister in Saudi Arabia.

It’s a question Khadr has never answered – and to my knowledge one he’s never been asked.

I’ve never sought to deny Khadr the right to speak. Though as someone who’s written about the free speech fight I must admit it’s an interesting test of where the lines of acceptable campus discourse are drawn. Misgendering someone gets you banned from speaking on campuses but murdering an American soldier fills the house and gets you a standing ovation.

The far-left in Canada is out of control. 

Deceitful environmentalist protesters claiming to speak for Indigenous people have set up illegal barricades across the country. They’ve blocked railways and highways — closing major thoroughfares, shutting down commercial and passenger rail and grinding our economy to a halt.

They are threatening the livelihood of countless blue-collar workers, including farmers, manufacturers, construction workers, workers in the forestry, coal and energy industries and so on. And, according to paramedics in British Columbia, they’re also putting lives at risk.

These protesters are as arrogant as they are destructive. They’re throwing a temper tantrum and using the heckler’s veto because they disagree with the results of our democratic process. 

The Coastal GasLink pipeline carrying liquified natural gas from northeastern British Columbia to the west coast has already been approved by the courts as well as every level of government.

This includes the Trudeau government, who have always erred on the side of listening to First Nations and giving them veto powers over pipelines, as well as the left-wing NDP government in British Columbia, who have done everything in their power to block other pipelines from reaching Canada’s west coast. 

Perhaps most importantly, this project was also given the green light from 20 band councils along the proposed route. This includes the elected band leaders of the Wet’sutwet’en First Nation, after long consultations with the company and a referendum within the community.

The fact that the Coastal GasLink project has jumped through all the required hoops is nothing short of miraculous. But even when a company does everything required of it, Canada still cannot get its act together to ensure the democratic will gets carried out.

To make matters worse in this situation, the mainstream media have distorted the issue and continue to use euphemisms to downplay the actions of the radical environmentalist left, calling their illegal actions “civil disobedience” and “peaceful protests.”

While an overwhelming number of First Nations voices are in support of the project and the pipeline, too many in the media have described these as “First Nations protesters” and the “Indigenous cause.”

Even the CBC’s John Paul Tasker pointed out the media’s biased and erroneous coverage. “I think we tend to do that in the news media, to go to one group and think that it represents a larger community,” said Tasker. “All the Indian Act band councils — all 20 of them in the area — supported this,” he reminded the audience.

So here we are, on the brink of a national crisis. The rule of law is breaking down, the economy is in disarray and any remaining confidence in our system is quickly vanishing.

Now is the time for strong leadership. We need our Prime Minister to step in and step up. He needs to show strength, make a decision and put this chaos to rest. 

But where is our Prime Minister? Has anyone seen him? 

Oh right, Trudeau is off on a vanity tour in Africa, meeting with local despots and bribing them into supporting Canada’s bid to receive a temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Instead of showing leadership at home, demonstrating that he has control in his own country when it comes to tough negotiations and conflict resolution, Trudeau is off touting his $2 billion foreign aid spending and making clear his preference to deal with foreign affairs rather than his own domestic duties.  

If Trudeau would rather booze and schmooze with world leaders, he should resign as PM and apply for a position in the UN. 

But if he wants to call himself Prime Minister of Canada, he needs to act like it. He needs to take control of this situation, intervene and enforce the laws of the land.