Alleged terrorist Time Canada's Newsmaker of the Year

CFP ^ | December 23, 2004 | Arthur Weinreb

[MikeEdwards]

The Canadian edition of Time Magazine has chosen Syrian born Maher Arar as its Newsmaker of the Year. The Ottawa Ontario resident landed at JFK International Airport in New York in September 2002 after returning from Tunisia where his wife has family. The Canadian citizen was detained in New York and then shipped off to his native Syria where he was detained and tortured for over a year before being released.

After returning to Canada, Arar chose not to blend into the woodwork but forced the Canadian government to hold an inquiry into his arrest and detention and to examine the sharing of information between Canada and other countries.

Arar’s choice for Newsmaker of the Year was so politically correct. And so typically Canadian.

Time Canada used Arar to propound the theory, so popular in this country, that the United States is responsible for all of the world’s problems. As stated in the article, "Arar’s case points to the risks inherent in America’s dominant role in the post-9/11 world." If radical Islamists that fly planes into buildings and blow up nightclubs are somehow even a tiny bit responsible for the present state of the world, Time Canada didn’t think that it was important enough to mention. . . . .

[Ashamed Canadian]

Bleh. The left will never wake up to the truth.

[Bluegrass Conservative]

I've never understood why people criticize Time for sometimes picking horrible people as the "Person of the Year" or the "Newsmaker of the Year". This isn't the Nobel Prize. It's a pick that is based on what person made the biggest impact on the news or world that year. Sometimes that is a politician (George W. Bush), sometimes it is a great person (Mother Teresa), sometimes it is a horrible person (Adolf Hitler). But no one can deny that these people had a lasting impact on the year they were chosen.