There is way too much in the news this week. The crazies
have come out in full force. It is a domino effect I think. Bundy started it,
Sterling was pushed in, the KKK are always on the fringes waiting for their
media moment. Poor Chicago. Almost a given to be in the news for the insane
amount of ignorance going on in the South Side and the elite wild of suburbia.
This week I read the following story and was moved to the
point of immobility. After reading, I sat at my computer for probably 15
minutes. Thinking. Processing.
This story was deep.
So deep, I am not going to paraphrase it for you. You should
grab yourself a cup of tea and a pastry and take 15 minutes to read this story.
It’s below.
If I were a professor in this situation, I don’t know what
choice I would make. To educate or not educate a man, who as a young boy had
been indoctrinated into the darkest part of terrorism under Bin Laden rule. A
15-year old boy who killed mercilessly was captured by American military before
being imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. Was he old enough to know better? Would any
child-soldier?
If this professor was educating inmates at an American
prison, I don’t believe she would have been targeted the way she was. If she
was working to educate prisoners in her own country (Canada), I don’t believe
she would have been judged so deeply. She would have been hailed as a hero,
given accolades, encouraged to teach others and share her methods.
Because she was trying to educate a terrorist who had
spilled American blood, I think she was unfairly persecuted. It is incredible
that she was supported by most of her faculty peers, students and president. It is shameful that the community continues
to scorn her without knowing the full story.
Who are we supposed to educate? Who is worthy of redemption?
Are we rehabilitating or punishing? And what do we do with our own inmates,
guilty of heinous crimes and evil doings?
How do you measure someone’s ability to repent? And who is capable of
doing so?
The comment that sticks with me most was from the
prisoner/student:
"Children’s heart are like
sponges that will abserb what is around it, like wet cement soft until it’s
sculptured in a certain way," he wrote, "a child soul is a sacred
dough that must be shaped in a holy way, for there is no good fruit in a bad
earth or tree." - See more at: http://0-chronicle.com.innopac.library.unr.edu/article/The-Professorthe-Prisoner/146183/#sthash.DKkuRlEg.dpuf
Many of the comments on the article suggest the professor
was manipulated and duped. She might have been. If she was, she can look back
and know that she tried to make a difference and do the right thing. Her
conscious is clear and her heart is clean. What scares me about the vehemence
of the manipulation accusation is that it makes me believe there are people who
would choose to do nothing for fear of being manipulated. They would toss their
humanity aside, opting for swift judgment instead of compassion.
I say to my
soon-to-be-five-year-old “Time, place, and manner” when she is doing something
she ought not to be in that moment. There is a time, place, and manner for
compassion and punishment, anger and peace. I think this professor chose a time
to be compassionate and educate versus condemn. I don’t know if I would do the
same. The lines are blurred for me, between what is wrong and what is right. I
do believe we should have options for some prisoners in the American penal
system to be educated and become contributing members to society. A low level,
non-violent offender is very different from a terrorist, but I can’t say with
certainty what’s in a person’s heart or mind. Can you?
Was she right to pull resources, forming a liberal-based
education and a bevy of classes for this one prisoner? I don’t know if there is
an answer to that. I do think if educators put half the time and resources into
programs the way she did for this one person, our education system would be
incredible.
*And when I say liberal-based, I am not referring to a
political definition. I am referring to the origins of a liberal arts
education, the reason colleges were created. There is an awesome definition and
breakdown of terms here: https://www.aacu.org/leap/what_is_liberal_education.cfm
The Professor and the Prisoner
A scholar’s beliefs took her from Canada to Guantanamo and, she says,
closer to the spirit of a liberal education.
Jason Franson
Arlette Zinck, an associate professor of English at King’s U.
College, in Alberta, heard a pessimistic talk about Omar Khadr’s detention in
2008. “We don’t do hopeless,” she remembers thinking
at the time.
By Ian Wilhelm
Edmonton, Alberta
One afternoon in September 2008, students at
King’s University College here filled every available seat in a lecture hall,
occupied the aisles, and fanned out against the wall. A guest speaker had them
spellbound with the story of Omar A. Khadr.
The speaker, a human-rights lawyer from Scotland named Dennis Edney, told
the students at this small Christian college how the Toronto-born Mr. Khadr had
been captured at the age of 15 in Afghanistan by the U.S. military and was
being held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Years of living in Edmonton
hadn’t scrubbed away the lawyer’s Scottish brogue, nor had he adopted
Canadians’ preference for polite talk. The young man stood no chance of
receiving justice, he said bluntly. It was hopeless.
From near the front of the hall, that cold assessment hit Arlette Zinck in
the gut. "We don’t do hopeless," thought Ms. Zinck, an associate
professor of English.
A short time later, although she was not scheduled to speak, she felt moved
to stand up before the entire college. Ms. Zinck, slim with straight, auburn
hair that frames her face, wasn’t exactly sure what she would say. It turned
out to be a simple message.
"You’ve heard a passionate advocate. You’ve heard one story. You never
leave it at one story. Go out and learn everything you can," Ms. Zinck 51,
recalls telling the students. "If at the end of that you’re still wanting
to do something, then know that we’re not going to leave that with you; we’re
going to walk beside you."
It was a pledge. Perhaps similar to one professors make every day when they
see passion in their students’ eyes. But the commitment Ms. Zinck made that
afternoon would eventually give her an unlikely new student: Omar Khadr
himself. It would take her far from Canada and, some would argue, far from the
proper role of an academic.
Child soldier. Murderer. Torture victim.
Terrorist.
Omar Ahmed Khadr has been called many things since his capture by U.S.
Special Operations forces on July 27, 2002.
After a firefight and an airstrike on a compound seven miles from Khost, in
eastern Afghanistan, Mr. Khadr was found in the dirt and rubble, seriously
wounded. During the skirmish, Army Sgt. First Class Christopher J. Speer, a
Delta Force medic, had been killed by a grenade, purportedly thrown by Mr.
Khadr.
A few months after his capture, the U.S. military moved him to Naval Station
Guantanamo Bay. During Mr. Khadr’s time in custody, his military defense
lawyers said he had been beaten by interrogators and made to endure other
abuses—accusations that a judge rejected.
Allegations of his mistreatment provoked outrage, but the key controversy in
the Khadr case was his age; at 15 he was one of the youngest captives held at
the prison in Guantánamo.
Although military prosecutors call Mr. Khadr a hardened terrorist, Mr.
Edney, who works pro bono for Mr. Khadr’s family, says the detainee was but a
boy sent into battle by a father who had indoctrinated him in radical Islam.
During Mr. Khadr’s youth, his family moved back and forth between Canada and
Pakistan, where his father ran various charitable projects for Afghan refugees.
The Khadrs eventually settled in Afghanistan, where the father formed ties with
Osama bin Laden. In the summer following the September 11, 2001, attacks and
the U.S. military response in Afghanistan, Omar Khadr joined a group of
militants who wanted him to work as an interpreter. The U.S. military said he
received "basic training" at that time, learning how to use grenades,
rifles, and other weapons. Not long after leaving his family, he found himself
in the deadly firefight in Khost.
In Canada, Mr. Khadr’s case sharply divided the country. Many considered his
imprisonment a necessary part of America’s war on terrorism. Critics of the
Canadian government said it should have done more to repatriate him and to
speak out against the United States’ detainment of terrorism suspects in
Guantánamo.
The government’s silence, wrote Michelle Shephard, a Canadian reporter, in
her 2008 book,
Guantanamo’s Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr,
meant "a Canadian teenager has been interrogated, abused, and jailed in
conditions worse than those afforded convicted rapists and murderers. Canada
has lost the moral high ground we once enjoyed."
In the weeks following Mr. Edney’s visit to
King’s University College, Arlette Zinck noticed an energy building on the
campus of 600 students.
A senior stopped her in the hall one day, breathlessly telling her he had
been reading documents about the Khadr case.
Another day, she discovered students in the atrium ironing an image of Mr.
Khadr’s young face onto white T-shirts for a silent protest of his treatment.
Then a handful of students sought out Ms. Zinck and made an appeal: "We
want to send him a letter."
A commitment to social activism runs strong through the private Christian
college, but Ms. Zinck was surprised by how passionate the students were. She
liked the idea of a letter, remembering Matthew 25:36, which urges the faithful
to "visit" the imprisoned.
After an attempt to send postcards to Mr. Khadr via the U.S. Judge Advocate
General’s Corps failed, Mr. Edney offered to help. On his next trip to
Guantánamo, he would take letters directly to Mr. Khadr.
Ms. Zinck’s first letter was short. She introduced herself and her family.
She invited Mr. Khadr to come and visit one day, and included pictures of her
two children—her daughter Arielle on a horse and her son Colin playing ice
hockey.
The goal was simply to let Mr. Khadr know that people back in his home
country were concerned about his welfare.
She handed the letters to Mr. Edney. And she waited.
Before Mr. Edney’s talk on campus, Ms. Zinck had read only the occasional
newspaper article about the Khadr case. Her passions are not political but
literary.
In the classroom she has a maternal quality as she gently prods her students
to think deeply about a text. She speaks with a thoughtful, quiet confidence,
has a self-deprecating sense of humor, and as her colleagues at King’s note, is
fiercely determined when she sets her mind to a task.
Her scholarship centers on the writing of John Bunyan, the 17th-century
preacher who wrote
The Pilgrim’s Progress. It tells of a lost soul who
must overcome suffering and trials to make his way to the "Celestial
City."
Ms. Zinck dislikes drawing connections between her scholarly focus and her
interest in helping Omar Khadr. But Bunyan is widely believed to have started
writing
Pilgrim’s Progress while in prison. Ms. Zinck would seem to
draw on that fact one day to give Mr. Khadr hope. "Some of the world’s
most important stories have been written by men in prison," she would tell
him.
His handwriting was shaky; words were misspelled,
and the grammar at times incorrect.
But the short letter, dated October 23, 2008, spoke volumes.
Dear Arlette:
I got you letter and picture and was very
serprised by them. So thank you very much for them i’m in your debt and what
you showed me is more than what i expected and that you are true friend and as
they say: The true friend is not in the time of ease but in the time of hard
ship. So again thank you and i’m honored to visit you when i come back.
Stay will with best wishes
Your truly
Omar A Khadr
From that initial exchange, a correspondence blossomed. As Mr. Edney
prepared for his trips south, which he took several times a year, Ms. Zinck
would hand him a packet of letters, including hers. When he returned, it was
often with a letter from his client.
Mr. Khadr’s responses were usually short, expressing deep thanks for the
attention from the outside world. And while his formal education had stopped at
eighth grade, his words revealed an articulate, even poetic, young man.
"Your letters are like candles very bright in my hardship and
darkness," he wrote to Ms. Zinck on January 22, 2009. "We hold on the
hope in our hearts and the love from others to us, and that keeps us going till
we all reach our happiness."
That summer, Mr. Khadr wrote that her words were worth more than gold
because words "keep you going in such hardship."
In a letter dated that fall, Ms. Zinck responded. "Omar, don’t feel
discouraged about the time you are spending in Guantanamo right now. Live it
fully. Be kind to those around you. Know there are many of us here at home who
are thinking about you. Right now you have time to read slowly and think
deeply. Believe it or not this is a blessing if you will see it as such."
"Be a good student of the lessons that life is presenting to you right
at this moment," she wrote near the end of the letter. "They are
precious, uniquely yours and irreplaceable."
Respectful of Mr. Khadr’s Muslim beliefs, Ms. Zinck, a practicing
Episcopalian, never tried to teach him about Christianity, let alone convert
him. But she did not refrain from expressing her own faith. "Whenever you
are lonesome, remember you have many friends who keep you in their
prayers," she wrote. "Each morning at 9 o’clock, I include you in
mine."
More frequently, she expressed her faith in the power of education.
"I know you are likely busy and preoccupied these days, but I hope you
have had time to do some reading," she wrote on February 5, 2010.
"Reading provides an education that no school can provide."
In that same letter, encouraged by Mr. Edney, she asked Mr. Khadr to write a
one-page book report.
Mr. Khadr responded, telling her what books he was reading:
Great
Expectations, the Twilight series,
Three Cups of Tea, a John
Grisham novel, and
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. He chose
to write about that last one, the nonfiction account of a Sierra Leone
teenager’s experience fighting in his country’s civil war and his
rehabilitation from the horrors he witnessed and committed.
His report was a methodical summary of the book, each of his points
numbered, one through seven. But his conclusion hinted at the demons in his
life:
"Children’s heart are like sponges that will abserb what is around it,
like wet cement soft until it’s sculptured in a certain way," he wrote,
"a child soul is a sacred dough that must be shaped in a holy way, for
there is no good fruit in a bad earth or tree."
In a letter he included with the essay, for the first time, he signed off as
"Your … future student."
Really, though, Ms. Zinck had already become his teacher.
During the exchange of letters, Mr. Khadr wrote
nothing about the legal roller coaster he was on. After several years of
uncertainty over how to prosecute detainees, in 2007 the U.S. government
charged Mr. Khadr with murder in violation of the law of war, attempted murder
in violation of the law of war, conspiracy, providing material support for
terrorism, and spying.
Military-court proceedings were finally coming to a close by the fall of
2010, eight years after his imprisonment, and a military jury would decide his
fate. At Mr. Edney’s suggestion, the Army lawyer who served as Mr. Khadr’s
counsel asked Ms. Zinck to testify at his trial, to tell the jurors about his
educational potential. She agreed.
For Ms. Zinck, the relationship had been its own roller coaster. She had not
expected to develop the bond she had with Mr. Khadr, and as word spread about
her work with him and her plans to testify, the news media put an uncomfortable
spotlight on King’s University College.
In August, in a filing to the military commission, Mr. Khadr’s defense team
said Ms. Zinck would testify that the college was willing to admit Mr. Khadr
"immediately." Ms. Zinck, who learned of the filing from a reporter
with
The Globe and Mail, denied that the promise had been made. Other
erroneous reports said King’s had offered Mr. Khadr a scholarship or a tuition
waiver.
J. Harry Fernhout, the university’s president at the time, began to hear a
steady drumbeat of questions that grew louder as Ms. Zinck’s court date neared.
The university said it took no official position on the Khadr case and
emphasized that Ms. Zinck was doing Christian charity on a purely volunteer
basis, not as an official project of King’s.
Most but not all faculty members and students were supportive of her. Some
donors complained. In phone calls, emails, and the occasional home visit, Mr.
Fernhout tried to explain the situation to them. A few balked and eventually
stopped supporting the institution. (He declined to say how much the
controversy cost King’s in financial support.)
Ms. Zinck even received a pair of anonymous letters containing threats. She
declines to discuss the details, but the letters were worrisome enough that Mr.
Fernhout turned them over to the police.
He says the Khadr case was the most divisive issue he ever had to deal with
as a university president. Yet he supported Ms. Zinck. It was only after a long
talk with the president that she agreed to appear at Mr. Khadr’s trial.
Their discussion had been reassuring. But on October 26, 2010, as Ms. Zinck
traveled from Edmonton to Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, and from there
on a charter plane to Guantánamo, she still had her doubts.
She had never met Mr. Khadr in person. Her plan was to tell the jury about
the young man she had found in the five letters he sent her over two years: the
thoughtful student, the eloquent soul. And just maybe, prod the jurors to
question the narrative they had heard about him.
It was as if Mr. Khadr was a character in a novel, she thought, and the jury
a class of students meant to interpret his actions and motivations. "And
I’m a lit scholar," she thought. "I teach people how to ask
intelligent questions about a figure that you meet in a text."
Yet the doubts lingered. What was an English professor from Canada doing in
a trial like this? What chance did she have of changing a single juror’s mind?
As she said later, "I knew I was going to go down to be comic relief in
a very dark bit of political theater."
Two days after arriving in Cuba and only hours
before she was to testify, Ms. Zinck was taken to an old, squat, two-story
airport building with a traffic-control tower jutting from its top. It was
here, in an area known as Camp Justice, where the military commissions were
held. Inside the building, a member of Mr. Khadr’s defense team handed her a
stack of papers; it didn’t take her long to figure out what it was: the
confession of prisoner 0766, Omar Ahmed Khadr.
As part of a deal signed before her arrival, Mr. Khadr had pleaded guilty to
all of the charges against him, making him the youngest war criminal in modern
history. At the end of the documents was Mr. Khadr’s signature, in the same
uneven writing as he signed his letters to her.
Ms. Zinck says she didn’t feel disappointment or outrage at Mr. Khadr. She
says she wasn’t even surprised. To her, it was just the latest sign that the
system had failed him.
She still wanted to testify. The jury was unaware of all aspects of the deal
and would in part determine his sentence. And though it might have little
impact on the outcome, she wanted to show Mr. Khadr that the outside world had
not abandoned him.
At about a quarter to three, in a canary-yellow jacket, she took the stand.
She was scared but "on," reminded of the moments before she defended
her Ph.D. dissertation. About 50 people, mostly military personnel, occupied
the windowless room. And there, a few feet away, sat her student. Mr. Khadr
wore a dark suit, and a trim beard covered his face. At 24 years old, he was no
longer the slight boy who had been captured in Afghanistan.
They exchanged a short nod of hello and a smile.
Ms. Zinck settled into the witness chair. Hours earlier Tabitha Speer, widow
of the Army medic whom Mr. Khadr had now admitted killing, sat in the same
chair, talking about the life of her late husband. At one point, she had spoken
directly to Mr. Khadr, saying he had stolen a father from her two children.
Now, the jury heard a different story.
Prompted by questions from Lt. Col. Jon S. Jackson, Mr. Khadr’s Army defense
lawyer, Ms. Zinck told the court about her background, how her relationship
with Mr. Khadr developed, and the person she had grown to know.
"What’s your analysis of Omar’s writing of what you’ve seen?"
asked Lt. Col. Jackson.
Ms. Zinck emphasized his good character, calling him courteous, with a
generous spirit: "He is remarkably outward focused," she said.
"He will always ask what’s happening to the people that he’s writing
to."
"And, of course, I mean I see an intelligent young man," she
added. "A man who’s thoughtful and has a good vocabulary and capacity to
express himself." If he ever wanted to apply to King’s, she said she would
write his recommendation.
The prosecution lawyer, a captain whose name has been redacted from the
court transcript, seized on that statement.
Would admissions officers "consider the whole Omar, which would be the
fact that he admitted that he murdered someone?" he asked.
Yes, said Ms. Zinck.
"They’ll consider the fact that he admitted that he attempted to murder
as many Americans as he possibly could?"
Yes, she repeated.
"That he wanted to murder for money?"
Yes.
He hammered on the fact that Ms. Zinck was not speaking on behalf of King’s
or everyone at King’s. Again and again, he made the point that the prisoner
might not get accepted if he applied.
"If I’m a betting woman," she answered at one point, "odds
are good."
The prosecutor brought up foul language and crass names Mr. Khadr had called
guards and military officers, asking: Is that thoughtful? Is that courteous?
No, Ms. Zinck said. But she had two teenagers at home and heard that
language under much less "difficult circumstances."
When the prosecutor had finished, Lt. Col. Jackson asked whether, if Omar
Khadr applied to King’s as a convicted war criminal, it would be taken into
account that he was 15 at the time of the crimes. Yes, replied Ms. Zinck, it
would. And then she gave voice to what many had long argued was the crux of the
case:
"We treat our children differently before the law, because we understand
that human beings are mutable and that it is our responsibility to protect
them, and particularly our responsibility to give them opportunity to reform,
right, to start again."
Three days later, the jury sentenced Mr. Khadr to 40 years in prison. Ms. Zinck’s
words had apparently fallen on deaf ears. Perhaps her testimony meant something
to Mr. Khadr; it’s hard to know. Mr. Edney declined to make him available for
an interview.
But also sitting in the courtroom during her testimony was Katherine Porterfield,
a child psychologist who works with child soldiers and victims of torture. In
her mind, the professor’s contribution was immeasurable.
"To me," Ms. Porterfield says, "the greatest truth that was
spoken at that entire hearing came out of Arlette Zinck’s mouth."
As part of his plea deal, Mr. Khadr’s sentence
was reduced to eight years. And after one more year in Guantánamo, Canada would
consider allowing him to be repatriated to serve the remainder of his time.
Exhausted and mentally drained, Ms. Zinck cried on the plane ride home, but
she felt hopeful that Mr. Khadr’s life was entering a new phase.
Lt. Col. Jackson had made her an offer: While Mr. Khadr remains in
Guantánamo, can you develop a correspondence course for him?
Ms. Zinck relished the idea—and made it a team effort.
She brought together a multidisciplinary group of about 15 professors from
in and outside of King’s: a mathematician, a biologist, a historian, a
geographer, a religion scholar, and others.
They designed a curriculum based on books by Canadian authors set in
different parts of the country or exploring different cultures there, providing
Mr. Khadr with a virtual tour of a home he barely knew. He read
Who Has
Seen the Wind, a novel about life on the Canadian prairie, and
Obasan,
a story told through the eyes of a child about the internment of the Japanese
in Canada during World War II.
They wove in lessons about math, history, and geography with the reading.
For example, when he read a book that featured the Canadian Rockies, a physicist
at King’s designed a math lesson to teach Mr. Khadr how to measure the height
of a mountain using triangulation.
The lessons were intended to help sustain him during his final year in
Guantánamo, but he remained in limbo. In November 2011, when he was first
eligible to return to Canada, government leaders gave mixed messages as to
whether he would be moved.
As the months dragged on, his military lawyers sought to bolster the
correspondence lessons. So, for the second time in her life, Ms. Zinck was
asked to go to Guantánamo. In April and May 2012, she held what she called the
"spring session"—two visits lasting a few days each.
At Guantánamo, Ms. Zinck insisted on wearing a business suit, hose, and
heels despite the 90-degree heat—a wardrobe that sometimes drew quizzical looks
on the base. She wanted to dress as she would for classes at King’s.
In a small room at the base’s Camp Echo, with Mr. Khadr at a small, plastic
table, his ankles shackled to the floor, she taught practical lessons on essay
writing and reading critically. But it was also a freewheeling affair, with Ms.
Zinck recruiting others on the base to contribute brief seminars. A civilian
lawyer taught Mr. Khadr about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. With
Ms. Porterfield, the psychologist, Mr. Khadr read journal articles and
connected concepts in the psychology of trauma and resilience to his own life.
Ms. Porterfield says it felt a like graduate-level class.
For Ms. Zinck, the lessons for Mr. Khadr were a curriculum of "human flourishing,"
approaching a Platonic ideal of what education should be. Without the pressure
to transmit job skills or meet academic requirements, she and her colleagues
were free to teach to the whole person. And contrary to the criticisms that she
had no business giving lessons to a suspected terrorist, Ms. Zinck believes she
was acting in the true spirit of liberal education, with its power to change
lives.
"That’s ultimately what liberal arts and science education is all
about," she says. "It builds people."
Arlette Zinck takes a white binder from the
bottom shelf of a bookcase in her low-lit office at King’s. She places it on a
table and opens the cover.
Inside, preserved in plastic sleeves, are Mr. Khadr’s lesson plans and
completed tests. The professor turns the pages as if reminiscing over a family
photo album.
Someday she would like to give the assignments back to Mr. Khadr. Once he’s
free. Perhaps to serve as a reminder of how far he has come.
In September 2012, 10 years after he was captured—and almost four years to
the day from Mr. Edney’s talk at King’s University College—Mr. Khadr returned
to Canada.
The departure from Guantánamo was a long-sought victory, but it was not an
easy homecoming. For Ms. Zinck, the sad irony was that though Mr. Khadr was
closer than ever—held at a maximum-security prison in Ontario—she was cut off
from him. As a new prisoner, Mr. Khadr had been placed under evaluation, with
restricted communications privileges.
He was also a target for other inmates. Given his high profile, Ms. Zinck
feared he would be hurt, or worse.
The uncertainty took a toll, and the professor drew heavily on her Christian
beliefs. "Without my own vibrant, personal faith, the pain of caring in a
context where so, so, so many are ambivalent or opposed might be more than I
can bear," she says.
Indeed, many were against Mr. Khadr’s return.
One of them was Ezra Levant, a Canadian newspaper columnist, who wrote about
the case in his 2011 book,
The Enemy Within: Terror, Lies, and the
Whitewashing of Omar Khadr. In it, he lambasted Ms. Zinck as a key member
of Mr. Khadr’s "fan club," saying she had "led the charge in
turning her campus into a factory for Khadr groupies."
He
argued that sympathetic Canadians like Ms. Zinck had been duped by the savvy
Mr. Khadr.
Others have questioned whether she overlooked the hurt caused to Tabitha
Speer and her family. Ms. Zinck said she prays regularly for them.
"People are going to eventually meet this young man," she says,
"and they’re going to come to their own decisions about who he is."
Ultimately, her work did not hinge on whether Mr. Khadr did or did not do
what he was charged with. It was about restoring an individual to the larger
community.
"For us, it’s never been about guilt or innocence; we’re not
lawyers," she says of the team of educators she assembled. "It’s been
about the simple understanding that punishment plays some role in justice, but
if that’s all you’ve got, you haven’t got justice."
While the criticism has persisted, others have rallied to support her, with
some saying her involvement in a very public issue is all too rare these days
for academics.
David J. Goa, director of the University of Alberta’s Chester Ronning Centre
for the Study of Religion and Public Life, has contributed lessons on
Christianity, Islam, and secularism to Mr. Khadr. He says Ms. Zinck and King’s,
with its liberal-arts focus and Christian orientation, had entered an area
where most administrators and professors at larger, public universities would
be reluctant to go.
To Mr. Goa, Ms. Zinck is fulfilling one of a professor’s fundamental roles.
"One of the gifts of tenure," he says, "is precisely to give you
liberty to speak in the public square about things that are important and to
enhance the conversation about it."
"Integrity." Ms. Zinck says. "Who
has it? What does it look like?"
It is 9:30 a.m. on a sunny winter day at King’s, and the professor is
starting to rally her sleepy students into a conversation about
A Man for
All Seasons and the virtues—and drawbacks—of living a conscientious life.
She moves around the room, a small gold cross hanging from her neck, and
tries to get the 22 students to use the text and the decision of its main
character, Sir Thomas More, to reflect on their own lives. "What does
living with integrity look like?" she asks them.
The discussion continues, but one topic Ms. Zinck won’t bring up in the
classroom is Mr. Khadr. If a student asks about their relationship, she is
happy to discuss it, but outside of class.
In general, few ask. While some students at King’s remain engaged in the
Khadr case, those who were provoked by Mr. Edney’s remarks have all graduated.
Mr. Khadr’s case continues to receive attention from the news media, but
since his release from Guantánamo, it is not the same hot-button issue it once
was.
Today Mr. Khadr is imprisoned in a medium-security facility not far from
Edmonton and fighting his conviction, saying he signed the plea deal because it
was his only way out of Guantánamo.
Ms. Zinck was able to re-establish communication with him several months
after his return and now speaks with him often. Members of the team of
professors she organized visit Mr. Khadr regularly to tutor him, and other
prisoners have expressed interest in joining the classes.
He is about halfway to the credits needed to receive his high-school
diploma. He hopes to become a doctor. Enrollment at King’s someday remains a
possibility.
Looking back on it all, Ms. Zinck says, she never intended to become so
involved. "Look, I got up that morning in September 2008, and I went to
work. I sat in the audience and I listened because that was my job, and I
watched our students because that, too, was my job, and everything else has
fallen out from this."
And for all that Mr. Khadr has received from Ms. Zinck—the letters, the
lessons, the hope—she says the gifts have been returned in kind.
"In getting to know this young man, I have been privileged to have
observed embodied hope in a way that I have not been exposed to it
before," she says. "I have learned how to cope with fear, my own and
other people’s. I’ve learned the value of story and how engaging with narrative
can open windows and doors in the most isolating prison cells."
Letters from Omar Khadr quoted in this article were made public at his
trial. Arlette Zinck’s letters to Mr. Khadr first appeared in the Edmonton
Journal.
- See more at:
http://0-chronicle.com.innopac.library.unr.edu/article/The-Professorthe-Prisoner/146183/#sthash.M2x3Mc89.dpuf
