Imagine The Intolerable

Imagine that your family lives with the dread knowledge that their husband, son and father became the target of a terrorist attack. He was a loving son, husband and father, a marine engineer, a specialist whose field of endeavour brought him to the attention of the United Nations, and he was responding to an invitation by the U.S. government to assist them in an environmental venture, travelling from Israel where he lived, when the attack by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine took place at a stopover in Greece.

The terrorists threw grenades at the Boeing 707, shooting 83 rounds at the jetliner. Leon Shirdan had obligingly exchanged seats with a five-year-old just moments earlier, at the request of the child's parents who wanted their child to be able to sit closer to them on the plane. Leon Shirdan was the the only person killed during that attack. The two attackers, one of whom was named Mahmoud Mohammad Isa Mohammad, had arrived in Athens from Beirut to fulfill their mission to attack the El Al plane. They were arrested by Greek police, a trial held, and they were sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Two years into his prison sentence, Mahmoud Mohammad was released from prison. Other Palestinian terrorists had hijacked another airliner, threatening to kill everyone on board unless the two prisoners in Greece were released. They were, and Mahmoud Mohammad went to Spain and from there later applied to emigrate to Canada, without disclosing details of his background, presenting himself as a legitimate emigrant, along with his wife and two daughters.  Almost thirty years later the Government of Canada finally succeeded in deporting him back to Lebanon, after trying fruitlessly since 1987.

The man who posed as an ordinary person anxious to escape the uncertainty and violence of the Middle East, preferring to live in Canada as a place of refuge where he and his family could live their ordinary lives, informed Canadian authorities that he had left his interest in terrorist activities long behind him, once his past activities had come to the attention of the authorities. Nothing, however, expunges the fact that he murdered an innocent man through the commission of a terrorist act, and was able to live with his family under circumstances that were unreflective of his past.

Another family moved to Canada, to escape the uncertainties of life in the Middle East. The mother, wife and child of the murdered Leon Shirdan chose to leave Israel and to emigrate to Canada. Leaving behind the dread memories of the never-ending conflict and uncertainties that had led to the terrorist-inspired death of their son, husband, father. And then, a year after moving to Canada, they discovered that the man who had murdered the person they mourned was living an hour's drive away in a nearby Ontario town.

For them Mohammad's removal from Canada provided much relief,  after a long and elaborate series of legal actions and desperate appeals hoping to overturn the government's intention to deport him as a criminal, finally succeeded. The Shirdan family now has some level of closure. The decades of living with the haunting realization that the man who had murdered their loved one had chosen to migrate with his family to the very same destination that they themselves had done, has now seen closure, with his removal.

In a sense, a kind of Canadian justice has atoned for the indifference of fate that allowed a cold-blooded murderer to live a normal life with his family as though he had committed no offence against humanity. And although the Shirdan family has reason to feel bitter about the murder that occurred in 1968 and the circumstances that intervened allowing the murderer to escape justice, they may now perhaps take comfort in the fact that Mahmoud Mohammad's long fight to evade deportation finally was eclipsed by justice prevailing.

In a way, this event reflects what occurred after the Second World War, when the horrors of the Holocaust became public and people realized the enormity of the crimes against humanity that took place under the feverishly anti-Semitic auspices of the Third Reich. Jews who had emigrated to Canada after the war discovered on occasion that they could recognize faces that passed them on the street that were familiar to them. The survivors of the death camps saw to their horror the faces of former Nazi guards who had ensured they were unable to escape the dread consequences of being a Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe.

For all too many years, successive governments in Canada either took no notice of rumours of the presence of Nazi war criminals living out the rest of their natural lives in peace, far from the scene of their complicity in genocide, or feeble attempts were made eventually and the public by and large tended to deplore the harassment of old people who were once rabid Jew-killers, but who had lived normal lives in Canada, impressing their neighbours with their presence as "nice" people.