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Photo by Twitter/The Boyle Family

But what the heck, let’s think the best of the Boyles. Sunny ways, etc. The best still involves the unpleasant matter of Joshua’s short-lived marriage to none other than Zaynab Khadr — daughter of the late Ahmed Khadr, the Egyptian-Canadian al-Qaida financier for whom Jean Chrétien famously went to bat when he was detained in Pakistan.

Longtime National Post readers may think of me as a bleeding heart on the question of Zaynab’s younger brother Omar. In my view he was a child soldier, a victim of America’s post/9-11 repudiation of due process and of the Canadian government’s complicity in that, which was enabled by Canadians’ bloody-minded glee in seeing anyone named Khadr locked up. I think he deserved his $10 million payout.

That doesn’t mean I would invite the guy to my office for tea and cake and smiley photos — though I’d much rather break bread with Omar than with Zaynab. Her al-Qaida bona fides, her legendary “why shouldn’t they feel it once in a while?” view on the 9/11 attacks, were firmly on the record by the time she married Boyle in 2009, at which point he became a de facto Khadr family spokesperson. Less than a decade later, there he was hamming it up in the PMO.

It’s just a bizarre misstep. Politically, it could be a gift to the Tories: before the Bill Morneau schmozzle came along, they had intended to make the fall session all about the Khadr payout. Here’s an opportunity to revive it. And here’s an opportunity to question Trudeau’s judgment when it comes to simple matters of right and wrong.

It’s a stretch, sure — but all Canadian politics is a stretch, and the Trudeau government has always struggled when discussing what to do with the world’s bad guys. They promised a peacekeeping mission for reasons unclear, then all but abandoned the idea after stringing the UN along for ages. They never managed to explain coherently why we withdrew the fighter jets from the mission against ISIL. Their stated focus on deradicalizing and reintegrating any returning ISIL fighters is broadly speaking the right one, I think — but the vast majority of Canadians will disagree, and the force of the Liberals’ progressive self-righteousness will not change their minds.