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Instead, it reads like a justification for jihad — the story of a victim whose parents pushed him towards fundamentalist Islam despite his desire to smoke pot and be a normal Canadian teenager.

He rambles on for 17 pages about his interest in drugs and his parent’s attempts to impose their religion upon him.

“My parents forced me to enrole (sic) in an Islamic school, I wasn’t Muslim and didn’t identify as Muslim, but it was better than Kuwait,” he wrote. It was at this Islamic school in Canada, he says, that he “realized Islam would fix all the problems in society or the world in general.”

He said he began to then reject “the rule of the people (or so called democracy and freedom)” and started down the path towards jihad.

El-Bahnasawy provides a propaganda-laden version of global affairs, where “the Jews and Christians” refuse to follow Islam, the Americans engage in a one-way war against Muslims and the Western media unfairly portrays ISIS as “barbaric” and “terrorists.”

This is what led him to “military jihad,” he says.

El-Bahnasawy’s story includes complaints about how he was treated in U.S. custody, and how sad he felt when American officers called him “wannabe ISIS.”

He finished his letter by stating his hope that Islam will govern the world, and encourages his judge to read the Qu’ran and convert to Islam. (“I hope to see you as a Muslim someday,” he writes.)

Meanwhile, his lawyers want us to believe that he is worthy of a second chance. A support letter written to the judge states that his family will help him to “be rehabilitated to be a productive member of society.” They sure didn’t do that the first time around.