The Death of a Soldier
22nd October 2015
Mark Steyn reminds us of some inconvenient truth.
The photograph at right shows Corporal Nathan Cirillo of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders (the Princess Louise’s) on the last weekend of his life. Megan Underwood and her friend (standing next to the corporal) were visiting Ottawa from California and, passing the Cenotaph, asked if they could have their picture taken with the “very handsome guard”.
Corporal Cirillo died a few days later – October 22nd 2014, one year ago today. A man who wore the uniform of his regiment with pride, he might have expected to stare death in the face in Afghanistan or some other thankless piece of barbarous sod. Instead, he was gunned down on Wellington Street by Michael Zehaf-Bibeau.
Zehaf-Bibeau was born in Quebec as Michael Joseph Hall and was a recent “revert” to Islam – as was Martin Couture-Rouleau, the killer of Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent of the Royal Military College in St Jean-sur-Richelieu a couple of days earlier, and the killers of Drummer Lee Rigby on the streets of South London. Yet, even by the standards of the booming new category of “recent Muslim converts”, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was a prime specimen. In a detail almost too absurd, the Ottawa jihadist turned out to be the son of Susan Bibeau, the Deputy Chairperson of the Immigration Division of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board. Her (now ex-)husband was a “Libyan businessman”.