A resident of Edmonton, Canada, who was raised in a family with strong ties to Hamas has been ordered deported from Canada after an immigration panel found he served as an active member of the group during his teenage years, the Edmonton Journal reports.
But John Calvin, now 24, who has been in Canada since 2010 while claiming refugee status, says he expects to be killed if he is sent back to the Palestinian Authority-assigned territories.
Calvin said his renouncement of Hamas, his conversion to Christianity five years ago and the fact he is gay are all factors that will make him a target when he returns to his former home.
“For me, deportation is the equivalent of a death sentence,” Calvin, who does not use his real name, told the EdmontonJournal in an interview Sunday.
“If I am not killed by the (Palestinian) government, I will be killed by Hamas because I shamed them publicly, and if not them, then I will be killed by my family,” he warned.
Under Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, residency can be denied to anyone found to be a member of a terrorist organization, a label that has been applied to Hamas by Canada and other governments.
A December 19 decision of the Immigration Appeal Division found there was sufficient evidence to show Calvin was an active, willing participant in Hamas activities as a teenager, including numerous instances when he passed through Israeli checkpoints to deliver coded messages, and times when he shot at Israeli jeeps.
“In delivering these messages, I find the respondent made a significant, knowing and willing contribution to Hamas’s terrorist acts,” said the decision from appeal division member George Pemberton.
“I find that he possessed the requisite knowledge and mental capacity to make his own informed choices. He chose Hamas.”
At his hearing in July, Calvin testified that he was born in 1990 in Judea and Samaria, where his family lived in a large complex that had hiding places for fugitives and was often searched by the Israeli army for accused terrorists.
He said his maternal grandfather was one of the founders of Hamas and that five uncles remain senior members of the organization who have planned suicide bombings and made explosives.
From a young age, Calvin was indoctrinated into Hamas’s extremist world view.
He said he began passing messages for family members around age 13 and continued doing so for at least a year. But it was also around this time he began to question his family’s teachings, in part fuelled by his increased interactions with Israeli people “who did not seem anything like what I had been taught.”
By age 16, he said he was ready to break with his family, “but could not just come out and disavow what they stood for, because that would have been treason and I would have been shot immediately.”
At age 18 he did renounce Hamas and converted to Christianity a couple of years later, but he kept quiet about it until his family overheard him on the phone one night. Calvin said the news enraged his father, who tried to stab him before he managed to escape to a local church.
From there, he eventually escaped into Jordan and then made his way to Toronto through a scholarship to a bible college. That was followed by a stint in Three Hills, at the Prairie Bible Institute and then to Edmonton in 2012, where he has been surviving with odd jobs and help from friends.
Calvin said any “minor” transgressions as a young teenager should not be held against him now. When it came to passing messages, he said he didn’t know the contents of the notes and didn’t comprehend at the time that they might be used for terrorist activities.
He said he believed he was doing errands to help his family, rather than helping Hamas.
Calvin said he plans to appeal the deportation order to the Federal Court of Canada, a move that must be made by January 19.
It is unclear how long that process will take, though Calvin said he has been told it will be fairly quick.
“I don’t think I should be held accountable for decisions I made or did not make when I was 14. The punishment … is pretty harsh. I am not my family and I have done everything in my power since I was 14 to distance myself from them,” he told the Edmonton Journal.