Rosie Dimanno is on the front page of the Toronto Star today making our soldiers out to be bastards.

She is now, because of an unidentified Canadian soldier, a widow in Afghanistan, and there's no worse fate for a woman in this country.

"I don't have a husband! I have nobody to protect me! What am I to do?

"You say sorry? What does sorry mean to me? Will sorry feed my children?"

The father, Nazrat Ali, was shot and killed for coming too close to a checkpoint (without authorization to do so) in his taxi. I believe many of the details are still unclear at this time, but that doesn't stop Dimanno from all but weeping alongside the devastated widow and screaming for the head of the soldier that shot Ali.

Nasrat Ali, a poor Shiite who barely eked out an existence making tin pots and pans, had just been buried after his corpse was ritualistically washed by relatives. More than 1,000 mourners had attended the funeral at Amam Bargah mosque — the imam counselled against violence and retribution.Nasrat Ali's photograph, photocopied, has been posted throughout the mosque compound — a handsome man, clean-shaven in what looks like it might have been an official ID, perhaps something from a passport.

"Look, no beard," a relative points out. "Not Taliban, not Al Qaeda. Just Afghan."

Whether justifiable or not, a Canadian soldier has taken the life of what was palpably an innocent civilian, an Afghan who had returned to his country only three years ago after living for nearly two decades in neighbouring Iran. As Shiite exiles, the Ali family fled Soviet occupation, warlords, the Taliban, finally coming home after the U.S.-led coalition put a Pashtun leader in the presidential palace.

They thought it was safe now.

They were tragically wrong.

Oh come on! Yes, any loss of life is a tragedy, whether it's a Canadian life or an Afghani life. But Afghanistan is a war zone. People die every day. There are dozens of casualties every week - people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Things are no different in any war zone anywhere, ever. This is not front page news, even during a slow week. Dimanno's tone suggests she's sorry that the Canadian soldiers didn't torture him first, because then that would be a real story! Give us some Canadian Abu Graihb! We want our soldiers to be evil so that we have an excuse to hate them!

Ms. Dimanno, and the editors of the Toronto Star: Do you think our troops are evil? Do you want us to think that?

The regular readers of the Toronto Star are just the kind of weak, mush-minded people who would be sitting there nodding their heads and saying we shouldn't be fighting "George Bush's war" because we are "peacekeepers". If they had their way, we'd just wait until the terrorists took over Canada, and then they'd send our military out to plant flowers in the Al-Qaeda leaders' gardens.

Get ready for another two years of this drivel, till Dimanno can go back to reporting on Olympic Games. She was good at that.