their children to attend public school classes that include teaching tolerance of gays and lesbians. Elmasry acknowledged that "Teaching tolerance at a young age is a must ... but you have to balance that with the appearance that you are not promoting certain values, in this case homosexual families." In February 2005, Elmasry wrote on the website IslamOnline.net that: "I believe that the responsibilities of Canadian Muslims are to emphasize education in their own community and also other faith communities that homosexuality is against the natural law of the creator, and that it is harmful to the body, the mind and the soul of the person." Robert Mugabe In July 2008, writing in an op-ed for the Montreal Gazette, Elmasry called Robert Mugabe "clumsy" but "no worse than many leaders in the developing world" and questioned: "Why so did many Western media outlets, including Canadian ones, send their own correspondents to cover an election in a poor faraway African country of about 13-million black people? The answer is that Mugabe is hated by the British now as he was hated in 1980 when he was elected the first president of free Zimbabwe, after 90 years of British colonization under the name of Rhodesia." Elmasry praised Mugabe for "trying to implement a land reform; to redistribute the land of about 5,000 white farmers to his country's poor black people" and argued that the collapse of Zimbabwe's economy and the rampant inflation are the result of Western sanctions and not because of Mugabe's land seizures. Elmasy criticized the Western media for not reporting that "Mugabe was and still is popular especially in the rural areas; his land reform has won him support among his own people." Father Raymond J. de Souza criticized Elmasry for this op-ed, writing that Mugabe is "a man so isolated that even his fellow African dictators have distanced themselves from him". De Souza also wrote that "If he [Elmasry] did not represent himself as Canada's head professional Muslim, Mr. Elmasry's celebration of Mr. Mugabe would have been too incredible to print." Omar Khadr In July 2008, Elmasry wrote that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is "playing politics" and remains indifferent to Omar Khadr's incarceration at Guantanamo Bay prisoner because Harper had calculated that refusing to press Washington for Khadr's return would score him "political points". Elmasry further stated that "This is where a leader comes in to say,