board77

Alright I thought I would have this big flowery post to introduce this interesting news piece, played on the CBC last night. (I was actually going to post this last night but I fell asleep). Basically many people are blaming immigration and multiculturalism as the cause for home grown terrorism. (For those who don't know 17 men and boys were arrested on terrorism related charges in Toronto, all of them were born in Canada or came here at an extremely young age).

The CBC did a piece on this and the reporter went to England and the Netherlands and interviewed quite a few people on the changing immigration and intergration policy toward Muslims in Europe.

I would very much like to discuss it since I have concerns on where Canada is going and I think this piece crystalized things for me.

http://www.cbc.ca/national/ ,
click on "watch the National news online" . Once it starts go to time code 25:00. Real Player required. it's about 30 minutes.

I'll just post a few thoughts here since I don't want to colour too many peoples ideas news piece. I like that they interviewed politicians, average people in towns and some Muslims for this piece. That's it for now.


I would highly recomend watching this today as the newscast gets changed sometime after 11:30pm Eastern time. If it gets posted somewhere else on the CBC site after that I will change the link. (Also if you want to send the CBC a comment I am sure they would appreciate it.)

I would like to have posted something like this for TORC but unfortunately there are 3 seconds of a TOS violation. (I'll see if I can email the CBC on that).

EDIT to fix spelling and gee this was a big flowery post after all.
X-posted with HOF.

The London bombers were all the children of Muslim immigrants as well, as were the Paris rioters, the Lebanese gangs that caused trouble in Sydney, and IIRC the Spanish train bombers and the killers of Theo van Gough. I’ve read that there are serious issues with this particular group in Europe, although I have to be careful with my sources here. From my personal experiences with the local Muslim community they’ve been quite OK.

Still, this is a topic that must be bought up and discussed IMHO.

As I think this topic is worth pursuing, I’ll pose a question.

Are communities of unintegrated immigrants a problem to the host country?

In Belgium the small-crime rate (theft, violence etc) amongst immigrants (/muslims) is significantly higher than for the autochthonous population, but I have no figures here to prove it

I think there is indeed some racism and discrimination, but on the other hand they also abuse this to rectify their deeds, I read some interviews with young muslim criminals that became drugs dealers etc, and they said things like they had been searching for a normal job, but got rejected a few times (5 or so) because of their colour so they gave up. To be honest, I have been looking for a new job for the past months now as well, and got rejected more than the double of that number, usually without even getting any reply, but I cant blame my colour for it
Many of them are school-drop outs as well, I guess its normal u only can get the dirty jobs that noone wants, when you quit school at 14 or 15 without any diplome.
So, I think they should stop behaving like victims, if you want to reach something you must work for it cuz u wont get it for free, and that also counts for white people (although many of them (the immigrants) somehow seem to think we dont have to work and study hard to get something)
But as said, I cant deny they probably are discriminated a bit, but thats also a negative spiral because if they keep on playing the victim and use that as a justification for bad things, they will even get a worse name and be treated worse.

This post is only about the (hopefully) minority of migrants that do bad things. I am aware that most of them are nice people, as most of my colleagues here are from Morocco and they're all nice people
Sadly though the bad guys give them all a bad name, so they should condemn this behaviour from the inside of their community and give a sign that they also dont want such excesses

Very good question I think though, what would count as intergrated? Just according to my definition I don't think anyone who hasn't made some kind of effort to learn the language or learn the way things are done. I know it happens, but I haven't been confronted with it.
No community i know of (in the Greater Toronto Area) can totally work in a vacuum without other people coming in. For example, China town. They took a major hit when Sars hit Toronto. There is the Danforth area which is greek I think. Both these areas depend somewhat on "outsiders" to come in a spend money.

What I find sort of disturbing in the news video is that both sides seems to deseire an exclusivity or have their own 'turf'. Only certain type of people are 'allowed' into 'their' area. I personally have not witnessed that here.