Saturday, June 24, 2006

Multiculturalism works fine / Ottawa Citizen, 23 June 2006

http://digbig.com/4kpkn
Peter Beyer
"The suggestion is that this a problem of the failed integration of newcomers into our society, and above all that these young people are typical of a portion of our population that is dangerously caught between two contradictory worlds. As Robert Sibley put it in this newspaper ("Rethinking multiculturalism," June 10): "Western-born Muslims straddle a fault line. Their parents and community leaders want them to act according to the traditions of an Islamic society in which they have never lived. At the same time, they confront a secular society replete with all the lures of a hedonistic ethos they have been taught to despise." While this kind of argument may seem plausible and probably does describe the situation of some Muslim youths in Canada, perhaps even one or two of those arrested, it is also seriously flawed if applied to Canada's Muslim youth in general, a group that now arguably numbers more than 300,000. There is no crisis among second-generation Muslim Canadians; even the very religious tend to be integrated into society"