Boreal

Making It All Worthwhile

We need to step up efforts to stem Muslim youth radicalization

Sheema Khan, Globe and Mail, Aug. 14, 2016

Yes we need to, and it's urgent.

Sheema Khan is a semi-regular columnist and apologist at Canada's newspaper of record and the daily with the largest weekly readership.

Unfortunately, Ms. Khan, as she tends to do, even when making observations about which we can all agree, can't resist blaming the West for the "bad things" done in the name of her God and His Messenger.

I am a regular contributor to the comment section of  the Globe and Mail. More often than not my remarks about Islam will not make it pass their censor, especially if I offer a relevant, if notorious verse of the Koran and/or a saying of Muhammad.

Perhaps surprisingly, my response to Ms. Khan's accusation that it is mostly our fault if young people are attracted to terrorism, they let pass.

My comment:

Since you made a reference to the 2016 Environics' Survey of Canadian Muslims, allow me to do the same.

Our survey found that young Muslims are often more religious than their immigrant parents. For many, their religious identity is becoming more important to them – not less.

Among those who consider both religion and country to be very important to their identity (72% of the population), half (50%) say that being Muslim is more important, compared with 15 percent who place greater emphasis on being Canadian, and 27 percent who maintain that both parts of their identity are equally important.

An obsession with traditions, selective memory loss and a willingness to abandon one's capacity to reason is rapidly becoming, in many Western countries, a young people's psychosis.

For young people who have never experienced the old ways, this obsession with traditions and rituals appears to come from contact with teachers, religious scholars and preachers versed in the old ways. This contact being facilitated, if not forced, by parents who want their children to adopt traditions and customs which they themselves questioned when they were young.

The same parents who fled oppressive or dysfunctional regimes to live secure productive lives in the West.

They are the same parents who insisted that the religion that created most of the conditions that made their lives miserable in their native land be taught to their children, or at least accommodated in the public school system and in the public space in their adopted countries.

They got their wish and now, like us, are reaping the rewards.

More people looking to scriptures for guidance can only lead to less integration as the many references to communities of believers in the survey suggest. How could it be otherwise?

At Boreal, we strive to explain the ostensibly complicated in terms we can all understand. It is our motto. Maybe we are reaching you based on the praise showered on Boreal Books' rebuttal of Sheema Khan. That is encouraging.

Thank you.

1) Excellent opinion, the article's writer forgets some readers are capable of calling her bluff.

2) Excellent post. Boreal Books has illuminated the issue far better in the comments section here than the Globe's own writer. This is the problem with MSM, it shies away from the real world and we are left having to educate each other.

3) Brilliant post!

4) Well said, truly.

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Bernard Payeur, August 15, 2016