O Canada! Time to Wise Up in the Great White North!

Clifford May's article in Townhall starts out:

Are you surprised that terrorists appear to have set their sights on such unlikely targets as the Parliament building in Ottawa and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in Toronto? Astonished that anyone would even consider sawing off the head of a Canadian Prime Minister? Are you thinking: What could anyone have against free, democratic, liberal, multicultural, diverse and tolerant Canada?

The question answers itself. Freedom, democracy, liberalism, multiculturalism, diversity and tolerance – these are precisely the attributes that Militant Islamists find most offensive.

Yes, those feckless, bland, well-meaning folks to the north of their protector-power can't figure out what Australia and the UK, among other Anglophone countries, have been able to divine through extensive use of their citizenry's collective frontal lobes!

This reality is difficult for some people to fathom. It shouldn't be. The Nazis disdained liberal societies as decadent. The Communists rejected democratic values as bourgeois. Now Militant Islamists regard Western nations as blasphemous. This is old totalitarian wine in new bottles.

Canadians don't want their rosy view of reality, free of evil and based on tolerance of all creeds, religions, and eccentric mindsets, to suffer a nasty intrusion of reality.

Those arrested last week were acting locally but linking globally. According to Canada's National Post, “before police tactical teams began their sweeps around Toronto on Friday, at least 18 related arrests had already taken place in Canada, the United States, Britain, Bosnia, Denmark, Sweden, and Bangladesh.” That doesn't mean those arrested are part of a global organization. It does suggest they are part of a global movement. You don't defeat such movements by forfeiting battlefields or attempting appeasement. How you do defeat such movements we are only beginning to figure out – one must hope.

The suspects arrested in Canada are all Canadian citizens or legal residents. Early reports insisted they "represent the broad strata of our society” but that description did not withstand scrutiny.

Remember Munich and appeasement and all sorts of compromises with Uncle Joe Stalin? Doesn't work unless one is singularly focussed and often bloody-minded about protecting one's national assets, including control of one's borders! Even Canada's protector-power to the south has not quite figured out how to square that circle!

Americans generally expect immigrants to adopt not just American citizenship but also American nationality: to embrace American values, to revere the U.S. Constitution and to learn to speak English. Our more multicultural neighbors to the north have demanded less of those who apply for their passports. Canadians have asked immigrants few questions about their religious and political convictions. Recently, the Canadian government has even been considering allowing Muslims to substitute Islamic Sharia law for civil law. It will be instructive to see if this episode prompts any changes in Canadian thinking.

"Canadian thinking" is a euphemism for a Pollyanna mindset that only an ignorant backwater could engender, one that swallows a liberal world-view without a knowledge of history or the common sense of a tragic national experience. Canadians had no revolution with their mother-country, no Civil War, no wrenching civil rights experience. Mexicans have told me that they feel more sympatico with Americans, because of the sense of tragic history and revolt against authority both historical narratives share. May finishes his article with an admonition:

That is not to suggest that every immigrant to Canada must attempt to become a Molson-drinking, hockey-playing, Dudley Do-Right, proudly pronouncing “z” as zed. But would it be too demanding for Canadians to insist that those who want to make their homes in the Great White North not aspire to be suicide bombers and decapitators of infidels?

Free peoples, if they are to stay free, need to exercise control over their borders. They also need to exercise discretion about who they welcome as neighbors and compatriots.

As of 2007, Americans travelling to Canada and Canadians going to the USA will have to display passports at the borders as identification, I read recently in the news online [sorry, no link].

It's sad that things have come to such a sorry pass on what was once a border between friends.