.
I always get the impression from the media that Canada is far more welcoming to and tolerant of Muslim immigrants than the US or UK but is that in fact the case? There have been several outrages committed (pigs’ heads left outside mosques, etc) although few of this magnitude.
I note that the story comments that 65% of Qebecois would not want a mosque built near them. Is Quebec representative of Canada as a whole or are French-Canadians more prejudiced than their Anglo-Canadian compatriots?
…I’ve also heard that liberal producers and screenwriters are hypocrites.
But just because I’ve “heard” something doesn’t make it true.
How did you get this impression? Why, based on a couple of anecdotes, would you consider your impression to be wrong?
How are you planning on “measuring your impressions” and comparing your impressions to my impressions? How tolerant is the United States to Muslim immigrants? Didn’t the US President do something a couple of days ago that was pretty fucking intolerant to Muslim refugees? Have the Canadian government done anything comparable in the last couple of years?
I just read a CBC account of the shooting. Witnesses told the CBC that the shooters were yelling (what else) “Allahu Akbar!”
Which means this anti-Muslim hate crime was likely carried out by other Muslims.
If so, this incident doesn’t reflect badly on Canada at all- just on people like Justin Trudeau who raced to blame white Islamophobic bigots.
With the caveats that (a) I wouldn’t make too many assumptions about this event until more facts are known, and (b) it’s always dangerous to generalize, there has certainly been evidence over the years of a franco-linguistic culturally motivated xenophobia among a small minority of Quebec francophones. Some of it has turned against Muslims as being an obvious “other” and therefore a perceived cultural threat, and as in the US and elsewhere, much of it is associated with the right and far right, as exemplified by this article.
And while crackpot minorities exist everywhere, by and large, no, this is not at all typical of Canada. It’s pretty much the diametric opposite of Canada. It’s probably fair to say it’s not typical of Quebec, either, but it’s been known to occur in Quebec in one way or another from time to time for the reasons I mentioned. This is, after all, the province that legislates the language of store signs and displays and the allowable size of English text (very small!) compared to French. This kind of cultural warfare never ends well. OTOH, when one of the extremist parties tried the tactic of prohibiting Quebec government employees from wearing “religious symbols” but made exceptions for the kinds of things French Catholics like to wear – but not things Muslims sometimes wear – it caused a furor in Quebec and nationally, and the party was ignominiously voted out of office in a humiliating defeat. Much of this kind of stuff is uniquely Quebecois.
He did? I was following the news very closely and I don’t recall seeing this. I also had my twitter open and again I don’t recall seeing this. Can you provide a link to something please?
Because of course it’s totally impossible that someone who isn’t a Muslim could ever know this incredibly well known phrase.
The bodies aren’t even cold yet and you have to trot out alternative facts? Trudeau hasn’t said anything of the sort.
AFAIK, the only thing possibly tangentially related to this that Trudeau has done is tweet that Canada welcomes Muslim refugees. It’s possible that tweets like this one are being misattributed to him.
I don’t exactly understand why someone would misattribute a tweet by “Conor McCormick,” who is no one of interest, to Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada.
In any case, two suspects have been arrested. They have not yet been identified by police but the media is putting out the names Alexandre Bissonnette, a distinctly not-very-Muslim-sounding name, and Mohamed Khadir, which very much is. How they got the names I don’t know, though. I’d assume the police are being tight lipped because they may want to ensure a) they have the right guys and b) there isn’t a third guy.
Sadly, some victims are still in extremely grave condition.
Yes, but that was earlier, in response to Muslim ban in the US. I don’t think he’s tweeted anything in connection with the mosque attack except condolences and condemnation of the violence. Trudeau’s complete recent statement is here.
Police are holding a press conference at the moment, but there isn’t a lot more news. Six dead and five apparently in critical condition, 200 police responded, two suspects arrested. No word on motive or identity, suspects said to be in their 20s or 30s, may appear in court as early as today.
I don’t understand it either.
Yes, I agree. The only reason I said “possibly, tangentially related” is because there were some rumors that one or more of the shooters were Syrian refugees (please note: i’m not making this claim. I don’t know if it’s fact, and given previous events like this, I suspect it very likely is not, we’ll all have to wait and see who the shooters are before we start blaming Trump or Trudeau or Muslims or white bigots).
In a bizarre twist, one of the shooters called the police from the mosque and told them where to find him, while the other fled and had made it a pretty good distance before being caught.
This is understandably especially shocking in Quebec City, which has a weirdly low crime rate even by Canadian standards. Last year the city - which isn’t small, it’s a city of over half a million people - had one murder.
Someone claimed on twitter that one of the suspects has been released. It turns out he was only a witness and not a suspect. It could be this guy you mentioned as having called the police.
I don’t know the truth of the original claim on twitter.
You quite plainly have not read the thread you cite. Tell me specifically where I said that liberal producers were hypocrites? The article said as much and I started the thread to find what people’s opinions were of that article. I happen to think the author made a fair point but that in no way suggested I thought all of them were hypocrites.
You’re allowing an obvious animus against me to color my posts in your eyes. All seems jaundic’d, etc. My advice is to take it to the Pit if you wish to speak more freely.
Returning to the topic I certainly haven’t heard that Trudeau rushed to blame white bigots and from what I know of the guy it would be quite out of character for him to speak so hastily. My opinion of Canadians (and perhaps it’s misinformed) is that they tend to be more easy-going than their neighbours south of the border, less prone to the forming of the sort of neo-nazi hate groups that we see in the US.
I’m an Englishman so I bow to the North Americans here but there was no malice aimed at anyone in my OP, despite the implications of Banquet Bear above.
Getting back to aldibronti’s question about integration, Canada does traditionally score high on policies to integrate immigrants. (That is not to say that all Muslims in Canada are immigrants, but it is one metric to measure how well a country does at accommodating diversity.)
Here’s a couple of articles about it:
Canada slips out of top-five countries in integrating immigrants | The Star?
Post in haste, repent at leisure. That should of course be all looks yellow, etc. in post #13.
Sorry for the triple post, mods.
Well now just one suspect, Alexandre Bissonette.
He is to appear in court Monday.
The young man, who dressed up as the Grim Reaper for Halloween, also “liked” Donald Trump, French Front National leader Marine Le Pen and Mathieu Bock-Cóté, a Quebec City columnist known for his pro-nationalist and anti-multicultural views.
A refugee welcome group in the capital city, however, said Bissonnette’s name and photograph were already familiar to them. In a post on Facebook, Bienvenu aux réfugiés said they learned “with sadness and anger about the identity of the terrorist Alexandre Bissonnette, unfortunately known by several militants in Quebec City for his viewpoints that were pro-LePen and anti-feminist, as expressed in social media and at Université Laval.”
I assume we can expect a travel ban on Canadians soon, right?
With any luck…a wall!
I’ve just been out so what I know is snippets that I caught on the car radio and the CBC’s latest tweets when I got home. As many might know by now, there is only one suspect who is believed to be the shooter, Alexandre Bissonnette. AFAIK Mohamed el Khadir was the 911 caller and appears to be a material witness, not a suspect. But lots of details are still unconfirmed.
CBC Radio did an interview just now with Maxime Fiset, who was a well-known leader of one of the Quebec ultranationalist alt-right factions mentioned in the link back in my post #4, and has since renounced it and turned to fighting against it. He said he was only surprised that something like this had not happened sooner.