Other People's Wars - Caledonia Wake Up Call

Foreword“Terrorism in Canada? It can’t happen here.”This is a commonly held sentiment and a mistake. On the surface, Canada appears to bea peaceful country – provided that one never reads the smaller stories buried in ournewspapers or examines the sanguinary aspects of our history. For a country that wasconceived, gestated, born and matured because of conflict and warfare, comparativelylittle political violence occurs here.Our constitutional document, the British North American Act, pledges itself to thepursuit of “peace, order, and good government.” While no Canadian is ever reallyprepared to accept our various levels of governments as being good, compared to those ofmany other peoples, they are. We have built a decent society.Canada has a long cosmopolitan history and in many ways is still a frontier society.Both of these are traits that encourage immigration and we welcome newcomers –provided that they are prepared to live peaceful, quiet, and mannerly Canadian lives. Butthings have changed over the last 25 years while we were not paying attention.As we opened our gates wider than ever, tolerance became a public virtue rather than acommonly-held private one, which means that it became rude to publicly express anyconcerns about some of the people flowing into Canada, and somehow impure to listen tosuch complaints. All seemed well in the peaceable kingdom, and that was all most of uswanted to know.We conditioned ourselves too well: Canadian Sikhs started to fall prey to violentterrorists who wanted to change their practices and draw off their prosperity to fuel a warin the Punjab, and most of us barely blinked. Even the 1985 Air India bombing was seenby most Canadians as really having nothing to do with us. A year later, Sri LankanTamils started to arrive in numbers, and hardly anyone recognized that this was an entirecommunity under the control of the supporters of a homeland terrorist campaign.In 1994, Ahmed Ressam was just another refugee claimant with just another fraudulententry document who came to Canada and dropped out of sight – like thousands of others.Again, it was nothing to be alarmed about. The extraordinary had become ordinary, andit was rude to draw conclusions. Who knew that he would next come to our attention asan al Qaeda terrorist?That peaceful, civil, and cosmopolitan society we want has not vanished, nor is it reallyendangered – provided that we become intolerant about one particular point. We mustbecome absolutely intolerant of those who come here to perpetuate other people’s warsand prey on our citizens who share their background. Our future depends on it.-- John Thompsoniv