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Steve Paikin: But for those who say, "We're gonna be a majority in Canada, or a majority
in the United States by 2050?"
Doug Saunders: If you want the bottomline, the best projections, Europe usually gets
point or two. It's the belief that floods of immigrants are coming into Europe from
Muslim countries and actually trickles are. And some of them have a lot of children when
they arrive, but their children don't have a lot of children, and their grandchildren
have about the same number of children as the rest of us. So the best projections are
that Europe including Russia which has a pretty high Muslim population historically, could
peak just shy of 10% Muslim around the middle of the century when the population growth
rates will largely converge. I mean that could be off by a couple of percent. Anyway we are
not talking about majorities. United States Muslims will probably outnumber Episcopalians
and Jews within 30 years. So at around 2% and...
SP: 2% of the population?
DS: Some 2-3% area, and Canada, a very high growth rate of Muslims who... Pakistan is
the largest source country and it has fairly high fertility rate, and it takes a few generations
for things to converge. So they could triple in number to about 6% of the population by
mid century in Canada. By which point... And the projections here are a little foggier,
but if Canada follows other places, it will probably converge. It means you'll have neighbourhoods
in Toronto that there'll be a lot of people from Muslim backgrounds. I don't quite have
the assurance to call somebody who is the grandchild of a Muslim immigrant a Muslim
necessarily. Culturally for sure, but beliefs change so quickly. I mean, if you fastidiously,
I could say, if you'd looked at the media in sort of 1970 you would have seen a lot
of projections that North America's gonna be overtaken by hippies.
[laughter]
DS: 'Cause they're everywhere and they seemed to be pregnant all the time.
[laughter]
DS: And they're imposing their values upon us and so on. And then they went and voted
for Ronald Reagan and all that.
[laughter]
SP: Okay, next metric. Jon, in your view based on what you know, see in here, do Muslim families
want to integrate into their new societies or remain apart from them?
Jonathan Kay: My vantage point is Canada, and I think in the case of Canada, the answer
is overwhelmingly that you do seem to want to integrate. I mean, it's not the focus of
Doug's book, but it's amazing how lucky we are here in Canada in that there is a fairly
low incidence of radicalism. And you would know it because of course when there is an
incident of radicalism, it is... The media understandably focuses on it because it's
interesting to focus on that as opposed to focusing on the 99% of people who are quietly
living their lives and have jobs and go to school and that sort of thing.
SP: It takes one guy who wants to behead the Prime Minister and...
JK: It doesn't even take a guy, it takes a 12-year old wearing a hijab, playing soccer
in Quebec. I mean that's all it takes for us lemmings to go, "Stop the presses! She's
taken off her hijab! She's scored a goal!"
[laughter]
JK: We love these stories, and we get the false impression that somehow it signals a
society that's coming apart at the seams. I don't think it's coming apart at the seams.
Interestingly though in Quebec it's more of a flash point, because there you have a language
culture that itself feels besieged. And so it doesn't have the confidence of feeling
it's in the majority in North America. And so because many French Nationalists feel besieged,
they have a special sensitivity which somehow has manifested itself in unattractive ways
in regard to the relatively small number of Muslims in that province.
JK: But I think in the rest of Canada, in many ways we're a model society in regards
to how we assimilate immigrants. There's always gonna be bad stories. There's always gonna
be honour killing stories, there's always gonna be arguments about burkas and that sort
of thing. But if you compare Canada to Europe which I think is a fair comparison, I think
we are miles ahead and a lot of it has to do with the factors that Doug listed, we never
had a guest worker program. You know the program in Germany where the...
SP: Well, we do now. [chuckle]
JK: I mean we do in terms of, if you wanna go work in the oil and sector stuff like that.
But the idea of you come here for 20 years, you learn the language, you put down roots,
and then you're mysteriously just gonna go back home, that bizarre logic never took hold
here. You came here, you became a landed immigrant, you became a citizen, you had a stake in the
country, you voted and I think we've shown that that is the recipe for successful immigration
experiences.
SP: I wonder if the integration issue can actually be looked at in terms of many different
communities, not just the Muslim community. If you look at where most Chinese Canadians
live for example in this city, they tend to live in the various China towns. Same could
be said of Jewish Canadians. Same could be said of Italian Canadians, at Woodbridge.
DS: One of the things I found both in this book and my previous book, "Arrival City",
which looked at bottom rung neighbourhoods, was that the people who failed to integrate...
And really, I think our question here should not be whether integration mainly works. It
should be, when it doesn't, is it a threat to us and how large of a problem is that slice?
The people who cluster together into immigrant neighbourhoods where everyone speaks the same
language and eats the same food, by several important measures, they integrate better
than people who scatter out among people who look like me.
DS: And if you look at the dynamics of how these neighbourhoods work you realize well,
there tends to be networks of mutual assistance. There tends to be networks of things like
child care and educational help and so on that help people, that make this sort of day
to day life easier as people join into the culture. Maybe it means that the first people
who arrive don't bother learning English. I lived in Kensington Market for years, and
there were plenty of people who'd arrived from Vietnam and China around me who the parents
never really learned much English at all and never had much interest. But the kids always
did, I mean 100%, right? And so on.
DS: One of the things I look closely at in this is what causes extremism. And this is
kind of a nebulous question in some ways but there has been at least a pretty good volume
of work on this in the last few years, both from scholars, but also from intelligence
agencies and so on. MI5 did a very big look at thousands of people who had become Islamic
extremists and supporters of Islamic extremism and so on.
SP: What did they find?
DS: That they tend to be, first of all, not very religious, or at least they didn't commit...
I mean obviously when they are terrorists they use the language of religion and so on,
and they adopted solitism and so on if there's any. But they don't come in through it through
religious faith. They tend to at the outset be personally motivated or criminally motivated
and so on. But interestingly, very much so they tend to be middle class and quite well
educated, and geographically they tend much more often to be the lone Muslim in a so-called
'white neighbourhood' than somebody who's part of a tight-knit community and so on.
DS: Now we were talking here about extremism as in support of violence and terrorism and
so on. Religious fundamentalism is another matter, but religious fundamentalists don't
become violent extremists, that's the interesting... And I think this is true in other cultures
as well. They are two very, very separate things. Being intensely religious and being...
Believing in a political idea that the land of your religion should not be violated and
that you should use violence to prevent that from occurring are very, very separate things.
That is not to belittle any aspect of it. Look, Canada's had problems. We had a proper
Al-Qaeda cell in Toronto that however amateurly, were plotting various things based in the
suburbs and so on.
DS: And we had another cell that was supporting a British group based out of Ottawa and so
on. And we had Ahmed Ressam, the Y2K bomber here. I remember covering his trial in Los
Angeles and learning the term 'sleeper cell' and hearing alarming reports in, when was
that, in 2000 about possible cells of Al-Qaeda terrorists who might be plotting stuff. Actually
it was the spring of 2001, I remember covering that, and it was a Canadian who got us to
know that. So look this is a political movement that is very dangerous.
SP: Let me do one more metric on this then, then we'll get this audience involved here.
I can remember one politician telling me a couple of elections ago, he was door-knocking
in Brampton. And as the family opened the door, he looked inside the house, the apartment
I guess it was, and he noticed on the far wall a picture of the twin towers in flames.
And that gave him pause, and it gave me cause to ask this question which is something again
anecdotally one hears, Jon, do Muslims in the west cheer on secretly, terrorists? What
do you think?
JK: I would say the answer is probably, generally speaking, no. I don't think that's the case.
If you look at United States and Canada, the proportion of Muslims who say that they support
terrorism as we define it tends to be low. That doesn't mean they're not gonna give you
different answers on various geopolitical issues. But I am surprised by the very low
number of Muslims I meet who actually will support terrorism in the way we would define
it. I think the numbers are higher in Britain and in other European countries. But they're
still lower than we think of in the conventional political wisdom, and I think the numbers
in Doug's book illustrate that.
SP: Doug?
DS: Yeah, there is certain "did you know" figures that get popped around and they keep
appearing in books, in magazine articles and so on, and one of them is the did you know
that a survey found that 8% of American Muslims support violence against civilians "if the
cause is right," which I kept reading it in "The Daily Mail" in Britain and so on and
thinking, that's a very large number of people who think that something that is fairly appalling
is right. And when we finally look up the study that produced that statistic, you realize
that the proportion of non-Muslims who support violence against civilians if the cause is
right is 24%.
[laughter]
DS: And suddenly the question becomes why do so many fewer Muslims support this? And
probably because I mean, they're the main victims of it. Now, and you could say that
a lot of these people are talking about their own country's militaries when they hear that
question and so on, which is still completely unforgivable. And that you could say all of
these Muslims are thinking about Al-Qaeda and so on, but that's probably not the case.
Because loyalty to the military of the country is fairly high as well, and so on. Now, in
terms of behaviour and so on, there's not a lot of suggestion of support.
DS: I think there were some distorting factors caused by the Iraq war and by the ongoing
standoff in Israel-Palestine, which has caused a lot of Muslims and some Jews to support,
or at least, to support extreme actions that would not be acceptable anywhere else. I think
there's a symbolic identification with the Israel-Palestine conflict that has... That
if you ask questions about anything in the world, that's what people, and particularly,
a lot of Muslims think about that has distorted views in North America and Europe.
SP: Jon, a follow-up?
JK: I think just as a brief add-on to that, when violence is raging in places like Iraq
or Israel, people lose their minds, in a way. If you... The day after the 9/11 attacks,
if you'd put a microphone to most Americans saying, "Do you support this, do you support
that?" You'd be shocked at the answers you would get. Whenever any part of the world
is engulfed in war and the images are being broadcast into people's homes, you get attitudes
that are wildly at variance with the baseline attitudes people have. And what's interesting
is now that, for instance, Israel has been relatively terror-free for the last couple
of years, you're starting to see a less radical opinions on both sides in regard to what kind
of violence is justified and what kind of means of resistance, to use the preferred
catch phrase of people who support or who formerly supported Hamas and terrorist attacks
and those sort of thing. So I think the proper time to get people baseline attitudes is when
bloodshed is not on the front page. Because once it is on the front page, people do...
SP: All bets are off.
JK: Yeah, all bets are off.
SP: As I invite you folks to go to that microphone there, start a line up if you'd like to ask
questions. As you're lining up, Doug, one more thing, too, and I had a gentleman come
up to me earlier this evening, just after I arrived here, who said, "I watched Doug
on your program last night. And you asked him something. Ask it again today because
I'm not sure," he said, "I'm not sure he gave you a good answer."
DS: I think violence is not on the front page, we'll see if my opinion is moderate.
SP: "He gave you a superficial answer. I want you to go at him again on this." And here's
the question. The question is, okay, you've laid out the case in the book. You've got
the numbers, you've got the public opinion surveys to back it up, you've got the demographic
studies to back it up. And yet, there's going to be a chunk of the population for whom,
"Don't bother me with the facts, I know what I know and I feel what I feel about this.
And you can't convince me with your little studies and your polls about what I feel."
What do you say to that person?
DS: There are two type of persons that we're talking about here. There is the type of person
which includes people who write books about the Muslim Tide and so on, who really does
believe that Muslim immigrants are guided by an ideology of conquest in the guise of
a religion and that they are bent on taking over the society, and nothing will convince
them otherwise. I think that group of people is extremely small, and I have no interest
in having a dialogue.
DS: A much larger group of people which includes, I think almost all the people who buy those
books and so on, are people who saw a group of people with head scarves on arrive in their
neighbourhood at the same time as reading headlines and maybe even sometimes experiencing
the side effects of a very violent, political movement in the name of those people's religion
and who want answers as to how those two things are connected. And, a set of answers arose
from this movement of activists and writers and so on saying, "Yes, there is a complete
continuity between the ordinary Muslim believer and the radical extremist. Yes, it really
is more of a political ideology than a religion. Yes, they are not interested in integrating,"
and so on.
DS: And I think people provisionally were willing to believe that because in the years
after September 11th, there was such an overwhelming number of narratives presenting that and so
on. And that's who I'm talking to. I'm not talking to the people who fundamentally believe
that there is a thing called the West that is homogeneous. There's a thing called the
Land of Islam that is homogeneous. That's a belief that unites both the Muslim Tide
activists and the Islamic extremists and so on.
DS: I'm talking to ordinary people. And I'm, quite frankly, honestly talking to ordinary
people who are like me. I mean, this is not a book where... It's not a multiculturalist
book. I'm doing a very old-fashioned thing here, and I'm being the white guy. It feels
kind of mid-20th century, "I'm gonna write this little book about the Muslim problem"
and I've...
[laughter]
DS: And, there's something a little bit backward about how I've approached this. And I'm not
politicking about this because those are the terms in which the debate is being conducted,
and we need to address it back in those terms to say, "Okay. Yes, I'm aware that there are
many different communities coming in and that we shouldn't reify the Muslim and instead
we should talk about moderate Ismaili and Alawite communities versus more extreme Deobandi
and Saudi communities and so on. Well yes, but we also need to actually address the worries
that people have about the homogeneous averages of Muslim immigrants and take that.
DS: So there's another type of book that you could write where you could say this is all
illusions that we have a mosaic of different communities with different values and so on.
But no, I'm taking it on the terms that people tend to discuss this on. So we end up in a
weird situation where we have three white guys on a stage talking about the Muslims.
[laughter]
DS: And I would only argue that I think that we are at the end of an era where in some
weird way, it's necessary to do that.
JK: First of all, you have to stop with your White shame, like you just...
[laughter]
JK: And I don't wanna say you should have White pride 'cause that has negative connotation,
but you should have White-less shame. [chuckle] But your question was very interesting about,
the one you're urged to re-ask about a core of people who just will not be convinced by
the data, 'cause I recently had an experience with this. A couple of weeks ago, there was
this story that circulated on the Internet about how Christians and journalists were
being crucified, literally, crucified on the Presidential Grounds in Egypt. It turns out
the story wasn't true, it was based on Internet rumours. Although ironically enough, a few
days later, someone actually was crucified in Yemen in this grizzly incident.
JK: But I wrote an article debunking this Egyptian story which wasn't true. Also, some
horrible things have happened in Egypt in the last... But this wasn't one of them. It
was just a false story. And I got dozens of emails from people saying, "How can you do
this? You're giving ammunition to the Islamists and those who want to appease the Islamists."
And I emailed back saying, "But you realize, the story's not true." They say, "It doesn't
matter if it's true."
[chuckle]
JK: "They wanna crucify Christians. They're horrible people. Can't you see they wanted
this?" I said, "Well yeah, some of them might wanna do that but they didn't actually do
it, did they?" "It doesn't matter!" The point is that I gained a sort of an insight into
their psychology that...
DS: Wrote a book about it.
JK: I did. Oh yes. And it's not on sale here, but it's...
[laughter]
DS: It's a great book, by the way.
JK: Maybe some people would like to take it out of a library, you'll tell them what it's
called.
DS: Are you talking about "Among the Truthers?"
JK: Yeah.
DS: "Among the Truthers" by Jonathan Kay is an incisive examination of the...
JK: I didn't mean to be...
[laughter]
DS: Of the September 11th denial movement and a highly-recommended book.
JK: Thank you. Thank you. But my point here was that there is a group of people... And
these are not necessarily bigots, but there are people... Many of them are veterans of
the Cold War or cultural veterans of the Cold War, and they lived their whole life under
the idea that there was this alien civilization that truly did want to destroy Western freedom.
And the Soviet Union truly did want... I mean, they said, "We are going to take over the
world. We will bury you." That was... This is part of their PR campaign, and so it wasn't
irrational to fear this. And if you're someone in your 40s or 50s, or 60s and 70s and you
remember this, then you are attuned to any threat that mirrors that. And for a lot of
these people, it's militant Islam.
SP: Okay.