kraychik

Is it your contention that nuclear weapons cannot be justifiably used under any circumstances? I'd make an easy few dollars betting that you believe the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unjustifiable and constitutes "war crimes". You are a communist, after all.

Hardly. Are you now going to tell us all that the CIA "installed" the Shah, and that things in Iran would have been completely different had it not been for American "interference"? If anything, America should be criticised for allowing Iran to plunge into Islamism via Carter, assuming that America had the means to prevent the tyrannical takeover of Iran in 1979.

Thanks for sharing with us, again, that you don't know what conservatism actually means in a political context. Consider a conservative in Russia in 1992, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Assuming he or she is trying to conserve the ways of the past, what exactly are those previous ways? Communism, of course. So a conservative in that context is a leftist. Islamists ("theocratic Jihadists", as you labelled them) absolutely qualify as leftists, even if you do want to qualify them as conservatives, which is fair as long as we understand that the meaning of the term conservatism varies based on context. They're all about a massive state and dictating to the individual how he or she must live his or her life. There is no respect for individual freedom in such a society. So yes, they are leftists.

This a all a huge micharacterisation of these events. Where do you think Hezbollah and Hamas get their weapons and technology that they use for their terrorism against Israel? I guess when Iran does something, it's not a threat, but when Israel says something, it is a threat. It's unsurprising to get this narrative from you, considering you don't think the Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamist organisation. They're "largely secular", right?

Yes. Iran is acting logically, in its own way. Yes, but Iran adds to that threat. You cannot say that with certainty. And Iran has been engaged in "low-level" conflict with America and Israel for decades. It supplies Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as terrorist organisations that operate in and around Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Pakistan. Iran has plenty of blood on its hands, and certainly doesn't have good intentions that line up with our interests that it seeks to act upon once it secures nuclear weapons.

I agree with this, for the most part. I don't think the tyranny in Iran will collapse without revolution or war.

I suppose you don't think you're dumbing down this discussion by pretending that concerns about Islamic expansion are as ridiculous as anti-Semitic narratives about global Zionist conspiracies? I guess 14 million people with a tiny strip of land are to be compared to about 1.5 billion who form mega-majorities in about 60 countries and have a rich history of conflicting with non-Muslims in India and Pakistan, Indonesia, Chechnya, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, and so forth, and where we've seen mass murder in the name of Allah carried out across the globe? Yeah, this conversation sure has been dumbed down, but not in the sense that you mean.

This is just a desperate attempt to slander those of us who reject your ridiculous attempts to pretend that there isn't a problem with contemporary immigration and multiculturalism policies as hysterical buffoons wearing tinfoil hats. What a surprise, your entourage of socialists and communists clap like seals in agreement with this strawman argument of yours! You leftists are like lemmings, and the phenomenon is clearly observable even in a discussion forum.

The thing is, there are no concrete Canadian values that you are willing to articulate. For leftists like you who've made a religion of moral relativism, you're not willing or able to take a stand for basic values: starting with freedom of speech and expression. There are some components of Canadian culture that should be rigid and inflexible, unfortunately we have so many Canadians that are like you, who are unable to stand up for these values because they either don't understand them, or worse, sincerely disagree with them. There is nothing "pragmatic" about importing trash to come into the country, demonstrate in favour of Islamism, and to occupy subsidised housing projects and emergency rooms. Unless, of course, your objective is to expand the voter base of the Liberal Party and the NDP.

That's because of the declining standards in screening them as opposed to earlier years.

You're trying to ridicule Bonam by suggesting that he thinks there is some sort of conspiracy among Muslims to usurp societies and take over. He never said that, or even so much as implied it. You're one inch away from demanding that Bonam produce a secret document signed in blood by all Canadian Muslims committing themselves to a stealth takeover of the country. What he did actually say was entirely correct - that irresponsible immigration policies can destroy a country and change it for the worse. Democracy contains the mechanism of its own destruction. I'm not saying it's inevitable, but we shouldn't tempt fate by importing people who gleefully have their young children hold signs declaring "BEHEAD ALL THOSE WHO INSULT THE PROPHET". This is a recipe for disaster, but predictably, you're here to obfuscate from the core issues and attack strawman arguments in order to deflect from the failures of your socialist ideology. Nobody made that claim, so you're just continuing to hack away at your strawman argument. Well, nobody except folks like Qhadafi who stated the war with the West would be won with babies, and not bullets.

Yes, it should be done on a case-by-case basis. Unfortunately, Canada is packed with leftists like you who refuse to actually implement any standards whatsoever to screening applicants based on values.

It's not at all far from the case. Leftist immigration policies have dramatically transformed the demographic composition of this country over recent decades, and by extension increased the base of supporters for the NDP and the Liberals. You should be less concerned with their calls for the murder of the Los Angeles filmmaker and a lot more worried about their contempt for freedom of speech and expression. We already have plenty of people in this country (and on this board) who despise this most basic freedom. Why are we bringing more of them in to provide a stronger electoral base for politicians who share this hatred of free speech and expression? Seriously? Making a video lampooning Islam is a "hate crime"? See, you're another one of those lemmings that in one breath states support for freedom of speech and expression ("I respect their right to protest", you said) and then in the next breath you reveal that you don't even understand what this freedom means by suggesting the film be viewed as a criminal act, as a "hate crime". If you didn't already know this, "hate crime" is a nonsense term coined by your side.

Thank you for fulfilling my prophecy. I states earlier in this thread that socialists and communists like yourself will inevitably obfuscate the role culture plays in shaping a person's set of values, and by extension, their ability to integrate meaningfully into a still largely free society like Canada. A basic question even you should be asking is why Canada is bringing in immigrants that are failures? Are we really so short on applicants that we're desperate to bring in Islamists from Somalia to clean our federal government offices? The answer is because our system is broken because it was established by leftists who refused to implement reasonable standards for reasons I've outlined several times in this thread.

It's a lot easier to just go on a case-by-case basis. The problem is we're not screening applicants at all when it comes to values. Why? Because according to multicultural" Canada, anything goes. About half of Canada subscribes to the Justin Trudeau view that describing "honour killings" as barbaric is too harsh, and he was (still is?) the Liberal immigration critic.

Right, because when Somalian and Sudanese Islamists come to Canada they magically become different people. Why keep a Nazi or communist out of Canada? They might act completely differently once they come into our country, right? Considering Canada doesn't keep such statistics, there's no point in trying to pull a Michael Hardner "show me the peer-reviewed studies from a social science journal" attempt to kill the discussion. I know what I see, and contemporary immigration in Canada is a disaster, which is entirely predictable, considering leftist politicians formulated the policies to comply with their utopian worldviews. Extra bonus: they expand their own voter base by importing useless freedom-hating third-worlders who will be dependent on so-called "social programs". About half of the participants in this thread refuse to even acknowledge a problem. I'm pretty sure that half includes you.

Yeah, those Jews in Israel, how dare they view a nuclear Iran as an existential threat. They're such "shrieking little cowards", aren't they?

Are we supposed to be surprised to see a socialist who "used to be a conservative" parroting propaganda from PressTV The Guardian? I'll try to make this thread a little more serious, considering it started off with the anti-Western Islamist narrative. It is entirely understandable why Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons: they believe the rewards outweigh the risks. The sanctions aren't doing anything to slow them down, all they do is sow the seeds of discontent among the affected population. And even then, state propaganda is somewhat effective in exploiting the sanctions towards reinforcing the "evil greedy Jew-controlled America wants to kill all of us" narrative (which is close to the narrative bleeding heart subscribes to). The Iranian regime is confident that America will not leverage its military advantage towards stopping their intransigence (they're violating the NPT, for those that care about "international law", as well as supporting terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, as well as in and around Israel) because they see the weakness that currently sits in the Oval Office. Until Iran is forced to pay a price for its ongoing intransigence, the status quo will continue and they'll develop nuclear weapons soon enough. In the age of modern terrorism, it's a scary thought.

Exactly, they don't provide you with evidence. Nevermind the fact that these very same people have plotted terrorist attacks in Canada. I'm not the one who still doesn't know why Statistics Canada doesn't keep the kinds of statistics you were asking for earlier.

Exactly.

Even if leftists like Michael Hardner or Black Dog were to actually open a history book, they would still continue to deflect from the relationship between Islamism and tyranny. They are committed to doing everything they can to obfuscate and pretend that unknown and far more complex factors are to blame for the systemic failures of this ideology, because they are terrified that it will be associated with Muslims and possibly lead a "moderate Muslim" to an unfair stereotype. The same people that invoke Timothy McVeigh in a desperate attempt to deflect from the virtual monopoly Islam has on contemporary terrorism are the same people who we should blame for why grandma's colostomy bag is being searched by the TSA and why Nidal Hasan was able to overtly express his Jihadist ideology as an army psychiatrist and succeed in his mission to murder American soldiers.

In Michael Hardner's world, the failures of most Muslim-majority countries have nothing to do with Islam. I think we need some research studies, about now.

Of course, you're unable to grasp how religion is separate from innate characteristics of a person. Thanks for answering my question, even though you answered the question unknowingly by avoiding it. This is why you almost use the terms race and religion interchangeably, because you don't realise that religion isn't really an intrinsic part of a person as race, gender, or age are. It's funny how defensive you are of religion in this case when you espouse your contempt for it in so many other places.

Religion is indeed a grounds upon which discrimination is prohibited in the Canadian constitution. Now do you need to have it explained to how things like race, gender, and age are different than religion, or can you figure that out or your own?

So you don't realise why they don't collect such information, right? That's unsurprising. Really? Mass murderers around the world committed by people shouting "Allahu Akbhar!" don't provide you with "any real evidence of a significant problem"? Perhaps you live on the same island of delusion with Black Dog and Michael Hardner. Yeah. That's exactly what we need. More "studies". Perhaps Harper can start a multi-million dollar "fact-finding mission" to get to the bottom of this.