Blemished Connections

This new phenomena that has been afflicting the world, of populations migrating in great numbers from their countries of origin to other countries of the world which promise them a better, more secure and more prosperous future in developed countries, for themselves and their families has appeared to have brought with it some extremely undesirable elements. Where people, decades earlier, were grateful to leave the geographies which failed to live up to their modest expectations of a life well lived, and eagerly left all vestiges of their old lives behind to take up entirely new ones, this attitude no longer seems to prevail.

People migrating through emigration to other countries of the world from impoverished countries, countries suffering the ravages of war, of political, minority and religious oppression, or as persecuted refugees, appear to arrive on the new shores of the welcoming countries replete with traditional grievances, importing their restiveness and aggressions along with their other belongings. Canada has had some fairly dreadful experiences in the last decades with the importation of such grievances, where immigrants bring the past with them.

From the violence in the Sikh community where moderate Sikhs and Hindus find themselves afflicted by the threat of vengeance and violence expressed in the name of militant Sikhism determined to force India to surrender part of its Punjab area to a completely autonomous Sikh homeland, to the Tamil Tigers extorting funds from Canada's large Tamil population, to support its battle for separatism and a Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka.

The larger problem of greater proportion seen among the Muslim communities in Canada where young men are encouraged to express their anger at the West that has succoured them and their families, but which is seen as blisteringly, hatefully anti-Muslim is another problem of much more urgent expression, simply because the violence of Islamist jihad is so widely scattered. Intelligence and policing authorities and their agencies are focused on stemming the rising tide of home-grown jihadist activities.

Yet here in Ontario, reflecting what had occurred decades earlier in British Columbia, a moderate Sikh publisher of the Punjabi Post out of Brampton, has been the victim of vicious political thuggery, resulting from politics that have their ancient genesis in India, not Canada. Because Jagdish Grewal, along with so many other Canadian Sikhs, rejects violence, and criticizes the violence emanating from pro-separatist Sikhs, he was targeted, as was Tara Singh Hayer before him.

The Air India investigation was a horribly botched affair, where no one was found guilty of the terrorist murder of almost three hundred Canadians, and 22 Indian nationals, except for one individual implicated in the plot. Those truly guilty of this dreadful assault on civilization costing the lives of hundreds of innocent people, have been able to escape justice. Which may just breed contempt for Canadian law and order and the efficacy of our policing authorities in establishing adequate evidence for convictions.

Encouraging, in an extremely perverse way, like-minded terrorists to believe that they too can escape justice if they undertake to silence an outspoken critic of violence, like Mr. Grewal. Whose three attackers, clad in black and masked, attempted to kill him, managing to brutalize him, and instill in him the bleak realization that although he lives in a country that protects freedom of expression, there are those who will deny him that right.