Monday, March 08, 2010
On the firing line, by Louis Prefontaine
"I'll make you lose your job." Another missed test by the child, another round of telephone threats from the mother. Tania scoop. Again. When teaching in classes for immigrants, we must know the only truly useful thing: the other is always right. Not you, not your country, not your safety rules, your secularism, your gender equality. No. While it takes the edge when you are dealing with a minority of fundamentalists who, like this fanatical denying the rules of his school, seeking to undermine the foundation of our rule of law while scurrying to make life unbearable to those who try to help.
Tania has taught one year at this elementary school northeast of town, specializes in the integration of newcomers. She could continue, but it was too difficult emotionally. Worse, he has shed his assessment with a score of zero to five levels of ethics and accusations of racism from the director and his assistant. Her crime? Wanting to teach geography to a child, having expressed his failures and his parents have asked her shoes running shoes during physical education.
"Toronto is in Lebanon, my dad told me, no no no you're a liar!" throwing the young veiled girl eleven years with his teacher in the middle class. Tania showed him the world map, he pointed Toronto, then Lebanon. "No, not in Lebanon, Toronto. Your father may have been mistaken." No, Tania, her father was right. Muslim Dad is always right. You should know. And so the next day he landed in your class, the lunch hour, violating the most elementary rules of the school, to insult you, call you a racist, and you t'invectiver threatening.
Shortly after that, a trip to Lebanon to eight weeks for the little girl. When she returned, she took a long delay, so that its results were not up to his classmates. Meeting with parents and the director. The diagnosis? No, the little one has no delay, no she has nothing to learn. It is you, Tania, the racist, nasty feminist who wants to learn the ideas of liberation of women to her child, so says a hysterical mother, a Canadian Halifax converted to the virtues of submission to the husband and soft body. The director asks you out, and nothing will ever be the same between you and him thereafter. His confidence, you had lost.
Months passed, with insults bi-weekly inexorably following each test, each failure of a girl who was taught that the world is what Papa-Muslim said he is. One day, the physical education teacher called Tania and told him about the child: "it does not remove his boots, because she said it was wrong that could see his ankles." Tania reassured the little girl told him that Allah does not punish, it was simply putting his running shoes and playing with his friends. She eventually convince her, but at what price? The next day she was again summoned to the principal's office, where she gets insulted again, where his own superior told her she should have accepted the girl involved in the activities below (even though this is extremely dangerous and contrary Regulation). Literally, he said: "between school rules and rules of the religion of man, what are the rules of religion gentleman who must prevail". And that's what happened thereafter, thank you to the repeated threats of prosecution from the sad individual.
How were you dictated returned with a large "X", Tania, because they were referring to Christmas or Easter? How many times have you had to adapt yourself just to survive here in your own country, where you should just be an example to newcomers?
At the end of the year, rather than having defended his professor, the director and his assistant, a Lebanese origin, decided to get rid of it as best they could. At the School of immigrants, Tania, yet she was the daughter of an Italian immigrant, had not understand the basic lesson: in Quebec, are immigrants who make the law and our rules do not apply that 'to those unfortunate enough to be white and French. The others, they released the insult of racism, they appeal to the virtues of multiculturalism, they call their lawyers, they are based on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to impose their rights and freedoms.
Yet "there, there are so many nice people," says Tania. I think it's flat, because every time we talk about it with stories about completely stupid. The nice ladies who send you of baklava, that we do not remember." The problem, it is precisely there: nice people and bad people, confused, violent, psychotic, exist in every culture in every nation. In Quebec, however, just one of those fanatics are using ethnic status to which he immediately gives a semblance of credibility. If you're white and francophone and you act this way, we'll put you outside the school, call the police, call the DPJ, and take you to the position you pursue. If you come from elsewhere, we will let you make the name of multiculturalism, in the name of reasonable accommodation on behalf of the understanding.
Like it or not, it is a war. A fight between our values, our conceptions of space and public freedoms, and those unscrupulous individuals who believe they can use our openness against us, who sink our doors open and then occupy our homes. And in this war on this front, there are people like Tania, who, if she dropped the education of children, however, continues to learn our language and culture to immigrants and adults involved, by taking balls hate every day to improve our society and to promote greater cohesion in the respect of our common values. Tania is a heroine in her own way in the trenches of multiculturalism, the weapon of our carelessness in hand.
And so we finally decided to support it, respect those who, like her work to the integration of immigrants? If we finally said, loudly, that our values and our culture are not negotiable, as our law applies to everyone and we do not have to suffer the insults of those who refuse? If anyone dared to require newcomers to respect our institutions and those working to help them achieve in our house every day?
For if we do not at the level of integration by daring to impose our values, we will have to act in the number of immigrants to receive. And that's a different debate. Necessary, but oh how much more difficult to accept for the apostles of multiculturalism which has accumulated failures as Quebecers medals at the last Olympics. Until then, thank you Tanya, and good luck.
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Labels: Human mistake, Louis Préfontaine, Multiculturalism, Religion and fanaticism
# posted by Francis Chartrand @ 6:46 PM 
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