Explosion near Stadium in Paris, multiple shootings and hostage taking...

[transplant99]

Originally Posted by RougeUnderoos

You know, they aren't a country or a government. It's not like some representative of these nuts to sign a peace treaty on the deck of an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.

I don't have a solution, that's for sure. I don't know what should be done. I'm not really comfortable "volunteering" thousands of people who aren't me to invade Iraq for the third time in 25 years, and drop into the middle of a civil war in the hopes they finish off an ideology.

Correct but we know where they are now. We know where to take the fight.

As for the "signing a peace treaty" shot, we don't need them to be an official head of state, just the leaders of the various movements. Hezbollah nor Hamas nor the PLO were ever officially government reps, but we could still have peace talks with them if they would agree.

[GirlySports]

and you can't look all the entire population of canada as a whole. there are regions that need people more than others. The Maritimes are really hurting for workers, recession or not.

[CaptainYooh]

Originally Posted by polak

Its 25,000 people. ...

There are 14,000 severely disabled people in Alberta alone. Most of them live on AISH, which is about $1,400 per month to cover everything - rent, food, clothing. They have very little advocacy and almost no influence in Government policy.

Thousands of poor seniors in Alberta are waiting for a bed in a nursing home due to shortage of funded beds.

Thousands of Albertans are waiting many months and sometimes years to see a medical specialist or have an MRI test done.

There are over 250,000 homeless people in Canada that receive no financial assistance at all other than minimal life-support services through charitable agencies.

I do not have the link to accurate overall costs of taking one refugee but I recall reading it exceeds $200,000 when you account for all kinds of the Government assistance they are entitled to receive.

[VladtheImpaler]

Originally Posted by GirlySports

I'm not sure they have it right. Not having refugees presents its own problems like a shrinking population.

Monaco doesn't even count, it's just a millionaires playground.

Population issues are taken care of by admitting legitimate immigrants that you select.

[GirlySports]

Originally Posted by CaptainYooh

There are 14,000 severely disabled people in Alberta alone. Most of them live on AISH, which is about $1,400 per month to cover everything - rent, food, clothing. They have very little advocacy and almost no influence in Government policy.

Thousands of poor seniors in Alberta are waiting for a bed in a nursing home due to shortage of funded beds.

Thousands of Albertans are waiting many months and sometimes years to see a medical specialist or have an MRI test done.

There are over 250,000 homeless people in Canada that receive no financial assistance at all other than minimal life-support services through charitable agencies.

I do not have the link to accurate overall costs of taking one refugee but I recall reading it exceeds $200,000 when you account for all kinds of the Government assistance they are entitled to receive.

Well the hope is that these refugees will contribute to society and pay the taxes the help these other programs. Yes it costs more at first through subsidies but in the long run, they help the next generation.

That's how it was with all of us. Canada helped our us, we as Canadians help the next.

Originally Posted by VladtheImpaler

Population issues are taken care of by admitting legitimate immigrants that you select.

hopefully that is what is happening.

[sharkov]

Originally Posted by ranchlandsselling

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...ttacks-killers

A Syrian who apparently passed through Greece as a refugee last month, a known French extremist and an Egyptian were said to be among a cell of eight Islamist gunmen who killed nearly 130 people in a bloody wave of suicide bombings and shootings that left France reeling


Paris attacks: Isis militant said to be Syrian who passed through Greece on refugee route – live

As much as I`d hate to paint everyone with the same brush but it only takes a few a$$holes to ruin the chances of many legit refugees.

[polak]

Originally Posted by CaptainYooh

There are 14,000 severely disabled people in Alberta alone. Most of them live on AISH, which is about $1,400 per month to cover everything - rent, food, clothing. They have very little advocacy and almost no influence in Government policy.

Thousands of poor seniors in Alberta are waiting for a bed in a nursing home due to shortage of funded beds.

Thousands of Albertans are waiting many months and sometimes years to see a medical specialist or have an MRI test done.

There are over 250,000 homeless people in Canada that receive no financial assistance at all other than minimal life-support services through charitable agencies.

I do not have the link to accurate overall costs of taking one refugee but I recall reading it exceeds $200,000 when you account for all kinds of the Government assistance they are entitled to receive.

If you think taking on or not taking on 25,000 refugees in Canada/2,000 in alberta is going to change any of that, then you have a surprise coming your way.

Those problems are deep rooted, systematic and societal problems that have a replenishing base. This is an opportunity to provide direct help that should be beneficial for Canada and in turn all of those issues in the long run.

If you don't help with the refugee crisis, then how do you pick which global crisis you do aid? Tsunami relief in Japan? Earthquake in Haiti? Ebola in Africa? Clearly Canada should just ignore all of those world emergencies cause not only do we have all of the problems you just listed at home, but also, unlike the refugee situation, aiding the situations I listed provides ZERO benefit to Canada.

So do we become isolationist?

If so, lets hope we never need help.

[CaptainYooh]

Originally Posted by GirlySports

...Canada helped our us, we as Canadians help the next...

Girly, you are trying to justify bringing refugees, because it's a good or the right thing to do. It is for them. It is not for Canada. At least, not now and not in these circumstances for all of the reasons I have listed earlier.

There is a huge difference between smart immigration process that is intended to enhance our economic well-being and hasty political refugee acceptance process which puts undue and unnecessary stress on the country when times are already tough.

[Itse]

Originally Posted by CaptainYooh

Not.

For as long as we have an array of our own seemingly unsolvable problems with poverty, homelessness, health care, youth unemployment, neglect of disabled, declining civil service quality, which are all exacerbated by declining economy and looming recession, the answer must be "absolutely not". Switzerland, Japan, Luxembourg, Monaco and many other countries have it right. They do not care to upgrade their international political image by doing grand gestures.

Being royally compassionate on behalf of the country is an unacceptable substitute for being responsible and accountable to the people of the country. Those who want to help struggling families can do so financially and personally through a myriad of good organizations.

If you were a philosophy student, you would have failed a test there. The answer is not the problem, it's the way you frame it, and the things you ignore. You are trying to reduce the logic behind actions you don't like as "grand gestures", which is completely unfair.

I mean seriously, you really think all those politicians all over Europe who are accepting those immigrants are just being nice? You don't get to power by being nice. Not in Europe, not in Canada, not anywhere.

As was abundantly clear in the hypothetical, as it is in real life, refusing to take in refugees is in no way a guarantee of safety.

It just trades one type of risk for another type of risk. You can make that trade if you like, but IMO the facts suggest that probably taking in the refugees is in the long run the safer choice.

[JonDuke]

Nice to see the people lining up to donate blood when needed the most.

[burn_this_city]

Refugees will pay their way once they are settled and working. The premise that they're a burden on the system isn't supported by facts.

[Flash Walken]

Western Nations need to put their ideological money where their mouths are and export democracy and secularism to anti-western nations instead of brutally arming and supporting the theocracies/autocracies/dictatorships that are currently in power.

Saudi Arabia is the chief exporter of terrorism in the world.

All other solutions are laughable in the face of supporting fascist dictatorships that actively undermine western security.

They are literally terrorizing western nations with their own currency.

Anything that doesn't address the systemic problem of radical islam coming from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE will fail miserably.

The Wahhabi movement that animates Saudi policy from behind the scenes was founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92), a Sunni theologian who called for a return to austere practices supposedly followed by the Salaf, or earliest Muslims, during the 7th century. He regarded images, saints, shrines, communal festivals, and secular lifestyles, with music, dance, and socializing, as distractions from true piety. Thus he rejected all changes since early Islam as bid‘ah, or heretical innovations and idolatry. He composed the “Kitab al-Tawhid” or “Book of God’s Uniqueness,” which became the guiding text for his followers, who consequently speak of themselves as Muwahhidun (total monotheists) or as Salafis (followers of the ways of the first Muslims). So as not to detract from those absolutist ideals, they usually do not even refer to themselves as Wahhabis or followers of Wahhab.

Wahhab’s calls for puritanical reform and his attacks on the tombs of early Muslims led to expulsion from his hometown of Uyaynah, 19 miles northwest of modern-day Riyadh. He found refuge at Diriyah, a city then ruled by Muhammad ibn Saud. There the two leaders established a religio-political pact during the year 1744 under which the Wahhabis aided the king in battle in exchange for imposition of Wahhabism as the official form of Islam. Diriyah, on the outskirts of Riyadh, became the center of Wahhabism; from there missionaries were dispatched to convert other Muslims in Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and Syria to the new sect. Jihad, or holy war, was initiated against Muslims in Arabia who refused to adopt the old Salafi ways as re-prescribed by Wahhab and upheld by King Saud, who was presented as Allah’s chosen monarch to whom all Muslims had to pledge baya, or absolute allegiance, so as not to face annihilation as foes of god.

Madrassas and preachers funded by the House of Saud instilled Wahhabism across the Arabian Peninsula after Saud’s troops gained control of much of the region and established the first Saudi kingdom. Between 1744 and 1818, Wahhabi preachers and fighters embedded their tenets and institutions into Arabian society so deeply that even the return of moderate Sunni ideas to the region when the Ottoman Empire demolished Saudi power did not eradicate extremism. Wahhabism survived and provided the ideological basis for the Saudi return to power as the Emirate of Nejd between 1824 and 1891, with the capital city at Riyadh, and as the third Saudi kingdom starting in 1932.

When he began conquering Arabia, Abdulaziz ibn Saud (ruled 1932–53) deployed Wahhabism as a religio-political means of uniting the Peninsula’s restive tribes. Submission to Allah’s absolute will, as interpreted by Wahhabi doctrine and upheld by the House of Saud became a
rallying cry. Wahhabism served Saud’s descendants in the ruling family as a bulwark against Arab Nationalist rivals like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, who were turning to the Soviets during the 1960s and 1970s. Faced with that rise of secularism and fueled by oil money, King Faisal ibn Abdulaziz al-Saud (ruled 1964–75) decided the propaganda of Wahhabism, which proclaims the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as the sole rightful defender of Islam, would become the long-term strategy for the monarchy’s survival.

When Afghanistan, another largely Sunni country nearby, moved from Soviet influence to Soviet control, in 1979, the House of Saud saw an opportunity to project itself as the global defender of Muslims. This view coalesced with the Cold War aims of the US, which saw the Saudi desire to weaponize Islamist ideology as tactically useful in the West’s struggles against the Soviet Union. As later described in testimony before the US Senate Judiciary Committee, and listed on the late King Fahd’s website, Saudi Arabia spent $4 billion per year on mosques, madrassas, preachers, students, and textbooks to spread the Wahhabi creed over the next decades. Thousands of Muslim centers sprang up along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan and then in Afghanistan itself—training not scholars but jihadis equipped with Wahhabi ideology and American weapons. The madrassas in Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan produced al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The US did not foresee that foreign fighters drawn to the Afghan jihad might carry violence back to their native lands as al-Qaeda affiliates spread across the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and South Asia.

Since 2011, between 100 and 150 new mosques are at various stages of planning and construction across France. The Muslim Council of France claims that less assistance for such expansion comes from “foreign organizations,” but US government sources suspect that much of the funding is actually funneled from Saudi sources through difficult-to-track chains of bank accounts and person-to-person cash transfers. In Bosnia, too, Saudi financing has been central since the end of the civil war, in 1995, for construction of new mosques and cultural centers, such as the King Fahd Mosque in Sarajevo. Saudi and Qatari Wahhabi charities controlled 60 percent of mosques in Italy by 2009. In Kazakhstan, the Mecca-based Muslim World League, long associated with disseminating Wahhabism, is funding construction of mosques. The intelligence service of India estimates more than $244 million has been spent by Saudi Wahhabis during the past decade to set up 40 new mosques and four new madrassas and take over hundreds of others across the subcontinent, from Kashmir in the north to Maharashtra in the west and Kerala in the south.

Marginalized European Muslim immigrants and their descendants, like the Kouachi brothers, who lived in the blighted banlieues, or French suburbs, have become favorite face-to-face targets of Wahhabi
proselytizers and radicalizers, as documented in an extensive report by the Institut Montaigne, a French think tank. The laundering of funds from Saudi and other donors runs through the accounts of mosques to imams who then make distributions to organizations and individuals. Once radicalized in their Western and Asian towns, budding jihadis are sent to organizations like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Islamic State—groups which US and EU intelligence services regard as being financed by Saudi Arabian assets and continuing to draw upon the most extreme interpretations of Wahhabism.



When US-led coalition forces moved into Afghanistan and Iraq, in 2001 and 2003 respectively, the conditions had already been laid for them to be battled to the death by local and foreign fighters committed to the Wahhabi ideology. When Western troops withdrew, the ideologues attacked recently installed governments with renewed “substantial and sustained” Saudi support, in the words of Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service. The goal seems to be that of ensuring Sunni groups loyal to Wahhabism and allied to Saudi Arabia will control both those nations as well as neighbors wracked by unrest like Pakistan and Syria. Consequently, such countries become training grounds for al-Qaeda–affiliated groups and the Islamic State. Thus, over the past three years, in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and most recently Lebanon, the Saudi state has been able to utilize jihadis to launch a “proxy Sunni-Shia war” aimed specifically against Iran and its #####e and Alawite allies, according to US Vice President Joe Biden. Saudi action was initially directed by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the kingdom’s former ambassador to Washington and ex–intelligence chief, who had warned Dearlove, even prior to 9/11, that “the time is not far off, in the Middle East when it will be literally, ‘God help the Shia.’ More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them.”

[neo45]

As sad as it is it is usually safer to leave the brutal dictator in power than it is to intervene. Iraq is a good example of this. North Korea is currently a brutal dictatorship but the West intervening would ultimately make things worse for the innocent people. Exporting democracy simply isn't possible in certain places. To do so would take decades of consistent foreign policy, which in a country like the US that has a new president every 4 or 8 years, simply isn't going to happen

[taco.vidal]

Reports are emerging that one of the terrorists involved in last night’s Paris massacre was a Syrian refugee who arrived in Greece last month.
Greek journalist Yannis Koutsomitis tweets that the country’s Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection has confirmed that the terrorist found with a Syrian passport on his person was, “registered as refugee on Leros island in October.”

http://www.infowars.com/report-paris...ce-last-month/

[schteve_d]

Originally Posted by taco.vidal

http://www.infowars.com/report-paris...ce-last-month/

I can't help but think he was carrying his passport with every intention of the world finding this out. Hell, maybe that's why he registered as a refugee to start with. Not sure what the motivation for it would be. Perhaps to discourage countries from accepting refugees essentially trapping them in country?

[metallicat]

So because one of the terrorists might have been a refugee, we should entirely close our borders to all refugees? Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water.

I know after 9/11 I wanted revenge. I cheered when Bush stood on the rubble and said he'd be getting revenge. But now 15 years later, nothing has been solved. More wars have been fought, innocent lives have been lost by the hundreds of thousands.

So going back into the middle East for more war is a good plan? I can see many of you beating the war drums. Why would this be any different?

Cut and run. Leave the middle East and Asian countries entirely. I think I've become a pacifist.

[longsuffering]

Originally Posted by transplant99

My solution is a unified NATO and UN backed confrontation that has never ever occurred before where it is a single goal of all involved to end the advancement of ISIS and force a surrender where actual diplomacy and conversation can the occur in an effort to end this once and for all.

Genuine question - and I actually agree that a multilateral solution is required.

Assume you're successful. Then what happens? Who governs? Will the NATO and UN force or other groups stick around after to ensure the population has access to food, education, opportunity law & order?

What's the exit strategy?

[longsuffering]

Originally Posted by CaptainYooh

Not.

For as long as we have an array of our own seemingly unsolvable problems with poverty, homelessness, health care, youth unemployment, neglect of disabled, declining civil service quality, which are all exacerbated by declining economy and looming recession, the answer must be "absolutely not". Switzerland, Japan, Luxembourg, Monaco and many other countries have it right. They do not care to upgrade their international political image by doing grand gestures.

Being royally compassionate on behalf of the country is an unacceptable substitute for being responsible and accountable to the people of the country. Those who want to help struggling families can do so financially and personally through a myriad of good organizations.

Thank god the majority of Canadians don't share your views.

Helping those in need is a core Canadian value, both individually and as a nation.

I'm proud that Canada is going to share the burden and responsibility with Europe to help these people who are in such desperate need.

To turn our backs to these people would be disgraceful.

[Matata]

Originally Posted by polak

I'm sick of hearing that its the west responsibility to achieve peace in the middle east.

Much of the violence and instability in the middle east is a direct result of western intervention. Our governments and corporations have spent a century ravaging the middle east for their own benefit (which happens to be the exact same amount of time that they've been aware of the middle east's massive oil reserves, I wouldn't call that a coincidence). To spend a hundred years exploiting a region and spilling an ocean of blood, then to walk away and say "it's your problem now"... That doesn't sound like justice or a path to peace to me.

[VladtheImpaler]

Originally Posted by neo45

As sad as it is it is usually safer to leave the brutal dictator in power than it is to intervene. Iraq is a good example of this. North Korea is currently a brutal dictatorship but the West intervening would ultimately make things worse for the innocent people. Exporting democracy simply isn't possible in certain places. To do so would take decades of consistent foreign policy, which in a country like the US that has a new president every 4 or 8 years, simply isn't going to happen

You cannot export democracy to tribal societies. Democracy functions only in places where there is loyalty to the nation. That allows for peaceful transfer of power - the Democrats and Republicans hate each other, but in the end they know that each is American first and foremost. In the Middle East and most of Africa the first loyalty is to the clan and/or tribe and/or sect, so politics becomes a zero-sum game. You cannot afford to lose power. You can bring in democracy, but it will be of the "one man, one vote, one time" sort. There are certainly exceptions to be found here and there, but the rule holds.