Baby, meet bathwater

I remember, relatively recently, having a discussion about where one would take a visitor to Toronto who hadn't been here before. It's tough; the city has its share of tourist traps, but it's not exactly bursting with historic locations. Ultimately, we decided that the best thing would be to take our (hypothetical) guest on a tour of the city's various ethnic neighbourhoods - Chinatown, Greektown, Little Italy, Little India and so on - and let them marvel at the remarkable combination of cultural diversity and cultural harmony.

I know that sounds a bit trite, but it's genuinely how I felt. In fact, Toronto's multiculturalism was probably what made me proudest of the city - something I hoped we could all build on, and something I'd pass on to my kids. So much as I usually refrain from attacking stuff in Post's comment pages, which I work on, I have to say it: I'm increasingly fed up with people who've long had it in for multiculturalism using charges against 17 fringe members of a single group as a pretext to attack it.

Tart Cider did a good job earlier in the week of taking on Robert Fulford's proclamation that "some groups … decid[ing] to live in ghettos of their own making” constitutes an indictment of our brand of multiculturalism. But today George Jonas - whose writing I generally like, even though I tend to disagree with it - is back on the same kick as Fulford, but much further out in left (right?) field.

Jonas' point, more or less, is summarized in his first few lines. Multiculturalism not only "awarded citizenship to aliens, alienated citizens and turned two grand solitudes into several petty ones”; it also "made possible, perhaps even rendered inevitable” attempted terror attacks. Later, he gives us this head-scratcher: "In the heady atmosphere of [the 1960s] no one in authority could — or perhaps would — note the potential for trouble in multicultural paradise, namely that a well-meaning attempt to limit cultural dominance by any one group within a country, harmless and equitable on its face, has the capacity of turning a nation-state into a railway station in which passengers mingle, occasionally sharing a destination but no destiny. Railway stations and airport terminals can evoke the most profound sense of alienation in human beings. It's no coincidence that trains, buses, subways and airplanes are among the preferred targets of terrorists.”

With all respect to Jonas, whose career certainly merits it, this is beneath him. There's a reason why he spends virtually the entire column outlining how we got to the point where multiculturalism wrought its terrible consequences upon us, and never moves beyond rhetoric to offer actual evidence of those consequences - there is no evidence. Canadian society isn't at war with itself; 17 outsiders are allegedly at war with the rest of us - just the same as a few outsiders in Britain, Spain, the United States, and probably most other Western countries.

It's the nature of columnists to exploit the latest news story to advance their pre-existing views, and I suppose I can't really blame my colleagues for doing so. But it would be pathetic if the rest of us allowed what appears to be a few failed terrorists to change the way we view our city and our country.