Re: Syrian refugee crisis.
 

FFS man, listen to yourself. It'd be so much simpler if they'd all just starve to death, I suppose, wouldn't it?

Re: Syrian refugee crisis.
 

My children are tucked up in bed...

Where the children sleep - Där barnen sover - Ett fotoprojekt av Magnus Wennman

Re: Syrian refugee crisis.
 

Do you intend your post the help the far right? Because it will

Re: Syrian refugee crisis.
 

Few things help nationalists more than flooding their country with foreigners who have no desire to assimilate.

Few utopian ideals last more than three generations--the first believe them, the second tolerate them, the third tear them down--and multiculturalism is into its third generation now. It'll be dead and buried well before I am.

Re: Syrian refugee crisis.
 

Very hard to look at those photographs.

Re: Syrian refugee crisis.
 

You have an unusual take on flooding.Not to mention it's only a minority who may not fully integrate.

Re: Syrian refugee crisis.
 

How do you know that they have no desire to assimilate?

Hmm, maybe they spend hours on a website talking to other people from their own country? Damn foreigners

Re: Syrian refugee crisis.
 

Do you think assimilation is a two way process?

We seem to be relatively well integrated in Toronto but with some levels of segregation all be it probably more for convenience of utility than any hostile reason.

Re: Syrian refugee crisis.
 

Been travelling in Europe for just over a week. I was shocked at the rising anti refugee feelings from so many people. The most interesting conversation was from a visible minority taxi driver who made the comment after a news story "that unless the migrant flow was brought under control and most migrants sent back it would put back race relations 30 years".

Re: Syrian refugee crisis.
 

There will be challenges, but we in Europe better get used to it. The times are a changin'. The important debate is integration.

Re: Syrian refugee crisis.
 

Integration won't happen if the numbers are too large, you just get ghettos.

Re: Syrian refugee crisis.
 

An issue, to be sure. One of the biggest obstacles at present are faith based schools - eliminating those would be a good start, indeed, almost a precondition.

Re: Syrian refugee crisis.
 

I don't disagree that faith-based schools are prone to insularity of world-view and likely to be part of the problem, but eliminating them in the UK woudl be hugely difficult. Nor is it necessarily the right approach. Don't forget, the UK is a country that has a constitutionally established religion, whose head of state is also head of that religion, and where CofE schools (where the local parish priest or PCC chair is ex officio a governor) are still prevalent especially at junior level. While most church schools no longer exclude non-adherents to the Anglican creed, their very existence creates a basis in law for other faith schools to operate, some of which may be rather more prone to ghettoization (if that's a word).

I think many of us on these forums are quite familiar with your views on organized religion. But religion, and religious instruction, are not necessarily damaging in and of themselves. When the tone of instruction becomes extremist, when religious leaders call for crusades, or jihads, or pogroms, or any other take on my-god-is-better-than-your-god nonsense, that's when it becomes dangerous, and that (prevention of the preaching of hatred and intolerance in all its various forms) is what presents the biggest problem.

Re: Syrian refugee crisis.
 

A constitutional change to pencil in when we change monarch, then? I accept that many faith schools are relatively benign (eg. CofE, Jewish) and are certainly viewed as a god given right by the parents of their attendees, nevertheless for a cohesive society, religious convictions need to be reduced if not eliminated. Blair went in completely the wrong direction with his 'solution' to the historical bias. But he's a religious nutter so I would expect no less.

Re: Syrian refugee crisis.
 

If I were writing his biography I'd be tempted to persuade my publisher that this is the perfect title for his time in office and since...