Everyday, we (and Québeckers in particular!) are bombarded with messages of being bad, of being racist, of being discriminators.
What a POWERFUL article by Mr. Martineau. Merci/Thank you.
Like this journalist, Bambi is fed up.
Enough is more than enough!
Below is a quick translation of Mr. Martineau’s article published yesterday in the Journal de Montréal:
https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2020/11/22/plus-capable
“A message to all those who take advantage of the forums offered to them to say that Québeckers are racist, intolerant, narrow-minded, chauvinist, sectarian, cautious, and closed to others.
If you find life so hard in Québec.
If you think Québec is such a terrible place.
If you are in so much pain.
Go, what the hell!
Jump on a plane and go to milder skies!
We’re not holding you back…
Shame on Amnesty International
I think I am correct when I say that I am not the only one who is fed up with these insults.
For some time now, it seems like the one who will hit the hardest on the head of Québeckers.
Until Amnesty International gets down to it, claiming in an odious ad that Québeckers discriminate against all those who are not called Tremblay or Roy!
Don’t you have dictatorships to condemn, dear friends of Amnesty? Political prisoners to be released? Torturers to denounce?
The people of Québec are among the most welcoming ones in the world.
Talk to the Haitians we have welcomed with open arms. To Vietnamese boat people. To the Chileans who fled the Pinochet dictatorship.
To the Algerians who chose to move here because they were fed up with the Islamists.
And to the Iraqis, yes, Adib, the Iraqis who came here so that they could finally live in peace and see their children thrive, be successful, shine – and, who knows? maybe even fill halls and be applauded at Sunday High Mass by French-speaking white Catholics who will treat them as friends, compatriots and equals” [Bambi will allow herself to add the following: Mr. Adib Alkhalideh, a famous artist, told viewers of Radio-Canada, the French CBC, that he feels “humiliated” in “Ville Saint-Laurent” where he resides and “on TV”. Funny as Bambi lived there for 15 years. She has cousins and friends who happily still reside there. The last time she checked, no one was “oppressed” or “microaggressed”, regardless of his/her mother tongue, religion, or other parts of their complex identities). Mind you, this part of Montreal has been tenderly called “Saint-Liban” (Saint Lebanon), as it is filled with all sorts of old and recent immigrants from all over the world, mostly from this tiny Mediterranean Arab country].
“Fed up with seeing people who have taken full advantage of the generosity and openness of Québeckers to, once settled in, spit in our face.
The bare minimum
All you are being asked is to speak our language and not to wave your religion like a flag when you work for the state and you are an authority figure.
Is it so appalling?
Do you know any regions of the world where it is as good to live as here?
I imagine if your home country was so beautiful, so egalitarian, so generous, if it defended the rights of its citizens so well and if it treated its minorities so well, you would not have decided to leave everything to settle here, thousands of kilometres from your native land, from your parents, from your friends.
Would it be too much to ask you to take advantage of your forums to praise our generosity, sometimes? Our benevolence? Our clemency? Our charity? Our openness?
We are not asking for much. Just stop dragging us through the mud.
We are a minority.
And a minority is fragile.
It is quite normal that we want to protect our culture, our language, our ways and customs.
Do you know all the struggles, all the fights that our parents, our grandparents and our great-grandparents had to lead so we can still be here?
Integration is a two-lane highway. We have duties to you.
But you have them toward us too.”
