Try Hard

I think that the following quote from Beloved is extremely telling. Ironically given that it is a book about slavery, I believe it explains part of the immigrant experience of Canada and the United States. If you've ever been asked, after having referred to yourself as a Canadian, "Where are you really from?" you would understand the feeling expressed in the following lines:

"And in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not his. He hid it in his breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap water and tried to not to love it. On nights when the sky was personal, weak with the weight of its own stars, he made himself not love it. Its graveyards and low-lying rivers. Or just a house--solitary under a chinaberry tree; maybe a mule tethered and the light hitting its hide just so. Anything could stir him and he tried hard not to love it."

These sentences are a constant reminder that as much as you might feel it, this is not your place. Your place is somewhere far away. You might never have even been there but because you had the misfortune to have a certain skin colour and features you're evermore of that foreign place. Of course had you had the good fortune to be born with pale, white skin you are instantly accepted in this new land. Somehow you are more deserving of the title of Canadian and American than even those that have been here for many generations.

Now thinking about this experience specifically in relation to Muslims you can perhaps understand the rage of certain extremists in western countries. Muslims in Canada are, perhaps more than other groups, excluded from being fully Canadian or American. For one, they are less inclined to change their habits and dress to conform (though it's never enough) to the expected standard. I should say fairly that Canada and the United States have nothing on the United Kingdom where Muslims are ghettoized and completely rejected from British society; from what I've read this is also the case in France and Germany and much of Europe.

Ultimately when you're not fully part of a place you're always uncomfortable, unstable and resentful. You're constantly reminded that you are rejected in your day to day interactions and simple statements like "where are you really from?". Your roots are shallow. This makes weeding easy when that day comes but it also makes cultivation by extremists equally easy.