Photo: The Associated Press

According to a poll conducted by Léger Marketing in Canada and Caravan in the United States, and released exclusively to Postmedia News, the large majority of Canadians don’t believe that Muslims share our values. 55 per cent of Canadian respondents, and 50.3 per cent of American respondents, disagreed with the statement “Muslims share our values.”

Those numbers change significantly based upon where the questions were asked. In Quebec, where the debate of “reasonable accommodation” has been brought to the forefront by cultural conflicts with Muslims wanting to wear the full niqab, fully 72 per cent said Muslims do not share their values:

Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies, which commissioned the poll along with the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, said the opinion Canadians held of Muslims had been deteriorating over the past few years.

“I think the principal thing that worries me when you see these results is the tendency to generalize,” he said.

“There is a tendency to see an incident arising with someone who is Muslim or a group of people who are Muslim are involved and there seems to be a ready tendency to generalize to the entire group.” Ayman Al Yassini, executive director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, agreed the situation was getting worse and suggested Canada’s Muslim community reach out more to other Canadians.

I knew there would be someone who could explain to us how the majority is, in some technical way, incorrect about their own views. It is not Muslims who do not share Canadian values, but rather Canadians who generalize. It’s a perfect explanation for a poll that doesn’t seem to agree with the fairytale presented on CBC’s “Little Mosque on the Prairie.”

You mean there are greater barriers to cultural compatibility than Peter Sellers-like Pakistani accents and women wearing colourful hijabs? Uh, yeah.

Perhaps one of the more revealing aspects of integration failure is in the reactions from the Muslim community when given the opportunity to condemn terrorism.

When news hit that four Ottawa Muslims were accused of conspiring to commit terrorist atrocities in the capital city, a Montreal-based Islamic group’s first instinct was to reach out and shield the accused.

When Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf unleashed his brainchild for a 13-story mosque in a building partially destroyed by one of the jets crashing into the World Trade Center two blocks away, Muslims were quietly subdued. But when an irrelevant Pastor from Florida threatened to burn the Koran, it suddenly became a rallying point for the Muslim world to burn American flags and promise to rain death down upon the infidels.

As for our spineless, cowardly politicians across the entire political spectrum, none declined to prostrate themselves at the altar of the politically correct. As Rex Murphy wrote today in the National Post:

And what or who is more extraneous or ancillary, more truly irrelevant, than Pastor Jones? How could a genuine world issue, of cardinal depth and significance, be hostage to such a trivial player, to a pathetic and obvious publicity ploy by a man the world had never heard of?

Indeed. And yet what or who is more extraneous or ancillary to global peace and conciliation than some nobody cartoonist from Denmark? Yet he spawned riots the world over for doing nothing more than depicting the prophet Muhammad in a cartoon. When Kurt Westergaard was recently honoured with an award in Germany for those cartoons, the Muslim world again reacted with the kind of anger you would expect to be proportionate to a terrorist attack.

The solution to Muslim integration in Canada seems quite simple. When the followers of Muhammad ever get around to becoming as outraged over the acts of brutality perpetrated by fanatics of their religion, as they do over cartoons and threats to burn books, then you can expect Canadians to begin to believe that they share our “values.”