When I was a child, I don't believe I looked very different from anyone else around me, I was just me, and since I was me I was special to me. Other people would occasionally approach me, total strangers, to ask where I was from. Since I knew nothing other than life in Canada and was absolutely certain I was born in Canada, I would simply look at them somewhat puzzled at the question and respond, Canada, of course. Those questions didn't stop until I reached adulthood, and then if they were posed, were hooded in a circumlocutory manner, still plainly obvious to me.

I don't believe even now, that back then I should have excited that kind of curiosity, since I don't believe I could ever have been mistaken for what we now politely term a "visible minority". I was part of an ethnic minority, as a Jewish child, and my parents had come to Canada from Poland and from Russia, and I was sent to a parochial school after normal school hours, but it was a secular parochial school, teaching cultural history, language, literature.

When my husband and I first moved to the street we now live on twenty-four years ago, the first neighbour to knock at the door of our new house to introduce himself and welcome us to the street lived directly across the street from us, a young black man whom we got to know quite well. We were dumbstruck when he and his wife decided to take their two then-teen sons to live in the United States where he'd had a job offer they felt he couldn't refuse.

Some of our neighbours are more recent arrivals to the country than we are as second-generation Canadians. We have families from Hong Kong, Egypt, France, Bangladesh, India and Russia living on this street. There has never been any division between people here, and those who are more recent arrivals than others have chosen to meld into the social fabric of the community. Our Bangladeshi Muslim neighbour has been hesitant about the presence of a Sikh family on the street. The former has made overt efforts to win me over to an Islamic point of view, the latter has become a firm family friend.

And that, primarily, points to the differences between immigrants who have long established themselves in the country, adapting themselves to a different, new culture, appreciating a heritage that was present before their arrival, and accepting the values of the country they chose to emigrate to. In deep conversation with some of our neighbours, current affairs invariably come up. And the views with which later arrivals, failing to adapt to their new environment has captured the attention of the earlier arrivals are sternly critical.

They are almost universally aghast at the sense of entitlement evinced by late arrivals, and mostly people whose faith is Islamic. Most recall that there was no organized governmental assistance at any level to help new arrivals learn their new language, culture, laws, but that people went out to accomplish all of the required adjustments on their own initiative to fit into what they knew would be the legacy they would give to their children and their grandchildren. Some people, albeit horrified at the current situation prevailing with Syrians desperate to escape punishing oppression are not willing to accept refugees who are Muslim.

And this is what is outstanding about Muslims; among those anxious to live their lives in harmony with others not like them, there are significant numbers whose indoctrination in violent Islamist precepts of jihad in proselytizing for their religion to transform the world community leading to terrorism has impacted in producing a government more totalitarian than most of the others, intent on butchering their own and threatening the stability of the entire Middle East. The result of which is millions of fleeing Sunni Muslims from the minority Shiite Muslim carnage which has claimed well over a quarter million lives in the past four years.

Amidiyya Muslims as a minority sect within Islam, persecuted as apostates, appear to be the sole social-religious-cultural group among those Muslims emigrating to Canada who don't bring a pathology of cultural fixation in tribal conflict and rage against others with them to Canada. While celebrating their culture and heritage and religion they also pay due respect to Canadian customs, laws and values.