I believe that Ben Sixsmith’s article was based on the beheading murders in France and the terrorist shootings in Vienna. It is this extremism and its related violence that I find incompatible with western life.

As someone who has enjoyed the hospitality of Muslim friends and colleagues and attended Iftar dinner at mosque, I refuse to associate the recent violence in Europe with rank and file Islamic belief.

Indeed there is much in western culture that is inflammatory and philosophically in opposition to beliefs of any conservative culture. Licentiousness in the form of hedonism is anathema to any culture based on traditional family and marriage.

Honestly, the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Mohammed are seemingly designed to outrage in that there is nothing funny about them. Maybe I don’t get French humour. Still, their tastelessness does not justify murder.

A pre-requisite for successful adaptation to western life is a tolerance of satire, pornography other free expressions of dubious taste.

And, no I don’t give the west a pass on blowback from its’ murderous warring foreign policies or corporatist meddling in places that were once colonial outposts.

As a white westerner, I fully acknowledge that I am on unceded indigenous land obtained by trickery and refusal to fulfill treaty agreements.

As someone who has chosen to marry outside my tribe I find that my world is richer and better for having met and befriended those who look, eat and worship differently than me. If there is one constant in human history, it is that people move around to improve their situation or escape a bad one.