Thank you, Chair, and thanks to the committee for this opportunity. I have served on this committee but it's been quite some time. It's a fascinating discussion.
I want to direct this question to either one of you. I wonder about this. You mentioned what's happening: the conflict, the history, and how we've come to this point. It appears to me that—it's obvious to all of us—this is not primarily an issue in the Middle East. It may have exploded there but we're seeing problems in northern Africa, West Africa, East Africa, and in Sudan, of course. There seems to be something else. I often wonder if we aren't addressing the elephant in the room and that is precisely this.
I've had the chance to travel extensively in Turkey and I've made some strong connections there. I serve on a Canada-Turkey parliamentary association. The reason that I'm passionate about those things is that Turkey plays such a large role. It had the capacity at one point, and I think still does, being primarily the only other democracy in the region other than Lebanon, to some degree, and of course, Israel. But when I was travelling with one of my Turkish friends, he referred to the Christian west and the Muslim countries, and I corrected him. I said it's not that. It's the secular west. We established long ago that we would allow secularism to be the platform on which we base our society. Is not this really a conflict between that struggle, the struggle of control, of releasing that? Of course, if we study Islam it's inclusive throughout society and isn't this really a struggle whereby they realize that if they allow that secularism to creep into their society they're going to lose that control? I wonder if either one of you could comment on that.