Immigration et certaines prises de position des associations francophones hors Québec (#342) « Quebec Culture Blog

2015/08/27 Leave a comment

For those interested in Francophone immigration to English Canada, a good long commentary on the tendency of some stakeholders to assign sole responsibility to CIC, rather than recognizing that there are broader issues at stake. His particular recommendations:

Une mini-révolution tranquille « économique » hors Québec est possible sur plusieurs niveaux afin de déclancher une telle restructuration:

  1. On pourrait créer un fonds de solidarité francophone pancanadienne pour les cotisations des entreprises francophones hors Québec (cela pourrait remplacer le rôle de revenu Canada dans ce domaine, et pourrait inciterait les entreprises francophones à continuer d’opérer en français hors Québec si, en revanche, on leur offre des avantages sur la taxe sur la masse salariale).
  2. On pourrait fonder une banque de développement d’affaires francophones spécifiquement pour les entreprises hors Québec qui prouvent que leurs opérations internes sont en français. On pourrait créer une société d’assurance pancanadienne francophone avec des branches partout au pays.
  3. On pourrait financer des cliniques médicales francophones, et de les loger dans les hôpitaux anglophones à travers le pays (il existe des cliniques de langue anglaise dans les hôpitaux chinois en Chine pour les étrangers, alors pourquoi ne pas implanter un système semblable au Canada anglais pour les francophones?)
  4. On pourrait offrir une aide financière au niveau des cours de formation pour les employés qui travaillent dans les entreprises qui ont le français comme langue principale d’opérations internes (affichage, réunions, documents, main d’oeuvre).   Un tel programme serait nécessaire
  5. … les prestataires et fournisseurs hors Québec d’une certaine taille, qui désirent obtenir les contrats du gouvernement, devrait embaucher un seuil minimum de francophones (dont les compétences linguistiques auraient été évaluées au préalable par un tiers neutre et impartial).

Immigration et certaines prises de position des associations francophones hors Québec (#342) « Quebec Culture Blog

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Iranian epic ‘Muhammad’ aims to change Islam’s image – Business Insider

2015/08/27 Leave a comment

Interesting that such a film received approval to be made and shown in Iran and how audiences inside and outside Iran (those that can see it) react:

The award-winning director of Iran’s most expensive ever film, “Muhammad”, says he hopes it will improve Islam’s “violent image”, but the religious epic risks angering many Muslims despite not showing the prophet’s face.

The huge production about the childhood of the prophet cost up to an estimated $40 million and took more than seven years to complete.

The 171-minute film, which stars many top Iranian actors, premieres on Wednesday in 143 theatres throughout Iran, the day before it opens the Montreal Film Festival.

In an interview with AFP in Tehran, its director Majid Majidi, 56, said extremists and jihadists such as the Islamic State group “have stolen the name of Islam”.

In the Western world, “an incorrect interpretation of Islam has emerged that shows a violent image of Islam, and we believe it has no link whatsoever” to the religion, he said.

“Muhammad” is the first part of a trilogy on the life of the prophet. The film depicts events before his birth and up to his teenage years, before he became prophet, which according to the Koran was at the age of 40.

While Iran has denounced cartoons of the prophet like those published by French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Shiite Muslims are generally more relaxed than Sunnis about depictions of religious figures.

While many planned screenings of “Muhammad” in Shiite-majority Iran have already sold out, in the Sunni Muslim world the production has triggered controversy.

Iranian epic ‘Muhammad’ aims to Islam’s image – Business Insider.

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Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote: Lulu 30 Percent Off Sale

2015/08/27 Leave a comment

Lulu_27_Aug_Sale

For any of you interested in the print version (available here), rare 30 percent off sale at Lulu, today only.

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Birthright citizenship is a hallmark of New World democracies

2015/08/26 Leave a comment

Good commentary on the Republican primary birth tourism polemics.

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Overcoming Islamophobia: Fear is never the best basis for action – William Macdonald

2015/08/26 Leave a comment

Good essay on the need for perspective and mutual accommodation by William A. Macdonald in the context of Canadian Muslims but applicable more broadly:

The numbers tell their own story. There are about a million Muslims in Canada, and 1.6 billion around the world, one-quarter of whom reside in India and Indonesia. Despite the current problems particular to Islam, there is no irresistible link between Islam itself and terrorism. No Muslim country is in the world’s top 20 in terms of homicides per capita, nor is Islam associated with any of the 10 largest genocides in history.

The only long-run solution to the relationship between Islam and the rest of the world is rooted in mutual accommodation. Whatever is being done to fight terrorism must always keep that reality in mind. Words matter, and we should avoid to the extent possible including the terms Islamic or Muslim in our descriptions of extremism or terrorism, even if the violence is being done in the name of Islam. Readers already know that’s what al-Qaeda and Islamic State claim.

Islam is no different from any other religion in its need to examine itself critically. The thinking mostly has to come from within, while the challenges will often come from outside events. The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding gay marriage is a good example: Religion not only challenges the world; the world challenges religion. Institutional religions, if they are to survive and thrive, need to communicate with their adherents, and everyone else. For example, the Pope challenges the world to do better at the very moment when the acceptance of gay marriage challenges his church (and not very long after it was challenged by the adverse reaction to its reluctance to respond to the sexual abuse of young people in its care).

David Brooks, the insightful conservative columnist for The New York Times, described the current post-gay-marriage situation in the United States very well. True believers – mostly of a religious persuasion – have a choice, he says; one way is to keep fighting for what they believe by seeking to change laws so that they can impose their views on society. The other, as Mr. Brooks and I both believe, is for these groups to accept that they are special communities of individual believers who can make their best contribution to their members and to society, not by trying to impose their views on others, but by the strength of their own communities of faith.

In recent weeks, the racist massacre in Charleston, S.C., has provided yet another example to our world, desperately in need of more compassion and a larger purpose than individuals themselves. It is difficult to imagine anything more powerful than the personal, face-to-face forgiveness of the deeply mourning relatives to the murderer of their loved ones. The authenticity of this forgiveness could come only from the force of their deep faith.

There is an urgent need to find the best strategy to address the double challenge presented by terrorist acts in Canada and terrorist recruits from Canada. Aside from that issue, how big a problem are Muslims? Or, from another perspective, is Canada a problem for Muslims? Canada’s history is all about a growing capacity for the inclusion of more and more differences in our society. Covering a woman’s face with a niqab is certainly incompatible with the openness that has become part of the Canadian way. Yet it represents no threat to anyone except on those occasions when there is a clear need to see someone’s face, such as for identification purposes or during testimony in court.

Overcoming Islamophobia: Fear is never the best basis for action – The Globe and Mail.

For those interested in his website and more of his views, his framing piece can be found at CANADA: STILL THE UNKNOWN COUNTRY along with other commentary at Canadian Difference.

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The Case for Teaching Ignorance – The New York Times

2015/08/26 Leave a comment

Good advice to all of us, whether policy makers or not, on uncertainty and the need to understand the limits of available evidence:

Presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions.

People tend to think of not knowing as something to be wiped out or overcome, as if ignorance were simply the absence of knowledge. But answers don’t merely resolve questions; they provoke new ones.

Michael Smithson, a social scientist at Australian National University who co-taught an online course on ignorance this summer, uses this analogy: The larger the island of knowledge grows, the longer the shoreline — where knowledge meets ignorance — extends. The more we know, the more we can ask. Questions don’t give way to answers so much as the two proliferate together. Answers breed questions. Curiosity isn’t merely a static disposition but rather a passion of the mind that is ceaselessly earned and nurtured.

Mapping the coast of the island of knowledge, to continue the metaphor, requires a grasp of the psychology of ambiguity. The ever-expanding shoreline, where questions are born of answers, is terrain characterized by vague and conflicting information. The resulting state of uncertainty, psychologists have shown, intensifies our emotions: not only exhilaration and surprise, but also confusion and frustration.

The borderland between known and unknown is also where we strive against our preconceptions to acknowledge and investigate anomalous data, a struggle Thomas S. Kuhn described in his 1962 classic, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” The center of the island, by contrast, is safe and comforting, which may explain why businesses struggle to stay innovative. When things go well, companies “drop out of learning mode,” Gary P. Pisano, a professor at Harvard Business School, told me. They flee uncertainty and head for the island’s interior.

The Case for Teaching Ignorance – The New York Times.

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Is it ok to criticise Islam? | openDemocracy

2015/08/25 Leave a comment

Interesting column by William Eichler, defending free speech but underlying some of the complexities involved:

Speech always takes place within a context. Articles, cartoons and films are all embedded within a particular time and place. Behind each and every cultural product is a world of meaning constituted by the historical and socio-political context within which it is produced. And the manner in which it is received is shaped by this same context. Pre-fatwa Rushdie made this very point: “Works of art, even works of entertainment do not come into being in a social and political vacuum…the way they operate in a society cannot be separated from politics, from history. For every text, a context.”

What is the context of much of the criticism and satire that is levelled at Islam and Muslims today? Islamophobia from the far (and not so far) right; a “War on Terror” discourse that frames all Muslims as potential killers; the catastrophic invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; and violent, political upheaval throughout the Middle East. Against this  backdrop it’s little wonder that many Muslims don’t feel like laughing at caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad or engaging in discussions about the flaws in their faith.

Many free speech advocates characterise this stance pejoratively as a “Yes, but…” argument—a pusillanimous defence of basic democratic values that cedes too much ground to terrorists. But this is nonsense buoyed up by macho rhetoric. The dispute is not about free speech, and to hunker down behind abstract principles while refusing to deal with the world as it actually exists is to opt for cheap moralising at the expense of rigorous analysis. This is what Rousseau meant when he wrote that, “Those who desire to separate politics from morals will understand neither.”

Free speech is a principle worth defending, and it should certainly be protected from theocratic thugs with guns as well as from anyone else who wants to curtail it. I’m happy to declare “Je suis Charlie” myself, no matter how tired a slogan it might sound. Nobody should be killed for drawing cartoons. But in order to show commitment to slain satirists and the inviolability of free expression, we don’t have to ignore the concerns of those at whom the satire is aimed.

There is nothing wrong with complexity. The world is full of ‘shadows’ and shades of grey that cannot be ignored. It is not morally weak to say ‘Yes, but I am also concerned about how free speech is used.’ In fact, this position is both intellectually and ethically stronger and more rigorous than a simple declaration of ‘Yes, I believe in free speech’ that’s followed by a hollow silence. Caveats don’t weaken a moral stance—they make the arguments that underpin it even stronger.

Is it ok to criticise Islam? | openDemocracy.

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Don’t LOL, the kids can still spell: Renzetti

2015/08/25 Leave a comment

Elizabeth Renzetti on the state of kids spelling and the evolution of language:

“Healthy languages change,” Mr. Shea said. “Dead languages are static.”

The linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker also delivers a liberating smack on the nose to pedants and doomsayers in his recent book, The Sense of Style. “The problem with the Internet-is-making-us-illiterate theory, of course, is that bad prose has burdened readers in every era,” he writes. Television and radio were once blamed for a decline in writing skills; now, it’s texts and Twitter. But, as he argues, college students are actually writing more these days than ever before, and they do not make more mistakes than their predecessors or “sprinkle their papers with smileys.”

Instead of seeing a degradation brought about by technology, Mr. Pinker identifies a long-existing division between bad prose, which is bloated, rule-obsessed and obscure, and good prose, which is vibrant, direct and clear. And he banishes treasured notions, such as the idea you can’t start a sentence with a conjunction, to grammar’s slagheap. To deftly split an infinitive is accepted. Prepositions can be placed anywhere they want to cling to. (The rules around prepositions and other parts of speech, Mr. Pinker demonstrates, have more to do with centuries-old fashion than clarity or common sense.)

In other words, language is its own thing, shifting and transforming before our eyes, as much the possession of teenagers as the people who grew up on Strunk and White. “When it comes to correct English, there’s no one in charge,” Mr. Pinker writes. “The lunatics are running the asylum.” And that’s how it should be.

Don’t LOL, the kids can still spell – The Globe and Mail.

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How families can counter the pull of violent extremism

2015/08/25 Leave a comment

Michelle Walrond, mother of suspected extremist, Luqman Abdunnur (see ‘My son has screwed up his life,’ Ottawa woman says), on indications of radicalization:

  1. If they don’t accept your family, they don’t accept you. If their new friends or teachers or clergy don’t want to know their family then they don’t want a “whole person” to join their ranks, they want a cog in the wheel of their mechanisms. When I converted to Islam, the first thing my imam-appointed guardian did was to ask to meet my parents. I barely spoke to my mother before I converted, but I was told if I wanted to be a Muslim, I had to make good relations with her. When I said I was once married but living on my own, he insisted on meeting my husband too. When my son, who was born Muslim, joined the mosque that taught him radical ideology, they told him and his classmates, “Most of your parents are not (really) Muslims.” And by a fabricated extension, he no longer had to give them their rights as family members. That lie was antithetical to Islam.
  2. If you get to meet your loved one’s new acquaintances, it shouldn’t be too much to ask that your loved one and his or her influencers provide verifiable facts about themselves. Mr. Bledsoe says: “Involve them in conversations. Get them to talk to you.… Go where they are going, even if it’s a religious institution.… We tried to go to Nashville to meet Carlos’s friends, but they would disappear.”
  3. Radical extremists prey on people with weak personalities. Unfortunately, moderate Muslim communities often encourage conformity, close-mindedness and banality. Positive influences should strengthen character, encourage creativity and innovation. In ultra-conservative Muslim communities “innovation” is a sin, but skewed interpretations of social responsibility are presented as activism. Encourage your loved one to challenge their fabrications and deceptions.

How families can counter the pull of violent extremism – The Globe and Mail.

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Can a Song Change the Meaning of ‘Jihad’? – The Daily Beast

2015/08/25 Leave a comment

Interesting approach – using a music video to influence opinion:

Spiegel tries to correct the misunderstanding of the word within the first minutes of the music video for “Jihad Love Squad” with a title card that reads: “Jihad: The spiritual struggle within oneself between good and evil.”

Now just so it’s clear, there is a jihad within Islam that means a holy war. But to most Muslims, the concept of jihad is part of the everyday struggle to the best person you can be. That is why Spiegel’s friend wore a ring bearing that word and why I know Muslims with the first name “Jihad.” (I can’t even imagine how tough that name is at the airport?!)

Spiegel, who was born in New York but is now based in Los Angeles, increasingly became concerned over how the song, and especially the video, would be received by both the Muslim community and the Muslim haters as the released date approached.

He fully gets that the anti-Muslim bigots could target him. After all in 2013 when the Council on American-Islamic Relations spearheaded a campaign to redefine the word “jihad” with a series of ads, it was met with outrage by the queen of anti-Muslim bigotry, Pam Geller.  She even spent money to put up ads to define jihad in the most negative light possible in hopes of stoking the flames of hate against Muslims.

On the flip side, Spiegel is keenly aware that some Muslims may watch the video and believe that he’s not deconstructing a negative stereotype about Muslims, but perpetuating it.  And to be honest, some will likely see it as that. I showed the video to a cross section of Muslims and some did voice concerns that the video could be misunderstood.

The music video, which Spiegel directed, was beautifully shot in India. It opens with a woman greeting customers at a restaurant. She then goes into a backroom, straps on what appears to be a suicide vest, covers herself in a full burka and heads out in to the street.  She soon walks into a schoolyard where young kids playing see her and freeze in apparent fear. As the tension builds, she presses the button to activate the vest.

But as you can imagine, there’s a twist. Instead of an explosion of material that can kill, it releases different colored powders, the type used in the Hindu festival of colors known as “Holi.” Spiegel explained that the powder represents the woman spreading love, not death.

Can a Song Change the Meaning Sam Spiegel of ‘Jihad’? – The Daily Beast.

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