Sadiq Khan and the Future of Europe: Mehdi Hasan

2016/05/16 Leave a comment

Mehdi Hasan on Sadiq Khan’s election, contrasting multiculturalism and integration in Britain and other European countries:

Mr. Khan’s resounding victory was a stinging rebuke to the peddlers of prejudice. Here is a Muslim who prays and fasts and has gone on the hajj to Mecca. But he sees no contradiction in being a card-carrying liberal, too. As a member of Parliament, he voted — despite death threats from Islamist extremists — in favor of same-sex marriage and he campaigned to save a local pub in his constituency from closure. He has pledged to serve as a “feminist mayor” of London and made his first public appearance after the election at a Holocaust memorial service.

The capital, admittedly, is a city apart — diverse, immigrant-friendly and home to around four in 10 of England’s 2.6 million Muslims. But even outside London, the more relaxed and tolerant British model of multiculturalism has done a far superior job of integrating, even embracing, religious and racial diversity than the more muscular, assimilationist models in Continental Europe.

While Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy have declared multiculturalism a failure, the truth is that their countries, Germany and France, have never tried it. As Tariq Modood, the author of “Still Not Easy Being British,” writes, multiculturalism is the “political accommodation of difference.” For the French, however, difference has never even been tolerated, much less accommodated. In contrast, British-style multiculturalism has treated integration, as even David Cameron conceded almost a decade ago, as “a two-way street” and never required, in the words of Will Kymlicka, the author of “Multicultural Odysseys,” that “prior identities” must “be relinquished” in order to build a national identity.

Is it surprising that polls find that British Muslims are more patriotic and take more pride in their national identity than their non-Muslim counterparts and studies show that ethnic and religious segregation in Britain is either steady or in decline?

That isn’t to deny the problems. Britain’s Muslims tend to have the highest unemployment, worst health and fewest educational qualifications of any faith community. But this likely has more to do with a history of racism than it does with an unwillingness to integrate. A 2013 study found that Muslim men in Britain were up to 76 percent less likely to get a job offer than Christian men of the same age holding similar qualifications, while Muslim women were 65 percent less likely to be employed than Christian women.

The situation, then, is far from perfect, but there is a good reason that British Muslims look across the English Channel and breathe a sigh of collective relief.

Source: Sadiq Khan and the Future of Europe – The New York Times

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How and Why You Diversify Colleges – The New York Times

2016/05/16 Leave a comment

Frank Bruni on the efforts by USA elite colleges to broaden socioeconomic diversity of their student populations:

The socioeconomic diversity at elite colleges is hardly the most vital concern about higher education. These colleges serve a small fraction of the country’s students.

But that diversity is important nonetheless. It’s a mirror of our values — in particular, of how well we own up to stacked decks and how willing we are to make adjustments.

Amherst is an exemplar of such adjustments. It’s tweaking campus operations to recognize that some less affluent students stick around during breaks. It’s marshaling extra resources so students from low-income families can take on the sorts of unpaid internships and research opportunities that other students do.

I mentioned community colleges before: About 10 years ago, Amherst took just seven transfers from those schools. It has taken 34 in each of the last two years.

The college’s president told me that one of her current passions is to admit more military veterans, who bring to the campus abilities, experiences and outlooks that other students don’t possess.

She wasn’t talking about doing them a kindness. She wasn’t outlining a social experiment or anything gimmicky. She was embracing the reality that real learning and a real preparation for citizenship demand the intersection of different life stories and different sensibilities. Colleges should be making that happen.

Source: How and Why You Diversify Colleges – The New York Times

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For Muslim women in Canada, a sense of vulnerability: Sheema Khan

2016/05/16 Leave a comment

Sheema Khan focuses on gender differences in analysis of the recent Environics Institute survey:

The recent Environics Institute survey of Muslims in Canada reveals a community that belies facile stereotypes – no more so than when you analyze the results along gender lines.

For example, the survey (for which I served as an unpaid consultant) found that fewer Muslim women share the optimism about Canada felt by their male counterparts. And while both groups believe that their Muslim and Canadian identities are very important, when asked to choose between the two, women choose their Muslim identity at a far higher rate. As a corollary, fewer women than men believe that immigrants should set aside their cultural backgrounds and try to blend into Canadian culture. Furthermore, more female immigrants have indicated that their attachment to Islam has increased since moving to Canada.

The survey, based on telephone interviews with 600 Muslims across the country, also provides an interesting snapshot of gender-based attitudes toward community institutions. For example, only 33 per cent of Muslim women attend a mosque at least once a week for prayer, compared with 62 per cent of men. The lack of female attendance is not surprising, given that many mosques do little to encourage female participation. Interestingly, a core of about 20 per cent of women (and men) is unhappy with opportunities for women to play leadership roles in Muslim organizations. This could provide the basis for an unmosqued movement, or the creation of women’s mosques.

 When it comes to family life, a whopping 90 per cent of Muslim men and women believe the responsibility for caring for the home and children should be shared equally. However, more men believe that the father must be the master in the home, placing the Muslim level of support for family patriarchy roughly equal to that of Canadians in the 1980s. However, today’s younger Muslim generation rejects patriarchy at roughly the same level as that of other Canadians.

Muslim women are less optimistic about relations with non-Muslims than men are, the survey found. A greater number worry about the reaction of Canadians toward Muslims, believing that the next generation of Muslims will face more discrimination. They are also more concerned about media portrayal of Muslims, and stereotyping by colleagues and neighbours.

It seems the crux of the matter lies in discrimination, as 42 per cent of Muslim women (compared with 27 per cent of men) say they have experienced some form of discrimination or ill-treatment during the past five years. Such incidents occurred mainly in public places – stores, restaurants, banks, public transit. Of women who experienced xenophobia, 60 per cent said they are identifiably Muslim. This ratio is reversed among the 25 per cent of Muslim women who experience difficulties at border crossings. As a result, women worry far more about discrimination, unemployment and Islamophobia than men.

The discrimination concerns are real, as illustrated by employment statistics from the 2011 National Household Survey, in which the unemployment rate of Muslims was 14 per cent, compared with the national average of 7.8 per cent, despite Muslims having high levels of education. The unemployment rate was highest in Quebec (17 per cent), which was double the provincial average. In comparison, the national unemployment rate of visible minorities hovered around 10 per cent.

Even Canadian-born Muslims, who graduated from a Canadian institution, fared worse than the national average, with an unemployment rate of 9.5 per cent. One can only imagine the difficulties in finding employment for the 60,000 Muslim women who head a single-parent household.

Clearly, Muslim women feel more vulnerable about the future, given that they bear a greater brunt of discrimination than their male counterparts.

Source: For Muslim women in Canada, a sense of vulnerability – The Globe and Mail

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Sweden’s rape crisis isn’t what it seems: Saunders

2016/05/16 Leave a comment

Doug Saunders provides the needed nuancing regarding Sweden and refugees:

But aren’t refugees and immigrants responsible for a greater share of Sweden’s sexual assaults?

In a sense. Statistics show that the foreign-born in Sweden, as in most European countries, do have a higher rate of criminal charges than the native-born, in everything from shoplifting to murder (though not enough to affect the crime rate by more than a tiny margin). The opposite is true in North America, where immigrants have lower-than-average crime rates.

Why the difference? Because people who go to Sweden are poorer, and crime rates are mostly a product not of ethnicity but of class. In a 2013 analysis of 63,000 Swedish residents, Prof. Sarnecki and his colleagues found that 75 per cent of the difference in foreign-born crime is accounted for by income and neighbourhood, both indicators of poverty. Among the Swedish-born children of immigrants, the crime rate falls in half (and is almost entirely concentrated in lesser property crimes) and is 100-per-cent attributable to class – they are no more likely to commit crimes, including rape, than ethnic Swedes of the same family income.

What also stands out is that almost all the victims of these crimes – especially sex crimes – are also foreign-born. But for a handful of headline-grabbing atrocities, it isn’t a case of swarthy men preying on white women, but of Sweden’s system turning refugees into victims of crime.

That is the real Swedish crisis. Refugee shelters are terrible, dangerous places, whoever is in them. When such shelters, then known as displaced persons camps, held millions of Europeans in the 1940s and 1950s, histories show they were at risk of sexual predation and organized attacks against Jewish refugees.

Because otherwise generous Sweden doesn’t allow refugees to seek work until they know the language, tens of thousands of people are stuck in these awful places, in similar conditions, or in welfare-dependent netherworlds.

There they become victims of violent crime, victims of economic exclusion and victims of a grotesque, viral story that portrays them as predators, entirely because of their skin colour.

Source: Sweden’s rape crisis isn’t what it seems – The Globe and Mail

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Daphne Bramham: Canada’s flawed bill will make it easier for ‘citizens of convenience’

2016/05/16 2 Comments

Will see whether other former citizenship judges speak publicly on C-6 either against or in favour (the article mistakenly states that the Liberal government is eliminating the physical presence requirement – it is not):

Some of what Robert Watt saw and heard during six years as a citizenship judge shocked him. It’s why he’s so deeply concerned about some of the Liberals’ proposed amendments in Bill C-6.

“Memorably, on one occasion, several newly sworn in citizens brought suitcases to the ceremony room for a rapid departure to Vancouver International Airport,” he wrote in a submission to the committee that studied the bill.

He calls them citizens of convenience.

“Very early on, it became clear that a noticeable percentage of all applicants were not really interested in citizenship,” he said.

Many had left Canada immediately after making an application to return to work or to school in their country of birth or residence. They stayed there until they were required to come back to have their documents checked and take the knowledge test. Then, they’d leave again, “coming one more time to take the (Citizenship) Oath, and then leaving again.”

In many cases, he wrote that they “distorted and misrepresented” how long they had been in Canada. Using their permanent residents’ cards, they left no record of the times they came and went from Canada via the United States.

Along with other citizenship judges, Watt held hearings to try to extract the truth about how much time they had been here. In some cases, they found that applicants in line for citizenship had been outside Canada for so long that even their permanent resident cards had expired.

“These applicants were at first startling,” Watt wrote. “Then, as they kept turning up, they provided the most dramatic evidence why it was essential to have the requirements for citizenship made as clear as possible; and, to have assessment processes which would ensure that those who deserved citizenship and truly qualified for it, received it and those who fell short … did not.”

Three of the Liberals’ amendments cause the former citizenship judge the most concern. They are: reducing the amount of time spent in Canada before applying for citizenship; limiting the requirement to speak one of the two official languages; and, eliminating the “intent to reside” provision.

Source: Daphne Bramham: Canada’s flawed bill will make it easier for ‘citizens of convenience’ | Vancouver Sun

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Hollywood Studios Targeted by Feds in Gender Bias Investigation – The Daily Beast

2016/05/14 Leave a comment

Interesting to see how it turns out:

As much as powerful female voices in Hollywood like Patricia Arquette have helped bring national awareness to the industry’s alleged gender bias, Maria Giese, one of the women directors interviewed by the EOCC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission], deserves credit for helping to spearhead the investigation.

Giese began working on the issue at the end of 2011, when she met with the Directors Guild of America.

“The DGA fought me so ferociously and were so hostile to the activist efforts I was making inside the guild to increase hiring of women directors,” she told The Daily Beast. “I realized there was a huge conflict of interest—here was a union run by a vast majority of male members pretending to have an interest in hiring mandates of women when they own the lion’s share of the pie.”

She first met with the ACLU in February 2013, and again in April and May, and explained why the issue was so significant and how they could possibly mitigate it, either by coming up with solutions to take legal actions themselves or by getting the EEOC involved.

She had previously met with the EEOC and said that they were more interested in a single woman filing a lawsuit with smoking gun evidence against a studio than in getting involved themselves. She now believes that government involvement is the only way to affect real change.

Very few women directors have been as vociferously critical of the industry as Giese, who admits she has essentially sacrificed her career in doing so.

“I knew I would risk getting blacklisted in an industry that is run on personal relationships,” she said. “But I hadn’t been able to get any work for a very long time and I felt I had nothing left to lose.”

 There are only a handful of women directors who have achieved enormous success in Hollywood, most notably Kathryn Bigelow. Giese said that roughly 4 percent of studio features are directed by women, and nearly 100 percent of those women are movie stars, pop stars, or relatives of movie moguls (Angelina Jolie, Drew Barrymore, Sofia Coppola, and Jodie Foster, to name a few).

“There’s no guarantees that this investigation will amount to any change, and that puts women directors and allies of women directors in a precarious position if they choose to speak out right now,” said another female director who asked to remain anonymous.

If the EEOC found evidence of widespread discrimination in Hollywood, they could potentially sue studios or seek to negotiate a solution that would increase their hiring of women in various roles.

Source: Hollywood Studios Targeted by Feds in Gender Bias Investigation – The Daily Beast

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Toronto school [Thorncliffe Park] offers sanitized sex-ed amid parent concern

2016/05/14 1 Comment

Seems like an accommodation that preserves the essence of the curriculum while addressing parental sensitivities:

An alternative to Ontario’s updated health curriculum is being offered by the Toronto elementary school that found itself at the centre of the sex-education controversy — with Grade 1 students having the option to learn about “private parts” instead of proper names for genitalia.

Thorncliffe Park Principal Jeff Crane said because a number of parents had concerns about their children being taught the words penis and vagina, the school decided to offer a class where teachers covered the key issue of inappropriate touching without being specific about body parts, a move meant to keep kids in school this week and at least learn some of the curriculum.

About 60 per cent of the 300 students in that grade were taught the proper curriculum, the remaining 40 per cent the sanitized version.

“We let parents know ahead of time when the health strands for human development were being taught and, for Grade 1, that there would be one lesson where there would be discussion of body parts … They were told if learning the names of genitalia was a concern, they could write me a letter requesting a religious accommodation,” said Crane, whose school is located in the riding represented by Premier Kathleen Wynne, who championed the updated health curriculum.

Parents were told “the lesson would be exactly the same, but instead of using proper terms like penis and vagina, we would use the term ‘private parts.’ The key learning in that expectation is that this is a part of your body always covered with clothes, nobody touches it and you don’t show anybody. We were able to maintain the integrity of the expectation with a very simple accommodation.”

Last September, Thorncliffe Park school was hit by protests — which saw hundreds of children pulled out of school because of the sex-ed curriculum — where parents set up their own classes in the adjacent park. Even weeks later, when that protest ended, enrolment remained lower than expected. But now, it has rebounded and sits at 1,310 students, down from the projected 1,350.

Crane said he held 20 sessions with more than 650 parents to go over the curriculum and to counter misinformation circulating in the community, which has a large Muslim population.

He said he expects to offer modified lessons to students in Grades 4 and 5, when puberty and menstruation are among the topics covered.

Source: Toronto school offers sanitized sex-ed amid parent concern | Toronto Star

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Quebec minister refuses to sign off on new, controversial history course

2016/05/14 Leave a comment

Positive move:

A proposed high school history course that critics said ignored minorities in Quebec and promoted a rigid, nationalist ideology will not be implemented province wide as planned, the Education Department confirmed Thursday.

Instead, the department will make changes to the program to better reflect the province’s cultural and linguistic minorities, according to a government official as well as other well-placed sources.

The contentious plan was introduced by the Parti Quebecois government before it lost the 2014 election and was being piloted in a few Quebec schools.

Department spokeswoman Marie-Eve Dion said schools that want to try piloting the new program in August 2016 will be allowed to do so while all others will stick to the old curriculum until further notice.

“Many consultations have been done and improvements are constantly being implemented,” she said in an email. “The goal is to make the course as representative and inclusive as possible.”

The program was to be introduced province wide in the 2016-17 school year, which begins in late August.

“This is absolutely good news,” said Sylvia Martin-Laforge, head of the Quebec Community Groups Network, a federally funded organization that advocates for the province’s anglophone community.

“We understand that the minister was not happy with the material. It would seem that people were eager (in the Education Department) to roll out this program and the minister had the courage to say ‘No. We will not roll this out.’”

The proposed two-year program, called History of Quebec and Canada, was widely panned by First Nations groups, as well as by cultural and linguistic minority communities across the province.

Documents obtained by The Canadian Press revealed that non-European francophone immigrants are scantily mentioned.

In the guidelines teachers use to craft their lesson plans, Confederation in 1867 is not a theme, but tucked into the larger section called “1840-1896: The formation of the Canadian federal system.”

Moreover, the only discussion of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, considered the father of multiculturalism in Canada, is in the context of him “inviting the provincial governments to reopen the Canadian Constitution,” after which Quebec left “empty-handed.”

Martin-Laforge said “we can only hope that the depictions of minority communities will not be stereotypical and that the new program doesn’t characterize us as bad guys.”

Jacques Beauchemin, who helped write the proposed curriculum, told The Canadian Press earlier this year the purpose of the program was to remove mentions about Quebec being a diverse society that promotes multiculturalism.

Source: Quebec minister refuses to sign off on new, controversial history course – Macleans.ca

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Malta’s citizenship scheme ranks number one in Henley & Partners report – The Malta Independent

2016/05/14 Leave a comment

Best compilation of citizenship investment programs, by the company that promotes them:

Malta’s citizenship scheme has taken the number one spot in a report compiled by Henley & Partners.

Henley & Partners launched its Global Residence and Citizenship Programs 2016 report, which ranks the 19 most relevant residence-by-investment programs as well as the top eight citizenship-by-investment programs available throughout the world today.

“For the second year in a row, Malta’s Individual Investor Programme is the top ranking citizenship-by-investment program in the world, with a score of 73 out of 100. The Mediterranean island nation is followed by Cyprus (71), and Antigua and Barbuda (62) in 2nd and 3rd place respectively,” the report read.

“A Maltese citizen has the right of settlement in all 28 EU countries and enjoys visa-free travel to 168 countries worldwide including the EU, the US and Canada. For improved visa-free travel, permanent relocation, and financial security, Malta is the way to go”.

“The Malta Individual Investor Programme is a modern citizenship-by-investment program designed, implemented and globally promoted by Henley & Partners for the Government of Malta under a Public Services Concession. Moreover, it is considered the world’s most advanced and most exclusive citizenship-by-investment program, being capped at 1800 applicants. Compliance and due diligence standards are considered to be the world’s strictest, aiming to ensure that only the most respectable of applicants are admitted”

As for Residency programmes, out of the 19 programs reviewed, Portugal’s Golden Residence Permit Program has again emerged as the world’s best residence-by-investment program, with a score of 80 out of 100. It is followed by Belgium (78) and Austria (77) in 2nd and 3rd place respectively.

In order for a person to acquire Maltese citizenship, one would have to make a contribution to the development of Malta, make a purchase of stocks/bonds, and must undertake a property transaction. “The combined upfront financial requirement, including applicable government charges and citizenship application fees, is just under  €900,000, the Henley and Partners website says.

Source: Malta’s citizenship scheme ranks number one in Henley & Partners report – The Malta Independent

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Facebook’s Bias Is Built-In, and Bears Watching – The New York Times

2016/05/13 Leave a comment

One of the more perceptive articles I have seen on the recent Facebook controversy and the overall issues regarding the lack of neutrality in algorithms:

The question isn’t whether Facebook has outsize power to shape the world — of course it does, and of course you should worry about that power. If it wanted to, Facebook could try to sway elections, favor certain policies, or just make you feel a certain way about the world, as it once proved it could do in an experiment devised to measure how emotions spread online.

There is no evidence Facebook is doing anything so alarming now. The danger is nevertheless real. The biggest worry is that Facebook doesn’t seem to recognize its own power, and doesn’t think of itself as a news organization with a well-developed sense of institutional ethics and responsibility, or even a potential for bias. Neither does its audience, which might believe that Facebook is immune to bias because it is run by computers.

That myth should die. It’s true that beyond the Trending box, most of the stories Facebook presents to you are selected by its algorithms, but those algorithms are as infused with bias as any other human editorial decision.

“Algorithms equal editors,” said Robyn Caplan, a research analyst at Data & Society, a research group that studies digital communications systems. “With Facebook, humans are never not involved. Humans are in every step of the process — in terms of what we’re clicking on, who’s shifting the algorithms behind the scenes, what kind of user testing is being done, and the initial training data provided by humans.”

Everything you see on Facebook is therefore the product of these people’sexpertise and considered judgment, as well as their conscious and unconscious biases apart from possible malfeasance or potential corruption. It’s often hard to know which, because Facebook’s editorial sensibilities are secret. So are its personalities: Most of the engineers, designers and others who decide what people see on Facebook will remain forever unknown to its audience.

Stuart Goldenberg 

Facebook also has an unmistakable corporate ethos and point of view. The company is staffed mostly by wealthy coastal Americans who tend to support Democrats, and it is wholly controlled by a young billionaire who has expressed policy preferences that many people find objectionable. Mr. Zuckerberg is for free trade, more open immigration and for a certain controversial brand of education reform. Instead of “building walls,” he supports a “connected world and a global community.”

You could argue that none of this is unusual. Many large media outlets are powerful, somewhat opaque, operated for profit, and controlled by wealthy people who aren’t shy about their policy agendas — Bloomberg News, The Washington Post, Fox News and The New York Times, to name a few.

But there are some reasons to be even more wary of Facebook’s bias. One is institutional. Many mainstream outlets have a rigorous set of rules and norms about what’s acceptable and what’s not in the news business.

“The New York Times contains within it a long history of ethics and the role that media is supposed to be playing in democracies and the public,” Ms. Caplan said. “These technology companies have not been engaged in that conversation.”

According to a statement from Tom Stocky, who is in charge of the trending topics list, Facebook has policies “for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality” of the items that appear in the trending list.

But Facebook declined to discuss whether any editorial guidelines governed its algorithms, including the system that determines what people see in News Feed. Those algorithms could have profound implications for society. For instance, one persistent worry about algorithmic-selected news is that it might reinforce people’s previously held points of view. If News Feed shows news that we’re each likely to Like, it could trap us into echo chambers and contribute to rising political polarization. In a study last year, Facebook’s scientists asserted the echo chamber effect was muted.

But when Facebook changes its algorithm — which it does routinely — does it have guidelines to make sure the changes aren’t furthering an echo chamber? Or that the changes aren’t inadvertently favoring one candidate or ideology over another? In other words, are Facebook’s engineering decisions subject to ethical review? Nobody knows.

Source: Facebook’s Bias Is Built-In, and Bears Watching – The New York Times

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