Denmark: How Flipping The Script Helped Keep Young Muslims From Joining ISIS

2016/07/16 Leave a comment

Good example of a counter radicalization strategy:

One day in 2012 a group of policemen in a Danish town was sitting around in the office when an unusual call came in. This town, called Aarhus, is a clean, orderly place with very little crime. So what the callers were saying really held the cops’ attention. They were parents, and they were “just hysterical,” recalled Thorleif Link, one of the officers. Their son was missing. They woke up one day and he was gone.

The officers put together whatever clues they had about the missing person: He was a teenager who went to a local high school, and he lived in a largely Muslim immigrant neighborhood just outside town. But before they got any further with their investigation, they got another call, from another set of parents. Their son was missing too.

“Why is this going on?” asked Allan Aarslev, a police superintendent.

After talking to the parents and snooping around the neighborhood the police figured it out: These young men and women had gone to Syria. They were among the exodus of thousands of European citizens who were drawn to the call put out by ISIS, the Islamist terrorist group, for Muslims worldwide to help build the new Islamic state.

 

Link and Aarslev are crime prevention officers. They usually deal with locals who are drawn to right-wing extremism, or gangs. The landscape of global terrorism was completely new to them. But they decided to take it on. And once they did, they wound up creating an unusual — and unusually successful — approach to combating radicalization.

The rest of Europe came down hard on citizens who had traveled to Syria. France shut down mosques it suspected of harboring radicals. The U.K. declared citizens who had gone to help ISIS enemies of the state. Several countries threatened to take away their passports — a move formerly reserved for convicted traitors.

But the Danish police officers took a different approach: They made it clear to citizens of Denmark who had traveled to Syria that they were welcome to come home, and when they did, they would receive help with going back to school, finding an apartment, meeting with a psychiatrist or a mentor, or whatever they needed to fully integrate back into society.

Their program came to be known as the “Aarhus model.” It’s been called the “hug a terrorist” model in the press, but this description never sits well with the cops. They see themselves as making an entirely practical decision designed to keep their city safe.

As they see it, coming down hard on young, radicalized Muslims will only make them angrier and more of a danger to society. Helping them is the only chance to keep an eye on them and also to keep the peace in their town.

Link and Aarslev were intuiting what scientists who study radicalization are coming to see.

“The original response was to fight [extremism] through military and policing efforts, and they didn’t fare too well,” says Arie Kruglanski, a social psychologist at the University of Maryland who studies violent extremism. “That kind of response that puts them as suspects and constrains them and promotes discrimination — that is only likely to exacerbate the problem. It’s only likely to inflame the sense there’s discrimination and motivate young people to act against society.”

Their approach has a basis in research on interpersonal relations as well.

Christopher Hopwood, an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, studies something called noncomplementary behavior. Complementary behavior is the norm. It means when you act warmly, the person you are with is likely to act warm back. The same is true with hostility. But noncomplementary behavior means doing the unexpected. Someone acts with hostility and you respond warmly. It’s an unnatural reaction, and it’s a proven way to shake up the dynamic and produce a different outcome than the usual one.

The nonviolent resistance movements of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi are the most well-known examples of this tactic. The Aarhus model is another. How did it unfold in real time? Consider the case study of a young man we call “Jamal.” Jamal is not his real name, and we don’t usually use pseudonyms, but he asked us to not use his name. He doesn’t want to be known as a person who almost became a terrorist. He wants a job and a life now. But that didn’t seem possible for a while.

Jamal was born in Somalia; his family moved to Denmark because Somalia was in the middle of a civil war. His was the only black family in the neighborhood and the only Muslim family, and his childhood wasn’t easy. Kids called him names, asked him if he had the same blood as they did, and teased him. For a long time he just would fight back, but he knew he was disappointing his father.

When he was a little older Jamal decided to take a different tack. He tried to be the good kid. He studied and made jokes in class, and his stress eased. The teachers liked him, his classmates liked him, and he began to make Danish friends and even to feel more Danish.

Then one day in high school his teacher organized a debate about Islam. Jamal had just been on the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, with his family, and he was infused with a newfound religious identity. And during the debate one of the girls started saying to the class that Muslims “terrorize” the West, and kill people and stone women. Jamal argued with her and eventually lost his temper, saying, “People like you should never exist.”

After that moment, Jamal’s life went off the rails. The teacher told the principal, who told the police, who questioned Jamal about being a terrorist. Jamal had to stay home from school and miss his final exams. The police cleared him, but it was too late for him to redo his exams so he had to redo some of high school. He was furious about it. Soon after the investigation his mother died, and he blamed her death on the stress caused by the investigation. He began to feel rejected by the West.

During that year he ran into a group of fellow Muslims who had experienced some of the same discrimination. One of them had an apartment, and the group spent a lot of time there talking, praying and watching videos of Anwar al-Awlaki, a famous English-speaking imam. The friends talked a lot about jihad and making the trip to Syria. Two of the guys in the apartment began planning their trip.

While he was living in that apartment, Jamal got a call from Link, who had heard about his case. Jamal cursed him out and tried to hang up the phone, but then Link did something Jamal didn’t expect: He apologized, for the ordeal his fellow officers had put Jamal through. Hearing a policeman take responsibility for his life getting derailed really moved Jamal. He agreed to come into Link’s office.

When Jamal got there, Link introduced him to Erhan Kilic, one of the first official mentors hired by the program. Kilic was a fellow Muslim who had also faced discrimination in Denmark as a child. But he had taken a very different path. He had decided to embrace Denmark as his country. He now had a wife and two daughters and a successful practice as a lawyer. Kilic relayed to Jamal the main message of the Aarhus program: If he chose to, Jamal could also find his place in Denmark.

This is what sets the Aarhus program apart. It didn’t use force to stop people from going to Syria but instead fought the roots of radicalization, Kruglanski says. “There are strong correlations between humiliation and the search for an extremist ideology,” he says. Organizations like ISIS take advantage of people who, because of racism or religious or political discrimination, have been pushed to the margins of society.

Link and Aarslev’s program showed people like Jamal that there was a place for them.

“Aarhus is the first, to my knowledge, to grapple with [extremism] based on sound social psychology evidence and principles,” Kruglanski says. What Link and Aarslev were doing was so unexpected that it created an opening for people to think differently about their ideology. “They expect to be treated harshly,” Kruglanski says. Instead, they got the opposite. “That kind of shock opens people’s minds to maybe they were wrong about their society that they perceived as their enemy. It opens a possible window into rethinking and re-evaluating.”

Starting in 2012, 34 people went from Aarhus to Syria. As far as the police know, six were killed and 10 are still over there. Of the 18 who came back home, all showed up in Aarslev and Link’s office, as did hundreds of other potential radicals in Aarhus — about 330 in total.

But the program is admired for another accomplishment: Since the initial exodus of young people, very few have left from Aarhus for Syria, even when traffic from the rest of Europe was spiking. Last year, in 2015, it was just one person.

The program is still precarious, though. One terrorist attack in Aarhus could undo much of the work that has been done. But the officers are willing to keep trying. As Link put it, there are still “strong forces” out there tempting young Muslims to leave their lives in the West and join the battle.

Read more of this post

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with

Police diversity fails to keep pace with Canadian populations

2016/07/15 Leave a comment

Police_diversity_fails_to_keep_pace_with_Canadian_populations_-_Manitoba_-_CBC_NewsSurprised they were able to get this much data.

When I asked for the date from the major police forces – Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal – the quality of data was mixed (Alberta does not collect employment equity information):

Only one major city in Canada — Halifax — staffs a police force that is as racially diverse as its community, CBC News has found.

All other major law enforcement agencies across the country fail to reflect their communities’ diversity among their ranks, leaving large swaths of visible minorities and Indigenous populations without representation.

  • While 57 per cent of Peel region, outside Toronto, is diverse, its police force has only 19 per cent non-white officers.
  • 54 per cent of Vancouverites are from minority groups, whereas 22 per cent of its police force match that profile.
  • For York region, also neighbouring Toronto, that ratio is 44 per cent for the population, but 17 per cent for the police force.
  • In Edmonton, 35 per cent of its citizens are visible minorities or Indigenous, yet those groups are represented in less than 10 per cent of its police force.
  • In Nunavut, 12 per cent of the police force is Aboriginal, but the territory is almost 90 per cent Indigenous.

These findings come as minority groups across North America are shining the spotlight on allegations of abuse of authority and discrimination among polices forces.

In May, CBC News surveyed all major police forces in Canada in order to establish a national snapshot of the racial diversity of key law enforcement agencies.

These figures were then compared to the demographic makeup of the public for each community using the results of the 2011 National Household Survey to calculate the disparity between the racial profiles of police and general populations.

…The Toronto Police Service says one of the key impediments to achieving better representation is that the rate of officer turnover has been outpaced by the rapidly changing community.”In 2000 we were at about nine per cent visible minority. We’re now at about 24 per cent,” says Mark Pugash, director of corporate communications for the force.

“People who join tend to stay for 30 years, or in other cases 35 years or longer. So there’s not a great turnover. We’ve also had hiring freezes for a number of years in recent times.”

Pugash says that when Toronto police hire, they have focused on recruiting Somali Canadians, and have also been successful in debunking certain myths about policing through a program that teams up youths with officers.

Source: Police diversity fails to keep pace with Canadian populations – Manitoba – CBC News

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

USA: New York to pay citizenship application fee for 2,000 immigrants – NBC-2.com

2016/07/15 Leave a comment

Canadian citizenship fees, including the cost of pre-assessment of language, are currently around $830, making the cost unaffordable for many low-income immigrants and refugees:

New York state will cover the application fee for U.S. citizenship for an estimated 2,000 low-income immigrants, with winners to be selected by a lottery, state officials announced Wednesday.

The drawing is an effort to help those immigrants who cannot easily afford the existing $680 fee for applying for citizenship. It will be open to approximately 160,000 immigrants now living in New York whose incomes are low, but just too high for federal assistance.

New York Secretary of State Rossana Rosado said the application fee – which is soon set to go up to $725 – often poses a significant burden for many immigrants struggling to make ends meet in a new nation.

“It’s a huge obstacle,” Rosado told The Associated Press. “For many of those families citizenship is a luxury. It shouldn’t be.”

The federal government already waives the application fee for immigrants in the lowest income bracket. An estimated 400,000 in the state are eligible for the help, Rosado said, but many may not know it. Rosado said the lottery is also intended to act as an outreach campaign for those immigrants who aren’t aware of the federal fee waiver.

Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration authorized the lottery program after advocates for immigrants proposed the idea. Private donors will contribute money to help the state pay the application fees.

Source: NY to pay citizenship application fee for 2,000 immigrants – NBC-2.com WBBH News for Fort Myers, Cape Coral & Naples, Florida

Filed under Multiculturalism

Broken Melting Pot Is No Alternative To Canadian Multiculturalism | Jack Jedwab

2016/07/15 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Jedwab.

Reality in many parts of USA is closer to multiculturalism than melting pot, given strong ethnic communities and identities, despite political discourse and posturing:

Those driving the melting pot rhetoric might argue that it refers to the immigrant experience and is therefore not about the American-born black population. That observation however makes illusory the melting pot objective of creating a harmonious whole. As regards immigrant acceptance in the American melting pot, the success of Donald Trump’s campaign has also served as a reminder of the high levels of anxiety and hostility towards immigration and diversity. Then again, perhaps the melting pot theorists were thinking about melting white European and not Hispanic immigrants. Well, so much for the idea that the American model of diversity seeks to make one out the many.

In a thoughtful essay in a 2012 edition of the journal National Identities , northeastern University political science professor David Michael Smith notes that the success of the melting pot rhetoric is attributable to the concept’s ambiguity. It simultaneously represents both uniformity in its end product and the presence of diversity which it must somehow incorporate. Smith observes that “…in the first instance, attention is focused on the creation of a ‘new race” or ”new compound’ which is nonetheless homogeneous in character.” It by virtue of this ambiguity that the concept it used across a spectrum of Americans that rally those who are favorable to immigration and those opposed to it.

Paradoxically, when it comes to describing cultural pluralism in the United States, the trend amongst several American thinkers is towards some variant on the idea of multiculturalism. For some time, the tired melting pot adage has been giving way to a depicting the country as a “salad bowl” with a mixture of various ingredients that keep their individual characteristics. Even the most ardent American proponents of the melting pot acknowledge that it is increasingly difficult to defend the idea.

Sure Canadian multiculturalism has historically and continues to confront a set of important challenges, but it’s difficult to give credibility to misinformed critics that point south of the border to offer a better alternative.

Source: Broken Melting Pot Is No Alternative To Canadian Multiculturalism | Jack Jedwab

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

The Tenors sang ‘All Lives Matter’ in ‘O Canada.’ They were wrong.

2016/07/15 Leave a comment

One of the better commentaries – Adrian Lee provides one of the clearest expressions of why the critics of ‘Black Lives Matter’ have it wrong:

In place of the lyrics “With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North strong and free,” the group sang instead: “We’re all brothers and sisters/All lives matter to the great,” raising a marker-scrawled sign “All Lives Matter,” before returning to the standard lyrics in French. (A note of pity here for Michael Saunders, the Toronto Blue Jays’ Canadian-born outfielder, who stared blankly into the sun as the camera panned to him during this moment.)

Let’s leave aside what they could have meant by “to the great,” and take a moment to explain why the statement “All Lives Matter” alone here is thoughtless, at best. As a dismissal, or even a response to the statement “Black Lives Matter”—a movement and rallying cry for black communities in America, Canada and beyond who have witnessed, experienced and felt acts of discrimination (both overt and subtle) and are refusing to accept societal norms that have produced police brutality and other acts of violence—it is unworthy. It is a statement that salves the oppressor; it is a sentence that erases the pain by equating that pain to those experienced by everyone. It is, as the popular argument goes, the equivalent of telling a neighbour whose house is on fire that all houses matter. It is, as my colleague Jason Markusoff noted on Twitter, the rhetorical equivalent of interrupting those solemnly pausing on Remembrance Day to say “Never forget” with a haughty “No, it should be ‘Never forget all genocides’.” Never mind that taking vitriolic offence to the brusque response one often receives to “all lives matter” takes away from the actual issues at hand. “All Lives Matter” is, at best, unhelpful because it refuses to acknowledge that people are different, and some people are hurting right now.

Some may point to U.S. President Barack Obama’s more diplomatic note at the recent NATO summit in Warsaw: “When people say ‘black lives matter,’ that doesn’t mean blue lives don’t matter. That just means all lives matter.” This, it’s worth noting, is a different point than merely saying “All Lives Matter.” That’s because saying “Black Lives Matter” does not mean “only black lives matter”; that’s a flawed premise too, and it’s a defensive reading that refuses to acknowledge that those lives actually do. The conceit of “Black Lives Matter” is about focus, and not about exclusion; the reality that most of North American society has focused expressly on lives that are not black makes this urgent, and makes “All Lives Matter” particularly cruel.

Source: The Tenors sang ‘All Lives Matter’ in ‘O Canada.’ They were wrong.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Hungary does 180 on migrants amid severe labour shortage

2016/07/15 Leave a comment

Not completely a 180 given that it is a guest worker rather than immigration approach.

The experience with “guest workers” elsewhere in Europe, particularly Germany, indicates they tend not to return and thus governments are faced with longer-term integration challenges:

Faced with a severe labour shortage, the government is considering plans to invite non-EU “guest workers” to live in the country. “Guest workers” are usually allowed to stay and work in a country for a certain number of years but do not hold citizen rights.

Economics minister Mihaly Varga has supported demands voiced by the country’s Confederation of Employers and Industrialists to allow “hundreds of thousands of migrants from countries outside of the EU” into Hungary, according to Austrian newspaper Die Presse. Estimates predict that the nation will need tens of thousands of migrants to make up for its labour shortage and to prevent negative economic repercussions. However, the draft proposal specifies that the country wants “skilled, culturally integrable guest workers”— most likely implying that Muslims are not welcome.

Experts who know the country believe that the government is trying to avoid a public backlash over trying to attract foreigners by excluding those it considers not “culturally integrable.”

“[T]hey know it will be a hard sell to the Hungarians, given the way the government has staked its legitimacy on being nativist and xenophobic, suggesting that every foreign person who enters the country takes a job away from a native-born Hungarian,” said Holly Case, a Brown University professor focusing on eastern Europe, who added that she did not believe the country’s “guest worker” plans would succeed.

“Based on what’s happened thus far, I think if skilled younger workers have a choice between Hungary and other countries where the xenophobic rhetoric has not been so shrill, they will go elsewhere.”

Hungary’s labour shortage had long been anticipated: Each year, Hungary loses young workers to other EU countries such as Germany or France where wages are much higher. Restaurants and hotels especially have long been struggling to find Hungarians willing to stay.

“Many young Hungarians simply do not see a future for themselves in Hungary,” said Case. “The government has not managed to make staying attractive, in spite of all their nativist ‘Hungary for the Hungarians’ rhetoric.”

Moreover, birth rates in the country have been low for decades. Consequently, like in much of eastern Europe, the nation’s population is declining — and the share of older and retired people among the total population is increasing.

Other European countries, like Germany, face a similar problem which is why German Chancellor Angela Merkel often referred to the possibility that young refugees could ultimately make up for a lack of skilled workers in the country and prevent the collapse of its pension system. Whether or not Germany will become a role model in that regard is still uncertain, though. Since last year, only 30,000 refugees have found jobs — out of more than 1 million arrivals.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has chosen a different course: He supported programs aimed at attracting non-Muslim skilled workers to the country, while at the same time condemning the influx of refugees and provoking strong rebukes from other EU leaders for comments that some considered xenophobic.

“We shouldn’t forget that the people who are coming here grew up in a different religion and represent a completely different culture. Most are not Christian, but Muslim … That is an important question, because Europe and European culture have Christian roots,” Orban wrote in an op-ed published last September.

Calling Orban’s behaviour an example of “borderline political communication,” Gabor Bernath, a researcher at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, said that the prime minister’s actions were also highly contradictory. “Just one year ago, Orban said [in front of] Arab investors: In Hungary, ‘the culture of respect’ still dominates.”

Source: Hungary does 180 on migrants amid severe labour shortage | Toronto Star

Filed under Immigration Tagged with

Europe’s citizenship tests are so hard not even citizens can pass – The Washington Post

2016/07/14 Leave a comment

Some great examples of European citizenship tests, which appear designed to keep people from becoming citizens rather than ensuring good basic knowledge and integration:

Critics of Europe’s citizenship tests have pointed out that they do not follow a common pattern or they are based on little research as to what questions are needed to distinguish migrants who are willing to assimilate from those who are not. And yet, they have the potential to determine the fate of thousands. Particularly amid the recent influx of migrants into Europe, there has been a renewed focus on a contentious question: How should a test that will help determine whether an individual can acquire citizenship look?

Source: Europe’s citizenship tests are so hard not even citizens can pass – The Washington Post

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , , , ,

Rise in anti-Semitism in Western Europe, decrease in Eastern Europe: poll | i24news

2016/07/14 Leave a comment

Interesting findings and linkage to concerns over large-scale arrival of migrants and refugees:

A recent survey has revealed a rise in anti-Semitism in Western Europe, while at the same time there has been a decline in anti-Jewish sentiments in Eastern European countries.

The survey was conducted by the EJA (European Jewish Association) ahead of a discussion Wednesday on anti-Semitism in Europe at the Israeli Knesset’s Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora.

The poll found that 19 percent of Jewish communities – the vast majority of them in Western Europe (mainly in France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Northern Ireland) – reported a rise in anti-Semitism.

In Antwerp, Belgium, one community reported a marked rise in antisemitism (5 on a scale of 5), while another community in the same city reported relative calm.

Communities in the Netherlands reported a rise in anti-Semitism (4 on a scale of 5), as did the Jewish community in Nancy, France.

However, some 9.5% of Jewish communities – the vast majority of them in Eastern Europe – reported a decline in anti-Semitism in the past year.

Around 66% of Jewish communities throughout Europe (East and West) reported a lack of real change in the level of anti-Semitism in the past year.

The survey was conducted last Thursday among a representative sample of communities in capital cities and outlying towns throughout Europe, from Belfast in Northern Ireland in the West to Tbilisi, Georgia in the East.

In cities where there are large concentrations of Jews (Paris and Antwerp, for example), the sample included a number of communities in the same city.

The survey comes just months after an annual study on global anti-Semitism found that the number of violent anti-Semitic incidents worldwide fell considerably in 2015, partly because the extreme right has been focused on Muslims.

Violent anti-Semitic incidents dropped more than 40 percent in 2015, but other kinds of anti-Semitic displays increased dramatically in Europe, stated the Annual General Analysis on Anti-Semitism Worldwide, published jointly by Tel Aviv University, Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the European Jewish Congress.

The report attributed the decrease to a number of factors, including an increase in security measures, the growing fear of terrorism that may increase sympathy for Jews targeted for violence, and the lack of a military confrontation involving Israel in 2015.

Another factor cited in the report was the flow of over a million immigrants and refugees to Europe in 2015, which caused a trend of anti-immigrant sentiment that has strengthened extreme right parties. In Scandinavian countries, extreme right sympathizers have been gravitating towards major centrist and right parties for practical reasons.

The extreme right has also in many cases pointed at Jews as the root cause of terrorism, claiming they fostered Muslim immigration in order to undermine European culture. “The Jews are depicted as directly responsible for the migration wave, either by causing the war in Syria and Iraq and by creating ISIS […] because of the wish to achieve the following goals: to destroy European racial identity, to incite Christians and Muslims against each other, to create a Middle East devoid of Arabs and Muslims and even to destroy western democracies in order to control them – an accusation which is a derivative of conspiracy theories. Jews are guilty of the Islamization of Europe by bringing in the refugees, and of the opposite as well, of Islamophobia, by allegedly misusing the anti-Muslim rhetoric in order to invoke support for Israel,” said the report.

Source: Rise in anti-Semitism in Western Europe, decrease in Eastern Europe: poll | i24news – See beyond

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

‘That Ignoramus’: 2 French Scholars of Radical Islam Turn Bitter Rivals – The New York Times

2016/07/14 Leave a comment

Personally, I think it is a mix of the two elements – the individual and the structural:

What propels Islamist terrorism and attacks against France is more than an academic debate: The answer shapes policy toward blunting the threat.

So it is no inconsequential matter in a culture under attack, and one that so cherishes its intellectual debates, that France’s two leading scholars of radical Islam — former friends — have turned bitter rivals over their differing views.

“Madman,” “thug,” “illiterate,” “paranoid,” “ass,” “not a thinker” — these are just some of the choicer insults the two men have hurled at each other in a peculiarly personal quarrel with far larger stakes that has reverberated through the French news media and society for months.

The two distinguished academics, Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel, have long lists of books to their name, and years of field work in the Middle East, Central Asia and the troubled French suburbs. They are both eagerly consulted by the French news media and government officials.

But with France on edge and the continued target of terrorist attacks, their clashing analyses of the origins, development and future of jihadism have broken out of academic circles to present an important question for France and for all of Europe: Which man holds the key to understanding the phenomenon?

Mr. Kepel, 61, a professor at Sciences Po, the prestigious political science institute, finds much of the answer inside France — in its suburbs and their dysfunctional sociology — and in the role of Islam, angering many on the left.

Mr. Roy, 66, who as a bearded young man roamed Afghanistan with the mujahedeen in the 1980s and now teaches at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, places greater emphasis on individual behavior and psychology in a jihadism he considers strictly marginal to Islam.

Mr. Kepel sees individuals as cogs in a system — part of a classically French, structuralist tradition that minimizes the role of individual human agency.

Mr. Roy, on the other hand, sees mostly troubled people in the jihadist ranks who act out their fantasies of violence and cruelty.

The terrorists who have carried out recent attacks were mostly marginalized young men and petty criminals, he says, adding that they have used Islam as a cover to pursue extreme violence.

“They haven’t had a militant past,” Mr. Roy said of many of these terrorists, in a telephone interview. The problem they represent, he says, is the “Islamicization of radicalism.”

It is a signature phrase that enrages Mr. Kepel, who leans toward its opposite: the radicalization of Islam.

“That ignoramus,” Mr. Kepel grumbled in an interview this month in his book-lined office, offering some choice gibes about his onetime friend’s lack of Arabic.

Mr. Kepel testified for an influential 2015 parliamentary report, wrote a best seller on terrorism after the attacks in Paris in November, and has been omnipresent in television and radio studios.

“At the ministry, they tell me, ‘I saw Kepel yesterday,’ ” said Mr. Roy, himself a favorite of the country’s dominant left-leaning news media. His arguments, for the moment at least, appear to be winning in government circles.

As the jockeying has intensified in official circles, so has the falling-out between the old friends.

Today they cannot stand each other, and, with the passion that typifies intellectual fights in a country where nothing short of war is more serious, they contemptuously dismiss each other’s views.

“The King Is Naked,” read the headline on Mr. Kepel’s attack on Mr. Roy this spring in the newspaper Libération, in a play on the French meaning of Mr. Roy’s name.

In turn, while acknowledging a long and now broken friendship, Mr. Roy today offers his own less-than-friendly critique of Mr. Kepel as a kind of cloistered intellectual.

 “We were friends for 20 years,” Mr. Roy said in the interview. “I traveled with him in Istanbul. But I was very struck by his incapacity to talk to anybody.”

“He’s sincere the way a madman is,” he added. “He’s not a thinker. He’s not a philosopher.”

The French debate has echoes of Republican criticism in the United States of President Obama for his reluctance to use the word Islam in connection with terrorism.

But as is so often the case in contemporary France, the heart of the dispute here is a disagreement about the country’s relationship with Islam.

Mr. Roy sees a Muslim population that is relatively well-integrated.

But for Mr. Kepel, the murderous jihadism that struck France in 2015 is the expression of a slow-burning Islamist radicalization that took shape over decades because of a failure of integration.

Source: ‘That Ignoramus’: 2 French Scholars of Radical Islam Turn Bitter Rivals – The New York Times

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization, Religion Tagged with , ,

Beyond Integration: How Teachers Can Encourage Cross-Racial Friendships : NPR

2016/07/14 Leave a comment

Lessons that can also be applied at later stages in life? In the workplace?

There’s a reason Jose Luis Vilson’s students learn in groups: He wants them to feel comfortable working with anyone in the classroom, something he’s realized in his 11 years of teaching doesn’t always come naturally.

“I don’t really give students a chance to self-select until later on, when I feel like they can pretty much group with anybody,” he says.

Vilson teaches math at a public middle school just north of Harlem in New York City. Most of his students are Latino and African-American, and Vilson pays close attention to the fact that their racial identities affect their experiences in the classroom.

Children entering adolescence, he knows, are less likely to maintain cross-racial friendships as they grow older. But teachers like him may be able to help change that, according to a new study led by researchers from New York University.

In past decades, it’s become increasingly clear that diversity in classrooms isn’t just a buzzword. A growing body of research points to classroom diversity as an important aspect of childhood development. Kids who make friends with kids of other races tend to be more socially well-adjusted, more academically ambitious and better at interacting with people who are different from them.

The NYU researchers knew of these findings and wondered if just putting kids of different races in classrooms together is enough to foster lasting connections. Their hypothesis was that, as kids grow into early adolescence, they increase their same-race friendships and decrease their cross-race friendships.

So they looked at data from the Early Adolescent Development Study (EADS), a longitudinal survey where researchers questioned more than 500 elementary and middle-schoolers over the course of two academic years: fall 1996 to spring 1998. The students in the study all went to school in one district in the American northeast where the racial makeup of each of their classrooms was roughly half black and half white.

And the researchers were right, says Elise Cappella, head of the project: “Cross-race friendships diminish over the course of one academic year; same-race friendships increase.” The finding bore out among all of the students in the study, particularly those who were older and/or white.

Integration, she says, “[is] a very important step” to fostering cross-race connections. “But it’s not the only step.”

This is where teachers like Jose Vilson can have an impact. All of those group activities he encourages in his classroom, he hopes, will help students learn to learn from each other.

The difference comes down to the kind of environment teachers created: did students collaborate with one another, or did they compete?

“Teachers who were warm and responsive to students’ needs and created a classroom context characterized by respect and trust — in those classrooms, students had lower increases in same-race friendships over the course of that year,” Cappella says.

In other words, students who started the year with cross-race friendships were more likely to keep them throughout the year with the help of a friendly teacher.

The third, fourth and fifth-graders in this sample, Cappella says, are just entering the age where they start to become more self-conscious. “Sometimes, during those times, you begin to associate with people who you think may have shared identities as you as a way of building an understanding of who you are,” she says.

Teachers who build supportive atmospheres “[allow] students to get to know one another across differences,” Cappella says. “And when you get to know each other across differences, you see other kinds of similarities that may be more hidden as well.”

It’s relatively rare to find classrooms that look like the ones profiled in the EADS: more or less an even split between black and white students. Vilson’s classroom doesn’t look like that, but he says that cross-cultural contact in school will help his students outside the classroom.

“The real world is such that people have to find a way to get along with each other, but also work with each other,” he says. “There’s a lot of value in actually getting to know different people — how they work and what their values are and what their experiences are.”

Source: Beyond Integration: How Teachers Can Encourage Cross-Racial Friendships : NPR Ed : NPR

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →