Anti-immigration ideology apparently trumps the military:
Lawmakers on Tuesday slammed reports that offices for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have been closed on several large military bases in recent weeks.
The offices are a lifeline for immigrant military recruits and active members seeking citizenship, and help expedite the protracted process.
On Monday, BuzzFeed News reported that the offices at U.S. Army basic training locations in Fort Benning, Ga.; Fort Jackson, S.C.; and Fort Sill, Okla.; were closed Jan. 26.
“Our military is stronger because of the diversity of those who serve in it,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., a combat pilot who lost both legs in the Iraq War, said Tuesday. “No matter where you were born and what background you come from, if you are able and willing to wear the uniform of this great nation, you should have the opportunity to become an American citizen.”
The comments come in the wake of heated and controversial rhetoric over border security and the role of immigrants under President Donald Trump. He has railed against certain immigrants’ access to the U.S., saying some have fueled terrorism, hurt the national job market and created other concerns.
“This is indefensible,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., tweeted Tuesday of the closures. “These military recruits are willing to put their lives on the line for our country and fill key positions in our Armed Forces. We need to honor their service.”
Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, also pushed back against the move Tuesday.
“Yet another barrier for immigrants who were promised naturalization after service,” he tweeted.
This comes as Congress has failed to reach a deal on a fix to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, which could force recipients known as Dreamers to be deported. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has said Dreamers serving in the military would not be deported, but it’s not clear how if an executive order Trump signed last year definitively ends DACA.
For now, the fate of the program lies in a legal effort making its way through the courts. The Pentagon estimated late last year that 900 Dreamers were serving in the military.
Duckworth called out the the closure of the citizenship offices on military bases as another Trump-initiated roadblock against immigrants.
The offices are critical to the Military Accessions Vital to National Interest, or MANVI, program, which helps immigrants join the military with a fast track to citizenship.
“The closure of the offices makes it significantly harder and it violates the commitment we have made to thousands of brave men and women who signed up to defend our country through the MAVNI program,” Duckworth said. “It’s disappointing to see the Trump administration head in such a shameful direction.”
Duckworth has introduced several bills to prevent veterans and servicemembers from being deported and denied the opportunity to become citizens of the nation they swore to defend.
For example, her legislation would establish naturalization offices at military training facilities to make it easier for servicemembers to become citizens, prohibit the administration from deporting veterans and give legal permanent residents a path to citizenship through military service, her office said.
Duckworth said she has also co-sponsored legislation to protect military recruits who have enlisted through the MAVNI program from being discharged or deported due to their immigration status.
Her office estimates 1,000 to 1,800 recruits – including hundreds of Dreamers – have skills that are underrepresented in the U.S. military and are currently waiting for the chance to serve.
Will be interesting whether the inclusion rider gains momentum (A-listers have the negotiating power):
“I have two words to leave with you tonight, ladies and gentlemen: inclusion rider.”
Two simple words they may be, but when Frances McDormand closed her acceptance speech with them at the Academy Awards, not a whole lot of people had heard those terms paired that way. The big spike in Google searches for the phrase Sunday night reflects the frantic clatter of people across the world summoning those key words.
So, what is an inclusion rider, exactly?
Simply put: It’s a stipulation that actors and actresses can ask (or demand) to have inserted into their contracts, which would require a certain level of diversity among a film’s cast and crew.
For instance, an A-list actor negotiating to join a film could use the inclusion rider to insist that “tertiary speaking characters should match the gender distribution of the setting for the film, as long as it’s sensible for the plot,” Stacy L. Smith explained in a 2014 column that introduced the idea in The Hollywood Reporter.
Smith, who directs the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California, told NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly she had “absolutely no idea” McDormand would bring up the concept at the Oscars. “But,” Smith added, “talk about being elated and thrilled to hear those two words broadcast around the world.”
Smith has pushed for years for more diverse representation in film — delivering a TED Talk on the topic while she was at it — and the inclusion rider has been a crucial arrow in her quiver.
“The goal really is to figure out: How do we move from all the lip service in Hollywood to actually see the numbers that we study every year move?” Smith said.
And those numbers have been stark. Here’s a brief look at some of the findings she and her colleagues published last year in a study of 900 films across a decade-long span:
Just 31.4 percent of speaking characters were female, even though they represent a little more than half the U.S. population.
Women represented 4.2 percent of the directors, and just 1.4 percent of the composers.
About 29 percent of speaking characters were from nonwhite racial/ethnic groups, compared with nearly 40 percent in the U.S.
Only 2.7 percent of speaking characters were depicted with a disability, despite the fact that nearly 1 in 5 people in the U.S. has one.
Though Smith does not believe there are many film stars yet who have pushed for an inclusion rider, she said some indeed have asked for it. Smith said she and her colleagues work with civil rights attorney Kalpana Kotagal to craft language for these actors in their contract negotiations.
And with the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, which are working to call attention to sexual harassment and workplace inequality, Smith said she thinks something of a sea change may be underway.
“I think there’s an appetite now to ensure that equity and inclusion are part of the process in telling these stories,” she said.
The actress won an Oscar for her leading role in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. And not long after she picked up her statuette from the presenters, she put it down to ask all the female nominees in the building to stand: “Look around, everybody,” she said, “because we all have stories to tell and projects we need financed.”
Then, she broke out the those two little words that made a big splash online.
“I just found out about this last week,” McDormand told reporters after the ceremony, referring to the inclusion rider concept. “And so, the fact that I just learned that after 35 years of being in the film business — we’re not going back.”
Ronan Farrow, one of the journalists who helped bring attention to the allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Hollywood megaproducer Harvey Weinstein, told NPR’s Rachel Martin that McDormand’s moment shows an equity movement “trying to turn this into more than just talk.”
“It’ll be interesting to see if there is an uptick in the use of [inclusion riders],” Farrow said. “This is going to be the struggle when it comes to representation, when it comes to harassment and assault. Is there going to be follow-on? Are the contracts going to change? Is the legislation going to change? Will the bylaws of the professional organizations change?”
If you ask McDormand, that answer is clear.
“The whole idea of women ‘trending’? No. African-Americans ‘trending’? No. It changes now,” she said after the Oscars. “And I think the inclusion rider will have something to do with that — right? Power and rules.”
Good nuanced analysis of the various campus antisemitism reports:
The Anti-Defamation League recently released the results of its annual anti-Semitism audit. The findings were staggering.
Anti-Semitic incidents in the United States surged nearly 60% this past year, driven in part by an increase in such cases in schools and on college campuses. ADL found 1,986 cases of harassment, vandalism or physical assaults against Jews and Jewish institutions in 2017, up from 1,267 in 2016.
But these results conflict with those of other surveys. Two recent reports — one from the Research Group of the Concentration in Education and Jewish Studies at Stanford and one from the Steinhardt Social Research Institute at Brandeis — found that, by and large, Jewish students do not feel threatened on campus.
This raises questions: Is anti-Semitism a perennial menace on American college and university campuses that increasingly threatens Jewish students around the country? Or is campus anti-Semitism a negligible issue that has been overhyped by overzealous Israel supporters?
The answer is, it’s anti-Semitism, but many younger Jews are reluctant to use the term in that context. And the less affiliated they are with organized Jewish life, the more that seems to be the case.
The Stanford report employed in-person interviews with 66 Jewish students on various California campuses who were either “unengaged or minimally engaged in organized Jewish life,” since these students “represent the vast majority of Jewish college students.” Most of them felt comfortable on their respective campuses, both in general and as Jews, and traced any discomfort they felt to the “strident, inflammatory, and divisive” tone of the campus discourse on Israel.
The Brandeis report grew out of a finding from a 2016 Steinhardt Institute study, which surveyed students on 50 campuses about anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment and found wide variance between students’ experiences on different campuses.
The more recent Brandeis study focused on only four schools (Brandeis, Harvard, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania), and was distributed to both Jewish and non-Jewish respondents. The survey concluded that “the majority of Jewish and non-Jewish students… disagreed that their campus constituted a ‘hostile environment toward Jews.’” Some felt that there was a “hostile environment” toward Israel, but the majority did not agree.
Both of these studies seem to support the conclusion that campus anti-Semitism is a negligible phenomenon.
But this reading is oversimplified. One issue that affects both studies is the narrowness of the student populations surveyed. The Stanford report’s focus on unaffiliated students is particularly troubling, because removing Jewishly engaged students clearly skewed the findings. In fact, the two Brandeis studies as well as an earlier study from 2015 all agreed that those most strongly identified with the Jewish community and Israel are more likely to report hostility on campus. In other words, the Stanford study removed those most prone to experience — or, at least, to report — anti-Semitism.
The 2016 Brandeis report explained that this could be because those students are more likely to be targeted, or because they are more sensitive to the issue, or because students who experience anti-Israel sentiment might begin to feel more connected to the Jewish State, or some combination of all of these factors.
This does not mean that the Stanford survey is wrong; it merely emphasizes different data than other, earlier surveys and is thus more compelling if you feel that that campus animosity — at least when it is connected to Israel or Zionism — is not a serious issue, and less compelling if you disagree.
In other words, there’s data to reinforce your confirmation bias, whichever direction that might skew.
The focus on four randomly selected campuses in the 2017 Brandeis study also seems to indicate that campus anti-Semitism is not a serious problem. However, critics argue that four campuses are not a representative sample, and that the report merely amplifies a point from the earlier study: that there is wide variance from campus to campus in students’ perceptions of overall hostility toward Jews and Israel.
The 2016 Brandeis report found that some individual campuses and regions of the country are seen as more continually problematic on a year-to-year basis and referred to some campuses as relative “hotspots.” The report also found that one of the strongest predictors for perceiving a hostile climate toward Israel and Jews is “the presence of an active Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) group on campus.”
This finding is corroborated in the later Brandeis study. “The majority of Jewish and non-Jewish students at all four schools disagreed that their campus constituted a ‘hostile environment toward Jews,’” the study found. Students were more likely to agree that there was a hostile environment toward Israel on their campus than that there was a hostile environment toward Jews, but most students — except for those at Michigan — still disagreed that there was hostility to Israel.
Perhaps not coincidentally, in November 2017, one month before the study was released, the student government at University of Michigan passed a BDS resolution, its first successful BDS campaign after 11 previous attempts dating back to 2002.
Additionally, the students addressed in the Kelman study did not deny that there was a toxic discourse connected to Israel on their campus; they acknowledged the problem but assigned equal responsibility for the issue to both the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian camps, a natural response for those who are alienated and feel rebuffed by the political stances or tactics of both sides. They used words such as “unsafe,” “discomfort” and “threat” to describe some of their campus experiences and were concerned that their Jewishness allowed them to be stereotyped as holding certain views.
Despite these issues, students were reluctant to use the word “anti-Semitism.” The study explains that this shows the students’ “understanding of the difference between Israeli politics and Jewish people,” and this may ring true for those who agree with that distinction.
And yet, some of the behaviors that the students described witnessing, such as ascribing stereotypical “dual loyalty” to the Jewish people, or holding people who happen to be Jewish responsible for actions taken by others who are also Jewish (or Israeli), or the fear of losing social status because of support for Jewish issues (or Israel), are all classic examples of anti-Jewish animosity, regardless of the students’ reticence.
In other words, the unaffiliated students at these colleges are redefining what counts as anti-Semitism, choosing to rule out behaviors that older generations of Jews — like those who run ADL — see as anti-Semitic.
The Stanford report also refers to “exaggerated claims about the tone of campus activism and misrepresentations of student experience.” The researchers conclude, ”Such claims do far more harm than good by heightening tensions and reinforcing divisions.”
But imputing to all other studies emphasizing the presence of anti-Semitism on campus a common agenda or method is itself misleading and elides their significant differences. Moreover, despite greater emphasis on the presence of anti-Semitism, some of these other reports — including an ADL report in 2015 — also describe the daily experience of most Jewish students on American college and university campuses as largely comfortable, despite the presence of anti-Semitic incidents. The Stanford report’s conclusions are perhaps not entirely a revelation.
Research suggests that Jewish students, for the most part, feel comfortable on campus, but the story is more complex than the main findings publicized in recent surveys. It seems that there is only one issue these surveys clarify unambiguously: that we do not agree on a standard definition of anti-Semitism, and this makes assessing its overall impact on American campuses much more difficult.
Always good to have more and better data. However, hard to understand the need in the Ontario public service given salary scales already in place and wonder whether existing mechanisms like the Census are being used and analyzed as effectively as possible to identify more precisely the gaps before adding yet another reporting requirement:
Ontario plans to introduce legislation Tuesday that aims to close the wage gap between women and men in the province.
If passed, the “pay transparency” bill would require all publicly advertised job postings to include a salary rate or range, bar employers from asking about past compensation and prohibit reprisal against employees who do discuss or disclose compensation.
It would also create a framework that would require large employers to track and report compensation gaps based on gender and other diversity characteristics, and disclose the information to the province.
The pay transparency measures will begin with the Ontario public service before applying to employers with more than 500 employees. It will later extend to those with more than 250 workers.
The government says it will spend up to $50 million over the next three years on the initiative.
Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne is expected to announce the legislation — called Then Now Next: Ontario’s Strategy for Women’s Economic Empowerment — during a Women’s Empowerment Summit at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.
“We know that too many women still face systemic barriers to economic advancement,” Wynne said in a statement. “It’s time for change.”
According to the province, the gender wage gap has remained stagnant over the past 10 years, with women earning approximately 30 per cent less than men.
The government said it looked to other jurisdictions to create the basis of its legislation, including existing laws in Germany, Australia and the United Kingdom.
Wynne has made the themes of fairness and opportunity key planks of her bid for re-election this spring, pitching policies like the province’s increase to minimum wage and expansion of drug coverage for people aged 25 and under as part of those efforts.
Good long read and reminder of how attitudes and processes can hamper, not foster, integration:
I first landed in England in September 2004. I took the underground from Heathrow and sat in the carriage with my luggage, face plastered to the window, as the train made its way through the late summer greenery of west London. Culture shock blended with a counterintuitive sense of ease and familiarity with a country – in fact, a whole hemisphere – that I had never visited. I had lived my entire life in Sudan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and had come to the UK to study for a postgraduate degree at the University of London. Over the next weeks, I found the city and its people both bewilderingly cool and enthusiastically welcoming. That duality would go on to be the central theme of my life in the UK – confusing impenetrability accompanied by a yielding accommodation.
I settled in quickly, squatting in a relative’s spare bedroom until I could make arrangements. But I had severely underestimated the expense of London and, already impoverished by the high overseas student tuition fees, I began working while I was studying, my student visa allowing for 20 hours a week. I temped in offices across London, using an A–Z to find my way around. My topography of London is still anchored in the locations of those anonymous office blocks across the city. At the end of my course I extended my student visa in order to finish my dissertation and meanwhile was offered a contract as a research assistant at an investment bank where I had been temping. I went into the interview with precisely £15 to my name. Had the position not paid by the end of the week, I would not have been able to get through the first month.
A few weeks into the job and with a little disposable income for the first time in my life, I rented a room on a Bethnal Green council estate. Standing on the balcony, looking out at east London, I remember thinking that it was a sort of Valhalla. After a year or so, in 2007, a combination of student visa extensions and a partner visa by virtue of a relationship I was in at the time meant that I was granted limited leave to remain (ie with no recourse to public funds). After five years, I would be eligible for permanent residency.
My problems with the Home Office began in 2012. What should have been a routine application for permanent residency was turned down. I don’t remember the exact wording of the letter because my concentration shattered while trying to process what my lawyer was saying. The reason seemed to be that the right to permanent–after-temporary residency had been circumscribed. The laws had changed. “We’ll need to appeal immediately,” she said. “You don’t have to leave right away.”
It is hard to describe what it feels like to confront the possibility of leaving a country in which you are settled. I had by then been living, working (in emerging markets private equity) and paying taxes in the UK for nine years and enjoyed all the natural extensions of that investment – a career, close friends, a deep attachment to the place, a whole life. It is almost as if the laws of nature change, like gravity disappears and all the things that root you to your existence lose their shape and float away. I remember thinking, “I can’t leave, I’ve just bought a sofa.” It was a ridiculous thought, but that secondhand sofa from the local flea market was the first item of furniture I had ever bought. Suddenly, it signified the folly of nesting in a country that had no intention of letting me make a home.
In January 2010 David Cameron, backed into a tough stance by the looming election, announced a “no ifs no buts” pledge to bring immigration down to the tens of thousands. Theresa May took the helm at the Home Office in May and immediately set about making as big a dent in the net migration number, then about 244,000, as possible. Despite the Liberal Democrats making an attempt to dilute some of the crueller aspects of immigration law, condemning the “Go home” billboard vans May sent through the streets of London and publicly challenging Cameron on the tens of thousands figure, immigration policies continued to harden. They culminated in the 2013 immigration bill that declared the country would become a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants.
The resulting legislation represented a fundamental dismantling of the means by which all migrants could challenge Home Office decisions, despite around half of appeals ultimately being successful. By the time the 2015 immigration bill was introduced, the Conservatives, unfettered by coalition, introduced a host of measures that meant a hostile environment policy was surreptitiously rolled out against legal migrants as well.
Unable to tackle EU migration due to freedom of movement, the Home Office, while cutting its numbers of immigration case-workers, focused on non-EU migrants and their families, even when they were legal. “Discretion” – a word that sends chills down the spine of many a Home Office application veteran – became the governing principle. As with Nadir Farsani, a 27-year-old Saudi engineer who has lived in the UK most of his adult life and whose parents have British citizenship. He nevertheless had his student visa rejected by a case worker who decided a quirk of Arabic naming convention meant Nadir’s father’s supporting financial documents were not legitimate. Nadir was not informed nor asked to provide additional evidence and was asked to leave the country. While waiting for his application to be processed, his grandmother in Saudi Arabia fell ill and died. He could not travel to say goodbye.
Since 2010 I have experienced a constant attrition in the ranks of friends who did not have the means or the time to challenge often unfair decisions. Damned by discretion, rather than the law, they left.
The right to appeal decisions was curbed. The tier-1 visa, which had allowed for highly skilled migrants looking for a job or wishing to become self-employed, was abolished. Students’ right to work after graduation was limited and the Life in the UK test became a residency requirement. And British citizens began to be affected. In 2012 May announced rules that allowed only those British citizens earning more than £18,600 to bring their spouse to live with them in the UK. The figure is higher where visa applications are also made for children. She also made it all but impossible for people to bring their non-European elderly relatives to the UK. “Skype families” can spend years on opposite sides of the world, watching their children grow up on video.
Incentivised to reject, the Home Office grew ever more brutal and incompetent. Satbir Singh, CEO of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, is one of many British citizens whose application for his spouse to join him in the UK was rejected. They had satisfied all the requirements, but the Home Office lost their documents. In one of JCWI’s cases, a British citizen on a zero hours contract had a nervous breakdown due to the long hours he had to work in order to satisfy the income requirement. He needed hospitalisation but refused – two weeks off would mean that his income would fall under the threshold.
The principle of reject and hope no questions are asked has given rise to instances of unfathomable cruelty. In one case, reported in February, an interviewee began hallucinating. When her rejected case went to the supreme court, the judge said, “Reading that interview, it is apparent that the claimant was very unwell at the time … She appeared to be talking to people who were not there and the interview nonetheless continued, including beyond a time when she asked whether or not she had wet herself.”
The hostile environment also began to chew up those who had lived their entire lives in the UK. Commonwealth citizens who arrived in the country decades ago have discovered that in a hardened immigration climate they are without the necessary papers. So Paulette Wilson, a 61-year-old former cook in the House of Commons, was sent to Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre last October and taken to Heathrow for deportation to Jamaica, a country she had not visited since she was 10. A last-minute legal intervention prevented her removal, and, following media coverage in the Guardian, she was granted a residency permit.
In most cases, the speed with which the Home Office capitulates when challenged is a clear giveaway that decisions were made in the hope they would not be appealed. In my case, I appealed my residency extension and prepared a case with a litigation lawyer – only for permanent residency to be granted days before my appearance in court. There was no explanation and we had not provided, yet, any new information. My joy was followed by a nausea of fury. I had bankrupted myself trying to pay the £30,000 legal fees and lived in a constant anguish of instability, paralysed and yet tensed for action, only for the decision to be overturned because it was wrong in the first place, and because the Home Office couldn’t be bothered to fight it.
Forty per cent of cases brought before a judge on appeal are overturned. Consider that this applies only to the small number of individuals who have the means to appeal, and the scale of the wider miscarriage of justice becomes apparent. At one point, the government was proposing that the rule of “deport first, appeal later” that currently applies only to foreign national criminals be applied across the board; thankfully, this was eventually overturned by the supreme court, which declared it unfair and unlawful.
The original sin, the motivation for so much of the inhumanity being visited on applicants, is the “tens of thousands” target, an unrealistic and arbitrary number, backed by no intelligence or research. But the heart of the dysfunction throughout the past eight years isn’t that immigration laws have tightened, it is that they have become unpredictable, as new rules are introduced or scrapped. There have been 45,000 changes to immigration rules since May took over at the Home Office. Both applicants and immigration officials are navigating the system using a map whose contours and geology shift constantly. Farsani compares the process to “climbing a crumbling staircase”.
At the same time, the public tone, led by the Tory populism on immigration, became sharper and the idea that the UK had a soft-touch immigration system grew stronger. By the time the Brexit referendum campaign was under way, the national perception of the country’s immigration rules was in fantasyland. It was surreal to watch when, at the same time, I was unable to secure a residency, let alone a passport.
And the ignorance culminated in Brexit. The mainstreaming of lies was complete. A points-based system? We already have one. It’s called a tier-2 visa and to avail yourself of it you have to have sponsorship and a job offer from a UK employer, as well as sufficient funds to sustain you until your first salary. An NHS surcharge? We already have one. Every non-EU citizen who takes up a job or student position in the UK pays £150-200 before the visa is issued. They also pay national insurance, taxes that go towards the Home Office, plus high and escalating fees to process routine applications – in addition to fees paid to all the outsourced affiliated agencies that administer peripheral processes such as English tests and interviews.
Sometimes, going through that third-party machinery was like being in some dark comedy. The £150 English language test I had to book last-minute (or my naturalisation application would have been refused) took place in a lugubrious, privately run testing centre in Holborn, in London. Examinees were kept apart by a complicated, completely over-the top system. The examiner and I chatted amiably for a few minutes before she started the test. Then the frequency changed. Loudly and very slowly, she began: “Have. You. Been. To. Any. Festivals. Recently?” I said no and then she began to painfully explain what a festival was. I assured her that I knew, but just hadn’t been to any recently. She looked down at the subject notes where we had been asked to pick a topic we would like to speak about. I’d written down “Canada” as I had just arrived back in London that morning after delivering a keynote speech at a labour union event in Toronto. “Canada!” She said. “What. Can. You. Tell. Me. About. Canada?”
The really dirty secret is that the government can stop non-EU migration dead whenever it wants. Of the 170,000 non-EU migrants who came to the UK in 2016, about 90,000 were granted tier-2 employment. These are visas that we can simply stop issuing. But the economy needs the labour, something the government will not admit, instead choosing to treat applicants as people who somehow manage to come to the country against its will. If anything, the UK needs more non-EU migrants to plug skills gaps, particularly in the NHS – yet doctors offered jobs in hospitals are being blocked from coming to Britain because monthly quotas for skilled worker visas have been oversubscribed.
And, if Brexit finally goes through, into this inflexible immigration system will march three million EU citizens whose status will need to be registered and regularised. It is simply, for those of us who have been through it, a terrifying prospect. And May still doubles down, running the Home Office from Downing Street. In mid-February she overruled the Home Office in order to insist that EU citizens who arrived during a Brexit transition period would not have the automatic right to remain in the country. The move has caused alarm in the Home Office, with government sources admitting that work on a separate registration scheme had “barely begun” and “almost certainly” would not be ready in time. May then backed down.
The cavalier detachment with which these big decisions are made cannot be isolated from the general corporate cheapening of human life that has set in over the past decade. Satbir Singh sees immigration policy as indivisible from this environment. “If you look at what has happened in Britain over the last eight years,” he says, “there’s a thread of institutional degradation that runs through it all. Whether you are waiting for medical treatment, a welfare payment or an immigration decision, we are all clients, standing behind a glass window.” And we were the lucky ones. We weren’t in detention, which almost 28,000 people entered in 2016-17. We weren’t the ones being interviewed while hallucinating and wetting ourselves. We weren’t being handcuffed as we left burning buses.
And still the plight of migrants and their families doesn’t resonate with the British public as loudly as it should. I have heard the argument that no one has a right to settlement in a country that is not their country of birth many times. But other than in asylum cases or when people are joining family members, it is often the case that a life in the UK just develops organically. Sudan, where I am from, is in my bones, but the UK is where I had built a life just by virtue of the time I spent here. Via study and work, relationships and just the day-to-day of living, an investment is made in the country that you do not wish to unwind. Is that not, at its heart, what integration is? Is that not, allegedly, the Holy Grail? Satbir Singh, having won the right to bring his wife to the UK after the Home Office admitted its mistake, reflects on what is now, effectively and deliberately, an alienating process. “The first interaction you have with the state is suspicion, that you are a liar, a cheat and a fraud. This is an enormous roadblock to integration.”
In 2017, the permanent residency that was granted on appeal qualified me for British citizenship. More than a decade after that moment of pregnant possibility on a balcony in Bethnal Green, and 14 years after excitedly taking in the view of London’s parks on a train from the airport, I was making my way towards my naturalisation with leaden feet. The citizenship had been so shorn of its significance, so stripped of its essential meaning, that the ceremony felt like a formality. And when it was over it felt hollow. My relief was dulled by exhaustion and sadness that becoming the citizen of a country in which I had invested so much had been marred by an extractive, dishonest and punitive system. I now looked forward to only one thing – to never have to think about any of it again.
But the day after the ceremony I was crossing a bridge I had crossed thousands of times before, absentmindedly listening to Talking Heads’ This Must Be the Place. It was one of those cinematic London winter dusks, when the rich colours in the sky cast a benign, almost otherworldly light on the water. And I heard the lyrics – “Home is where I want to be” – for the first time. Every grain in the scene around me sharpened as a welling of belonging stung my eyes.
“They don’t want you to integrate,” Farsani had told me. “They want you to fail so they can point their fingers at you and say, ‘Look, immigrants do not integrate’.” But we do, because the country, in spite of its broken immigration system, slowly, organically, casually, naturalises you in ways that cannot be validated by a Life in the UK test, citizenship ceremony or exhaustive application dossier. But daily this natural, healthy process is being violated, via administrative incompetence and politically instructed cruelty, to fulfil a soundbite “tens of thousands” target the government cannot meet, and is too proud to jettison.
A recently-leaked audio clip, which appears to reveal a well-known Los Angeles-based acting teacher named Lesly Kahn advising a student to change her name and present as Latinx, has been circulating on social media.
The Daily Beast spoke with the woman who recorded the conversation, who asked to remain anonymous. She confirmed that it was a recording from an intro acting class of Kahn’s last Saturday.
In the controversial clip, Kahn can be heard urging an aspiring actress to change her name to “Rosa Ramirez,” insisting that, “Just the fact that your name is Rosa Ramirez is gonna get you a meeting.” When the young woman, who describes herself as “100% Ashkenazi Jewish,” says that no one has ever told her to change her name, Kahn expresses incredulity.
After confirming that the woman isn’t already on IMDb, Kahn proceeds to outline a plan of action for “Rosa Ramirez,” telling her to “wear something fucking red, wear some fucking sparkly earrings” and get new headshots taken. After reiterating that she should “come up with the most Latin name you can come up with,” Kahn further advises her to “stop admitting to being a huge Jew” because “it’s just not going to help you.” In the background, others can be heard laughing as Kahn says to “keep us posted” on “the saga of Rosa Ramirez.” Later, Kahn even advises the student to document her transformation on Instagram, suggesting that the exposure might be able to help the not-currently-working actress book a series.
The woman who recorded the interaction told The Daily Beast that it wasn’t the only disturbing conversation she witnessed in Kahn’s intro acting class. She recalled that, after the recorded incident, there was a point where the students were asked to share their biggest weaknesses as actors. One woman responded that “her weaknesses were that she is white and old.”
“I just sat there like ok, cool, here we go again,” the woman who recorded the class told The Daily Beast. “This was Lesly’s opportune moment to shut this all down, but of course, every Caucasian female in the room was like, ‘Oh yeah, me too!’ and then the original woman said, ‘I mean, I just have to say it, it’s racist.’”
When she tried to speak up, the woman responsible for the leaked audio clip alleges that Lesly said something along the lines of: “I’m not willing to have this conversation.”
“I’m just sitting there soaking this all in,” she recalled, “being a woman of African descent thinking, ‘Yeah, must be so hard for all of you white people to get jobs in Hollywood!’ That could have been the moment to address what had been said, but instead I was shut down.”
While she had had every intention of joining the group when she first arrived, she left class and told the office that she wouldn’t be coming back. After describing the uncomfortable “Rosa Ramirez” incident, she was given two email addresses to reach out to with her complaints. She told The Daily Beast, “I of course emailed them immediately as soon as I got home, and neither one of them has reached out to me.”
She confessed that she was “honestly kind of stressed out” by how the story blew up, adding, “I’m not out for attention.” In fact, she wasn’t recording with the intention of publishing anything, but rather for her own class notes. She shared the clips with “some of my friends of Latin descent” in an attempt to gauge if the interaction was as disturbing to them as she had perceived it to be. “And so one friend gave it to another friend, and that’s how it’s gotten around,” she explained.
“Equality feels like oppression when you’re accustomed to privilege.”
Reflecting on Kahn’s behavior, she said, “It’s not ok for her to be out there preaching this to fresh-faced people who may be new to this city and know that she has a reputation, and take everything she says to be gospel truth. Let’s say this girl goes out there like, ‘My name’s Rosa Ramirez,’ and then everybody finds out that she’s of Jewish descent. She’s going to look really stupid, and there goes her career.”
She added: “Equality feels like oppression when you’re accustomed to privilege. At the end of the day, that’s what it is, and that’s why so many people are crying right now, because it’s like ‘oh my goodness, there are other people getting things,’ but that doesn’t mean there’s any less for you.”
According to their website, Lesly Kahn & Company claims to offers “real-world career guidance and feedback” to actors, in classes that include acting essentials, technique clinic and comedy intensive. Additionally, they provide career counseling, on-set coaching and private classes. The website warns that LK & Co. isn’t for “the faint of heart,” adding, “We want you to work your butt off now, so that soon you can live your dream.” Their Facebook page boasts frequent shout-outs to former and current students. On February 22, they postedan article about One Day at a Time, the Netflix reboot that centers around a Latinx family in Los Angeles, captioned, “Kinda thrilling for me to see so many Kahnstituents working together. Ed Quinn, Todd Grinnell, Gloria Calderon Kellett and Isabella Gomez—just wow.”
Kahn’s bio lists a BFA in Acting from NYU and an MFA in Acting from The Yale School of Drama. Writing on her own experience in the industry on the Lesly Kahn & Company website, Kahn recalled, “Everything was out of my control: would I ever GET an audition? If so, when? How? Would the role be right for me? Would ‘They’ think it was right for me? What were ‘They’ looking for? Who were ‘They’ anyway? How should I look? What should I wear?!”
She concluded, “Of course, I couldn’t do anything about any of it. Still can’t. Neither can you. But if you’re willing to try some stuff, I can probably fix it so that, at the very least, you can always count on your acting. Wouldn’t that be a relief?”
Reached by phone, the office of Lesly Kahn & Co. referred The Daily Beast to Lesly Kahn’s social media statement. In the statement, which was released on her Twitter and Facebook pages on Monday, Kahn wrote, “I sincerely apologize for my recent comments. I believe in diversity and inclusion in the arts and in all areas of life. As a Jewish woman, I understand the pain that can come from being discriminated against. On behalf of myself and my company, the most sincere apology is extended to my students, current and former, and all others affected. I deeply regret the offense my words have caused. I value and respect people of all ethnic backgrounds, am extremely sorry and will use this learning experience to ensure against that type of incident in the future.”
When asked about Kahn’s statement, the woman who recorded the incident responded, “She had to do that to save face,” adding, “She’s not sorry for what she said, she’s sorry she got caught. Her heart’s not changed. She’s still the same person she was on Saturday.”
Dani Fernandez, one of the individuals who’s shared the audio clip on social media, is a former student of Lesly Kahn’s. Comments on Fernandez’s social media postings seem to illustrate a pattern of disturbing behavior in Kahn’s acting classes. One commenter recalled their negative experience in an intro class at Lesly Kahn & Company, alleging, “Some of the highlights were telling students to look up porn on their phone to get in the mood. Asking a girl if she’s ever done anal in front of the class.” The commenter, who wishes to remain anonymous, told The Daily Beast that the class they attended was not personally led by Kahn.
Sarah Ann Masse is an actor, comedian and writer who also took an intro class at Lesly Kahn & Company. Masse told The Daily Beast that she was first put off by comments that Kahn made in class. “She started talking about how she had been an actor, and she felt she struggled because she looked Jewish, and there were very few parts for Jewish-looking actors,” Masse recalled. Kahn eventually explained that she got a nose job “to look less Jewish.”
She took the class with her husband, who stayed behind and talked with Kahn after Masse had gone to check her class recommendations in the office. When they met up at the car, Masse says that her husband informed her, “I was talking to Lesly, she was crazy complimentary of you, talking about what a talented actress you were, but she told me that she thought you needed to get a nose job or else you wouldn’t get work.” Both Masse and her husband were disturbed by the alleged conversation. “My reaction was to be really angry, because first of all I think that for anyone, but especially for an acting teacher to suggest body modifications to their students, is super destructive,” Masse told The Daily Beast. “I was also really angry that she said it to my husband and not to me.”
Masse alleges she called Lesly Kahn & Company to report the exchange, and says that the man at the desk was “very upset and apologetic,” saying that Lesly would reach out to her. Masse never heard back from Kahn. She told The Daily Beast that she subsequently wrote about her experience in an all-women’s Facebook group, and “many people” came forward with similar stories of being urged by Kahn to change their appearance or undergo cosmetic surgery.
When the audio clip of Kahn leaked, Masse “was horrified.” She observed, “It’s bad enough to tell young women that they need to modify their bodies to have a career, but then she starts playing this ‘game’ of let’s pretend to be a different race, let’s pretend to be a different ethnicity—as though race and ethnicity are things that you can just put on or adopt…I think there’s this myth going around in the industry right now that it’s really hard if you’re a white actor because everybody cares about diversity, and that’s not true.” She concluded, “If [a role] is clearly supposed to be Latinx and you send in a bunch of white actors pretending to be that, you’re responsible for perpetuating the whitewashing and brownfacing that goes on in this industry.”
While Masse disclosed that she was nervous that speaking out about Kahn could result in professional blacklisting, she told The Daily Beast, “I can’t stand by and say nothing when I know the truth about my experience.”
Another performer, who wishes to remain anonymous, told The Daily Beast that Lesly Kahn suggested that she get collagen injections, a nose job, and a chin lift during an intro class, reportedly saying, “It’s really hard to get work when you’re too Jewish-looking.”
Buried deep in Lesly Kahn and Company’s five-star reviews on Yelp, it’s possible to find a few buried testimonies that mirror the leaked audio. In one negative review from 2016, a Yelp user wrote, “Lesly and her assistants also spent most of class complaining that everyone who was booking was ‘Latin and 17’ and if they could they’d ‘make us all 17 and Latin,’” adding, “Kinda racist and also inaccurate.”
On Twitter, Fernandez condemned “the mentality that Latinos are taking all the acting jobs (which is so far from the truth) and therefore white people should be allowed to do this.”
Articles and studies consistently show that Hollywood has a ways to go in terms of inclusionand rightful representation. A 2017 piece in The Verge pointed out that, “While Latinos make up 17 percent of the US’s population, television representation of Latinos in 2017 lagged behind at a mere 8 percent, the greatest racial disparity among minorities.”
When a self-identified Jewish woman tells a student that her only chance for success is presenting as Latinx, she’s playing into the paranoia that white performers are being pushed aside for people of color. This seemingly indefensible position is harmful on multiple levels, implying that performers of color who are finally being cast are merely filling quotas, or are being hired for their ethnicity as opposed to their talent or skill.
Speaks for the inherent corruption of citizenship-by-investment programs:
The Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska has bought a Cypriot passport under a controversial scheme that allows rich investors to acquire citizenship and visa-free access to the European Union, the Guardian can reveal.
Deripaska, an aluminium magnate with connections to Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, is one of hundreds of wealthy individuals who have applied for Cypriot nationality. His application was approved last year.
The revelations will revive concern about oligarchs with Kremlin connections buying EU passports. Large numbers of the Russian and Ukrainian elite featured last year in a list of hundreds of people granted Cypriot citizenship over the past four years.
The island also offered citizenship to Viktor Vekselberg, a major shareholder in the Bank of Cyprus, the country’s biggest bank, documents show. Vekselberg appears to have turned the offer down. His spokesman said he only had Russian citizenship.
Deripaska and Vekselberg appeared on another list issued by the US Treasury in January of oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin. Deripaska has denied claims that he served as a back channel between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign, as an investigation by the special counsel Robert Mueller into possible collusion continues.
The Cypriot documents seen by the Guardian and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) show that Deripaska’s first attempt to become a Cypriot citizen was unsuccessful.
Cyprus has been accused of failing to vet passport candidates vigorously enough, heightening concerns in EU circles about people being able to buy EU citizenship. On this occasion, however, Deripaska was asked to resubmit his case because of a preliminary inquiry into his affairs in Belgium. The inquiry was subsequently dropped in 2016.
Cyprus’s council of ministers sent Deripaska’s case back to the island’s interior ministry, the Cypriot documents say, asking it to investigate further. The oligarch’s naturalisation bid had to be re-examined before a final decision could be made.
Deripaska’s name was made public this week when an interior ministry document listing beneficiaries of the collective investment scheme was distributed inside Cyprus’s parliament. Clerks left it in a room used by journalists, and several picked up a copy.
Leaked documents show that the Cypriot “golden visa” scheme remains a lucrative source of revenue for the island, generating at least €4.8bn (£4.3bn). Cyprus has given citizenship to 1,685 “foreign investors” since 2008 – many from the former Soviet Union, and from China, Iran and Saudi Arabia – and 1,651 members of their families.
The finance ministry has previously said it carries out stringent checks on all citizenship by investment applications, with funds required to undergo money laundering controls by a Cypriot bank. Cyprus is not the only EU country to have granted citizenship to high net-wealth Russians, it says. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing on the part of beneficiaries.
Vekselberg’s Renova group is one of Russia’s biggest conglomerates. He made a major investment in the crisis-hit Bank of Cyprus in 2014, buying almost 10% of its stock. The move at a time when the island’s economy was depressed meant he was an “exceptional case deserving of honorary naturalisation”, the documents say.
Vekselberg’s spokesman, Andrey Shtorkh, said: “Mr Vekselberg has only one citizenship, of Russian Federation and was never granted any other citizenship including Cypriot.”
Cyprus made it easier for rich foreigners to gain citizenship in September 2016. It had previously required investors to have at least €5m in domestic assets, including real estate, firms and government bonds. Applicants could also take part in a collective investment scheme by spending a minimum of €12.5m, or €2.5m per person. The ruling council reduced the eligibility threshold to €2m and ditched collective schemes.
The fresh trove of scheme beneficiaries obtained by the Guardian and the OCCRP confirms the extent to which Cyprus’s citizen-by-investment programme has become a main avenue for Russian oligarchs who wish to get a European passport.
The Portuguese MEP Ana Gomes described the visa scheme as “absolutely perverse, immoral and increasingly alarming”. The European commission launched its own inquiry last year into citizenship-by-investment programmes in the EU. The outcome is expected to be revealed later this year.
Cyprus, along with Malta, is one of the countries under scrutiny. “Cyprus is the biggest European investor in Russia and a great number of Russian nationals acquired Cypriot passports. We are all aware that there is also a big problem of recycling money. The point is that Cyprus, like other countries, is not just selling its passport. It is marketing European citizenship,” Gomes said.
Naomi Hirst, a senior campaigner at Global Witness, said EU states that sell citizenship should carry out “the sharpest of checks” on applicants.
“The source of wealth and background of these individuals should be scrutinised,” she said. “If not, then the whole of the EU could be made vulnerable to those who will use these schemes as a ‘get out of jail free card’ to move freely around Europe.”
Good commentary on the difference between systemic and individual racism:
A predictable quality about air bubbles is that they always rise to the surface.
So it is with the light weight of ignorance.
Late last week, a senior Toronto police officer went on Twitter to dispute journalist Marci Ien’s account in the Globe and Mail of race playing a factor in being pulled over for the third time in eight months, and this time in her own driveway. She described the subsequent and now all-too-familiar fear and uncertainty and anxiety and fatigue of DWB, or Driving While Black.
She said she did nothing wrong, and was not given a ticket.
“You failed to stop at a stop sign,” a tweet by Staff Supt. Mario Di Tommaso read in part. “It was dark. Your race was not visible on the video and only became apparent when you stepped out of the vehicle in your driveway.”
His views were echoed by Deputy Chief Shawna Coxon.
“We are accountable,” she wrote on Twitter. “The whole event (incl. the traffic infraction) is on camera. The ethnicity of the driver is not visible until after she was pulled over, when she exits the car.”
Then Toronto Police Association chief Mike McCormack swooped in with a spectacular bit of you-asked-for-it-ism, tweeting an excerpt from a 2005 Globe and Mail interview of Ien where she said she liked speeding.
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She said this in 2005. Therefore she must deserve being pulled over three times in 2017-18.
Unsurprisingly, they led the conversation down the path to square one: Was it racism or not?
What is worth noting is that a police force that talks of building relations with the Black community and setting up “sensitivity training” remains out of its depth even with the basics of racism.
Racism isn’t just about intent. It’s also about outcomes.
Racism can occur without anyone having to be a racist — or without someone being actively prejudiced against a person of colour.
A Black person could be stopped five times by five different police officers, without any officer consciously disliking Black people.
For having the courage to share her story, Ien is now placed in the centre of a circle of doubt, a position that so many people of colour find themselves in when they speak of their experiences.
Disrespected, based on her account, by the cop who stopped her.
Disbelieved, humiliated and dismissed by the cops who challenged her story.
When police spokesperson Mark Pugash told the Star, “Ms. Ien has made some very serious allegations and we would encourage her to file a complaint with the Office of the Independent Police Review Director,” he means she should initiate a process that would hinge on proving whether the individual officer who stopped her was racist.
Nowhere in Ien’s piece is the allegation that the man who stopped her was racist.
But Pugash, and indeed his senior brass, depressingly show no understanding of systemic racism; in this case, a system not set up to mitigate a bundle of experiences that belong to the umbrella of racism.
What is being asked of Ien is to ignore the countless experiences and stories of humiliation, and manhandling by police. Ignore the needless deaths, some captured on videos that have scarred so many.
Ignore all those individual stories that stitch together to show a pattern of racial profiling and prove this particular incident to be racist.
In her book So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo says, “Those who demand the smoking gun of a racial slur or swastika or burning cross before they believe that an individual encounter with the police might be about race are ignoring what we know and what the numbers are bearing out …We are being targeted.”
Data from traffic stops found that Ottawa police are more likely to pull over disproportionate numbers of Black (and Middle Eastern) drivers.
Black people are three times more likely to be street checked in Halifax, according to information released by the Halifax Regional Police.
In Toronto, the seven-year long Black Experience Project found 79 per cent of Black men between the ages of 25 and 44 have been stopped by police in public places.
How Black people (and Indigenous people and other marginalized people) experience police is different from how people with specific status of race and age and wealth experience police. How we all experience police at the point of help is different from how we do at the point of criminalization.
“The power and corruption that enable police brutality put all citizens, of every race, at risk. But it does not put us at risk equally, and the numbers bear that out,” writes Oluo.
An individualistic society lead by those with status whose interests the police uphold has no impetus for changing the system.
And the wilfully ignorant, they go along for the ride.
Good reminder that all parties are playing this game:
The tsunami is spreading far from the epicentre of the Jaspal Atwal earthquake. And it doesn’t discriminate between political parties.
The Liberals, of course, have been the ones swept farthest out to sea. A week after Atwal — a former wannabe hitman for the Sikh separatist cause — was summoned to dine with Justin Trudeau in India, the prime minister and his national security adviser were neck-deep and clinging to a conspiracy theory.
It was an Indian plot, they said, meant to make us look soft on separatism. So far, the theory isn’t selling well.
But are the Conservatives and the NDP still high and dry? Not exactly. Take the case of the Conservatives first.
The motion that did not move
Hoping to paint the Liberals as soft on terror, the Tories drafted a parliamentary motion this week that states that the party “values the contributions of Canadian Sikhs” but condemns “all forms of terrorism, including Khalistani extremism and the glorification of any individuals who have committed acts of violence.”
It was a trap, of course. Had the Liberals voted yes to the motion, they would have been repudiating some of their Khalistani allies. If they’d voted no, they’d have been caught in bed with them.
The word “glorification,” of course, takes aim at a painful topic for families of the victims of the Air India Flight 182 bombing: the re-branding of the man who planned the terrorist act as a saintly hero.
A martyr poster of Air India bombing architect Talwinder Singh Parmar is seen fixed to the exterior of the Dashmesh Darbar Temple in Surrey, B.C. on Oct. 3, 2017. (CBC)
He is Canada’s deadliest mass-murderer by far: Talwinder Singh Parmar, the architect of the 1985 bombing, whose portrait adorns Sikh temples in Surrey, B.C. and Malton, Ont. Children are being taught that the man who blew 329 innocents out of the sky was a model citizen and a persecuted martyr. (Parmar’s role in planning the attack, which was accepted as fact by both the Air India inquiry and the judicial inquiry, was confirmed by the testimony of the man, who admitted to making the bomb.)
So the Conservative motion had a sharp point on it. But there was a problem: as soon as they got wind of it, the separatist lobby, led by the World Sikh Organization, peppered Ottawa with complaints that this was an attack on all Sikhs, not just the violent ones.
A flurry of text messages went out. “They are targe[t]ing the Sikh community and tarnishing us as extremists,” one of the messages said. “Canadians are starting to see us as terrorists when we are not … Everyone please leave voicemails at the offices of Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer … Please communicate to them that if the Conservatives carry through and bring this motion forward then we will not welcome them in our Gurdwaras and we will absolutely not support them in the future.”
It was a familiar tactic: claiming that a critique of extremists is an assault on all Sikhs. But by morning, the blitz of messages seemed to have worked — or so the World Sikh Organization claimed.
So, the Conservatives reconsidered — and not for the first time.
The veneration of Talwinder Parmar became an issue in 2007 at the annual Vaisakhi parade run by the Dashmesh Darbar temple in Surrey, B.C. Then-prime minister Stephen Harper sent two MPs on his behalf: Jim Abbott and Nina Grewal. The Liberals sent Sukh Dhaliwal — an MP again today — and the NDP sent then-MP Penny Priddy.
Along with then-B.C. premier Gordon Campbell, they all took the stage alongside Parmar’s son and such other separatist luminaries as Satinderpal Gill of the banned International Sikh Youth Federation. The politicians all smiled and waved as the floats rolled by with tinselled portraits honouring Parmar and other martyrs.
Afterwards, all of them insisted it was no big deal — although Campbell changed his mind the next day and said he would not have attended if he’d known about the martyr posters.
Abbott also changed his mind — in the other direction. First, he said he was “flabbergasted” to realize that the Air India bomber was being lionized in this way. But after consulting with the Conservative Party, he reversed himself and praised the parade unreservedly.
In later years, the temple management responded by fixing a large portrait of Parmar to the outside wall.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, centre, and Punjab state Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal, right, gesture along with an unidentified person at the Golden Temple, the Sikhs’ holiest site, in Amritsar, India, in November, 2009. (Prabhjot Gill/The Associated Press)
Still, there was not a word about it from Stephen Harper — who, like Justin Trudeau, endured his share of lectures on this topic from his Indian counterparts.
Like Trudeau, Harper emphasized that separatists have freedom of speech in Canada. Neither Harper nor Trudeau thought to mention that Canadian politicians also have freedom of speech — and have rarely used it to denounce the celebration of Parmar.
Or so it was until — oddly enough — the very day the Jaspal Atwal story broke.
The news we all forgot
Nobody remembers it now, but moments before the Atwal wave crashed into his Indian tour last week, Prime Minister Trudeau made some news of his own. In fact, it might have been the story of the day — on any other day.
Trudeau was facing constant demands to clearly repudiate Sikh extremists back home. Pressed in New Delhi by the CBC’s David Cochrane, Trudeau at first ducked a question about the Parmar “martyr” posters. He merely condemned violence and extremism in general.
So Cochrane asked him again: What about those Parmar posters? This time, Trudeau said what so many Canadian politicians have refused to say: “I do not think we should ever be glorifying mass-murderers, and I’m happy to condemn that.”
That was a first. No Canadian leader had said it before. Every Vaisakhi parade, after all, is a vote-rich environment. Condemning violence in broad terms is easy. Condemning voters who revere a specific martyr is harder.
Too hard, apparently, for a politician who has long identified with Sikh grievances against the Indian government. That would be Canada’s first Sikh party leader, Jagmeet Singh, who was asked the same question about the Parmar posters after winning the leadership of the NDP last fall.
In an interview on CBC’s Power and Politics, Singh repeatedly declined to say whether the Parmar posters were appropriate. The following week, when asked again if they should be taken down, he ducked the question (again), saying, “I’m not here to tell what a community should or shouldn’t do.”
Would be nice to have a comparable Canadian study, contrasting Postmedia (both their high brow and low brow brands), the Globe and the Star:
Loyal readers of New Matilda should remember One Path Network, a Muslim video production studio and media company in Sydney. They produced the first devastating report exposing Channel Seven’s favourite purported Muslim leader and sheikh, Mohammed Tawhidi.
Their calm and factual retort to Tawhidi’s lurid claims about Muslim conspiracies in Australia left his credibility in shreds.
The OPN team has come up with a new report on Islamophobia in Australian media. Disappointingly, I don’t think it has received any media coverage. Thus, New Matilda is proud to bring you a brief summary of its findings, and a few accompanying comments.
A quick summary of the report, complete with flashy graphs and images, and an accompanying short video, can be seen at this link. There’s also a longer PDF version, which can be downloaded at the site, and runs to 44 pages, though about 20 pages are devoted to front pages about Muslims. More on that shortly.
The report investigates how five newspapers covered Islam in 2017. Their primary metrics were a numerical count of certain types of stories, number of front pages, a few case studies, and a brief look at a handful of columnists reporting on Islam.
The newspapers were all Murdoch’s: the Australian, Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph, Courier Mail, and Adelaide Advertiser.
Articles were regarded as “negative articles written about Islam”, if they “referred to Islam or Muslims alongside words like violence, extremism, terrorism or radical”. It should be noted – this is a pretty expansive definition. A story that accurately reported a noteworthy incident of Muslim violence, without being inflammatory or misrepresenting material facts, and which had the respectful cooperation of Muslims, would still be caught up under this definition.
Indeed, the definition could go further. A report that noted Muslim women in a non-government organisation helping victims of domestic violence might also be caught up under this definition. It should also be noted – there is an implicit slippage, in the sense that a negative story about Muslims isn’t necessarily a story about Islam. Thus, I would argue that the definition may be overbroad.
With that proviso, it’s not much of a secret that the Murdoch press constantly attacks Islam and Muslims. So, given this definition, how frequent were stories featuring Muslims or Islam in a negative sense?
There were 2,891 of them. That’s almost 3,000 negative stories relating to Islam in one year. Which is an incredible amount. That’s almost eight stories a day, every day, for the whole year, somehow relating Muslims to terrorism or violence or whatever.
It’s a shame that the study didn’t investigate other media more fully. It would be interesting to know how they compare. The website guide to the report features an interesting comparison of Fairfax and Murdoch articles about Islam (in the sense explained above). Interestingly, though Fairfax has considerably less coverage of Muslims than the Murdoch press, it’s still pretty substantial, at over 100 every month. That is, over three negative stories every day at the less Islam-obsessed Fairfax. And even this gives an unfair disproportionate advantage to Fairfax – it is not clear which Fairfax publications were taken into consideration in this count.
The next metric is front pages. Here, the numbers are pretty stark. 152 front pages relating to Islam or Muslims in a negative way. The graph gives an idea of how regular that is, though it seems likely on some days multiple papers had Islam related stories on the front page.
The front pages blur out the non-Islam related stuff, and make the content of interest in focus. This is an idea of what those front pages looked like:
Again, a weakness in this study is the overly broad definition. One interesting case is a Daily Telegraph story headlined “A KICK IN THE ASSAD”, about the Trump administration bombing Syria. To my mind, that story doesn’t relate to Islam in any serious sense. Yet funnily enough, the bottom of the page says: “NSW TERROR: ISIS LINK TO SERVO STABBING MURDER”. The Tele was determined to claim its space in this report.
The report turns to case studies, what is calls “ridiculous highlights” from the year. The first example is the coverage of terrorism. They observe that “a casual observer would not be faulted for thinking that Australia was actively engaged in daily combat on its streets. In fact, it would hardly be surprising if that was the perception in the offices of the Daily Telegraph and The Australian.”
The section on Yassmin Abdel-Magied reaches a staggering count of over 200 articles about her. This obsession is utterly deranged. I fear that this year too, we’ll continue to see Murdoch hacks trolling her social media to find new anodyne liberal tweets to feign outrage over.
Possibly the most revealing part of the study relates to opinion writers at the Murdoch press. We all know their positions. Yet it is striking to see their obsession with Islam quantified. All of them write about Islam a lot. Miranda Devine, one of the least devoted Islam bashers, made 16 per cent of her 185 op eds about Islam. Janet Albrechtsen weighed in at 27 per cent, a bit less than Greg Sheridan at 29 per cent. Andrew Bolt and Rita Panahi came in at 38 per cent and 37 per cent – particularly impressive for Bolt, who produced 473 opinion pieces in the year (I suspect this counts blog items). Jennifer Oriel wrote 48 op eds, and over half were about Islam.
What is striking about this to me is that this is like a kind of one-sided cultural war. When the Australian decided to promote Keith Windschuttle, progressive academics rallied to defend historical truth. When they trash climate change science, other media covers the actual record of what’s happening to the world. When the Murdoch press run anti-feminist claptrap, there are plenty of feminists at Fairfax and the Guardian to strike back.
But there is no serious mainstream contestation of this constant drumbeat of anti-Muslim and anti-Islam stories and op eds. These are hundreds of op eds demonising Islam, without any real response. There are apparently no Muslims working at (say) ABC or Fairfax to give a different take on these issues, or complain about what the Murdoch press is doing.
The report concludes with some brief analysis and statistics, which are kind of incredible when paired. One is the finding from an Australian National University study that 71 per cent of Australians were concerned about the rise of Islamic extremism. A reasonable finding, one might think, given the nature of media coverage of Muslims (I really wish One Path would do a follow-up study on other media outlets).
(IMAGE: André-Pierre du Plessis, Flickr)
Yet Griffith University researchers found the second statistic: 70 per cent of Australians think they know “little to nothing” about Islam and Muslims. Which raises an obvious question about what public opinion might be like if the media in Australia did its job differently.
My major reservation about the study is the broad definition of negative stories about Islam. If we simply regard these as stories about Islam or Muslims connected to violence, terrorism, and extremism, then the findings remain shocking. This is a constant, endless deluge of stories about Islam and Muslims. The vast majority receive no counter-argument or response, whether in the Murdoch press or elsewhere.
There are no ensconced media platforms for Muslims to write about Islamophobia in Australia with the kind of relentlessness of a Bolt or Oriel. The study shows a vast media empire endlessly picking on a small Australian minority before a huge audience, without offering the victims any way of defending their names and religion before that audience.
And the study that documented this is being ignored.
Multicultural Meanderings 