Holocaust education ‘not enough’ to tackle antisemitism, Unesco warns – The Jewish Chronicle

2018/06/05 Leave a comment

Valid points and a reminder that UN organizations are not blind to antisemitism:

Openly antisemitic attitudes are no longer limited to extremist circles and are increasingly voiced in the mainstream, the United Nations’ cultural agency has warned.

Unesco said that Jews in Europe were feeling under “renewed danger” and that while teaching people about the Holocaust is important, it is not an adequate substitute for education that aims to prevent antisemitism.

“If anti-Semitism is exclusively addressed through Holocaust education, students might conclude that anti-Semitism is not an issue today or misconceive its contemporary forms,” the agency said in a report, which was published on Monday.

“It is appropriate and necessary to incorporate lessons about anti-Semitism into teaching about the Holocaust because it is fundamental to understanding the context in which discrimination, exclusion and, ultimately, the destruction of Jews in Europe took place.”

The study – jointly produced with the OSCE, a security and democracy watchdog – calls on European governments to uses education to make young people more resilient to antisemitic ideas and ideologies.

Unesco director-general Audrey Azoulay (Photo: Getty Images)
“It is alarming that, as survivors of the Holocaust pass on, Jewish communities in Europe feel in renewed danger from the threat of anti-Semitic attacks,” Unesco’s director-general Audrey Azoulay said.

“Anti-Semitism is not the problem of Jewish communities alone, nor does it require the presence of a Jewish community to proliferate. It exists in religious, social and political forms and guises, on all sides of the political spectrum.”

She added: “This is both an immediate security imperative and a long-term educational obligation.”

The document contains a list of tropes that students should be taught to identify as antisemitic.

They include blood libel claims, the perception that Jewish people are more loyal to Israel than to their home countries, and conspiracies that Jews are plotting to take over the world for their own gain.

“It is appropriate and necessary to incorporate lessons about anti-Semitism into teaching about the Holocaust because it is fundamental to understanding the context in which discrimination, exclusion and, ultimately, the destruction of Jews in Europe took place,” the report says.

“Similarly, the study of anti-Semitism should include some attention to the Holocaust, as a nadir of anti-Semitism in history, through the state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and their collaborators.”

via Holocaust education ‘not enough’ to tackle antisemitism, Unesco warns – The Jewish Chronicle

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Halifax legion bars group that questions immigration, multiculturalism | The Chronicle Herald

2018/06/05 Leave a comment

Quite a change from the Legion opposition to Sikh Canadians wearing turbans a generation ago:

A Calgary-based group with controversial views on immigration and multiculturalism is no longer allowed to host a town hall at a Royal Canadian Legion in Halifax.

The National Citizens Alliance was set to host its meeting at a legion branch in Halifax’s north end Friday evening, but the event was cancelled by the legion Thursday.

“The original booking was made by an individual for a private function. When RCL Branch 27 learned that the booking was intended as a town hall meeting for the National Citizens Alliance, the booking was cancelled,” Valerie Mitchell-Veinotte, executive director of the Nova Scotia/Nunavut Command, told Global News.

The alliance promotes the idea of “integration” of new arrivals into what it calls the “basic cultural norms of Canada” and a belief that political correctness threatens Canada’s identity and culture.

The group said Friday it had further been banned from meeting at a church hall and a Halifax hotel, and now plans to hold a rally at a downtown park.

It had also recently been banned from participating in the Annapolis Valley Apple Blossom Festival, whose organizers apologized on Sunday after the NCA walked in its parade.

“We apologize to anyone who may have felt unsafe at the Grand Street Parade because of this political party’s attendance and derogatory messaging,” organizers of the week-long festival in Kentville, N.S., said in a statement.

Stephen Garvey, leader of the NCA, said on Thursday that he rejects the characterization of the party, adding that no one in his party made hateful comments or uttered any hate speech.

Garvey added his party doesn’t tolerate racism, and argued that his organization was taking part in the parade just like other political parties were. The NCA is not an officially registered party but has committed to running candidates in the 2019 federal election.

“They’re the ones dividing people,” he said. “If we offended people, that’s their problem, not ours. As far as we’re concerned, we probably added some nice spice to the festival.”

Garvey said the group wanted to host a town hall at the Halifax legion to clear up the confusion that has plagued the group since it made headlines with its role in the apple blossom festival.

Garvey told Global News that organizers had called the legion on Thursday morning to confirm the booking.

“They had actually confirmed it with us,” Garvey said. “Then someone higher up said no.”

Among the group’s core tenets is the goal of implementing a “strong no nonsense immigration policy that puts the well-being and safety of the Canadian people first and implementing a temporary pause and substantial reduction in immigration.”

via Halifax legion bars group that questions immigration, multiculturalism | The Chronicle Herald

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Citizenship for sale: how tycoons can go shopping for a new passport | The Guardian

2018/06/04 Leave a comment

Best overview and analysis I have seen to date:

It’s the must-have accessory for every self-respecting 21st-century oligarch, and a good many mere multimillionaires: a second – and sometimes a third or even a fourth – passport.

Israel, which helped Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich out of a spot of bother this week by granting him citizenship after delays in renewing his expired UK visa, offers free nationality to any Jewish person wishing to move there.

But there are as many as two dozen other countries, including several in the EU, where someone with the financial resources of the Chelsea football club owner could acquire a new nationality for a price: the global market in citizenship-by-investment programmes – or CIPs as they are commonly known – is booming.

The ‘golden visa’ deal: ‘We have in effect been selling off British citizenship to the rich’
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The schemes’ specifics – and costs, ranging from as little as $100,000 (£74,900) to as much as €2.5m (£2.19m) – may vary, but not the principle: in essence, wealthy people invest money in property or businesses, buy government bonds or simply donate cash directly, in exchange for citizenship and a passport.

Some do not offer citizenship for sale outright, but run schemes usually known as “golden visas” that reward investors with residence permits that can eventually lead – typically after a period of five years – to citizenship.

The programmes are not new, but are growing exponentially, driven by wealthy private investors from emerging market economies including China, Russia, India, Vietnam, Mexico and Brazil, as well as the Middle East and more recently Turkey.

The first launched in 1984, a year after young, cash-strapped St Kitts and Nevis won independence from the UK. Slow to take off, it accelerated fast after 2009 when passport-holders from the Caribbean island nation were granted visa-free travel to the 26-nation Schengen zone.

For poorer countries, such schemes can be a boon, lifting them out of debt and even becoming their biggest export: the International Monetary Fund reckons St Kitts and Nevis earned 14% of its GDP from its CIP in 2014, and other estimates put the figure as high as 30% of state revenue.

Wealthier countries such as Canada, the UK and New Zealand have also seen the potential of CIPs (the US EB-5 programme is worth about $4bn a year to the economy) but sell their schemes more around the attractions of a stable economy and safe investment environment than on freedom of movement.

Experts from the many companies, such as Henley and Partners, CS Global and Apex, now specialising in CIPs and advertising their services online and in inflight magazines, say that unlike Abramovich, relatively few of their clients buy citizenship in order to move immediately to the country concerned.

For most, the acquisition represents an insurance policy: with nationalism, protectionism, isolationism and fears of financial instability on the rise around the world, the state of the industry serves as an effective barometer of global political and economic uncertainty.

But CIPs are not without their critics. Malta, for example, has come under sustained fire from Brussels and other EU capitals for its programme, run by Henley and Partners, which according to the IMF saw more than 800 wealthy individuals gain citizenship in the three years following its launch in 2014.

Critics said the scheme was undermining the concept of EU citizenship, posing potential major security risks, and providing a possible route for wealthy individuals – for example from Russia – with opaque income streams to dodge sanctions in their own countries.

Several other CIPs have come under investigation for fraud, while equality campaigners increasingly argue the moral case that it is simply wrong to grant automatic citizenship to ultra-high net worth individuals when the less privileged must wait their turn – and, in many cases, be rejected.

The Caribbean

The best-known – and cheapest – CIP schemes are in the Caribbean, where the warm climate, low investment requirements and undemanding residency obligations have long proved popular. Five countries currently offer CIPs, often giving visa-free travel to the EU, and have recently cut their prices to attract investors as they seek funds to help them rebuild after last year’s hurricanes. In St Kitts and Nevis a passport can now be had for a $150,000 donation to the hurricane relief fund, while Antigua, Barbuda and Granada have cut their fees to $100,000, the same level as St Lucia and Dominica.

Europe

Almost half of the EU’s member states offer some kind of investment residency or citizenship programme leading to a highly prized EU passport, which typically allows visa-free travel to between 150 and 170 countries. Malta’s citizenship-for-sale scheme requires a €675,000 donation to the national development fund and a €350,000 property purchase. In Cyprus the cost is a €2m investment in real estate, stocks, government bonds or Cypriot businesses (although the number of new passports is to be capped at 700 a year following criticism). In Bulgaria, €500,000 gets you residency, and about €1m over two years plus a year’s residency gets you fast-track citizenship. Investors can get residency rights leading longer term to citizenship – usually after five years, and subject to passing relevant language and other tests – for €65,000 in Latvia (equities), €250,000 in Greece (property), €350,000 or €500,000 (property or a small business investment fund) or €500,000 in Spain (property, and you have to wait 10 years to apply for citizenship).

Rest of the world

Thailand offers several “elite residency” packages costing $3,000-$4,000 a year for up to 20 years residency, some including health checkups, spa treatments and VIP handling from government agencies. The EB-5 US visa, particularly popular with Chinese investors, costs between €500,000 and $1m depending on the type of investment and gives green card residency that can eventually lead to a passport. Canada closed its CA$800,000 (£460,000) federal investment immigration programme in 2014 but now has a similar residency scheme, costing just over CA$1m, for “innovative start-ups”, as well as regional schemes in, for example, Quebec. Australia requires an investment of AU$1.5m (£850,000) and a net worth of AU$2.5m for residency that could, eventually, lead to citizenship, and New Zealand – popular with Silicon Valley types – an investment of up to NZ$10m (£5.2m).

via Citizenship for sale: how tycoons can go shopping for a new passport | World news | The Guardian

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Roseanne Barr’s fall was as righteous as it was inevitable – Southey

2018/06/04 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Tabitha Southey, calling out some of the right-wing “snowflakes:”

On May 29, following the latest in a long line of outbursts from comedian—and racist—Roseanne Barr, ABC cancelled the reboot of her self-titled sitcom. Roseanne would not, as had previously been announced, be renewed for a second season. Bob Iger, the CEO of the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, described her tweets as “abhorrent” and “repugnant.”

In her series-tanking tweet, the TV star—and avid spreader of bizarre, often anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about international pedophile rings conspiring with American civil servants to thwart Donald Trump—described Valerie Jarrett, a Black woman and senior advisor in the Obama White House, as the child of the “Muslim brotherhood & Planet Of The Apes.” That would seem to have been the straw that broke the network camel’s back, a camel that had shown remarkable, even super-camelean, fortitude up until that point.

Clearly, the weight of Roseanne having tweeted about another Black woman back in 2013—”Susan Rice is a man with big swinging ape balls,” she wrote—obviously didn’t make the camel break its stride; ABC signed her to do the show all the same. Roseanne’s penchant for spreading the theory that Hillary Clinton was at the centre of a cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles operating out of a Washington D.C. pizza joint should possibly have been taken as another indication that some kind of career-ending tweet was inevitable—but then, maybe her tweets were part of her appeal to a network said to have been worried it wasn’t locking down the “lock her up” demographic.

Roseanne’s long history of abject transphobia should also have been a clue that her triumphant return might end like this, much the way a taped confession of “I totally did it in the library with the candlestick, ask the professor, he saw everything” is a clue.

All of which is to say: while I applaud ABC’s decision to cancel the series without subjecting everyone to a week of “Will they or won’t they dump the racist now,” my sympathy for the network is limited. On top of everything else, they’re the ones who landed us with so many dangerously hot takes in the wake of Roseanne’s cancellation.

When physicists focused the world’s most powerful X-ray laser on a piece of aluminum, they heated matter to 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit (2 million degrees Celsius), making it for a moment the hottest thing on Earth. I bet those physicists are now feeling kinda silly. How does lasered aluminum even begin to compete with the takes generated by a number of Supreme Arbiters of What Is And Is Not Racism, or as they are more commonly known, “aging, conservative white men”? A number of these gentlemen took a break from explaining how racism is over—I mean, there was a Black president and everything—to sagely declare that this thing Roseanne had done was the official “Thing We Will Acknowledge As Racist To Prove We Are Not Racist Ourselves Before We Go Back To Complaining About the Scourge of Identity Politics of 2018.”

Writing on his personal website, former Fox News personality and professional sexual-harassment suit settler Bill O’Reilly saw it this way: Statements like Roseanne’s aren’t victimless, and attacking Valerie Jarrett in such a “gross personal way” caused genuine harm. To whom? Why, to “everyday Caucasian folks […] described as having ‘white privilege’ by ideological loons.” Now, O’Reilly complained, “the false generalizations are harder to refute.” Worst of all, by sending “a signal to the nation’s 46 million African-Americans that white racism is indeed alive and well,” Roseanne made “football players protesting the American flag … more confident in their dissent.”

Be careful, this scalding hot take warns, lest managing to star in a network sitcom despite—or arguably because of—being an open and unashamed racist until your racism becomes just a bit too blatant gives people the impression that white privilege played a part in your success. Roseanne Barr deserves to lose her show, O’Reilly seems to believe, because she failed to maintain plausible racism deniability, and in so doing risked hurting O’Reilly’s case that Black athletes peacefully protesting the repeated killings of unarmed Black people by police officers should just shut up, stop “dissenting” and play games for his amusement.

An essay by Todd Starnes of Fox listed all the people he feels ought to have lost their shows before Roseanne, and noted that Barr’s tweet was “detestable and racist.” But, he asks: “Did ABC Entertainment go too far when it canceled her television show?” Roseanne, after all, “attracted a huge audience of gun-toting, flag-waving, blue collar Trump supporters” because Roseanne’s “rhetoric… appealed to Middle America.”

Again, he’s not saying Roseanne Barr shouldn’t have been fired. He’s just certain that the reason ABC executives chose to cancel the show called Roseanne, starring the woman named Roseanne, instead of just firing the eponymous star and executive producer and selling the world on The Show Formerly Known as Roseanne, But She’s Gone Now, Whoops, Sorry About the Racism, was because “Network executives could not stomach the show’s ‘deplorable’ viewers.” And that’s the real bigotry in this story.

Tucker Carlson apparently missed the memo that you’re supposed to condemn Roseanne’s racism before comparing her critics to genocidal fascists. He explained how Viacom and Hulu’s decision that now is a bad time to air old Roseanne reruns is a lot like Nazi book burning. The series, Carlson complained, was being “disappeared forever” possibly being “burned somewhere in a public bonfire so the rest of us can gather in our uniforms and chant slogans while that happens.”

Normally I’d frown upon comparing Hulu not serving up old sitcom episodes to Nazism, but credit to Carlson for working a literal fire into his hot take.

The actual no-kidding President of the United States threw in a hot take of his own, recognizing the true victim in this whole affair: Himself. The most powerful man in the world tweeted “Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that ‘ABC does not tolerate comments like those’ made by Roseanne Barr. Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didn’t get the call?”

Fox contributors and world leaders who spend their mornings live-tweeting Fox and Friends weren’t the only ones to throw a flaming take into the ring. Jimmy Kimmel took to Twitter to agree that Roseanne’s words were “indefensible,” but he cautioned that “angrily attacking a woman who is obviously not well does no good for anyone.” “Please,” he implored, “take a breath and remember that mental health issues are real. The Roseanne I know could probably use some compassion and help right now.”

Kimmel neglected, as people very concerned about mental illness in the aftermath of a friend of theirs getting in trouble for saying or doing something awful all too often do, to show that same compassion for the targets of Roseanne’s “unwellness” or many people who live with mental illness without joining in the centuries-long effort to compare Black people to animals in an attempt to justify slavery and more.

Roseanne herself apologized and explained that it was Memorial Day weekend, and she’d taken an Ambien. It’s easy to mock this, but I just took an antihistamine and now I have some things I want to say about the Dutch.

Predictably, Roseanne was held up as just another example of someone cruelly brought down by a “Twitter mob.” This is a bit like arguing against the use of torches and pitchforks before a crowd of people who have just tracked Dracula to his lair and put an end to his centuries of predation upon their gloomy Transylvanian village.

“The Twitter mob is getting more muscular,” warned Scott Gilmore, a Maclean’s editor-at-large who, like many pundits, seems alarmed that public opinion is increasingly formed and articulated by the public, which quite honestly seems to get it right at least as often as the professionals. It “usually takes a full day or even two” to generate enough outrage for people to “call for the offender to be boycotted, or fired, or otherwise punished,” Gilmore wrote. Indeed, in this case, the outrage against Roseanne came in less than 24 hours—outrage that was so brutal that it stopped her from being the star of a major network sitcom and subjected her to horrific “dismay” from TV anchors, “Roseanne sinned,” but in a world of “civil war” and “children being separated from their parents, or politicians being corrupt,” is contributing to the systematic dehumanization of black people really such a crime? Is it “important enough to sacrifice the livelihoods of the hundred-odd people who worked on the Roseanneshow,” Gilmore fusses, as though network shows don’t get cancelled for far worse reasons all the time and the people in the industry don’t understand that?

It’s a lot, says Gilmore, like this one time he was seriously tempted to join a “machete-wielding mob” stoning a man to death, this pissed-at-a-racist-TV-star thing. Luckily, a Blackhawk helicopter swooped down and flew the man to safety, leaving him still clutching the stone. “I don’t think I would have ever thrown it,” Gilmore assures us before leaving us with this dire warning: “But, then again, I never thought I would get so agitated about a comedian and her tweets.”

Be careful, we are told. Today you think maybe Roseanne Barr should go from being a wealthy actress with a network sitcom to being a wealthy actress without a network sitcom all on account of her being a racist. Tomorrow you’ll find yourself beating up cops and burning shops. Driven as we are by “dopamine-dealing retweets and likes,” as Gilmore insists is the case, who knows what horror we might unleash next if we don’t pull ourselves together and stop talking about racism on the internet?

I like to think the conversation has just begun.

via Roseanne Barr’s fall was as righteous as it was inevitable – Macleans.ca

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Letter to spouse applying for Canadian citizenship ‘offensive,’ Kwan says

2018/06/04 Leave a comment

Not easy to make these determinations and assessment of normal vs abnormal patterns of behaviour are valid approaches to identifying possible fraud or misrepresentation. Perhaps the language used could be more neutral in tone but hard to think of alternate ways to assess spousal applications but others may have ideas:

“To me, it’s completely inappropriate and I think it’s offensive and insulting,” Kwan said.

“I would like for the government to look at the systemic issue of this letter and why such letters are being sent out through those spousal sponsorship applications.”

The letter, from a Canadian immigration officer based in London, England, to a female applicant from Pakistan, says her permanent residency application appears suspect for a number of reasons — including that she is three years older than her husband, a Canadian citizen who has lived in Canada since 2005.

“You and your sponsor (husband) do not appear well matched,” the letter states, a copy of which was provided to The Canadian Press.

“You are three years older than him, he comes from a town four hours from where you live and you are not related, so it is unclear to me why the match was made.”

It is unusual for Pakistani men to marry older women, especially if they are not related, the unnamed immigration officer writes. The officer also notes their wedding guest list of 123 people was small compared to traditional Pakistani weddings.

“This apparent deviation from the cultural norm raises concerns that your wedding may have taken place in order for you to gain permanent residence in Canada.”
Kwan said she followed up with the department, only to find letters with such language are routinely sent to spousal sponsorship applicants from Pakistan to “‘tease out a response.'”

“Who are they judge whether or not that marriage is well-matched?” Kwan said.

“It’s one thing to say, ‘I do not believe in the authenticity of this marriage,’ it’s another to make a judgment on the quality of the marriage…. I find that offensive.”

Kwan raised the issue in question period this week and again with Hussen during a Commons committee meeting Thursday, asking for the government to review its treatment of spousal applicants.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau defended the program during question period, saying he was pleased his government has reduced a backlog of applications under spousal sponsorship and has also reduced waiting times from two years to 12 months.

“We also know there is more to do,” Trudeau said.

Improvements to the program have been made, and scrutinizing spousal sponsorship applications is an important part of the work of his department, Hussen added.

“Our department continues to uphold measures to safeguard against marriage fraud and other program integrity risks.”

Indeed, it’s not uncommon for the immigration minister to become involved in cases involving spousal citizenship cases that go before the courts.

Last week, a Federal Court judge rejected a judicial review application from Hussen’s office in a spousal case that was initially rejected and then won on appeal. The office felt there was evidence contradicting the wife’s claim that her marriage to a Nigerian man in 2014 was legitimate.

via Letter to spouse applying for Canadian citizenship ‘offensive,’ Kwan says

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Uproar in Lebanon over ‘naturalization’ granting hundreds citizenship – Al Arabiya English

2018/06/04 Leave a comment

Speaks for itself:

A controversial decree granting citizenship to 375 foreigners has sent ripples across Lebanon in the last 48 hours after news emerged that President Michel Aoun signed the resolution along with Prime Minister designate Saad al-Hariri and caretaker Interior Minister Nouhad Mashnouq.

While government officials kept silent, civil societies and activists took to social media to vent their anger and criticism.

The decree, which was riddled with accusations of bribery, grants Lebanese citizenship to affluent applicants including Syrians, Palestinians, Iraqis and Iranian nationals.

While MP Nadim Gemayel from Kataeb party was the first to announce the list of the names of those included in the presidential decree of naturalization, there was conflicting information as to whether the decree had already been signed.

In an interview with Al Arabiya news channel, MP Gemayel confirmed the signing of the decree according to sources close to the presidential palace.

Aoun’s office has yet to comment on the matter, with sources telling Annahar newspaper that the decree might have been drafted before the May 6 elections while the Cabinet was still fully operational. Both Hariri and Mashnouq have also refrained from commenting up to this point.

But the caretaker Justice minister Salim Jreissati confirmed in a statement Friday the signing of the decree which sent waves of shocks to a lot of Lebanese citizens especially Lebanese women married to foreigners who cannot grant citizenship to their children due to religious considerations and others related to the issue of settling the Palestinians.

These development draws a lot of questions whether if the law grants the Minister of the Interior, the President of the Republic with the approval of a majority of ministers, a naturalization decree.

The question now is about the “category” that has been naturalized, especially if it is true that they are rumored to be financiers who have paid about $ 200,000. If that is true the Lebanese are asking on social media: “Where did all that money go and in whose pocket it ended up?”

via Uproar in Lebanon over ‘naturalization’ granting hundreds citizenship – Al Arabiya English

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If you vote for a reckless politician, you can’t claim to be a good person: Domise

2018/06/02 Leave a comment

While  it is unhelpful to label people as good or bad, it is valid to highlight that people are accountable for their political affiliations and positions and are somewhat complicit in the overall nature of political decisions:

Earlier this year, while talking to a relative about Donald Trump’s comments regarding “s–thole countries,” I mentioned that Trump’s voters are every bit as responsible as Trump himself for converting the executive office into Coachella for white supremacists. My relative responded that free choices are part and parcel of democracy, and that we should respect people’s voting choices, even if we don’t agree with them. After all, she said, these are mostly good people who generally feel put off by politics.

At the time, I let the matter drop, but I think about that conversation when the Know-Nothing school of the authoritarian right defends its leaders against scandal and ignominy. And with the recent stream of news over the last couple of weeks, it should be safe to say that not only are voters of the populist right driven by their own politics—rather than an alienation from it—they cannot hide behind the assumption they are good people.

Many who throw in their lot with the populist right have serious hang-ups about immigration and multiculturalism, as shown in a study by Jackie Hogan of Bradley University, and Kristin Haltinner of the University of Idaho. Dehumanizing words such as “barbarians” and “parasites” are often used by political and nationalist organizations to describe out-groups, and to circle the wagons in defence of whiteness. These groups have, in recent years, co-opted the right wing and replaced principled conservatism with nationalist and religious theatrics.

Additionally, a recent study conducted by Steven V. Miller of Clemson University and Nicholas T. Davis of Texas A&M University found that white people who would not want immigrant or non-white neighbours were more likely to oppose democracy. Moreover, they were “more open to rule of government by the army,” or by a “strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections.” (The study, by the way, was conducted from 2011 to 2016, before Donald Trump was elected President.) In a follow-up article for NBC News, writer Noah Berlatsky summarized this effect as a tendency of white voters to pull away from democratic institutions, when marginalized people are perceived as benefiting from democracy. “When faced with a choice between bigotry and democracy,” wrote Berlatsky, “too many Americans are embracing the first while abandoning the second.”

The study dovetails with previous evidence to show that white people with racial hang-ups are more supportive of harsh punishments in the criminal justice system, and less supportive of social service programs, when they perceive racialized minorities as the targets of those programs. Prejudice isn’t simply a matter of personal preference, and it doesn’t park itself at the ballot box. Voters who elect populist right-wing politicians—and who know they’ve proposed or support policies that are likely to harm broad swaths of the population—aren’t good people forced into a bad decision by a disdain for politics. Harm against those groups are their politics.

In April, the New York Times reported that U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents have separated more than 700 migrant children from their asylum-seeking parents since October, and taken to shelters run by non-government agencies. Many of them wind up in the facilities indefinitely, and many of them are younger than four years old. And earlier this month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero-tolerance” policy for the crime of crossing the border illegally, which pledged to separate children from their parents if they are apprehended.

While the alleged abuses by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection date back to the Obama administration, the response from the Trump administration has been an encouragement for these agencies to escalate punishments in order to deter future migrants. In a recent interview with NPR, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly commented that the migrants in question are “not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society,” and that children separated from their parents “will be taken care of—put into foster care or whatever.”

In short, it’s easy to let right-wing populism slide by a simple rejection of élitism—performing a civic duty that occasionally has unforeseen consequences. This is a complete cop-out, and assumes voters have no responsibility to engage with their own humanity. To mark the ballot with that motivation, under the belief that one is fundamentally a “good” person, is to fool oneself. Especially when candidates tout policies during the campaign that will punish and marginalize, and then receive an electoral mandate to act on them. Voters knew who Donald Trump was, before they elected him President. They knew this could happen to innocent migrant children.

Keep that in mind as Ontario’s election day nears. Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford has taken to the campaign trail with his everyman attitude and a bullish approach to sensitive issues. This brand of empty populism—rooted more deeply in his feelings than any demonstrable evidence or priced-out policy—has not deeply hurt his election chances among working-class and high-income voters.

In a community meeting in northern Etobicoke, Ford has pledged to bring back the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy. TAVIS was a police detachment whose tendencies towards racial profiling (or, if you will, “carding”) and strong-armed tactics were so destructive to community policing that even the Toronto Police Service itself recommended the organization be disbanded. And Ford has plainly stated that he is dead set against safe injection sites for opioid addicts, stating that society can’t “just keep feeding them and feeding them” drugs. This, despite repeated rafts of evidence that safe injections sites help save lives, and no evidence that shutting them down will accomplish the same.

Ford’s disregard for the well-being of some Ontario communities doesn’t end there. He has also thrown in with the Campaign Life Coalition’s opposition to Bill 163, which establishes protest-free zones outside abortion clinics. He has floated the idea of requiring parental consent for teenagers to seek abortions. And in his capacity as Toronto city councillor, he attacked a home for autistic youth as having “ruined the community.”

But according to polls, even with his musings on his record, Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives remain a strong contender to form Ontario’s next government. Without a coherent and fully costed platform for voters to examine so they can arrive at an educated decision, the PC campaign has mostly surrendered itself to Ford’s own political and social revanchism. Even the Campaign Life Coalition says that his actions and words should speak for themselves: “There is much on the public record about Ford’s views on Toronto’s controversial gay pride parade…This public record can also be considered an indicator of where Doug stands with respect to the pro-family values that are important to many socially conservative members of the PC party.”

And now, voters appear poised to hand him a blank cheque.

Though I may disagree with many on the right, there are principled ways to practise conservative politics. At the very least, if a politician intends to cut back on social services, spur business by cutting red tape, and address the sticky matters of crime and drug policy, those proposals should have plenty of evidence and a fully costed budget attached. But what has passed for “evidence” lately are the gut feelings of people with low stakes. People whose lives and safety are not placed at risk by reckless policies that result in young men of colour being racially profiled, young women screamed at as they enter abortion clinics, and children ripped out of their mothers arms at the border. People who would generally refer to themselves as “good.”

It hardly matters what a voter’s intentions might have been when they cast a ballot for bullies and panderers who have no moral objections to making life more difficult for the marginalized. Regardless of the intent, if the pain of marginalized communities is less important than jamming a finger in the eye of the so-called elites, that voter has signalled to politicians that inflicting pain is a sound campaign strategy. Our pain, in other words, are their politics.

If this is how they choose to exercise their civic duty, then God save the rest of us from good people.

Source: If you vote for a reckless politician, you can’t claim to be a good person

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Bagnall: Is Shopify’s board of directors too male, too white?

2018/06/02 Leave a comment

Good for Meriel Bradford, who I worked with in the 90s, for calling them out:

It wasn’t the question most of Shopify’s board of directors had been expecting.

The six individuals — all white, five of them male — had just concluded the business portion of the annual shareholders’ meeting Wednesday morning and had opened the proceedings to queries from ordinary shareholders.

Given what a spectacular year Shopify had just concluded — revenue in 2017 had jumped 73 per cent, pushing the share price to record levels — the directors, the stewards of the company, were anticipating a gentle time of it.

Meriel Bradford, a shareholder and retiree, was the first to grasp the microphone. She had warned Shopify’s CEO and co-founder Tobias Lütke privately what was coming, but didn’t know if he had shared this with his fellow directors.

Bradford, a former vice-president of Teleglobe and senior bureaucrat at Global Affairs and other federal departments, spoke with authority. She told the directors diversity was important for any company aspiring to be global.

“This board doesn’t have it,” she said.

Bradford had their attention. “What’s the problem and how can we help you fix it?”

Responsibility for the answer fell to John Phillips, head of the board committee responsible for finding candidates to serve as director. Phillips acknowledged the preponderance of white males on Shopify’s board before adding, “We’re constantly searching for great talent.”

It was a weak response. Bradford pressed the point. “I suggest your search technique is poor,” she said before taking her seat.

It’s difficult to deny the boardrooms of many high-tech firms lack diversity, whether it involves gender, colour or sexual orientation. But was Bradford’s assertion fair?

This newspaper examined the makeup of the boards that guide 15 companies that Shopify considers its peers, at least when it comes to the important matter of compensation for executives and directors. (These included firms such as HubSpot, Zendesk, Cornerstone OnDemand, Atlassian and Etsy, which were listed in the circular distributed in advance of Wednesday’s meeting of shareholders.)

Most of the peer firms have eight or nine directors, more than Shopify’s six, and do exhibit more diversity, especially when it comes to gender. Half of Zendesk’s eight directors are women, for instance, as is the case at Etsy.

Given that high-tech firms tend to draw heavily from the male-dominated worlds of engineering and finance for their board talent, this is all the more notable.

Just two of Atlassian’s nine board members are women but one, Shona Brown, runs the show as chair.

As for colour, well, let’s just say visible minorities in this group are generally the exception. Nevertheless, the companies do appear to be making some strides diversifying in general.

For instance, Cornerstone OnDemand, a California software firm, has nominated former Jiva Software CEO Elisa Steele to serve as chair of the board. Steele is expected to be confirmed in this role June 14.

Boston-based Wayfair, another software firm that Shopify counts among its peers, last month named Andrea Jung to its board. Jung, the former CEO of Avon Products, is a well-known pioneer for businesswomen and also serves on the board of Apple.

Five weeks ago, another Boston-based software peer, HubSpot, revealed that India-born, Brazilian-raised entrepreneur Avanish Sahai had joined the firm’s directors.

At the conclusion of Shopify’s shareholders’ meeting at the firm’s Elgin Street headquarters, Bradford chatted amiably with fellow shareholders. A couple of Shopify employees came by to introduce themselves, but none from management or the board. “It surprises me that no one is reaching out,” she said referring to the top guns.

It’s perhaps less puzzling if you examine the detail of the management circular distributed in advance of the meeting.  In it, there’s a section that deals with the company’s policy on diversity. It notes the board of directors “values diversity of abilities, experience, perspective, education, gender, background, race and national origin.”  When considering nominees for the board, the policy reads, “diversity is taken into consideration. Currently, one of our six directors (Gail Goodman) is a woman.”

Bradford’s point was simply that Shopify can do better than that.

Source: Bagnall: Is Shopify’s board of directors too male, too white?

Filed under gender Tagged with , , ,

Ungovernable unlicensed immigration adviser gets 7-year jail term

2018/06/02 2 Comments

Good:

An unlicensed immigration consultant has been slapped with a seven-year jail sentence for giving immigration advice and counselling an applicant to lie — conduct an Ontario court described as “evil.”

Angelina Codina, 60, a disbarred Toronto lawyer, was also ordered to refund more than $30,000 to four of her former clients. This is one of the stiffest sentences handed to an unlicensed immigration consultant.

In February, a jury found Codina guilty of five charges under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which carries a maximum sentence for an offence at two years imprisonment or a fine of $100,000, or both.

“Unscrupulous immigration consultants in Canada are in a special position to thwart the system by advising people outside Canada on what lies they can profitably tell in order to gain admission,” Ontario Superior Court of Justice Anne Molloy wrote in her sentencing reasons released this week.

“The result is that unqualified, and often undesirable, applicants are able to successfully enter Canada by fraudulent means, taking the places of other more deserving candidates. These are the evils this legislation is meant to address.”

The charges against Codina, operator of Codina International, spanned three years from 2011 to 2014, and included four counts of offering advice on immigration matters without a license and one count of counselling a client to misrepresent facts on an immigration application.

By law, only a lawyer in good standing or a licensed immigration consultant can offer immigration advice for a fee. Codina is neither.

Although her company had employees, including some who were licensed to provide legal advice to immigration clients, the court said each of the offences of which she was convicted involved her personally either advising or offering to represent clients.

“This was an organized and sophisticated endeavour operated for profit without regard to the requirements of the law. There were four separate offences involving four sets of clients, all of whom suffered harm. That places this offence at the upper levels of seriousness for crimes,” Molloy wrote.

“Ms. Codina’s level of blameworthiness is also at the upper-end of the scale. She masterminded the whole scheme.”

Source: Ungovernable unlicensed immigration adviser gets 7-year jail term

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Jehovah’s Witnesses can shun members as they see fit, just like any old bridge club: Supreme Court

2018/06/02 1 Comment

Reasonable decision, although I expect some interesting commentary arguing against it:

A new Supreme Court ruling that Jehovah’s Witnesses are free to banish and shun any member they wish, regardless of how they decide to do it, offers a powerful precedent for religious independence in Canada.

It follows years of uncertainty of just how deeply into the waters of faith and doctrine Canada’s judges are willing or able to wade.

Now the limits are clear, thanks to the case of Randy Wall, a Calgary real estate agent and longtime Jehovah’s Witness whose “disfellowship” destroyed his client base and led him to seek redress in the courts. He did not dispute the right of the Highwood Congregation to banish him, but claimed they did so unfairly, without telling him detailed allegations, or whether he could have counsel or a record of proceedings.

The top court’s decision rejects that view, bluntly refers to his “sinful” behaviour, and says it has no business making legal decisions about it.

At issue were two episodes of drunkenness, one in which Wall “verbally abused” his wife, for which he was not “sufficiently repentant,” according to court records. The family was under great stress, stemming from the emotional troubles of their teenage daughter, who had similarly been disfellowshipped, leaving the parents in the strange position of being required by their religion to shun their own daughter. Wall said he was even pressured to evict her from their home.

He convinced a lower court it had the jurisdiction to hear his complaint, because it engaged his civil and property rights. The Alberta Court of Appeal agreed. But the Supreme Court has now said once and for all that the courts ought not to interfere in religious discipline.

To borrow an analogy used by a lower court judge in his case, a church is less like a public company that has to act fairly and more like a “bridge club” that can pick and choose its members — or boot them out — at its own discretion.

Supreme Court Justice Malcolm Rowe borrowed this analogy in his reasons on behalf of the unanimous nine-judge court, one of the last cases under former Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin: “By way of example, the courts may not have the legitimacy to assist in resolving a dispute about the greatest hockey player of all time, about a bridge player who is left out of his regular weekly game night, or about a cousin who thinks she should have been invited to a wedding.”

The discipline panels of voluntary religious groups do not exercise state authority like, for example, a professional regulatory tribunal for doctors or dentists. They are not “public decision makers” whose actions must be subject to judicial review, the court decided.

In this case, Wall has no fundamental right to be a member of the Highwood Congregation, so he does not have a right to procedural fairness in the decision whether to shun him. The group has no constitution or bylaws it must obey. The “disfellowship” may have spoiled his real estate business when other Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to do business with him, but that is likewise not a matter for the courts.

Lastly, and most crucially, this was a dispute over ecclesiastical issues, the court ruled. These cannot be decided by judges. How, for example, could a court of law evaluate the Highwood Congregation’s finding that Wall was not repentant enough for his sins? There is no common law on this, and rightly so, the court found.

“Even the procedural rules of a particular religious group may involve the interpretation of religious doctrine, such as in this case. The courts have neither legitimacy nor institutional capacity to deal with contentious matters of religious doctrine,” Rowe’s decision reads.

The limits of court intervention in religious affairs have not always been so clear.

In 1992, the Supreme Court said churches must show procedural fairness, like any tribunal, and not just issue edicts from on high. That precedent, in which the top court sided with a man expelled from a Hutterite colony, is part of the reason, for example, why the United Church of Canada last year gave up its push to defrock the popular atheist minister Greta Vosper.

Courts are always reluctant to tread on religious freedoms, and have typically intervened in church disputes only after the complainant has exhausted all internal processes.

But once they have, the courts have often heard the appeals, sometimes finding that the internal processes are unfair. Courts have intervened, for example, over the unfair discipline of United Church ministers.

But now the bar is very much higher.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling provides clarity to Canadians that neither courts nor governments can legally compel citizens to associate together unwillingly,” said John Carpay, president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms.

Wall could not be reached for comment. The case attracted many intervenors, representing Muslims, Sikhs, various Christian groups, and civil liberties advocates.

Source: Jehovah’s Witnesses can shun members as they see fit, just like any old bridge club: Supreme Court

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

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