Huge swing in favour of citizenship for all born in Ireland

2018/11/19 Leave a comment

Interesting shift. Shows the power of personal stories to change narratives (as happened with the

Alan Kurdi photo and Syrian refugees):

Seven out of 10 voters believe children born on the island of Ireland should be automatically entitled to citizenship, in an almost direct reversal of the result of the citizenship referendum 14 years ago.

A new Behaviour & Attitudes poll for The Sunday Times has found 71% of Irish voters believe anyone born in Ireland should be entitled to citizenship, while one in five (19%) feel they should not have automatic entitlement.

The poll was taken following the high-profile case of Eric Zhi Ying Xue, 9, a pupil in St Cronan’s national school, Bray, Co Wicklow, who was faced with deportation along with his Chinese mother, Leena Mei Mei Xue.

Source: Huge swing in favour of citizenship for all born in Ireland

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with

Toronto Sun Editorial: Birth tourism growing issue in Canada (surrogacy)

2018/11/19 Leave a comment

The earlier op-ed in the Globe gets traction in the Sun (How Canada became an international surrogacy destination [another form of birth tourism]:

There were 102 babies born to surrogate moms in British Columbia in 2016 and 2017.

Of those, 45 were babies for parents from other countries.

Parents who travelled here to have their child delivered in Canada, who before they left picked up a Canadian citizenship for their child and who left Canadian taxpayers with the bills for the pregnancy of their surrogate mom as well as costs for the delivery and postnatal care of their newborn.

We know this thanks to reporting by freelance Globe and Mail writer Alison Motluk, who earlier this month wrote about Canada increasingly becoming a destination for international surrogacy.

It’s understandable that foreign parents, especially those who may need to turn to surrogacy to have a child, would find Canada and a bonus Canadian citizenship for their child attractive.

Surrogacy is prohibited in many countries and few countries permit surrogacy for non-residents, let alone pay for costs associated with the surrogate mom’s pregnancy, delivery and postnatal care costs.

Without doubt, some of those parents are likely desperate to have children and may have few options. On compassionate grounds, their desire to seek surrogacy here may be compelling.

However, an open-door policy for birth tourism is also troubling.

Why is citizenship being handed out to the children of birth tourists as a going away prize?

Citizenship is a privilege, something often earned at great cost and difficulty for the many millions of Canadians who immigrated to this country and made it their home.

Why on earth should Canadian taxpayers foot the hospital bills for foreign couples who want to have their babies in this country – $3,000 to $6,000 for uneventful births to potentially more than $90,000 for premature babies with complications?

Is birth tourism something we should be encouraging?

And although B.C. tracks residency data on parents, other provinces don’t.

So we’re not even sure of the scope of birth tourism in this country, let alone its costs.

As Brian Lilley wrote in the Sun on this issue, Real Women of Canada wants Ottawa to close loopholes that permit taxpayer subsidization for foreign surrogacy – something many European countries have already done.

Without such change, there’s little doubt Canada increasingly will become a destination for birth tourism.

Source: EDITORIAL: Birth tourism growing issue in Canada

And the Lilley piece that prompted the editorial:

Call it birth tourism of another kind.

We’ve all heard stories about mothers arriving in Canadian cities just in time to give birth so their child can get Canadian citizenship.

But what about foreign parents having a kid in Canada via surrogacy?

It is happening and it is growing.

In 2016 and 2017 there were 102 babies born to surrogate mothers in British Columbia. A shocking 45 of those babies were born to parents from outside of the country.

Here is the crazy part, you are paying for it and the baby that is quickly whisked off to a foreign land is granted automatic Canadian citizenship.

The numbers, first reported by freelance journalist Alison Motluk in the Globe and Mail, show what experts believe to be a growing issue in Canada.

While surrogacy is tightly regulated in Canada, we are one of a handful of countries that allow foreign parents to find a surrogate within our borders. We also have “free” health care, meaning the “intended parents” of the child born by surrogacy aren’t on the hook for the bill.

Estimates for the cost of an uneventful birth range from $3,000 to $6,000, not including any prenatal or postnatal care. With 45 births in B.C. to foreign parents, that means taxpayers were out $135,000 to $270,000 in health care costs for the birth alone.

If there are complications those costs skyrocket. Estimates say care for a premature baby could top $90,000.

All of that paid for by Canadian taxpayers for a baby that will be shuffled home to a foreign country as soon as all the paperwork is complete.

Those numbers I’ve given you are for B.C. alone. Other provinces either do not keep or will not release stats on the number of surrogate babies for foreign parents.

Whatever the number in other countries, expect this to grow in Canada.

As other countries crackdown on foreign surrogate parents or don’t allow the procedure for non-residents, Canada has no such rules. We also offer complete health-care coverage for the Canadian surrogate and citizenship for the child upon birth.

That means a Canadian passport for life and easier entry, maybe even sponsorship of the parents later in life.

Other countries also make you pay to use their facilities.

One American company offering surrogacy charges a low of US$39,400 in Mexico to a high of US$64,900 for the “Guaranteed Baby” program in Ukraine.

With prices like that, no wonder Canada is becoming a more attractive destination for this kind of birth tourism.

The group Real Women of Canada, which is outright opposed to surrogacy, says the federal government should at least be looking to close this loophole allowing couples from other countries to have their child’s birth subsidized by Canadian taxpayers.

In a submission to Health Canada, which is looking at modernizing rules and regulations around surrogacy, the group calls for non-Canadians to be barred from using Canada as a surrogacy destination, something many European countries already do.

Any discussion of such a ban would be a sticky one for the government, in fact any discussion of the issue is sticky.

Emotions will run high, claims of targeting specific groups will be made.

Here’s an idea though, let’s get better information on this.

It’s understandable that foreign parents may want to give their child the privilege and advantages of a Canadian passport. That’s why we have an immigration system.

But let’s find out from each of the provinces how often this is happening.

Are Canadians paying for the hospital care for babies born to foreign parents?

Are we paying for expensive neonatal care or even IVF treatments so foreign couples can have a child?

Are we handing out citizenship to children that will not live here? And if so, how often is this happening?

This looks like the type of thing  people didn’t think of when the current regulations were devised.

More than a decade in, maybe it’s time we had some honest conversations about what we want to allow, who is going to pay for it and who should actually get a Canadian passport.

Source: LILLEY: Canadians paying bills for birth tourism

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with , ,

A lesson in reaction to John Carpay’s rainbow flag comparison: the cross does not justify lunacy – Coren

2018/11/17 Leave a comment

I always find it somewhat amusing with the contrast between more reasoned argumentation in mainstream publications and some true colours emerge at an event organized by Rebel Media. As Carpay should know, invoking Hitler or the Nazis means he has lost his arguments (Godwin’s law):

I was shocked when it was revealed that Christian conservative lawyer John Carpay had compared the rainbow flag to the Nazi swastika. Not because Carpay had drawn the grotesque juxtaposition, but because it had taken so long for such a sentiment to be made public.

Last Saturday, Calgary-based Carpay, a leading voice with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, and ubiquitous within social conservatism, spoke at a conference organized by Rebel Media, where the sewers breathe and the ghouls come out to play.

“How do we defeat today’s totalitarianism?” he asked rhetorically. “You’ve got to think about the common characteristics. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a hammer and sickle for communism, or whether it’s the swastika for Nazi Germany or whether it’s a rainbow flag, the underlying thing is a hostility to individual freedoms.”

He later apologized, explaining that he was actually discussing totalitarianism when he listed the rainbow flag with the emblem under which 12 million people were slaughtered in death camps — including, of course, many gay men. Such apologies are usually signs of being sorry because someone is caught, not because they are genuinely contrite. Change of heart and mind come about not due to pressure, but because of personal conviction.

I’ve known Carpay for many years, and he’s not an evil man. A little eccentric, extremely conservative, but not evil. What he is, however, is a committed right-wing Christian, and that’s a world few of us know well.

In the United States it’s enormously influential, in Canada less so but — as we saw with the leadership victories of Andrew Scheer federally and Doug Ford in Ontario — it can muster perhaps 20 per cent of any conservative race, and thus decide a vote.

At the heart of their beliefs is the conviction that there is a spiritual war taking place, and that the major battlefields are life and sexuality. The rights of women to control their bodies, or of gay men and women to live equally and enjoy the same rights as the heterosexual majority, are not signs of progress or liberty, but a satanic attack on God’s plan, and on the safety and sanctity of the Christian family.

Within evangelical circles and on the right of the Roman Catholic Church it’s a commonplace view, as any casual reading of socially conservative media platforms or blogs will show.

One of the books often quoted is The Pink Swastika, co-authored by the odious Scott Lively. He’s notorious for his anti-gay extremism, has advocated the criminalization of “the public advocacy of homosexuality”, and spread his venom in Uganda and Russia, where LGBTQ people live in fear of their lives. His book, subtitled “Homosexuality in the Nazi Party” is now in its fifth edition. No credible historian takes it at all seriously, but many Christian social conservatives certainly do.

At the epicentre of all this is fear, and in that it is not unlike the cult that has developed around bestselling author Jordan Peterson. Long powerless groups are finally speaking out and up for their rights, and whether they are women, gay, trans, native, or Black, their insistence on justice intimidates many of those who have long taken it for granted.

Within a conservative Christian context, it’s comforting to paint the entire struggle in spiritual colours, because if God is on your side it’s all going to be OK. Problem is, Jesus never mentions homosexuality, and is in fact stunningly indifferent to what some around him insist is sexual sin. Lesbianism is never referred to in the Old Testament, and the subject of homosexuality is spoken of a mere handful of times in the entire Bible. If any demand permeates the Gospels it’s love, acceptance, and the welcoming of the marginalized.

Carpay’s apology is irrelevant. What matters is that reactionaries shame the voice of Christ with their fanaticism, that Nazism is minimized by such grimy propaganda, and that LGBTQ people — still persecuted, humiliated, and killed in large parts of the world — have once again been assaulted.

The rainbow flag is a symbol of liberation, but the swastika is an icon of genocidal horror. That anybody should think otherwise, and use the cross to maintain their lunacy, makes this Christian very angry indeed.

Source: A lesson in reaction to John Carpay’s rainbow flag comparison: the cross does not justify lunacy – Coren

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

The Rise of the Resentniks: And the populist war on excellence.

2018/11/17 Leave a comment

Interesting take by Brooks. Always felt there was an element of resentment in Canadian conservative attacks on elites, and the exaggerated distinctions between the “anywheres” and “somewheres”:

There’s a powerful moment at the start of Anne Applebaum’s recent essay in The Atlantic. She’s recalling a party she threw on Dec. 31, 1999, at her home in Poland. Many of the hundred-odd guests were Polish, but others flew in from around the world for a weekend together, to greet the new millennium.

Most of the guests were conservatives — which in those days meant being anti-Communist and pro-market, but also believing in international alliances like NATO. The party was a great success, lasted all night and continued into brunch the following day. Everybody felt a part of the same team.

“Nearly two decades later,” Applebaum writes, “I would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my New Year’s Eve party.” She estimates that half the people at that party are no longer on speaking terms with the other half.

For example, in recent years Applebaum has not had a single conversation with a woman who was once one of her closest friends and is godmother to one of her children. She tried to reach out to this woman and suggested they get together, but the woman refused. “What would we talk about?” she texted.

Those of us who came of age in conservative circles know exactly what Applebaum is talking about. The same kinds of rifts have opened up among conservatives around the world, in Britain, Italy, Germany and the U.S.

Some conservatives stayed on the political trajectory they were on in 1999. Others embraced populist nativism. They wandered into territory that is xenophobic, anti-Semitic, authoritarian. Still others were driven leftward by the reactionary revival.

What happened? This is the story I would tell.

During the Cold War, being a conservative was a moral cause. You were fighting Communist tyranny — aligned with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Lech Walesa. But you were somewhat marginalized in your own society. Liberals controlled the universities, the news media, the cultural high ground, so the right attracted many people with outsider personalities.

Then with the election of Reagan and Thatcher and in the years afterward, conservatives built their own counter-establishment — think tanks, publications, broadcasting outlets. As conservatism professionalized, it despiritualized. After the Soviet Union collapsed, conservatism no longer had a great moral cause to rally around. It became a technocratic, economics-focused movement concerned with small government and entitlement reform. Compassionate conservatism and the dream of spreading global democracy were efforts to anchor conservatism around a moral ideal, but they did not work out.

Many conservatives simply could not succeed in the new conservative counterestablishment. In any meritocracy, there are going to be a lot of people who lose out and do not get the glittering career they think they are due. Sooner or later those people are going to rise up to challenge the competition itself and to question its idea of excellence. “Resentment, envy, and above all the belief that the ‘system’ is unfair — these are important sentiments among the intellectuals of the Polish right,” Applebaum writes.

At the same time, they resent how spiritually flat conservatism has become. “The principles of competition, even when they encourage talent and create upward mobility, don’t necessarily answer deeper questions about national identity, or satisfy the human desire to belong to a moral community,” Applebaum continues.

In such a situation, you’re almost bound to get a return of blood-and-soil nationalism. The losers in the meritocratic competition, the permanent outsiders, seize on ethnic nationalism to give themselves a sense of belonging, to explain their failures, to rally the masses and to upend the meritocracy.

In office, what the populist nationalists do is this: They replace the idea of excellence with the idea of “patriotism.” Loyalty to the tribe is more important than professional competence. In fact, a person’s very lack of creativity and talent becomes proof of his continued reliability to the cause, as we’ve seen in the continued fealty to King Trump.

While there is a sprinkling of good professionals in the Trump administration, they are there by accident, not by intent. Many of those staffing the White House could not get a job in any normal Republican administration, which selected people according to any traditional criteria of excellence.

And now, as Trump reshuffles his administration yet again, we see the remnants of the B and C teams replaced by members of the D team. Over the past few days, there’s been a lot of gossip over whether Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker will keep his job. But it almost doesn’t matter, because from here on out, it’s Whitakers all the way down.

If conservatism is ever to recover it has to achieve two large tasks. First, it has to find a moral purpose large enough to displace the lure of blood-and-soil nationalism. Second, it has to restore standards of professional competence and reassert the importance of experience, integrity and political craftsmanship. When you take away excellence and integrity, loyalty to the great leader is the only currency that remains.

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USA: Blacks Are Twice as Likely as Whites to Experience Sudden Cardiac Death

2018/11/17 Leave a comment

Striking. Both the fact and lack of explanations:

The rate of sudden cardiac death in African-Americans is twice as high as in whites, and no one knows why.

Sudden cardiac death is an unexpected fatality from cardiac causes that happens within an hour of the onset of symptoms, usually with no known cause.

For more than six years, researchers followed 9,416 blacks and 13,091 whites who had no history of cardiovascular disease. Over the period, 67 whites and 107 blacks died suddenly with heart symptoms. The study is in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The researchers controlled for education, physical activity, depression, cholesterol and other factors. Blacks tended to have lower incomes, were less likely to be insured and had higher rates of smoking, diabetes and high blood pressure. But even after accounting for these differences, they found that the risk for sudden cardiac death was still 97 percent higher in blacks than in whites.

The lead author, Dr. Rajat Deo, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, said that there could be variables they were unable to rule out, or unknown genetic factors that predispose blacks to heart rhythm disorders.

In any case, he said, “Over the last two decades, we’ve seen a reduction in heart attacks and stroke, but we haven’t seen the same kind of reduction in sudden cardiac death. I think more work needs to be done.”

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Ahead of a federal election, what road will Conservatives take on immigration?

2018/11/17 Leave a comment

The latest by Michael Adams. See my earlier take on Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel on her positioning (Conservative immigration critique of the levels plan):

On the surface, the contrast between Canada and the United States on immigration is sharp. U.S. President Donald Trump was recently warning of an “invasion” by a group of migrants crossing Mexico on foot, even going so far as to send troops to the border in a theatrical flourish just ahead of the mid-term elections.

Around the same time, Canada’s Prime Minister was apologizing for this country’s refusal to accept the 907 German Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis who sought safety in Canada in 1939. Justin Trudeau drew parallels to our own time – noting refugees are still on the move around the globe and the resurgent anti-Semitism evidenced by the recent mass shooting in Pittsburgh.

But despite the Prime Minister’s humanitarian gestures – and the fact that the Immigration Minister is touring the country making the case for higher immigration levels and a compassionate asylum policy – there is certainly an appetite in Canada for a thicker border and a more hard-line approach to immigrants and refugees. Responding to that appetite is something politicians who wish to court those voters will need to do carefully.

There was a time when those who question the fundamentals of Canada’s approach to immigration, multiculturalism and refugees were spread across all political parties. Over the past 20 years, research indicates that this constituency has become concentrated in the Conservative Party. These voters are not the majority of the Conservative Party, but they’ve been gravitating in that direction for a number of years.

For most of his time in government, former prime minster Stephen Harper resisted the temptation to court xenophobic feeling on the political right; instead, he built a Conservative majority in part by courting the newcomers and settled immigrant communities in Canadian suburbs. He also cultivated an increasingly diverse caucus and cabinet. In 2015, a pivot to more xenophobic messaging, including the introduction of the “barbaric cultural practices” snitch line promoted by ministers Kellie Leitch and Chris Alexander, proved the wisdom of his earlier approach: The divisive gambit backfired and helped fuel a Liberal majority.

As the Conservatives prepare for the next federal election, they are in a tight spot. They can’t win government – and certainly not a majority – without appealing to new Canadians who are the key to winning ridings in the suburbs of large Canadian cities. At the same time, they need to appear in touch with voters who are having second thoughts about Canada’s current policies and practices on immigration, refugees and multiculturalism. Our data indicate that Canadians who are most likely to question the status quo on migration-related issues are concentrated in Alberta and Saskatchewan, where Conservatives rely on racking up plenty of seats. Attracting these two groups simultaneously will be a tricky task.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer will probably remember the lessons of 2015 – but he’ll also feel Maxime Bernier breathing down his neck. The platform of Mr. Bernier’s breakaway People’s Party proposes immigration levels substantially lower than those currently in place and opposes the use of immigration “as a tool to forcibly change the cultural character and social fabric of Canada.” Virtually every vote Mr. Bernier wins with these policy ideas will be a vote that’s siphoned away from Mr. Scheer’s Conservatives – a threat that is especially acute in the Quebec City area and in rural Quebec, where the CAQ did so well in the recent provincial election.

Many commentators have wondered whether the blatant racism and xenophobia advanced by far-right candidates in Europe and now the United States will take hold in Canada, where no major political party in recent decades has adopted strongly anti-immigrant policies or rhetoric. Could it happen here?

With the emergence of Mr. Bernier’s party and the success of the CAQ, some variation is here today. The question is whether Canada’s case of xenophobic populism will be a mild one that inoculates us against a more virulent strain, or whether it will take hold and change the norms of our political culture in a deeper way.

To some extent, this will be up to Mr. Scheer himself: Will he compete with Mr. Bernier for anti-immigration votes and expand the issue’s place in our political discourse? Or will he follow the model of the early Harper years, when the Conservatives used pocketbook issues and selected socially conservative messages to connect with new Canadians?

His answer will affect his party’s fortunes – and likely have a powerful effect on Canadian political culture for years to come.

Source: Ahead of a federal election, what road will Conservatives take on immigration?: Michael Adams

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Amazon’s Algorithm Has an Anti-Semitism Problem

2018/11/17 Leave a comment

As we are also seeing in the ongoing Facebook scandals, tech hasn’t managed to include ethical and moral considerations in its business models and algorithms:

In the wake of the Pittsburgh massacre, I invited my followers on Twitter to send me their inquiries about anti-Semitism. The response was overwhelming, and ran the gamut from questions about specific aspects of the prejudice to requests for advice on how to help fight it. One reader asked for more information about the Rothschild family, the Jewish banking dynasty that is a favorite bogeyman of anti-Semites and is typically used as a stand-in for the Jewish conspiracy that purportedly controls world affairs. He explained that some in his circle of friends regularly make bigoted remarks about the Rothschilds and their vast power and he wanted to set them straight. I’d written a report about the Rothschilds in school years ago, but figured there was probably better, more up-to-date material out there. So like anyone else, I went to Amazon.com and plugged in “history of rothschilds.” To my surprise, this is what I got:

amazonrothschilds
Rather than direct me to serious scholarship on the Rothschilds, like historian Niall Ferguson’s multivolume history on the family, Amazon first recommended blatantly bigoted content.

This isn’t the only instance of Amazon’s algorithm feeding intellectually bankrupt content to intellectually curious readers regarding fraught subjects. A search for “who did 9/11” yields this book as the #1 search result:

amazon911

As the book’s own blurb notes, its author, Nick Kollerstrom, is a “longtime member of Britain’s 9/11 truth group.” Among other conspiracies, the book contains an entire chapter entitled “9/11 and Zion” which blames the attack on the Jews. (Kollerstrom also happens to be a Holocaust denier who infamously declared, “Let us hope the schoolchildren visitors are properly taught about the elegant swimming pool at Auschwitz, built by the inmates, who would sunbathe there on Saturday and Sunday afternoons while watching the water polo matches.”)

Similarly, if one searches for “Jews and the slave trade,” the second, fourth, and fifth results are not scholarship on the subject, but notoriously anti-Semitic publications from Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. Farrakhan has worked for years to mainstream the baseless anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews were behind the African slave trade.

(All searches above were done logged out from Amazon while incognito on Chrome, to ensure that the search results were the default ones, and not influenced by the specific user or their past search history.)

This isn’t Amazon’s first run-in with anti-Semitism concerns. Back in 2000, the company came under fire for stocking The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the most influential anti-Semitic tracts in history. At the time, while firmly distancing itself from the bigoted content, Amazon insisted that it would not remove it from the catalog, because the company does not censor books. Today, copies of The Protocols on Amazon carry a cautionary message from the Anti-Defamation League and the following disclaimer from the company:

As a bookseller, Amazon strongly believes that providing open access to written speech, no matter how hateful or ugly, is one of the most important things we do. And because we think the best remedy for offensive speech is more speech, we also make available to readers the ability to make their own voices heard and express their views about this and all our titles in reviews and ratings.

It’s a reasonable defense. But it does not cover Amazon’s algorithm prioritizing the bigoted books over the legitimate ones.

The problem here is not that Amazon sells anti-Semitic material. The problem here is not that Amazon is trying to be anti-Semitic. It’s that the company is ignorant of anti-Semitic ideas, and so has not trained its algorithm to discount them. If a human librarian were asked about the Rothschilds, 9/11, or Jews and the slave trade, they would know how to distinguish between conspiratorial rantings and genuine documentation. They would also likely be aware of the anti-Semitic canards swirling around the subjects, and would steer interested readers away from them. Amazon’s vaunted search engine, perfectly tuned to maximize sales and the user’s shopping experience, has no such cultural competency.

Beyond the moral failure, these results also represent a straightforward professional failure. When a person searches for “history of rothschilds,” they are looking for historical information on the family, not a book featuring a shadowy figure squeezing blood out of globe. A bookselling algorithm that feeds readers misinformation is a broken bookselling algorithm.

If big tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google want to get serious about combating online hate and misinformation, they need to start developing cultural competency on bigotry—and fast. They need not just coding experts working on their algorithms, but anti-hate experts who can flag conspiratorial currents. After all, it’s impossible for computers to identify a prejudice if they don’t know what it looks like. It’s about time we started teaching them.

Source: Amazon’s Algorithm Has an Anti-Semitism Problem

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Trump Is Reshaping The Judiciary. A Breakdown By Race, Gender And Qualification

2018/11/16 Leave a comment

Good analysis with significant longer-term impact. Sharp contrast with Canadian judicial appointments under the current government where by my count, 56 percent are women, 9 percent visible minority and 3 percent Indigenous peoples:

The Trump administration has already written the opening chapters of what could be its most enduring legacy: the makeup of the federal courts.

In partnership with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Trump White House has secured lifetime appointments for 29 appeals court judges and 53 district court judges. That’s not to mention two Supreme Court nominees.

“He came into office with a mandate to nominate judges in the mold of Justice [Antonin] Scalia and Justice [Clarence] Thomas,” said Carrie Severino, chief counsel at the Judicial Crisis Network, which advocates for conservative judges. “That was a key reason he won the presidency.”

Supporters will celebrate that record this week at the annual convention of the Federalist Society, whose primary mission is to place conservatives on the courts.

The effort is so important to the Republican legal community and the party’s voting base that lawmakers have been holding hearings for nominees while the Senate was in recess, aiming to confirm those candidates in the lame-duck session scheduled before the end of the year.

Critics call this an abuse of the system and point out that all the Trump picks for the appeals courts and the Supreme Court tend to have something in common: most of them are white men.

“Of his 43 appellate nominations, none are African-American,” said Vanita Gupta of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

“None are Latino. Only nine are women. Our nation’s great diversity should be reflected in its government institutions, especially the federal judiciary, which serves as the guardian of our rights and liberties.”

Also notable, said Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, is that the Republican-controlled Senate limited President Obama to two circuit court judge confirmations and 22 district court nominations during his final two years in office.

Obama’s choice for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, never got a hearing.

NPR aggregated these data from public sources and inquiries to judicial nominees. This presentation reflects the state of nominations formally sent to the Senate as of Nov. 14, 2018. View the full spreadsheet here.

Source: Trump Is Reshaping The Judiciary. A Breakdown By Race, Gender And Qualification

Filed under gender, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

What has Germany really learned – and remembered – from Kristallnacht?

2018/11/16 Leave a comment

Good commentary with the lingering questions “What have we learned from the Shoah?”:

Last week, Germany memorialized the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht – “the night of broken glass” – during which 1,400 synagogues and innumerable Jewish businesses throughout the country were vandalized. There were dozens of killings on that day, Nov. 9, 1938. At least 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

It was the visible unravelling of the old as a violent new social order was born, yet the savagery had not emerged from a void, as many have since argued. For almost a century, anti-Semitic speech had been increasingly normalized in public discourse. The brutality of Kristallnacht was an unsurprising outcome once a leader able to channel hatred arrived on the scene.

As the 2018 memorial date approached, the German government banned a planned protest march by far-right groups. This was a risky move in a liberal democracy, but necessary, according to Thomas Lutz, who heads the Memorial Museums Department of the Topography of Terror Foundation in Berlin. Mr. Lutz told me he encouraged the authorities to take preventative action. He belongs to the postwar generations who have made moral responsibility and Holocaust education their life’s work – a group that is being tested as never before. The radical Alternative for Germany party (AfD) is a serious threat to the German liberal consensus. Having entered the political mainstream in 2017, its leaders are hostile to foreigners and to Holocaust memorialization in the name of resurgent ethnic nationalism.

Two political streams are emerging where, until recently, there was only one. The AfD is increasing its support, but last week the older ethos was also visible when a 94-year-old former SS guard went on trial for crimes committed in Poland. “Germany owes it to the families and victims to prosecute these Nazi war crimes even today,” the prosecutor said. “This is a legal and moral question.”

No country has made greater efforts to atone for Second World War crimes than Germany, the perpetrator state. Since the 1970s, schoolchildren have learned about the Holocaust through history classes and mandatory visits to concentration camps. Museums such as Mr. Lutz’s superb Topography of Terror, which details the Nazi regime in words and pictures, have been erected. Small and large memorials pepper Berlin, including the massive and unsettling Holocaust Memorial near the famous Brandenburg Gate.

On the other hand, the former East Germany did not parallel this education. According to Communist ideology, there were no war criminals east of the Wall: they all lived in the West; a fiction that blocked acknowledgement and reflection. At reunification in 1990, the two cultures were largely strangers, and in the subsequent years, the promise of measurable gain has not materialized in much of the East. One can plot the growth of animosity. Simmering resentments soared in 2015 when Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed a million poorly vetted refugees into the country. Postwar taboos against racist speech loosened, possibly liberated by trash talk from the new U.S. President. Permission to spout hatred almost always radiates from the top.

On the anniversary last week, Ms. Merkel delivered a powerful address in a reconstructed synagogue in Berlin. She decried the “worrying” rise of anti-Semitism in her country. She called for the safeguarding of protective institutions and the liberal values that underpin them. And she asked the seminal question we once thought we had answers to, but has since become ambiguous: “What did we really learn from the Shoah, this rupture of civilization?”

“Democracy is complicated,” she said. “It relies on balance between majority and minority, on the division of powers.” Then she addressed an evident truth: Those who felt left behind were looking for simple, not complicated, answers – and they were finding them among racist nationalists.

Given its 20th-century history, the revival of right-wing German nationalism is a fearful prospect – not least to Germans themselves. Yet as important as it is to march in the streets, simple confrontation is not an effective strategy. New research suggests that cultural memory has a shelf life of 70 to 80 years – exactly the time that has elapsed since the Holocaust. Better solutions to the economic problems and social resentments of those who feel outstripped must be reimagined.

Angela Merkel is Europe’s wisest leader, but she has been fatally weakened by the political rise of the extreme right in both parts of her country. In her forthcoming absence, others must defend the democratic values she embodies and with which she has served her country.

Her question, “What have we learned from the Shoah?” hangs in the air.

Source: What has Germany really learned – and remembered – from Kristallnacht?

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Racial profiling concerns raised after ‘DNA sweep’ targeting Middle Eastern men alleged in B.C.

2018/11/16 Leave a comment

Of note:

Civil liberties watchdogs say they’re troubled by a recent media report that suggested homicide investigators in B.C. targeted numerous Middle Eastern men in a voluntary DNA collection “sweep” as part of their investigation into the killing of a teenager.

The use of a DNA dragnet, they say, raises immediate concerns about racial profiling, coercion and the targeting of vulnerable populations, as well as questions about what’s done with DNA samples after they’ve been collected.

“If you’re trying to build trust in communities to further your investigation, make this something people will find credible,” said Micheal Vonn, policy director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

The body of 13-year-old Marrisa Shen was found in a wooded area of Central Park in Burnaby, B.C., in July 2017, prompting a massive investigation that at its peak eclipsed 300 investigators.

Two months ago, the region’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT) announced that a suspect, Ibrahim Ali, 28, had been arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Ali, a permanent resident of Canada, had arrived in the country in March 2017 as a privately sponsored refugee from Syria.

Police would not say how they homed in on Ali. During their 14-month investigation, they canvassed more than 1,300 residents, conducted 600 interviews and identified and eliminated 2,000 “persons of interest.”  The killing was said to have been a random act.

This week, the Burnaby Now newspaper reported that prior to Ali’s arrest, police had approached numerous Middle Eastern men across the region — including those who escaped “persecution in totalitarian regimes” — asking them if they would voluntarily provide samples of their DNA.

One of those men, Ayub Faek, fled Iraq as a refugee and came to Canada in the early 2000s. He said homicide investigators called him out of the blue and asked if they could come talk to him.

“When they came, I asked them, ‘Why me?’ and they say, ‘Not only you; many people,’” Faek told the newspaper. “I said, ‘Do you have clue like about why, for example, me?’ Maybe they have clue. They didn’t tell me. They didn’t tell me anything.”

Faek said he was asked about his work and visits to the park and was shown Shen’s picture. He agreed to provide a sample of his blood from his finger. “You don’t want to do that … but you have to say yes,” he said.

The Burnaby Now also spoke with Ariyan Fadhil, another Burnaby resident who fled Iraq in the early 2000s. He said he was questioned in a van during his lunch break and agreed to give a DNA sample.

“I knew that, if they want, they’re going to get an order from court or something, I don’t know, to take it from me, so that’s why I gave it,” he said.

Both men told the paper they were skeptical about the assurances they got that their DNA samples would be destroyed after the investigation was complete.

Cpl. Frank Jang, a spokesman for IHIT, said in an email Wednesday that it would be improper to comment while the case is before the courts.

“What I can tell you is that IHIT strictly adheres to Canadian law and RCMP policy with respect to the handling of DNA exhibits.”

The RCMP’s website states that DNA profiles must be removed from a database in a “timely manner” if the donor asks for its removal or if it is no longer useful in the investigation for which it was obtained.

But Vonn said police agencies should take the extra step of providing written verification to people that samples have been destroyed.

“You should be able to take that to the bank,” she said.

As for the act of collecting DNA samples in the first place, Vonn said while it is described as voluntary, there’s still an inevitable “element of coercion” involved because if you don’t agree to give a sample, that could make you a target of suspicion.

“No doubt police are very alive to how delicate a balance this is,” she said. “In other cases, we’ve heard in media reports people say the officer made it clear, ‘You don’t do this. We’ll put you under a microscope.’”

The use of DNA sweeps has come under scrutiny in the past. In 2016, in response to a complaint, Ontario’s Office of the Independent Police Review Director examined the use of the technique by Ontario Provincial Police detectives investigating a sexual assault in Bayham, a rural municipality in southwestern Ontario.

While police succeeded in finding the culprit — a migrant worker from Trinidad — the review found that the DNA canvass carried out by police had been “overly broad.”

DNA was obtained from virtually “every local migrant worker of colour,” regardless of physical characteristics, the review found.

The scope of the DNA sweep “could reasonably be expected to have an impact on the migrant workers’ sense of vulnerability, lack of security and fairness. It could also send the wrong message to others in the local community about how migrant workers, as a group, should be regarded,” the review found.

And while DNA samples of those individuals cleared in the investigation were destroyed, the OPP “took no steps” to notify migrant workers this had taken place.

Dozens of migrant workers from that case have since filed complaints with the Human Rights Council of Ontario.

And one of those workers is the plaintiff in a proposed class-action lawsuit against the province of Ontario alleging that the results of DNA samples collected in this and other cases have been retained unlawfully.

Source: Racial profiling concerns raised after ‘DNA sweep’ targeting Middle Eastern men alleged in B.C.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

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