Canada has a skills shortage – but which skills, and where? Lack of data leaves the experts unsure

2019/03/12 Leave a comment

Another in-depth look by the Globe on data gaps:

Five years ago, then prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government was convinced that Canada’s labour market was sinking into a deepening skills-mismatch problem: There were plenty of skilled jobs available, but not enough qualified applicants to fill them.

In the February, 2014, budget, the Tories attempted to drive home the point by including a Finance Department study that said the job-vacancy rate (open jobs as a percentage of all jobs) was north of 4 per cent, its highest level since 2008, despite still-high unemployment of 7 per cent.

But that study contradicted Statistics Canada’s data on job openings, which put the vacancy rate at barely above 1 per cent.

It turned out that some of the government’s stats were gleaned from internet job postings on sites such as Kijiji, and those counts were badly tainted – double-counting some jobs and including some positions that had already been filled.

The so-called Kijiji Jobs Report, as it became known, was a major embarrassment for the Harper government. Critics accused the Conservatives of using half-baked statistical evidence to justify their economic policies.

But it was unclear whether Statscan’s numbers were right either. Job vacancy estimates from the Conference Board of Canada and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business yielded still different results.

The episode was a wake-up call: If Canada faced deepening shortages in key skills, it lacked the statistical detail to see them properly, let alone do anything about the problem.

In the five years since, there has been a renewed focus on bringing Canada’s labour-skills data into the 21st century – with increased funding to match.

But progress has been slow and the stakes are rising. A growing economy and aging population have eaten into the available labour pool, slicing the unemployment rate to a four-decade low. An increasing number of companies complain that they can’t find enough skilled workers.

To help fill the labour gaps, successive federal governments have increased what’s known as “economic” immigration, targeting highly skilled foreign workers. The provinces have also been given increased powers to recruit immigrants to fill their skills needs. All this comes against a backdrop of rising automation and artificial intelligence, which will dramatically reshape the labour market.

Finance Minister Bill Morneau has said that skills development will be a focus of his March 19 budget. But if Canada is going to embark on a skills overhaul, it will need to fill the gaps in its data first.

“Being able to gather that information, in terms of the [skills] supply and demand, I think is going to be really important, given the scale and speed with which this [change] is happening,” says Dominic Barton, head of Mr. Morneau’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth, probably the most influential voice shaping the government’s long-term economic priorities. “There is an urgency to this.”

This challenge didn’t exactly sneak up on policy-makers. It’s been a decade since the Harper government’s Advisory Panel on Labour Market Information (LMI), chaired by prominent Queen’s University economist Don Drummond, issued a 228-page report containing wide-ranging recommendations to modernize Canada’s labour data.

“Reducing unemployment or raising wages by a better matching of workers and jobs by as little as a tenth of a [percentage] point would raise GDP by some $800-million,” Mr. Drummond wrote. “That is why we need to spend more money on LMI and spend it smarter.”

Identifying problems with Canada’s labour skills data differs depending on who you ask. Academics, economists, policy-makers, employers, teachers and workers all use the information. But there are two common complaints.

First, information isn’t sufficiently “granular” – it doesn’t drill down deep enough to identify specific skills in supply or demand in the marketplace, or precisely where these skills are available or needed.

Second, data are too scattered among a variety of agencies and levels of government, which don’t do a great job of sharing their information with each other or making it user-friendly.

Statscan is the primary producer of labour data in this country. But the Harper government slashed Statscan’s labour market information budget by more than 20 per cent between the 2011-12 and 2013-14 fiscal years.

In the wake of the Kijiji Jobs Report, however, the Conservatives re-opened the taps, and the flow has accelerated under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.

Statscan’s current budget for labour data is more than $30-million, up nearly 40 per cent from 2013-14 levels. Still, it’s a small slice of the agency’s total annual budget of more than $600-million.

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Source:     Canada has a skills shortage – but which skills, and where? Lack of data leaves the experts unsure David Parkinson March 11, 2019     

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Douglas Todd: Female foreign students endure harassment, exploitation

2019/03/12 Leave a comment

Of note:

Female foreign students from South Asia are experiencing sexual harassment by landlords, exploitation by bosses, and ethno-cultural double-standards, all the while dealing with their own fears of being deported.

Metro Vancouver community workers are warning about the particular vulnerability of the increasing number of young women coming to Canada from the Punjab region of India and other parts of South Asia, whose often-modest families have sold off much of their property and assets to get them to Canada.

Stories are emerging that some female international students — desperate to make enough money to avoid returning to their homelands — are resorting to offering sexual services to landlords and are even getting involved in the drug trade, says Kal Dosanjh, a police officer who runs a Surrey-based support program called Kids Play.

The young women are frightened, especially when exploitative employers in the underground economy, including at some restaurants, threaten to report them to immigration officials and have them deported, said Dosanjh.

“When these kids, who don’t know the law, hear about deportation, they get scared, because they’ve already spent so much money coming to Canada, and so much money surviving here, that the last thing they need is to be sent back to their country,” Dosanjh said.

There are more than 500,000 foreign students in Canada. After a jump of almost 50,000 additional students from India in 2017, one quarter of Canada’s international students now come from there.

“It’s a source of shame if they get sent home. They fear they’ll never get the chance to come back to Canada,” said Dosanjh, who also works with male foreign students whom he says tend to get exploited by under-paying construction companies or become low-level participants in the drug trade to pay high student fees and rents.

Being able to fly into Canada on a student visa is seen as the “ticket out of India, out of poverty” for many students, said Dosanjh. “For them to be able to stay here means everything in terms of future job prospects, monetary wealth, sanitary conditions, a significant change in lifestyle.” Many will put up with a lot of hardship to avoid going home.

MOSAIC, a large B.C. settlement service for migrants, this year began training teachers and other education officials about what they could do to support women among Metro Vancouver’s 110,000 foreign students, who the agency maintains are generally “more likely to be sexually assaulted and less likely to be helped” than native-born students.

“New research confirms that international students reported more sexual assault than domestic students and experience more intense fear, helplessness and horror after victimization,” says a statement from MOSAIC, whose 350 staff members are led by CEO Olga Stachova.

“Some perpetrators of sexual violence see international students as easy targets — too ashamed to report sexual assaults, unaware of where they can get help and influenced by different cultural norms.”

MOSAIC highlighted the case of Maham Kamal Khanum, an international student from Pakistan at UBC, who said sexual violence against women is “normalized” in her home country. “It was almost a culture shock to learn how unacceptable sexual violence was here,” Khanum said.

Dupinder Kaur Saran, Kal Dosanjh, Kiran Toor. Saran and Toor are volunteers with Kids Play, which helps youth in Surrey who are getting into trouble. Kal Dosanjh is a police officer and head of the non-profit group.

Many international students “don’t have a place to belong” when they come to Canada, says Kiran Toor, who, along with Dupinder Saran, has volunteered to work with international students through Kids Play, a large Surrey-based non-profit organization devoted to supporting young people, particularly South Asians.

Many foreign students are under a great deal of financial, social and academic pressure, including to learn English.

A recent article in Desi Today, an Indo-Canadian magazine in B.C., said it’s common for male and female foreign students to work more than the 20 hours a week permitted under a Canadian study visa.

The magazine quoted South Asian community workers who know of intimidated young women being sexually harassed in the workplace by employers, because they have worked many hours over their allowed limit and don’t want to be reported to border officials.

The young women especially feel shame about admitting to something that might hurt their reputations.

In 2017 there was a sudden jump of 48,000 more students from India. (Source: Canadian Bureau for International Education)

While Dosanjh said many female students from India are “liberal, open-minded and sophisticated,” Desi Today quoted community officials who said some traditional Indo-Canadians are “talking bad about the girl students from India.” Some Indo-Canadians don’t like that the young women are often see in public with males. Most officials cited in Desi Today did not respond to The Vancouver Sun’s messages.

At the worst, Dosanjh said, some Indian foreign students who are desperate for cash are getting involved in prostitution and the drug trade. The young men, says the longtime Vancouver police officer, are generally serving as “mules” and the women are agreeing to hold drugs for their male friends.

The effort to help schools provide more support to female foreign students who arrive in Canada without support networks is hampered, MOSAIC’s Stachova said, by the under-reporting of difficult incidents. “The students always think they have the worry: What will happen to my status in Canada?”

Even though the problem of exploitation of female foreign students is real in Metro Vancouver, Stachova said it has to be put into perspective. “I don’t want to sound alarmist,” Stachova said, “because we are generally a safe country.”

Still, the stakes are exceedingly high for the students.

As Dosanjh says, many families in India, particularly in the Punjab, see Canada as a kind of heaven on earth. “So the young people think of it is a land of rich amenities, where they can have a better life, become permanent residents and eventually sponsor their family to come over. That means that once these students come here the last thing most of them want to do is return to India.”

All of which make them more susceptible than most to exploitation.

foreign students from South Asia are experiencing sexual harassment by landlords, exploitation by bosses, and ethno-cultural double-standards, all the while dealing with their own fears of being deported. Metro Vancouver community workers are warning about the particular vulnerability of the increasing number of young women coming to Canada from the Punjab region of India and other parts of South Asia, whose often-modest families have sold off much of their property and assets to get them to Canada.

Source: Douglas Todd: Female foreign students endure harassment, exploitation

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Black RCMP officers say they endured racism ‘on a regular basis’

2019/03/12 Leave a comment

Not a new issue:

Current and former black RCMP officers say they’ve regularly endured racist treatment from their colleagues and are calling for Canada’s national police force to improve its treatment of visible minorities.

Alain Babineau, who retired from the RCMP in 2016 after a 27-year career and now lives in Ottawa, told Radio-Canada one of his bosses nicknamed him “black man,” and that racial slurs were common.

“The word n–ger was used on a regular basis,” he said.

One example he shared occurred in Quebec City in 2008 at the Sommet de la francophonie, a meeting of representatives from French-speaking nations.

“There were a lot of African countries visiting Quebec City, and a group of RCMP members were talking about their VIPs from Africa and using the N-word and making jokes and so on,” he said.

“I told them, ‘First of all, I’m extremely offended by what you’re saying. And, number two, these are our clients.

“Of course [they said], ‘We’re just joking around’ … their jokes are not always the funniest.”

‘I had so much pride for the RCMP’

Radio-Canada spoke to other black RCMP officers, including two who agreed to speak anonymously because they fear reprisals from their employer.

CBC and Radio-Canada have agreed not to name them or say where they work.

“Over the years, members have called me ‘black bastard,’ ‘uneducated black man’ and again recently ‘n–ger,'” one officer said.

He added that after working in several communities across Canada for over 15 years, he’s tired of the racist treatment.

“I had so much pride for the RCMP,” he said. “Now, if someone asks me what I do, I say I work for the government.”

The other officer said he wished his colleagues would stand up to defend him, but the RCMP workplace culture is not friendly to people who complain about racism.

“I heard the word ‘n–ger’ more often in the RCMP than in the general public,” the officer said.

While CBC and Radio-Canada have chosen not to disclose the details of these incidents to protect the officers’ identities, the events have been corroborated with documents and witnesses have confirmed what happened.

Other officers who had agreed to talk to Radio-Canada changed their minds at the last minute.

Allegations ‘deeply troubling,’ RCMP says

In a statement to Radio-Canada, the RCMP called the allegations of racism “deeply troubling” and said all forms of discrimination will not be tolerated.

Both the RCMP and Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said they’re taking steps to address the situation.

The police force said it routinely uses what’s known as “gender-based analysis plus,” or GBA+, to “assess how men, women and gender-diverse people experience policies, programs and initiatives.”

“The ‘plus’ in GBA+ acknowledges that this analysis goes beyond biological sex and gender differences and also examines the impact of other identity factors such as race, ethnicity, religion, age and mental or physical disabilities,” the RCMP said.

Watchdog board created

Goodale’s office brought up a new interim civilian watchdog board his government created for the RCMP to help rid it of bullying and harassment.

Its members will be named by April 1, and Goodale’s office said it’s aiming “to appoint members who represent the diversity of Canadians.”

The officers who spoke to Radio-Canada want the RCMP to do an in-depth study of visible minorities in the RCMP, citing a recent Ottawa police diversity audit as one example of something the RCMP could adapt.

The RCMP declined to comment on whether it would take a similar step.

In 2015, the RCMP’s then commissioner admitted there were racists in the force.

“I understand that there are racists in my police force. I don’t want them to be in my police force,” Bob Paulson told a group of First Nations leaders.

Visible minorities underrepresented in RCMP

Babineau now works as a volunteer adviser for the Montreal-based Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations.

He said, while he believes individual acts of direct racism have decreased in the RCMP over the years, systemic racism is still a problem.

Visible minorities, excluding Indigenous people, make up 22 per cent of Canada’s general population, according to the 2016 census — but only 11 per cent of the RCMP’s workforce as of 2018.

In this sense, the RCMP is more representative than the typical Canadian police force. In 2016, the most recent year this national data was available, eight per cent of all Canadian police officers were visible minorities.

However, while there are now more women and visible minorities in the RCMP’s leadership, visible minorities remain absent from the three highest ranks.

“There are now many women in the highest ranks of the RCMP. That’s a good thing,” Babineau said. “The same thing should be happening for racialized people.”

Source: Black RCMP officers say they endured racism ‘on a regular basis’

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Identity politics, Israel style: Treat Israeli Arabs As People, Not Things

2019/03/12 Leave a comment

Good post on Ottomans and Zionists:

If there was a silver lining to the deal brokered by Prime Minister Netanyahu between Bayit Yehudi and Otzma Yehudit to run as a joint electoral list and the immediate furor that ensued, it is that it focused a spotlight on the most abhorrent prejudice and racism that is exhibited toward Israel’s Arab citizens. What made Meir Kahane, his Kach party, and his Kahanist followers so repugnant and led to Israel outlawing Kach was its advocacy for discrimination and glorification of violence toward Israeli Arabs. Kahane’s heirs in Otzma have continued in his footsteps, calling Arabs a fifth column with whom there can be no coexistence, proclaiming that less than one percent of Israeli Arabs are loyal to the state, advocating that Arabs who “speak out” against Jews be executed, working to prohibit Arabs from public life, and attempting to criminalize relationships between Jews and Arabs. It is evident – or should be – to anyone with an ounce of moral fiber that this type of incitement should not be welcome anywhere in Israeli society. But the new focus on Otzma has a downside in that it threatens to obscure a much bigger problem, which is the routine delegitimization of Israeli Arabs that takes place as a matter of course.

The most familiar example of this constant message that shunts one fifth of Israeli citizens into a rhetorical leper colony is Netanyahu’s infamous 2015 election day warning that Arabs were being bused to the polls in droves. The clear implication was twofold; first, that there was something untoward or dangerous about Arabs having a say in the composition of Israel’s next government, and second, that true Israeli patriots should come vote in order to counter Arab influence. It not only portrayed actual full citizens of Israel as being ominous but did it on the basis of their ethnicity alone. After all, Netanyahu did not say that his political opponents were going to the polls in droves, nor did he call out any individual parties. His message was straightforward: Arabs are voting, and no good result can possibly come out of that because they are Arabs.

In the current campaign, this same message is alive and well. But it is not just Netanyahu who is utilizing it. Across the political spectrum, there is a rush to assure Jewish Israeli voters that nobody is looking to form a government that includes Arabs; not Likud under Netanyahu, and not Kachol Lavan under Benny Gantz. Netanyahu, naturally, has made this pledge a centerpiece of his campaign. In the Likud party campaign kickoff on Monday, Netanyahu repeatedly trotted out the catchphrase “Tibi or Bibi,” referring to Ta’al chief Ahmad Tibi, who has been an MK for two decades. Netanyahu argued that the only way for Gantz to form a coalition is by including Arab parties, making the choice for voters one between Bibi – the current prime minister running for reelection – or Tibi – who is not running for prime minister and is not even the top person on the Hadash-Ta’al list but is Israel’s most recognizable Arab politician. It’s an effective rhyming catchphrase, and despite the fact that its logic is absurd, it works precisely because it plays on this notion that Arab parties, which overwhelmingly garner Israeli Arabs’ votes, are inherently non-kosher.

There are now two Arab party lists with very different politics, and the one that includes Tibi is the one that is more moderate, endorses a two-state solution (inherently accepting Israel’s legitimacy), and is a willing participant in Israeli institutions. But in singling out Tibi rather than the actual Arab extremists in the Balad party – whose representatives have called for Israel’s dissolution, have supplied intelligence to Hizballah, and have been convicted for smuggling cell phones to imprisoned terrorists – Netanyahu is purposely casting a wider circle of aspersions on Israeli Arabs as a group.

Sadly, Netanyahu is not alone, though he stands out in his bluntness and willingness to embrace the most extreme position. Gantz on Monday ruled out forming any coalition with Tibi as well, and lumped him in with Kahane, which is an unfair comparison by any measure. Unlike Netanyahu, Gantz and Yair Lapid have not explicitly ruled out using Arab parties to form a blocking coalition, as Yitzhak Rabin did, and it is to their credit – factoring in the soft bigotry of low expectations – that they have not definitively closed that door. But they are also obviously trying to walk a tightrope in their avoidance of directness on a host of issues so as not to be cast as leftists, and making any overtures that legitimize Arab participation in Israeli political life is a quick route to the dreaded leftwing moniker.

Politicians have not come up with this strategy out of nowhere. It is an unfortunate reality that Jewish Israeli society prioritizes the Jewish aspect over the Israeli aspect in this regard, and politicians understandably believe that their voters will respond to using Arabs as an electoral foil. It is certainly the case that there are Arab parties, such as Balad, that are anti-Zionist in a genocidal way, and there have been Arab MKs who are not only anti-Zionist but have actively committed treason against their country. Much as Kahane violated Israel’s Basic Law on racist incitement and was banned from serving in the Knesset and his party outlawed, I have no problem with that standard being used on Balad – which yesterday was banned from running by Israel’s Central Elections Committee – or on MKs like Hanin Zuabi (who is not running for the next Knesset but has been the subject of disqualification petitions in the past). But portraying Israeli Arab participation in governing Israel as something that shocks the conscience in its extremity should itself shock the conscience in its extremity. That it does not is a poor statement about Israel’s commitment to its Arab citizens, who should not be delegitimized as a category of people.

One of the most familiar pro-Israel talking points is that Israel is the country in the Middle East where it is best to be an Arab, since they are full citizens who not only vote but serve in the Knesset and on Israel’s High Court. There is a popular formulation of this idea that the strength of Israel’s democracy can be demonstrated by an Arab justice (Salim Joubran) sending a Jewish president of Israel (Moshe Katsav) to prison. But it is hollowly cynical to use Israeli Arabs’ participation in political life to tout Israel’s greatness, and in the next instance portray Israeli Arabs’ participation in political life as something that must be negated and combated. The entire spectacle of using Israeli Arabs as props, raising them up for geopolitical benefit and keeping them low for domestic political benefit, is ugly and should stop. The best thing that Israel’s current election campaign could accomplish would be to demonstrate that this tactic does not work.

Source: Treat Israeli Arabs As People, Not Things

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Anti-Immigration Groups See Trump’s Calls for More Legal Immigrants as a Betrayal

2019/03/11 Leave a comment

Kind of amusing. But one should judge his administrations anti-immigration actions more than this apparent change of language:

For months, President Trump has been railing about the urgent need for a wall to protect against what he calls “an invasion” of illegal immigrants flooding across the southwestern border. But he has also been delivering another message: “We need workers,” he told a group of activists recently.

In other words, he wants more immigrants.

“I want people to come into our country, in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally,” Mr. Trump ad-libbed last month during his State of the Union address.

Comments like those from the president have ignited furious criticism from his hard-line, anti-immigrant supporters who accuse him of caving to demands for cheap foreign labor from corporations, establishment Republicans and big donors while abandoning his election promise to protect his working-class supporters from the effects of globalism.

“This is clearly a betrayal of what immigration hawks hoped the Trump administration would be for,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates cutting legal immigration by more than half. He warned that Mr. Trump was in danger of being “not even that different from a conventional Republican.”

Breitbart News, a conservative website that promotes anti-immigrant messaging, published on Thursday the latest in a series of articles attacking Mr. Trump for catering to big business at the expense of the Americans who put him in the Oval Office. “Trump Requests ‘More’ Foreign Workers as Southern Border Gets Overrun,” the site blared on its home page.

“That Mr. Trump would advance the interests of the global elite ahead of our citizens would be a tragic reversal on any day,” Lou Dobbs, the Fox News host, said in a televised rant against the president on Wednesday evening on the Fox Business Channel. “The White House has simply lost its way.”

Corporations and influential corporate conservatives such as Charles G. Koch and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have long urged the president to help them recruit the talent they need by expanding the number of workers who can enter the United States from other countries.

That has become more urgent as the economy has improved and as declining unemployment has made it harder for companies to find workers. To assuage their concerns, Mr. Trump has increasingly tailored his immigration talking points to cater to the needs of business executives like those who attended a business round table on Wednesday at the White House.

“We’re going to have a lot of people coming into the country. We want a lot of people coming in. And we need it,” Mr. Trump said as he sat next to Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, and other executives. “We want to have the companies grow, and the only way they’re going to grow is if we give them the workers, and the only way we’re going to have the workers is to do exactly what we’re doing.”

But that message runs counter to the hard-line immigration image that Mr. Trump has carefully nurtured — most recently by shutting the government down for 35 days in a failed attempt to pressure Congress to fund a wall on the Mexican border.

Mr. Trump won the White House in no small part by embracing anti-immigrant messaging that tapped into the economic fears of blue-collar workers upset about losing their jobs to foreign workers. Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, he attacked undocumented immigrants as “rapists and murderers” and called for a “big, beautiful wall” along the border with Mexico.

Since becoming president, Mr. Trump has aggressively sought to crack down on illegal border crossings, increase deportations, cut the number of refugees allowed into the United States and make it harder for migrants to claim asylum. He has complained about drug dealers, gangs and members of Central American caravans pouring across the border. And last summer, his administration separated thousands of migrant children from their parents in an effort to deter Central American families from trying to seek refuge in the United States.

The harsh record — and comments by Mr. Trump that disparaged African nations in vulgar terms and suggested that Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS” — has earned him the enmity of Democrats and immigration activists, who call him a racist president.

It is unclear whether Mr. Trump will follow through on his recent, pro-business messaging. Many of the president’s aides — including Stephen Miller, his top immigration adviser in the White House — agree with the hard-line activists about the need to lower legal immigration.

In 2017, Mr. Trump endorsed the Raise Act, a Republican Senate bill that would reduce legal immigration by as much as 50 percent. And the administration is currently considering a proposal to cut immigration by denying work authorizations, known as H-4 permits, to almost 100,000 spouses of immigrants who are brought in by companies to work legally in the United States.

But even so, some of the nation’s most hard-line anti-immigration activists have become increasingly nervous that Mr. Trump might waver on their primary concern — the need to shrink the number of immigrants who enter the United States each year, currently 1.1 million.

They argue that tight labor markets make it exactly the wrong time to allow more foreign workers to compete with Americans. Chris Chmielenski, the deputy director of NumbersUSA, which lobbies for lower legal immigration, said companies should be pressured to hire more Americans instead.

“Anything we do now to bring in more foreign workers could actually reverse some of the economic gains over the last four years,” Mr. Chmielenski said. “We’re absolutely concerned. We feel this isn’t how he ran on the issue.”

Last week, in an effort to communicate that message directly to Mr. Trump, NumbersUSA began airing an ad on Fox News Channel in the hopes that the president would get the message that his supporters do not want to let in more than one million immigrants each year.

“The majority of voters say the number should be cut to 500,000 or less,” the ad said. “Americans want less immigration.”

Mr. Krikorian, of the Center for Immigration Studies, said that companies that no longer have access to foreign workers would have no choice but to turn to Americans who are still struggling to find work: people with disabilities, teenagers, older people and even former convicts.

He also said that modest increases in wages for workers would evaporate if companies were allowed to simply tap an unlimited pool of lower-paid workers from other countries.

“If you want wages to go up,” Mr. Krikorian said, “you don’t import more foreign labor.”

Business groups dispute that analysis. They argue that immigration expands the amount of business activity in the United States, adding jobs and increasing wages for the vast majority of American workers.

“Our country has benefited tremendously from welcoming people who have contributed to our economy, our communities, across the board,” said James Davis, a spokesman for the Koch network. “We want to welcome in everyone who wants to contribute to our society. We want to see more legal immigration.”

Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us, a pro-immigration advocacy group that started with backing from Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of Facebook, said that “immigrants and immigration increase economic growth, they increase economic productivity and they increase wages for the overwhelming number of native-born Americans.”

Mr. Schulte, whose group has been highly critical of Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant messaging and policies, welcomed the president’s recognition that legal immigration is a positive thing for the United States’ economy.

But he cautioned that Mr. Trump must be measured by his actions, not his words. He called on the president to halt the effort to deny the H-4 work permits to immigrant spouses.

“He should stop trying to revoke the H-4 rule,” Mr. Schulte said. “Increasing legal immigration would help native-born Americans. Unfortunately, the record has been one bent on cutting overall immigration levels.”

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Finding a Place in Women’s Mosques

2019/03/11 Leave a comment

Of interest:

These are heady times for Kahina Bahloul, organizer of a women’s mosque in France, a country that is home to the largest Muslim population in Europe. Practical considerations dominate the spiritual — a search for an affordable location, a flurry of radio and television interviews marking the rise of a vanguard of women imams leading pop-up mosques from Berlin to Berkeley, Calif.

Ms. Bahloul, 39, who was trained as a lawyer in Algeria, said she stopped attending formal prayer services in Paris about three years ago because “I didn’t feel respected.”

She said she was taken aback by mosques that isolated women, steering them to back doors and relegating the worshipers to basements or seats hidden behind screens. She gave up after one mosque directed the women to pray in a nearby garage.

“I felt excluded by the mosques,” said Ms. Bahloul, who is earning a doctorate in Islamic studies from France’s École Pratique des Hautes Études and intends to be one of two imams leading prayers at the mosque. “I felt excluded by my community — and a lot of other women felt the same way.”

Together with Faker Korchane, 40, a high school philosophy teacher and a freelance journalist, she is developing the Fatima Mosque while searching for rental space in the Paris region. Their concept is a liberal mosque that will host weekly prayers led alternately by a female and male imam with worshipers of both sexes separated on either side of the same prayer hall.

Ms. Bahloul is building on an evolving tradition of women imams with history dating from the 19th century in China among the Hui Muslims. There, women lead mosques exclusively for women. But in the last three years, women imams elsewhere have begun to organize women’s mosques with varying styles in Denmark, Germany, Canada and the United States.

In 2016, the Mariam mosque opened in central Copenhagen, with the call to prayer sung by women. A year later, Seyran Ates, a Turkish-born German lawyer and activist, founded the Ibn Rushd-Goethe mosque in Berlin. To great fanfare and speeches, a women’s mosque started in Berkeley, Calif., in 2017 at Starr King School for the Ministry, a graduate school and Unitarian Universalist seminary.

Rabi’a Keeble, a Muslim convert and graduate of that seminary, founded the Berkeley mosque, Qal’bu Maryam. But she quickly faced challenges. It was not easy to attract Muslim women, who were wary of the organizers, she said.

“You assume there must be other like-minded people all over the place,” Ms. Keeble said. “What woman wants to continue to sit behind, walk behind, listen to men interpret scripture to their benefit? There must be a bunch of women waiting for someone to step up and kick those doors down. Well, that’s just not true.”

The Berkeley mosque’s location was always tenuous. After a year occupying free space, the group moved to a temporary home, she said, and recently found new quarters at First Congregational Church of Oakland.

Real estate is the critical issue that determines the strength of reform mosques. In 2012, Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed opened a mosque in Paris designed to be inclusive to women and welcoming to homosexual Muslims. Faced with insults and some hostility, Mr. Zahed said members preferred to be discreet, moving locations every three months to avoid being targeted. The mosque closed after three years, and Mr. Zahed has since resettled in Marseille in the south of France to run an institute to train reform imams.

“We had threats and people identified the places,” Mr. Zahed said of the Paris mosque. “Then owners didn’t want us to stay any longer. They were very happy to have us in the beginning, but they had so much political pressure that they wanted us to leave. It was always like this.”

Ms. Bahloul has not faced that kind of pressure for the Fatima Mosque, a concept she has openly promoted since January with a series of television interviews in France that have provoked hundreds of comments. She has also drawn coverage in Brazil, Italy and Canada, and in Northern Africa in Morocco, which characterized her concept as revolutionary.

“Among Muslims there are two reactions,” she said. “Most are very favorable — ‘finally a breath of fresh air. We have been waiting for this for a long time.’ There are others who are insulting and accuse us of trying to change the real Islam. But what is real Islam? Those critics have a very simple approach and have a superficial understanding of Islam.”

Ms. Bahloul’s views are shaped by her eclectic background, divided between France and Algeria, where she grew up in northern Kabylia, the child of an Algerian father and French mother. Her maternal grandmother was a Polish Jew and her grandfather French Catholic.

“Since I was young, I have always posed questions,” Ms. Bahloul said. “What really struck me was the evolution of the practice of Islam of my paternal grandparents, who were very traditional, cultural and spiritual. And after that I watched the spread of the conservative Salafist movement and the first veils worn by women in the 1990s.”

For now the organizers are preoccupied with practical concerns — renting a location, eventually organizing a crowdfunding campaign, reaching out to city officials who could aid in the search for space for Friday prayers and community meetings.

In the meantime, Ms. Bahloul teaches about Islam online through her association, Parle-moi d’Islam, with lectures on how to read the Quran or prosaic themes such as: “Does the Quran say to hit wives?”

Mr. Korchane, the co-founder, also says they must work to reach another pivotal group. He wants to create special videos to attract young Muslims, who he says sometimes lack deep knowledge of Islam. “They think, for example,” he said, “that eating halal or wearing a veil are part of the pillars of Islam.”

Source: Finding a Place in Women’s MosquesOrganizers of reform mosques are building on an evolving tradition of women imams that dates back centuries. But some Muslim women remain wary.

Filed under Religion Tagged with , , ,

Anti-BDS laws are more than words. They are a legal attempt to punish a passive act: Neil Macdonald

2019/03/11 Leave a comment

I would distinguish between boycotting products and services from the occupied territories (legitimate) from Israel proper:

Back in January, the publisher of a tiny newspaper in Arkansas, standing on journalistic principle, defied the dead hand of government, the way a publisher is supposed to. Publisher Alan Leveritt’s scorching article, posted on the website of the American Civil Liberties Association, gladdened the journalistic heart.

Or at least it should have. But we don’t know whether it did; the institutions of American journalism, impoverished and increasingly frightened of their own audiences, are mostly maintaining a courageous silence. You’d think they’d be concerned.

Dozens of relatively recent state laws now require anyone who does business with government, including media organizations, to effectively make a pro-Israel pledge, and in some cases, sign one.

The signatory must promise not to in any way limit business activities with Israel or its settlements in the occupied territories, which even the United States considers illegal under international law.

Risking ad revenue

Last year, Leveritt was told to sign the pledge or lose badly needed ad revenue from the Arkansas university system. He told the state of Arkansas to go jump in a lake.

“We really needed the business,” Leveritt wrote, but at what price?

“Since when do American citizens have to pledge to act in the interest of a foreign power in order to do business with their own government?”

“As an American, I say it is none of their damn business what political beliefs we hold. We’ll see them in court.”

On the phone this week, Leveritt said his newspaper is actually unconcerned with Israel and its occupation, and has taken no editorial view on it: “We are concerned about the 20,000 people in this state who have been kicked off Medicaid. We focus on local issues.”

He in fact regards the demand to sign the pledge as the state forcing his paper to take an editorial position against its will.

“I wouldn’t sign a pro-Palestine pledge, either.”

Other newspapers across the country must have been asked to sign similar pledges, he notes (“If they have signed, they should be ashamed of themselves”), but there has been precious little support of the Arkansas Times.

“I have not received a single call. Nothing.”

Leveritt’s only ally seems to be the American Civil Liberties Association, which regards the right to boycott as a “McCarthy-era loyalty oath,” and is helping him sue. The writers’ organization PEN has expressed support, too.

But that sort of free-speecher view is not widely shared in America, at least where the boycott involves Israel.

Since 2015, 26 other states have passed laws similar to the one in Arkansas. The United States Senate just passed a federal version. Basically, these laws are an attempt to punish entities or individual Americans who choose not to do something – in this case, choosing not to invest with, buy from or otherwise economically support Israel.

It’s all an attempt to combat a strategy chosen by Palestinian leaders and their supporters roughly 13 years ago. After decades of being told by Israel and the West to abandon armed struggle and choose a non-violent path to oppose Israel’s occupation and settlements, the Palestinians and their allies decided to do just that: they founded the so-called BDS movement, standing for boycott, divest and sanction, using economic levers to pressure Israel.

BDS counterattack

At first, Israel brushed off BDS as trivial, but as the movement began to gain traction worldwide (BDS is supported in whole or in part, by, among others, the United Church of Canada and the Quakers, and the corporate world has taken notice), the Israeli government and its supporters organized an aggressive counterattack, using everything from lawsuits and public shaming of individual BDS supporters to lobbying efforts aimed at persuading other countries to outlaw boycotts. BDS, they proclaimed, is not just anti-Semitic, it’s “economic terrorism.”

Nowhere has Israel found greater support than in the United States, which is unsurprising. America has the largest population of evangelical Christians in the world. Their support for Israel is as absolute as their opposition to abortion, and they understand how to exercise political power. The anti-boycott laws generally pass with healthy bipartisan support.

“Anti-Israel policies are anti-Texas policies,” declared Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, signing his state’s anti-BDS law.

Elsewhere, nations are choosing sides, many of them coming down on Israel’s. Governments in France, Germany and the UK have all denounced BDS. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has effectively called the movement anti-Semitic, accusing it of singling out and delegitimizing Israel.

Ultimately, though, denunciations by politicians or governments or political parties are just words – a declaration of a political position to voters. BDS supporters in Canada probably couldn’t care less what Trudeau thinks of them, and in any case, politicians are hardly consistent on such matters. Politicians are constantly singling out, delegitimizing and sanctioning other nations for bad behaviour.

Washington, for example, was furious when Venezuelan troops blocked foreign food shipments and shot protesters, but regards Israel’s blockade of foreign food aid to Gaza and its troops shooting Gazan protesters — which Israel defends on security grounds — as completely justified.

The anti-BDS laws in the United States, though, are more than words. They are a legal attempt to punish a passive act, which is a form of speech. There are powerful politicians who would actually criminalize BDS.

Leveritt, the Arkansas Times publisher, puts it this way:  “As an American citizen, I say I can not buy whatever I don’t want to buy and it’s none of the state’s damn business.”

So, ultimately, it will be the courts in America, and perhaps elsewhere, to decide how far this can all go.

Already, federal courts in Kansas and Arizona have blocked anti-BDS laws in those states as illegal suppression of speech. A speech pathologist fired from a university in Texas for refusing to sign the pledge is also suing. In Britain, the country’s high court dismissed charges of discrimination levied against local councils that supported the boycott. A high court justice, compared BDS to boycotts of South Africa’s apartheid regime, ruling: “There is legitimate scope for criticism of Israel without that implying anti-Semitic attitudes” (precisely the opposite of what Israel and its supporters argue).

Other British judges have sided with pro-Israel groups. And in the U.S., comparisons have been drawn to the boycotts of discriminatory white-owned businesses during the civil rights era. The Arkansas Times made precisely that argument.

But when Alan Leveritt got his day in court, he lost.

Arkansas Federal Judge Brian Miller, in late January, ruled that a boycott is not protected speech, and that the state has the right to force businesses to sign the pledge.

Leveritt has filed an appeal: “I’m not signing anything.”

Well, good for Alan Leveritt. He has guts. But the Arkansas Times was just forced to go from weekly to monthly publication, and principles can be expensive.

Source: Anti-BDS laws are more than words. They are a legal attempt to punish a passive act: Neil Macdonald

Filed under Antisemitism Tagged with ,

‘Whiter Every Election Cycle’: How a Hate Group Joined GOP

2019/03/11 Leave a comment

A risk to conservatives in many countries, Canada included:

The white nationalist group Identity Evropa is so cozy with the Republican Party that members led their College Republican clubs and campaigned in support of GOP congressional candidates.

At least one Identity Evropa fan, who is not a member of the group, attended CPAC last weekend where he demanded an autograph from a leftist podcaster who, tripping on acid, signed the book “eat shit.”

Identity Evropa is a fascist organization. Its members have been involved in violent street brawls, including 2017’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. While other white supremacist organizations imploded after the rally, Identity Evropa attempted to cast aside the alt-right’s tarnished image and rebrand as a “clean-cut” organization. The makeover was an attempt to appeal to the mainstream Republican Party, according to chat logs released Wednesday by the media collective Unicorn Riot.

But despite its new face, the group stayed true to its fascist heart, the leaked conversations reveal.

The chat group’s name was an ironic nod at the image Identity Evropa tries to present to outsiders: “Nice Respectable People Group.” The image landed the white supremacist group a softball interview with the Today Show last year. Privately, Identity Evropa members celebrated the interview as a recruitment driver, the leaked chat logs reveal.

“Can we send a bouquet of flowers and a ‘thank you from Identity Evropa’ card to the ‘TODAY Show’?” one group member wrote in a message first flagged by Media Matters researcher Madeline Peltz. “I feel like we owe them something after so many applications today.”

The racist group wasn’t just pandering to the media. Members were also encouraged to get involved with their local Republican parties, Splinter first reported.

“Identity Evropa leadership strongly encourages our members to get involved in local politics. We’ve been pushing this for a while, but haven’t seen much of it happening,” leader Patrick Casey wrote in an Oct. 2017 message. “Today I decided to get involved in my county’s Republican party. Everyone can do this without fear of getting doxxed. The GOP is essentially the White man’s party at this point (it gets Whiter every election cycle), so it makes far more sense for us to subvert it than to create our own party.”

Months later, Identity Evropa member and Charlottesville marcher James Allsup quietly won an uncontested seat in his local Republican party, The Daily Beast first reported. After months of hedging by local Republican leaders who likened Allsup to a lynching victim, the local party ejected him in January.

But other Identity Evropa members have stayed close to the Republican Party. One member who described himself in October as having “an interview for a political job coming up. Anyone know any good inside sources for political news? I can’t say my main news source is [fascist podcast] Fash the Nation.” (Elsewhere in the chat, he posted racist and anti-Semitic attacks.)

The member used the screen name “Logan” and shared links to his now-defunct website, which he registered under the name, Logan Piercy. He described “door knocking” on behalf of Republican candidates in Montana during the 2018 congressional primaries. Piercy did not return The Daily Beast’s Thursday request for comment at the email address used to register his website.

Racists who didn’t campaign on the ground instead pushed for their favorite Republicans from afar. In September, when Rep. Steve King was under fire for being a white supremacist, Casey ordered the group to call then-House Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy to voice support for King, HuffPost first reported.

“Got through on the 202 number,” one member wrote. “Thanked lady for taking my call, identified myself as a member of a young conservationist Republican group that supports Congressman Steve King.”

Others bragged of donating money to King, and dreamed about getting him to interact with their Twitter account, as he has with other white supremacists.

Younger members described themselves as being members of College Republicans clubs.

“I’m an officer in my college republicans. I’m sure many other IE members are. It’s easy to infiltrate low level GOP stuff if you just show up,” one Identity Evropa member said in September, adding that he hoped to convert two members of his club. He also described modeling the club after Identity Evropa.

“[That feeling when] I’m making rules for my college republicans based on the IE guidelines and it makes me look like the responsible moderate,” he wrote.

“Join college republicans if you haven’t already,” another urged his fellow white supremacists.

“Dude I joined college republicans and a day later I had a 30 minute conversation with the most right wing populist candidate on the east coast,” another wrote.

A fourth Identity Evropa member mulled “starting a chapter” of College Republicans at his school.

Identity Evropa is far from the only far-right group making eyes at the GOP. Conservative youth darling Turning Point USA is reportedly rife with racism, as its former national field director allegedly texted another employee that “I hate all black people. Like fuck them all… I hate blacks. End of story.” The Proud Boys, an ultra-nationalist brawling group, have posed with Republican politicians and acted as a security service for Roger Stone.

Unicorn Riot’s Wednesday leaks also included chat logs from groups dedicated to a podcast by Allsup and his colleague Nick Fuentes, and logs for a chat group specifically for Fuentes fans.

Fuentes was at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where he posed with Brexit architect Nigel Farage. An apparent admirer of Identity Evropa who was active in Fuentes group chat was also in attendance. The young man, who posted under the screen name Simon Scola, lamented in Fuentes’ group chat that Identity Evropa’s Massachusetts “twitter page is dead and i doubt they have many people.” Elsewhere in the chat he posted an Identity Evropa sticker, which he bought at a racist conference.

Though Scola wrote about his fears of having his identity exposed, he revealed himself to the hosts of socialist podcast Chapo Trap House, who were attending CPAC with media passes.

In a Monday episode, Chapo host Will Menaker described a young man running up to them with a copy of pundit Ben Shapiro’s book while Chapoco-host Matt Christman was tripping on acid. “He was like, ‘sign my book! Sign my book for me!’” Menaker said. “And Matt actually did sign it, ‘eat shit.’”

Shortly after the encounter, Scola proudly tweeted a picture of the Shapiro book, with “eat shit” scribbled on the front page.

“The kid whose book I signed was a ratty little dude with bad facial hair,” Christman told The Daily Beast.

Source: ‘Whiter Every Election Cycle’: How a Hate Group Joined GOP

Filed under Radicalization Tagged with , , ,

Islamic State extremism on show at “miserable” Syria camp

2019/03/11 Leave a comment

Reminder of need for caution regarding wannabe returnees:

AL-HOL CAMP, Syria, March 8 (Reuters) – Foreign women with Islamic State have tried to assault others they deem “infidels” at a camp where they are being held in northeast Syria, attempting to impose their views even as the jihadists are facing territorial defeat, Reuters journalists visiting the site have found.

“They yell at us that we are infidels for showing our faces,” said a Syrian woman at al-Hol camp, where women and children were transferred from Islamic State’s final bastion in eastern Syria. “They tried to hit us.”

The Baghouz enclave is Islamic State’s last shred of populated territory after years of attacks have rolled back its ultra-radical “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq.

But its impending defeat is confronting the U.S.-allies Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) with the problem of what to do with growing numbers of people, many of them Islamic State followers, emerging from the enclave.

Most have been sent to al-Hol camp, already overcrowded with uprooted Syrians and Iraqis. Camp officials say they do not have enough tents, food, or medicine. Aid workers warn of spreading diseases, and dozens of children have died on the way there.

At least 62,000 people have now flooded the camp, the United Nations said on Friday, way above its capacity. More than 90 percent of the new arrivals are women and children.

The Syrian Kurdish authorities who control the camp have cordoned off the foreign women. On Friday, dressed head-to-toe in black and wearing full face veils, they gathered behind a fence with a locked gate.

“The foreigners throw stones. They swear at the Syrians or Iraqis and at the camp officials. Even the kids make threats,” said a security official at the camp.

‘WE NEED HELP’

Guards have fired in the air to break up a few fights and on one occasion used a taser to pacify a foreign female jihadist detainee, another Syrian woman at the camp said.

Some of the women coming out of Baghouz in recent weeks have displayed strongly pro-Islamic State sympathies.

Hundreds of jihadists have also surrendered. But the Kurdish-led SDF believes the most hardened are still inside, ready for a fight to the death.

Before the final assault on Baghouz, the SDF said it was holding some 800 foreign Islamic State militants and 2,000 of their wives and children. While it has not given updated figures, the numbers have ballooned, prompting fresh calls for support.

“The situation in the camp is very miserable. The displaced are growing very much and we are trying to cover people’s needs as much as we can. But we need help,” said Mazin Shekhi, an official at the camp.

When young children arrive alone, officials deliver them to aid agencies or try to find adults to care for them at the camp for now, he added.

“Even the big tents are full. People are sleeping out in the open.”

The International Rescue Committee said at least 100 people have died, mostly children, en route or soon after reaching the camp, and more than 100 children have arrived on their own. The aid agency warned the camp had reached breaking point.

Women from different countries begged for food or asked about their detained husbands, while young boys kicked a ball around in the dirt amid scores of tents swaying in the wind.

CAMP SKIRMISHES

Some of the tensions at al-Hol reflect friction that has simmered for years between jihadists who travelled to Syria to join Islamic State, “al-Muhajirin”, and locals who were members or lived under its rule.

“There were problems with some people,” said a 30-year-old woman from Turkestan who gave her name as Dilnor.

She said her entire family had moved to Syria to escape oppression at home and “just wanted to live under the caliphate”. Her mother, father and siblings all followed her to Syria.

“The natives … they were kind of rude. They always said the muhajirin are a problem and dirty and so on. It was always like that,” she said outside the wire fence of the pen where she was staying with scores of other women.

“Now (they) are alone, and the muhajirin alone. Now there are no problems.”

Shekhi, the camp official, said foreign women with ties to Islamic State had been kept apart so “they don’t mix” with others. “We put them in a section alone to avoid them making problems with the displaced,” he said.

The foreign women often fought among themselves, he added.

“There are some who are more extremist who don’t accept others. This is happening just among themselves, because they are separated from the Syrians and Iraqis,” he said. “The situation is under control.”

The staunch loyalties of Islamic State followers point to the risk the group will continue to pose after the capture of Baghouz. It is also widely accepted that the militants will still represent a threat, holding remote patches of territory and mounting guerrilla attacks.

Source: Islamic State extremism on show at “miserable” Syria camp

Filed under Radicalization, Refugees, Religion Tagged with , ,

ICYMI: Why we shouldn’t boycott Michael Jackson’s music

2019/03/09 Leave a comment

Agree (even if not a great fan):

The vivid revelations of sexual abuse by pop star Michael Jackson – unproven in court, but hauntingly recounted by survivors in a recent documentary and an Oprah Winfrey special – have raised once again that thorny question: Can you still enjoy the art or wisdom of someone who is alleged to have done evil?

Mr. Jackson’s family vehemently denies any wrongdoing at his objectively creepy Neverland estate, complete with its youth-chasing Peter Pan themes. The estate is vilifying the young men who have come forward with their stories of seduction, grooming and worse, which go back to 1993. We may never know exactly what happened on those 2,800 acres near Los Olivos, Calif., and Dan Reed’s documentary Leaving Neverland reprises old rumours, but cannot definitively prove them beyond the first-person accounts.

Three major Quebec radio stations, the BBC, Norwegian radio and at least one Dutch outlet have now boycotted MJ’s music in the wake of this recent publicity. Others are sure to follow. Many former fans are likewise sickened and censorious, and indisputably, the King of Pop has had his crown knocked down. It wasn’t so long ago, of course, that Mr. Jackson held his infant son over a balcony in Berlin, apparently one step away from dropping Prince Michael II onto the pavement below. But the pressing question now is whether Mr. Jackson’s work is irredeemably tainted – and whether we can ever listen to his music innocently again.

Everyone must make their own calls on this. Personally, I find it easy to separate the man from his music. I will go to my grave loving the Motown-era Jackson Five versions of I Want You Back and ABC, with Little Michael in angel-voiced glory. And the 1983 Motown Special performance riveted my world with a new Michael, complete with the game-changing moonwalk.

Still, that doesn’t settle the basic question. For many decades, we have been confronted by artists whose views and actions seem to undermine their best achievements, and there are even websites devoted to rating their misdeeds, because of course there are. There is a rogues’ gallery of racists and anti-Semites in the Western arts and culture canon: Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Patricia Highsmith, T.S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, H.P. Lovecraft, Dr. Seuss (!). There are misogynists and alleged wife-murderers: William S. Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Louis Althusser. There are actual charged murderers: Caravaggio and Phil Spector, for example. And there are, of course, many very bad husbands and wives: Charles Dickens, Pablo Picasso, Woolf again, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald (a drunk as well) and so on. And there is the going concern of Woody Allen, who continues to work despite the allegations of sexual abuse against him.

As critic Charles McGrath said, “Genet was a thief, Rimbaud was a smuggler, Byron committed incest, Flaubert paid for sex with boys.” So are you going to give up reading them all because of moral censure? That would, at the very least, limit your literary range. Explaining away racism, anti-Semitism or misogyny as a “feature of the time” is little better, a mealy-mouthed apology.

So the best way forward is just to bite the bullet on bad behaviour. In philosophy, the special case is Martin Heidegger, the phenomenologist who revolutionized German philosophy in the 1920s with his monumental bookBeing and Time, and continued to influence the discourse after the Second World War with dense essays on art, poetry and technology. The problem is that, from the 1930s on, Heidegger aligned himself solidly and publicly with the Nazi Party. His 1933 Rector’s Speech at the University of Freiburg is an uncommonly clear defence of the authoritarian status of Adolf Hitler, and of the subservient role universities must assume under a Nazi regime. It is an indefensible, shameful performance: craven, arrogant, pretentious, and slick all at once. Heidegger worked to destroy his Jewish former mentor, Edmund Husserl, and maltreated his secret Jewish lover, Hannah Arendt.

What a world-class creep! And still I recommend that my students read Heidegger. Why? Because the man is the instrument, not the hand. I assign his work in almost every class I teach, because his insight is indisputable. I never play down the Nazi proclivities, or how they are joined to deeper thoughts about Earth and world, beauty and truth. He was a terrible man, but a great philosopher.

That is how it rolls here on planet Earth. Human beings are flawed, sometimes terrible creatures. And yet they can, under the right circumstances, commune with the sublime. I don’t know how that is possible, but it is. Don’t turn off the music, friends: Just turn on the awareness.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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