IRCC Minister commends Richmond council for tackling birth tourism

2020/02/13 2 Comments

No signalling of change or new studies or initiatives as expected (need to await the results of the IRCC, CIHI, StatsCan analysis of those non-resident self-pay on visitor visas compared to other temporary residents):

Marco Mendicino, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, told the Richmond News the federal government wants to “weed out” abuses of the immigration system, but he added the principle of “jus soli” – birthright citizenship – has served Canada well.

Birthright citizenship has been in existence in Canada since 1947 and it is also a common practise in other countries, like the U.S. and some Commonwealth countries, Mendicino pointed out.

“There are families who do come to Canada and do avail themselves of this principle and they’re able to bestow upon their children Canadian citizenship as a result of this principle – along with that a number of rights and privileges,” he said, adding “it’s a principle that has absolutely served the country well.”

But Richmond has become known as the “epicentre” of birth tourism, attracting people who come to give birth here in order to secure Canadian citizenship for their baby. In the past year, 23 per cent of babies born at Richmond Hospital were born to non-residents.

Several businesses advertise – exclusively in the Chinese language – for birth tourism services, saying they will provide accommodations for pregnant women and help with after-care and paperwork.

Richmond council passed a motion on Monday to push the minister to end automatic citizenship for babies born to non-residents.

Mendicino said he “commends” the mayor and council of Richmond for having a discussion about the birth tourism and he will reflect on the motion that was passed. The issue needs to be monitored and tracked “very closely,” he said.

“I think we should express some gratitude to the City of Richmond and the council for examining the issue and advocating what the issues are within the context of the concern,” he said. “It’s more about determining and finding where the abuses are within the system rather than getting rid of the principle.”

Mendicino said the federal government is taking “concrete steps” to strengthen the oversight of immigration consultants “to really hold accountable any individuals who are trying to backdoor or take advantage of the system.”

He added the federal government wants to work with provincial partners and municipalities like Richmond to “weed out any abuse of our immigration system.”

There was a level of frustration at Richmond council on Monday – directed somewhat at Vancouver Coastal Health, the provincial government and the federal government – as councillors debated the merits and wording of a letter to push the federal minister of immigration to tackle birth tourism.

Voting against the motion were Couns. Alexa Loo, Kelly Greene and Michael Wolfe.

While Greene said she’s 100 per cent against birth tourism, she felt the motion was worded so that it could cause “disproportionate harm” to “vulnerable people such as refugees and stateless people.”

She said the harm would be exclusively to people of colour and she didn’t want to see at-risk people further marginalized.

“The motion should be to stop birth tourism,” Greene said. “It’s not – it asks to stop birthright citizenship for a broad swath of people.”

Coun. Bill McNulty said he sees birth tourism in his neighbourhood and called on senior governments to take action.

“I think this is an issue that really has put us in a vulnerable position – the two levels of government are totally out of touch with what’s happening in the communities,” McNulty said.

He also suggested the city needs to push Vancouver Coastal Health into action, considering 66 per cent of non-resident births in B.C. take place at Richmond Hospital.

Au echoed the sentiment that VCH should look into the issue, saying the health authority is “not willing to touch this.”

However, VCH spokesperson Catherine Loiacono pointed out this is a federal issue and health care professionals have a duty to provide care to anyone who needs it.
“Care is always triaged according to the safety of the mother and baby – mothers needing immediate care are seen first,” she added.

Nursing baseline staffing is based on patient volumes – not on census data. A staffing review in 2019 found that Richmond Hospital is staffed “appropriately” for patient safety and quality care, Loiacono said. Because the nature of giving birth is unpredictable, if there are increased numbers of patients, more resources are brought in, she added.

Source: Minister commends Richmond council for tackling birth tourism

Filed under Birth Tourism, Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with , ,

Taking Away Citizenship as a Counterterrorism Tool Is Fraught with Challenges

2020/02/13 2 Comments

Phil Gurski, from the security perspective:

Citizenship is an important part of the modern world. Most of us are a citizen of at least one country. Having citizenship confers special privileges: the right to vote, the right to receive certain social assistance, the right to work, and a feeling of belonging. It should not be dismissed or used frivolously.

A lot of countries also grant citizenship to those who emigrate from their homelands to a new one (sometimes called ‘naturalized’). This process often takes some time – years in most cases – and is accompanied by all sorts of checks and reviews. After all, no state wants to bring in people with shady backgrounds who are capable of causing mayhem once they become ‘one of us.’

In my experience in Canada, the citizenship pathway is as good as it can be. The necessary agencies, including intelligence and law enforcement, are part of the decision-making process, ensuring to the greatest degree possible that we prevent ‘undesirables’ from making their new home in our nation. Is the system perfect? No, but it is very robust.

Under what conditions, then, should citizenship be revoked? We should assume here that the only type that can be removed is that which has been granted by the state: ordinarily those born in a country automatically receive it at birth (children of foreign diplomats may be an exception), and it far from clear whether there is anything that could – or should – lead a state to rescind birth citizenship (NB Canada is currently dealing with the phenomenon of ‘birth tourism’ whereby pregnant women, often from Asia, travel to give birth in Canadian hospitals. Where all this goes is under debate now.)

Modern terrorism has thrown a wrench into all this. In hundreds of countries citizens have radicalized to violence in accordance with an ideology, left the confines of their homeland, joined a group abroad and become part of it, committed atrocities in the group’s name on occasion and eventually seek to come home. Not surprisingly, few states want these individuals back as they could very well organize or commit acts of terrorism in their backyards. What can we do to prevent their return?

Under these circumstances, is citizenship revocation OK? Normally, no. Our governments take away what they have granted only if it can be demonstrated the process in place at the time of application was fraudulent. In other words, if so-and-so lied on a form and tried to hide certain facts from those investigating the claim, that application can be subsequently voided. This should not be controversial as all the relevant facts were not made available when needed and as a result the individual does not deserve to become one of us.

What, then, do we do in cases of terrorists, some of whom were born in our countries, some of whom got citizenship after having moved, but became terrorists later (sometime much, much later)? After all, the vast majority of terrorists are made not born. Can we take away their birthright/gift?

In the former case, no. Few if any countries have tried to do this and where they have they have tied themselves in legal knots. The UK has taken away the citizenship of ISIS member Shamima Begum despite the inconvenient fact that she was born in England. The government has tried to argue that she is ‘entitled’ to Bangladeshi citizenship as her ancestry lies in that country; hence, she has not been rendered stateless. Bangladesh sees the matter quite differently.

Then we have the case of Iyman Faris, an al-Qaeda terrorist who was found guilty and sentenced in 2003 for his role in a plot to cut the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge. A federal judge in Columbus, Ohio, stripped him of his naturalized U.S. citizenship after ruling that he had lied on immigration papers before becoming a citizen in 1999 (he entered the U.S. using the passport and visa of someone he’d met in Bosnia). The official also ruled that Faris’ terrorist affiliations demonstrated a lack of commitment to the U.S. Constitution.

Two years earlier another judge had rejected a similar request by the government, saying at the time there wasn’t enough evidence to prove Mr. Faris’ misrepresentations influenced the decision to grant him citizenship.

Where does this leave us? In a legal quandary, that’s where. The UK handling of Ms. Begum beggars disbelief as she is the citizen of one and only one country. The U.S. strategy in the case of Faris suggests that anyone who does anything illegal at any point in their life is at risk of having their citizenship clawed back. Neither case is ideal.

The bottom line is that Ms. Begum, and perhaps Mr. Faris, were radicalized where they lived and worked. They are a product of a part of our society – not a proud part, but a part nonetheless. Recalling citizenship merely displaces the problem: it does not solve it.

Source: https://www.hstoday.us/subject-matter-areas/counterterrorism/perspective-taking-away-citizenship-as-a-counterterrorism-tool-is-fraught-with-challenges/

Filed under Citizenship, Radicalization, Revocation Tagged with

Why Labeling Antonio Banderas A ‘Person Of Color’ Triggers Such A Backlash

2020/02/12 2 Comments

Interesting reflections on identity and who is Latino or Hispanic.

Same issues emerge with respect to Canadian visible minority classifications: Argentine and Chilean are not formally classified as Latin American by StatsCan yet ethnic media regularly portrays Canadian politicians of Argentine and Chilean origin as Latino (e.g., Heritage minister Pablo Rodriguez):

As Oscars night approaches on Sunday, movie fans are being reminded of a persistent diversity problem in the film industry’s most anticipated awards event: Few nominees aren’t white.

Only one person of color was nominated in the acting categories: Cynthia Erivo for her role as Harriet Tubman in the biopic Harriet.

Some media, however, also alluded to another actor as an exception to the #OscarsSoWhite dilemma: Outlets called Antonio Banderas, nominated for best actor for his role in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory, an actor of color.

The thing is, Banderas is from Málaga, Spain, and does not identify as a person of color. There are nonwhite Spanish people, but this isn’t the case for him.

In an interview with Univision’s Jorge Ramos in January, Banderas was asked about the controversy. He chuckled and said he prefers to take it with a bit of humor.

“I don’t know what I am,” he told Ramos. “When I’ve gone to the U.S., I’ve considered myself Latino, because those are the people I’ve connected with the most.”

Banderas then recalled filling out an official form in the U.S.: When he went to check the box for “white” under race, he was told that was wrong, that he was Hispanic.

“I said, ‘Hispanic isn’t actually a race,’ ” Banderas told Ramos, but he went ahead and checked the Hispanic box. “Great, I’m happy to be Hispanic, Spanish, Latino, and if I’m a person of color, well then I’m a person of color.”

The idea that Banderas is a white European may be obvious to many, especially those in the Latinx community, but it’s not the first time a white Spaniard has been referred to in the U.S. as a “person of color” or Latinx.

After all, Spaniards are technically considered Hispanic by the U.S. Census Bureau, which defines the term as “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.”

And Latinx is a gender-inclusive variation of Latino/Latina, which generally includes any person of Latin American descent.

Banderas has often taken on Latin American roles in movies, including a Mexican mariachi assassin in Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado.

A person of color?

After the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominees last month, the news site Deadline wrote that the men’s acting categories “were dominated by white actors with Antonio Banderas being the lone person of color” and later tweeting that “only two actors of color were nominated in the major acting categories.” The publication eventually deleted both comments, although the previous version of the article is on other sites.

Vanity Fair wrote — and eventually deleted — that “while Spaniards are not technically considered people of color, it should be noted” that Banderas was also nominated.

And Reuters initially referred to Banderas and Erivo as the only “not white” actors nominated. The news agency later corrected the mistake, but some publications had already run the original version.

The backlash in Spain has been fierce.

Spanish media pounced on the word choice. Some publications accused the U.S. of having an “absurd obsession” with race. Others criticized Hollywood, saying that it was “convenient” to consider Banderas a person of color to appear more diverse.

To make things more confusing, Spanish media translated “person of color” literally — persona de color — a phrase that, in Spain, isn’t used in the same way as in the United States. While different Spanish-speaking countries have variations of the concept, in Spain the term persona racializada is usually used instead.

To many Spaniards’ ears, persona de color made it sound like Americans were saying Banderas was black. Twitter users made jokes about the term, saying Banderas is a person of color — the color white.

Putting Spanish in the same box

But others thought the term offensive and called it racist.

Juan Pedro Sánchez, 25, who lives in Madrid and weighed in on the Twitter discussion, criticized those who responded negatively, saying the concept of race and ethnicity varies according to where you are. He said Spaniards were all too quick to point out that they’re white.

“A lot of people in Spain are bothered if others confuse them for Latin American because Spaniards see Latinos as people of color, and they don’t want to be associated with that,” Sánchez tells NPR.

He says this confusion happens often to Spaniards traveling outside Spain. He experienced it firsthand when he spent a summer in Chicago in 2017.

“It’s a reoccurring problem — they put Spaniards in the same box as Latinos,” says Sánchez. “What bothers me is not being considered a person of color, but that people ignore that Spain was a colonizer country. It erases that history.”

There’s another part of history that’s sometimes overlooked. Whiteness within Spain itself is complicated. There have been historically marginalized communities, including people with Roma or North African ancestry, who are often considered nonwhite. At times in history, many Spaniards have also felt like the “other” in Europe.

Not just about language

Spanish-speakers have a variety of backgrounds. Many people labeled Hispanic also identify as white, black, Middle Eastern, Indigenous, Asian or any mix of these. But many Hispanic and Latinx people don’t speak Spanish.

Confusion around labels can lead people to assume that someone identifies as Latinx or as a person of color simply because Spanish is their mother tongue, according to sociologist Jennifer Jones at the University of Illinois.

“There’s just a presumption that anyone who speaks Spanish is of a certain background,” says Jones. “I think there’s this interesting slippage, which has happened from the beginning of the invention of the so-called Hispanic category, that it was primarily understood by a lot of folks as about language and less about country of origin.”

Jones says there’s a reason the term Hispanic is so vague. When it was first introduced into the U.S. census in 1980, the idea was to be as inclusive and all-encompassing as possible, so as to not leave out any groups. Before 1980, people of Latin American descent were labeled white by the U.S. government — but by being grouped with whites, there were few statistics on the Latinx community and therefore no way of knowing what its concerns and needs were.

“There wasn’t a lot of consensus about what it meant to be Hispanic in the first place, and so [those lobbying for the term to be created] were kind of reluctant to give very clear parameters around that,” says Jones. “But they realized there was power in numbers to be able to make claims to the state, in terms of resources and support, to create a voting bloc and to get lawsuits around these kinds of issues. So they sort of banded together as a way of asking for a category.”

Linguistic anthropologist Jonathan Rosa at Stanford University says it’s precisely because of this inclusive language that people from Spain can now strategically access certain political and economic markets — and benefit from the ambiguity of the definition of Hispanic.

“People fought really hard to have these categories or to make recognition possible for artistic or athletic or intellectual prowess,” Rosa says. “And I think there’s legitimate concern when someone who isn’t associated with the kinds of histories of marginalization and exclusion … is benefiting.”

Latin music?

He gives the example of Spanish flamenco-trap singer Rosalía, who has won various Latin music awards since her career took off internationally in late 2018: an MTV award for best Latin video, five Latin Grammys and, just last month, a Grammy for best Latin rock, urban or alternative album.

“She then ends up being a sign of these really troublesome layered forms of marginalization where not only is there only one category [for Latinx music] but the only person who can be honored within that category isn’t even associated with the experience that that category was allegedly created to recognize,” says Rosa.

But that experience can be hard to define. Even within the Latinx community itself, people face different kinds of marginalization. Many factors are at play, including race, socioeconomic class and education level. A white, middle-class person from Chile may be treated differently in the U.S. from a working-class person from El Salvador with Indigenous roots.

“Things need to be complicated”

And then there are the different experiences between new immigrants and Latinx people born in the U.S. or whose families have been stateside for generations. What’s more, the terms Hispanic and Latinx have frequently fluctuated to include or exclude different communities and nationalities.

As Banderas notes, in the U.S., Spaniards are considered Hispanic. That may mean that they receive similar treatment to those in the Latinx community.

In Rosa’s view, that’s not as much a problem as the risk of overlooking Spain’s history of colonialization.

“People say you’re making things more complicated, but things need to be complicated,” says Rosa. “I just worry that we end up flattening out history. My goal here is not to police Latinidad [Latin-ness],” he says. “My goal is to draw attention to these power dynamics.”

Source: Why Labeling Antonio Banderas A ‘Person Of Color’ Triggers Such A Backlash

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Australia Can’t Deport Indigenous Aboriginal People, Court Rules

2020/02/12 Leave a comment

Would appear to have been self-evident!

Australia’s highest court ruled Tuesday the government can’t deport Aboriginal people as part of its policy of ridding the country of foreign criminals.

The High Court ruled in a 4-3 decision that indigenous Australians cannot be deported even if they do not hold Australian citizenship.

The court had heard the case of two men who were born overseas but identified as being from indigenous tribes.

The government attempted to deport them after they served prison sentences for violent crimes. The government has been criticized for deporting some criminals who have lived in Australia since where were children but had never become citizens.

The court found that Brendan Thoms, 31, who was born in New Zealand to an indigenous Australian mother, was an Aboriginal Australian.

Thoms had lived in Australia since he was 6, is accepted as a member of the Gunggari tribe and is recognized as a native title holder of their traditional land.

But a majority of judges was not convinced that Daniel Love, 40, was indigenous and was accepted as a member of the Kamilaroi tribe.

He was born in Papua New Guinea to an indigenous Australian father and has lived in Australia since he was 5.

His lawyers say he will provide more evidence of his Aboriginality and another trial could be held to decide the issue.

Both Love and Thoms were placed in immigration detention and threatened with deportation on their release from prison after serving sentences for unrelated crimes.

Love has had his visa restored since his lawyers initiated court action and lives on the Gold Coast.

Thoms has been in immigration detention in Brisbane for the 16 months since he completed a six-month prison sentence.

Their lawyer Claire Gibbs demanded that Thoms be immediately released.

“He’s very anxious to be released and to be reunited with his family after all this time,” Gibbs said outside court.

“The High Court has found that Aboriginal Australians are protected from deportation. They can no longer be removed from the country that they know and that they have a very close connection with,” she added.

The Home Affairs Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Gibbs said both Love and Thoms would sue the government for wrongful detention.

“Both of my clients have suffered severe embarrassment about being Aboriginal men in immigration detention and they’ve been subject to a lot of ridicule,” Gibbs said. “So it’s been a very, very tough time for them both.”

The court found Aboriginal Australian have a special cultural, historic and spiritual connection to Australia which is inconsistent with them being considered “aliens” in the meaning of the Australian constitution.

Indigenous Australians make up 3% of the population and are the most disadvantaged minority group in a range of measures. Indigenous Australians die younger than other Australians and are overrepresented in prisons.

Source: Australia Can’t Deport Indigenous Aboriginal People, Court Rules

Filed under Aboriginal, Citizenship Tagged with ,

Islamic finance making strides in Canada

2020/02/12 Leave a comment

Relatively less coverage in Canadian media although there are a number of players.

One of the more recent stories I have seen in “mainstream” media is www.cbc.ca › news › canada › toronto › 2-men-acquitted-of-all-fraud…2 men acquitted of all fraud, theft charges in Shariah … – CBC.ca:

Although currently not quite in the very centre of attention of the global Islamic finance industry, the Canadian Islamic finance scene in the recent past has experienced growing interest from domestic and international investors, as it developed a rising number of Shariah-compliant investment and financing offerings. The reason is that more Muslims are seeking halal banking and finance products and – in general – an open-minded and progressive society is looking for alternative and socially conscious ways of investing.

Canada is home to an estimated 1.5mn people following the Islamic faith, or around 4% of the population, which makes Muslims the second largest religion in the country, while it is also the fastest-growing. Most of them are immigrants, but there is also a growing percentage of Muslims born in Canada and a smaller, but increasing number converting from other religions to Islam. Most of them live in the Greater Toronto and Greater Montreal area and are generally middle-class and well educated with considerable grades of financial literacy. Overall, it is estimated that the number of Canadian Muslims will double in the coming decade. Besides, the Muslim community in Canada is quite young, so there is definitely a large potential for mortgage, car, house and personal insurance, credit cards and consumer loans. Multiple-language offerings, personalised services and modern technology-based banking and investment products further create demand in Islamic banking.

These facts, paired with Canada’s global competitiveness and ease of doing business, its AAA credit rating, its well-supervised financial market with strong risk management mechanisms, a sound banking system and a financial regulatory regime which has shown to be compatible with many Islamic finance instruments make a solid background for a thriving Islamic banking and finance landscape.

This situation, together with open-minded non-Muslims on the outlook for ethical and sustainable investment, has raised particular demand for halal mortgages and sukuk and Islamic mutual funds, Islamic insurance, or takaful, as well as commodity- and infrastructure-backed investment. Notably, Canada’s wealth in natural resources, which ranges from mining to hydrocarbons, combined with its ambitious infrastructure development agenda provide countless investment opportunities for investors looking for Shariah compliance in accordance with the asset-backed product requirements of Islamic finance.

There are already a number of Islamic finance players, with the most established being United Muslim Financial, Habib Canadian Bank, Al-Ittihad Investment, Al Yusr, Manzil Bank, Ijara Community Development Corp, Islamic Co-Operative Housing Corp, Ansar Co-operative Housing Corp, Qurtuba Housing Co-op, An-Nur Housing Cooperative, Amana Auto Finance Canada, Assiniboine Credit Union, newer players such as Iana Financial, Wealthsimple Halal, ShariaPortfolio Canada, Global Iman Fund, as well as a number of other medium-sized and smaller player and mortgage cooperatives. Besides, there are a growing number conventional banks and financial institutions opening Islamic windows or planning to do so, among them Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce or the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.

According to the Toronto Financial Services Alliance, a public-private entity seeking to turn Toronto into a global financial center, the Canadian banking sector currently has around $18bn worth of Shariah-compliant mortgages, while international sukuk could generate $130bn in domestic infrastructure investment managed using a combination of both Islamic and environmentally and socially responsible investing methodologies.

Another area where Canada is likely to expand its Islamic finance sector is takaful. Large insurance companies such as Manulife Financial and Sun Life Financial are currently gaining experience from their takaful-based insurance subsidiaries they have opened in Malaysia and Indonesia and are also developing ethical mutual insurance products bearing in mind that mutual insurances policies are very similar to takaful as they provide a fair and transparent relationship between policyholders and insurer.

In a nutshell, three are plenty of opportunities for Islamic banking in Canada with a Muslim population that will increase substantially in the future and with a growing interest of foreign investors noticing that Canada is developing into an Western hub for Islamic investment and finance, following the footsteps of the UK.

Source: Islamic finance making strides in Canada

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

Deportation flight leaves UK for Jamaica despite court ruling

2020/02/12 2 Comments

More questionable UK government practice:

A planned deportation flight to Jamaica has taken off but with only around half of those due to have been on board after a court last night upheld a legal challenge.

As the government came under fire for proceeding with the flight, it was defended on Tuesday by the Chancellor, Sajid Javid, who said those onboard were not members of the Windrush generation but offenders who posed a risk to the public.

“These are all foreign national offenders – they have all received custodial sentences of 12 months or more. They are responsible for crimes like manslaughter, rape, dealing in class A drugs,” he told BBC Radio 5 live.

Asked how many people were onboard, he said he did not know the exact number but believed it was “around 20 – or above 20.” Around 56 people were originally thought to have been due to be deported.

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Saudi Arabia Rebuffs Trump Administration’s Requests to Stop Teaching Hate Speech in Schools

2020/02/12 Leave a comment

“Modernization” only goes so far:

In 2018, Saudi women took to the streets around the country, permitted to drive cars themselves for the first time. That same year, unrelated men and women were allowed to mix at a Formula-E car race and concert extravaganza, listening to DJ David Quetta and the Black Eyed Peas—unthinkable not long ago in a country where religious police used to enforce a strict separation of the sexes.

That’s part of the raft of highly visible social reforms that Saudi Arabia has launched in recent years as the Kingdom tries to reposition itself as a modern global economic powerhouse. But you don’t have to look far to see a very different country, where officials plotted the violent murder of The Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi, where a young Saudi Air Force officer studied before deploying for training in Florida where he shot three U.S. Navy Airmen last fall, and where millions of children go to school every day and read state-sanctioned hate speech in their text books.

For a White House that seems to have given Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a wide berth on the first two incidents, the Trump Administration has been pushing hard behind the scenes for the last one to change. Since 2017, when President Donald Trump marked Saudi Arabia as a key regional ally, the Administration has seen the state’s textbooks — which teach a version of fundamental Islam so extreme it was used by the Islamic State — as a security threat and a key part of its efforts to fight terrorism.

Two new reviews of Saudi government textbooks show not much has changed, despite these efforts. In 2019, Saudi students were still being instructed to keep westerners at a distance, to consider Jews “monkeys” and “assassins” bent on harming Muslim holy places, and to punish gays by death. All those sentiments are included in text books that are required reading for Muslim children in Saudi Arabia from kindergarten through high school, according to a review by Jerusalem-based Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, or IMPACT SE, a nonprofit whose research has been cited by the UN and the Anti-Defamation League.

A second organization highlighted similar disturbing material. “Students are being taught that Christians, Jews and other Muslims are ‘enemies’ of the true believer, and to befriend and show respect only to other true believers, specifically the Wahhabis,” the strict sect of Islam upon which Saudi Arabia was founded, says Ali Al-Ahmed of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Gulf Studies, in a preview for TIME of his own meticulous review of the 2019 textbooks due out in March. The two groups have shared their results with U.S. government officials.

Both reviews acknowledge there have been some changes to the Saudi curriculum, designed to appease the Kingdom’s western critics. Al-Ahmed notes that in one passage, the phrase “Christians and Jews” has been replaced with phrase “the enemies of Islam,” but says other parts of the same textbook make clear that Christians and Jews remain in the ‘enemies’ camp. Marcus Sheff, CEO of IMPACT SE, says some of the most notable changes in the curriculum fit in the Crown Prince’s ambitious modernization plan for the country, called Vision 2030, such as depicting women as entrepreneurs. “But they are encouraged to be entrepreneurs while not befriending westerners they would do business with,” Sheff adds.

The slow pace of change and the Saudi government’s refusal to do more has been a source of disappointment to Trump, a senior administration official tells TIME. Trump joins a long line of U.S. leaders, UN bodies and human and civil rights groups that have been pressuring the Saudi government for decades to stop proselytizing its harsh version of Wahhabi Islam, spread inside and outside the Kingdom by its clerics’ sermons online or given in mosques that Saudi money built. The government freely distributes hundreds of thousands of Wahhabi Qurans around the world, and makes its school textbooks freely available on the internet. Since the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., largely by Saudi-born jihadists, every administration that has occupied the White House has asked the Saudi government to revise what it teaches its children, with only glacial change as a result.

Trump Administration officials say they’ve been working in private to point out the dangers of this kind of hateful language to Saudi officials, but they are reluctant to publicly criticize Riyadh’s foot-dragging. “We can’t just demand from a sovereign nation ally an immediate fix,” a second senior administration official told TIME. “The Saudis are crucial to our national security efforts in the region, mainly those in places like Yemen… They have provided us a lot of support in those fights that we share.”

The Bush and Obama Administrations also kept similar critiques behind closed doors, according to Farah Pandith, who served in both administrations and was appointed first-ever Special Representative to Muslim Communities. “They were our partners in the post-9/11 context in fighting al Qaeda. We wanted to do this in a way that allowed them to keep a little bit of dignity but also show leadership,” she told TIME. “It should not be others forcing them to do the right thing.” She says the Saudi government has dismissed some of the more extreme preachers and taken some of their most hate-filled sermons off the internet, but much of the material is still accessible, including in the national curriculum. “It’s a question of scale. I traveled to 80 countries as representative to Muslim communities. None has more influence than the Saudis.”

Saudi critics like say the curriculum is perpetuating extremist violence, including the actions of Saudi Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, 21, who is accused of opening fire on U.S. personnel at Naval Air Station Pensacola on December 6th, killing three Navy Airmen and injuring eight. Alshamrani, an officer of the Royal Saudi Air Force, had armed himself with a legally purchased 9mm Glock handgun, only days after reportedly showing videos of mass shootings to other Saudi students training at the base as part of a longstanding U.S. military training program.

Terrorism expert Mia Bloom says the material Alshamrani would have ingested at school back home was so extreme that the State Department found it was used by the Islamic State during its reign of terror in Iraq and Syria. “Until ISIS started publishing their own ‘Al-Harouf’ series of children’s textbooks, ISIS used Saudi textbooks in their schools to train the cubs of the caliphate,” Bloom told TIME, a subject she detailed in her 2019 book, Small Arms: Children and Terrorism. “The Saudi textbooks promoted a view of the world that was virtually indistinguishable from ISIS ideology: hatred of the west; hatred of other Muslims, that are not Sunni; hatred of Jews and antagonism towards women.” Al-Ahmed says the Saudi officer would have had to prove mastery of such malevolent material to rise in the military ranks.

None of the Trump Administration officials would go so far as to blame such lessons for the Saudi officer’s alleged actions, but they concede if the education had been reformed shortly after 9/11 in 2001, when Alshamrani would have been around two years old, it may have helped. “Unfortunately, Pensacola is a reminder — a harsh one — of work left undone,” an administration official said.

“You could go back to 2001,” a second senior official added, referring to the attacks that killed more than 3,000 Americans. “If they had changed their textbooks in 1975, we’d be in a better spot.” The administration officials interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity to brief TIME on their sensitive discussions with the Saudi Kingdom over the issue.

Among the gradual changes IMPACT SE notes in the 2019 Saudi textbooks include striking several references of Christians as “pure infidels” or unbelievers, and removing the statement that “Christianity in its current state is an invalid and perverted religion.” The Christian faith is no longer defined as a “colonial religious movement that subjected Muslims to Western ideas and stopped the spread of Islam,” the report said, all of which are positive changes if your number one supporter is President Trump, whose base is largely made up of evangelical Christians.

Also deleted is the claim that the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” are “a secret Jewish plan to take over the world,” and that Jews believe the world was promised to them and that it’s their right to control it. But Zionism is still described as a racist movement that uses money, the media, drugs, and women to achieve its goals, according to IMPACT SE’s review.

A Saudi official told TIME that the Kingdom “is implementing a comprehensive program to reform and improve all its educational institutions,” which include “ongoing” reforms to the textbooks. The official declined to comment on an advance copy of IMPACT-SE’s report made available to him by TIME.

Amb. Nathan Sales, the State Department’s Acting Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights, asked the Saudi government to make further changes to the textbooks, but was rebuffed, a senior administration official told TIME. The State Department declined to comment on Sales’ interaction, but a senior State Department official said that “the Saudi government has worked to modernize the educational curriculum in public schools” but that “some textbooks containing derogatory and intolerant references to Shia and non-Muslims remained in use.” Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the friction with the Kingdom.

Administration officials are still hoping for bigger reforms this summer, when the government publishes the 2020 edition of the K through 12 textbooks.

Pandith says the textbooks aren’t the only thing that needs changing, as the hundreds of thousands of Saudi Korans distributed around the world also portray Wahhabism as the only true version of Islam. “If you want to demonstrate that you see the folly of what you did before…let’s do a buyback program,” she says, an idea she outlines in her 2019 book, How We Win.

“If MBS (the Crown Prince) wanted to overhaul the viewpoint that they are the only Muslims that matter, he could do it in a minute with the kind of government they have,” she says. “The choice to do it piecemeal means their heart isn’t in this endeavor.”

Source: Saudi Arabia Rebuffs Trump Administration’s Requests to Stop Teaching Hate Speech in Schools

Filed under Religion Tagged with , , ,

In Amazon’s Bookstore, No Second Chances for the Third Reich The retailer once said it would sell “the good, the bad and the ugly.” Now it has banished objectionable volumes — and agreed to erasing the swastikas from a photo book about a Nazi takeover.

2020/02/11 Leave a comment

Some transparency on their criteria needed, given the size and impact of Amazon. Strikes me as over-reach with the respect to the scrubbing of Nazi symbols in the “The Man in the High Castle” tribute book given that they are so central to the original novel and television series.

Other examples more clear cut:

Amazon is quietly canceling its Nazis.

Over the past 18 months, the retailer has removed two books by David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as several titles by George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. Amazon has also prohibited volumes like “The Ruling Elite: The Zionist Seizure of World Power” and “A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind.”

While few may lament the disappearance of these hate-filled books, the increasing number of banished titles has set off concern among some of the third-party booksellers who stock Amazon’s vast virtual shelves. Amazon, they said, seems to operate under vague or nonexistent rules.

“Amazon reserves the right to determine whether content provides an acceptable experience,” said one recent removal notice that the company sent to a bookseller.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been roiled in recent years by controversies that pit freedom of speech against offensive content. Amazon has largely escaped this debate. But with millions of third-party merchants supplying much of what Amazon sells to tens of millions of customers, that ability to maintain a low profile may be reaching its end.

Amazon began as a bookstore and, even as it has moved on to many more lucrative projects, now controls at least two-thirds of the market for new, used and digital volumes in the United States. With its profusion of reader reviews, ability to cut prices without worrying about profitability and its control of the electronic book landscape, to name only three advantages, Amazon has immense power to shape what information people are consuming.

Yet the retailer declines to provide a list of prohibited books, say how they were chosen or even discuss the topic. “Booksellers make decisions every day about what selection of books they choose to offer,” it said in a statement.

Gregory Delzer is a Tennessee bookseller whose Amazon listings account for about a third of his sales. “They don’t tell us the rules and don’t let us have a say,” he said. “But they squeeze us for every penny.”

Nazi-themed items regularly crop up on Amazon, where they are removed under its policy on “offensive and controversial materials.” Those rules pointedly do not apply to books. Amazon merely says that books for sale on its site “should provide a positive customer experience.”

Now Amazon is becoming increasingly proactive in removing Nazi material. It even allowed its own Nazi-themed show, “The Man in the High Castle,” to be cleaned up for a tribute book. The series, which began in 2015 and concluded in November, is set in a parallel United States where the Germans and the Japanese won World War II.

“High Castle” is lavish in its use of National Socialist symbols. “There’s nothing that there isn’t a swastika on,” the actor Rufus Sewell, who played the Nazi antihero, said in a promotional video. The series promoted its portrayal of “the controlling aesthetic of Hitler” in its nomination for a special effects Emmy.

But in “The Man in the High Castle: Creating the Alt World,” published in November by Titan Books, the swastikas and eagle-and-crosses were digitally erased from Mr. Sewell’s uniform, from Times Square and the Statue of Liberty, even from scenes set in Berlin. A note on the copyright page said, “We respect, in this book, the legal and ethical responsibility of not perpetuating the distribution of the symbols of oppression.”

An Amazon spokeswoman said, “We did not make editorial edits to the images.” Titan, which wanted to market the book in Germany, where laws on Nazi imagery are strict, said Amazon approved the changes.

Some fans of the series said they found reading the book as dystopian as the show itself. “If you can’t even have swastikas shown in a book about Nazis taking over America, please do not make books ever again,” wrote one reviewer.

When Amazon drops a book from its store, it is as if it never existed. A recent Google search for David Duke’s “My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding” on Amazon yielded a link to a picture of an Amazon employee’s dog. Amazon sellers call these dead ends “dog pages.”

Some booksellers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said they had no problem with the retailer converting as many offensive books to dog pages as it wished.

Mr. Delzer, the proprietor of a secondhand store in Nashville called Defunct Books, has a different view. “If Amazon executives are so proud of their moral high ground, they should issue memos about which books they are banning instead of keeping sellers and readers in the dark,” he said.

The bookseller said he only knew Amazon was forbidding titles because he received an automated message from the retailer, saying two used books he sold seven years ago — “Conspiracy of the Six-Pointed Star: Eye-Opening Revelations and Forbidden Knowledge About Israel, the Jews, Zionism, and the Rothschilds” and “Toward the White Republic” — were now proscribed.

“This product was identified as one that is prohibited for sale,” Amazon told him. Failure to immediately delete listings for these books, the company said, “may result in the deactivation of your selling account” and possible confiscation of any money he was owed.

Amazon said it didn’t really mean any of that about “Toward the White Republic.” “We did not intend to imply the book itself could not be listed for sale,” it said in a statement.

As for “Conspiracy of the Six-Pointed Star,” which is widely available from other online booksellers, Amazon said the book did not comply with its “content guidelines.”

Mr. Delzer said the email, which he posted on an Amazon forum,was clear and Amazon was dissembling about “White Republic.”

A bookseller since 2001, Mr. Delzer said he does not condone white supremacist material but believes people should be free to read what they want. The biggest seller in his shop at the moment is by Greta Thunberg, the young climate activist.

“Amazon wants its customers to trust Amazon,” he said. “The place that sells books doesn’t want much critical thinking.”

In 1998, when Amazon was an ambitious start-up, its founder, Jeff Bezos, said, “We want to make every book available — the good, the bad and the ugly.” Customers reviews, he said, would “let truth loose.”

That expansive philosophy narrowed over the years. In 2010, when the news media discovered the self-published “Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure” on the site, the retailer’s first reaction was to hang tough.

“Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable,” it said at the time.

That resolution wilted in the face of a barrage of hostility and boycott threats. Amazon pulled the book.

Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said Amazon has the same First Amendment right as any retailer.

“Amazon has a First Amendment right to pick and choose the materials they offer,” she said. “Despite its size, it does not have to sponsor speech it finds unacceptable.”

Physical bookstores rarely stock supremacist literature, for no other reason than it would alienate many customers. The question is whether Amazon, because of its size and power, should behave differently.

“I’m not going to argue for the wider distribution of Nazi material,” said Danny Caine of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kan., who is the author of a critical pamphlet, “How to Resist Amazon and Why.” “But I still don’t trust Amazon to be the arbiters of free speech. What if Amazon decided to pull books representing a less despicable political viewpoint? Or books critical of Amazon’s practices?”

Amazon’s newfound zeal to remove “the ugly” extends beyond the Nazis. The order page for the e-book of The Nation of Islam’s “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews” stated last week, “This title not currently available for purchase.”

“The Man in the High Castle” was based on a 1962 novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick, whose stories are often about the slippery nature of reality and how it will be controlled in the future by governments and corporations. One character in the streaming series was Mr. Rockwell, the American Nazi Party founder.

In photos in “Creating the Alt World,” the tribute book, the swastika around Mr. Rockwell’s neck was removed. The real life Mr. Rockwell has been largely removed from Amazon’s bookstore as well.

After a complaint by a member of Congress in 2018, a children’s book that Mr. Rockwell wrote disappeared from Amazon. So did his book “White Power.” Other Rockwell material, like The Stormtrooper Magazine, is described as “currently unavailable.”

Some sellers circumvent the blocks by listing titles with a word or two changed, other booksellers said. One seller said he recently received a message from Amazon that several titles by Savitri Devi, also known as “Hitler’s Priestess,” were forbidden. But they are now on the site. And a copy of “Toward the White Republic” recently popped up on Amazon, for $973 plus postage.

There is still an abundance of other Nazi material available on Amazon, much of it with favorable reviews. There is the “SS Leadership Guide,” many editions of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and Joseph Goebbels’s “Nature and Form of National Socialism,” to name just a few.

That only underlines how hard it can be to tell exactly what Amazon’s rules are. The confusion is reinforced by AbeBooks, the biggest secondhand book platform outside of Amazon itself.

Some of the books dropped from Amazon are available on Abe. Recently, there were 18 copies of Mr. Duke’s books on Abe, at prices up to $150. Amazon, which owns Abe, declined to comment.

Source: In Amazon’s Bookstore, No Second Chances for the Third ReichThe retailer once said it would sell “the good, the bad and the ugly.” Now it has banished objectionable volumes — and agreed to erasing the swastikas from a photo book about a Nazi takeover.By David Streitfeld

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

ICE now uses cellphone location data to help arrest immigrants

2020/02/11 Leave a comment

Reminder of the risks of location tracking (convenience versus privacy). Wonder whether CBSA is doing the same:

Companies that sell your cellphone location data to marketers are also selling that information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the government body known for detaining children in cages. According to a new report by the Wall Street Journal, ICE and its affiliated organizations at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have been using location information for “millions” of cellphones bought from marketers to track down and arrest undocumented immigrants at the US-Mexico border.

The effort seems to be massive and legal. And as WSJ points out, “The federal government’s use of such data for law enforcement purposes hasn’t previously been reported.”

Experts told the Journal that these are the “largest known troves of bulk data being deployed by law enforcement in the US.” Venntel, a company that licenses location data and is affiliated with the mobile ad company Gravy Analytics, has received $250,000 in contracts in the past few years from DHS, which operates ICE. Public records show that Venntel has also received a contract from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

“This shows the overlap of immigrant rights and data privacy rights,” Adam Schwartz, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Recode. “Our society has failed to protect consumers from companies that harvest and monetize their personal information, including their sensitive location data. Now, reportedly, the federal government has purchased access to that data, and is using it to locate and deport immigrants.”

He added, “This is one more reason why we need strong consumer data privacy laws.”

Homeland Security officials wouldn’t tell the WSJ exactly how it leverages location data. It’s possible that the agency can use the information to see where people are crossing the border — for instance, in locations outside of regulated entry ports — and plan detention efforts accordingly. Documents reviewed by the Journal “make oblique references to such data being used to track, among other things, tunnels along the border.” The use of data does not sound dissimilar to certain marketing strategies. Advertisers can use anonymized geolocation data from cellphones to target people when they visit, say, a McDonald’s location.

As Recode has previously reported, DHS has stated that its organizations acquire “commercially available location data” from “third-party data providers” to “detect the presence of individuals in areas between Ports of Entry where such a presence is indicative of potential illicit or illegal activity.”

A 2018 Supreme Court case determined that cellphone location data is protected and that law enforcement needs warrants to collect it. As the Journal reports, however:

The federal government has essentially found a workaround by purchasing location data used by marketing firms rather than going to court on a case-by-case basis. Because location data is available through numerous commercial ad exchanges, government lawyers have approved the programs and concluded that the Carpenter ruling doesn’t apply.

The data they’re using doesn’t include personally identifiable information like a user’s name, but rather an anonymized alphanumeric ID. Still, as a New York Times investigation into this type of data showed late last year, it’s pretty easy to figure out who someone is based solely on their location. If a person spends every night at a certain location and working hours on weekdays at another location, for example, it’s relatively straightforward to determine where that person lives and works. Using those two bits of information, only minor internet sleuthing is necessary to figure out who that person is, not to mention loads of other info about them.

“Even though they say it’s anonymous, when compiling different datasets together it gives you a very detailed picture of who you are, better than even you have,” Dragana Kaurin, a research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, told Recode.

“This data can be used to discriminate against people by race, gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation or class,” she added, giving the example of how you could figure out someone is, say, Muslim based on their shopping at Halal markets or visiting mosques.

And as we’ve said before, free software like the weather or gaming app on your phone is never free. It’s common for free software and services — anything from antivirus software to your weather or gaming app — to sell your personal information, including your location, to data brokers that can then sell it to other entities and even law enforcement. In other words, free software can come at a significant cost to your privacy. The terms of the exchange are embedded deep in the privacy policies we never read.

This is no longer a matter of creepy ads following you around the internet. It could be law enforcement, too.

Source: ICE now uses cellphone location data to help arrest immigrants

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Rulings spark hope for Egyptian Copts fighting Islamic estate law

2020/02/11 Leave a comment

 Some apparent progress:

  • Egyptian courts have largely applied Islamic inheritance laws to both Muslims and the Coptic Christian minority

  • But Coptic Orthodox customs call for gender equality in inheritance matters

CAIRO: Egyptian Copt Amal Hanna says she is determined to fight the long-standing application of Islamic inheritance laws to Christians, as recent court victories embolden Coptic women.For decades, Egyptian courts have largely applied Islamic inheritance laws — which mostly allocate a bigger share of inheritances to men than to women — to both Muslims and the country’s significant Coptic Christian minority.But Coptic Orthodox customs call for gender equality in inheritance matters.
Hanna has twice been faced with the unbalanced division of family estates.
The first was more than 20 years ago, when a court granted her brother double her share of their parents’ property.
Then, after her aunt died last year, another court awarded the entire inheritance to Hanna’s brother.
“I was dumbstruck,” she said. “It really upset me, especially as my family raised us — me and my brother — as equals.”
Hanna has appealed against the ruling.
But Christian women’s hopes were rekindled late last year after Coptic lawyer Hoda Nasrallah and her brothers were granted an equal share of their father’s inheritance.
The November ruling by a Cairo family court took into account a constitutional article allowing Christian principles to be the basis of rulings on the minority’s personal status affairs.
Nasrallah’s rare victory generated a buzz across Egypt, but it was not the first of its kind.
In 2016, a Christian woman won a legal dispute with her brother, obtaining equal inheritance.
Coptic Christians have long complained of discrimination and underrepresentation in Egypt.
They are the largest non-Muslim religious minority in the Middle East, and account for 10-15 percent of Egypt’s predominantly Sunni Muslim population of 100 million.
They have also been the target of Islamist militant attacks that have left more than 100 dead since December 2016.
Elizabeth Monier, an expert on Coptic affairs at the University of Cambridge, said applying Christian inheritance rules would meet resistance from within the legal system.
Their application “has had to overcome resistance from entrenched practices and norms, both in the judiciary and society,” she said.
Though Nasrallah had already agreed with her brothers to split the estate equally, it took her around a year to have a court rule in her favor.
She said she pursued the case in order to set a legal precedent for other Christian women.
“My fight was about ensuring that the constitution is applied,” Nasrallah said.
“Many judges are against applying Christian norms,” she added. “It can be even more challenging when the heirs are in disagreement.”
Hanna also criticized a lack of legislation forcing judges to apply Christian rules.
In building her case, she said she invoked the constitution and used the 2016 ruling as precedent.
Hanna said she feared her appeal would be rejected, but would keep on challenging the decision.
“I will even take it to the constitutional court if I have to,” she said.
Lawyers say the lack of a personal status law for Christians is partly to blame for courts’ resistance.
“Coptic males sometimes push for Islamic laws to be applied since it’s in their interest,” lawyer Atef Nazmy said. “It is vital that a personal status law for Christians be created to regulate these issues.”
Christian denominations have for years been locked in talks over a unified personal status law.
They have yet to reach agreement or present a bill to parliament.
Nazmy said issues like divorce were at the core of the divisions.
Egypt’s strict Coptic Church applies rigid rules to divorce, granting it only in cases of adultery or conversion to other faiths.
Monier said courts might also resist granting Christian women equal inheritance because they fear Muslim women would seek the same rights.
In 2018, then Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi sparked controversy across the Islamic world by proposing a bill on equal inheritance for Muslim women.
The move drew praise from secularists and women’s rights activists across the region, but stern rebuke from Egypt’s Al-Azhar, the Sunni Muslim world’s most prestigious educational institution.
Despite the resistance, Monier remains optimistic.
“That a Coptic woman has taken her case to court and won suggests there is some progress being made,” she said.
“This is another step that is part of the journey toward greater gender equality.”

Source: Rulings spark hope for Egyptian Copts fighting Islamic estate law

Filed under gender, Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

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