Articles of interest: Multiculturalism

2023/12/08 Leave a comment

Poll not surprising given events as debates over Israel Hamas war affect diaspora communities and risk social cohesion and inclusion among other articles.

Poll finds support for deporting non-citizens supporting hatred, terror; mixed feelings over Canada’s ‘diversity’

Of note and not surprising given the events:

It was only two months ago that Canada saw large, disproportionately immigrant-led demonstrations calling for the expulsion of “gender ideology” from public school curricula. As Enns said, there is a social conservatism among immigrant communities that isn’t always sympatico with Canada’s various progressive frontiers.

Source: Poll finds support for deporting non-citizens supporting hatred, terror; mixed feelings over Canada’s ‘diversity’

Highlights of the Leger poll:

MOST CANADIANS SEE THE STRENGTH THAT DIVERSITY BRINGS TO THE COUNTRY, BUT FEEL THERE ARE PITFALLS AS WELL.

  • 56% believe that some elements of diversity can provide strength, but some elements of diversity can cause problems/conflict in Canada.
  • Three-quarters (75%) believe that an individual who has non-permanent status while in Canada and publicly expresses hatred toward a minority group or expresses support for any organization listed by the Canadian government as a terrorist group should not be allowed to stay in Canada.
  • While 69% think that Canadian universities should be places where dissenting opinions can be aired and discussed in a civil and constructive manner, 48% actually believe they are places where this happens.

Source: Diversity in Canada

Tasha Kheiriddin: Canada, the land of imported ethnic conflicts

Of note:

In other words, leaders in all strata of civil society — politicians, business, and academia — have a lot of work to do if we want to diversity to enrich Canadian society instead of tear it apart. That starts by focussing on what Canada stands for, honouring its history and achievements, and ceasing the relentless ideological takedown of our country as a colonial, oppressive state. The reality is that most newcomers came here to escape regimes that perpetrate far worse oppression than Canada ever did. It’s time our leaders stood up and said so.

Source: Tasha Kheiriddin: Canada, the land of imported ethnic conflicts

Lederman: The war in the Middle East is creating new divides in CanLit

Sound advice:

Open letters may be performative, but they are also of value. People who are justifiably angry and anguished feel compelled to do something, say something. Writers and other artists especially feel the need to voice their views. But if a letter dismisses the value of human lives on either side – or calls into question (or ignores) sexual assault, please think about what you’re signing. Or posting.

Source: The war in the Middle East is creating new divides in CanLit

Khan: The loss of the Afzaal family reminds us what happens when hate goes unchecked

Agree:

During these unsettling times of rising Islamophobia and antisemitism, the verdict is a stark reminder of what happens when hate goes unchecked. We must be vigilant against the proliferation of ideologies that seek to drive us apart, while ensuring that each member of our society is not fearful for their personal safety.

The human spirit has the resiliency to overcome evil with good. Yumna’s school mural reminds us of the virtues we all share as we strive toward a just, compassionate society. That is her legacy. What will be ours?

Source: The loss of the Afzaal family reminds us what happens when hate goes unchecked

Chris Selley: The fever to cancel Egerton Ryerson has broken

Yes indeed:

I have argued before that Ryerson makes an absolutely ideal subject for a discussion about how to treat otherwise benevolent historical figures who espoused unfortunate views — which is to say most of them. Instead we got a mad rush to rename. The HDSB’s Ryerson Public School in Burlington became Makwendam Public School. “Pronounced muck-kwen-dum,” the board explained, it “is the … word for ‘to remember’ in the Anishinaabemowin language.”…

Clearly, however, the issue has come off the boil. No one is hounding the Toronto District School Board to rename Ryerson Community School, or the City of Ottawa to rename Ryerson Avenue, or the United Church to rename Ryerson Camp in Vittoria, on Lake Erie. And that’s symptomatic of a moral panic: It goes from zero to 60 and back to zero just as quickly.

Blessed are those who who can stand firm on their principles, and on the historical record, in the face of the statue-toppling iconoclasm that overcame Ontario two years ago. Blessed and vanishingly few

Source: Chris Selley: The fever to cancel Egerton Ryerson has broken

Africans are being slaughtered, but with no Jews to blame, the left shrugs

An inconvenient truth:

But at the “civil society” level, the reason is simple: the conflict doesn’t fit the left’s anti-colonial narrative. The oppressors are not white or white-adjacent. This crisis cannot be blamed on capitalism, the United States, or Jews. There is nothing for the left to gain, politically, by calling out a community that is part of its own coalition. So just like feminists stay silent when Jewish women are raped, progressives fail to stand up for Black Africans when they are massacred.

The crisis in Sudan exposes “intersectionality” for what it is: a big, fat anti-semitic lie. The hypocrisy is beyond belief. And the Masalit are the ones to pay the price.

Source: Africans are being slaughtered, but with no Jews to blame, the left shrugs

Au-delà de l’affaire Bochra Manaï 

The dangers of appointing activists:

Quand Bochra Manaï a été nommée commissaire à la lutte au racisme et aux discriminations systémiques à la Ville de Montréal, Valérie Planteassurait les Montréalais qu’elle avait été sélectionnée au terme « d’un processus très rigoureux » qui était « garant de la qualité de la personne qui avait été choisie » et que cette dernière savait qu’elle servait désormais une « institution » et comprenait bien « son [nouveau] rôle ».

Beaucoup de Montréalais s’inquiétaient en effet du fait que la principale intéressée s’était surtout fait connaître comme porte-parole du Conseil national des musulmans canadiens et qu’à ce titre, elle avait publiquement pourfendu la loi 21 sur la laïcité de l’État et le Québec tout entier, devenu, selon elle, « une référence pour les suprémacistes et les extrémistes du monde entier ». Pouvait-on vraiment penser que quelqu’un qui tenait quelques semaines plus tôt des propos aussi provocants et aussi peu objectifs (elle était allée jusqu’à associer la loi 21 aux attentats de Québec et de Christchurch, en Nouvelle-Zélande) allait se muer instantanément, par la magie d’une nomination, en commissaire impartiale ?

Le noeud du problème est là. On recrute des militants politiques pour en faire des fonctionnaires censés être objectifs et impartiaux et on s’étonne ensuite qu’ils soient demeurés avant toute chose… des militants.

Source: Au-delà de l’affaire Bochra Manaï

As incidents of hate speech rise, when can employers legally sanction workers? 

Useful info:

Incidents of Antisemitism and Islamophobia are drastically rising in Canada in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war and the employment-related legal implications are quickly emerging as many workers openly express their personal views and attend protests or rallies. What happens when their employers, or others, take offence?

Source: As incidents of hate speech rise, when can employers legally sanction workers?

Colby Cosh: Court of Appeal rejects idea that math test is racist

Good decision even if largely on process grounds:

The Court of Appeal has taken a very dim view of almost all of this, partly because the concerns about the test turned out to be completely overblown. Aspiring teachers were always allowed to keep writing the test as often as they liked until they passed. Privatized provision of the test meant that opportunities to retake were never more than a few weeks apart. And teachers could take a crack at the MPT at any point in their course of studies; they didn’t have to wait until they were facing the immediate pressures of the job market.

The divisional court didn’t take any of this into account before hitting the Charter of Rights detonator, even though the evidence then before it was statistically slender and concerned only first attempts at the MPT. (Moreover, in voluntary field trials of the test, many candidates didn’t provide racial labels at all, creating possible — nay, virtually inevitable — bias issues in those statistics.)

Source: Colby Cosh: Court of Appeal rejects idea that math test is racist

Amira Elghawaby victime d’actes islamophobes

Threading the needle on the Israel Hamas war but clarity on Merry Christmas:

Lorsqu’elle a pris connaissance de l’offensive surprise du Hamas contre Israël, au matin du 7 octobre,  Mme Elghawaby a été « choquée » par ces événements « douloureux », raconte-t-elle.  Mais le silence qu’elle a maintenu sur la place publique dans l’immédiat a été dénoncé par plusieurs.

Il a fallu attendre une dizaine de jours avant qu’elle ne publie une déclaration, une prise de parole qui ne mentionnait pas explicitement les attaques du Hamas. « Les communautés musulmanes me mentionnent que nous ne pouvons pas laisser le conflit israélo-palestinien rouvrir un chapitre aussi douloureux. L’héritage de cette période sombre est ravivé aujourd’hui », avait-elle alors fait valoir, faisant référence au « profond traumatisme » vécu au lendemain des attentats du 11 septembre 2001 aux États-Unis par les communautés musulmanes et arabes.

… Noël férié, du racisme ?
Est-ce que souhaiter « joyeux Noël » est raciste ? Sa réponse est claire : « Non, pas du tout. C’est beau d’être dans une société pluraliste. On a plusieurs religions et on veut comprendre tout le monde et leurs fêtes. » Elle mentionne en appui une chronique qu’elle a écrite dans les pages du Toronto Star en 2018, intitulée « Est-il acceptable de dire “joyeux Noël” ? Oui », où elle affirmait que dire « bonnes vacances » pour éviter toute référence religieuse n’était pas « une panacée » pour l’inclusion. 

Jeudi après-midi, le Bloc québécois a déposé aux Communes une motion condamnant la position de la Commission canadienne des droits de la personne. Elle a été adoptée à l’unanimité par les élus, à l’image de celle déposée la veille à l’Assemblée nationale du Québec.

Source: Amira Elghawaby victime d’actes islamophobes

Yakabuski: Rights commission’s humbug view of Christmas is just the gift the CAQ needed

Indeed. What were they thinking (or not):

…But hark! Out of the dark November sky, by what could only have been the grace of some higher power, this week emerged the gift of fate that Caquistes had been needing. It came in the form of a Canadian Human Rights Commission discussion paper that the CAQ seized on as a frontal attack on Christmas, allowing it to present itself as the defender of the faith against the woke zealots.

“Honestly, we’re going to continue to celebrate Christmas, and we’re not going to apologize for celebrating Christmas,” CAQ Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette insisted after the National Assembly voted 109 to 0 to approve a motion denouncing the CHRC paper. The offending tract referred to statutory holidays related to Christianity as examples of the “present-day systemic religious discrimination” that is “deeply rooted in our identity as a settler colonial state.”

Source: Rights commission’s humbug view of Christmas is just the gift the CAQ needed

Douglas Todd: It’s dangerous to bring modern-day blasphemy laws to the West

Valid concern:

Canadian senators have recommended it. An Australian state has already done it. And some Danish politicians are preparing for it.

They are all pushing new laws that would, in different ways, make it a criminal offence to mock a religion. Some now call it “religious vilification” — even while it used to be known as “blasphemy.” The subject is in the air more than ever this fall because of hot-blooded enmities arising in the wake of the Hamas-Israel war.

Canadian Sen. Salma Ataullahjan this month said she wants legislation to combat “mischaracterization of religious Islamic concepts.” Chris Minns, premier of New South Wales in Australia, just brought in a fine of up to $100,000 for anyone who “severely ridicules” a religious belief. Denmark votes in December on whether to ban “improper treatment of scriptures,” particularly Quran burnings.

As much as I personally oppose the ridiculing of religious beliefs or symbols, I also believe legislators need to approach this crucial issue of free expression with extreme caution. It is dangerous for any society to forbid people from casting profane aspersions, however offensive, on that which others consider sacred.

Source: Douglas Todd: It’s dangerous to bring modern-day blasphemy laws to the West

If diversity is our strength, then why are diaspora news outlets being silenced?

There’s a dangerously naïve sentiment among some that Canada’s pluralism is immune from erosion. 

But in reality, Canadians from virtually every nation on the earth, of every political persuasion and religion, living side by side in peace is not something that magically happens. It takes constant work, strong leadership and information to understand the context of plural (e.g. cultural, regional, etc) goals and grievances and to resolve tensions peaceably.

Non-biased, smart journalism has a big role to play in this regard. But with Canadian mainstream media outlets closing regional offices and firing international bureaus en masse, there’s virtually no consistent mainstream coverage of how Canadian policies or politics are being felt by Canadian diaspora groups. Instead, the primary source of coverage many rely upon to understand factors that might impact different groups are stories found by using Google to search for minority community media outlets, often called Canadian “ethnic media” or “diaspora media.”

However, after December 19, 2023, thanks to the Canadian federal governing Liberal’s bill C-18, that capacity will be eliminated. December 19 is the day the bill comes into force, and the megalithic search engine Google said they would begin blocking search results for all Canadian news sources, including ethnic media. Google’s move will come months after Facebook’s parent company, Meta, blocked access to Canadian news sites across its platforms

Source: If diversity is our strength, then why are diaspora news outlets being silenced?

After ‘Sinicization’ of Islam in Xinjiang, China is closing and destroying mosques in other Muslim areas: report 

Telling:

“I do think it’s been quite shocking to see the lack of outrage from Muslim governments, which are quite rightly critical of what is happening now in Palestine and have also come to the defence of the Rohingya in the past,” Ms. Pearson said. “What we want to do is really open the eyes of Muslim-majority countries to what is happening in China.”

Source: After ‘Sinicization’ of Islam in Xinjiang, China is closing and destroying mosques in other Muslim areas: report

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Globe editorial: Who we are, and must be, as Canadians

2023/11/15 Leave a comment

Same principles, of course, apply to any form of racism, discrimination and hate:

…Solidarity can take many forms. Tearing down posters of those held hostage by Hamas is a hateful act; do not let that happen unopposed. Go out of your way to solicit businesses that have been targeted for being Jewish-owned. Most of all, reach out to your fellow citizens to let them know that they are not alone.

That is who we want to be, who we must be, as Canadians…

source: Who we are, and must be, as Canadians

Filed under Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

U.N. Women’s Groups Accused of Boosting Hamas Massacre Deniers – The Daily Beast

2023/11/15 Leave a comment

Of note. Valid critique. Article highlights relevant comparisons and this policy and political failure:

…

Prominent human rights campaigners in Israel say the most important women’s organizations within the United Nations have failed to give proper recognition to the massacre and mass rape carried out by Hamas on Oct. 7.

The UN Women statement from Oct. 13, failed to mention any of the atrocities and the U.N.’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) talked amorphically about “the gendered dimensions of conflict” without laying out the brutality inflicted on women during the horrific attack.

“The silence of the international human rights and women’s rights community is deafening,” Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a former vice president of CEDAW, told The Daily Beast. “For those of us who believe in the power of international human rights institutions and in solidarity between women, it is a particularly devastating blow. The betrayal is not only to the victims of sexual abuse, but to the very integrity of the institutions.”

The reticence to comment on the specific atrocities in Israel and horrific gender-based violence in contrasts with UN Women and CEDAW’s history of speaking out in defense of women all over the rest of the world.

…

Source: U.N. Women’s Groups Accused of Boosting Hamas Massacre Deniers – The Daily Beast

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

French march against antisemitism shakes up far right and far left – BBC

2023/11/14 Leave a comment

Of note. Of course, the anti-immigration and xenophobic discourse of Le Pen is directed against Muslims, surprising omission from the article:

Something unprecedented is happening this weekend in Paris, brought about by the war between Israel and Hamas and its spill-over in Europe.

For the first time ever, a major demonstration being attended by representatives of the major political parties includes the far right – but not the far left.

On Sunday afternoon thousands of people heeded a call from the Speakers of the two houses of parliament to show their support for French “Republican” values and their rejection of antisemitism – this in the face of a steep rise in antisemitic actions since 7 October.

Among the first to announce their presence were Marine Le Pen, three-time presidential candidate for the National Rally (formerly the National Front), and the party’s young president, Jordan Bardella.

Almost simultaneously came a rejoinder from their counterpart on the far left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, irascible leader of France Unbowed (LFI). His party would not be attending, he tweeted, because the march was a “rendezvous for unconditional supporters of the massacre [of Gazans]”.

Source: French march against antisemitism shakes up far right and far left – BBC

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Anti-Zionism Is Not Anti-Semitism – The Atlantic

2023/11/08 1 Comment

Important distinctions:

On October 7, the Islamist militant group Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, killed more than 1,400 people in Israel. Israel responded with military operations that have killed several times that number of Palestinians in Gaza, a territory described by Human Rights Watch as an “open-air prison” as a result of an Israeli and Egyptian blockade. In both cases, most of the casualties are civilians. The conflict has reverberated into other areas of the world, including the United States, where anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim incidents have included the killing of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy. The bloodshed has revived the perennial debates about anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

“Look, it’s clear that the hardened anti-Zionists from the far left are the photo inverse of the white supremacists from the far right,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told CNN’s Dana Bash earlier this week. “There is no argument anymore that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, that is as plain as day. And to think that extremism only comes from one side of the spectrum is a joke.” Greenblatt’s sentiments were echoed among supporters of Israel, including in publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The Jerusalem Post, which editorialized that “to deny the Jewish people, and only the Jewish people, a right afforded to all nations—is to discriminate against Jews.”

The claim that “there is no argument anymore” is curious. Even within the ADL, staffers have objected to the argument that anti-Zionism is necessarily anti-Semitism, as Jewish Currents reported last year.

Political Zionism, defined concisely, is the belief that the Jews should have a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland. Anti-Zionism, in similarly brief terms, is the opposition to that belief. It should be no surprise that most Palestinians and those who sympathize with their plight are anti-Zionist. “The Arab has been on the receiving end not of benign Zionism—which has been restricted to Jews,” Edward Said wrote in The Question of Palestine, “but of an essentially discriminatory and powerful culture, of which, in Palestine, Zionism has been the agent.”

There are certainly forms of anti-Zionism that are anti-Semitic, such as the belief that Jewish Israelis should all be expelled or killed or that they should be forced to live as second-class citizens under an Islamist government. Storming the tarmac at an airport in Dagestan in the hopes of participating in a mob lynching of passengers arriving from Tel Aviv, or vandalizing synagogues in Madrid and New York in response to the Israeli government’s actions, or threatening Jewish students with rape and murder, are clear expressions of hatred toward Jews. Americans, both Jewish and not, can underestimate how common anti-Semitism remains in the rest of the world.

But there is nothing anti-Semitic about anti-Zionists who believe that the existence of a religious or ethnically defined state is inherently racist, and that the only real solution to the conflict is, as the Palestinian American advocate Youssef Munayyer writes, “equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians in a single shared state,” with a constitution that would “recognize that the country would be home to both peoples and that, despite national narratives and voices on either side that claim otherwise, both peoples have historical ties to the land.” Perhaps you think this idea naive or unrealistic; that is not an expression of prejudice toward Jews.

For one thing, there were prominent Jewish advocates for this idea before the founding of Israel, such as Hannah Arendt and Martin Buber. In 1921, the Jewish philosopher Ahad Ha’am wrote that Arab Palestinians “have a genuine right to the land due to generations of residence and work upon it. For them too this country is a national home and they have the right to develop their national potentialities to the utmost.” There are also some prominent Jewish supporters of a single binational state today, such as the former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg. The Jewish American writers Tony Judt and Peter Beinart have also made the case for a one-state solution.

I should say here that I do not have an answer to this question. Two states or one, my preference is for both Israelis and Palestinians to be able to live freely and in peace and equality, in whatever arrangement allows them to do so.

Nevertheless, it is a cruel absurdity to demand of Palestinians that they not only acquiesce to Israel’s existence, but also actively support the idea of an ethnically defined state that excludes them from equal citizenship, one that was made possible only by the flight and expulsion of 700,000 of their forebears in the Nakba of 1948. It is not anti-Semitic to want equal rights in the land you share with others, and to oppose a political arrangement that has resulted in what Israeli human-rights groups justifiably describe as a form of apartheid. While Jewish Israelis retain their rights wherever they go within Israel’s borders, Palestinians are subject to draconian restrictions on their lives and freedoms depending on their location.

“My mom was born and raised a mere 10-minute walk from my childhood home, but my father’s family is from Tulkarem, a small city in the West Bank. And so my dad, my siblings, and I have West Bank IDs while my mom, a Jerusalemite, has a Jerusalem ID,” the journalist Abdallah Fayyad wrote in The Boston Globe in 2021, describing life in his childhood neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. “That meant that while my mother had a right to live in Jerusalem, the rest of us were only guests in our own home, living there because we renewed travel permits that technically allowed us only entry into Jerusalem, not a permanent stay.”

Palestinians in the West Bank who have been displaced at gunpoint by Israeli settlers, Palestinians in Gaza who have watched their children die in Israeli missile strikes, Palestinians who have been evicted from their homes in Jerusalem as part of an effort to Judaize the city—are none of these people allowed to question whether a Jewish state is an optimal arrangement for them? Are none of their relatives, friends, and loved ones abroad allowed to do so?

Nor is the question of national self-determination as straightforward as the Post would have it. Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, maintaining the Jewish character of the state of Israel has required an extraordinary amount of violence, because Jews are not a clear majority in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank put together. Even if they were, however, it is not as though Palestinian demands for equal rights would cease. Opposing that violence, or believing that it stems from the state having a specific ethnic character, is not a form of bigotry. It is not “self-determination” if you are determining the fate of your neighbors because they lack the same rights as you.

In the United States, the ADL itself has highlighted those on the far right who believe “they are fighting against demographic and cultural changes that are destroying the ‘true America’—a white, Christian nation,” and who want Jews to “either leave the country or be converted.” Sadly, this is a racist chauvinism that echoes sentiments expressed by politicians in the current Israeli government.

Few Americans who are not themselves white nationalists would think it prejudiced for those who are not white Christians to oppose such an arrangement in the U.S., least of all Jews.

Obviously, there are factors in Israel that make a commitment to one state with equal rights for all more complicated than in the United States, where the concept is foundational even if the execution is not. For generations, Palestinians have borne the brunt of the violence of war, occupation, and discrimination. The near-destruction of European Jewry is less than a century old, and the flight (both voluntary and involuntary) of the Mizrahim, who make up the largest portion of Israel’s Jewish population, from other Middle Eastern and North African countries is younger than that. Fears and grudges build up over years of conflict and separation, making the personal and emotional connections necessary for such reconciliation difficult, although brave souls on both sides of the divide are trying.

The ideal version of the one-state solution also remains unpopular for now among both Israelis and Palestinians (except for Arab citizens of Israel). You may think it impossible. You may prefer a different outcome. You may think it is dangerous. But the vision itself is not an expression of anti-Jewish hatred and should not be treated as such.

The effect of equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is to silence the criticism of the Israeli government by Palestinians and their advocates. Characterizing all such criticism as an inherent form of bigotry is used to justify the exclusion of such critics from mainstream society, to suspend them from their schools, or to fire them from their jobs. But it is not anti-Semitic to want equal rights for all in Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv, in Gaza, in Ramallah. That is, after all, what generations of Americans have sought in their own home.

Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Source: Anti-Zionism Is Not Anti-Semitism – The Atlantic

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Chait: It Is Actually Possible to Oppose Bias Against Jews and Muslims at the Same Time – New York Magazine

2023/11/07 Leave a comment

Indeed, but not so simple in practice:

Here is a simple proposition: You can oppose antisemitism without condoning hatred of Muslims or Arabs. Likewise, you can oppose bias against Muslims and Arabs without condoning antisemitism.

This may sound like a simple idea. Yet it is one the entire Republican Party seems unable to grasp.

Last May, the Biden administration announced what it called the most ambitious strategy to oppose antisemitism ever undertaken. In the wake of Hamas’s terrorist attack last month, President Biden and Second Gentleman Douglass Emhoff held a roundtable with Jewish leaders to express support for Israel along with opposition to antisemitism. And as antisemitism has grown on campuses, the administration recently announced new stoops to combat it.

Republicans insist Biden and his party are complicit in antisemitism. The main reason they give is that the Democrats also oppose bigotry against Muslims and Arabs.

Given that I am accusing the Republicans of failing to grasp a principle a literal child could easily understand, you may be justifiably suspicious I am either making it up or picking on one or two random outliers. So I am going to supply several examples, all taken from published journalism, not random social-media posts.

Daniel Henninger has written a Wall Street Journal column headlined, “Democrats Have an Anti-Semitism Problem.” Many of the examples he cites consist of people protesting the Democratic Party’s positions (progressive activist groups released a “Gaza 2024 statement” asserting they won’t vote for Joe Biden “if he does not end U.S. support for Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. … Anti-Israel protesters paraded in front of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s house in San Francisco last Saturday evening.”), which is obviously evidence for the complete opposite of his point.

But in the midst of that confusion, he cites this as evidence for Democratic antisemitism:

Because the Democrats now consider Muslim Americans an important part of the party’s voting coalition, meetings were held this week at the White House with Muslim leaders. Mr. Biden in his national address last month spoke at length against ‘Islamophobia.’

In a National Review column headlined “Why Joe Biden Is Caving on Israel and Antisemitism,” Charles C.W. Cooke asks, “Why, at this moment, is [Biden] launching a bizarre ‘National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Related Forms of Hate,’ when everyone with eyes can see that we are in the midst of the worst bout of antisemitism in recent memory?”

The Federalist’s John David Danielson sneers:

On Wednesday, the White House announced a “National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia,” the necessity of which, according to awkwardly scripted remarks by Vice President Kamala Harris, is that Muslims endure a disproportionate number of ‘hate-fueled attacks and other discriminatory incidents,” Leave it to the Biden White House to pick a moment when a wave of antisemitism is surging across America to announce this.

The New York Post has a news story asserting, “The Biden administration faced backlash Wednesday after announcing that it would develop ‘the first ever US National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia’ in the US amid rising levels of antisemitism.”

Tom Cotton attacks the administration for calling Islamophobia America’s top concern.

If you watch even a few seconds of the video he links, you can see Kamala Harris labels hatred the top concern, and defines this to include hatred against both Jews and Muslims or Arabs.

Cotton is simply lying about this, but there’s a genuine confusion in the right-wing mind about the relationship between Islamophobia and antisemitism. It is true that, broadly speaking, the conflict between Israel and Arabs has pitted antisemites and Islamophobes against each other. But that does not mean that opposing one form of prejudice requires accepting or embracing the other. Not every political conflict must be resolved in zero-sum terms.

Conservatives — ironically, like many radical leftists — see the world in zero-sum terms, so that opposing prejudice against one party to a conflict means accepting it toward the other. Segments of the anti-Israel left cannot bring themselves to denounce antisemitism precisely because they see doing so as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause. The right’s mentality is a mirror image of that thought process.

But the conservative refusal to denounce Islamophobia is an important reason why it is necessary for liberals — especially liberals who support Israel — to do so.

Muslims and Arabs do, in fact, face a lot of prejudice in the United States. This prejudice is routinely inflamed by Republican leaders. Donald Trump has routinely attacked Muslim Americans as foreign and unworthy of participation in civic life, smeared with fake claims of having supported 9/11, and recently vowed to keep them out of the United States unless they accept “our religion.”

The American conservative movement is institutionally committed to ignoring Trump’s flagrant racism, even while it hyperactively engages with the most deranged claims about institutional racism from activists and academics. Meanwhile, Trumpian racism against Muslims and Arabs has spread quickly within the party.

In recent days, prime time Fox News host Jesse Watters said:

“I want to say something about Arab Americans and about the Muslim world. We — and when I say we I mean the West and western technology — have created the Middle East. We made them rich. We got that oil out of the ground, our military protects all of these oil shipments flying around the world, making them rich. We fund their military. We respect their kings. We kill their terrorists. Okay? But we’ve had it. We’ve had it with them!”

Notice how Watters, not unlike Trump, conflates “Arab Americans” with people living in the Middle East, dismissing them all as enemies. It is almost impossible to find Republicans who will denounce any of this rhetoric.

The Republican idea that the Democratic Party’s opposition to prejudice in general somehow weakens any of the particulars is a projection of their own ethnographic view of the world. What they are attempting, instead, is to leverage their dehumanization of Arab and Muslim Americans into a play to attract Jews. But the ultimate safeguard of Jewish security in America lies not in subjugating and demeaning other minorities, but in enshrining the principle of civic equality.

Source: It Is Actually Possible to Oppose Bias Against Jews and Muslims at the Same Time – New York Magazine

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Car: Choose Respect

2023/11/07 Leave a comment

Winnipeg MP on the importance of dialogue, listening and respect:

How can you say you care about combatting Islamophobia or the lives of innocent children without calling for a ceasefire? How can you say you care about the loss of innocent Palestinian life if you attend a vigil for kidnapped Israelis? How can you say you care about defeating Hamas if you want Israel to respect calls for humanitarian pauses so that aid can flow?

These are several of the questions I have faced from people upset with the perspectives I have shared in relation to what has been happening in the Middle East. For some, it does not matter that I am speaking with members of both the Jewish and Muslim community every day. It does not matter that I have called for more aid to flow to Gaza, for the hostages to be released by Hamas, or for a two-state solution that can bring peace to this conflict. It does not matter that I am actively organizing meetings with police, elected officials, community leaders and experts to address the rise in hate against both the Jewish and Muslim community.

Every single word we utter, every single action we take, is parsed through by too many who are looking for some iota of ammunition they can use to establish what they believe to be an allegiance to one side or the other. It is not always about choosing a side, it is not always black and white, and it is certainly not always static.

It is possible to disagree on the ways in which we solve conflicts, without having to denigrate the character, morals, or intentions of the person with whom we disagree. President Obama said recently that “we should choose not to always assume the worst in those with whom we disagree.” How we conduct our behaviour towards others is a choice, and it is a choice we should pause to consider often.

I have had many respectful and productive conversations about the conflict recently with constituents, some Jews, some Muslims, and many from neither community. What made them respectful and productive?

First, we listened to each other. No interrupting, no positioning for the last word, just moments of genuine pause and reflection as the other spoke. Second, we were calm. No shouting, and no attempts to leave scars behind. Third, they were honest. The words conveyed stayed true to the values of those conveying them, and in that, each maintained their integrity. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the objective in that moment was not to change the mind of the other – or to see the inability to do so as a failure – however, it was to leave the other with a broadened understanding of an opposing point of view that provided an opportunity for further reflection. It is this that contributes to the meaningfulness of thinking critically through difficult issues.

I am grateful to those who are continuing to reach out. However difficult the discussions, they need to happen. I hope that when they do, they can unfold in the ways I have highlighted from recent experiences noted above.

Protesting outside of businesses owned by members of a specific religious community, with calls to boycott them, simply because they are members of that community, is wrong. Intentionally intimidating people in the streets, is wrong. Calling for Jews to be flushed into the sea, or for Muslims to “go back to where they came from”, is wrong. These actions are not only hateful, they also prevent the conditions necessary to foster healthy relationships and peace from taking root.

As an educator, I often worked with kids and families who had experienced traumas in their lives. In order to help heal, it required trauma informed language and practices. This means reframing our own bias, making an effort to shift from asking “what’s wrong with you?”, to “what happened to you?’. We must do our best to move from judgement to curiosity.

These are fundamental principles in a trauma informed approach to conflict resolution. The intention is not to adjudicate on questions of who or what is “right” or “wrong”. The intention, is to guide us towards greater understanding of one another’s perspectives, and to restore a sense of humanity to a societal dialogue that has become increasingly void of it.

As difficult as the conversations are that we are having right now, we must have them. One day, we all hope soon, this war will end. When it is over, we will still be neighbours, co-workers, and family. We will still want the best for our kids and our communities. In order for us to overcome the trauma and wounds left behind from this current crisis here at home, we will need to lean as heavily as ever before, on the principles of respect, compassion, and love, while choosing to see the best in one another. That starts now.

Ben Carr is the Member of Parliament for Winnipeg South Centre

Source: Choose Respect

Filed under Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Goldberg: When It Comes to Israel, Who Decides What You Can and Can’t Say?

2023/11/06 Leave a comment

Good discussion of the players and the issues:

Last week, the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law sent a letter to nearly 200 college presidents urging them to investigate campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine for potential violations of federal and state laws against providing material support to terrorism. As evidence for these very serious accusations, the ADL and the Brandeis center offered only the student group’s own strident rhetoric, including a sentence in its online tool kit, which praised Hamas’s attacks on Israel and said: “We must act as part of this movement. All of our efforts continue the work and resistance of the Palestinians on the ground.”

Under the direction of Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has also ordered state universities to shut chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine. Citing the same tool kit, DeSantis said, “That is material support to terrorism, and that is not going to be tolerated in the state of Florida, and it should not be tolerated in these United States of America.” Virginia’s Republican attorney general has opened an investigation into American Muslims for Palestine, a national group that, according to the ADL, helps coordinate the activities of Students for Justice in Palestine, “for potentially violating Virginia’s charitable solicitation laws, including benefiting or providing support to terrorist organizations.” Several Republicans, including Donald Trump, have called for revoking the visas of pro-Palestinian student activists.

Ever since Hamas’s slaughter and mass kidnapping of Israelis on Oct. 7, there has been mounting fear and fury over the mistreatment of Jews at American colleges and universities. The Homeland Security, Justice and Education Departments are all taking steps to combat campus antisemitism. Congressional resolutions have condemned it. But while plenty of pro-Palestinian students have behaved in appalling ways, many also feel besieged, and for good reason.

For Palestinian and Muslim students, the invocation of terrorism law is especially frightening. Attempts to curtail anti-Zionist activism are not new; about 35 states have laws targeting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. But now advocates for Palestinian rights describe a new level of repression. “The ADL is calling for the mass violation of students’ rights in a manner that’s reminiscent of the post 9/11 environment, but with a more intensely Palestinian twist,” said Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at the civil rights organization Palestine Legal. She predicts that if federal and state governments follow through on the ADL’s demands, Palestinian activists will be subjected to an increase in surveillance, infiltration and investigation, even though their groups “pose zero threat and have done nothing but engage in speech 100 percent protected by the First Amendment.”

Columbia University’s Rashid Khalidi, a pre-eminent historian of Palestinian history, readily acknowledged a rash of recent antisemitic incidents on college campuses. But he drew a distinction between interpersonal harassment and an institutional crackdown. “Both sides have feelings of being victimized,” he told me, but the forces arrayed against them are not the same. “The Patriot Act may be mobilized to shut down speech” deemed supportive of Palestinian terrorism. “That’s the difference.”

No one should underestimate how awful the campus climate is for many Jewish students, who’ve experienced a surge in violence and abuse. At Cornell, an engineering student was arrested after threatening to shoot up a kosher dining hall and calling for Jews to be raped and murdered. Demonstrators at a rally in support of Palestinians assaulted Jewish counterprotesters at Tulane; one student had his nose broken. In October, Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean of at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote an opinion essay headlined, “Nothing Has Prepared Me for the Antisemitism I See on College Campuses Now.” In it, he told of a student who insisted that she would feel safe on campus only if the school got “rid of the Zionists.”

This hostile environment stems, at least in part, from the nearly vaunted role played by the Palestinian cause in the left’s understanding of global dispossession. Because America helps underwrite Israel’s military occupation, Palestinians are often viewed as singular symbols of imperialist oppression. For decades, radical Black activists in America have seen, in Israel’s occupation of Palestine, a mirror of their own subjugation, and that identification was supercharged during America’s 2020 racial justice protests, when a mural of George Floyd appeared in Gaza City. In some social justice circles, then, support for Israel is viewed as something akin to support for the K.K.K.

This contempt for Zionism has only accelerated with the pulverizing bombing of Gaza and its thousands of civilian casualties. And too often, on hothouse campuses full of young people with half-formed ideas and poor impulse control, anti-Zionism segues into hatred directed at Jews.

For some Jews on campus, the vituperation against Zionism has been particularly disorienting because, for years now, they’ve been trained in exquisite sensitivity to identity-based slights.

Not all Jews identify with the state of Israel, of course, and activists from Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow have led protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. But many Jews see their relationship with Israel as an essential part of their Jewishness, and even some fierce critics of Israel’s government were shaken by the widespread demonization of the country so soon after Hamas’s atrocities. When they say that the campus climate makes them feel unsafe — a rhetorical trump card in other contexts — they expect official action.

On Wednesday, the presidents of several Israeli universities wrote a letter to their international colleagues calling on them to accord Jewish and Israeli students and faculty members “the same respect and protections as any other minority.” Citing principles of safety and inclusivity, the letter said, “Just as it would be unthinkable for an academic institution to extend free speech protections to groups targeting other protected classes, so too should demonstrations that call for our destruction and glorify violence against Jews be explicitly prohibited and condemned.”

But this demand for protection can collide with the First Amendment rights of Zionism’s critics, and with academic freedom more broadly. “I wouldn’t compare this with the internment of the Japanese Americans in World War II, but the point I’m making is that there are times when people get really upset about what’s happening in the world and do things that are unwise at best and really harmful to people and democracy at worst,” said Kenneth Stern, director of Bard College’s Center for the Study of Hate and author of “The Conflict Over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate.”

Stern occupies a unique position in this profoundly polarizing debate. He’s a liberal Zionist and an expert on antisemitism, as well as a committed civil libertarian who critiques the way mainstream Jewish groups wield institutional power to try to silence pro-Palestinian voices.

As he describes in his book, in 1982, he resigned from the left-wing National Lawyers Guild rather than face what felt like a purge for refusing to sign onto a strictly pro-Palestinian line. Years later, he became the in-house antisemitism expert at the American Jewish Committee, but eventually left in part over concern that, in its ardent defense of Israel on college campuses, the group was forsaking a commitment to academic freedom. He helped draft an internationally adopted definition of antisemitism that includes some forms of anti-Zionism. He’s also inveighed, in opinion essays, congressional testimony and in his 2020 book, against the use of that definition, put out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016, to traduce the free speech of Israel’s critics.

“The complexity of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict should make it an ideal subject to teach critical thinking and how to have difficult discussions,” writes Stern. “Instead, it is being used as a toxin that threatens the entire academic enterprise.”

As with the conflict between Israel and Palestine more broadly, there’s plenty of blame to go around. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a libertarian-leaning free speech organization, shared data with me showing that, since 2002, there have been more attempts made to de-platform pro-Palestinian campus speakers than pro-Israel ones. But attempts to shut down pro-Israel speakers, by disinviting or disrupting them, are more likely to be successful.

Both sides, then, have credible stories to tell about being censored and intimidated. The difference is where that intimidation is coming from. For supporters of Israel, it largely comes from peers and, in some cases, professors. For supporters of Palestine, it comes from powerful outside institutions, including the state.

There is little reason to think that the pressure brought to bear by these outside institutions is making Jewish students any safer. One result of the denunciatory mood that overtook many progressive spaces toward the tail end of the Trump years was to give reactionary ideas a rebellious frisson. You could see this in the little subculture of New York scenesters who adopted the trappings of conservative Catholicism as a rebuke to liberalism, but also in more significant cultural phenomena, like the popularity of the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast and the right-wing radicalization of Elon Musk. Among young people, the appeal of right-wing heterodoxy was limited by the fact that relatively few want to give up either a commitment to human equality or premarital sex. Anti-Zionist activism, by contrast, offers something that’s been missing from left-wing politics for years: the chance to stand up for the downtrodden and scandalize elites.

“By trying to censor anti-Israel remarks, it becomes more, not less, difficult to tackle both antisemitism and anti-Israel dogma,” Stern writes in his book. “The campus debate is changed from one of exposing bigotry to one of protecting free speech, and the last thing pro-Israel advocates need is a reputation for censoring, rather than refuting, their opponents.”

Of course, Israel’s partisans already have that reputation. “What can you say about what settlers are doing in the West Bank?” asked Khalidi. “What can you say about ethnic cleansing in 1948,” the year of Israel’s founding? “How can you defend any of those things? They don’t have an argument. They have to shut down debate.” Those who disagree with him might try to prove him wrong.

Source: When It Comes to Israel, Who Decides What You Can and Can’t Say?

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Trump-era antisemitism policy expected to fuel flood of student lawsuits against universities

2023/11/06 Leave a comment

As so often happens, lawsuits emerge, more broadly than just antisemitism:

As campuses across the country continue to erupt in protests over the Israel-Hamas war, a little-known 2019 presidential executive order is expected to fuel a flood of student legal claims against universities.

Attorneys — from a mix of white-shoe corporate firms to Jewish advocacy groups — are meeting with students who say their schools are failing to protect them from antisemitic or anti-Israel conduct.

In 2019, then-President Donald Trump signed an order instructing federal officials to expand the interpretation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include “discrimination rooted in anti-Semitism” as a form of discrimination based on race, color and national origin — prohibited behavior for programs that get federal funding. Trump signed the order amid a series of violent incidents against Jews, including the 2018 killing of 11 congregants in a Pittsburgh synagogue and a 2019 attack that killed three inside a Kosher supermarket in New Jersey.

Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not include the word “religion” as a subject of discrimination. Because the law does not list religious characteristics, legal experts say, federal officials have gradually expanded interpretations to include ethnoreligious groups.

Trump told federal agencies “to consider” using the Sweden-based International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which includes “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

The alliance promotes Holocaust education and research, and has come under criticism by both Jewish and non-Jewish groups for suggesting that broad criticism of Israel can be construed as antisemitic.

In January 19, 2021, the day before Trump left office, the U.S. Department of Education, released a five-page questions and answers memo defining what constitutes antisemitism at schools.

An NBC News review of the department’s current investigations showed 15 pending cases related to race or national origin. The most recent filing listed was against Oberlin College in Ohio, dated a week before the Hamas attacks on Israel. Melissa Landa, an alumna of the college, told NBC News that she filed the letter because the school didn’t intervene after a professor taught students that “Israel is an illegitimate settler colonial apartheid regime,” according to Landa.

“I think that students need to file Title VI complaints so that universities can have federal money withheld from them, and maybe that will make them act,” Landa said. “I hope that my Title VI complaint will serve as an example for them.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Education said that since Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, which killed more than 1,400 Israelis, “we have seen an uptick in complaints and the department is assessing them all.”

Lawyers said they have received an overwhelming number of calls from across the country from Jewish college students and their parents requesting representation in Title VI claims. Kenneth Marcus, who ran the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights during the Trump and George W. Bush administrations, said he is getting many calls.

“Oh, my God, I can’t tell you how many campuses we’re dealing with every single day. We have never been so inundated with cases,” said Marcus, who now runs the Brandeis Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit focused on protecting the civil rights of Jews.

In recent years, the Brandeis Center has filed Title VI complaints against the University of Vermont and the State University of New York at New Paltz on behalf of Jewish students who said their universities have allowed antisemitism to fester on campus.

In April, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights said it found that the University of Vermont failed to investigate student claims of antisemitism and did not examine whether the complaints had created a hostile environment for Jewish students.

The University of Vermont signed a resolution agreement with federal officials later that month vowing to enact reforms such as expanding the school’s discrimination policy to include protections for students based on shared ancestry, including antisemitism. In June, the Office for Civil Rights opened a formal investigation into SUNY-New Paltz.

For years, Marcus has also been fighting to broaden Title VI protections to members of other ethnoreligious groups. He said prior to the Trump administration, he wrote guidance memos that said Title VI could be interpreted to include protecting members of other ethnoreligious groups such as Sikhs and Arab Muslims. But in 2019, Trump kept his executive order focused on protecting Jews.

In September, President Joe Biden issued a statement noting that Title VI also prohibits Islamophobic activities in federally funded programs. But the U.S. Department of Education has not released a detailed memo that defines Islamophobia as it has done for antisemitism.

Gadeir Abbas, a senior litigation attorney with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said his team is preparing discrimination complaints on behalf of Muslim and pro-Palestinian students, who he says are being unfairly labeled as Hamas sympathizers or unfairly accused of providing support to terrorists.

“I think that pro-Israel groups, groups that are seeking to marginalize Palestinian voices on campus, see the Title VI claim as a way of attacking not the administration, but the other student groups,” Abbas said. “The idea is that [they’re] going to censor or penalize or punish any advocacy for equal rights of Palestinians.”

As a result, he said, Palestinian students — or students who say they support Palestinian civilians in Gaza — feel vulnerable on campus and in their communities, and some are considering filing their own Title VI claims.

NBC News has reported that bias incidents against Muslims are on the rise. CAIR said that it received 774 reports of bias incidents and requests for help from Muslims across the country from Oct. 7 through Oct. 24, nearly triple the number compared to a similar time period last year.

Abbas said that students, like all Americans, have a right to protest in the United States. “In a conflict between the First Amendment and Title VI, the First Amendment wins,” Abbas said. “Those student groups are participating in lawful activity. They’re recognized willingly by their colleges and universities.”

Three weeks before the Hamas attacks and the subsequent protests on American campuses, Palestine Legal, an advocacy organization for Palestinian rights, filed a Title VI complaint with the U.S. Department of Education. Attorneys demanded a federal investigation after the University of Illinois Chicago barred students “with Arab sounding names” from attending a January 2023 informational session on a university-sponsored Israel study-abroad program.

Legal experts said they expect the largest number of future Title VI cases to be filed against universities by Jewish students. The Anti-Defamation League recently reported that nationwide, “incidents of harassment, vandalism and assault increased by 388 percent over the same period last year.”

One of the most outspoken advocates for Jewish students’ use of Title VI since Oct. 7 has been the Lawfare Project, a nonprofit that represents Jewish clients. Lawfare staffers have met with Jewish students on campuses, posted solicitations for cases in Jewish WhatsApp groups, and used the organization’s social media accounts “End Jew Hatred” to recruit young clients.

“While we always had students reaching out to us, after Oct. 7, that became a flood,” said Lawfare senior counsel Gerard Filitti, while standing on the sidelines of a recent pro-Israel rally at Columbia University. “The phone was ringing nonstop.”

Georgetown Law student Julia Wax, 25, was also at the Columbia rally. Wax said she is in talks with Lawfare to file a Title VI lawsuit against her law school, claiming that pro-Palestinian student organizations on her campus have been publicly supporting Hamas.

“I think in a perfect world, Georgetown would create some sort of an open forum for this conflict to be discussed,” said Wax, adding that she wants Georgetown to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

In February 2020, Lawfare represented one of the first Jewish college students to file a Title VI complaint against a university after Trump’s executive order. Jonathan Karten, then 24, was a Columbia University student who said he was harassed by members of the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine. (The group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Karten’s complaint said students called him “racist” and a “Zionist pig.” Tensions further escalated as professor Joseph Massad, who teaches modern Arab politics and has a history of criticizing Israel, referred to the military wing of Hamas as “armed resistance,” according to the complaint. Karten’s uncle was killed by Hamas militants in 1996 while hitchhiking in Israel.

“My professor endorsed the very same monsters,” Karten, who recently rejoined the Israeli army, said in a WhatsApp message.

The Department of Education declined to comment on the status of the case.

Karten’s younger brother, Isidore, also a Columbia alumnus, is pressuring the department to do more. Since the Hamas terrorist attacks, he has also helped organize pro-Israel events around the city and says he is frustrated by what he sees as Columbia’s muted response to antisemitism.

On Wednesday, Columbia University announced it was starting an antisemitism task force to come up with changes to academic and extracurricular programs. Columbia spokesperson Samantha Slater said in a statement that the university is beefing up security.

“Over the past few weeks, we have increased our public safety presence across all our campuses,” Slater wrote. “We are also working closely with outside security firms and are in regular contact with the New York City Police Department.”

Isidore Karten said he and other young Jewish activists continue to feel that Columbia can do more. “I don’t think they are doing enough,” he said

Source: Trump-era antisemitism policy expected to fuel flood of student … – NBC News

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Chris Selley: Teaching kids about the Holocaust won’t cure us of our antisemites

2023/11/04 Leave a comment

Valid caution:

In 2019, the Pew Research Center polled Americans on their knowledge of the Holocaust and their attitudes toward Jews. The results were intuitive: The more people knew about Hitler’s rise to power, and about how many millions of Jews were murdered, the “warmer” their feelings were.

“Warmer feelings” seems to be the basic goal British Columbia and Ontario have in mind in beefing up Holocaust education in elementary and secondary schools, after Hamas’s Oct. 7 pogrom in southern Israel led to celebrations on the streets of Canadian cities, and later the targeting of Jewish-owned businesses for protests and various other antisemitic acts.

“If we really want to fight hate in this province, if we really want to stand up to antisemitism, it is critical that we learn from the past,” B.C. Premier David Eby said this week. “We know how threats and hate can accelerate into violent acts and into horrific outcomes. We must ensure that the same horrors are not repeated.”

“By including new mandatory learning in Holocaust education in elementary and secondary schools, we are ensuring students are never bystanders in the face of hate and division,” Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce averred.

It would be very difficult to argue against Holocaust education, unless you think students needn’t know about seminal events in human history. (Astonishingly, only Ontario and B.C. mandate any at all. Expect that to change.) But as a means to a greater social end, Holocaust education isn’t necessarily as effective as people might hope.

A cautionary note from the Pew survey: The “warm feelings” gap between the informed and uninformed really wasn’t very big. The people who were most informed about the Holocaust measured 67 out of 100 on Pew’s “feeling thermometer.” The least informed were at 58.

And another cautionary note from the British Centre for Holocaust Information: Just because you teach kids something doesn’t mean they’ll believe it or remember it. In a 2016 survey of nearly 10,000 English secondary-school students, the centre found that “despite the Holocaust being a staple in the curriculum for almost 25 years, student knowledge and conceptual understanding is often limited and based on inaccuracies and misconceptions.”

Just over 10 per cent of students believed “no more than 100,000 lives were lost (in the Holocaust),” the study reported.  “Most (students) had little understanding of why (the Jews) were persecuted and murdered,” with most assuming it was simply a matter of Nazis abhorring “difference” of all kinds. The understanding of antisemitism specifically — past and present — was so weak that “68 per cent of students (were) unaware of what ‘antisemitism’ meant.”

Teaching about the Holocaust in isolation from antisemitism, from Jewish history, and from Jews in the modern world, is one of the key pedagogical pitfalls American essayist Dara Horn identified in a fascinating recent piece at The Atlantic. Horn quoted Charlotte Decoster of the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum: “Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”

“When anti-Semitism is reduced to the Holocaust, anything short of murdering six million Jews — like … taunting kids at school, or shooting up a Jewish nonprofit, or hounding Jews out of entire countries — seems minor by comparison,” Horn argues.

“Holocaust education remains essential for teaching historical facts in the face of denial and distortions,” she concludes. “Yet over the past year, as I’ve visited Holocaust museums and spoken with educators around the country, I have come to the disturbing conclusion that Holocaust education is incapable of addressing contemporary anti-Semitism.”

Indeed, it strikes me that the worst things I’ve heard Canadians says since Oct. 7 have come from conspicuously educated people who surely know what the Holocaust was. “How beautiful is the spirit to get free that Palestinians literally learned how to fly on hang gliders,” Harsha Walia jaw-droppingly effused on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery. She has a law degree from UBC. She was director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, for heaven’s sake, until she cheered the burning of churches on First Nations.

It seems safe to say, knock wood, that Canada isn’t quite as deep into this problem as some of our peer nations. By the Anti-Defamation League’s definition, eight per cent of Canadian adults harbour antisemitic views. In France it’s 15 per cent, in Belgium 22 per cent, in Spain 26 per cent. We don’t have France’s soul-crushing banlieues — ghettoes fine-tuned to turn bitter, unemployed young Muslim men into extremists. We have freedom of speech: We let pro-Palestinian activists say their piece, disturbing as it might be, rather than turning the water cannons on them.

Pew found that simply knowing something of another faith (or none) significantly warmed feelings toward that faith: Atheists scored just 38 degrees on the “feeling thermometer” among Americans who don’t know any, and 51 degrees among Americans who do. Catholics enjoyed the same 13-per-cent jump. Those with personal connections were 10 degrees warmer to Hindus, Jews and Mainline Protestants. Canada is a country where people of many faiths and of no faith work and socialize together — even those who might have been raised with prejudicial attitudes toward others. That ought to help.

But of course, it only takes one pathetic, bigoted freak to lose the plot before something horrific happens. Sticking to our values is all we can do, in my view, and that should absolutely include well-designed Holocaust and antisemitism curricula. But no one should assume it’ll be enough. This problem didn’t emerge on Oct. 7, after all. Oct. 7 simply shined a blinding light on it

Source: Chris Selley: Teaching kids about the Holocaust won’t cure us of our antisemites

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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