The ‘Genocide Games’ Disruptors Giving Hell to Beijing

2022/02/09 Leave a comment

Creative, even if drowned out by the cheerleading media and others:

With the 2022 Winter Olympics well underway in Beijing, a coalition of activists from around the world is vowing to keep up its pressure on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Chinese government throughout the two weeks of the competition, which they’ve dubbed the “Genocide Games.”

The organizers, many of them women in their early twenties and thirties, have launched a series of events to run on each day until the end of the Games on Feb. 20. “During the month of February we will be continuing our campaign against Beijing 2022, shining a spotlight on China’s egregious human rights abuses,” Pema Doma, Campaigns Director for Students for a Free Tibet, told The Daily Beast. “Together we’ll continue to challenge Chinese propaganda at Beijing 2022.”

One of their main programs is the #IWillNotWatch campaign, heavily promoted on social media to discourage viewers around the world from watching the Olympics “and to counter Beijing’s propaganda show,” Zumretay Arkin, Program and Advocacy Manager for the World Uighur Congress in Munich, told The Daily Beast.

On Feb. 4, as Beijing was airing its glitzy Opening Ceremony, the coalition live-streamed Beijing 2022: The Alternative Opening Ceremony, where several young Tibetans, Uighurs, and Hongkongers convened to spotlight China’s human rights abuses.

NBC’s broadcast of the opening ceremony attracted just 14 million TV viewers, making it one of the least-viewed opening ceremonies in the history of the Olympics, according to statistics from NBC Sports. This marked a stark decline of about 43 percent from the 23.8 million viewers who watched the Opening Ceremony for the Winter Games in Pyeongchang in 2018.

The day before the ceremony, activists stepped up their pressure with a series of demonstrations in 65 cities around the world to protest what they called “the IOC’s failure to hold China accountable for their serious and worsening human rights abuses.”

At a protest in San Francisco, a Tibetan monk clad in a maroon robe walked at the front of the march holding a portrait of the Dalai Lama as he led some 100 marchers south across the Golden Gate Bridge to the Chinese Consulate in downtown San Francisco. Behind him, several Uighurs waved the flag of the East Turkestan independence movement, which is unofficially used by activists to represent China’s Xinjiang Province. Others carried placards that read, “No Rights, No Games,” and “No More Shame Games.” Another showed a skier standing in front of an Army tank, a reference to the iconic photo of the Tank Man, a Chinese citizen who used his body to stop a column of tanks rolling down a Beijing street in 1989 during an anti-democracy crackdown.

As the March wound its way through the streets of San Francisco, bystanders stopped to take photos and to applaud the protesters. Dozens of drivers beeped their horns and leaned out of their cars to shout support.

When China won the Summer Olympics in 2008, rights activists expressed concerns about the country’s dismal human rights record. In response, China and the IOC argued that the Games would actually improve human rights and rule of law in China.

Activists say that the opposite happened. China, encouraged by the legitimacy given to it by its successful hosting of the 2008 Games, stepped up its suppression of human rights.

Since 2008, an estimated 160 Tibetans have self-immolated in protest against China’s increasingly abusive policies in Tibet, which Freedom House has ranked the least free place on earth, tied with Syria. In Xinjiang, as many as 1 million Uighurs, a Muslim, Turkic-speaking people, have been thrown into brutal prison camps, which the Chinese refer to as “re-education schools.” Hong Kong has also faced a severe crackdown against democracy, with prominent politicians, activists and journalists arrested, and civic organizations shut down.

“The Chinese government has felt emboldened since 2008,” says Chemi Lhamo, a 25-year-old Canadian-Tibetan activist in an interview with The Daily Beast. “It got the message from the international community that it was okay with China’s abuses, that the world will turn a blind eye to this.”

This time around, no one is predicting that the Olympics will democratize the country. Touting an authoritarian one-party rule as an alternative to Western-style democracy, China has risen to become an economic, technological and military powerhouse. Chinese leader Xi Jinping still wants to be legitimized by holding the Olympics, but he sees no need to placate the international community.

“How in the world does it make sense for China to host the Games when it has such a brutal record?” said Lhamo. “Things have not gotten better—they’ve gotten worse.”

Activists representing disparate peoples in China began to strategize immediately after China was awarded the Winter Games. In October 2020, a delegation representing 160 human rights groups had a virtual meeting with the IOC hoping to convince the body to either cancel or relocate the Winter Olympics. The meeting didn’t go well, some of those who attended the meeting told The Daily Beast.

“The conversation was tense, and they were not very respectful of the activists,” says Frances Hui, the 21-year-old director of We The Hongkongers, who took part in the meeting. “Each of us shared our own firsthand, heartfelt experiences. I couldn’t believe it when they told us the Olympics was simply about people from around the world playing sports.”

Teng Biao, a Chinese human rights lawyer who also took part in the meeting, says the IOC responded with the same excuse that was given in 1936 when Nazi Germany was awarded the Games: politics and sports should be kept apart. “The IOC refuses to listen,” he told The Daily Beast. “Human rights are getting worse and there is growing evidence of that. The IOC is clear about what’s happening in China. But it doesn’t care.”

The activists decided to call for a full boycott of the Games, which they conceded would be an uphill battle. An alliance of some 200 groups began to write letters, organize petitions, and stage protests around the world. Campaigners representing Tibetan, Uighur, Hongkonger and Chinese activists urged international corporations to stop their sponsorship of the Winter Olympics, but these pleas fell on deaf ears. Leading world corporations feared offending Beijing and risking one of the world’s biggest markets.

Allianz, the insurance and financial services giant, one of 13 international corporate sponsors, is believed to be the only sponsor that agreed to meet with campaigners. Company officials politely listened to speakers and promised to discuss the issue in-house. But there was no further response, even after activists staged a sit-in and chained themselves to the door of the Allianz building in Berlin last month.

Some of the protests leading up to the Games have even led to arrests. In October last year, Greek police detained 18-year-old Tibetan student Tsela Zoksang and Hong Kong activist Joey Siu, after the two climbed the scaffolding at the Acropolis, where they waved the Tibetan flag and the flag of the “Hong Kong revolution” and shouted “Boycott Beijing 2022” and “Free Tibet.” The following day, demonstrators disrupted the official torch lighting ceremony at the Temple of Hera in Ancient Olympia, where the torch is traditionally lit just before being carried across the globe to the site of the Olympics. The protesters unfurled a Tibetan flag and a banner that read, “No Genocide Games,” before Greek police shoved them to the ground.

The following month, Lhamo and several other activists carried a mock black coffin bearing the Olympic Rings to the IOC headquarters. “We held a mock funeral for the IOC because the three values of the Olympics—excellence, friendship and respect—are dead; the IOC clearly doesn’t care about them,” said Lhamo. “The only friendship I see is with the Chinese government.”

Days after the mock funeral, protesters camped outside the White House for 57 hours, urging President Joe Biden to take action against the Games. On Dec. 7, Biden announced a diplomatic boycott of the Games, citing human rights abuses, but stopped short of prohibiting American athletes from taking part. Britain, Australia, Japan and Canada followed up with similar announcements.

Activists took credit for the diplomatic boycott.

“I do see this as a result of our ‘NoBeijing2022’ Campaign,” says Siu, one of the activists who was detained in Greece. “We held protests all over the globe. We had activists sleeping outside the White House. This was a direct result of our collective efforts.”

In the months leading up to the opening ceremony, the coalition began to reach out to Olympic athletes to tell them about the human rights situation in China in hopes of convincing some to withdraw from the competition, or to at least make a political statement at the Games.

“Athletes should never have been put in a situation where they need to choose between legitimizing genocide or human rights,” says Hui, the We The Hongkongers director. “But this is the reality: Beijing 2022 is not the opportunity Olympic athletes were promised and Thomas Bach and the IOC have failed the athletes by putting them in this situation.”

Anticipating that athletes might make such statements, Beijing issued a threat. “Any behavior or speech that is against the Olympic spirit, especially against the Chinese laws and regulations, are also subject to certain punishment,” warned Yang Shu, deputy director of Beijing’s Olympic organizing committee.

Then, just days before the opening ceremony, several athletes from different countries announced anonymously that they would boycott the Opening Ceremony to show solidarity with the victims of human rights abuses, the Washington Post reported. The athletes said they would not explain their absence until after the games to avoid being punished. According to Students for a Free Tibet, some 150 of Team USA’s 224 athletes walked in the Opening Ceremony, while less than half of Team Canada participated.

The organizers say they’re disappointed they failed to achieve their goal of bringing about a boycott of the games, but they remain optimistic. “There have been huge changes since we launched this movement,” says Hui. “People are now much more aware of the situation in China. A lot of people now know about the human rights abuses there.”

Lhamo says the coalition has no choice but to continue their protests against Beijing 2022. “We have to continue to raise our voices for the people back home because the oppression is not going to go away,” she told The Daily Beast. “It’s only going to get worse.”

Source: The ‘Genocide Games’ Disruptors Giving Hell to Beijing

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Immigrants. The working poor. Essential workers. Third doses lag in Toronto’s most vulnerable areas; Let’s celebrate Toronto’s vaccine success story

2022/02/09 Leave a comment

Not that surprising as they lagged with earlier doses as well.

Throughout the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, Torontonians have watched as neighbourhoods home to those experiencing some of the harshest outcomes of the pandemic have had among the lowest vaccination rates. 

Now, as public health and community organizations work on the ground to improve third-dose uptake, new data from the Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine at University Health Network lays bare the stark demographic differences between the Toronto neighbourhoods with the highest rates of third-dose vaccination and those with the lowest. 

What it shows in granular detail is that many of our most vulnerable citizens — immigrants, the working poor and essential workers in trades and manufacturing — live in areas where third-dose vaccinations just aren’t happening anywhere near the rates seen in some of Toronto’s richest and least-racialized neighbourhoods. 

For example, 71 per cent of the population is racialized in the bottom 20 per cent of Toronto neighbourhoods ranked by third-dose uptake. That compares to just 24 per cent in the top 20 per cent of neighbourhoods with the highest rates of third-dose vaccination. 

Similarly, the percentage of the population that meets low-income thresholds in the areas with the lowest third-dose vaccination rates is nearly double that in neighbourhoods with the most administered. 

“It doesn’t need to be this way. There was great success in narrowing the access gap for the rollout of Dose 1. It can be done again. We can’t afford not to,” said Dr. Andrew Boozary, executive director of the Gattuso Centre.

“If we don’t address the pathologies of poverty, if we don’t shift more public investment into these neglected neighbourhoods, we will continue to see worse health outcomes and wider health disparities than we’ve ever seen.”

The Gattuso Centre’s analysis also shows that neighbourhoods with the lowest third-dose uptake have higher proportions of essential workers in manufacturing, utilities, trades, transport and equipment operation — sectors that don’t conform to regular nine-to-five workdays and that are not conducive to allowing workers to take time off to get vaccinated during clinic hours.

Indeed, the percentage of the population working in manufacturing and utilities is 10 times higher in areas with the lowest rates of third-dose vaccination than in those with the highest rates. Likewise, the percentage of people employed in the trades, transport and equipment operation is more than four times higher in the bottom 20 per cent of Toronto neighbourhoods by third-dose vaccination than in the highest 20 per cent. 

“If racialized community members are getting their third doses at a third of the rate compared to non-racialized communities, we need to make specific, targeted interventions that are going to provide information in a culturally appropriate and safe way for these communities,” said Michelle Westin, senior analyst for planning, quality and risk at Black Creek Community Health Centre who has been leading mobile vaccination clinics in northwest Toronto.

“We need to be having ambassadors that are representative of these communities to help build that trust. We have to have vaccinators that are representative of these racialized communities. We need to make sure that vaccinations are accessible to people who are low income, so ensuring that they are in spaces that they can get to easily, assist with providing transportation if needed, ensuring that hours of the clinic work with folks that are having to work different hours of the day and multiple jobs,” she added.

The city of Toronto has been waging a three-pillared operation to get shots into arms in the neighbourhoods with the lowest uptakes. This includes hyperlocal clinics in malls, transit stations, workplaces and schools; outreach around these clinics through 155 community agencies and more than 400 neighbourhood vaccine ambassadors; and a get-out-the-vote style campaign, dubbed “VaxTO,” using text messages, phone calls, emails and town halls to get information out.

“We know that when we announced our target to reach 90 per cent of residents for their first dose, people told us it was impossible in a city as large and diverse as ours. We proved that it was possible when you commit to equity and you don’t stop,” said Coun. Joe Cressy, chair of the Toronto Board of Health. “You literally have to go door-to-door, building-by-building in every language with trusted local leaders. It’s not quick because tackling inequity is never quick. But it works.”

To date, 60 per cent of eligible residents in Toronto have received a third dose. 

But there is still a long way to go. The Gattuso Centre found that the gap between the neighbourhoods with the most and least third dose-uptake has widened substantially over the past seven weeks. In Kingsway South, for example, 68 per cent of eligible residents have received a third dose, compared to just 27 per cent in Mount Olive-Silverstone-Jamestown — a gap of 41 percentage points.

“The gap is striking, especially given what we’ve learned throughout the pandemic. We’ve seen real success in earlier stages of the vaccine rollout when community leadership has been supported with the resources and focus to ensure there is true access. It obliterated many notions of vaccine hesitancy early on,” Boozary said.

“But if we stray from that, we will continue to see this widening of a gap and it will not be recoverable if we do not ensure that those same investments and resources and supports are there for everyone.”

Luwam Ogbaselassie, implementation lead with the Gattuso Centre who has been supporting the vaccination effort in the Humber River-Black Creek region, said the involvement of community leadership is key to narrowing the third-dose uptake gap. 

“Wherever there are resources being allocated towards vaccines, it should be guided by community leaders around how best to structure those clinics and how best to reach the people who have been the hardest to reach and continue to be the hardest to reach,” she said, noting that she has seen first-hand the meaningful impact of community ambassadors who live in the same buildings and in the same neighbourhoods as those who may harbour mistrust of the health care system. 

“I’ve always said as a hospital partner, we bring the vaccines, we bring the clinical teams, but we look to our community partners to guide us on how to set up the clinics, how to engage with people who live in the community.

“Community leadership makes all the difference.

Source: Immigrants. The working poor. Essential workers. Third doses lag in Toronto’s most vulnerable areas

On a more positive note:

It’s a snowy Thursday afternoon in Toronto and the vaccination clinic at the Woodbine Mall is getting ready to welcome its first visitors of the day. The news is full of the demonstrations in Ottawa against pandemic restrictions. Similar protests are about to come to Toronto. But at the clinic, the mood is purposeful, unruffled, even buoyant.

Nurses sit at tables filling syringes with vaccine and loading them into trays. Helpers lay out colouring sheets to amuse kids coming in for their jab. One greeter brandishes a little Canadian flag that she waves to show visitors when a booth is free.

As opening time approaches, operations manager Simone Richards gathers everyone for the daily huddle, a combination of pep talk, check-in session and revival meeting. Smiling behind her mask, she warns the group: “We are running low on teddy bears.” The local police station donated a pile of the toys to soothe nervous kids and there are only a few left.

After singing a rousing Happy Birthday for their clinical manager Arturo Villasan, staffers put their hands in, like athletes before a game, for a go-team cheer – except that, pandemic style, their hands don’t actually touch. Then they open the doors to let people through. They get hundreds a day, most of them happy to get the protection offered by the vaccines against COVID-19.

The scene at the Woodbine clinic tells a different story than you see in the headlines. In a week in which all the oxygen was consumed by noisy and sometimes obnoxious protesters, it is worthwhile to remember that most Canadians don’t feel their rights are being trampled by a despotic government. Most believe in vaccines and are eager to get jabbed. Most wear their masks and obey the rules on gathering and distancing. Though it will disappoint the Russell Brands of the world, Canada is not in revolt. Quietly, capably mustering all the available tools of technology, science and human collaboration, the country is getting on with the task of combating a deadly and insidious virus.

Toronto’s vaccination campaign, the biggest in its history, is an impressive success story. More than 6.5 million doses have been administered. Ninety per cent of residents 12 and older have one dose and 87 per cent two. Sixty percent of eligible residents have a booster, the result of a stepped-up Team Toronto drive to meet the threat from the Omicron variant. More than half of kids have one dose and a quarter have two.

To inoculate all those people in a city of 180 languages, dozens of cultural groups and scores of neighbourhoods has been a staggering task. To reach the hesitant, the disadvantaged and the disengaged, the city has hired hundreds of community ambassadors and translators to get the word out. It has dispatched mobile clinics from one end of the city to the other. It has bombarded residents with text messages, robocalls and flyers.

On the same afternoon that Ms. Richards and her team were greeting visitors to their big clinic in a Hudson’s Bay store at Woodbine, workers were going door to door in a Parkdale seniors’ building and soothing nervous kids at a Mount Olive school. At a small clinic in a mall at Jane and Finch streets, they don’t just wait for people to walk in. They recently persuaded the busy lady at the local roti joint to sit for a vaccination right in her shop. Every vaccination counts.

Leading me on a clinic tour, Joe Cressy, a city councillor who is chair of the city’s board of health, called it a brilliant example of breaking down silos and bringing everyone together in a common cause: pharmacies, hospitals, public-health workers; community and neighbourhood associations; cops and firefighters; care homes and schools.

Though we hear a lot these days about conflict and anger, what really stands out is the way all these groups are working arm in arm. As Mayor John Tory puts it, “the city has been united.”

Of course, it’s taking a while. It’s only natural that people are frustrated with the persistence of this virus and the annoying, limiting measures put in place to control it. If some believe that governments are to blame for much of the misery, they have a perfect right to say so, as long as they do it peacefully and lawfully. But while thousands are taking to the streets, hundreds of thousands of others are still lining up to get their shots and do their bit to quell the virus.

Ms. Richards and her Woodbine crew are standing ready to help them, with kindness, efficiency and good cheer. More teddy bears are coming.

Source: Let’s celebrate Toronto’s vaccine success story

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

As Officials Look Away, Hate Speech in India Nears Dangerous Levels

2022/02/09 Leave a comment

Of note:

The police officer arrived at the Hindu temple here with a warning to the monks: Don’t repeat your hate speech.

Ten days earlier, before a packed audience and thousands watching online, the monks had called for violence against the country’s minority Muslims. Their speeches, in one of India’s holiest cities, promoted a genocidal campaign to “kill two million of them” and urged an ethnic cleansing of the kind that targeted Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

When videos of the event provoked national outrage, the police came. The saffron-clad preachers questioned whether the officer could be objective.

Yati Narsinghanand, the event’s firebrand organizer known for his violent rhetoric, assuaged their concerns.

“Biased?” Mr. Narsinghanand said, according to a video of the interaction. “He will be on our side,” he added, as the monks and the officer broke into laughter.

Once considered fringe, extremist elements are increasingly taking their militant message into the mainstream, stirring up communal hate in a push to reshape India’s constitutionally protected secular republic into a Hindu state. Activists and analysts say their agenda is being enabled, even normalized, by political leaders and law enforcement officials who offer tacit endorsements by not directly addressing such divisive issues.

After the monks’ call to arms went viral, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his top leaders remained silent, except for a vice president with a largely ceremonial role who warned that “inciting people against each other is a crime against the nation” without making a specific reference to Haridwar. Junior members of Mr. Modi’s party attended the event, and the monks have often posted pictures with senior leaders.

“You have persons giving hate speech, actually calling for genocide of an entire group, and we find reluctance of the authorities to book these people,” Rohinton Fali Nariman, a recently retired Indian Supreme Court judge, said in a public lecture. “Unfortunately, the other higher echelons of the ruling party are not only being silent on hate speech, but almost endorsing it.”

Mr. Narsinghanand was later arrested after he ignored the police warning and repeated calls for violence. His lawyer, Uttam Singh Chauhan, said his speeches may have been a reaction to anti-Hindu comments by Muslim clerics.

Mr. Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party did not respond to requests for comment.

“Does the prime minister or home minister need to address every small, trivial issue?” said Vinod Bansal, a spokesman for the World Hindu Council, a party affiliate. “The accused have already been arrested. The secular groups will always highlight such incidents, but not when Hindus, Hindu gods and goddesses are under attack.”

The hate speech is stoking communal tensions in a country where small triggers have incited mass-death tragedies. The monks’ agenda already resonates with increasingly emboldened vigilante groups.

Vigilantes have beaten people accused of disrespecting cows, considered holy by some Hindus; dragged couples out of trains, cafes and homes on suspicion that Hindu women might be seduced by Muslim men; and barged into religious gatherings where they suspect people are being converted.

In recent weeks, global human rights organizations and local activists, as well as India’s retired security chiefs, have warned that the violent rhetoric has reached a dangerous new pitch. With right-wing messages spreading rapidly through social media and the government hesitant to take action, they are concerned that a singular event — a local dispute, or an attack by international terror groups such as Al Qaeda or the Islamic State — could lead to widespread violence that would be difficult to contain.

Gregory Stanton, the founder of Genocide Watch, a nonprofit group, who raised similar warnings ahead of the massacres in Rwanda in the 1990s, told a U.S. congressional briefing that the demonizing and discriminatory “processes” that lead to genocide have been well underway in India.

In an interview, he said Myanmar was an example of how the easy dissemination of misinformation and hate speech on social media prepares the ground for violence. The difference in India, he said, is that it would be the mobs taking action instead of the military.

“You have to stop it now,” he said, “because once the mobs take over it could really turn deadly.”

The Dasna Devi temple in Uttar Pradesh state, where Mr. Narsinghanand is the chief priest, is peppered with signs that call to prepare for a “dharm yudh,” or religious war. One calls on “Hindus, my lions” to value their weapons “just the way dedicated wives value their husbands.”

The temple’s main sign prohibits Muslims from entering.

The monks’ anger is rooted in a sense of internalized victimhood that dates to the founding of India’s republic after independence from British rule in 1947. When Pakistan was carved out of India in a bloody partition that left hundreds of thousands dead, the Hindu right was incensed that the founding fathers turned what remained of India into a secular republic.

They celebrate a Hindu hard-liner’s assassination of Mohandas Gandhi — a renowned symbol of nonviolent struggle, but to them a Muslim appeaser. Pooja Shakun Pandey, a monk at the Haridwar event, has held re-enactments of Gandhi’s assassination, firing a bullet into his effigy as blood runs down.

The forces that shaped the ideology of Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, have slowly risen from the fringes to dominate India’s politics.

Mr. Modi, the prime minister, spent decades as a mobilizer for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the century-old right-wing organization to which Mr. Godse belonged. Mr. Modi’s party sees the group as the fountainhead of its political ideology and has relied heavily on its vast network of volunteers to mobilize voters and secure victories.

When he was chief minister of Gujarat, Mr. Modi saw firsthand how unchecked communal tensions could turn into bloodletting.

In 2002, a train fire killed 59 Hindu pilgrims. Although the cause was disputed, violent mobs, in response, targeted the Muslim community, leaving more than 1,000 people dead, many burned alive.

Rights organizations and opposition leaders accused Mr. Modi of looking the other way. He rejected the allegations as political attacks.

After he rose to the country’s highest office in 2014 on a message of economic growth, there was hope that Mr. Modi could rein in the fury. Instead, he has often reverted to a Hindu-first agenda that inflames communal divides.

In 2017, Mr. Modi picked Yogi Adityanath, a monk who had started a youth group accused of vigilante violence, to lead Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state with more than 200 million people.

In his saffron robe, Mr. Adityanath has legislated a ban on religious conversion by marriage, an idea that he calls “love jihad,” in which Muslim men lure Hindu women to convert them. His group has served as moral police, hounding interfaith couples and punishing anyone suspected of disrespecting cows.

As Mr. Adityanath campaigned for re-election, the group held a meeting in New Delhi around the same time as the monks’ event. With a picture of Mr. Adityanath behind them, attendees took an oath to turn India into a Hindu state, even if it meant killing for it.

Mr. Adityanath’s office would not address his current relations with the group, but said the chief minister “had nothing to do” with the meeting.

Dhirendra K. Jha, a writer who has studied the rise of Hindu nationalism, said he worried that extremists now dominate India’s politics in such a way that those who call for violence feel protected.

“Unless this is dealt with, the kind of consequences that may happen — I can’t even imagine, I don’t dare to imagine,” said Mr. Jha.

The choice of Haridwar as the venue for a bold call to violence was strategic — the city attracts millions of visitors annually, often for religious festivals and pilgrimages.

The riverbank was recently busy with seers and worshipers. Families picnicked and took dips in the chilly water. Even as some religious authorities appeared troubled by the calls for violence, they were reluctant to condemn them.

Pradeep Jha, the main organizer of the city’s largest pilgrimage festival, said he shared the vision of a Hindu state, not through violence but by urging India’s Muslims to convert back; in such a view, everyone in India was Hindu at one point.

“I believe we need to pursue our goals with patience, with peace,” he said. “Otherwise, what is our difference with others?”

Mr. Narsinghanand has made a name for himself doing the exact opposite.

As he sees it, India’s Muslims — who account for 15 percent of the population — will turn the country into a Muslim state within a decade. To prevent such an outcome, he has told followers that they must “be willing to die,” pointing to the Taliban and Islamic State as a “role model.”

In 2020, Mr. Narsinghanand was among the hard-liners stoking tensions during monthslong protests over a citizenship amendment seen as discriminatory toward Muslims. He called for violence, using the language of a “final battle.” “They are jihadis, and we will have to finish them off,” he said.

Riots followed in New Delhi, with 50 people killed, a majority of them Muslims.

Mr. Narsinghanand was always observant, but not an extremist, according to his 82-year-old father, Rajeshwar Dayal Tyagi.

He was a top college student, earning a scholarship to study food technology in Moscow. There, he helped open a vegetarian restaurant for Indian students that still operates.

Returning to India in 1996, he started a computer training institute with money from Mr. Tyagi’s pension. He soon dedicated his life to being a monk, leaving behind his wife and young daughter, said his father.

“I feel pained, I feel angry, it gives me stress,” his father said. “It’s not a good idea to use harsh words against anybody.”

Despite the police warning, Mr. Narsinghanand and his fellow monks repeated their messages of hate, including on national television and social media.

“This Constitution will be the end of the Hindus, all one billion Hindus,” Mr. Narsinghanand said at a virtual event. “Whoever believes in this system, in this Supreme Court, in these politicians, in this Constitution, in this army and police — they will die a dog’s death.”

When the police came to arrest an associate, he threatened the officers, who politely urged him to calm down. “You will all die,” Mr. Narsinghanand is seen in a video telling them.

The police arrested Mr. Narsinghanand on Jan. 15, and he was charged in court with hate speech.

“He said nothing wrong,” said Swami Amritanand, an organizer of the Haridwar event. “We are doing what America is doing, we are doing what Britain is doing.”

Mr. Amritanand said the call for arms was justified because “within the next 10 to 12 years there will be a horrible war that will play out in India.”

Late last month, the monks again sounded a violent call to create a Hindu state, this time at an event hundreds of miles away from Haridwar in Uttar Pradesh. They threatened violence — referencing a bombing of India’s assembly — if Mr. Narsinghanand was not released.

Ms. Pandey described their actions as defensive. “We must prepare to protect ourselves,” she said.

To the Haridwar police, the event in Uttar Pradesh did not count as a repeat offense. Rakendra Singh Kathait, the senior police officer in Haridwar, said Mr. Narsinghanand was in jail because he had acted again in the city; others like Ms. Pandey got a warning.

“If she goes and says it from Kolkata, it doesn’t count as repeat here,” Mr. Kathait said.

Source: As Officials Look Away, Hate Speech in India Nears Dangerous Levels

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization, Religion Tagged with , , ,

BRAUN: Ugly truths about trucker protest coming out

2022/02/08 Leave a comment

Refreshing commentary in the Toronto Sun:

Maybe the first big clue on Ottawa’s trucker occupation should have been the Confederate flags.

Or maybe the tip-off was former U.S. president Donald Trump calling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a, “far left lunatic … who has destroyed Canada with insane Covid mandates,” — this from the guy whose administration oversaw the deaths of 412,000 Americans in the pandemic he once claimed, “Is going to disappear.”

Certainly, there were people claiming from the get-go that the trucker convoy had been hijacked by far right-wing U.S. factions.

A week ago, police in Ottawa said they were working with the FBI and had voiced concerns that there was a hefty U.S.presence in the funding of the trucker protest ensconced in Ottawa.

The GoFundMe kitty had crossed $10 million when the platform was asked to take a closer look; GoFundMe did indeed shut down the “freedom convoy,” stating that evidence from law enforcement and “reports of violence and other unlawful activity” made it clear that the fundraiser for the truckers was in violation of their own terms of service.

The trucker convoy organizers then went to GiveSendGo , a platform that bills itself as the No. 1 free Christian fundraising site.

The Guardian did an expose of GiveSendGo after a data breach last year revealed the platform’s alt-right associations with vigilantes and hate groups such as the Proud Boys — groups banned from other platforms for hate speech and violence.

CNBC reiterated Sunday that Ottawa police said they were investigating threats against public figures jointly with the FBI.

They reported, “The well-organized blockade, which police say has relied partly on funding from sympathizers in the United States, saw protesters bring in portable saunas on Saturday to combat frigid temperatures.”

Twitter was full of bizarre material on Sunday from U.S. Republicans, with Attorney General Ken Paxton, of Texas, for example, tweeting:

“Patriotic Texans donated to Canadian truckers’ worthy cause using GoFundMe. This BLM-backing company went woke, froze the funds, & failed to deliver Texans’ money. Today, I assembled a team to investigate their potential fraud & deception. Texas donors will get Justice! #GoFundMe.”

This retort from “Unbranded” (@unbranded63) is fairly typical of the outraged responses: “American Trumpists, tired of losing, turned their efforts to upending their northern neighbor. A few million dollars raised by insurrectionist Americans, and they thought they could topple the democratically elected government of Canada in a week. They’re deluded as always.”

Source: BRAUN: Ugly truths about trucker protest coming out

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Canadian soccer proves the power of citizenship

2022/02/08 Leave a comment

Sharp contrast.

While I have little patience with the Ottawa protesters/occupiers, there is a range between the organizers, who are extremists, and others who are frustrated (as all of us are).

But given the nature of the organizers, the many symbols of hate and the aggressive and abusive behaviour of many of those protesting, those who tolerate r don’t call out that behaviour are complicit:

It was a tale of two screens last Sunday.

On my phone, I was watching a stream of mostly white protesters rampaging around Ottawa, brandishing swastikas and Confederate flags, desecrating monuments, harassing journalists, assaulting homeless people and hurling racial slurs at those who stood in their way — even attacking ambulances rushing to patients in distress.

On TV, I watched the Canadian men’s soccer team pull off a gutsy, determined 2-0 victory over the United States — epitomizing the very best of the Canadian spirit and inching ever closer to qualifying for Canada’s first World Cup since 1986.

Two screens. Two Canadas. One closed to the world, fearful, and drenched in hate. The other, open to the world, confidently competing with the best in the world, made up of people from around the world who are proud Canadians by choice.

Canada’s new-found soccer success would not be possible without our ambitious immigration policy, which both Conservative and Liberal governments have supported over decades.

Just look at the makeup of the team. Canada’s star player, Alphonso Davies, was born in a Ghanaian refugee camp after his parents fled civil war in Liberia. Sunday’s goals were scored by Cyle Larin (Jamaican parents) and Sam Adekugbe (U.K.-born to Nigerian parents), with assists by Jonathan Osorio (Columbian parents) and Jonathan David (U.S.-born to Haitian parents). The Americans had a golden chance to tie the game late in the first half, but were denied by a highlight-reel save from Canada’s Yugoslavian-born goalkeeper, Milan Borjan, who celebrated emphatically before the sold-out crowd in his family’s chosen hometown of Hamilton, Ont.

But Canada’s immigration story is not the immaculate success we might think. This year marks the 75th anniversary of Canada having its own citizenship independent of Great Britain, yet the proportion of immigrants who become citizens dropped by 20 per cent between 1996 and 2016, the latest year for which data is available. It doesn’t help that, right now, more than 400,000 citizenship applications are sitting in a warehouse somewhere, awaiting processing by an outmatched bureaucracy that is only just getting around to allowing online applications. Citizenship applications now take more than two years to process — which doesn’t seem like evidence of a country eager to welcome new citizens.

Canadians continue to strongly support immigration, but too often it’s framed in purely economic terms. For example, in her last fall economic statement, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland devoted $85 million to reduce processing times. This is because “immigration is critical for Canada’s economic growth, especially when it comes to attracting top global talent, meeting the needs of employers and addressing labour shortages,” as the government’s Economic and Fiscal Update 2021 put it.

But immigrants aren’t just workers. They are future citizens, future voters and future owners of our society. If we believe that to be true, we need to behave accordingly.

The immigrant-rich Canadian team I watched on TV last Sunday proves that when people believe in Canada and feel an equal part of it, they will give their heart and soul to make it great, no matter where they were born. These wonderful athletes have inspired the nation with their toughness, togetherness and talent. They and their families have done so much more for Canada than simply “meeting the needs of employers and addressing labour shortages.”

The second screen, though, was no less true. The hateful bunch in Ottawa — and the MPs who still stand by them — show another side of Canada that we cannot simply wish away. And they demonstrate very clearly the attitudes newcomers often encounter, alongside racialized people born in Canada. Maybe that’s one reason why citizenship rates are falling.

Maybe immigrants see the rise in hate and xenophobia, and take it more seriously than some Canadian-born citizens, who have only known democracy and don’t understand its fragility. Maybe they see their paperwork languishing in bureaucratic limbo for years and conclude that Canada doesn’t care.

But the soccer stars show that we have reason to care, and that we ought to get serious about respecting newcomers as citizens-to-be from day one. Because when newcomers believe in Canada and seem themselves in our future, we can take on the best in the world, and win.

Source: Canadian soccer proves the power of citizenship

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Court lets Priti Patel keep charging children £1012 for citizenship

2022/02/08 Leave a comment

Of note, law should to be changed from this “profiteering:”

The Home Office will continue to make a £640 profit on each child charged for British citizenship, as of a court ruling on 2 February.

The Supreme Court ended the four-year long fight against fees charged for children, some of whom were born in the UK, to become British citizens. Even if they were born in the UK, some children whose parents have a certain immigration status are not automatically British citizens – their families have to apply for citizenship for them.

While the court recognised that the £1,012 charged for each child was far above the administration cost of registering them as British citizens (£372) it concluded that parliament had allowed the government to set a fee above the ability of applicants to pay – which means it’s up to MPs or peers to change it.

The previous home secretary, Sajid Javid, described the fee as “a huge amount of money for a child to pay”, but failed to change it while in office.

Members of the House of Lords last week attempted to amend the Nationality and Borders Bill to reduce the fee to £372, covering the administrative costs, and to scrap it for children in care.

Child O, who was at the centre of the case, was born in the UK and has never left the country but their family was unable to pay the fee when applying for citizenship when Child O was ten. The now 14-year-old said they felt “very let down and alone”.

Campaigners say excluding these children and young people from British citizenship causes them to feel alienated, excluded and isolated in their home country, and are calling for the fee to be lowered or scrapped entirely for children in care or who are unable to afford it.

Their case was taken up by Amnesty International UK, and the Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens (PRCBC).

“This fee deprives thousands of children of their citizenship rights, yet the Home Office has chosen to keep overcharging, despite the alienation and exclusion this is causing,” said Steve Valdez-Symonds, Amnesty International UK’s refugee and migrant rights director.

Sam Genen, the lawyer who represented Amnesty in the case, said: “It is disappointing that the Supreme Court granted permission to hear arguments [on international law] but chose not to decide them.”

He added that the current composition and judgments by the court “show a reductive approach to the rights of the vulnerable. There is a general sense that the court seems less interested [in] individual rights and expertise.”

Amnesty and PRCBC had appealed a ruling by the Court of Appeal last year, which followed a ruling by the High Court in 2020 that the fee was excluding children from their citizenship rights.

Both lower courts found the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, had not given consideration to the best interests of children when setting the fee.

While the Home Secretary continues to have discretion in setting the citizenship fee for vulnerable children, parliament could choose to change that – all eyes are now on whether the Nationality and Borders Bill could be amended to reduce or remove the fee for children in care or who cannot afford to pay.

The Supreme Court ruling paradoxically highlighted the importance of British citizenship, noting: “It can contribute to one’s sense of identity and belonging, assisting people, and not least young people in their sensitive teenage years, to feel part of the wider community. It allows a person to participate in the political life of the local community and the country at large.”

Source: Court lets Priti Patel keep charging children £1012 for citizenship

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Ethnic and immigrant Chinese have range of feelings toward Beijing Olympics

2022/02/08 Leave a comment

Not that surprising to find a diversity of views:

Shuyu Kong recalls being a new Asian studies professor at a Canadian university when Beijing hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008.

Now, in 2022, with many years of seeing students explore their identity and a sense of belonging, the Simon Fraser University academic is once again thinking about the feelings of those with ethnic, heritage or immigrant ties to China as the Winter Olympics unfold in Beijing.

Source: Ethnic and immigrant Chinese have range of feelings toward Beijing Olympics

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Senator Woo: Election disinformation claims and Kenny Chiu’s Richmond riding

2022/02/07 Leave a comment

It was striking that the Conservatives lost three ridings with large Chinese Canadian populations: Steveston-Richmond East (which has flipped between the Conservatives and Liberals) and ridings which have been held by Conservatives for some time, Richmond Centre (2008-21) and Markham—Unionville (2015-21).

I tend to put more stock in claims of disinformation than Senator Woo, given his public record of being relatively uncritical of the Chinese regime.

And his critique of the article by Sze-Fung Lee and Benjamin Fung that prompted his rebuttal, for their comment that riding voters have “weak critical thinking skills and . . . (lack of) prior training or experience in dealing with disinformation” seems unwarranted given that we know that most voters, whatever their origins, are equally inexperienced in dealing with disinformation (nor are necessarily politicians).

And as to his concerns regarding Chiu’s proposed bill, they could be addressed in the Commons and Senate committees should the bill have proceeded to review:

Canadians are not generally sore losers, but the 2021 general election has produced a long tail of speculation about why certain ridings voted the way they did – but shouldn’t have. The latest is from two McGill academics in a recent Policy Options article, Misinformation and Chinese interference in Canada’s affairs. Sze-Fung Lee and Benjamin Fung claim that Kenny Chiu, a Conservative candidate in Steveston-Richmond East in B.C., was the target of a disinformation campaign via social media posts about a private member’s bill he proposed that did not get approved before the September federal election.

The Globe and Mail reported on the Lee and Fung article and questioned whether the campaign had cost him the election.

Neither the Globe nor Lee and Fung pointed to a “smoking gun” connecting Beijing to what happened in the Greater Vancouver riding, whose population is about 50 per cent ethnic Chinese. But both share the view that, in the words of Lee and Fung, “whoever was responsible for disseminating the fake news had a clear motive in reshaping the narratives in favour of Beijing’s interests.”

But was it disinformation – in the sense of false information that is intended to mislead – or legitimate debate within the Chinese-Canadian community?

Chiu’s Bill C-282, the Foreign Influence Registry Act, would have set up a registry for people or entities who contacted Canadian politicians or senior federal public officials in cases where they were or could be perceived to be acting on behalf of certain foreign governments or entities.

As Tarun Krishnakumar noted last July in a Policy Options article: “C-282 is also limited in that it only applies to agents acting on behalf of principals located in countries specifically designated by the Canadian government. In other words, it does not apply to foreign influence writ large. While politically expedient, this is problematic from a broader policy perspective as it opens up the framework to claims that it is discriminatory and unfairly targeted at certain countries.”

Lee and Fung don’t demonstrate the falsity of the social media posts they deem to be problematic but have instead taken at face value Chiu’s belief that he was the victim of disinformation.

One WeChat post that Chiu cited as misleading claims that the bill “is going to have extremely negative consequences for immigrants from mainland China. It will also harm economic, cultural and technological exchanges between Canada and China.”

The post goes on: “Although the bill doesn’t list which countries belong to the foreign forces, considering the soured relationship between Canada and China…(and Chiu’s) anti-China background, undoubtedly this bill is targeting mainland Chinese associations and aims to control or monitor mainland Chinese speech and behaviours.”

In Chiu’s proposed bill, a foreign principal was defined as “a foreign government, an individual or entity related to a foreign government, a foreign political organization that exists primarily to pursue political objectives or an individual or entity related to such an organization.”

It defined a related entity – among several criteria – as one in which the leadership is “accustomed or under an obligation, whether formal or informal, to act in accordance with the directions, instructions or wishes of the foreign government or foreign political organization.”

Given that the People’s Republic of China (the PRC) is an authoritarian state, one could reasonably argue that all legally constituted entities in China – including corporations, educational institutions, alumni organizations, cultural groups, and municipalities – fall under the definition of foreign principal. If that is the case, any individual in Canada acting on behalf of such an entity would be subject to registration if he or she were to speak with a parliamentarian or senior public official on a public policy matter.

The Globe editors dismiss the idea that anyone attending a Chinese cultural event would be subject to registration under the proposed act. That may be so, but what if a Canadian representative of that Chinese cultural group were to speak with me as a senator about cultural services trade between Canada and China?

If the bill had passed, what would have stopped Canadian officials from declaring the cultural group to be under the control of the Chinese state and requiring that any representative of that group register under the act to consult with a parliamentarian or senior official about a public policy matter?

The “related entity” argument is what lies behind the calls to ban Huawei from involvement in Canada’s 5G telecommunications network. On the face of it, Huawei is a privately held company with no formal ties to the Chinese state. But critics of Huawei say it is tantamount to a foreign principal because the company is headquartered in China and could be required by the Chinese state to hand over data that would compromise Canadian security.

The same logic is behind the recent forced divestiture of China Mobile’s assets in Canada on the grounds that those assets could be leveraged by the Chinese state for non-commercial purposes. China Mobile does not actually own or operate any network infrastructure in Canada but rather uses the Telus network to deliver telecommunications services.

A badly written law such as C-282 would open the door to a similarly broad interpretation of many Chinese entities on the basis that they could theoretically be subject to direction from the Chinese state.

It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that many recent PRC immigrants who have enduring ties with their native country feared Chiu’s bill would have negative consequences for them, and that it would “harm economic, cultural and technological exchanges between Canada and China.” That they felt this way is less about “reshaping the narratives in favour of Beijing’s interests,” as Lee and Fung assert, as it is about self-protection.

None of the above is a defence of the Chinese system of government or Xi Jinping’s drift toward autocracy. But a badly drafted Canadian law on foreign influence does not advance democracy in China. It does, however, set back democracy in Canada by stigmatizing Canadians with institutional ties to the PRC.

It is bad enough to cry election disinformation without proper scrutiny. What is worse is Lee and Fung’s insinuation that some Steveston-Richmond East voters cast their ballots against Chiu because of “weak critical thinking skills and . . . (lack of) prior training or experience in dealing with disinformation.”

We harm the body politic by projecting our insecurities onto fellow citizens, especially Chinese-Canadians, and assuming that they are unwitting receptacles for disinformation from Beijing.  And we undermine the integrity of our elections by casting doubt on the legitimacy of voters’ intentions simply because their views don’t align with ours.

Lee and Fung are correct in saying that “taking a stand against . . . the Chinese Communist Party does not make the Conservatives or Canada anti-China.” They should have added the corollary that voting against a Conservative position on China does not make the elector a disinformation dupe or Chinese Communist Party sympathizer.

Source: Election disinformation claims and Kenny Chiu’s Richmond riding

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Serwer: Whoopi Goldberg’s American Idea of Race

2022/02/05 Leave a comment

Good thoughtful analysis and commentary, and the importance of understanding historical experiences:

It made sense, to the New York Daily News sports editor, that these guys dominated basketball. After all, “the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smartalecness,” not to mention their “God-given better balance and speed.”

He was referring, of course, to the Jews.

In the 1930s, Paul Gallico was trying to explain away Jewish dominance of basketball. He came up with the idea that the game’s structure simply appealed to the immutable traits of wily Hebrews and their scheming minds. It sounds strange to the ear now, but only because our stereotypes about who is inherently good at particular sports have shifted. His theory is not any more or less insightful now than it was then; his confidence should remind us to be skeptical of similar, supposedly explanatory arguments that abound today.

Looking back at old stereotypes is a useful exercise; it can help illustrate the arbitrary nature of the concept of “race,” and how such identities shift even as people insist on their permanence and infallibility. Because race is not real, it is malleable enough to be made to serve the needs of those with the power to define it, the certainties of one generation giving way to the contradictory dogmas of another.

Whoopi Goldberg, the actor and a co-host of The View, stumbled into a public-relations nightmare for ABC on Monday when she insisted that “the Holocaust wasn’t about race.” After an episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert aired in which she opined that “the Nazis were white people, and most of the people they were attacking were white people,” she was temporarily suspended from The View. She has apologized for her remarks.

I don’t mean to pile on Goldberg here, who I think is struggling with an American conception of “race” that renders the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust illegible. I regard her remarks not as malicious, but as an ignorant projection of that American conception onto circumstances to which it does not apply. In America, distinctions among European immigrants that were once considered deeply significant dissolved in the melting pot, leaving an absence in popular memory that might explain their salience elsewhere, and how someone could be seen as white in America and yet still be subject to persecution based on their “race.”

The Nazi Holocaust in Europe and slavery and Jim Crow in the United States are outgrowths of the same ideology—the belief that human beings can be delineated into categories that share immutable biological traits distinguishing them from one another and determining their potential and behavior. In Europe, with its history of anti-Jewish persecution and violent religious divisions, the conception of Jews as a biological “race” with particular characteristics was used by the Nazis to justify the Holocaust. In the United States, the invention of race was used to justify the institution of chattel slavery, on the basis that Black people were biologically suited to permanent servitude and unfit for the rights the nation’s Founders had proclaimed as universal. The American color line was therefore much more forgiving to European Jews than the divisions of the old country were. But they are branches of the same tree, the biological fiction of race.

In the United States, physical distinctions between most Black and most white people have misled some into thinking that the American conception of race is somehow more “real” than the racial fictions on which the Nazis based their campaign of extermination. Applying the American color line to Europe, the Holocaust appears merely to be a form of sectarian violence, “white people” attacking “white people,” which seems nonsensical. But those persecuting Jews in Europe saw Jews as beastly subhumans, an “alien race” whom they were justified in destroying in order to defend German “racial purity.” The “racial” distinctions between master and slave may be more familiar to Americans, but they were and are no more real than those between Gentile and Jew.

Adherence to religious belief was not required to be subject to Nazi persecution, and unlike some prior moments in European history, conversion was insufficient to escape danger. Jewish ancestry was enough, because it was ancestry—a person’s “race”—that made someone inescapably Jewish. In his infamous memoir, Adolf Hitler regretted that, early in life, he’d seen anti-Semitism as persecution of a people on the basis of religious belief, which he thought wrong. He later came to think of this as a Jewish lie to hide the reality that the Jewish people were a separate “race” whose goal was to enslave the rest of mankind. It should not be lost that enslaving all of mankind is a concise summary of Hitler’s own political project.

“Judaism predates Western categories. It’s not quite a religion, because one can be Jewish regardless of observance or specific belief,” my colleague Yair Rosenberg wrote. “But it’s also not quite a race, because people can convert in! It’s not merely a culture or an ethnicity, because that leaves out all the religious components.”

This is all true, but Black Americans are not really a “race” either, and the borders of Black American identity can also be difficult to define or agree upon. To some extent, shared history, culture, and ancestry exist, but as the scholars Karen and Barbara Fields write in Racecraft, the very concept of race implies a material reality where none exists. Most American descendants of the emancipated have white ancestry, and millions of white Americans with African ancestry have no knowledge of it. “Race is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons,” the Fieldses write, “and is subject to change for similar reasons.”

It is not necessary for race to be real for racism to be real. It is only necessary that people believe race to be real. When people act on fictions, those actions have repercussions even if the underlying belief is false—even if the people know that the underlying belief they are acting on is false. The fact that anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the media, of governments, and of financial institutions are untrue does not rob them of their explanatory power for those who choose to believe in them. For Thomas Jefferson to know, somewhere in the disquiet of his own conscience, that slavery was a “cruel war against human nature itself” did not in and of itself grant freedom to those he owned as property.

“The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t—I mean you can tell, they knew he wasn’t—anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man,” James Baldwin wrote in 1964. “For if he wasn’t a man, then no crime had been committed.”

To this, we could add Jean-Paul Sartre’s observation that “if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” Race allows humanity to keep inventing, in language that can bend the most rational minds, groups of people whose supposed characteristics justify whatever cruelty we might wish to indulge.

Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.

Source: Whoopi Goldberg’s American Idea of Race

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

USA: From slavery to socialism, new legislation restricts what teachers can discuss

2022/02/05 Leave a comment

Age of ignorance?

Across the U.S., educators are being censored for broaching controversial topics. Since January 2021, researcher Jeffrey Sachs says, 35 states have introduced 137 bills limiting what schools can teach with regard to race, American history, politics, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Sachs has been tracking this legislation for PEN America, a writers organization dedicated to free speech. He says the recent flurry of legislation has created a “minefield” for educators trying to figure out how to teach topics such as slavery, Jim Crow laws or the Holocaust. One proposed law in South Carolina, for instance, prohibits teachers from discussing any topic that creates “discomfort, guilt or anguish” on the basis of political belief.

“That means that a teacher would have to be very, very careful about how they discuss something like, let’s say, fascism or racism or antisemitism,” Sachs says. “These are political beliefs, and it means that teachers are going to have to second-guess whether they can describe that political belief in as forthright and honest a way as we wish for fear of falling afoul of this bill.”

Critical race theory, an academic approach that examines how race and racism function in American institutions, has inspired a backlash in conservative circles across the United States. In one of his first acts in office, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia, established a hotline to allow parents or members of the community to report critical race theory in the classroom. Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, a conservative mom’s group is offering a $500 bounty to catch teachers who break a state law prohibiting certain teachings about racism and sexism.

“I think it must be a very terrifying time to be an educator at any level in higher ed or in K-12,” Sachs says.

“You have, unfortunately, the kinds of daily stressors that we’ve all become used to because of COVID,” he says. “And now on top of that, these educators are trying to negotiate outraged parents and media pundits. … When you listen to what educators are saying, they’re burned out, and many of them, I think, will head for the exits.”

Interview highlights

On how some of the proposed bills would be impossible to comply with

Some of the bills — I would say many now — include a provision that says something to the effect of: Teachers cannot be compelled to discuss a controversial contemporary issue, but if they do, they must do so evenhandedly and without any kind of favoritism. However, many of those same bills also would require teachers to denounce, in the strongest possible terms, ideas like Marxism or socialism.

For instance, a bill in Indiana that is currently under consideration would require, among other things, that in the run-up to any general election in the state, students must be taught “socialism, Marxism, communism, totalitarianism or similar political systems are incompatible with and in conflict with the principles of freedom upon which the United States was founded.” And it goes on to say as such, “socialism, Marxism, communism, totalitarianism or similar political systems are detrimental to the people of the United States.”

The issue there, among many others, is that it’s a bill requiring students to be exposed to this litany of claims about different ideologies. And it also requires that in doing so, teachers cannot show favoritism or bias in any one direction. In other words, it’s a bill that can’t possibly actually work. Teachers are being pulled in two different directions, and the consequence is going to be a kind of self-censorship.

Another Indiana bill … prohibits teachers from including in their class any “anti-American ideologies.” Now that term is never defined, and again, it’s not that teachers can’t endorse or promote anti-American ideologies — they’re just simply forbidden from even discussing them.

On bills that address sexuality, gender and LGBTQ issues

It differs bill to bill. But again, many do include language prohibiting teachers from discussing concepts like gender fluidity. It prohibits them from discussing “nontraditional gender identities” and in many cases forbid[s] teachers from discussing controversial events that would presumably include, in many cases, ones like gay marriage or LGBTQ rights.

We see as well many bills requiring teachers to report to parents if their children are asking questions about their gender identity, and in many cases as well — for instance, in a Florida bill — that prohibit teachers from “encouraging any conversation about sex and sexuality.”

So it really puts teachers in an impossible situation. In a contemporary high school or middle school, even earlier in elementary school, these sorts of topics arise. And in particular, it would put LGBTQ teachers in a really difficult situation where they’re forced, essentially, to disguise their identity or the status of their relationships in order to fend off running afoul of these bills.

On how these laws are similar to what’s going on in authoritarian countries

It often gets dismissively described as “woke ideas,” and more broadly, I think we would just describe these ideas that we’re talking about as socially liberal ideas. And unfortunately, what we’re seeing is in countries like Russia, China, in Turkey, in Hungary, we are seeing these regimes targeting educational institutions and other sites of cultural production like museums or the media, [as] an attempt to drive these ideas out — to signal that to be a “real” Russian or to be a “true” Hungarian, one must be straight, one must be socially conservative. These efforts underway in these regimes, that are either authoritarian or unfortunately trending in that direction, all signal the kind of political energy that leaders believe they can get by attacking these ideas.

On a new law that addresses the concept of systemic racism

There’s a law currently on the books in North Dakota that was passed last November after just five days of consideration that has me up at night. This is a law that attempts to prohibit critical race theory in K-12 schools, and I just want to reemphasize here this is not a law that prohibits people from endorsing or promoting critical race theory. It’s a law that forbids them from even including critical race theory in the classroom. And the way that that law defines critical race theory is what has me so concerned: … “critical race theory, which is defined as the theory that racism is not merely the product of learned individual bias or prejudice, but that racism is systemically embedded in American society and the American legal system to facilitate racial inequality.” In other words, the law now is saying that whenever a teacher talks about racism, they may only describe it as a product of an individual’s own biases or prejudices. They cannot describe it — even when the facts command them to — as something more endemic or embedded within American society. It’s a way essentially of preventing teachers, I think, from being honest about a lot of the uglier sides of American history and contemporary society.

Whenever you discuss slavery, your teacher would have to essentially say, “These slaveholders were racist.” The system that they were in, the laws that supported them, the economy that made that business profitable, you’d have to separate those institutional features and describe slavery purely as a product of individual bias, which does violence to the topic. It fails to educate students, and I think might discourage students from thinking critically about contemporary institutions and identifying whether or not they also might be guilty of systemic racism.

On how the idea for these restrictive teaching bills first came about

The origins here … go back to that summer of 2020. There’s a researcher there named Christopher Rufo, who was then with the Discovery Institute in Seattle. This is in a conservative educational institute centered around the promotion of intelligent design. And Christopher Rufo wrote a series of articles for an online website called City Journal. And in his City Journal articles, he detailed what he described as indoctrination in K-12 schools or in employee training programs in businesses or state agencies, programs that he said were training people to become critical race theorists.

Those articles caught the attention of Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, and Rufo appeared on his program in early September of 2020. The very next day, he received a phone call from Mark Meadows, then chief of staff for the Trump administration. Apparently, Trump had watched the program that evening. He’d seen what Rufo had to say, and within a matter of days, Rufo was in conversation with the Trump administration on some sort of legislative or executive response. The product of that conversation was Trump’s executive order in late September, where he prohibited any state agency from discussing certain ideas as part of employee training or [training for] a state contractor that wishes to do business with the federal government.

Source: From slavery to socialism, new legislation restricts what teachers can discuss

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