Chait: The Apocalyptic Style in Woke Thinking

2026/09/03 Leave a comment

Good nuanced commentary and the need to recognize moral ambiguity:

…In an atmosphere that permits deliberation, rage may give way to reason. Liberal supporters of Israel may concede to the Free Palestine movement that Israel’s current government has no strategy other than endless use of force, that it has willingly enabled settlers to terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank, and that American policy has done too little to alter these choices. The Palestine activists might be made to acknowledge that the carnage in Gaza would not have occurred but for Hamas’s desire to murder as many Israeli Jews as possible, and that the group deliberately maximizes deaths among Palestinian civilians by embedding their fighters in schools and hospitals.

In other words, the Middle East is complicated. Bringing the moralistic fervor of Western progressives entirely onto one side of a generations-long conflict between warring religious sects claiming mutually exclusive historical and divinely granted rights to control a sliver of land is unlikely to result in peaceful coexistence.

Pro-Palestinian activists are correct to argue that American support has enabled Israel to pursue a one-state solution and to rely on military force in place of diplomacy. What they have yet to grasp is that the Western left’s inability to repudiate Hamas has had a pernicious effect on the conflict: reinforcing a co-belligerent in a cycle of violence. The American civil-rights movement is not, in fact, the proper moral lens with which to understand a terrorist group that murders not only Jewish civilians but also dissident Palestinians, and whose objective is not the right to vote and sit at lunch counters but to impose sectarian theocracy. An effective and humane Western form of activism would recognize that disregard for Palestinian well-being is a trait shared by Hamas and Israel, and would challenge both accordingly.

The American influence on this intractable conflict can be exercised more constructively. What Middle East policy cannot accomplish—what no reforms in any policy domain can accomplish—is resolving the existential angst caused by a political style that cannot tolerate moral ambiguity.

Source: The Apocalyptic Style in Woke Thinking

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

Quebec election: Cette école déborde-t-elle en raison d’un «trop grand nombre de nouveaux élèves» issus de l’immigration?

2026/09/03 Leave a comment

PQ can’t help itself:

Quand le chef du Parti québécois (PQ), Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, a lié l’immigration et le manque d’espaces dans une école de la banlieue de Québec, samedi, il n’a fait pas de distinction entre les élèves tout juste arrivés au Québec et les immigrants de deuxième génération, qui sont nés ici.

« [Cette] école déborde en raison d’un trop grand nombre de nouveaux élèves qui viennent de l’immigration », a-t-il déclaré devant l’école secondaire Roger-Comtois, située dans le quartier Loretteville. Des propos qui ont fait sursauter plusieurs de ses adversaires politiques.

« Je trouve ça épouvantable », a lancé la solidaire Ruba Ghazal. « Ça manque de classe », a déclaré le libéral Charles Milliard.

Mais qu’en est-il vraiment ?

Située dans la circonscription de Chauveau, l’école secondaire Roger-Comtois a inauguré lundi son nouveau pavillon modulaire de 24 locaux. Destiné à accueillir « près de 500 élèves » et conçu pour demeurer en place « pour plusieurs années », il « vise à répondre à la croissance soutenue de la population scolaire de l’établissement », a expliqué par courriel le Centre de services scolaire de la Capitale (CSSC).

“Selon des données fournies par le CSS au Devoir, le nombre d’élèves immigrants fréquentant Roger-Comtois est passé de 83, en 2019, à 293, en 2026. Cela, sur un total de 2441 élèves pour l’année scolaire en cours. Les élèves immigrants constituent donc aujourd’hui 12 % de la population étudiante à Roger-Comtois.

Interrogé à ce sujet samedi, le Parti québécois (PQ) n’avait pas pu fournir de chiffres précis sur l’établissement de la Capitale-Nationale.

Citant des données du ministère, son équipe a tout de même souligné que le nombre d’élèves immigrants fréquentant des écoles du CSSC avait augmenté de deux fois et demie depuis l’année scolaire 2015-2016.

Le PQ n’a toutefois pas précisé qu’une partie de cette hausse (32 %) était liée à l’immigration « de deuxième génération », soit aux élèves nés au Québec d’au moins un parent né à l’étranger.

En élargissant la loupe à l’ensemble du Québec, il est possible d’observer que l’augmentation des élèves dans les écoles depuis 2015-2016 est davantage attribuable à l’immigration de deuxième génération (53 %) qu’à celle de première génération (47 %). En avril, le réseau scolaire québécois comptait donc, au total, 752 000 élèves « non issus de l’immigration », 265 000 immigrants de deuxième génération et 179 000 immigrants « nouveaux arrivants »….

Source: Cette école déborde-t-elle en raison d’un «trop grand nombre de nouveaux élèves» issus de l’immigration?

When the leader of the Parti Québécois (PQ), Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, linked immigration and the lack of space in a school in the suburbs of Quebec City on Saturday, he made no distinction between students who had just arrived in Quebec and second-generation immigrants, who were born here.

“[This] school is overflowing because of too many new students coming from immigration,” he said in front of Roger-Comtois High School, located in the Loretteville district. Words that startled many of his political opponents.

“I find it terrible,” said the solidarity Ruba Ghazal. “It lacks class,” said liberal Charles Milliard.

But what is it really?

Located in the district of Chauveau, Roger-Comtois secondary school inaugurated its new modular pavilion of 24 premises on Monday. Intended to accommodate “nearly 500 students” and designed to remain in place “for several years”, it “aims to respond to the sustained growth of the school population of the school,” explained by email the Centre de services scolaires de la Capitale (CSSC).

“According to data provided by the CSS au Devoir, the number of immigrant students attending Roger-Comtois increased from 83 in 2019 to 293 in 2026. This, out of a total of 2441 students for the current school year. Immigrant students now make up 12% of the student population in Roger-Comtois.

Asked about this on Saturday, the Parti Québécois (PQ) was unable to provide precise figures on the establishment of the Capitale-Nationale.

Citing data from the ministry, his team nevertheless pointed out that the number of immigrant students attending CSSC schools had increased two and a half times since the 2015-2016 school year.

However, the PQ did not specify that part of this increase (32%) was related to “second generation” immigration, i.e. students born in Quebec of at least one parent born abroad.

By extending the magnifying glass to the whole of Quebec, it is possible to observe that the increase in students in schools since 2015-2016 is more attributable to second-generation immigration (53%) than to first-generation immigration (47%). In April, the Quebec school network therefore had, in total, 752,000 “non-immigrant” students, 265,000 second-generation immigrants and 179,000 “newcomers”.

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Eric Kaufmann: It costs Canada millions to discriminate against white male academics

2026/09/03 2 Comments

Sensationalist, even if backed up by by available data using the h-index. But there was a need to improve the balance within academia as previous hiring reflected historical patterns and arguably biases, and again arguably going too far in doing so.

That being said, Kaufmann’s point of activist academics in the social sciences has merit:

…The systematic hiring of lower-achieving minorities and women affects the performance of organizations and programs. In order to assess this, we examined the prestigious federal Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program. This is the pinnacle of Canada’s research system, spending $300 million annually on renewable seven-year awards of between $100,000 and $200,000 per year.

Beginning in 2003, and accelerating after 2017, the CRC program implemented an aggressive regime of diversity targets in which institutions that did not meet their quotas for female, minority and Indigenous chairs were threatened with losing their chair allocations. Canada’s Constitution allows for race and sex discrimination, thus CRC openings routinely state that able-bodied straight white males need not apply.

The effects have been dramatic. In 2000, 80 per cent of CRCs were white men. By 2025, just 20 per cent were. Between 2017, when unvarnished EDI was implemented, and 2025, the female share doubled from 30 to 60 per cent while the Black and Indigenous component jumped from two per cent to between 10 and 15 per cent.

We measured the research productivity of Black, Indigenous and female scholars between 2016 and 2025 and discovered that whites and Asians averaged an h-index of 34, Blacks 23 and Indigenous scholars 15. Men averaged 38 to women’s 28. Blacks, First Nations and women are significantly less productive even after controlling for length of career, tier of chair, discipline and year of award. This echoes American results. Moving from a white or Asian chair to a Black or Indigenous chair, or from a male to a female, results in 12 to 15 per cent less research impact.

The effect on the CRC program has been severe. The Canadian government pays chairs to produce research, and — taking into account differences in citing practices by discipline — the h-index is the best unbiased indicator of its impact. Assigning a dollar value to each h-index point, we estimate that EDI hiring costs the CRC program $18 million a year, or six per cent of its budget….

We calculate that money diverted to scholar activism in the social sciences and humanities costs a further six per cent of the CRC budget — and this excludes the tab for administering EDI. This means that around 12 per cent — $36 million of the program’s $300 million annual budget — is wasted on equity and diversity. The EDI “tax” across the Tri-Council agencies’ entire budget of $4.5 billion, not to mention the wider higher education sector, is enormous….

Source: Eric Kaufmann: It costs Canada millions to discriminate against white male academics

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LILLEY: Where was the outrage as Canadians renamed our own history?

2026/09/02 1 Comment

Although different in some ways when renaming comes from a foreign power, valid question nevertheless:

…My question for all the people screaming about the renaming of Lake Ontario is: where were they as we renamed schools, roads and more once named for Sir John A. Macdonald? Where were they as we removed our history by pulling down statues dedicated to our first prime minister?

Schools in Nova Scotia and Ontario had Sir John A.’s name dropped from them. Statues in Montreal, Kingston, Regina, Victoria and elsewhere were taken down.

In Saskatoon, John A. Macdonald Road was renamed miyo-wâhkôhtowin, a Cree word meaning “good relationships.” In Ottawa, a federally controlled road, the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway, was renamed under the Trudeau government to Kichi Zībī Mīkan, an Algonquin phrase meaning Great River Road.

Where was the outrage over this by the people now furious about Donald Trump changing the name of Lake Ontario? Where was their national pride? Where was their demand that our history be respected?

What about when Egerton Ryerson had his statue torn down, his name taken off the university long associated with him over false claims of connections to residential schools?

Where was the outrage when Edward Cornwallis had his name and image stripped from our public spaces? When Justin Trudeau unilaterally took the name of Sir Hector-Louis Langevin, a Father of Confederation, off the building that housed the Prime Minister’s Office, why did these same people not step up and raise their voices?

Tearing down our own history

Here in Toronto, we recently renamed Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa Square on the false claim that Henry Dundas supported and extended slavery in the British Empire. Sankofa is a Ghanaian word, taken from the language of the people on the west coast of Africa who sold most of the slaves into the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

We have spent close to a decade stripping away our own history, being vandals to our own heritage, and most of the public has been silent….

Source: LILLEY: Where was the outrage as Canadians renamed our own history?

Filed under Multiculturalism, Trump administration Tagged with ,

Jack Jedwab: The seeds of today’s efforts to excuse antisemitism were planted 25 years ago in Durban

2026/09/01 Leave a comment

Useful historical reminder:

…That legacy is now visible everywhere. Jews are often required to prove that what they experience as antisemitism is indeed antisemitism. Expressions that would be condemned instantly if directed at other minorities are parsed endlessly when Jews are the target. The same people who insist that minorities must be trusted to define their own experience of racism suddenly demand footnotes, qualifications and geopolitical context when Jews describe hatred directed toward them.

That is one of the enduring legacies of Durban. It showed how easily anti-racism can be inverted when ideology overtakes principle. A movement that begins by defending the vulnerable can end up deciding which vulnerable people are inconvenient. A discourse built to expose hatred can become a vehicle for excusing it. A gathering convened to fight racism can, in the name of fighting racism, make room for one of its oldest forms.

Twenty-five years later, the deeper lesson arising from Durban is that universality is fragile. Anti-racism cannot survive if it becomes selective. Human rights cannot retain their force if some forms of hatred are condemned while others are rationalized because they fit a preferred political narrative….

Source: Jack Jedwab: The seeds of today’s efforts to excuse antisemitism were planted 25 years ago in Durban

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CBC reverses restriction on labelling 9/11 as ‘terrorism’

2026/08/31 2 Comments

Really wonder what CBC is thinking. Miller’s comment nails it:

…The move was welcomed by Canadian Identity and Culture Minister Marc Miller, who stated on social media that the earlier policy was “a piece of pedantic and foolish guidance that caused legitimate anger.”

Boshra’s post came within an hour after Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree reiterated the federal government’s view that 9/11 was the “deadliest terrorist attack in history.”

Anger about the CBC policy had exploded online ahead of the 25th anniversary of the attacks, and as relations plummet between Canada and the U.S. after trade talks fell apart last week.

In a written statement Friday afternoon, Anandasangaree did not mention the CBC policy, but stressed that the Canadian government has “always recognized 9/11 as the deadliest terrorist attack in history” and passed a law in 2001 to create a legal definition of “terrorist activity.”

He noted that Canadians “stood with our American neighbours” after the attack, including by hosting thousands of stranded air passengers in Gander, N.L., and joining the war in Afghanistan, where 158 Canadian soldiers died. …

Source: CBC reverses restriction on labelling 9/11 as ‘terrorism’

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Robert Brym: Yes, anti-Zionism is antisemitic

2026/08/28 Leave a comment

Agree:

…All these findings are in line with results from a 2024 survey of 414 Canadian Jews and a 2018 survey of 2,335 Canadian who identify as Jewish by religion or ethnicity.

Members of the JFN are therefore wrong to claim that being Jewish is only a matter of religion and not a matter of statehood. Moreover, just as it is antisemitic to discriminate against Jews based on their religion, I believe it is antisemitic to erase support for the existence of a Jewish state as a core part of Jewish identify.

Some Jews are anti-Zionists. They deny the need for the existence of a Jewish state. In Canada, a 2025 survey of 332 Jewish Canadians found that one per cent of Canadian Jews at the time regarded themselves as anti-Zionists, while the most recent 2026 survey of 625 Canadian Jews cited earlier puts the number at five per cent. The proportion of Jews who deny the need for Jewish statehood is thus tiny….

It should not surprise us that the JFN has written an op-ed arguing that anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism. In the principles section of their website, they state that they oppose the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism which was accepted by Canada in 2019. It includes non-legally binding illustrative examples of what might constitute antisemitism, including, “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.”

Notably, the JFN’s “principles” page on their website lacks any mention of the horrific attacks on October 7, and their press release page includes only two entries, one opposing the IHRA definition and one about “anti-Palestinian racism.”

Many Jewish Zionists, including me, are highly critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and its conduct in the Israel-Hamas war. However, for reasons I’ve indicated, I regard the small coterie of Jewish anti-Zionists as misguided.”

Robert Brym is an emeritus professor of sociology and Jewish studies at University of Toronto.

Source: Robert Brym: Yes, anti-Zionism is antisemitic

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ICYMI: Muslim Association promises ‘Jew-free’ incident will not recur at future youth events

2026/08/28 Leave a comment

Demonstrates the need for moderation…:

In June 30 submission to National Post, Sharaf Sharafeldin, president of strategy at the Muslim Association of Canada, stated that during the three-day conference that attracted thousands of Muslim-Canadians, speakers and attendees examined “faith-rooted life” in Canada. The incident involving the “jew-free” phrase occurred during a youth session and was “a public, anonymous audience-participation exercise” that produced a word cloud image, when asked what kind of community they wanted. It has since been widely circulated.

There were 50 entries visible in the word cloud, wrote Sharafeldin. But the facilitator did not notice the “jew-free” entry.

The August 12 update follows an “internal investigation” into the incident.

“MAC regrets that this phrase appeared at our Convention, even briefly and even though it originated from an anonymous, bad-faith submission with no connection to the youth or the discussion taking place in the session.” The organization did not explain what it meant by bad faith….

Source: Muslim Association promises ‘Jew-free’ incident will not recur at future youth events

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Jewish public servants face disproportionately high levels of discrimination at work, survey finds

2026/08/27 Leave a comment

Of note:

The federal public service is facing calls to combat antisemitism after Jewish civil servants reported experiencing disproportionately high levels of discrimination in the workplace.

In 2024, the annual federal employee survey tracked responses based on religion for the first time. A breakdown of the responses found that 18 per cent of Jewish civil servants reported experiencing discrimination and harassment in the workplace, including offensive remarks.

Some Jewish community leaders say the survey confirms anecdotal reports they’ve heard about rising antisemitism within the public service. 

Across the federal civil service, 9 per cent of employees who responded to the survey said they had experienced discrimination in the workplace in the preceding 12 months, with 11 per cent reporting they had faced harassment.

Thirteen per cent of Muslim public servants said they had experienced discrimination in the year preceding the survey, with 12 per cent reporting they had experienced harassment. 

Only half of civil servants responded to the survey, including approximately 67,820 Christians, 6,550 Muslims, 3,130 Hindus, 1,830 Sikhs and 1,500 Jews.

Fourteen per cent of Sikh public servants who responded said they had experienced harassment, with 13 per cent saying they had suffered discrimination, including on the basis of their race. …

Source: Jewish public servants face disproportionately high levels of discrimination at work, survey finds

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

What is Dominion Society of Canada and why are people of different political backgrounds worried?

2026/08/26 Leave a comment

Of note:

…People with different political ties have criticized Dominion Society. They include Jason Kenney, former Alberta premier and onetime Conservative MP. 

“There are a bunch of totally legitimate concerns about what I would characterize as imprudent or irresponsible immigration policy,” Kenney, federal immigration minister from 2008 to 2013, told CBC Hamilton in an interview this week. 

“But I think that is categorically different than basing our immigration policy on race.”

Dominion Society, he added, seems more interested in the colour of people’s skin than the kind of contribution they’re making to Canada. 

“That is clearly un-Canadian, and it needs to be called out.

“People like me, who are on the right of centre of Canadian politics, have a special obligation to do that,” Kenney said. “I think it’s really problematic to have a group like that wrapping itself in Canadian patriotism and nationalism that is trying to exploit public concern about immigration and turn it into, frankly, a racist message.” …

Source: What is Dominion Society of Canada and why are people of different political backgrounds worried?

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

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