Older refugees have high levels of depression even decades after immigration to Canada

2020/01/24 Leave a comment

Interesting:

Most research on the mental health of refugees focuses on the first few years after resettlement in the host country, but little is known about their long-term mental health.

A new study of Canadians aged 45-85, released this week, found that refugees were 70% more likely to suffer from depression than those born in Canada when age, sex and marital status were taken into account — even decades after immigration.

“Our findings indicate that the refugee experience casts a long shadow across an individual’s lifespan,” says the study’s first author Shen (Lamson) Lin, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto’s Factor Inwentash Faculty of Social Work (FIFSW).

“While our data did not capture reasons for the high levels of depression among refugees, we believe it may be influenced by exposure to pre-migration traumas such as genocide, forced displacement, human trafficking, sexual assault, famine, and separation from family.”

In order to untangle the potential contribution of post-migration challenges, which face all immigrants, from the pre-migration trauma unique to refugees, the research team also investigated depression among immigrants who did not arrive as refugees. Post-migration problems may include downward socioeconomic mobility, racial discrimination, higher levels of unemployment, language barriers, and reduced social networks.

The prevalence of depression among non-refugee immigrants (16.6%) was much closer to that of their Canadian-born peers (15.2%) than to that of refugees (22.1%).

“Our results suggest that post-migration challenges are less important than pre-migration traumas when it comes to depression,” says senior author, FIFSW Professor Esme Fuller-Thomson, who is also cross-appointed to U of T’s Department of Family & Community Medicine and is is director of the University’s Institute for Life Course & Aging.

“The greater prevalence of depression among refugees — half of whom arrived more than four decades ago — underlines the importance of providing mental health resources for our refugee community both immediately after arrival, but also in the ensuing decades.”

The study investigated factors that may have influenced levels of depression among participants, including age, sex, marital status, income, education, health, chronic pain, health behaviors and the frequency of social contacts. But even when these characteristics were accounted for, refugees still had much higher odds of depression than individuals born in Canada.

The researchers found that social support is a key. A lack of social support was associated with higher levels of depression among refugees — they were also more likely to have less of it. Refugees were more likely than those born in Canada to report that they lacked: 1) someone who showed them love and affection (17% versus 8%), 2) someone to confide in about their problems (27% vs 16%), and 3) someone to give them good advice about a crisis (27% versus 16%). (The level of social support among immigrants who did not arrive as refugees was relatively similar to the Canadian born group, and much less vulnerable than the refugee group.) When the availability of these three levels of social support was high, the relationship between refugee status and depression significantly diminished.

“Our study indicates that the quality of relationships, rather than the quantity of social connections, matters most for refugees’ mental health.” says co-author Karen Kobayashi, a professor in the Department of Sociology and a research affiliate at the Institute on Aging & Lifelong Health at the University of Victoria. “This highlights the importance of investigating ways to promote powerful positive social relations among refugees and asylum seekers in their families, neighbourhoods, and communities.”

The study’s findings also have important policy implications.

In Canada, two different sponsorship programs are currently in place. Government-assisted refugees (GARs) get basic financial aid and assistance offered by professionals to help with the settlement process. Privately sponsored refugees (PSRs) are supported by a network of engaged volunteers, often members of a church, mosque or synagogue who are able to provide extensive assistance with all kinds of settlement issues including housing, health needs and job searches.

According to recent studies on Syrian refugees in Canada, PSRs report having more help in daily errands, fewer unmet needs and a higher employment rate than GARs.

“We anticipate that refugees sponsored under the PSR program may be more likely to thrive post-migration because of a stronger social support network and this may set them on a positive employment and mental health trajectory for decades after their arrival.” says co-author Hongmei Tong, Assistant Professor of Social Work at MacEwan University in Edmonton.

Consistent with earlier studies, Canadian adults in this study who were poor, experiencing chronic pain and those with more co-morbid health conditions had a higher prevalence of depression.

“It is not surprising that Canadians who have household incomes under $25,000 per year have double the odds of distress compared to those with incomes above $75,000. Struggling to pay the rent and feed one’s family can be extremely distressing,” said co-author Simran R Arora, Master of Social Work student at the University of Toronto.

“Mental health professionals must be careful not to neglect physical health concerns such as chronic pain,” said co-author Karen Davison, Health Science Program Chair at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, B.C. “We really need to be treating the whole person in order to address depression.”

Source: Older refugees have high levels of depression even decades after immigration to Canada

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America’s census looks out of date in the age of big data

2020/01/24 Leave a comment

Similar issues with the Canadian census, no doubt, and the debate over StatsCan accessing bank financial data is an illustration of the potential and the privacy and political roadblocks (globalnews.ca › news › statistics-canada-pause-plan-obtain-banking-re…Statistics Canada hits pause on plan to obtain banking …):

A DOG-SLED or a snowmobile is the surest way to reach Toksook Bay in rural Alaska, where Steven Dillingham, the director of America’s census bureau, will arrive to count the first people in the country’s decennial population survey on January 21st. The task should not take long—there were only 590 villagers at the last count, in 2010—but it marks the beginning of a colossal undertaking. Everyone living in America will be asked about their age, sex, ethnicity and residence over the coming months (and some will be asked much more besides).

This census has already proved unusually incendiary. An attempt by President Donald Trump to include a question on citizenship, which might have discouraged undocumented immigrants from responding, was thwarted by the Supreme Court. His administration has also been accused in two lawsuits of underfunding the census, thus increasing the likelihood that minorities and vulnerable people, such as the homeless, will be miscounted.

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Islamic leaders make ‘groundbreaking’ visit to Auschwitz

2020/01/24 Leave a comment

Significant:

Muslim religious leaders joined members of a U.S. Jewish group at Auschwitz on Thursday for what organizers described as “the most senior Islamic leadership delegation” to visit the site of a Nazi German death camp.

The interfaith visit came four days before the 75th anniversary of the camp’s Jan. 27, 1945, liberation by Soviet forces and as world leaders gathered in Jerusalem to commemorate the Holocaust.

The secretary general of the Muslim World League, Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, and the CEO of the American Jewish Committee, David Harris, led the tour to the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial in Poland. The Nazis operated extermination and concentration camps in Poland when Germany occupied the country during World War II.

The American Jewish Committee said that Al-Issa, who is based in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, led a delegation of 62 Muslims, including 25 prominent religious leaders, from some 28 countries during the “groundbreaking” visit. At one point, they prayed with their heads pressed on the ground at Birkenau, the largest part of the camp and the most notorious site of Germany’s mass murder of European Jews.

The AJC delegation included members of the organization, among them children of Holocaust survivors.

“To be here, among the children of Holocaust survivors and members of the Jewish and Islamic communities, is both a sacred duty and a profound honor,” Al-Issa said. “The unconscionable crimes to which we bear witness today are truly crimes against humanity. That is to say, a violation of us all, an affront to all of God’s children.”

Auschwitz was the most notorious in a system of death and concentration camps that Nazi Germany operated on territory it occupied across Europe. In all, 1.1 million people were killed there, most of them Jews from across the continent.

The visit comes as Saudi Arabia works to be seen abroad as a moderate and modernizing country following decades of adherence to a hard-line interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism. The Muslim World League, under al-Issa’s leadership, has embraced the effort.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s strategy to modernize the kingdom is aimed in part at attracting greater foreign investment and fostering a national Saudi identity that is not founded solely on conservative religious values.

Al-Issa’s outreach to Jewish organizations also coincides with a broader alignment of interests and ties emerging between the Arab Gulf states and Israel, which share a common foe in Iran.

On Friday, members of the delegation will visit the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and attend Muslim and Jewish religious services there.

Source: Islamic leaders make ‘groundbreaking’ visit to Auschwitz

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What Lunar New Year Reveals About the World’s Calendars

2020/01/23 Leave a comment

Neat article:

Lunar New Year kicks off Saturday as one of the most important holidays in Vietnam, South Korea, China and other Asian countries. Typically, it starts on the second new moon after winter solstice.

On the Gregorian calendar, the civil calendar used in most countries, including the United States, the Lunar New Year changes every year, as do the dates of holidays like Rosh Hashana, Diwali and Ramadan.

It can be easy to think of a calendar as a scientific given, or a reflection of the laws of the universe. In fact, as these holidays remind us, there are as many ways to track time as there are cultures and languages. Each calendar reveals something about how the people who created it relate to the world around them while also preserving rich cultural identities and memories.

Most time-keeping traditions track the movement of the sun, moon and stars. Others consider seasonal events, like the autumnal swarming of sea worms, used to orient each year in the Trobriand Islands off New Guinea, or the flowering of immortelle trees into hundreds of tiny vermilion flames, which marks the start of the dry season in Trinidad.

With any calendar, the basic question is which of thousands, if not millions, of cycles in the world to follow, said Kevin Birth, an anthropology professor at Queens College. Calendars “always come down to this cultural choice,” he said, so using one system over another is ultimately a social contract, regardless of how scientifically accurate or sophisticated a calendar is.

A solar year — the time it takes Earth to orbit the sun — lasts around 365 days, while a lunar year, or 12 full cycles of the Moon, is roughly 354 days. Because of this discrepancy, a purely lunar calendar — like the Islamic, or Hijri, calendar — doesn’t stay aligned with the seasons. Islam’s holy month of Ramadan may fall in summer one year, and winter a number of years later.

To correct for seasonal drift, the Chinese, Hindu, Jewish and many other calendars are lunisolar. In these calendars, a month is still defined by the moon, but an extra month is added periodically to stay close to the solar year.

A solar calendar is useful for farming, fishing and foraging societies that need to plan ahead for particular times of the year. But a purely solar calendar, like the Gregorian, tells you nothing about the phases of the Moon.

The traditional Hijri calendar requires an observation of the early crescent moon to start a new month, and thus encourages paying attention to the cosmos. The Gregorian calendar can’t be tracked in the sky, which might be why many Westerners have less awareness of the moon and other natural phenomena, said Sacha Stern, a professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London.

Major events on the calendar shape cultural identity. When Jews around the world celebrate Sukkot, a harvest festival, they are observing the timing of the harvest in Israel, and preserving a connection throughout the diaspora, Dr. Birth said.

Holidays also structure personal and historical narratives. Some secular holidays in the United States center on legacies of war, which fits “when you think that the United States also has the largest military budget in the world,” Dr. Birth said. Chinese holidays usually emphasize family union and honoring ancestors, said Haiwang Yuan, a professor of library public services at Western Kentucky University, which aligns with the importance of filial piety.

Many ancient calendars, like the Chinese and Mesoamerican ones, build in fortunetelling, with prescriptions for when to build a house, get married, have a funeral and other life events. Similar calendars provide structure and comfort to people today. Britt Hart, an astrologer based in Philadelphia, said she thinks people can be drawn to horoscope-based calendars because they’re seeking a grander sense of time and order in the universe.

In the context of history, staying connected to an alternative calendar can also be a form of resisting the mainstream, or maintaining an identity outside of it. When a calendar is imposed on a society, it usually has to do with politics and power. The ability “to say when the year will start, or decide that a religious festival should be celebrated at a particular time, can be quite useful for a politician,” Dr. Stern said.

The Gregorian calendar has only been used as a global standard for about a century, and is “very much a reflection of European commerce and colonialism,” Dr. Birth said. It has now been built into computer architecture, but that doesn’t mean another calendar couldn’t one day become dominant.

A Hijri calendar from the Gregorian year 2014 hangs in Dr. Birth’s office. On it, Christmas falls on 3 Rabi al-Awwal, the third day of the third month.

He loves the reminder that, “holidays you think are stationary actually move, and those you think move are actually stationary.” It shows “how cultural these things are, rather than natural,” he said.

Source: What Lunar New Year Reveals About the World’s CalendarsRather than a scientific given, calendars say a lot about the history and cultural values of the societies that created them.

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Immigrants new to U.S. are farming its lands with old ways

2020/01/23 Leave a comment

Interesting. Wonder if any of this is happening in Canada (apart from the Canadian Sikhs in British Columbia):

It was pitch-black in the early morning after the Washington region’s first snowfall, when the Nigerian farmer went to check on his crops. Olaniyi Balogun pushed open the fence, took two steps, then stamped his boot against the soil. He bent over the rows of kale and gently touched the underside of a palm-size, sprouting leaf.

“Hmm,” he grunted, frowning. Just like he thought — frozen.

Most farmers in the Maryland suburbs stop growing their crops by mid-January, but Balogun wants to stretch out the season as far as he can. His wife says it’s because he’s a workaholic; he disagrees. In the rural towns outside Akure, the city in southwestern Nigeria where he was born, people farm year-round.

“For me, this is the only thing I know how to do,” said Balogun, 53, a stocky man with a deep, steady voice. Every time he steps out onto his farm, he said, he remembers himself as a boy, leaping off a crowded pickup truck into the cornfields, slingshot in hand.

“This is what makes me happy.”

Agriculture was once the driving economic force of Montgomery County, now a booming suburb of 1 million people. But after World War II, rapid industrialization drew residents and resources away from the land, leaving just several hundred farmers in what is now the county’s protected 93,000-acre agricultural reserve.

As the county’s demographics change, another shift is underway. Immigrants, many of whom grew up farming in their home countries, are taking over small pockets of the land — part of what advocates say is a national trend that is most pronounced in West Coast states such as California and Washington.

In the United States, farmers have been — and are — predominantly white and male. A third of them are over 65, and as they march toward retirement, many struggle to find successors, contributing to a crisis within the industry that has seen rises in bankruptcies, loan delinquencies and suicides.

From New York’s Hudson Valley to California’s Central Coast, public and private organizations are trying to connect immigrants with the resources they need to start their own farms or cultivate land owned by others, hoping to infuse the industry with new energy and traditions.

The U.S. agriculture census does not track farmers based on national origin, but judging by its data on race, the growth of immigrant farmers seems likely, experts say. From 2007 to 2017 (the most recent year the census was conducted), the number of farms with Hispanic producers grew about 30%, from 66,000 to 86,000. Those who study the census note that since many land-leasing contracts happen informally, these figures may undercount the number of foreign-born farmers who are bringing their agricultural traditions to U.S. shores.

In her recent book “The New American Farmer,” Syracuse University professor Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern says immigrant farmers often introduce new crops and their own, more sustainable farming practices — complementing a growing U.S. “food movement” that urges consumers to take back control of what they eat.

Some immigrant farmers in Maryland have become their neighborhood’s local producers, reviving fading relationships among buyers, farmers and landowners.

“These farmers, their heart and soul are in the land,” said Caroline Taylor, a Maryland farmer and the head of the nonprofit Montgomery Countryside Alliance. “It’s something people miss.”

A love match service: land + farmer

The alliance runs a program, called Land Link, that matches potential farmers with landowners who don’t want to farm but want to keep their land active. The goal, Taylor said, is to revitalize the agricultural reserve and in turn fend off developers hungry for the land.

Since it started in 2011, the Land Link program has helped to lease out nearly 500 acres. It has gained more momentum in recent years, Taylor said, in part because of increasing demand from immigrant and minority farmers, who constitute the majority of applicants. Alliance staff members receive a growing number of inquiries each week on the program, Taylor added, some from people not even in the country yet.

Before he moved to the United States, Balogun ran his own farm in Nigeria that spanned more than 120 acres. In 2016, he married Tope Fajingbesi, a self-described “city girl” who left Lagos in the early 2000s to study, and later settle in College Park as a lecturer at the University of Maryland. They agreed that he would join her if — and only if — he could farm. But in wealthy Montgomery, buying land, even renting, seemed impossible.

“I said to him, ‘Yes, of course we will do it,’ but inside, I thought, ‘Oh my God, there’s no way,’ ” Fajingbesi, 42, recalled. “What was the plan? I don’t know. We had no plan.”

When Land Link first matched them with landowners Dorothy and Brad Leissa, Fajingbesi crunched the numbers. “$500 a month,” she told her husband. That’s all they could shell out. At an introductory meeting, the Nigerian couple nervously asked the Leissas how much it would cost to rent the acre of land around the their 19th-century farmhouse. When the landlords asked for a dollar, Fajingbesi thought she had misheard. One dollar, the Leissas repeated.

“We’re happy to share,” said Dorothy, a soft-spoken schoolteacher. “Really, we’re happy to let them use it.”

Slowly, Balogun began to build up Dodo Farms, spending 11 — sometimes 12 — hours at the site each day. When he harvested his first tomatoes, he brought a bag to the Leissas’ farmhouse at the top of the hill. At Thanksgiving, he turned up at their door with a 25-pound turkey.

Last year, the couple brought him a gift: a wooden sign for the dim-lit shed where he does his administrative work. On it, the words “OFIISI NIYI” — Yoruba for “Niyi’s office.”

They wanted to show Balogun that he belonged on the farm, Dorothy said.

And that it belonged to him.

What’s old is new again

Minkoff-Zern, the Syracuse professor, interviewed 70 immigrant Latino farmers for her book. Nearly all showed a preference for a specific farming style, she wrote, “one where they are able to regain control over their daily labor and reproduce a specific agrarian way of life.”

They limit use of chemicals, opting for natural alternatives that were used in family farms in their home countries. They go out of their ways to ensure that the crops are safe and healthy. As one Mexican farmer in New York told Minkoff-Zern: “We were organic [in Mexico], we just didn’t know we were.”

Balogun is similar: Instead of commercial fertilizer, he uses cow manure, which he gets free from a nearby cattle rancher. He avoids pesticides, picking out weeds and insects by hand.

“These farmers are working with natural systems, using quote-unquote old school conservation techniques,” Taylor said. “These are folks that have things to teach us.”

Immigrant farmers also offer different crops. In the summer, Balogun grows a type of spinach often used in Nigerian stews but not easily found in this country. Another Land Link farmer, Tanya Doka-Spandhla, 54, almost exclusively grows crops native to South and West Africa — vegetables that grew in the backyard of her childhood home in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Doka-Spandhla, who came to the U.S. two decades ago, said she started her farm in 2015 because she missed food from home. She wanted the mustard greens, “tsunga,” that are sautéed with peanut butter sauce, and the pumpkin leaves, “mubura,” that are boiled and eaten with porridge. She craved the jelly-meat of the bright yellow horned melon, called “kiwano.”

On summer weekends, her three-acre farm in Gaithersburg is a buzzing hub for Montgomery’s expanding West African population.

“It just makes sense,” Taylor said. “We have a million people in the county now. They aren’t all people who want to eat baked potatoes.”

Dodo Farms, too, has earned a loyal following — and not just among immigrants. Among the more enthusiastic fans is Alexa Bely, a 50-year-old biology professor who not only gets most of her household’s produce from Balogun but has persuaded her neighbors in College Park to do the same.

For those who cannot make it to the College Park farmers market, where Balogun sells produce on the weekends, Bely picks up their vegetables and delivers them herself.

“I’ve become a bit of a nut about this,” she admitted, laughing. “But he’s doing something that I really believe in.”

“And,” she added, “his carrots are the best I’ve ever tasted.”

Source: Immigrants new to U.S. are farming its lands with old ways

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USA: Why The Census Bureau Is Turning To Children To Reach Asian Immigrants

2020/01/22 Leave a comment

Despite Trump, officials are doing their job to increase participation:

In the last week, the United States Census Bureau has rolled out six ads in different Asian languages with pretty much the same storyline: cute little girl tells her dad all she knows about the census.

The ads’ backdrops vary — a Chinese bakery, a Korean grocery, a Filipino family’s home office — but in each one the daughter sweetly nudges dad into filling out census forms.

“We definitely wanted to hone in on that family connection and filial piety,” said Tim Wang, whose agency TDW+Co made the ads in and around Los Angeles.

The Census Bureau says that language barriers make Asian immigrants some of the hardest people to count, and it’s spending millions more on culturally-relevant advertising to reach them than it did 10 years ago.

Still, community advocates in Los Angeles, home to some of the world’s largest Asian diasporas, worry that large swaths of people could be missed in a national headcount that decides political representation and how government resources are distributed.

One concern: Census officials have dropped eight of 14 languages spoken by Asians that it used for advertising in its 2010 campaign, including those for Cambodians, Thai, Pakistanis and Laotians.

“(Asians’) numbers might increase, but we’re not going to know because they’re not responding,” said An Le of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus, who is coordinating census outreach to Asian Californians with other non-profit groups.

A Census Bureau official cited cost as the reason it cut back on the number of languages the bureau is using in TV, radio and digital ads.

But program manager Kendall Johnson said the Census Bureau values reaching people in their native languages and has more than doubled the number of outreach workers it’s hired in 2020 to 1,500-plus, many of them bilingual. More than 100 languages are spoken among these “partnership specialists,” who go to community events and exhibit at conferences, Johnson said.

Johnson added that the Census Bureau sees community-based groups as important partners and has placed all of its English language materials online for them to translate should they want.

“We’re just one of many voices out there,” Johnson said. “We may have the largest campaign. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other campaigns out there.”

Le said that Asian American organizations in California and beyond have indeed been busy compiling translated resources in as many languages as possible.

Still, Le fears that many Asians with limited English will fall through the cracks — and not just because the public awareness campaign is in fewer languages.

The Census Bureau is making a push for respondents to fill out the questionnaire online which Le said will be a problem for Asian immigrants who lack internet literacy or access.

Those who can navigate the web will be able to answer questions in a limited number of Asian languages: Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, Korean and Vietnamese.

Paper forms which will only be offered in English and Spanish.

The language barriers posed by the census is just one of the challenges of getting Asian immigrants counted. The White House also had planned to ask 2020 Census respondents whether they were U.S. citizens until the Supreme Court blocked the question.

“We were just terrified that the citizenship question was going to be on, right?” Le said. “There were like many fights that we were trying to be prepared for.”

Asians are the fastest growing racial demographic in the country, but the Census Bureau is still devoting roughly the same proportion of its budget to that audience: 9% or $20.4 million.

But Johnson predicted the bureau’s media campaign to do better than in 2010, in large part due to increased use of digital ads on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

“The ability to much more precisely target the media is what is allowing us to get the most bang for our buck,” Johnson said.

The Census Bureau projects that its media outreach will reach 99% of the 18-plus population of all races and ethnicities.

TDW+Co principal Wang saw from focus groups and survey findings that reaching Asians in particular would be challenging.

“Asian American audiences had the lowest level of familiarity on what the census is, and why it’s important,” Wang said.

That’s why, Wang said, the messaging they developed is “very educational, motivational, and very uplifting in tone and nature.”

TDW+Co will keep introducing ads through June, including those that remind people to respond to the census, and also to “humanize” the census takers who may come knocking on their doors if they don’t, Wang said.

Source: Why The Census Bureau Is Turning To Children To Reach Asian Immigrants

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German Court May Reject Appeal to Remove Anti-Semitic Relic

2020/01/22 Leave a comment

https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/01/21/world/europe/ap-eu-germany-anti-semitism.html

Similar to discussions in Canada about statues of former historical figures and leaders. Believe there is a greater risk in removing the ugly parts and aspect of our history and historical figures than not, and having interpretative plaques or adjacent exhibits is a better approach:

A court in eastern Germany indicated Tuesday that it will likely reject a Jewish man’s bid to force the removal of an ugly remnant of centuries of anti-Semitism from a church where Martin Luther once preached.

The Naumburg court’s senate said, at a hearing, that “it will maybe reject the appeal,” court spokesman Henning Haberland told reporters.

“The senate could not follow the plaintiff’s opinion that the defamatory sculpture can be seen as an expression of disregard in its current presentation,” Haberland said.

The verdict will be announced on February 4.

The so-called “Judensau,” or “Jew pig,” sculpture on the Town Church in Wittenberg dates back to around 1300. It is perhaps the best-known of more than 20 such anti-Semitic relics from the Middle Ages that still adorn churches across Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

Located 4 meters (13 feet) above the ground on a corner of the church, it depicts Jews suckling on the teats of a sow, while a rabbi lifts the animal’s tail. In 1570, after the Protestant Reformation, an inscription referring to an anti-Jewish tract by Luther was added.

Judaism considers pigs impure and no one disputes that the sculpture is deliberately offensive. But there is strong disagreement about what to do with the relief.

Tuesday’s hearing was the second round in the legal dispute, which comes at a time of mounting concern about anti-Semitism in Germany. In May, a court ruled against plaintiff Michael Duellmann, who wants the relief to be taken off the church and put in the nearby Luther House museum.

Judges in Dessau rejected arguments that he has a right to have the sculpture removed because it formally constitutes slander and the parish is legally responsible.

The relief “is a terrible falsification of Judaism … a defamation of and insult to the Jewish people,” Duellmann says, arguing that it has “a terrible effect up to this day.”

When the church was renovated in the early 1980s, the parish decided to leave the sandstone sculpture in place, and it was also restored. In 1988, a memorial was built on the ground underneath it, referring to the persecution of Jews and the killing of 6 million in the Nazi Holocaust.

Pastor Johannes Block from the Town Church says the church also considers the sculpture unacceptably insulting. However, he argues it “no longer speaks for itself as a solitary piece, but is embedded in a culture of remembrance” thanks to the memorial.

“We don’t want to hide or abolish history, but take the path of reconciliation with and through history,” he says.

In Berlin, the federal commissioner for Jewish life in Germany told reporters he favored putting the relief down into a museum.

“This would be a good contribution by the church to overcome anti-Semitism,” Felix Klein told reporters ahead of the court hearing.

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Beijing think tank cancels global conference amid Canadian boycott

2020/01/22 Leave a comment

The formal notice and related story of the cancelled 2020 International Metropolis migration conference in Beijing. One really has to wonder what the International Metropolis co-chairs and Secretariat were thinking when choosing Beijing to host the conference, beyond the finances:

A global migration policy conference Canada played a key role in establishing has been cancelled after its Beijing host pulled out of the event scheduled for June.

The 2020 International Metropolis Conference was at the centre of a boycott led by Canadian scholars over China’s poor human rights record: the repression of the Muslim Uighur and Tibetan minorities; threats to Hong Kong’s legal and judicial independence; and the ongoing detention of foreign nationals, including Canadian businessman Michael Spavor and former diplomat Michael Kovrig.

In an email to participating researchers and policy-makers last week, Professors Jan Rath of the Netherlands and Paul Spoonley of New Zealand, co-chairs of the event’s steering committee, said they regretted but respected the decision by the Centre for China and Globalization to pull out of the conference. Boycotters had argued that the centre is part of the Chinese apparatus and feared it would be used to legitimize the Communist regime’s policies and practices.

“We can understand that external pressures have complicated the organization of the event,” said the letter. “An International Metropolis Conference in Beijing would have offered an opportunity for members of the Metropolis network to meet and engage with their counterparts in that country and in the region, and vice-versa, in the interest of enhanced mutual understanding of migration developments.”

Andrew Griffith, a former director-general of the Canadian immigration department who led the boycott with others, welcomed the cancellation.

“The regime’s ongoing human rights abuses and cultural genocide efforts regarding minorities like the Uighurs make China an inappropriate host for an open discussion of migration issues, where human rights are central,” Griffith told the Star.

The conference had been organized by the International Metropolis Network, made up of experts from around the world in migration and settlement policies as a platform where state officials, non-government organizations and researchers share ideas and discuss best policies to manage migration and integration.

Canada was instrumental in the establishment of the international network of experts, with one of the organization’s three secretariats at Carleton University. The annual conference attracts as many as 1,000 participants and presenters a year and has been held around the world.

Organizers maintain that Metropolis has always been an “apolitical” network aimed at fostering understanding of migration issues.

“China has emerged as a major economic power in the world, and as a country with a significant role in migration, whether in Asia or globally. For us to have a comprehensive picture of regional and global migration means understanding China’s role in migration, both as a country of origin and, more recently, a country of destination,” the International Metropolis said in its letter to members. “To ignore China in the field of migration today is to have but a partial understanding of global migration phenomena.”

Griffith disagreed, pointing to the recent denial of entry to Hong Kong of Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch, a group critical of the Chinese regime, as an example of interference and repression by Beijing.

“For conferences in Western countries, that is largely true, but certainly not in a country like China, which would have used the conference to legitimize its policies and practices and not allow any open discussion of its repression of the Uighurs and other human rights abuses,” said Griffith

The conference’s steering committee said further details will soon be provided on an “alternative” International Metropolis event to replace the cancelled Beijing conference.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2020/01/17/beijing-think-tank-cancels-global-conference-amid-canadian-boycott.html

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The ominous metaphors of China’s Uighur concentration camps

2020/01/21 Leave a comment

Uncomfortable parallels:

The recent leak of Chinese Communist Party documents to the New York Times offers a chilling glimpse into the 21st century’s largest system of concentration camps.

A million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are now detained in a Chinese operation that combines the forced labour and re-education of Mao-era laogai with the post-9/11 rhetoric of the “war on terror.” U.S. President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, border camps crowded with migrant children and America’s global archipelago of so-called black sites detaining terror suspects deserve condemnation. So too do the concentration camps of the world’s newest superpower.

Retina scans, DNA databanks and facial recognition technologyare now ubiquitous across China’s Xinjiang province. They are modern-day updates to earlier surveillance technologies like Soviet internal passports.

KGB tactics

Satellite images and clandestine video footage of watchtowers, concrete barracks and barbed-wire perimeters conform to the prison esthetic described by Holocaust survivor Primo Levi and Russian labour camp detainee Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.

Nighttime roundups resemble KGB tactics, while involuntary medical injections recall the dark history of forced sterilization, from Nazi eugenics to the targeted sterilization of Indigenous women in Canada.

Another haunting parallel is the language Chinese officials use to justify their actions. Speaking of the concentration camps of totalitarian Europe, the late social theorist Zygmunt Bauman, himself a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, wrote that “gardening and medicine” have offered “archmetaphors” for the management of unwanted populations.

To cultivate a garden is to ensure the survival of some plants while eliminating others. Gardens require fences, walls and the extermination of weeds. As if to illustrate Bauman’s point, a Chinese official in Kashgar recently informed a crowd of Uighers:

“You can’t uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops in the field one by one. You need to spray chemicals to kill them all.”

The tenderly pruned gardens of classical China were peaceful retreats for poets and philosophers. By contrast, the association of human beings with noxious weeds and the Chinese Communist Party’s embrace of industrial agricultural metaphors have yielded dystopian results.

Language of disease

More than anything, Chinese statements about Uighur concentration are saturated with the language of disease.Likening Islam to a contagion, an official Communist Party document suggests Uighers have “been infected by unhealthy thoughts.”

“Freedom is only possible,” it adds, “when the ‘virus’…is eradicated.”

In an exercise in victim blaming for which cultural theorist Susan Sontag argues medical metaphors are especially conducive, Chinese officials have warned: “If you were careless and caught an infectious virus, like SARS” (a scenario that led to mass medical detention in China in the recent past), then “you’d have to undergo enclosed isolated treatment. Because it’s an infectious illness.”

Chinese officials are thus defending the camps as quarantine cells that will safeguard China from the Uighur epidemic while eliminating religious and cultural pathogens.

The human body has long served as a metaphor for state and society both in Western and Chinese thought. And medical analogies have proven central in the political calculus of extrajudicial detention. With a pseudo-scientific endorsement, policy-makers around the world have classified unwanted populations as parasites or social pathogens that need to be cured, physically isolated or excised completely.

First concentration camps

The first concentration camps in contemporary history, established by Britain during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), were directly inspired by plague quarantine camps in India and South Africa. The goal was to “cleanse” besieged towns of “disease, crime and poverty” by introducing wartime refugees to sanitary enclosures administered by British medical officials.

The Soviet Union likewise consigned “parasitic classes” to the gulag, while earlier generations in China referred to political prisoners as “convalescents.” Even today, xenophobic voices in America associate Latino migrants with “tremendous infectious disease.”

The biological metaphors revealed by the Chinese government’s recent document leak, however, find their most sinister analogies with Nazi Germany.

“The battle in which we are engaged” against the “Jewish virus,”Hitler proclaimed, “is of the same sort as the battle waged…by Pasteur and Koch. We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew.”

A germaphobe, Hitler imagined fighting “battles against a veritable world sickness, which threatens to infect the German people, a plague that devastates whole peoples.” In this imaginary landscape, Nazi apologists invariably depicted concentration camps as sanitary spaces that isolated Jewish “parasites” in the name of racial hygiene.

The genetic emphasis of Nazi racism ultimately meant “curing” Jews was an impossibility. By Hitler’s logic, outright extermination — or “euthanasia” in sanitized state-speak — was the only recourse. China, by contrast, holds out hope that Uighur camps, or “re-education hospitals”, can cure their “patients” and thus “clean the virus from their brain.”

Yet like cancer, Chinese Communist officials fear, “there is no guarantee the illness will not return.” And just because an inmate has “recovered from the ideological disease doesn’t mean they are permanently cured,” the documents reveal.

The language of disease justified some of the 20th century’s worst crimes. If left unchecked by the international community, China is poised to continue that tradition in the 21st century. And where China leads, others are likely to follow.

Source: The ominous metaphors of China’s Uighur concentration camps

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Is There a Way to Acknowledge America’s Progress? (applies more broadly)

2020/01/18 Leave a comment

Good reminder by Andrew Sullivan that many things have changed for the better. And of course, recognizing progress doesn’t mean doing more may not be needed, but having a historical perspective helps focus debate and discussion on what should be the more pressing issues:

…Why this sudden ratcheting up of rhetoric? On the right, it’s fueled by the kind of absurd hyperbole that Trump uses all the time. On the left, it’s Trump himself. His extremism, misogyny, transphobia, and racism have all provoked a sharp turn to the left among Democrats. But, as you can see from the workforce numbers for women, there’s little he can actually do to prevent the future from being female. He could tip the Court, which could, in turn, repeal Roe, but that would be a highly unpopular ruling and likely provoke a backlash that could lead to more moderate federal legislation in its place. Marriage equality is settled law, according to the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Gay visibility is ubiquitous. Black unemployment is at record lows; black women are seeing real improvement in their careers and earnings; crime in urban neighborhoods is a fraction of what it was in the 1980s and 1990s. Yes, we have a bigot in the Oval Office — but his ability to influence these broader cultural tides is quite limited.

Some of the rhetorical excess is also about money. Interest groups for various subpopulations have a financial interest in emphasizing oppression in order to keep donations flowing.

But a recent psychological study suggests a simpler explanation. Its core idea is what you might call “oppression creep” or, more neutrally, “prevalence-induced concept change.” The more progress we observe, the greater the remaining injustices appear. We seem incapable of keeping a concept stable over time when the prevalence of that concept declines. In a fascinating experiment, participants were provided with a chart containing a thousand dots that ranged along a spectrum from very blue to very purple and were asked to go through and identify all the blue dots. The study group was then broken in two. One subgroup was shown a new chart with the same balance of purple and blue dots as the first one and asked to repeat the task. Not surprisingly, they generally found the same number of blue dots as they did on the first chart. A second subgroup was shown a new chart with fewer blue dots and more purple dots. In this group, participants started marking dots as blue that they had marked as purple on the first chart. “In other words, when the prevalence of blue dots decreased, participants’ concept of blue expanded to include dots that it had previously excluded.”

We see relatively, not absolutely. We change our standards all the time, depending on context. As part of the study, the psychologists ran another experiment showing participants a range of threatening and nonthreatening faces and asking them to identify which was which. Next, participants were split into two groups and asked to repeat the exercise. The first subgroup was shown the same ratio of threatening and nonthreatening faces as in the initial round; subgroup two was shown many fewer threatening faces. Sure enough, the second group adjusted by seeing faces they once thought of as nonthreatening as threatening. The conclusion:

When blue dots became rare, purple dots began to look blue; when threatening faces became rare, neutral faces began to appear threatening … This happened even when the change in the prevalence of instances was abrupt, even when participants were explicitly told that the prevalence of instances would change, and even when participants were instructed and paid to ignore these changes.

We seem to be wired to assume a given threat remains just as menacing even when its actual prevalence has declined:

Our studies suggest that even well-meaning agents may sometimes fail to recognize the success of their own efforts, simply because they view each new instance in the decreasingly problematic context that they themselves have brought about. Although modern societies have made extraordinary progress in solving a wide range of social problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and infant mortality, the majority of people believe that the world is getting worse. The fact that concepts grow larger when their instances grow smaller may be one source of that pessimism.

This study may help explain why, in the midst of tremendous gains for gays, women, and racial minorities, we still insist more than ever that we live in a patriarchal, misogynist, white supremacist, homophobic era. We constantly adjust our view of our fast-changing world to ensure we don’t believe it has changed at all! Maybe this is simply another way of describing each generation’s shifting of the goalposts. Or maybe it’s because we’ve made so much progress that the injustice that remains appears more intolerable, rather than less. Or maybe, as these psychologists suggest, “holding concepts constant may be an evolutionarily recent requirement that the brain’s standard computational mechanisms are ill equipped to meet.”

But whatever the cause, the result is that we steadfastly refuse to accept the fact of progress, in a cycle of eternal frustration at what injustices will always remain. We never seem to be able to say: “Okay, we’re done now, we’ve got this, politics has done all it reasonably could, now let’s move on with our lives.” We can only ever say: “It’s worse than ever!” And feel it in our bones.

Source: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/andrew-sullivan-is-there-a-way-to-acknowledge-our-progress.html

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