New Zealand’s migrant boom is good news for Māori. It empowers us

2019/11/07 Leave a comment

In many ways, the Maori have played a similar role to French Canada forcing recognition that there is not one monolithic identity and the need for compromise, however imperfect, between different groups.

While in general there does not appear to be much tension in Canada between Indigenous peoples and newcomers, there is a need for greater understanding among newcomers (and indeed among all Canadians) regarding Indigenous peoples and the issues.

I would expect, should the newly re-elected Liberal government get around to it, the replacement to the citizenship guide, Discover Canada, will be far richer in its account of Indigenous peoples:

In April 2003, the year New Zealand’s population hit 4 million, statisticians were predicting the country would hit at 4.8 million people in 2046. As in Europe and North America the country’s birth rate was falling, and no one quite knew whether mass immigration would – or even could – continue at pace. Instead, the pressing concern at the time was how to reverse the brain drain.

In the mid-2000s almost 40,000 New Zealanders were upping sticks each year. Miners and truck drivers were packing their bags for Queensland’s mining boom. Bankers and lawyers were taking up plum jobs in London. Teachers, nurses, and other public servants were comparing what they made in Wellington with what they might make in Washington or Ottawa.

And in that very brief moment it felt as if New Zealandwas topping out. In 2008, the aspiring prime minister John Key took a camera crew to the capital city’s 35,000-seat stadium to illustrate just how big mass emigration was. The implication? We were, to repurpose a dangerous phrase, sending our best – to the US and beyond.

But the consensus among the commentariat was that Key’s stadium stunt was just that – a stunt – and even if he and his party came to power there was precious little they could do to reverse what was the natural order of things: a stronger Australian economy, its gravitational pull drawing in more and more New Zealanders.

Of course the commentators were right. The Australian economy remains stronger on most measures, and mass emigration was still a problem in the Key government’s early years. But one thing no one was anticipating was just how quickly the government would compensate for the brain drain with mass immigration.

In 2017, the Key government’s final year in power, net migration (the difference between those coming in or immigrating, including returning New Zealanders, and those going out or emigrating) was at a record 72,300. In 2015, net migration was at 58,000 and in 2013 it was a little shy of 50,000.

These are small numbers for countries such as Australia or the UK, sure, but for this country it was momentous. In the 20 years to 2014, average net migration to New Zealand was only 13,300.

And this year the country will reach another population landmark: 5 million people. It took more than 20 years to grow from 2 million to 3 million. It took 30 years for it to grow from 3 to 4 million. It took only 16 years to reach 5 million. And we are, because of that growth, a country transformed.

Population growth and the capital that comes with it aretransforming the Auckland skyline. Tradespeople from Asia, the Philippines especially, are in good part responsible for rebuilding Christchurch after the devastating earthquake in 2011. Tourism and dairy, New Zealand’s leading export industries, are thriving off the back of migrant labour.

You can spot the transformation in schools, workplaces and universities, and the streets as well. Māori make up 16.5% of the population, up from 15% in 2013. We’re present in every part of the country’s private and public life, and in a way that was unthinkable half a century ago.

Māori make up 23% of MPs – a disproportionate share – and Māori lead or co-lead every sitting parliamentary party, bar Jacinda Ardern’s Labour. It’s fashionable to imagine New Zealand as a 1950s Britain – the temperate climate, a buttoned-down national character, and the things that were best about Britain like a cradle-to-grave welfare system – but in reality this is a Māori country.

For a very brief moment in the 80s that fact was at the heart of New Zealand’s constitution. The government understood the country as “bicultural”. Two peoples were in partnership, Māori and the European settlers who came after, and we’d run the show as equals. Sure, there was a gap – sometimes even a chasm – between promise and practice, but the aspiration was there.

The problem, though, is mass immigration from the 90s onwards quickly made biculturalism unworkable. In 2019, Asian peoples make up 15% of the population and Pacific peoples another 8%. In this new country only one kind of culturalism works: multi.

For people who oppose Māori reasserting their claim on political powerthis is great news. Māori are just one minority among many, the opponents insist, claiming they’re not even indigenous. But for the small number of Māori who tie their political claims to their demographic power it’s quite terrible. On current trends Asian peoples will overtake Māori as the second-largest ethnic group in New Zealand. This is an “ethnic-cultural tension point”, as the country’s leading demographer put it, confirming that in every settler colony, population politics is toxic.

Except when it isn’t. The truth is immigration isn’t diminishing Māori claims on political power. It’s strengthening those claims, pushing each one forward. At Ihumātaohundreds of land protectors are occupying the historic site and reclaiming it for the local tribes. Among the occupiers are groups such as “Asians for Tino Rangatiratanga” meaning Asians for Māori political power. Visitors to the land and supporters of the occupation include west African Islamic scholars, Cook Islands royalty, and indigenous Taiwanese people.

This is what sets New Zealand apart – and maybe above – other countries in the Anglosphere. Māori rights aren’t contingent on their status as a (growing) minority. Population power doesn’t secure our rights. The Treaty of Waitangi does. The country’s founding document reaffirms Māori political power (in the treaty’s own words it reaffirms our “tino rangatiratanga”). And equally so the treaty protects migrants, guaranteeing that New Zealand is their place to stand as well. The only thing the treaty expects of them is to recognise and respect Māori political power. The bargain is that simple and, if Ihumātao is any guide, it’s one that migrants are more than willing to make. This is the reason I’m so happy about New Zealand at 5 million.

Source: New Zealand’s migrant boom is good news for Māori. It empowers us

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House of Commons becoming more reflective of diverse population

2019/11/07 Leave a comment

My latest in Policy Options:

How well does Canada integrate immigrants and visible minorities into political life? While the barriers to entering political life are significant, as the Samara Centre for Democracy study on nomination processes has shown, the recent election is cause for hope.

This article is based on an analysis of the 2019 election I undertook, using a dataset developed together with the Hill Times, Samara, and McGill University political scientist Jerome Black. We drew on a mix of official party biographies, media articles, social media, and name and photo analysis (we did not include Indigenous candidates and MPs). We also compared the 2019 results with those for the 2015 election and with visible minority representation in other countries’ legislatures. Our results show that in 2019 in Canada the visible minority composition of MPs elected is reasonably representative of the immigrant and visible minority populations in the country as a whole.

….

Source: House of Commons becoming more reflective of diverse population

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Hospital patients in Canada lacking English need access to interpreters, study says

2019/11/06 Leave a comment

An inevitable consequence of living in a diverse society where a percentage will not be fluent enough to understand the language used by doctors. Good study documenting the issue and sorting out where the needs may be greatest:

Waking up with worsening pain had Surjit Garcha worried, but the red blisters on her stomach were so alarming that she went to her neighbour’s home to try to explain, in her limited English, that she needed help.

Garcha, who lives alone, doesn’t have the English skills to call her doctor’s office and felt more comfortable going to someone she trusts.

Her neighbour took her to the emergency department in Delta, B.C., where Garcha learned she had shingles, a viral infection that can include complications such as scarring and vision and hearing loss in older adults.

Garcha, now 82, said the intense pain was bad enough, but not being able to understand what was wrong with her made her feel even more vulnerable.”The employees who bring food to patients would leave it outside the door, because they could catch what I had and no visitors could come in my room,” she said in Punjabi about her experience three years ago.

Garcha’s only solace was that a nurse spoke Punjabi, but it wasn’t until her daughter arrived from Seattle the next day that she had any contact with a family member.

Interpreters trained in medical terminology are more often provided for patients in Canada’s larger centres, but a researcher from the University of Toronto said lack of access to interpretation could potentially result in unsafe health care through missed diagnoses and medical errors, suggesting language services should be a priority.

Dr. Shail Rawal, lead author of a study that includes data from Toronto General and Toronto Western hospitals, said patients with a chronic disease and limited English are more likely to return to the emergency room or be readmitted to hospital because of poorer understanding of discharge instructions and not taking medication as required, compared with those who are proficient in the language and were discharged with similar health concerns.

The study was published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association and includes data for all patients discharged from the two hospitals with acute conditions, pneumonia and hip fracture, and chronic conditions heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, between January 2008 and March 2016, amounting to 9,881 patients.

“We saw that if you had heart failure and limited English proficiency you were more likely to come back to the emergency room to be reassessed in 30 days after you were discharged,” said Rawal, an assistant professor in the University of Toronto’s department of medicine and a staff physician at the University Health Network, which includes the two hospitals.”Patients who had limited English proficiency and heart failure or chronic obstructive lung disease were more likely to be readmitted to hospital in the 30 or 90 days after discharge,” she said.

For those with pneumonia or hip fracture, the data showed no difference in return to hospital regardless of patients’ ability to speak English, Rawal said.

“Our thinking is that those are acute conditions that have a pretty standard treatment, whether it be surgery and then rehabilitation or a course of antibiotics, whereas the two chronic conditions require a lot of patient-centred counselling and patient management plans.”

Of the 9,881 patients:

  • 2,336 had limited proficiency in English.
  • Nearly 36 per cent spoke Portuguese.
  • Just over 23 per cent spoke Italian.
  • Cantonese, Mandarin and Chinese were the primary languages for about 14 per cent of patients.
  • Greek and Spanish were the least spoken languages.
  • 18.5 per cent of the study subjects’ languages were listed as “other.”

Rawal said patients at the two hospitals have around-the-clock access to interpretation in various languages by phone and in-person interpretation is also available but must be pre-booked and is typically offered during business hours.

“The quality of care or the level of access to interpretation, in my view, should not vary based on which hospital you happen to present at with your illness,” she said.

“Currently, that is the case, that depending on what hospital you go to in our city, in our province or across the country, you will have varying levels of access to professional interpretation services and I think that in a linguistically diverse country the language needs of patients and families should be met by institutions.”

Family members often step in to interpret and alleviate a patient’s anxiety but may end up having to rearrange their schedules while waiting for nurses, doctors or specialists to show up at the bedside, Rawal said.

However, she said previous research studies have shown that families are less accurate in their interpretation than professionals and sometimes may not wish to translate what a clinician is saying, perhaps to lessen the impact if the prognosis would be too upsetting.

Kiran Malli, director of provincial language services for the Provincial Health Services Authority in British Columbia, said patients in Vancouver and the surrounding area have access to 180 languages through interpreters who work at hospitals and publicly funded long-term care homes.

The top three languages are Cantonese, Mandarin and Punjabi, Malli said.

In-person and phone interpretation is provided without a pre-booked appointment. The health authority started a pilot project last year to provide services by phone to family doctors’ offices, she said.

Another pilot on video-remote interpreting at hospitals, which Malli said would greatly benefit patients needing sign language — which is already being provided — will also start soon and benefit those living in isolated parts of the province.

A few scattered grassroots programs were available in B.C. in the 1990s but the current standardized one didn’t start until 2003, she said.

“It was getting pretty evident that we needed to do something a little more than just pulling up any bilingual person or calling on the overhead paging [system] to say ‘If anybody speaks Cantonese could you please come to emergency,”’ Malli said of the current program’s genesis.

“Research shows us that as people get older, even if you know English when you’re younger, you tend to revert back to your mother tongue as you age,” she said, adding elderly people in medical distress tend to forget the English skills they have.

“I do think we are seeing more elderly patients for that reason,” she said.

It’s unfair for health-care staff to expect family members to act as interpreters because, just like English-speaking patients’ relatives, their role should be to support their loved ones and not to be burdened further, Malli said.

“If we are looking at equity, as family I should just be there to support my family member through whatever it might be rather than act as their language conduit,” she said.

Source: Hospital patients in Canada lacking English need access to interpreters, study says

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Ethiopia: Nderitu – Ethiopia’s Chicken and Egg: Ethnicity or Citizenship? – AllAfrica

2019/11/06 Leave a comment

Interesting take from an Ethiopian perspective:

Does the 1995 ethnic federal constitution hinder Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed by entrenching ethnicity as an identity right from the preamble and demarcating states on ethnicity rather than geography? Last week, I argued it was partly responsible for the mushrooming of ethnic-based political parties, militias and even banks.

Liban Guyo engaged me in a lively discussion stating that the Ethiopian Constitution was crafted to accommodate demands for regional autonomy while managing inter-ethnic tensions.

Guyo said ethnic federalism, with security as the responsibility of central government, is embraced by groups such as the Oromo who suffered either real or imagined domination by the Amhara ethnic groups.

It was intended as a solution for social consequences of growing inequality and political powerlessness. With this in mind, Guyo said, Abiy is best placed to work towards a unitary system of government.

Throughout history, racial, ethnic and other groups such as women have organised to demand recognition on the basis of difference.

However, ethnic political mobilisation often informed by a shared history, language and sometimes religion raises different challenges for national citizenship.

Is the case of ethnic belonging and national citizenship that of the chicken and egg story? Which comes first and which is a subset of the other? Is it a threat to the citizenship and the nation when groups push for political recognition on the basis of ethnicity? In itself, ethnic-based social identity is not a problem.

However, it becomes a political problem because it identifies who we are but in the same breath, who we are not. It therefore makes it easy to be Oromo, if you are not Amhara, Hutu if you are not Tutsi, Kikuyu if you are not Luo and Dinka if you are not Nuer.

It becomes categorisation when ethnic identity marks boundaries between those in “our group” and those in “other.” This is dangerous for national citizenship and I will tell you why.

In circumstances where clear political divisions between ethnic groups exist, we perceive those in our group as similar in thought and behaviour. We also assume the “other” group thinks alike and what we know about one, applies to all of them.

For many people the immediate family and ethnic group, and not information from other sources, becomes the key shaper of opinions. We then pay more attention to differences, rather than commonalities. We translate this into actual discrimination against those who do not “belong” to our group.

This has important consequences on ethnic political identity as a source of violence. Identity- based conflicts such as witnessed in Northern Ireland and Myanmar, are very difficult to solve.

Leaders are often challenged to hold together a multi-ethnic society under a national identity. Citizenship in itself is an indicator of national cohesion when linked to efficient and non-discriminatory government services and policy practice in fields such as voting, stable economy, rule of law, and promoting equality of opportunity for diverse populations, in for instance, education and health.

It is the work of governments to budget for these services and grow economies. Contention usually begins when groups feel excluded from services as citizens especially when ethnic leaders appropriate state resources.

Ethnic federalism comes with challenges such as homogenizing and therefore weakening of national political parties and disaggregation of unions. This weakens citizenship.

Without a shared interconnected history, citizens see themselves as disconnected from the whole. The challenge for leaders is to lead citizens towards a common civic culture without devaluing ethnic identity or citizenship.

Resolving violent conflict, ethnic or otherwise, consumes immense resources that would otherwise be allocated to services such as education.

Ethiopia’s ethnic federal constitution lays a foundation for framing citizenship at the local level. Future governments may not escape from this variable in formulating national public policy and political programs.

What is guaranteed is that ethnic insecurity will require a political response that links the local to the national.

Source: Ethiopia: Nderitu – Ethiopia’s Chicken and Egg: Ethnicity or Citizenship? – AllAfrica

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House-hunting as an Asian immigrant in Vancouver means navigating racism

2019/11/05 Leave a comment

Account how some of the general narratives about Chinese and Chinese Canadians play out at the individual level. Although stating that her car is a Porsche (no shame, she works hard, and a good reporter) perhaps a detail that reduces empathy:

When my mother graduated from high school in Hong Kong in the 1970s, she and her friends did not have the luxury of going straight to college or spending a “gap year” travelling the world.

At age 18, she worked as a secretary all day and attended class in the evenings to earn a degree in business administration, while also studying English and shorthand.

She made 500 HKD a month, which was roughly equivalent to $80 Canadian at the time. Adjusted for inflation, that would still be less than $500 Canadian a month. My dad was working long hours, meanwhile, as a salesman for commission.

In my parents’ first home as a married couple, they lived in a flimsy shack on the rooftop of a high-rise building, which they jokingly referred to as their penthouse. It was better than when they bunked with their parents and siblings, with both families stuffed into 200-square-feet studios.

They saved fastidiously. My mom socked away half her salary each month and invested the money. Since she was constantly upgrading her skills at night, she also jumped jobs to double and triple her salary. By the time I was born, she had a fairly comfortable government job and my dad had moved up the ranks to general sales manager.

Yet they gave it all up to start over again in their early 30s. After selling their apartment, my parents moved to Canada, in hopes of giving their children a more secure future in a democratic country.

I’m now the same age they were when they settled in Vancouver. Even though I haven’t been quite as disciplined, because I followed their example of jumping jobs and working multiple gigs at once, I’ve saved enough and I’m looking for a home of my own.

Favourable rent comes at a steep price when it’s time to move

Searching for a condo in Vancouver as an Asian immigrant is a fraught and emotional experience. Why? Because there is a class struggle centred around housing affordability happening in the Lower Mainland — and it’s led to outright racism, ageism, classism and xenophobia.

If you chat with any Asian person in Vancouver, they’re likely to say they’ve noticed an uptick in racism, of people who voice their assumptions that they are recent migrants with bucketloads of cash and are driving up the real estate prices for “locals” and “real Canadians.”

Earlier this year, a stranger confronted and raged at me that my Porsche had almost struck her. I was dumbfounded. I commute an hour to work on public transit every day. Other times, people have simply shouted: “Chink!” at me, as I walked down the street.

At an apartment pre-sale event in Burnaby, I saw a one-bedroom that cost less than $450,000, and I couldn’t help blurting out, “Wow, that’s pretty cheap!”

It was a very crowded exhibition hall and immediately, everyone around shot dagger eyes at me and one white lady made a furious sound that sounded like “Eeuarrrckk!” then hissed under her breath, “Go back to China, bitch.”

And that’s just what I get as a young person. My parents are both boomers and immigrants, and even though they are so law-abiding they wouldn’t jaywalk, let alone engage in seedy real-estate fraud, they represent the most popular scapegoats for soaring real-estate prices in this city.

At best, it’s an unhealthy “us” versus “them” dynamic — at worst, it’s bigotry.

“I would never sell to a ‘housewife’ from China,” someone wrote to me in response to my first house-hunting story. The insinuation was that these people are undeserving of homes in Vancouver.

It makes me sad to see valid frustration about rising unaffordability lead to ugly attitudes toward people who are eager to become Canadians. My first job as a teenager was working as an English tutor, where I was mostly employed by “astronaut families.” Usually, it is the father who stays and works in the home country, planning to make money and join his family later, while his wife and children move abroad. The astronaut mothers that I knew were devoted to their kids’ educations, hiring multiple tutors and music teachers in ardent hope of helping them build bright futures in a new land.

Source: House-hunting as an Asian immigrant in Vancouver means navigating racism

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Ethnic media election coverage 29 October to November 3

2019/11/04 Leave a comment

Latest weekly analysis of ethnic media coverage. For the analytical narrative, go to Ethnic media election coverage 29 October to 3 November:

 

This is the last of the weekly analyses. The complete set can be found at: Ethnic Media Coverage.

I will be working on a summary report over the next few weeks regarding the close to 2,500 articles monitored 20 July to 3 November, building upon my pre-writ analysis in Policy Options, How does ethnic media campaign coverage differ?.

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‘Islamic Republic on the move’: Charlie Hebdo mocks Macron in Muslim veil row

2019/11/04 Leave a comment

Yet another manifestation of France continuing debates over the hijab, one unfortunately that has crossed to Quebec and its Bill 21:
French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has weighed in on the Muslim veil controversy, recently reignited by President Emmanuel Macron, by publishing a caricature of him ignoring the alleged Islamization of the French society.

The cartoon – relatively innocent by the standards of the weekly – features a row of sad-looking women, donning Muslim veils, with Macron in front stating: “That’s not my business.” The picture is dubbed “Islamic republic on the move,” in a clear nod to the president’s party – Republic on the Move.

View image on Twitter
Not uncommon for Charlie Hebdo pieces, the cartoon sparked a fierce debate. Many accused the magazine of “drifting to Fascism” and producing quality content for the “far right.” Others, however, lauded the magazine’s ability to exercise the “free speech” and to stick to the traditions of the political caricature.

Muslim veil row reignited

The cartoon refers to the debate on the Muslim veil, an issue raging in France for years. The controversy made fresh headlines on October 11, when a headscarf-clad Muslim woman showed up at the regional parliament in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, accompanying her son’s class during a field trip. The woman was confronted by a politician from Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally, Julien Odoul, who demanded she remove her veil.

The woman’s outfit, Odoul claimed, was a deliberate “provocation” that cannot be tolerated in wake of the recent stabbing of four French policemen. The woman, identified as Fatima E., has filed a complaint over Odoul’s attack since the incident, which she said left the class distressed and traumatized.

While full-face Muslim garments – as well as other kinds of masks – are banned in public spaces in France, headscarves are fine to wear. Still, they are prohibited in public schools “in the spirit of secularism,” alongside with other explicitly religious accessories, such as Jewish kippahs and large Christian crosses. Yet, there’s no law in France that forbids women from wearing headscarves – or anything else they please – during the field trips of their children.

Ambiguous stance of the Elysee

As the France-wide scandal grew, with some calling for a full veil ban while other urged the Elysee to protect the country’s “secularism,” Macron weighed in on the issue, warning against “stigmatizing”Muslims or somehow linking Islam with terrorism. “There is a lot of irresponsibility among political commentators… Communalism is not terrorism.”

But on October 24 he managed to reignite the veil row, stating issue was not “his business” altogether – or at least that’s what was ripped out of context and widely publicized by the French media, including Charlie Hebdo.

“Wearing of headscarf in public spaces is not my business, however, in public services, at school and while educating children, headscarf issue is my business. That is what secularism is about,” Macron said, adding that in certain neighborhoods in France, “some people use the headscarf as a symbol to break one’s connection with the republic.”

Macron’s statement seems to have left virtually everyone dissatisfied. Some said it was the first time in the history of the Republic that its leader said a public matter was not the state’s business, while others said the country needs a strong president, not Pontius Pilate. Macron’s stance on the veil issue was itself met with a mixed reaction, as some found his statement too weak and pandering to the Muslim community, while others, on the contrary, believed it to be ‘Islamophobic’ in essence.

Source: ‘Islamic Republic on the move’: Charlie Hebdo mocks Macron in Muslim veil row

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Vatican, Jews criticise Italy’s right for snubbing anti-Semitism committee

2019/11/01 Leave a comment

Of note:

The Roman Catholic Church and Rome’s Jewish community expressed dismay on Thursday after rightist parties refused to back the creation of a parliamentary commission to investigate hate, racism and anti-Semitism.

The idea of the committee was put forward by Holocaust survivor and life senator Liliana Segre in response to a regular stream of abuse hurled her way on social media.

The ruling 5-Star Movement and center-left Democratic Party (PD) backed the motion, but the far-right League and its allies, the Brothers of Italy and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, all abstained.

“The abstention of some parties is a bit dismaying. It’s a decision that we consider wrong and dangerous,” said the president of Rome’s Jewish community, Ruth Dureghello.

The Vatican’s powerful number two, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, also weighed in.

“I am worried, in the sense that on some things like fundamental values we should all be united,” he told reporters. “There is a danger that all this gets politicized. We need to break clear of this,” he said.

Segre was deported from Italy to Auschwitz in 1944 when she was 13 – one of some 776 Italian children under the age of 14 who were sent to the Nazi concentration camp. Only 35 survived.

She said this month that social media haters posted an average 200 messages a day against her. “They should be pitied or treated,” she said this week.

The League and its allies said they abstained in Wednesday’s vote because Segre’s motion was ambiguous, in citing, for example, nationalism and ethnocentricity as possible driving forces behind racial hatred.

“By doing that you are outlawing Brothers of Italy,” said one of the party’s senators, Giovanbattista Fazzolari. “This is not a commission on anti-Semitism, as they want you believe, but rather a commission aimed at political censorship.”

While Brothers of Italy and the League, led by Matteo Salvini, have both positioned themselves on the far-right of the political spectrum, Forza Italia sees itself as center-right and some of its leaders were dismayed by the decision to abstain.

“We are betraying our values and changing our skin,” said lawmaker Mara Carfagna, who is widely seen as a possible party leader when Berlusconi finally steps away from the helm.

She has voiced alarm at Berlusconi’s recent efforts to patch up differences with the League and hand effective control of the rightist bloc to Salvini. “We are being dragged along without defending our identity,” Carfagna wrote on Twitter.

The rightist bloc triumphed in a local election in Umbria on Sunday, beating a candidate put forward by the PD and 5-Star by 20 percentage points and ousting the center-left from power in the central Italian region for the first time in 50 years.

The Senate committee will be set up despite the abstention from the rightist bloc, but the 5-Star and PD both denounced their stance.

“This abstention seems to legitimize a culture of hatred that is reflected in society. It is a shameful page in our political life,” said 5-Star lawmaker Elisa Tripodi.

Source: Vatican, Jews criticise Italy’s right for snubbing anti-Semitism committee

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B.C. schools caught up in Hong Kong-China dispute

2019/10/31 Leave a comment

Ongoing:

A battle for public opinion over China and the protests in Hong Kong is playing out at schools in British Columbia.

Last week, supporters of greater democratic freedoms in Hong Kong set up an information booth at an annual professional development conference attended by hundreds of social studies teachers in the province. At the event, activists with the Vancouver Society in Support of Democratic Movement, a non-governmental organization, handed out information kits to educators.

The pamphlets, which organizers hoped would reach mainland Chinese students, draw attention to the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989 as well as information about the Hong Kong protests, criticizing China’s increasing suppression of the city’s freedoms.

“We are not against China, we are against the communist regime,” says one flyer.

The campaign took place days after a teacher at Steveston-London Secondary School in Richmond, just south of Vancouver, showed her Mandarin class students trailers for a patriotic Chinese film celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The students were given a list of questions to discuss the trailers, but the assignment sparked complaints from parents that the trailers were pro-China propaganda and the school asked the teacher to withdraw the assignment. The principal sent a letter to parents saying the teacher intended to use the trailers to show students a historical event or cultural activity in China and the assignment was for “oral practice only.”

The two events were not linked, but are both examples of heightened tensions in B.C. around Hong Kong’s struggle for greater democratic rights from China – an inflammatory subject in the sizable ex-pat community in Vancouver. The tensions spilled out in demonstrations on Vancouver street corners this summer, with pro-Hong Kong activists squaring off against pro-Beijing demonstrators. Scuffles over the destruction of pro-Hong Kong signs have also been videotaped and posted to social media.

According to Greg Neumann, vice-president of the B.C. Social Studies Teachers Association, 46 organizations, including Amnesty International and the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, set up booths on Friday to hand out materials to the province’s educators.

“We would not accept any organization that promotes any sort of illegal activity, or hatred in any form toward any group, especially those which are marginalized. We will not censor the messages of those promoting peace, justice, love, democracy, or any of the key values we have in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” Mr. Neumann said in an e-mail.

He added it is up to the teachers attending the conference to judge for themselves the usefulness and appropriateness of the resources provided by the exhibitors.

Prof. Wanda Cassidy, director of Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Education, Law and Society, said the topic of the materials being offered to teachers by the pro-Hong Kong society fits with social studies education.

“Social studies education encourages debate and discussion about all sorts of current local and world topics and teachers generally introduce students to a variety of perspectives on any given controversial topic,” she wrote in an e-mail.

“This might include examining different sorts of materials and messages that various groups convey. This fosters critical thinking, a main goal of social studies.”

Mabel Tung, chair of the pro-democracy society, said her group has been spreading the history of Tiananmen Square protests and massacre for years and providing tools and resources for teachers, but last week’s campaign was their first attempt to promote information about Hong Kong protests to B.C. educators.

“We want to tell the message to all Canadians to stand up for Hong Kong, to stand for the Hong Kong people, to fight for democracy,” she said. “Whatever is happening in Hong Kong, it may be happening anywhere in the world.”

One flyer distributed to teachers listed several reasons why many Hong Kongers are protesting, and why they fear Hong Kong being governed by the Chinese Communist Party.

“Because the Hong Kong government and the Chinese Communist Party is eroding Hong Kong’s autonomy: Communist infiltration of Hong Kong legislature; suppressing journalistic freedoms and free speech …” the flyer says.

Ms. Tung said her group hopes teachers can help reach students from mainland China with what she said was the correct information about the protests, such as that the movement isn’t demanding independence.

Officials with the Chinese consulate in Vancouver objected to the pamphlet campaign, saying it’s an effort by agitators from a foreign country trying to interfere in Hong Kong affairs, which they consider China’s domestic affairs.

“We think this should also be brought to the Canadian authorities’ attention and should be stopped from happening again. Furthermore, the indicated behavior should be condemned as it has nothing to do with freedom of expression but purely attempts to provoke political dispute by using public platform,” the statement reads.

When asked for comment, a spokesman with the Ministry of Education provided a statement noting that B.C. boards of education are responsible for choosing the resources that are used in their local schools.

Ken Tung, former chair of social service organization SUCCESS and a volunteer for the pro-democracy group, said activists also discussed modern China with participants at the teachers’ event.

“People need those backgrounds to talk about our international relationship – Sino-Canada relationship,” he said.

“The students definitely need to understand the international relationship, international trade, [and] how we work with Canadian values with those countries.”

Source: handed out information kits

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Why Haven’t Islamic Powers Criticized China For Brutalizing Muslims?

2019/10/31 Leave a comment

Some valid questions, written from a conservative perspective:

Anyone observing academia from within would know that most of the research coming out of a majority of social science departments is meaningless and irrelevant. It’s a self-referential racket that squanders money on bureaucratic nonsense and on research subjects completely dissociated with normal life and policy.

Had it not been so, right now there would be scores of scholarships and funding to find out the causality behind a single puzzling phenomenon: What explains otherwise virulent, hyper-activist, and volatile Islamic countries and jihadist groups being completely subservient to China?

It is, of course, unthinkable that India, the United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, Russia, or any European Union country would get away with what China is doing without a response from Islamic countries. After all, China is routinely, systematically, and violently attacking the Islamic countries’ fellow religious practitioners.

Islamic states and civil society are not otherwise shy about showing their displeasure and have resorted on other policy priorities to collective action via proxy forces, demonstrations, and active funding of jihadist groups. China has trade and military ties with all the major Islamic states, with major investments in Pakistan, Central Asia, Iran, and the Middle East.

So how did China manage to earn the subservience, when more than 1 million Muslims are interned in Chinese concentration camps? And what does that mean for Western policy that we couldn’t manage that feat through continuous appeasement?

The West Is in Too Deep with China

China has compromised and infiltrated Western big corporates and universities. For decades since the end of the Second World War, in the West among both libertarians and conservatives, the market has been worshiped as something larger than the nation-state, and now that the market has decided China’s money is more important than Western social cohesion, the fault lines are increasingly becoming prominent.

As Jim Antle recently wrote in The American Conservative, this is the modern metaphorical version of the proverbial corporatists selling the rope to Lenin by which he plans to hang them. But China should ideally shock both liberals and leftists as well and align them with conservatives. As Matthew Walther wrote, the barbarism in China is incomparable and unprecedented but should ideally bring the left and right together. The fact that it doesn’t shows how compromised the situation is.

Walther writes:

“I cannot believe I am typing this about a man who eight years ago said he would be walking on Mars by now, but Newt Gingrich is absolutely right. Our leaders are not prepared to deal with China. Not only do they lack the cunning and the willpower — they lack the requisite bargaining tools. We are in too deep, and China knows it. Any concession we could possibly demand of them will require a corresponding one that we are unable to grant.

Besides, it is not clear to me that a substantial number of Americans particularly wants to see our relations with China change. We are happy to buy cheap water bottles and Halloween decorations and licensed cartoon merchandise and mobile phones. We want our movies shown in Chinese theaters and our sports leagues to have large Chinese fan bases. From our home in this consumer paradise hell looks impossibly remote.

Very well. That’s on us to fix. But what explains the muted reaction from the Islamic world? This is an important question. While for liberals and neoconservatives every two-penny authoritarian looks like the next Adolf Hitler, only one great power that we know of is actively running concentration camps, where reportedly more than 1 million people are enslaved with no rights or freedom, women are being raped, and Mengeleian experiments are being conducted on live human subjects.

Now, as with any news this gruesome, there is always a need for caution on how much to believe and what to ignore. But no smoke can exist without some fire, and if even a quarter of the news coming out of dissidents is true, the reality is horrific.”

Why Are Islamic Leaders Silent?

The strangest part is the deadly silence from Islamic leaders. Naturally, this leads to a few questions. Are the Islamic countries afraid of China more than they are of the West? Is that because they worry about losing Chinese investment, or is that because they know that if they provoke China to the point of a war, Chinese military will not follow human rights rules during engagement?

It is unlikely that Chinese military in a war situation would follow the careful “minimal-civilian-casualty” mode of warfare or counterinsurgency the West currently practices. Is that a deterrent?

From Pakistan, to Iran, to Saudi Arabia, to Turkey, all the leading Islamic powers are silent about literally millions of their fellow religious practitioners being brutalized, as are the countless jihadist groups from Indonesia to Iraq. This could mean only one thing: that the Islamic states and jihadist groups are more afraid of China than they are of anyone else.

Consider any other power — the EU, the U.S., the U.K., Russia, India, or Israel — acting like China, and imagine what the reaction would be. Where are the mass protests? Where are the flag burnings? Where are the embassy attacks? Where are the jihadist bombings of Chinese economic interests in Africa and elsewhere? That question as to why there aren’t any needs to be probed for strictly strategic reasons. What did the Chinese manage to do that we couldn’t, after billions in aid, hundreds of thousands of refugees resettled, and humanitarian wars?

For liberals, neoconservatives, or Trotskyists, and anyone else who prefers values more than interests, the answer is always more universalism and internationalism. Tyranny and despotism need to be confronted forcefully at every juncture, even to the point of overstretching militarily and financially. National conservatives and realists, for example, believe in narrow realpolitik. To them, interests matter more, and only when interests are threatened.

China’s Rise Should Trouble Liberals and Conservatives

In one current case, however, everyone should agree that the rise of China should concern both conservative-realists and liberals. Liberals should be worried about human rights in Hong Kong, which Ben Domenech chronicled here, as well as the influence of Chinese authoritarianism within Western institutions. Conservative realists should be worried that China is a growing peer rival great power with hegemonic aspirations in Asia, a growing navy, and powerful research in AI and genetics unhindered by gender-diversity nonsense.

China is a power determined to hollow out the West from within. This is something the Soviets couldn’t do due to their economic model. One shudders to think, however, how much manufacturing the Western corporate sector then would have funneled to cheap Russian labor to hollow out heartland England and America, had the autarkic Soviets been more like globally integrated state-capitalist China.

Even for the sake of academic and strategic inquiry, both liberals and conservatives should focus on trying to find the answer to the question: What is the Chinese secret strategy through which they conquered the entire Islamic world and managed to earn its submissive obedience without firing a single shot or losing a single life in futile humanitarian wars, such as the ones fought with blood and treasure, since Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s?

Source: Why Haven’t Islamic Powers Criticized China For Brutalizing Muslims?

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