Look forward to seeing the questions and, in a few years, any government or other evaluations on the effects:
La décision, publiée mercredi dans la Gazette officielle, indique que les ressortissants étrangers et les membres de leur famille qui souhaitent s’établir au Québec (à l’exception d’un enfant à charge de moins de 18 ans ou d’une personne ayant une condition médicale) devront obtenir une « attestation d’apprentissage des valeurs démocratiques et des valeurs québécoises exprimées par la Charte des droits et libertés de la personne ». Le score minimum pour réussir l’évaluation est fixé à 75 %.
En vertu d’un accord entre Québec et Ottawa, le gouvernement du Québec est responsable de la sélection des immigrants économiques qui s’établissent sur son territoire. Pour immigrer au Québec en vertu du programme régulier des travailleurs qualifiés, un ressortissant étranger doit soumettre son intérêt au ministère de l’Immigration du Québec, qui évalue les candidatures selon une liste de critères socio-économiques. Un travailleur qualifié dont le profil correspond aux besoins du Québec est ensuite invité à présenter une demande formelle pour obtenir un certificat de sélection du Québec (CSQ), un document essentiel pour obtenir d’Ottawa le statut de résident permanent afin d’immigrer au Québec.
Dès janvier, Québec exigera désormais qu’un travailleur qualifié qui souhaite immigrer au Québec réussisse également son test des valeurs dans les 60 jours suivant sa demande de CSQ.
Qu’arrive-t-il en cas d’échec ?
Un ressortissant étranger qui ne réussirait pas son test des valeurs une fois qu’il a été invité par Québec à présenter sa demande pour obtenir un CSQ pourrait reprendre l’évaluation une première fois. Dans le cas d’un deuxième échec, il pourrait refaire l’examen une deuxième fois ou suivre, au Québec, un cours administré par le ministère de l’Immigration.
Or, si le ressortissant étranger choisit toutefois de tenter sa chance en passant le test une troisième fois, sans suivre le cours, celui-ci renoncerait à son droit à suivre le cours, explique-t-on dans la Gazette officielle.
L’imposition d’un test des valeurs aux immigrants est une promesse de longue date du gouvernement Legault. En campagne électorale, François Legault promettait toutefois d’imposer ce test aux immigrants une fois ceux-ci arrivés sur le territoire québécois. Ceux qui auraient échoué l’examen auraient été expulsés du territoire canadien. Or, Québec ne dispose pas de ce pouvoir et Ottawa a fermé la porte à un tel scénario.
La Gazette officielle ne présente pas mercredi des exemples de questions qui seront demandées aux ressortissants étrangers. Par le passé, le ministre de l’Immigration, Simon Jolin-Barrette, a affirmé que celles-ci seraient fondées sur les valeurs exprimées par la Charte québécoise des droits et libertés de la personne.
The far-right Alternative for Germany party on Sunday celebrated a strong showing in the former Communist East, more than doubling its support in a state election held two weeks after an attack on a synagogue that some tied to the party’s use of hateful language.
The party won 23.5 percent of the vote in Thuringia, according to preliminary returns, up from 10.6 percent in 2014. That left it in second place, behind the Left Party but ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives.
The party, known by its German initials AfD, has no hope of governing, since all the other parties have ruled out cooperating with it. But its strong showing is likely to reverberate in other ways. The election outcome could further strengthen the power of Björn Höcke, the party’s leader in Thuringia and its most notorious figure.
It has been described by people both in China and outside as the best propaganda film that country has ever produced and it may be the first Chinese-produced film to earn more than US$1 billion.
So it’s not surprising that parents and others are questioning the appropriateness of the trailers for My People, My Country being used as teaching material in Grade 10, 11 and 12 Mandarin language classes at a high school in Richmond.
The film is a 254-minute, patriotic review of seven historic high points since Mao Zedong and the Communist Party came to power 70 years ago.
Co-produced by a state-owned company, there is no mention of the Cultural Revolution or the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. The return of Hong Kong to Chinese control is portrayed as a triumph.
The South China Morning Post’s review described the film as a “jingoistic anthology,” while the Chinese news agency Xinhua said the film’s aim was to “awaken shared memories of Chinese people around the world.”
“After 70 years, our culture and propaganda departments finally figured out how to combine propaganda with art,” Yan Feng, a Chinese literature professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University wrote in a Weibo post quoted by the New York Times.
Even without English translation, the YouTube trailer is nothing like what you might imagine propaganda looks like — aside perhaps from the Hollywood patriot movies like Top Gun.
That’s what makes it so powerful.
There are seven trailers in all for the film and four were shown to Grades 10, 11 and 12, Mandarin-language classes at Steveston-London Secondary School.
After viewing them, students had a brief informal chat about what they saw before being handed written questions as a prompt for another discussion the following day, according to an Oct. 24 letter that principal Carol-Lyn Sakata sent to parents.
A copy of the principal’s letter with the teacher’s name redacted that was posted to the Canada Hong Konger Facebook page.
That discussion was cancelled because of parents’ concerns about using Communist Party propaganda in the school.
“We believe the teacher intended to engage students in an informal and open discussion to ‘analyze personal, shared, and others’ experiences, perspectives, and world views through a cultural lens,’ as contemplated in the provincial curriculum,” Richmond School District spokesman Dave Sadler wrote in an emailed response.”
But is propaganda culture? Or is it simply politics?
There’s a plausible argument to be made that My People, My Country is a cultural and even historic phenomenon. Certainly, it’s being widely shown and widely seen.
Released on Oct. 1 to coincide with 70th anniversary celebrations, it had 135,000 daily screenings on the first weekend, earning US$102 million, according to Variety. Online reviewers in China scored it as high as 9.7 out of 10, but as Variety diplomatically pointed out “in the past there has been doubt about the reliability of such scores.” Still, Variety suggests, it may be the first Chinese film to earn US$1 billion.
But if the teacher’s intent was to talk about it as cultural phenomenon, that’s not evident from the principal’s letter or from the assignment itself.
Under the Chinese caption “I love my motherland,” students were given “reflection questions.” Among them were: How did this movie make you feel? What words or phrases made you feel good? What was your favourite part? What four adjectives would you use to describe the movie? Does it remind you of your life?
Further down, there were questions about what they thought the movie’s message is and why it was produced.
Sakata noted the “controversial and political nature of the film” in her letter to parents. “With the current political unrest in Hong Kong, I understand the concern that you may have.”
There’s no doubt that that may be what has made parents and students more acutely aware of what is being taught in Mandarin classes.
But to suggest that is the only reason for concern is a disservice to both students and parents who are raising important questions far beyond a single teacher, some trailers and three classrooms.
What is being taught under the guise of Mandarin language learning in British Columbia’s public and private schools? How are teaching materials chosen? Who chooses them? Are they being supplied at no cost by the Chinese government?
While the provincial government sets curriculum, it doesn’t choose the resources used in local schools. That’s up to the school districts using the province’s rather vague criteria.
According to an education ministry spokeswoman, teaching materials must: support learning standards and outcomes of the curriculum; make connections with real-life examples; be age appropriate; meet copyright and privacy requirements; and, content must be socially acceptable.
There’s enough leeway that the Coquitlam School District, for example, has partnered directly with the Chinese government to set up a Confucius Institute with teachers and teaching resources provided by China at no cost.
It’s not clear how the choices are made in Richmond. Sadler wasn’t able to provide the answers Friday as it was a professional development day and the people who deal with curriculum issues were away.
But it begs the question of the province’s responsibility.
Canadian students and foreign students studying in Canada deserve an education untainted by political influence or interference especially from another country’s government. And that should be something the province is doing.
About 15 percent of the PPC candidates were visible minority:
Kulbir Singh Chawla really doesn’t like when he’s connected with a customer service representative with a foreign accent.
This, despite having a accent himself.
“Here in Canada, I would say don’t even employ Kulbir,” Chawla said of customer service jobs.
“Because I still don’t have that Canadian way of (speaking) fully.”
The most recent federal election saw a small but distinct cadre of people of colour and immigrants such as Chawla supporting and in some cases even running for far-right populist parties such as the People’s Party of Canada, the National Citizens Alliance and the Canadian Nationalist Party.
All of these parties wanted to reduce immigration and scrap Canada’s official multiculturalism policy.
Despite being an immigrant himself, Chawla says he supports these policies.
Chawla, an industrial engineer, came to Canada from India with his wife and daughter in 1999. He currently lives in Nova Scotia and calls himself a Canadian nationalist. When he first moved here, he considered himself left-leaning, but over the past two decades, he’s experienced what he calls a political awakening.
It led to him attending yellow vest rallies at the movement’s peak, where he would wear a matching yellow turban. And people would call him racist.
“The left media would say this is a racist movement. And there I am with my turban. And it just breaks their narrative,” he said.
He was first drawn toward the Conservatives, then toward far-right, fringe parties such as the National Citizens Alliance, which in addition to advocating for lower taxes and the abolishment of the Bank of Canada Act, wants to reduce immigration levels to about 50,000 a year. Chawla previously ran for the National Advancement Party of Canada, the NCA’s predecessor, in Calgary Midnapore in a 2017 byelection.
He says some reasons his political stance shifted are political correctness and liberal “indoctrination” about issues such as white supremacy and racial profiling (the former he says doesn’t exist, the latter he believes is valid in some cases).
“It started with the yellow vest movement … It’s come up as a big, I will say wake-up movement for Canada and Canadians. It brought them together as well. So there’s a great deal of populism and nationalism going on,” Chawla said.
He compares nationalism to working for a corporation; the ultimate goal should be the betterment of the company, rather than advancing one’s own personal fortune. The same goes for living in a confederation.
It’s where his deep distaste for call centres that employ people with accents stems from. He said he believes it hurts Canada both economically and in terms of its national identity.
In particular, he is opposed to customer service being outsourced to other countries, for economic reasons — it takes jobs out of Canada and hurts the country’s GDP. It inspired him to create a Change.org petition urging the government and corporations to “Create call centres in Canada!”
But he acknowledges there’s an important cultural component as well.
“When I come here, if I found my own type of people speaking on the call … then it’s no different from being in India,” he said.
“We immigrants came to Canada for a whole different outlook on life. And we find it’s all changing, back to the same old Punjabi style.”
For parties such as the People’s Party of Canada that were accused of harbouring racist candidates and policies, there’s an obvious benefit to having candidates and supporters of colour, says Akaash Maharaj, a former senior resident at Massey College and CEO of the Mosaic Institute, an organization that helps bring together immigrants who have come to Canada from countries affected by conflict.
“There has been an effort by extreme right parties to try and play a game of blackface and brownface to inoculate themselves against accusations of racism by demonstrating that they have at least one or more members of their parties or candidates who are not white,” Maharaj said.
But the allure of anti-immigration policies for immigrants themselves is more complex.
“On the face of it, it looks absurd and I think it is absurd … I wouldn’t say it’s widespread,” Maharaj said. “But it’s more common than one might expect.”
“It’s the old pull-up-the-ladder syndrome,” he added. “Now that they have made it in, they want to protect themselves from people exactly like themselves that harbour the same ambitions. They are afraid more people benefiting from Canada means that their share of the pie will somehow diminish.”
This phenomenon is even more common among recent immigrants when compared to first-generation Canadians or the descendants of immigrants, Maharaj noted.
Peter Loewen, a populism expert at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, said when immigrants move to Canada, integrate into mainstream society and accept the status quo, there’s a quick transition to viewing themselves as Canadian — and therefore, different from the rest of the people coming here.
He points to the 2015 federal election, where the support for a niqab ban was higher among immigrants than native-born Canadians.
“That’s largely underwritten by a sense that immigration is tough and once you’ve gone through it, you expect people to go through it without any more accommodations than you’ve had,” he explained.
Populism sells well to immigrant communities because at its heart, it’s about a deep disaffection with the political class who are seen as unsympathetic or even antagonistic toward everyday people. Immigrants can often come from countries with political corruption.
But populism comes in different forms, says Drew Fagan, professor of public policy at Munk School and a former deputy minister in the Ontario government.
“The new strain of right-wing populism increasingly pits itself against subsets of the population like immigrants and minorities. Whereas left-wing populism pits itself against what is viewed as an unfair system,” he said. “It’s about structure as opposed to people.”
And what is emerging around the world, and in Canada, is far-right populism, Fagan added. Its members are largely religious, have reservations about diversity, and are disdainful of institutions or perceived elites.
From there, populism can devolve into nativism, a policy of promoting the interests of native inhabitants of a country against those of immigrants.
As you may have noticed, I have been critical of the planning committee for the International Metropolis Migration conference decision to select Beijing as the site despite the country’s regime has been a producer of refugees and the UN and Amnesty International recognizing it is actively supressing China’s ethnic minority populations.
Examples can be seen with the Muslim Uighur minority through prison camps as well as suppression of the Tibetan minority.
The regime also regularly interferes with academic freedom both at home and abroad and uses such venues to legitimize its practices.
For these reasons, Howard Ramos and I have started a petition the International Metropolis conference steering committee to reconsider the location of the next conference.
We write to you to consider signing and endorsing our petition. More information and the petition can be found here:http://chng.it/PR5HX5ZsyH
Juan Hernandez-Villafuerte’s parents identified as Christian, so he didn’t understand why, by family tradition, they abstained from pork, washed their hands thoroughly before and after meals and covered the mirrors in the home after someone died.
“You had to do it, but you never knew why,” he says at age 41. “I wasn’t aware of my Sephardic heritage at (any) point, even though I knew there was something different about us.”
Before immigrating to Canada in 2012, he grew up in northeastern Mexico. His mother suspected they might have Jewish roots, so this fall, he left his home in Montreal and spent most of his vacation in the municipal archives of Mexico City. He found police and church records, as well as a yellowish paper — a property record from the year 1610 — bearing the name of his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather.
“I was actually able to touch it,” he says. “I always wanted to know who I was.”
He was prompted to begin his research after the Spanish Parliament unanimously passed a law in 2015 to grant citizenship to the descendants of Sephardic Jews, meaning Jews with Iberian roots. The deadline for applications passed at the end of September, at which point the Ministry of Justice said it had received more than 130,000 applications, of which approximately 6,000 had been approved.
Spain’s initiative is part of a trend across Europe to repatriate Jewish families who faced persecution. Beginning in the 1300s, Sephardic Jews were forcibly converted to Catholicism, and during the Spanish Inquisition beginning the 1400s, the converts were investigated under suspicion that they may be continuing to practice judaism. Some historians estimate 2,000 converts were burned alive, while others faced different punishments, and after the Inquisition was established, an estimated 100,000 remaining Jews were expelled. Portugal also enacted a similar citizenship law in 2015, and countries including Germany, Austria and Poland have been granting citizenship to the descendants of Jews persecuted in the lead up to the Holocaust and during the Holocaust.
Spain’s initiative has led people to discover their family identities, but many of them have spent $6,000 on the application process, and the program is politically and economically charged. While some people commend Spain’s gesture as a way to rectify historical violence — or at least a way to secure a passport to the European Union — critics point out the expense of the application and question the country’s motives.
“They took everything from us — our identity, our possessions, any property that we had,” says Maria Apodaca, a Sephardic Jew who lives in Albuquerque, NM. “I don’t have $6,000 a pop to do this, and I don’t see how it would benefit me,” she says. “I was planted in the United States, and in the United States I’ll stay.”
Applicants do not need to be practicing Jews, but they do need to prove Sephardic heritage with evidence such as census documents and records of birth, baptism, marriage and death. Applicants must have these records translated by a translator recognized by the Spanish government, and they must travel to Spain to sign with a Spanish notary.
“It’s almost like a huge, many, many months-long scavenger hunt,” says Daniel Romano, a lawyer in Montreal who applied for citizenship with his wife. In his legal profession, he recently worked on an immigration case of a Venezuelan refugee, and he says her refugee claim was “100 times more simple” than his Spanish citizenship application.
Romano has always identified as a Sephardic Jew, and he had a sense of duty to accept the Spanish government’s offer of reconciliation. “It’s odd, but I felt the need to reciprocate. They cannot make amends through our mutual ancestors … if the descendants do not take up the offer,” he says.
Some applicants have sought rabbis to vouch for their heritage. Shlomo Gabay, the rabbi at Beth Hamidrash, a Sephardic synagogue in Vancouver, says he received eight or more requests per month to write letters for Spanish citizenship applications. The requests came mainly from South Americans, Mexicans and the occasional Canadian, with some people showing him original scripts from the time of the Inquisition.
“People really, really took this seriously,” says Gabay.
Though not subject to the Inquisition, Jews who refused to convert or leave Spain were called heretics and could be burned to death on a stake.Henry Duff Linton (1815-1899)/Creative Commons
In Britain, some Jews have seen repatriation programs as a ticket to work, study and travel in the European Union after Brexit. Ben Shapiro, a 26-year-old man who works at an interfaith charity in London, considered applying for Spanish citizenship but instead applied for German citizenship because the process was easier given that his relative was already applying, and it achieves the same access to the E.U.
“There’s definitely a lot of Jewish people that feel like their Spanish or Sephardic expression of Judaism is important to them, so being validated by Spain is something that’s pleasing,” says Shapiro, “but I think also Brexit is just having a big (impact on) young, liberal European-liking people who don’t want to give that up if they don’t have to.”
Spain could be taking this measure as an effort to boost its population and economy. The country’s fertility rate is far below replacement level at 1.3 children per woman, and its population is predicted to decline by 9.4 million between 2000 and 2050, according to the United Nations Population Division in 2000. The country has introduced pro-natal policies to encourage Spaniards to have more children and has accepted increasing numbers of refugees. Since applicants for the Jewish repatriation program must pass a language and citizenship test — and in many cases must hire a lawyer and genealogist to help with their claim — the initiative could attract migrants of affluence, as could repatriation programs elsewhere in Europe.
“There’s a sense certainly toward the Jews of some sort of historical debt, some sort of reckoning,” says Howard Adelman, an associate professor of history at Queen’s University, specializing in Jewish history, “but if I can be more cynical, I think there’s also an element of an attempt to bring people with assets and affluence to the countries and also to offset some of the refugees that are arriving at these countries.”
An original land grant from 1610 given to Marcos Alonso de la Garza in northeastern Mexico. His descendant, Juan Hernandez-Villafuerte, searched for the document to prove his Sephardic Jewish heritage.Juan Hernandez-Villafuerte
He notes that Muslims also endured forcible conversion in Spain, and in the 1600s, he says, hundreds of thousands of converts, known as Moriscos, were expelled. Yet, “no country has it on the table to talk about repatriating Muslims.”
Adelman says some Jews are disillusioned by antisemitism during the Trump administration, while some Jews are leaving Israel due to its unstable democracy.
“Many of them are having an awakening that they have to have another place to go, and I think that Israel used to be that escape hatch, but now Israel is in as much chaos as the United States,” he says.
Applications for Spanish citizenship surged at the time of Donald Trump’s election, says Schelly Talalay Dardashti, who works with the Spanish Citizenship Committee of the Jewish Federation of New Mexico, which received 50 to 75 calls per day before the deadline from people inquiring about Spanish citizenship. Some applicants have showed up at her office and cried, she says, having observed family customs all their lives but never having understood that the customs were Jewish.
“That is a bombshell that goes off in someone’s head. That is a real identity crisis,” she says. “Citizenship is like getting this badge: yes, we are who we are.”
When Dardashti meets with people, she asks them to write down family customs related to death, food and even cleaning the home, but many applicants get DNA testing and hire genealogists to help their claim.
Dennis Maez, a genealogist in New Mexico, was so overwhelmed with requests from Sephardic applicants that he had to put on hold his day job, running businesses that sell cars and cattle. He researched family trees for approximately 250 applicants, tracing some families back as far as the year 910.
As the deadline approached, he was “absolutely burnt out,” he says. “I would just work tremendous hours putting the (genealogies) together. I just finally had to quit.”
In Montreal, Hernandez-Villafuerte did his genealogy research himself. Even if his application is approved, he never intends to live in Spain.
“I think this is something I had to do for my ancestors,” he says. “They went through a lot of pain. They were expelled from their land … To me, it’s not about, What I can do with that citizenship? It’s more about restoring something that I love, or we loved, hundreds of years ago.”
Black households in Canada are almost twice as likely as white households to have trouble putting food on the table due to lack of money, according to groundbreaking new research based on Statistics Canada’s community health survey.
This is the case even when Black people are homeowners and have the same income, education levels and household makeup as white people, said Leslie Campbell, director of programs for FoodShare, which partnered with the University of Toronto on the research.
The data shows for the first time that there is a direct correlation between race and food insecurity, independent of all other factors, said Campbell, who presented the findings at a FoodShare conference on food justice and equity on Wednesday.
“When you look at the whole population, there are certain factors that are seen as being protective,” Campbell said in an interview. “But when you look only at the Black population … all of a sudden, they don’t apply.”
“For example, while it matters greatly for white folks whether your household is headed by a single parent, for Black households, you have a significantly higher probability of food insecurity regardless of your household composition,” Campbell said.
The study suggests “there are other factors — structural barriers that Black communities are having to navigate — that mean the rules don’t apply in the same way when it comes to protection,” he said.
The findings impact everyone, he told the conference. That is because people in households struggling to pay for food cost Ontario’s health care system an average of $3,930 annually, more than twice as much as those in households where food is plentiful, who cost the system an average of $1,608.
The findings are based on data pooled from five Canadian community health surveys from 2004 to 2014 and include responses from almost 500,000 individuals. The study focuses on respondents who answered all the questions on household food security and who reported their ethno-racial identity as either Black or white.
The survey, which asks 18 questions related to food and hunger, defines “food insecurity” as marginal, moderate or severe.
People in households that are marginally food-insecure are worried about running out of money to buy food. Moderate food-insecure households may struggle to buy enough food, or have to skimp on quality and nutrition. People in households experiencing severe food insecurity are missing meals due to lack of income.
According to the analysis, one in eight Canadian households — or four million people — is experiencing food insecurity. But when broken down into white and Black households — before adjusting for income, education and other factors — just 10 per cent of white households are food-insecure, while more than 28 per cent of Black households have trouble affording the food they need, the study found. After adjusting for external factors, Black households are still 1.88 times more likely to have trouble paying for the food they need, the study found.
The picture looks even bleaker for kids. While just over 12 per cent of white children are food-insecure, almost 34 per cent of Black kids — one in three — are struggling, the data shows. Food insecurity among children is linked to learning problems, greater difficulty recovering from illness and long-term health problems such as depression and asthma, according to the study.
“I have to say, I was a bit heartbroken to see how bad it was, in particular for Black children,” said Valerie Tarasuk, principal investigator for U of T’s PROOF Food Insecurity Policy Research program.
“Even after taking into account things like income and home ownership and education, we still find a substantial differential” between Black and white households, she said in an interview.
“This study says it matters for us to get a grip on race issues in Canada,” she said.
“I think our study really screams that there needs to be much, much more attention (paid) to the ways in which governments at all levels can use their policy levers to offset what has to be a fairly significant level of race-based discrimination in the workplace, the housing market, the education system, in corrections and other places,” she added.
Home ownership is seen as a buffer to food insecurity because households facing a sudden loss of income or an unexpected expense can borrow against the value of their homes to make ends meet.
“But when you compare the Black homeowner to the white, they have way less protection,” Tarasuk said.
In fact, the study found the risk of food insecurity among Black homeowners was the same as for a white renter, she noted.
The only explanation is that Black households have lower-value homes or carry higher mortgages, or both, she said.
“It’s another illustration of the ways in which accumulated wealth in our country is racialized,” Tarasuk said.
Among all Canadians who experience food insecurity, the study found that 62 per cent are employed.
Since income is the largest single protective factor that determines whether a household has trouble paying for food, Campbell said the study findings point to the lower quality of Black employment.
Jobs without benefits and part-time, contract and other forms of precarious employment impact a household’s ability to afford food, he said.
Quality of employment isn’t just about whether people are contract or full-time employees, Campbell added. It also relates to a worker’s position and salary.
FoodShare advocates for equitable access to fresh, healthy, affordable food for everyone and partners with schools and community groups to provide low-cost, locally sourced fruits and vegetables through student nutrition programs, neighbourhood gardens, local markets and other initiatives.
The non-profit organization recently raised the salaries of its lowest-paid employees by 25 per cent to reduce pay inequities, said executive director Paul Taylor. The agency also tries to ensure diverse populations are included in recruitment efforts.
A universal basic income would help people experiencing severe food insecurity, Taylor said.
“But more holistically, we really need to look at systemic discrimination in housing, education, policing and employment that all disproportionately, it seems, have an impact on Black folks,” he said.
The collection of more race-based data — particularly related to employment — would be a good place to start, he added.
Silly. Normal journalist practice, even if one does not like the policies of the Trump administration or government agency:
For student and professional journalists alike, it’s a matter of ethical standards: The Harvard Crimson student newspaper, in its coverage of a campus protest against a federal immigration agency, reached out to the agency to ask for comment.
To student activists, the request showed a disregard for students living in the country illegally. Student groups circulated a petition demanding an apology and some, including the Harvard College Democrats, said they would refuse to speak to the publication.
The Crimson said this week it was standing by the decision despite the criticism in the latest example of heightened political sensitivity on college campuses that many say reveals an intolerance for different — often conservative — points of view. On several campuses, invitations to conservative speakers have been rescinded, and debates have raged over how to protect free speech.
At the Sept. 12 rally in Harvard Yard, representatives of several campus organizations called for the abolition of the U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement agency. In its article on the demonstration, the Crimson said the agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment. That kind of line is typical in news reports to demonstrate that reporters have attempted to get someone’s side of the story but have not yet heard back.
But the 11 student groups behind the petition charged that the effort was tantamount to calling the agency on the students. They wrote that the correspondence with ICE jeopardized students on campus who are living in the country illegally.
“We are extremely disappointed in the cultural insensitivity displayed by The Crimson’s policy to reach out to ICE, a government agency with a long history of surveilling and retaliating against those who speak out against them,” the petition says. “In this political climate, a request for comment is virtually the same as tipping them off, regardless of how they are contacted.”
The groups, including the college Democrats, Act on a Dream and Divest Harvard, called on the student newspaper to apologize and agree not to contact the agency for future stories. As a student publication, they said, the Crimson must prioritize students’ safety.
In a note to readers this week, Crimson leaders Kristine Guillaume and Angela Fu noted the reporters contacted the agency after the protest and did not share the names of anybody in attendance. They also defended the application of journalistic standards.
“At stake here, we believe, is one of the core tenets that defines America’s free and independent press: the right — and prerogative — of reporters to contact any person or organization relevant to a story to seek that entity’s comment and view of what transpired,” they wrote.
A spokesman for the immigration agency, Bryan Cox, said claims that the agency targets protesters for arrest are false and needlessly spread fear.
“Should the Harvard community wish to have a fact-based discussion as to what ICE does and does not do we would be happy to take part in that conversation,” he said.
Campuses across the country have been roiled by protests over controversial speakers and questions about political intolerance — a reflection, some say, of the hardening divide between the left and the right in American discourse. Where some see an effort to shelter students from any objectionable ideas, others see efforts to be more respectful of students’ varied backgrounds experiences.
In one case, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the student government moved to strip the campus newspaper of funding in 2015 after some students objected to an opinion piece published critical of the Black Lives Matter movement. At Middlebury College in Vermont in 2017, hundreds of students protested a lecture by Charles Murray, a writer who critics say uses pseudoscience to link intelligence and race, forcing the college to move his talk to an undisclosed location from which it was live-streamed.
Some political demonstrations have turned violent, including a 2017 riot at the University of California, Berkeley, over an appearance planned by conservative firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos that was canceled.
Student journalists and their advisers across the country regularly report efforts by students and school administrators to influence their coverage decisions, according to Chris Evans, president of the College Media Association. But he said it is rare to see efforts as blatant as those at Harvard.
“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with protesting,” Evans said. “The thing that can’t happen is that the student newspaper backs down. Let people debate whether certain voices should be heard. But it’s not the journalist’s job, with some exceptions, to decide what can and cannot be heard.”
Muslim groups helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to help Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue recover after a gunman killed 11 people there, one year ago this week. The Jewish congregation mounted its own fundraiser for New Zealand’s Muslims after a white supremacist shooter killed 51 people at two mosques there in March.
Such outreach between Jews and Muslims often draws widespread attention only in the immediate wake of tragedy. But as both faiths grapple with a rise in reported hate crimes and fears within their communities of being attacked for their beliefs, Jews and Muslims are forging bonds that rely on shared personal values to help combat anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
For Sheryl Olitzky, 63, the “aha moment” that inspired her focus on Jewish-Muslim connections came almost a decade ago on a trip to Poland, when she asked a guide why she saw no locals in the head-covering garb of devout members of either faith.
Olitzky, who was married at Tree of Life synagogue, recalled being stunned by the exclusionary response she heard and telling herself that “I could not change history, but I could rewrite it by changing the future” and working to prevent further episodes of discrimination against Jews and Muslims.
When the grandmother of seven returned home to New Jersey, however, it took several months for her to realize that, despite living in an area with “a fairly substantial number of Muslims and Jews,” she had no Muslim friends.
“I said, ‘I believe ignorance is a primary driver of hate, and it’s time, if I want to make change that I get to know Muslim women’,” Olitzky said.
When Olitzky was introduced to Atiya Aftab, a Muslim attorney and adjunct professor at Rutgers University, their partnership took off as the nonprofit Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom. What began as a meeting of six Muslim and six Jewish women at Atfab’s home now counts more than 170 chapters in 32 states and Canada, according to Olitzky.
The Sisterhood devotes much of its attention to education and shared experiences that can deepen ties between its members, with its fourth annual trip this year taking dozens of Muslim and Jewish women and teenage girls to Germany and Poland. But a vow to fight hate crimes that target their respective communities is also woven into the group’s foundation, with a “rise and respond” primer for speaking out against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia released this year .
Other members of the two faiths have created formal alliances as well. The Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council was established by the American Jewish Committee and the Islamic Society of North America in the first days after President Donald Trump’s 2016 election — following a campaign where Trump repeatedly stoked public fears of Muslims.
MJAC is co-chaired by two business executives, one Jewish and one Muslim. The group opened regional affiliates after a 2017 spike in reported hate crimes that included the death of Heather Heyer, killed while demonstrating against a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
AJC Director of U.S. Muslim-Jewish Relations Ari Gordon said that some themes common in episodes of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are “definitely linked.” The same man who allegedly attacked a synagogue in Poway, Calif., this spring was also linked to a fire set at a nearby California mosque, Gordon pointed out.
Hate crimes reported to the FBI have risen for three years running, according to official statistics, with Jews and Muslims ranking as the top two targets of religiously motivated incidents. But underreporting is seen as a significant obstacle to effective tracking of the problem. Heyer’s death, for example, was not included in the federal database although the man who drove his car into the crowd where she stood pleaded guilty to hate crimes charges.
MJAC has championed bipartisan legislation in Congress designed to improve the tracking of hate crimes — but its work has stayed in that domestic policy lane, steering clear of U.S. policy toward the Israel-Palestine conflict that has been a longtime divider of Jews and Muslims.
“We don’t put that issue on the side because it’s not important; quite the opposite,” Gordon said, adding that MJAC aims to demonstrate that the two faiths “can work together for mutual benefit and build trust despite this disagreement.”
Wa’el Alzayat, CEO of the Muslim advocacy group Emgage Action, and Halie Soifer, executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, took a similar approach when they co-authored a columnafter the New Zealand mosque attacks that described their faiths as battling the “common enemy” of white supremacist violence. The duo first got to know each other as colleagues on the staff of Samantha Power, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under former President Barack Obama.
“We can work together on issues that unite us, and that doesn’t mean we have to agree on every issue,” Soifer said. Alzayat, also a member of MJAC, agreed that the alignment to discuss their faiths’ struggles against hate crimes does not mean “you let go of your principles.”
If the two communities can successfully find that “common ground,” Alzayat said, “over time, the really difficult stuff becomes easier to talk about.”
The partnerships between Muslim and Jewish groups have extended beyond battling hate crimes. AJC held an event last week to show support for the majority-Muslim Syrian Kurds as they grapple with the fallout from Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from the country’s northeast and Turkey’s subsequent attacks on Kurdish-held territory.
But even when it comes to the unifying issue of preventing hate crimes against their respective faiths, not every Muslim-Jewish partnership agrees on how publicly to discuss Trump’s role in the problem. Alzayat and Soifer used their op-ed to label Trump “a symbol of rising Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and other forms of racial and religious intolerance,” and Olitzky also said she views Trump’s muddled rhetoric about white nationalists as having “given permission for them to come out” further into the open.
MJAC, for its part, takes a more positive approach toward an administration whose support it needs to get further hate crimes legislation passed into law under Trump. The president signed a bipartisan bill strengthening penalties for threats against religiously affiliated institutions into law last fall. Gordon praised the Justice Department’s work on anti-Semitism and said that the group would not pull back on “criticism where we think it’s due.”
