How a false W5 story 40 years ago became a watershed moment for Chinese-Canadians

2019/08/27 2 Comments

Good historical reminder:

It still baffles me, the casual racism of the newscast.

The opening remarks of W5 host Helen Hutchinson sounded the alarm, her voice dripping with concern about a “scenario that would make a great many people in this country angry and resentful.”

In universities across the country, “foreign” students were taking the place of real Canadians in professional schools such as medicine, dentistry and pharmacy.

The camera panned to a pharmacy class at the University of Toronto showing the six Chinese students who were supposedly taking up space from Canadians. The problem was the featured “foreign students” were Canadians who were either born in Canada or had become citizens.

The statistics were also misleading: W5 said 100,000 foreign students were crowding Canadian schools when the reality was less than half that, with only 20,000 in universities. Besides, in some professional faculties such as pharmacy you had to be an Ontario resident to apply. Foreign students were not eligible.

Forty years ago in September, it didn’t make sense to the professional journalists on the nation’s most watched investigative news program that a student of Asian descent could also be Canadian.

The intention was clear: real Canadians couldn’t get into professional schools because of foreigners. A white student was interviewed who said she had good marks but couldn’t get into pharmacy because outsiders were taking her place.

But how could they have got it so wrong?

The story had an all too familiar angle. Earlier racist legislation used in the defence of a turn-of-the-century head tax against the Chinese community had warned that foreigners were taking away jobs or opportunities from Canadians. The W5 story was a new spin on the same wedge issue. Get ready to build that wall. Go back home to where you came from.

It did have one major but unintentional effect: it united a community. The segment would be a watershed moment for Chinese-Canadians, awakening a social and political consciousness that reverberates to this day.

Four decades later the media has evolved: seeing not one, but two Asian anchors nightly on CBC’s The National is a revelation.

But we are still grappling with issues of race. In an era when the president of the United States can use racism as an election platform, doubling and tripling down on telling four American congresswomen of colour to “go back home,” the lessons of W5 are worth repeating.

The “Campus Giveaway” story should be a required part of the curriculum of every journalism school. Because those lessons, it seems, aren’t easily learned.

Maclean’s in 2010 essentially recycled the “Campus Giveaway” story with a “Too Asian” cover story that controversially followed the plight of white students who didn’t want to study at a university with, well, too many Asians.

And in 2014, CTV seemed to learn nothing from past transgressions after I broke a story about racist tweets from a producer of one of its sitcoms, Spun Out. The network decided, as it did decades earlier, to stonewall on accepting responsibility, hoping it would just go away.

It’s a reminder that inclusivity is a work in progress. The Star most recently struck a diversity task force looking at how we report and how to include more diverse sources in our reporting, especially with the upcoming election. Unconscious bias is real.

But Asian Canadians have much to thank CTV for decades later.

The W5 show ignited a firestorm of protest from a once silent community, which picketed the broadcaster demanding an apology. It brought together the community in a way that events never really had before.

There is so much wrong with the program it’s hard to figure out where to begin. That includes outrageous shots of a Chinese-Canadian students association meeting with a voice-over stating, “There are so many foreign Oriental students it’s like there are two campuses … at this meeting not one Canadian student attended.”

The story also attracted the key support of political leaders such as Bob Rae and Stephen Lewis, who narrated a devastating rebuttal of the show.

On a personal level, it encouraged me to apply to journalism school. It made me understand that voices matter. Change is a slow burn. When I started at the Star, Canada’s largest circulation newspaper, I was the first staff writer of Chinese descent, which was surprising since it was 1987, not 1887.

CTV’s bungled attempt to create division and controversy under the guise of investigative journalism helped fire up a generation of superstar leaders including Dr. Joseph Wong, who would earn an Order of Canada for his community work, and Susan Eng, who would end up as the chair of the Toronto police services board. Significant community and political leaders such as former MP Olivia Chow; Dora Nip, the president of the Multicultural History Society of Ontario; and the civic firebrands and sisters Amy and Avvy Go rose from the ashes of protest.

The influential civil rights group the Chinese Canadian National Council was also formed because of the show. The organization, headed by the dynamic Wong as the first national president, would crucially go on to fight for other issues, including a redress for head taxes on Chinese Canadians and to support other marginalized communities. To mark the 40th anniversary of the W5 program, Wong said the CCNC would be rebooted, with a particular interest in youth, social justice and equality issues.

CTV did eventually apologize, months later, under threat of a lawsuit.

“Right after the program was broadcast our critics, particularly Chinese-Canadians and the universities, criticized the program as racist: they were right,” said CTV executive Murray Chercover at the time. “There is no doubt that the distorted statistics combined with visual presentation made the program appear racist in tone and effect.”

Given the heated and divisive rhetoric over immigration at home and abroad, it’s a lesson worth remembering decades later.

Source: Tony Wong: How a false W5 story 40 years ago became a watershed moment for Chinese-Canadians

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Ethnic media election coverage 18-24 August

2019/08/26 Leave a comment

Latest weekly analysis of ethnic media coverage. For the analytical narrative, go to diversityvotes.ca Ethnic media election coverage 11-17 August 2019:

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

When an Influx of French-Canadian Immigrants Struck Fear Into Americans

2019/08/26 Leave a comment

From a time when Canada had large scale emigration and a reminder of francophone fears of assimilation, as was the case with most who emigrated to the USA.

And a certain irony: Quebec’s fear of the “other,” as seen in its endless debates over identity, immigrants and integration, are the same issues that played out with respect to the large numbers of Quebec immigrants in the late 19th century.

In 1893, Clare de Graffenried, special agent of the United States Department of Labor, published an article in The Forum describing an invasion of America’s northeastern border. For 30 years, Graffenreid observed, hundreds of thousands of French Canadians had been pouring into states like Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, finding work in the region’s burgeoning industries. “Manufacturing New England, Puritan and homogeneous no longer, speaks a French patois,” she wrote.

Furthermore, Graffenreid continued, French Canadian workers huddled in “Little Canadas” of “hastily-constructed tenements,” in houses holding from three to 50 families, subsisting in conditions that were “a reproach to civilization,” while “inspiring fear and aversion in neighbors.”

Within the two years after Graffenried’s piece appeared, both of my grandfathers were born in Maine’s Little Canadas. A century later, when I began researching these roots, I uncovered a lost chapter in U.S. immigration history that has startling relevance today—a story of immigrants crossing a land border into the U.S. and the fears they aroused.

Inheriting an ideology of cultural survival from Québec, the French Canadians in the U.S. resisted assimilation. This led a segment of the American elite to regard these culturally isolated French speakers as a potential threat to the territorial integrity of the United States—pawns, conspiracy theorists said, in a Catholic plot to subvert the U.S. Northeast.

While French-speaking people had lived in North America since the 1600s, the French Canadians Graffenried discussed crossed the U.S. border during the late 19th century, mainly to earn a living in New England’s cotton mills. Cotton textile manufacturing began in earnest in the region during the War of 1812, and by mid-century, it was the U.S.’s largest industry in terms of employment, capital investment, and the value of its products. When the United States blockaded Confederate ports during the Civil War and prices for raw cotton soared, New England’s mills shut down or slashed hours. Textile workers turned toward other industries, joined the army, or headed west.

After the war, with cotton shipping again, the mills reopened, but the skilled textile workforce had scattered. The corporations launched a campaign to recruit workers, and Canada’s French-speaking province of Québec answered the call. Before the Civil War there had been a trickle of migration from Québec to the Northern states, but when hostilities ended, trainload upon trainload of French Canadians began to settle in neighboring New England. By 1930, nearly a million had crossed the border in search of work.

They arrived in extended family groups, establishing French-speaking enclaves throughout New England in small industrial cities like Lowell, Massachusetts; Manchester, New Hampshire; Woonsocket, Rhode Island; Lewiston, Maine; and elsewhere.

These Little Canadas, often wedged between a mill and a Catholic church, formed a cultural archipelago, outposts of Québec scattered throughout the Northeast in densely populated pockets. By 1900, one-tenth of New Englanders spoke French. And in the region’s many cotton mills, French Canadians made up 44 percent of the workforce—24 percent nationally—at a time when cotton remained a dominant industry.

French-Canadian workers often lived in overcrowded, company-owned tenements, while children as young as eight years old worked full shifts in the mills. Contemporary observers denounced the mill town squalor. When 44 French Canadian children died in Brunswick, Maine, during a six-month period in 1886, most from typhoid fever and diphtheria, local newspaper editor Albert G. Tenney investigated. He found tenements housing 500 people per acre, with outhouses that overflowed into the wells and basements. Tenney excoriated the mill owners, the prominent Cabot family of Boston. Conditions in the tenements, wrote Tenney, “show a degree of brutality almost inconceivable in a civilized community. … A sight even to make a Christian swear.”

Brunswick was not the only mill town with poor living conditions. Journalist William Bayard Hale visited Little Canada in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1894. “It would be an abuse to house a dog in such a place,” Hale wrote. Some Fall River tenements, continued Hale, “do not compare favorably with old-time slave-quarters,” a not-so-distant memory in the 1890s.

Other immigrants also faced pitiable conditions, but the French Canadians were unique because they thought of themselves as Americans before they came to the U.S. “The French Canadian is as American as someone born in Boston,” said Civil War hero Edmond Mallet, “it is all the nationalities that emigrated here that truly constitutes the American people.” Mallet was part of the small, educated French Canadian elite in the U.S., which included priests, journalists, professionals, and business owners. In their view, “American” was not a nationality, but a collection of “all the nationalities” living under the Stars and Stripes. In keeping with this understanding, they coined a new term for their people living in the U.S.: Franco-Americans.

Franco-American journalist Ferdinand Gagnon argued in an 1881 hearing at the Massachusetts State House that French Canadians were among the original constituent elements of the American Republic. He cited “Langlade, the father of Wisconsin; Juneau, the founder of Milwaukee; Vital Guerin, the founder of St. Paul, Minn.; Menard, first lieutenant governor of Illinois,” among his compatriots who had founded “nearly all the large cities of the Western States.”

While Gagnon encouraged French Canadians to pursue U.S. citizenship, for him naturalization implied a narrow contract. If naturalized citizens obeyed the laws, defended the flag, and worked for the general prosperity, he felt their duties were discharged—language, religion, and customs could remain in the private sphere. Gagnon’s concept of citizenship was based on Québec’s history, where French Canadians had maintained a distinct cultural identity despite British rule since 1763. The Franco-American elite expected their people to maintain their identity in the U.S. just as they had done in Canada.

But U.S. opinion demanded of the naturalized citizen something more than a merely formal participation in civic life, and Franco-American efforts to preserve their culture soon aroused suspicion and enmity. By the 1880s, elite American newspapers, including The New York Times, saw a sinister plot afoot. The Catholic Church, they said, had dispatched French Canadian workers southward in a bid to seize control of New England. Eventually, the theory went, Québec would sever its British ties and annex New England to a new nation-state called New France. Alarmists presented as evidence for the demographic threat the seemingly endless influx of immigrants across the northeastern border, coupled with the large family size of the Franco-Americans, where 10 or 12 children was common, and many more not unknown.

Anti-Catholicism had deep roots in the Northeast. The region’s Revolution-era patriots had numbered the Quebec Act of 1774 among the British Parliament’s “Intolerable Acts,” not least because it upheld the Catholic Church’s privileges in Canada, establishing “popery” in North America. In the mid-19th century, supporters of the Know Nothing movement led attacks on Catholic neighborhoods from New York City to Philadelphia. In New England, among other incidents, a Know Nothing-inspired mob burned a church where Irish and French Canadian Catholics met at Bath, Maine, in July 1854. In October of that year, Catholic priest John Bapst was assaulted, robbed, tarred and feathered, and driven out of Ellsworth, Maine. While the Know Nothings faded away, in the late 19th century the nativists regrouped as the American Protective Association, a nationwide anti-Catholic movement.

In this climate, the supposed French Canadian Catholic subversion of New England became national news. Between about 1880 and 1900, as immigration peaked, it attracted coverage in daily newspapers; think pieces in outlets such as Harper’s, The Nation, and The Forum; articles in academic journals; and books in English and in French. The New York Times reported in 1881 that French-Canadian immigrants were “ignorant and unenterprising, subservient to the most bigoted class of Catholic priests in the world. … They care nothing for our free institutions, have no desire for civil or religious liberty or the benefits of education.”

In 1885, the paper reported that there were French Canadian plans “to form a new France occupying the whole northeast corner of the continent”; four years later, it outlined the purported borders of New France: “Quebec, Ontario, as far west as Hamilton, such portions of the maritime provinces as may be deemed worth taking, the New-England States, and a slice of New-York.”

And in 1892, the New York Times suggested that emigration from Québec was “part of a priestly scheme now fervently fostered in Canada for the purpose of bringing New-England under the control of the Roman Catholic faith. … This is the avowed purpose of the secret society to which every adult French Canadian belongs.”

Protestant clergy responded by leading well-funded initiatives to convert the Franco-American Catholics. The Congregationalists’ Calvin E. Amaron founded the French Protestant College in Massachusetts in 1885, offering a training course for evangelizing the French Canadians of New England and Québec. Baptist missionaries fielded the “Gospel Wagon”—a hefty, horse-drawn vehicle with organ and pulpit, lit by lanterns at night, preaching Protestantism in French to the Little Canadas of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

New England had become “a magnet attracting the world to itself. … [Québec is] repellant and shunned by the world’s best blood,” thundered the Baptists’ Henry Lyman Morehouse in an 1893 pamphlet. “The one a mighty current. … that has been as the water of life to the civilized world—the other, a sluggish, slimy stream, that has fructified nothing and given to mankind nothing noteworthy … a civilization where mediaeval Romanism is rampant. … Against the abhorrent forces of this Romish civilization we are contending, especially in New England.”

Amaron and Morehouse identified Protestantism with Americanism. For them, it was unthinkable that the U.S. could accommodate a variety of religious traditions and yet retain its political culture.

In retrospect, the fevered discourse about New England’s class of destitute factory workers reveals how little chattering classes in the U.S. knew their neighbors—a people whose presence in North America preceded Plymouth Rock. The “invasion” rhetoric did not discourage Franco-American sentiments in favor of maintaining their identity but intensified them. The Little Canadas continued in vigor for at least another half-century, and slowly dispersed, not due to nativist provocations, but for economic reasons—the decline of New England’s manufacturing base.

Talk of a French Canadian threat waned in the first years of the 20th century, as migration across the northeastern border slowed temporarily. This Victorian episode faded from memory only when U.S. fears were transferred to new subjects: the even more foreign-seeming Jewish and non-Protestant immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, who, in the early 20th century, began to arrive in growing numbers on U.S. shores.

Source: When an Influx of French-Canadian Immigrants Struck Fear Into Americans

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Lack Of Diversity In Genetic Databases Hampers Research

2019/08/26 Leave a comment

Similar issues in Canada:

When Lalita Manrai went to see her doctor for treatment of kidney disease, she noticed that some of the blood test results had different “normal” ranges for African Americans compared with everybody else.

When she asked her doctor which range applied to her — a woman born in India — he said the “everybody else” category was actually based on a study of Europeans, so neither category was right.

Instead, he said, he calculated “normal” for her by averaging the two values.

“It’s ridiculous,” says Arjun Manrai, a medical researcher at Harvard Medical School, who recounted this story of his mother, who died in 2018. But there simply isn’t good information about a lot of medical issues that may vary based on a person’s ancestry. “In this vacuum of information, this was what [the doctor] was doing as his approach to staging her kidney disease,” Manrai says.

It’s important to get those laboratory results right, because they influence a patient’s treatment, Manrai says.

The same problem comes up in other common situations, such as the A1C test that is used to diagnose and manage diabetes, and in genetic variants that can identify people at risk of sudden death from heart disease.

These factual gaps exist because much of the research used to understand these genetic tests and lab values comes from predominantly European populations. Manrai is part of a growing effort to correct the skewed picture that results.

One of the most widely used resources for studying the genetics of disease is the U.K. Biobank, which contains samples from half a million middle-aged British people, 95% of whom are of European ancestry.

“At the time they were recruited and the age group that were recruited, that largely reflected the average across the U.K.,” says Dr. Cathie Sudlow, the biobank’s chief scientist. “So because the study was in the U.K., that’s what we got.”

The biobank has been a boon to scientists who want to identify the genes that are involved in disease. Genes are universal. But the ethnically skewed resource doesn’t work as well to identify the genetic variants that differ based on ancestry.

“There is no one cohort anywhere in the world that can answer all questions for all people,” Sudlow says. So the biobank is working to help develop much more diverse resources.

The U.K. Biobank has helped establish large repositories in Mexico and China. In the United States, Sudlow and her colleagues have been offering advice to the National Institutes of Health, which is gradually putting together a biobank that aims to have a diverse population of a million volunteers.

There are dozens and dozens of collections like this scattered around the world, some in private hands and others accessible to scientists. Nobody knows exactly how many of these collections exist, but “broadly we’re talking about at least millions of people,” says Ewan Birney, co-director of the European Bioinformatics Institute.

He is part of an effort to find ways to link some of these resources together so scientists can quickly see how a discovery in one group applies to people with different ancestries. Birney says even though most of the initial work has been in European populations, a lot of it is relevant to everybody.

“How genetics works in different countries — sort of a surprise — is that very often the genetics is pretty much the same as you move between different countries,” Birney says.

Where biobank study conclusions can be misleading is in the details. The same genes and proteins are involved in diseases such as diabetes, but the variants that can affect a person’s risk of disease differ based on a person’s genetic heritage.

Birney expects that the new and linked databases not only will help identify issues of concern to a particular ethnic group but will identify genes that are important for everybody’s health. He’s particularly eager to learn what comes out of a biobank project taking shape in sub-Saharan Africa.

“Because Africa is the birthplace of humans, there’s the highest amount of genetic diversity inside of sub-Saharan Africa,” he says. “And it’s really clear if you are a geneticist, we should be spending an awful lot more time studying humans there.”

Birney is mindful of simply allowing scientists from rich companies to swoop in on this resource, so right now the African scientists developing biobanks will have an opportunity to study the data first. Birney says it’s “really important that we do that in a way that is empowering and enabling for the scientists who come from these different countries.”

Manrai at Harvard is tapping into data that’s already available, including medical databases curated by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I think understanding ancestry, race, ethnicity is an area that we’re going to see a tremendous amount of work in over the next 10 years,” he says.

Source: Lack Of Diversity In Genetic Databases Hampers Research

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Bernier picks ridings where PPC has best chance to win in bid to join leaders’ debate

2019/08/26 Leave a comment

Looking at the choices by percentage of immigrants and visible minorities, quite a range. Appears selection criteria weighted towards candidate name recognition and profile (for full riding detail, see diversityvotes.ca):

  • Beauce: 1.4 percent immigrants, 1.1 percent visible minorities
  • Etobicoke North: 58 percent immigrants, 75.7 percent visible minorities
  • Nipissing-Timiskaming: 4.6 percent immigrants, 2.4 percent visible minorities
  • Charleswood-St. James-Assiniboia-Headingley: 13.1 percent immigrants, 10.2 percent visible minorities
  • Pickering-Uxbridge: 30.2 percent immigrants, 36 percent visible minorities

People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier has provided five ridings to the federal commission organizing the election leaders’ debate in a last-minute effort to enter the highly anticipated event.

In a letter sent to the Leaders’ Debate Commission, Bernier picks five ridings based on “candidates who are better known in their riding as public figures, and therefore will start this campaign with an advantage that others don’t have.”

It includes his Quebec riding of Beauce and the Toronto riding of Etobicoke North, where Renata Ford, the wife of late former mayor Rob Ford and sister-in-law of Ontario premier Doug Ford, is running.

The commission had asked Bernier to provide it with three to five ridings where he thought People’s Party candidates had the best chance of winning, after saying on Aug. 12 that Bernier did not meet the criteria needed to qualify for the leaders’ debates slated for early October.

Commissioner David Johnston had preliminarily ruled that the People’s Party, as it stood, did not have a “legitimate chance” of electing more than one candidate in the upcoming election.

That determination is based on recent political context, polling and previous general election results. A final list of invited parties will be published on Sept. 16.

The three other ridings are Nipissing-Timiskaming, where local councillor Mark King is representing the People’s Party; Charleswood-St. James-Assiniboia-Headingley, where former Conservative cabinet minister Steven Fletcher is running; and Pickering-Uxbridge, where former Tory MP Corneliu Chisu carries the party banner.

Bernier states in the letter that his understanding of the criteria is that “it simply states that our candidates must have a legitimate chance to be elected in the general election, and not at this time in the election cycle.”

“The election campaign could have a huge impact on this legitimate chance. More so for the other reasons I explained regarding the recent political context, including the high level of volatility and disaffection of the electorate, and the fact that populist parties similar to the PPC have experienced very rapid growth in other Western countries,” Bernier wrote.

He said as the People’s Party is very young, it had little information about the regional distribution of its support across Canada and its concentration in specific ridings. Nor did the party have the money to conduct polls in 338 ridings.

Bernier also included data obtained from Meltwater, a media monitoring company, on how often his name popped up in online and print sources over the last year compared to other party leaders.

The numbers state his name popped up 23,518 times, more than Green Party Leader Elizabeth May and Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet.

As well, data included in the letter shows his name popped up on social media 1.67 million times, more than NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, May and Blanchet.

Bernier also included in his letter columns in publications such as the Toronto Star, National Post and The Post Millennial arguing in favour of his entry into the debate.

Among candidates, Renata Ford, though a political novice, carries name recognition through her politically involved family members.

Meanwhile, King is a council member in North Bay. He was supposed to run for the Tories, but the party removed him as a candidate last month for allegedly using a corporate credit card to purchase party memberships for himself and close family members. He then joined the People’s Party.

Fletcher was a Conservative MP from 2004 to 2015 and had served as ministers of state for democratic reform and transport. Chisu was a Tory MP from 2011 to 2015.

An Aug. 5 Mainstreet Research poll for iPolitics found Bernier to be running neck-and-neck with the Conservatives in his southeastern Quebec riding.

According to the commission’s letter sent to Bernier, the information he provided will now be relayed to an independent pollster before returning to the party for a final comment.

Source: Bernier picks ridings where PPC has best chance to win in bid to join leaders’ debate

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , ,

Polish Ontario newspaper accused of anti-Semitism

2019/08/24 Leave a comment

To watch:

Police in Peel Region have confirmed they are investigating a local Polish-language news outlet following a complaint from B’nai Brith Canada about anti-Semitic content.

The force’s Equity and Inclusion Bureau is “also aware” of the complaint, said spokesperson Const. Heather Cannon.

B’nai Brith laid the complaint after discovering “frequent anti-Semitic and hateful material” in Goniec, a news outlet based in Mississauga, Ont., that publishes a weekly newspaper with a circulation of about 1,000, and maintains a website and YouTube channel.

According to B’nai Brith, the paper has accused “Jews and Zionists” of having “terrorism in their blood,” and has urged readers to “stand up to the Jews,” in response to their attempts to “destroy” Poland.

In a series of “incendiary” articles, the outlet “warns repeatedly of Jewish control over the Polish government through ‘puppet politicians’ in the United States who favour ‘rewriting history’ in the interest of the Israeli government,” B’nai Brith said in an Aug. 15 statement.

Authors on the website have also stated that Jews are “playing their old game” of trying to interfere in various governments, while calling the actions of Jewish organizations “racist” and “satanic,” the Jewish advocacy group alleged.

“We are appalled by the blatant Jew-hatred peddled by this publication,” said Michael Mostyn, B’nai Brith’s CEO. “While there is room for disagreement over policies in modern Polish-Jewish relations, the anti-Semitic content that we are seeing is truly beyond the pale.”

Among other examples B’nai Brith cited was a photograph of Hasidic Jews juxtaposed with the U.S. Capitol building, followed by allegations that Congress is controlled by Jewish forces, as well as a headline saying, You Use WhatsApp – Jews Are Spying on You.

Goniec has also described a film documenting the 1941 anti-Jewish massacre in the Polish town of Jedwabne as “false propaganda of the ‘Holocaust enterprise’ in a plot to initiate reparations for Jewish property that was lost or stolen during the Second World War,” B’nai Brith charged.

Andrzej Kumor, the paper’s editor-in-chief and sole employee, called B’nai Brith’s accusations “unfounded” and said he will co-operate with police.

“I have nothing to hide,” Kumor told The CJN via email. “I was never hateful towards Jews or any other community. I see politics as a power play of different interests. I love the debate and I think that the debate is a cornerstone of (a) free, democratic society.”

He defended the material cited by B’nai Brith.

The headline about Jews spying, for example, “is about the security hole found in WhatsApp, which was exploited by (an) Israeli group with connections to … state security services,” Kumor explained, asking, “Is the headline, ‘The Russians are spying on us’ anti-Russian?”

He said the commentary titled Zionists Have Terrorism in Their Blood (not “Jews,” he noted) is about paramilitary groups in pre-state Israel – the Irgun, Haganah and the so-called Stern Gang – and “the smart political use of terrorism by Jews fighting for their country after the Second World War.”

As for the July 1941 pogrom in Jedwabne, “this crime should be investigated to the very end … to find out how many people died, and other circumstances,” Kumor said.

Several sources agree that at least 340 Jews were murdered in the pogrom, 300 of whom were locked in a barn that was set on fire.

Peter Jassem, past chair of the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada’s Toronto chapter, said it was brought to his attention “on numerous occasions” that Kumor was publishing “anti-Semitic content for years, sometimes explicitly, sometimes as innuendo regularly present in numerous articles written by him and his contributors.”

As for B’nai Brith’s translations, “everything seems to be accurate,” said Jassem. However, the title of one video cited by B’nai Brith “does not mean that Zionists have terrorism in their blood, but rather that they are guilty of terrorism,” Jassem explained. “But when you listen to the video, (Kumor) does say this: ‘Jews or Zionists have terrorism in their blood.’ ” Later in the same video, Kumor says, “It is said that Jews simply invented modern terrorism,” according to Jassem.

He added that both in this article and in an interview Kumor gave to an online Polish television station that Jassem views as anti-Semitic,” Kumor “seems to show  himself as a martyr and a freedom fighter whose mission is to uncover the truth and to defend freedom of speech. He blames Jewish conspiracy for this action against him.” 

Source: Polish Ontario newspaper accused of anti-Semitism

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Liberal party membership forms distributed at pro-Beijing rally against Hong Kong protests

2019/08/24 Leave a comment

Look forward to more details emerging:

As speaker after speaker criticized the mass protests in Hong Kong and defended the Chinese government at a Toronto-area rally recently, a different kind of politicking was quietly unfolding.

Several members of the crowd of about 200 passed around and appeared to fill in Liberal membership forms, a striking juxtaposition between Canada’s governing party and backers of China’s Communist regime.

A Liberal spokesman said Thursday the forms looked to be ones that haven’t been used for three years — since the party ended paid memberships — and which would not be accepted today as valid registrations.

And the party had nothing at all to do with the rally, he added.

But critics of the Chinese government say they’re troubled that any kind of Liberal recruiting efforts might have taken place at a pro-Beijing event, calling it more evidence of China’s sway within Canadian politics generally.

“You can see the close connection between the pro-Beijing camp and the Liberal party,” said Gloria Fung of the group Canada-Hong Kong Link. “But … the pro-Beijing camp actually has their people in different federal parties. It’s not only confined to the Liberal party. I can easily name people in the Conservative party who are advocates of the Chinese government’s interests.”

The Aug. 11 rally at King Square shopping centre in Markham featured a number of speakers who portrayed the massive demonstrations in Hong Kong as a dangerous threat to the city’s peace, stability and economy.

The protests have brought as many as a million or more people to the streets for the past 11 weeks, decrying a law that would have allowed extradition to mainland China, calling for the investigation of alleged police brutality and demanding democratic reforms. Some have become violent.

Speakers at the Markham event included Michael Chan, who until last year was an Ontario Liberal cabinet minister.

Chinese-language media reports had said Han Dong, another former MPP who is now running for the federal Liberal nomination in Toronto’s Don Valley North riding, would also attend. One of the event’s moderators mentioned his name, too. But Dong issued a statement latersaying neither he nor any of his campaign team were at the rally. He could not be reached for comment.

Recruiting new members is a timeworn way for would-be candidates to win party nominations.

John Yuen, a Toronto-based supporter of the Hong Kong democracy movement attended the Markham rally to observe, and said he videotaped people passing around forms bearing the Liberal logo.

In the video, posted on Facebook, some of the audience members begin filling out the papers.

Photographs taken by another observer at the rally, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Wilfred, provide a closer look at the form. It appears to be the same as one that was available for download from the Liberal website as recently as Wednesday evening. The National Post asked about the incident Thursday morning, and the download page had been disabled by the afternoon.

The form, which includes payment options, has not been used since 2016, when the federal Liberals decided to make membership in the party free, said spokesman Braeden Caley.

“Those images do not appear to be authentic Liberal registration forms, and they would not be accepted as valid by the party,” he said. “The Liberal Party of Canada was not involved in the event … in any respect.”

Canadians can now join the party without charge by registering online.

Regardless, the presence of partisan political activity at the event raised eyebrows within the Chinese-Canadian community.

“I was very alarmed,” said Fenella Sung of the group Canadian Friends of Hong Kong, who suggested the Liberal party investigate how it happened.

Fung of Canada-Hong Kong Link said she sees the incident as more evidence of Beijing’s attempts to involve itself in Canadian politics, an important issue with an election looming.

“I consider this to be a major threat to our democracy,” she said

Source: Liberal party membership forms distributed at pro-Beijing rally against Hong Kong protests

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Ukip Might Not Get Votes – But Its Anti-Islamic Voices Have a Platform

2019/08/23 Leave a comment

On anti-Muslim attitudes in the UK and UKIP:

It seems tempting to ignore the election of Richard Braine, the new leader of the UK Independence Party. After all, its former leader Nigel Farage moved on to found the Brexit Party and much of Ukip’s support seems to have migrated there with him.

But it would be a mistake to disregard Ukip. Its strongest impact was never in the parliamentary seats it failed to get, either in the House of Commons or the European Parliament. Rather, it made its mark by moving the conversation dangerously further to the right than was previously acceptable. Take, for example, the first controversy to emerge involving Mr Braine. Footage of a hustings for the leadership race showed him complaining some British towns and cities were effectively no-go areas for non-Muslims and calling for it to be a crime to hand out copies of the Quran under laws connected to violence.

Such virulent anti-Muslim sentiment underpins Ukip and has only become more intense over the years, despite claims that it wants to distance itself from the anti-Islamic views that shaped the leadership of Mr Braine’s predecessor, Gerard Batten. Mr Farage quit the party over the issue of Islamophobia and Mr Batten’s links to far-right activist Tommy Robinson. The footage of Mr Braine seems to indicate it’s a different face at the helm but the same message.

For a party that is arguably on the far-right of British politics, Ukip enjoys an outsized presence in terms of press coverage. The boisterous antics of the likes of Mr Farage boosted his popularity and was handsomely rewarded by a disproportionate amount of airtime on television, a radio show on a mainstream network and a platform with various media outlets.

But as oxygen has been given to such right-wing views in so much of the mainstream media, such voices and their radical views have become normalised.

Ukip began as a Eurosceptic party and leaving the EU was the issue that defined its purpose. It never found a critical mass to vote for it as a party – but it did manage to get a critical mass to take up its one issue. As a result, the Brexit referendum of 2016 happened. The turmoil that has unfolded since is significantly down to mainstream political parties not taking seriously how to provide leadership in an age where Ukip-style populist politics can make a difference.

Mr Farage has now moved on to another political force, one which yielded considerably more success in the recent European elections. But the Brexit Party could never have done so if Ukip had not existed in the first place. Ukip continues to tap into a minority of the British public’s sentiments – an unruly minority that seeks division in order to promote its agenda.

That agenda is increasingly not about leaving the EU, an issue that has been taken up by the Brexit Party, large parts of the Conservative party, and even significant pats of the Labour party. Ukip might deny it is an anti-Islamic party – but the issue of Islamophobia is increasingly shaping conversations both within its ranks and about it.

Since the Brexit referendum took place, it is the issue that has energised the remaining Ukip base like no other. Robinson, currently serving nine months in prison, was until recently serving as a political adviser to Mr Batten. Others, including Ukip candidates Mark Meechan and Carl Benjamin and Paul Joseph Watson, have been accused of racist, threatening language. Mr Watson founded the far-right conspiracy website Infowars which is known for promoting absurd conspiracy theories; he himself declared “Islam control” was needed rather than gun control.

The anti-Islam animus has been present within Ukip since its early days – but it now seems to have overtaken nearly all other considerations within the party today. Anti-Muslim sentiment is a problem that infests many parts of the political spectrum already, including within the ranks of the Conservative party, to the point where even the term Islamophobia is challenged.

Ukip is currently polling badly in the UK. But with anti-Muslim bigotry across Europe on the rise, history reminds us that insignificance at the ballot box doesn’t mean irrelevance elsewhere.

Source: Ukip Might Not Get Votes – But Its Anti-Islamic Voices Have a Platform

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Frédéric Bastien: L’immigration a des conséquences culturelles

2019/08/23 Leave a comment

While valid to question  arguments in favour of high levels of immigration, the reference to “notre peuple,” essentially “pure laine” French origin, in contrast to “the other” is telling.

Such exclusionary language hardly facilitates integration of immigrants, which is his stated objective:

Dans un texte publié dans Le Devoir le 19 août dernier, le président de la Chambre de commerce de Montréal, Michel Leblanc, invoquait la croissance économique et ce qu’il qualifie de « manque de main-d’oeuvre » pour justifier une hausse substantielle de l’immigration. Celle-ci serait essentielle pour nous propulser vers « un âge d’or économique » en vertu d’une politique nationaliste. Rien n’est plus faux.

Soulignons d’abord que les études faites sur le sujet montrent qu’il n’y a aucun lien entre l’immigration et la prospérité. Le PIB par habitant des pays qui reçoivent beaucoup d’immigrants n’est pas plus élevé que celui de ceux qui en reçoivent moins. Si ce lien existait, ça ferait longtemps que le Japon aurait été rayé de la carte des puissances économiques du globe, lui qui reçoit un nombre extrêmement faible d’immigrants. Pourtant, l’économie nippone demeure l’une des plus performantes de la planète.

La belle époque du chômage élevé

Depuis quelques années déjà, le taux de chômage au Québec est en baisse. Alors qu’il était de 10-12 % il y a quelques décennies, il tourne aujourd’hui autour de 5 %. Collectivement, on devrait se réjouir de cette situation. Mais ce n’est pas ce que font les lobbys patronaux. Ceux-ci regrettent la belle époque où il y avait dix postulants pour un emploi disponible. Les patrons avaient beau jeu de négocier à la baisse les salaires et de faire la fine bouche. Aujourd’hui, ce sont les travailleurs qui ont le gros bout du bâton. En quoi devrait-on se scandaliser de cette situation ?

Plusieurs employeurs refusent cependant de faire monter les enchères en offrant de meilleurs salaires et de meilleures conditions de travail. Par exemple, certaines grandes entreprises préfèrent se tourner vers la main-d’oeuvre étrangère. Elles sélectionnent des travailleurs qu’elles font venir ici pour les payer au salaire minimum, contournant les conditions locales du marché, maximisant ainsi leurs profits pour le plus grand bonheur des actionnaires. Les larmes de crocodile que verse aujourd’hui Michel Leblanc ne devraient pas nous émouvoir.

Ce dernier semble croire par ailleurs que l’arrivée massive d’immigrants fera en sorte que des postes seront pourvus. C’est vrai que l’immigration augmente l’offre de main-d’oeuvre, un élément essentiel pour faire baisser les salaires. Mais l’arrivée de nouveaux venus crée aussi de la demande. Ces gens consomment des biens et services que notre économie doit produire. Par conséquent, il faut engager encore plus de gens pour y pourvoir, et il faut donc faire venir encore plus d’immigrants, car « la pénurie de main-d’oeuvre » perdure, et on recommence avec une nouvelle vague migratoire. On se retrouve dans une spirale inflationniste sans fin.

Tout cela n’est pas sans conséquence pour la société d’accueil. Entre autres, toutes les études démontrent que l’immigration a pour effet de propulser à la hausse le marché immobilier. C’est excellent pour les propriétaires, mais les familles des classes moyennes et pauvres en paient le prix. Le coût des loyers est propulsé à la hausse et ces familles doivent déménager dans des banlieues toujours plus lointaines.

Le spectre de minorisation

L’immigration a aussi d’importantes conséquences culturelles. Plus les étrangers sont nombreux chez nous, plus il est difficile de les intégrer et, au fil des générations, de les assimiler. À Montréal, des ghettos se forment et plusieurs immigrants peuvent vivre en marge de la société d’accueil. À l’heure actuelle, le Québec reçoit par habitant presque deux fois et demie plus d’immigrants que la France et presque deux fois plus que les États-Unis, alors même que nous constituons 2 % de la population de l’Amérique du Nord et que nous ne sommes même pas un pays souverain. Sommes-nous plus capables que nos cousins français ou que nos voisins du sud d’intégrer et d’assimiler les immigrants à notre nation ? Comme le dit l’adage, poser la question, c’est y répondre.

Être nationaliste, ça veut dire être préoccupé par la survie de notre peuple. L’immigration a des conséquences culturelles importantes, notamment en faisant reculer de façon dramatique le pourcentage de personnes de langue maternelle française au Québec. Celui-ci était de 82 % en 1996 et il tourne aujourd’hui autour de 75 %. En 2100, ce taux pourrait être de 50 %, selon Statistique Canada.

Cette réalité, et non les mythes propagés par la Chambre de commerce de Montréal, devrait être au coeur de notre politique d’immigration. Les immigrants qui s’intègrent le mieux à la société québécoise, et dont les enfants s’assimilent ensuite à notre peuple, sont ceux qui parlent déjà français et qui ont un haut niveau d’éducation, obtenu dans des établissements reconnus. Il faut donc réduire la sélection de l’immigration à ce segment. Le but ne doit pas être de créer du chômage pour plaire au patronat, comme le réclame Michel Leblanc. Pour les nationalistes, il est plutôt primordial de rehausser le nombre de francophones au Québec et d’assurer notre survie.

Source: L’immigration a des conséquences culturelles

Filed under Interculturalisme, Multiculturalism Tagged with

Trump’s tweets about ‘disloyal’ Jews are laced with centuries of antisemitism

2019/08/23 Leave a comment

Situates the broader and historical contexts:

It was January in Paris – cold, gray – when a ceremony held on the Champ-de-Mars roiled the city’s elite. Military officials and civilians gathered to watch as a young Jewish artillery officer was punished for his alleged treason. Days earlier Alfred Dreyfus had been convicted of passing secrets to the Germans in a rushed court-martial. A French army officer stripped his insignia medals, took his sword and broke it over his knee. Dreyfus was marched around the courtyard of the École Militaire as crowds jeered and spat. Cries of “Jew!” and “Judas!” drowned out his muffled professions of loyalty to the French state.

The scene was striking – in the shadow of the newly built Eiffel Tower, a symbol of modernity, an almost primal witch-hunt unfolded. A once decorated army servant pleaded for pity as his neighbors called out “death to the Jew”. Dreyfus was exonerated two years later. The message of his trial was clear: even in a cosmopolitan city, in a country whose revolutionary myth called for liberty and equality, leaders could baselessly point their people’s animus toward the other in their midst.

There’s a sordid history to charges of Jewish dual loyalty in the US In the early years of the second world war, isolationists opposed to American involvement dismissed the war as little more than a “Jewish cause”. Charles Lindbergh berated Jewish leaders for “agitating for war”. Decades later, when the US senator Joe Lieberman ran on the Democratic ticket for vice-president, pundits questioned whether he was more loyal to Israel than to the US. During the democratic primaries in 2015, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders was challenged on his “dual citizenship” with Israel.

Source: Trump’s tweets about ‘disloyal’ Jews are laced with centuries of antisemitism

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →