Australia: Foreign-born voters and their families helped elect Turnbull in 2016. Can they save ScoMo?

2019/05/11 Leave a comment

Interesting overview of the upcoming Australian election and ethnic votes. Some similarities to Canada but with greater polarization and more extreme views:

At the 2016 federal election, a small but significant vote cast by foreign-born Australians and their families helped elect the Liberal Party. The voters backed conservative minor parties in typically Labor-leaning electorates, and their preferences flowed to the Liberals.

Electoral pundits made little of this phenomenon at the time, and the media were not particularly interested. But in the wake of a similar voting pattern in the same-sex marriage plebiscite in 2017, the search is now on to find the elusive “ethnic vote”.

Who are these voters and where do they live?

The two largest collectives of non-English speaking groups are Chinese-Australians, and people from the Indian subcontinent including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. These “ethnic groups” are already multicultural, multilingual and politically diverse.

Pockets of Chinese-Australians concentrated in key swing seats in NSW and Victoria were mainly responsible for the surprise outcomes in 2016. That included Reid, Banks and Barton in NSW and Chisholm in Victoria. Three of the four went to the Liberals, but on demographic grounds and political trends at the time, all could have been delivered to Labor. (While Barton stayed Labor, the swing to the Liberals was significant.)

In 2019, we could see a similar pattern emerge in these seats again, as well as in Moreton in QLD, Hotham in Victoria, and Parramatta, Greenway and Bennelong in NSW.

Australia has over 300 ancestries, 100 religions and 300 languages, so invoking a category like “ethnic” does not lead in a particular direction – especially given the divisions and diversity within cultural groups and language communities.

And this population diversity has been shifting as newer groups have accelerated their presence, and older groups have passed on. The foreign-born population now have a growing number of Australian-born children, although many may not yet be able to vote.

How are the parties targeting them?

The main ethnic communities lobby group, the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia (FECCA), has produced a policy wish-list and is seeking responses from the parties.

Among the majors, only the Greens have a clearly articulated multicultural policy, having put a proposal for a Multiculturalism Act with subsequent implementation and rights machinery to the Senate over a year ago.

The ALP still sits on its hands on the legislative option, possibly fearing that supporting such a move might trigger negative reactions from the working class and more racist voters.

Their policy now includes a “body” named Multicultural Australia, with a string of commissioners across the country. It will probably come under Tony Burke as Minister, focusing on citizenship and access issues. In this, it is a variant on the 1990s Office of Multicultural Affairs. This was once part of the Hawke/Keating prime minister’s office but was abolished by John Howard as soon as he could.

Labor has committed more funds for community language schools and criticised delays in processing citizenship applications, as well as the high level of English required to pass the test. Former Senator Sam Dastyari has argued that opening up parental reunion is a major offer to a range of ethnic groups needing older family members to do caring work. This move, as one of this author’s informants, said, would really “win the Desi’s heart”, and probably many other ethnic groups as well. The idea has prompted a hostile response from the Coalition.

While Liberal leader Scott Morrison reiterates the old Turnbull mantra of Australia being the most successful multicultural country, the government’s lacklustre Multicultural Advisory Council no longer seems to have a web presence other than one which promotes integration and Australian values.

The Liberals propose a system of aged care “navigators” to help people with limited English survive the aged care system, while also injecting funds into start-up businesses run by migrants.

Conservative think-tank the Institute for Public Affairs retains as its second policy demand of any Liberal government that Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act be abolished. The Liberals took this into 2013 and 2016; Morrison has said it’s not on for 2019, though the right of the party is still committed.

What role will they play in the election?

Ethnic communities are not necessarily either cohesive or unanimous in their political viewpoints unless something particularly touches on their “ethnicity”.

The recent anti-Chinese sentiment reflected in media headlines about the alleged corruption of Australian political parties by wealthy Chinese residents may be doing that among Chinese communities. Many Australian Chinese think that Labor is much more sensitive to these issues than the Coalition, and Liberal Party Chinese figures have voiced these concerns in public gatherings.

Although they can be very interested and involved in politics, Chinese Australians have tended to hold back from active political engagement in the past. Indians, by contrast, bring some knowledge of English and, coming from a Westminster democratic system, tend to be more directly engaged – as party members for example. The Greens are particularly open to south Asian members; so, it seems, is the Christian Democratic Party (CDP).

While there are many conservative and religious parties across the country, only NSW has the CDP. It’s offering a “multicultural” array of candidates and directing preferences to the Liberals. The party was key in funnelling support from East Asian intensive electorates in 2016.

After unsuccessful discussions over a number of elections as to whether a socially conservative alliance might be formed between Muslims and Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Daoist and non-religious groups, something like the alliance appears to have been launched in Sydney. Reportedly “targeting Labor seats that had a high no vote in the same-sex marriage survey”, it could put some further some punch behind the Christian Democratic Party even though it’s not directly affiliated. The CDP is also targeting the Pacific communities in its campaign of support for Christian footballer Israel Folau.

Meanwhile, parties of the far right are competing to present their anti-multicultural agendas. In Lindsay, neo-Nazi Jim Saleam represents the Australia First Party, while across the country, right-leaning parties tussle for the xenophobic vote. That includes Rise Up Australia, Shooters Farmers and Fishers, Australian Conservatives, Australian National Conservatives, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and United Australia Party.

Although these parties may preference the Coalition, they may prove to be one force that drives ethnic communities towards the ALP.

Election day and beyond

Election day will provide the proof for many of the claims about ethnicity, voting, influence and ideology. It’s highly likely that the senators elected from the right will run a unity ticket against multiculturalism in the new Senate.

This year may well prove the last flash of a mainly White Australian election, with its defenders doubling down on the right, while the centre takes on a multi-coloured hue, and the left is ever more rainbow. A lot of the knowledge that we may glean from the election process will only be learned in its aftermath, picking through small details and trying to form a pattern of explanation.

It has taken the Australian public sphere the best part of three years to work out what happened with cultural diversity and its complexities in 2016. We may well have just as long to wait this time around.

Source: Foreign-born voters and their families helped elect Turnbull in 2016. Can they save ScoMo?

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Younger Arabs embrace Palestinian identity, redefining Israeli citizenship

2019/05/11 Leave a comment

Interesting evolution of identity:

Loudspeakers blared nationalist Arabic music across hillsides in northern Israel on Thursday as children ran across a field waving Palestinian flags.

The scene was a rally for members of Israel’s 21% Arab minority. The Israeli term for them is Israeli Arabs, but many now reject that label, identifying instead as “Palestinian with Israeli citizenship,” or simply “Palestinian.”

Each year they hold a gathering to mark the Nakba — or “Catastrophe” — when Palestinians lament the loss of their homeland in the 1948-49 war that surrounded the creation of the modern Jewish state.

The scene was a rally for members of Israel’s 21% Arab minority. The Israeli term for them is Israeli Arabs, but many now reject that label, identifying instead as “Palestinian with Israeli citizenship,” or simply “Palestinian.”

Each year they hold a gathering to mark the Nakba — or “Catastrophe” — when Palestinians lament the loss of their homeland in the 1948-49 war that surrounded the creation of the modern Jewish state.

The event is a celebration of Palestinian identity that, Arab politicians and academics say, reflects a change in thinking over the decades.

On Thursday, busloads arrived at a roped-off field near the Khubbayza, a ruined Palestinian village that lay 20 miles south of Haifa and was destroyed in the fighting between Arab and Jewish forces in 1948.

It and hundreds of others are now marked on paper and digital maps by groups such as “Palestine Remembered.”

The Nakba rally is timed each year to coincide with the day that Israelis in the rest of the country celebrate Independence Day.

On Thursday, Palestinian flags flew in the roped-off field where Israeli authorities gave permission for the gathering. Across a country lane, Israeli banners were draped across the hillside from which Israeli police watched, a drone hovering nearby.

Shouting over the music, Rula Nasr-Mazzawi, 42, a psychologist, said many of the first two generations of Arabs in post-1948 Israel were too scared to discuss matters of identity openly.

“But now we are seeing the younger generation, the third generation, more and more identifying very frankly and very loudly as Palestinians,” she said.

“The term Israeli Arabs is mistaken, it’s not accurate. We are Palestinians by nationality, and we are Israeli citizens.”

Ahmad Tibi, Arab member of Iraeli parliament

In an interview earlier this year, Ahmad Tibi, an Arab member of Israel’s parliament with the Ta’al party said: “The term Israeli Arabs is mistaken, it’s not accurate. We are Palestinians by nationality, and we are Israeli citizens.”

He added: “They are saying Arab Israeli or Israeli Arabs in order to say that we are not Palestinians. We bypassed that. We are part of the Palestinian people, and we are struggling in order to be equal citizens.”

Identity and citizenship

Israel’s population recently passed the 9 million mark, according to the country’s Central Bureau of Statistics. This includes 1.89 million Arab citizens — mostly Muslim, Druze and Christians — living alongside the 6.68 million Jews who make up the 74.2% majority.

Professor As’ad Ghanem, 53, a Haifa University political scientist and co-author of the book “Palestinians in Israel,” drew a distinction with Druze and Bedouin Arabs, many of whom serve in the Israeli military, taken by many as an indicator of integration.

In contrast, most Muslims and Christian Arabs do not serve.

He said Israel’s Arabs had undergone a slow transformation from their initial status as marginalized within both Israel and the Arab world.

A new generation of intellectuals and politicians were “much more strong than those in the 50s and 60s,” and voiced their community’s complaints about discrimination in the job market, and lack of services, he said.

“The majority think that they want to be identified as Palestinian,” he said.

Nonetheless, he said most Israeli Arabs still valued their Israeli citizenship and would oppose attempts to transfer them to Gaza or the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority exercises limited self-rule, because “they see all the troubles on the other side.”

A woman shouts as she takes part in the Nakba rally marking the “Catastrophe” when Palestinians lost their homeland in the 1948-49 war, near the abandoned village of Khubbayza, northern Israel, May 9, 2019.

‘Best conditions’

Recently, Arabs were angered after Israel’s parliament last year passed the nation-state law, which declared that only Jews have the right to self-determination in the country.

“Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people — and only it.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reasserted that principle just before his victory in the election a month ago, saying on Instagram: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people — and only it.”

He sought to placate non-Jewish citizens — and critics at home and abroad — by adding “there is no problem with the Arab citizens of Israel. They have equal rights like all of us and the Likud government has invested more in the Arab sector than any other government.”

Some of the Arab minority disagree with the sentiments expressed at Thursday’s rally, saying Israel protects them from threats in the Middle East.

“I am very proud to be an Israeli Arab,” said Yoseph Haddad, 33, a Greek Catholic speaking in the mixed Jewish and Arab city of Haifa.

“The fact is that if you take a look around all or most of the Arab nations, the Israeli Arabs here in Israel are in the best conditions.”

But Eyad Barghuty, 39, a novelist and former head of the Arab Cultural Association, said there had been an evolution in identity.

His generation had to struggle to find their roots within a country that emphasized the majority’s narrative, he said, while a younger generation took their Palestinian-ness for granted.

“I saw the ruins of Palestinian villages across the Galilee when I was a young man working on building sites, and I had to go to encyclopedias to look these places up. … Now there’s an app.”

Eyad Barghuty, 39, novelist

“I saw the ruins of Palestinian villages across the Galilee when I was a young man working on building sites, and I had to go to encyclopedias to look these places up,” he said. “Now there’s an app.”

Source: Younger Arabs embrace Palestinian identity, redefining Israeli citizenship

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Laïcité : «On n’a pas l’air d’une société décente», dit Gérard Bouchard

2019/05/10 Leave a comment

Worth noting:

Le sociologue Gérard Bouchard croit que le Québec « n’a pas l’air d’une société décente » avec le projet de loi sur la laïcité de l’État qui dépeint une province peu sensible aux droits fondamentaux.

De passage à Québec dans le cadre des consultations du projet de loi 21 du ministre Simon Jolin-Barrette, celui qui a cosigné en 2008 le rapport Bouchard-Taylor croit que les libéraux sont en partie responsables de la polarisation du débat en n’ayant pas agi à l’époque.

« Si [le gouvernement Charest] avait appliqué nos principales recommandations, on ne serait pas là aujourd’hui, a dit M. Bouchard. On pourrait enfin s’occuper enfin d’enjeux qui sont beaucoup plus importants. »

« Avec un enjeu aussi émotif, qui rejoint ce qui est de plus profond chez une personne, c’est évident que si le débat traîne, on va d’échec en échec, avec de l’impatience, de l’animosité, de l’agressivité, de la polarisation et des positions qui se durcissent », a poursuivi le sociologue.

Avec le projet de loi 21 du gouvernement de la Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ), qu’il qualifie de « radical » puisqu’il utilise une clause de dérogation pour le préserver de contestations judiciaires, la réputation du Québec est entachée, a dit M. Bouchard.

« On a l’air de gens qui ne sont pas très sensibles aux droits fondamentaux, a affirmé le sociologue. On a l’air d’une société pas très démocratique [en ayant] recours à la clause dérogatoire pour se soustraire à l’examen des tribunaux. On n’a pas l’air d’une société décente. »

Des conséquences sociales  

Gérard Bouchard a aussi prévenu mercredi que le gouvernement Legault risque de détériorer les relations entre la population majoritaire francophone et les communautés minoritaires du Québec.

« Les relations entre la majorité [francophone] et les minorités ne sont pas en bon état au Québec, notamment depuis la Charte des valeurs du Parti québécois. On a pu le voir encore cet été avec la controverse sur les appropriations culturelles. L’état de ces relations est mauvais et je pense que le projet de loi [caquiste] va les détériorer encore plus », a dit M. Bouchard.

Selon lui, si Québec excluait les enseignants et les directions d’école du projet de loi, pour interdire qu’aux fonctionnaires ayant un pouvoir coercitif le droit de porter un signe religieux (comme il proposait déjà en 2008), « [le gouvernement] aurait de bonnes chances de convaincre les tribunaux ».

Gérard Bouchard a aussi rappelé qu’il n’existe aucune donnée scientifique qui prouve que le port de signes religieux peut endoctriner des élèves ou les traumatiser. « Il n’y a aucune étude rigoureuse qui permet » d’appuyer cela, a-t-il dit.

Si de telles études existaient, M. Bouchard pourrait même être favorable au projet de loi du gouvernement de la Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ), a-t-il ajouté mercredi.

Source: Laïcité : «On n’a pas l’air d’une société décente», dit Gérard Bouchard

And some teacher testimony in favour of Bill 21:

Si la cigarette de Lucky Luke ou un homme-sandwich McDonald’s transmettent des messages, les signes religieux le font aussi, ont dénoncé mercredi deux enseignantes invitées aux consultations du projet de loi 21 sur la laïcité de l’État.

Leila Bensalem, une enseignante de la Commission scolaire de Montréal (CSDM), croit que le voile que porte certaines musulmanes « n’est pas un modèle à transmettre [aux] élèves. »

De passage à Québec mercredi, Mme Bensalem était accompagnée de Nadia El-Mabrouk, professeure en informatique à l’Université de Montréal. Les deux femmes ont salué la volonté du gouvernement de la Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) d’interdire le port de signes religieux aux employés de l’État en position d’autorité, incluant les enseignants.

« Est-ce qu’il y a des données sur le fait que s’habiller en homme-sandwich McDonald’s, ça fait en sorte que les gens mangent plus de hamburgers ? L’affichage, la publicité, […] ça conditionne les personnes. Si on [en] n’était pas convaincu, […] il n’y aurait pas de publicité », a affirmé Mme El-Mabrouk.

« Les signes religieux [ont] une charge politique, a pour sa part affirmé MmeBensalem. C’est un problème dans une classe. »

Tout comme Djemila Benhabib, mardi, l’enseignante montréalaise considère qu’une enseignante musulmane voilée qui refuserait de retirer son voile, une fois la loi adoptée, serait « intégriste ».

Devant les parlementaires, elle s’est questionnée sur les états d’âme d’une petite fille iranienne dont la famille aurait fui son pays et qui se retrouverait devant une enseignante voilée. « Comment va-t-elle se sentir? », s’est inquiétée MmeBensalem.

« [Et] des élèves palestiniens […] qui ont fui les pratiques de l’État israélien [et] qui feraient face dans une classe à un enseignant qui porte la kippa, [voilà] qui les ramène à toutes ces choses qu’ils ont fuies », a-t-elle ajouté.

Québec « cautionne l’exclusion »

Haroun Bouazzi, porte-parole de l’Association des Musulmans et des Arabes pour la laïcité au Québec, croit pour sa part que le gouvernement Legault « cautionne l’exclusion » avec le projet de loi 21.

« Un gouvernement établit avec ses lois […] ce qui est acceptable ou pas dans une société. Le message est clair ici qu’il est acceptable d’exclure des membres d’une minorité sans raison valable », a-t-il dénoncé mercredi lors de son allocution devant les parlementaires à Québec.

M. Bouazzi a mis au défi le ministre Simon Jolin-Barrette de ne pas appliquer une clause dérogatoire à sa loi et de la laisser être contestée devant les tribunaux.

Plus tard en journée, mercredi, le sociologue Gérard Bouchard témoignera à son tour aux consultations particulières du projet de loi 21. Mardi, son ancien collègue, le philosophe Charles Taylor, a affirmé que le gouvernement Legault semait actuellement la division.

Source: Les signes religieux portent un message, disent des enseignantes

 

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Germany issues an ‘early warning’ report about rise of Islamist anti-Semitism

2019/05/10 Leave a comment

On Islamist extremists:

The top intelligence agency in Germany has written what is being called its most comprehensive analysis of rising anti-Semitism by Islamist extremists.

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, or BfV, described its 40-page brochure as a tool for educators, social workers, police and others who work closely with recent Muslim immigrants or refugees.

She said the agency has never published such a comprehensive analysis of the subject based on empirical data.

“We are an early warning system,” Pley said. “Recommendations on what can be done must come from society and the political establishment.”

Pley said there had been no public response to the report by Muslim associations in Germany, but that it had been downloaded 1,439 times since its release.

It is one of a few recent government measures born of increased concern about anti-Semitism in Germany.

In 2018, the government appointed a commissioner, Felix Klein, to focus specifically on the topic. In 2012, a Bundestag commission was established to report on anti-Semitism nationwide and in all categories.

“Anti-Semitism in Islamism” homes in on the Islamist extremist component, which represents a looming threat, the agency said, though relatively few anti-Semitic crimes in Germany have been attributed to Islamist extremism.

The report distinguishes between “Islam” the religion and “Islamism,” which it describes as a form of political extremism that “aims at the partial or complete abolition of the liberal democratic constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

Between 2010 and 2016, the Pew Research Center reported, the number of Muslims living in Germany rose to nearly 5 million, or 6 percent of the population, from 3.3 million, or 4.1%.

The vast majority of anti-Semitic crimes in Germany have a right-wing extremist background: In 2018, a total of 755 anti-Semitic crimes were reported, and 670 were attributed to the far right and 25 to “foreigners.” Of the 707 cases the previous year, 651 were attributed to the far right and 15 to foreigners.

But the new report, which identifies Islamist organizations and movements and their propaganda, warns that radicalization and incitement to anti-Semitic hate “form the breeding ground for violent escalations.”….

Anti-Semitic beliefs promoted by Islamist groups and individuals “already represent a considerable challenge for peaceful and tolerant coexistence in Germany,” the report says.

It is not the first time the agency has examined anti-Semitism in this context: Past annual reports on extremist crime have covered Islamism and its anti-Semitic components. A symposium was held on the subject in the early 2000s, Pley told JTA.

Juliane Wetzel, a senior staff member at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University in Berlin, called the report an “excellent contribution on the theme.”

“The conclusion is important: Islamist anti-Semitism is spreading in Germany,” said Wetzel, a member of the Bundestag’s commission of experts on anti-Semitism.

The new report is important, though the topic of anti-Semitism in Islamism has hardly been taboo in Germany as some critics have claimed, said political scientist Clemens Heni, director of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism.

Among other organizations, “the intelligence agency has reported on it for decades,” Heni told JTA.

In its definition of anti-Semitism, the brochure includes anti-Zionism, since it “aims at the complete elimination of the State of Israel” and falsely defines the Mideast conflict “as a Jewish ‘war of annihilation’ against the Palestinians.”

The brochure says that anti-Zionists in Germany often argue that they are against Israel, not against Jews. But given that “Israel is the only Jewish state in the world and that its annihilation would inevitably result in the death and expulsion of millions of Jews, this argumentation turns out to be a trick to conceal the actual thrust of anti-Zionism,” the report concludes.

Among other points, the brochure covers anti-Semitic stereotypes in Islamism and the rejection of the State of Israel by Islamist organizations.

Its list of Islamic extremist groups and movements in Germany includes the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, among others.

Though there has been no public response from Muslim organizations in Germany, the Liberal Islamic Association recently published its own 178-page report on the results of its three-year program, Extreme Out: Empowerment, Not Antisemitism. The project was designed to “shed light on and work [against] anti-Semitic attitudes among young people of Muslim faith” and to help youth see themselves as part of German society.

Source: Germany issues an ‘early warning’ report about rise of Islamist anti-Semitism

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Addiction Kills More Blacks, But Treatment Is Prescribed Mostly To Whites

2019/05/10 Leave a comment

Yet another study on the disparities in healthcare:

White drug users addicted to heroin, fentanyl and other opioids have had near exclusive access to buprenorphine, a drug that curbs the craving for opioids and reduces the chance of a fatal overdose. That’s according to a study out Wednesday from the University of Michigan. It appears in JAMA Psychiatry.

Researchers reviewed two national surveys of physician-reported prescriptions. Between 2012 and 2015, as overdose deaths surged in many states, so did the number of visits during which a doctor or nurse practitioner prescribed buprenorphine, often referred to by its brand name, Suboxone. The researchers assessed 13.4 million medical encounters involving the drug but found no increase in prescriptions written for African Americans and other minorities.

“White populations are almost 35 times as likely to have a buprenorphine-related visit than black Americans,” says Dr. Pooja Lagisetty, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School and the study’s corresponding author.

The dominant use of buprenorphine to treat whites occurred at the same time opioid overdose deaths were rising faster for blacks than for whites.

“This epidemic over the last few years has been framed by many as largely a white epidemic, but we know now that’s not true,” Lagisetty says.

What is true, Lagisetty added, is that most of the white patients either paid cash (40%) or relied on private insurance (35%) to fund their buprenorphine treatment. The fact that just 25% of the visits were paid for through Medicaid and Medicare “does highlight that many of these visits could be very costly for persons of low income,” Lagisetty says.

Doctors and nurse practitioners can demand cash payments because there’s a shortage of clinicians who can prescribe buprenorphine, according to Dr. Andrew Kolodny, co-director of Opioid Policy Research at Brandeis University. Only about 5% of physicians have taken the special training required to prescribe buprenorphine.

“The few that are doing it are really able to name their price, and that’s what we’re seeing here and that’s the reason why individuals with more resources — who are more likely to be white — are more likely to access treatment with buprenorphine,” says Kolodny, who was not involved in the study.

Kolodny wants the federal government to eliminate the required special training for buprenorphine and a related cap on the number of patients a doctor can manage on the drug.

Some physicians who have studied racial disparities in addiction treatment say the root causes go back to 2000, when buprenorphine was approved. At that time, proponents argued that buprenorphine was needed to help treat suburban youth, says Dr. Helena Hansen at New York University. Those young patients didn’t see themselves as addicted to heroin in the same way as hard-core urban heroin users who went to methadone clinics for treatment, she says.

“Buprenorphine was introduced as private office treatment, for a private market, with the means to pay,” says Hansen, an associate professor of psychiatry and anthropology. “So the unequal dissemination of buprenorphine for opioid dependence is not accidental.”

Hansen added that the fix must include universal access to treatment in a primary care setting, an end to the criminalization of opioid dependence (which puts more blacks in prison for drug use than whites), and more federal funding to expand access to buprenorphine for all patients.

Several leaders in the fight to reduce opioid overdose deaths say the study results are disturbing.

“It really demands for us to be looking at equitable treatment for addiction for African Americans as we do for white Americans,” says Michael Botticelli, director of the Grayken Center for Addiction at Boston Medical Center and the former director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Botticelli identified some key issues that may be contributing to the racial treatment gap that deserve further investigation. For example, he wants to know whether Medicaid reimbursement rates are simply too low to entice more doctors to work with low-income patients, or there are too few inner-city doctors prescribing buprenorphine, or African Americans themselves are somehow reluctant to seek this form of treatment.

Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health, called the findings surprising and disturbing. Surprising because the disparity is so large, and disturbing because her agency has prioritized educating doctors about the value of prescribing buprenorphine.

Volkow also expressed disappointment that federal parity laws, which are supposed to guarantee equal access to all types of medications, don’t seem to be working for buprenorphine. “We need to ensure that we have capacity to provide these treatments,” Volkow says. “Because if you say you have to pay for them, but there are no services that can provide the treatments, then the issue of paying for them is secondary.”

Volkow has noted that fewer than half of Americans with an opioid use disorder have access to buprenorphine or the two other medications used to treat opioid addiction: methadone and naltrexone. Volkow said she is glad that the use of buprenorphine is on the rise, but the U.S. needs to understand why this lifesaving treatment isn’t benefiting all patients who need it.

Source: Addiction Kills More Blacks, But Treatment Is Prescribed Mostly To Whites

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Huge Racial Disparities Found in Deaths Linked to Pregnancy

2019/05/09 Leave a comment

Yet another example of racial disparities. Have not seen and comparative Canadian studies and grateful if any readers can direct me accordingly:

African-American, Native American and Alaska Native women die of pregnancy-related causes at a rate about three times higher than those of white women, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Tuesday.

The racial disparity has persisted, even grown, for years despite frequent calls to improve access to medical care for women of color. Sixty percent of all pregnancy-related deaths can be prevented with better health care, communication and support, as well as access to stable housing and transportation, the researchers concluded.

“The bottom line is that too many women are dying largely preventable deaths associated with their pregnancy,” said Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the C.D.C.

“We have the means to identify and close gaps in the care they receive,” she added. While not all of the deaths can be prevented, “we can and should do more.”

Maternal health among black women already has emerged as an issue in the 2020 presidential campaign. Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, have both raised the glaring racial discrepancies in maternal outcomes on the campaign trail.

“Everyone should be outraged this is happening in America,” Ms. Harris recently said on Twitter. She blamed the deaths on racial bias in the health system.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which was not involved in the C.D.C. report, recently acknowledged that racial bias within the health care system is contributing to the disproportionate number of pregnancy-related deaths among minority women.

“We are missing opportunities to identify risk factors prior to pregnancy, and there are often delays in recognizing symptoms during pregnancy and postpartum, particularly for black women,” Dr. Lisa Hollier, immediate past president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement.

The United States has an abysmal record on maternal health, compared with other high-income countries. Even as maternal death rates fell by more than one-third from 2000 to 2015 across the world, outcomes for American mothers worsened, according to Unicef.

The C.D.C. examined pregnancy-related deaths in the United States from 2011 to 2015, and also reviewed more detailed data from 2013 to 2017 provided by maternal mortality review committees in 13 states.

The agency found that black women were 3.3 times more likely than white women to suffer a pregnancy-related death; Native American and Alaska Native women were 2.5 times more likely to die than white women.

[The topics new parents are talking about. Evidence-based guidance. Personal stories that matter. Sign up now to get NYT Parenting in your inbox every week.]

Obstetric emergencies involving complications like severe bleeding caused most of the deaths at delivery. Disorders related to high blood pressure accounted for most deaths from the day of delivery through the sixth day postpartum.

A leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths was cardiovascular disease, which is not typically associated with young pregnant women.

Heart disease and strokes caused more than one-third of pregnancy-related deaths, the C.D.C. found. Cerebrovascular events, such as strokes, were the most common cause of death during the first 42 days after the delivery.

Cardiac disease, which disproportionately affects black women, may be present in a woman before pregnancy, but it also may appear during pregnancy. If heart disease goes undetected, it may become acute after the baby is born.

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Laïcité: la consultation qualifiée de mascarade par des groupes religieux

2019/05/09 Leave a comment

Valid points by the groups not being invited to testify:

Le refus du gouvernement Legault d’entendre les groupes religieux directement visés par le projet de loi sur la laïcité démontre, selon ceux-ci, que son lit est déjà fait et que les consultations l’entourant ne sont qu’une mascarade.

Des représentants d’organisations juives, musulmanes, sikhes et même de l’Église unie du Canada ont vivement dénoncé, mardi à Montréal, le mutisme du gouvernement caquiste qui, à leurs demandes d’être entendus aux audiences de la commission parlementaire sur le projet de loi 21, n’a répondu que par des accusés de réception sans invitation.

«Le gouvernement voit cette loi comme un fait accompli», a déclaré Avi Finegold, porte-parole du Conseil des rabbins de Montréal, alors que les consultations s’entamaient à Québec.

«On dirait qu’ils essaient simplement de masquer le tout avec quelques journées de consultations, pour une loi aussi majeure», a-t-il déploré.

Déficit d’ouverture et d’inclusion

Pour ces organisations, il est inconcevable que les personnes directement touchées par cette loi soient ainsi ignorées.

«Le fait qu’on ne soit même pas invités aux consultations fait en sorte que notre opinion, pour eux, n’est même pas valide», a pour sa part avancé la porte-parole du Conseil national des musulmans canadiens, Sara Abou-Bakr, qui ne s’est pas gênée pour faire la leçon au gouvernement caquiste sur la notion d’inclusion.

«C’est sûr qu’ils ont pris cette décision-là sans même avoir l’idée d’avoir un Québec inclusif et sans même inclure tous les citoyens du Québec. L’ouverture, c’est d’inclure tout le monde. L’ouverture, ce n’est pas d’inclure les personnes (..) dont on sait qu’elles vont déjà être de notre avis. L’ouverture, c’est donner à tout le monde la chance égale de parler que ce soit pro-loi ou contre la loi.»

Cette exclusion des groupes directement touchés est particulièrement mal accueillie par Samaa Elibyari, du Conseil canadien des femmes musulmanes.

«Les femmes voilées, c’est-à-dire celles qui portent le hijab, seront les premières victimes. Il est donc déplorable que notre voix ne soit pas entendue à ce sujet», a-t-elle dit.

Selon elle, l’exclusion imposée par le gouvernement Legault «trahit un esprit de parti pris».

«Comment pouvez-vous justifier que les personnes qui sont les plus touchées ne sont pas représentées ?» demande-t-elle, faisant valoir que «ce n’est pas seulement les femmes qui seront affectées, c’est toute la famille, c’est toute la communauté» puisque la restriction à l’emploi devient une conséquence matérielle tangible.

Le voile comme signe d’inclusion

Les organisations font valoir que le discours d’ouverture à la diversité du gouvernement caquiste peut difficilement être soutenu dans les faits s’il est incapable de faire preuve d’ouverture pour l’étude de son projet de loi.

Plus encore, souligne Sara Abou-Bakr, le port d’un signe religieux pourrait s’avérer un puissant argument en faveur de l’inclusion.

«Le fait que je porterais un symbole religieux en travaillant pour le gouvernement mettrait l’emphase sur le fait qu’on vit dans un Québec inclusif», avance-t-elle.

Sur le fond, les organisations ne s’en cachent pas : elles perçoivent toutes le projet de loi 21 comme un instrument de discrimination.

«Nous estimons qu’il s’agit d’une discrimination encouragée par l’État, une légalisation de la discrimination, et ça affectera tout le monde», a de son côté déclaré l’imam Musabbir Alam, de l’Alliance musulmane canadienne.

«La loi 21 est une loi qui va renforcer la division de la société québécoise», a renchéri Sara Abou-Bakr.

Avi Finegold, de son côté, a cherché à contrer les discours de peur qui entourent ce débat.

«Nous ne devrions pas avoir peur de la religion. Nous n’essayons pas de convertir qui que ce soit. Nous sommes ici pour vivre nos vies et pour avoir notre foi religieuse exprimée de la manière dont nous le voulons l’exprimer», a-t-il dit.

Les organisations n’écartent pas la possibilité d’aller vers des recours juridiques pour contrer l’éventuelle loi et préparent également des activités de soutien à leurs revendications.

Source: Laïcité: la consultation qualifiée de mascarade par des groupes religieux

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Terry Glavin: The Tories insist racists aren’t welcome in their party. What are they doing about it?

2019/05/09 Leave a comment

Strong commentary, capturing the unfortunate missteps and resulting perceptions:

There’s no way around it: Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives have a racist jackass problem.

This is not to say that Scheer or any of his MPs have consciously invited the affections of the country’s racist jackasses, and there are far fewer votes in Canada’s racist jackass constituency than you might think. But it’s a problem. And Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives have it, in spades.

The most recent evidence is quite jarring. It comes in Ekos Research Associates’ latest annual findings about Canadian attitudes about immigration. Nothing much has changed in the long-term trends, but for the first time, the proportion of Canadians who say immigration rates are too high has merged with the percentage of Ekos poll respondents who say too many non-white people are coming to Canada. And that bloc is coalescing, for the first time, behind a single political party: Scheer’s Conservatives.

This is what it has come to. Sixty-nine per cent of the “too many non-whites” respondents say they back Scheer’s Conservatives. It only stands to reason that a fairly high number of these people are racist jackasses. And there’s growing evidence that sociopaths from that creepy white-nationalist subculture that congregates in obscure 4chan and 8chan chatrooms are hoping to mainstream their contagion into conservative parties. Scheer’s Conservatives insist they’re not happy about any of this.

“Mr. Scheer is clear. These types of views are not welcome in the party,” Brock Harrison, Scheer’s communications director, told me. “He’s stated that view many, many times. Sure, there are fringe elements who will tell a pollster they support the Conservative party, but, you know, those fringe elements who hold to these extreme ideologies have no place in the party. That’s clear.”

Fair enough. But if there’s nothing wrong with the Conservative message on immigrants and refugees and visible minorities, there sure is something wrong with the signal.

It’s not hard to make the case, for instance, that Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have disingenuously attributed racism and xenophobia to public anxieties and otherwise reasonable Opposition criticisms of the way Ottawa has handled the upsurge in “irregular” asylum claimants who have crossed the Canada-U.S. border since 2017. “This kind of rhetoric drives these people [racist jackasses] to us, whether we like it or not,” Harrison said. “The denunciations from Mr. Scheer are clear. Every time something flares up and the Liberals try to pin this on us, we stand firm and we denounce.”

But the issue flared up into a bonfire of the Conservatives’ own making last summer, when Maxime Bernier, Scheer’s primary challenger in the 2017 Conservative leadership race, got turfed from Scheer’s shadow cabinet for a series of weird anti-multiculturalism outbursts that put him in the crosshairs of the Conservatives’ capable immigration critic, Michelle Rempel. In a huff, Bernier founded his own rump political party, of the type that sometimes seems to specialize in anti-immigrant jackassery. It was a golden opportunity for Scheer to purge the party of its jackass wing and invite them to run off with Bernier. It was an opportunity Scheer didn’t take.

During the 2017 leadership race itself, the House of Commons was in an uproar over Liberal MP Iqra Khalid’s arguably outlandish motion to mount a national effort in the struggle against Islamophobia. But back then, the Conservative Opposition’s reasonable objections to Liberal hyperventilation were overshadowed by bizarre and paranoid alarums within the Conservative party itself. Several leadership candidates proved more than happy to cross deep into the territory of an Islamophobia they said didn’t even exist.

There was little separating Stephen Harper’s Conservatives from the Liberals and New Democrats on the issue of opening the door to Syrian refugees by the time voters walked into polling booths and turfed the Conservatives in the 2015 federal election. Even so, there was a bad smell about the party, coming from the fringes, and the occasional burst of air freshener out of Scheer hasn’t done the trick.

We’re only months away from another federal election, and with a spotty record to run on, Trudeau has given every indication that the question he wants on voters’ minds will be the same as it was last time around: what’s that smell?

Canada is changing dramatically. A lot of people don’t like what they see, and among them are voters who are predisposed to simple explanations and conspiracy theories. The rural white males drawn to white-nationalist propaganda are perched precariously on the bottom rung of every ladder the Liberal free-trade vision imagines, with its phasing-out of the oil patch and its preoccupation with gender equity, “political correctness” and the concerns of visible-minority communities.

While the Liberals deserve credit for attempting to craft policy that addresses the strains and stresses of globalization and migration, Team Trudeau has invested its political fortunes in a “liberal world order” that is broken. The losers in the shiny, happy world of the Liberal imagination are too easily written off by Liberal strategists. The New Democrats have lost their hold on voters from the old working class. The Tories have picked them up.

The promise of relatively open borders, the free flow of capital, people and ideas among and between liberal democracies and police states like China and gangster states like Russia and theocracies like Iran—all of this was already losing its sheen when Trudeau won his majority four years ago.

The urban millennials who carried Trudeau into office were already alert to the dismal prospect of a future planet convulsing in catastrophic climate change. Now they’re stuck in low-paying temporary jobs, and they’re dealing with out-of-reach housing, high daycare and transportation costs and university degrees that lead nowhere. Holding out higher immigration rates as some sort of magic road map out of this mess is at best a flimsy political strategy. It’s not convincing, for starters. But more importantly, it’s dangerous, because when the formula fails to fix things, it will be immigrants who take the blame, and Canada’s recent immigrants are overwhelmingly people of colour.

It’s not good enough for Scheer to get better at dealing with the occasional flare-ups that leave him looking like the hillbilly caricature Liberals like to make of him. He needs to openly admit that the Conservatives have a problem. He needs to clearly and emphatically demonstrate that he means what he says, that his party is not open to voters who scapegoat immigrants and hold fast to the view that there are too many non-white people coming to Canada. He needs to do something about it.

He needs to show them the door and invite them to leave. Whatever numbers he’ll lose to Mad Max Bernier, he’ll pick up from more centrist voters who’ve grown weary of Trudeau’s “woke” politics, with its wardrobe of groovy socks and a photo album filled with glamour magazine spreads where a portfolio of policy accomplishments should be.

But whatever the faults that can be laid at the feet of the Liberals, it’s Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives who have the racist jackass problem. And however much they genuinely don’t want it, they’re clearly not trying hard enough to shake it.

Source: The Tories insist racists aren’t welcome in their party. What are they doing about it?

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Glavin: Some say anti-elitist populism is sweeping Canada. Don’t believe them.

2019/05/08 Leave a comment

Glavin’s provides perspective on populism and on the latest from Samara (2019 Democracy 360 series, Don’t Blame “The People”: The Rise of Elite-led Populism in Canada). Great closing line:

It’s a question that has perplexed political scientists, the punditry and quite a few politicians. What is it about Canada that has allowed this country to dodge the populist waves engulfing the United States, the United Kingdom and no small swathe of the European continent? The question commonly arises in tandem with warnings, or threats, that the spectre of populist mobilization is on the near horizon, or that it’s already upon us.

Well, hold on a minute.

For starters, it’s helpful to recall that we’ve already been there and done that. A populist wave swept Canada back in the early 1990s, and it crashed on the rocks of a broken Progressive Conservative Party, failed to breach Ontario and Quebec, and spent its power in schism, factionalism and failed image makeovers. Eventually the movement dribbled back into the reconstructed Conservative Party of Canada, in 2003, and it had withered enough by 2006 to clear the way for Stephen Harper to win his first minority Conservative government.

As for a rejuvenated Canadian populism arising as an echo of Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again histrionics, or as a replication of the English nativism that reduced Britain to the shambles of Brexit, or as a copycat craze inspired by the gilets jaunes upheavals in France or the oddball populist poll victories in Italy, Hungary and most recently in Spain—don’t count on it. At least don’t count on it arising organically from an alienated and fed-up populace.

That’s the takeaway point in the Samara Centre for Democracy’s latest number-crunching from its extensive 2019 Democracy 360 series, a project Samara undertakes every two years to analyze the way Canadians communicate, participate, and lead in politics. As it turns out, populism is not on the rise in Canada—except perhaps as a stalking horse for politicians. Samara’s new report, titled “Don’t Blame ‘the People’: The Rise of Elite-Led Populism in Canada,” finds that the usual indices for populist alienation have been in steady decline since the Reform Party heyday of the 1990s. Politicians and some journalists are speaking the language of populism again, but by and large, the public isn’t. Not by a long shot.

Back in the mid-1990s, the Canadian Election Survey found that roughly 75 per cent of Canadians agreed with the statement, “I don’t think the government cares much what people like me think.” Samara’s finding, based on its survey of more than 4,000 Canadians earlier this year, finds that fewer than 60 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement.

It may or may not be disturbing that 63 per cent of the survey respondents agreed that “those elected to Parliament soon lose touch with the people,” and those respondents may or may not be right. But that’s down from the 77 per cent who agreed with the statement in 2004, and way down from the 85 per cent who agreed in 1993.

It should be disturbing to anyone who values the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that four in 10 Canadians agree that “the will of the majority should always prevail, even over the rights of minorities.” But the upside is that fewer Canadians hold to that view than in 2011 (six in 10) or in 2001 (seven in 10).

Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland has given voice to the concern that public anxieties about “the elites” could rattle the western consensus that the rules-based liberal world order needs to be defended. Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper has written a book about the growing trend in populism and how to harness it, from a conservative standpoint, for the public good. Former New Democratic Party leader Ed Broadbent warns that “the elites” are standing in the way of necessary economic and political redistribution. Since the 2015 election of the Liberals’ Justin Trudeau, “the elites” have come up in Parliament in 13 per cent of its sitting days. That’s up from three per cent during Harper’s term in power.

People who bang on about the elites also tend to whinge a great deal about “the mainstream media,” but in Canada, most people aren’t so inclined. The latest annual Edelman Trust Barometer, an opinion survey of 33,000 people in 26 countries, finds that Canadians are not losing faith in the news media, and Canadians show a higher rate of trust in journalism than respondents in just about every other country surveyed.

The Samara Centre defines populism as a style of doing politics and a set of attitudes and beliefs about politics and society. Populist leaders imagine politics as a conflict between two groups, usually “the elites” wielding largely unaccountable power over “the real people.” This can be fatal to democratic institutions, and populists who win elections quickly develop the habit of using people-power as a mere pretext to use the instruments of the state to go after judges, academics, journalists, political adversaries—anyone who stands in their way. And populism is by no means solely a phenomenon of right-wing politics, Michael Morden, research director at the Samara Centre, told me.

The anti-capitalist “left” mobilized hundreds of thousands of people during the 1990s to huge demonstrations against “the elites” of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other anchors of the liberal world order. But popular antipathy to those institutions ended up being harnessed most successfully in the U.S. by Donald Trump.

“Populism has been used to give licence to different kinds of radicalism. I think blame should be apportioned across the spectrum,” Morden said. “If you want to create more racists, then you generate a narrative that there’s more racists in society than there really are.”

Exaggerating the extent of populism is playing with matches, in other words, while populism is playing with fire.

Source: Some say anti-elitist populism is sweeping Canada. Don’t believe them.

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Revealed: new evidence of China’s mission to raze the mosques of Xinjiang

2019/05/08 Leave a comment

Dramatic and reprehensible:

Around this time of the year, the edge of the Taklamakan desert in far western China should be overflowing with people. For decades, every spring thousands of Uighur Muslims would converge on the Imam Asim shrine, a group of buildings and fences surrounding a small mud tomb believed to contain the remains of a holy warrior from the eighth century.

Pilgrims from across the Hotan oasis would come seeking healing, fertility, and absolution, trekking through the sand in the footsteps of those ahead of them. It was one of the largest shrine festivals in the region. People left offerings and tied pieces of cloth to branches, markers of their prayers.

Visiting a sacred shrine three times, it was believed, was as good as completing the hajj, a journey many in underdeveloped southern Xinjiang could not afford.

Before and after images of the Imam Asim Shrine. Credit: Digital Globe/ Planet Labs

But this year, the Imam Asim shrine is empty. Its mosque, khaniqah, a place for Sufi rituals, and other buildings have been torn down, leaving only the tomb. The offerings and flags have disappeared. Pilgrims no longer visit.

It is one of more than two dozen Islamic religious sites that have been partly or completely demolished in Xinjiang since 2016, according to an investigation by the Guardian and open-source journalism site Bellingcat that offers new evidence of large-scale mosque razing in the Chinese territory where rights groups say Muslim minorities suffer severe religious repression.

Using satellite imagery, the Guardian and Bellingcat open-source analyst Nick Waters checked the locations of 100 mosques and shrines identified by former residents, researchers, and crowdsourced mapping tools.

Out of 91 sites analysed, 31 mosques and two major shrines, including the Imam Asim complex and another site, suffered significant structural damage between 2016 and 2018.

Of those, 15 mosques and both shrines appear to have been completely or almost completely razed. The rest of the damaged mosques had gatehouses, domes, and minarets removed.

A further nine locations identified by former Xinjiang residents as mosques, but where buildings did not have obvious indicators of being a mosque such as minarets or domes, also appeared to have been destroyed.

Uprooted, broken, desecrated

In the name of containing religious extremism, China has overseen an intensifying state campaign of mass surveillance and policing of Muslim minorities — many of them Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking group that often have more in common with their Central Asian neighbours than their Han Chinese compatriots. Researchers say as many as 1.5 million Uighurs and other Muslims have been involuntarily sent to internment or re-education camps, claims that Beijing rejects.

Campaigners and researchers believe authorities have bulldozed hundreds, possibly thousands of mosques as part of the campaign. But a lack of records of these sites — many are small village mosques and shrines — difficulties police give journalists and researchers traveling independently in Xinjiang, and widespread surveillance of residents have made it difficult to confirm reports of their destruction.

The locations found by the Guardian and Bellingcat corroborate previous reports as well as signal a new escalation in the current security clampdown: the razing of shrines. While closed years ago, major shrines have not been previously reported as demolished. Researchers say the destruction of shrines that were once sites of mass pilgrimages, a key practice for Uighur Muslims, represent a new form of assault on their culture.

Three-way composite of Jafari Sadiq shrine.
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Three-way composite of Jafari Sadiq shrine. Photograph: Planet Labs

“The images of Imam Asim in ruins are quite shocking. For the more devoted pilgrims, they would be heartbreaking,” said Rian Thum, a historian of Islamat the University of Nottingham.

Before the crackdown, pilgrims also trekked 70km into the desert to reach the Jafari Sadiq shrine, honouring Jafari Sadiq, a holy warrior whose spirit was believed to have travelled to Xinjiang to help bring Islam to the region. The tomb, on a precipice in the desert, appears to have been torn down in March 2018. Buildings for housing the pilgrims in a nearby complex are also gone, according to satellite imagery captured this month.

Before and after imagery of the Jafari Sadiq shrine. L-R Dec 10 2013, April 20, 2019.
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Before and after imagery of the Jafari Sadiq shrine. L-R Dec 10 2013, April 20, 2019. Photograph: Google Earth/ Planet Labs

“Nothing could say more clearly to the Uighurs that the Chinese state wants to uproot their culture and break their connection to the land than the desecration of their ancestors’ graves, the sacred shrines that are the landmarks of Uighur history,” said Thum.

‘When they grow up, this will be foreign to them’

The Kargilik mosque, at the centre of the old town of Kargilik in southern Xinjiang, was the largest mosque in the area. People from various villages gathered there every week. Visitors remember its tall towers, impressive entryway, and flowers and trees that formed an indoor garden.

The mosque, previously identified by online activist Shawn Zhang, appears to have been almost completely razed at some point in 2018, with its gatehouse and other buildings removed, according to satellite images analysed by the Guardian and Bellingcat.

Three locals, staff at nearby restaurants and a hotel, told the Guardian that the mosque had been torn down within the last half year. “It is gone. It was the biggest in Kargilik,” one restaurant worker said.

Another major community mosque, the Yutian Aitika mosque near Hotan, appears to have been removed in March of last year. As the largest in its district, locals would gather here on Islamic festivals. The mosque’s history dates back to 1200.

Despite being included on a list of national historical and cultural sites, its gatehouse and other buildings were removed in late 2018, according to satellite images analysed by Zhang and confirmed by Waters. The demolished buildings were likely structures that had been renovated in the 1990s.

Two local residents who worked near the mosque, the owner of a hotel and a restaurant employee, told the Guardian the mosque had been torn down. One resident said she had heard the mosque would be rebuilt but smaller, to make room for new shops.

“Many mosques are gone. In the past, in every village like in Yutian county would have had one,” said a Han Chinese restaurant owner in Yutian, who estimated that as much as 80% had been torn down.

“Before, mosques were places for Muslims to pray, have social gatherings. In recent years, they were all cancelled. It’s not only in Yutian, but the whole Hotan area, It’s all the same … it’s all been corrected,” he said.

Activists say the destruction of these historical sites is a way to assimilate the next generation of Uighurs. According to former residents, most Uighurs in Xinjiang had already stopped going to mosques, which are often equipped with surveillance systems. Most require visitors to register their IDs. Mass shrine festivals like the one at Imam Asim had been stopped for years.

Removing the structures, critics said, would make it harder for young Uighurs growing up in China to remember their distinctive background.

“If the current generation, you take away their parents and on the other hand you destroy the cultural heritage that reminds them of their origin … when they grow up, this will be foreign to them,” said a former resident of Hotan, referring to the number of Uighurs believed detained in camps, many of them separated from their families for months, sometimes years.

“Mosques being torn down is one of the few things we can see physically. What other things are happening that are hidden, that we don’t know about? That is what is scary,” he said.

The ‘sinicisation’ of Islam

China denies allegations it targets Muslim minorities, constrains their religious and cultural practices, or sends them to re-education camps. In response to questions about razed mosques, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said he was “not aware of the situation mentioned”.

“China practices freedom of religion and firmly opposes and combats religious extremist thought… There are more than 20 million Muslims and more than 35,000 mosques in China. The vast majority of believers can freely engage in religious activities according to the law,” he said in a faxed statement to the Guardian.

Demolished mosque in the old town of Kashgar, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China.
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A demolished mosque in the old town of Kashgar, Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region, China. Photograph: Eric Lafforgue/Art in All of Us/Corbis via Getty Images

But Beijing is open about its goal of “sinicising” religions like Islam and Christianity to better fit China’s “national conditions”. In January, China passed a five-year plan to “guide Islam to be compatible with socialism”. In a speech in late March, party secretary Chen Quanguo who has overseen the crackdown since 2016 said the government in Xinjiang must “improve the conditions of religious places to guide “religion and socialism to adapt to each other”.

Removing Islamic buildings or features is one way of doing that, according to researchers.

“The Islamic architecture of Xinjiang, closely related to Indian and Central Asian styles, puts on public display the region’s links to the wider Islamic world,” said David Brophy, a historian of Xinjiang at the University of Sydney. “Destroying this architecture serves to smooth the path for efforts to shape a new ‘sinicised’ Uighur Islam.”

Experts say the razing of religious sites marks a return to extreme practices not seen since the Cultural Revolution when mosques and shrines were burned, or in the 1950s when major shrines were turned into museums as a way to desacralise them.

Today, officials describe any changes to mosques as an effort to “improve” them. In Xinjiang, various policies to update the mosques include adding electricity, roads, news broadcasts, radios and televisions, “cultural bookstores,” and toilets. Another includes equipping mosques with computers, air conditioning units, and lockers.

“That is code to allow them to demolish places that they deem to be in the way of progress or unsafe, to progressively yet steadily try to eradicate many of the places of worship for Uighurs and Muslim minorities,” said James Leibold, an associate professor at La Trobe University focusing on ethnic relations.

Critics say authorities are trying to remove even the history of the shrines. Rahile Dawut, a prominent Uighur academic who documented shrines across Xinjiang, disappeared in 2017. Her former colleagues and relatives believe she has been detained because of her work preserving Uighur traditions.

Dawut said in an interview in 2012: “If one were to remove these … shrines, the Uighur people would lose contact with earth. They would no longer have a personal, cultural, and spiritual history. After a few years we would not have a memory of why we live here or where we belong.”

Source: Revealed: new evidence of China’s mission to raze the mosques of Xinjiang

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