AI must get smart about the public good: Renzetti

2019/05/03 Leave a comment

Good column on the risks and the need for policy oversight, regulation and greater transparency on the criteria used by algorithms and the results of their decisions:

Let’s say you’ve submitted your résumé to Company X, hoping that all the work you’ve done on your cover letter will catch the eye of a discriminating member of the recruiting group. Perhaps your little joke about playing softball on the company team might even make you stand out from the pack.

But what if there is no recruiting group? No human one, that is. What if your CV is scanned by a computer algorithm, and that algorithm tosses out your résumé because it doesn’t like the fact that you played on a women’s softball team in university?

This, unfortunately, is not tomorrow’s dystopia; it’s today’s reality. A Reuters investigation last year revealed that Amazon’s planned résumé-vetting service was discounting applications that mentioned the word “women” or “women’s.” Why? Because the algorithm had been fed biased data. “Amazon’s computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in résumé submitted to the company over a 10-year period,” Reuters reported. “Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry. In effect, Amazon’s system taught itself that male candidates were preferable.”

Amazon scrapped that software, but bias in machine learning still exists in ways that will affect people every day, and are largely invisible. Some of those baked-in biases are outlined in a new report, Discriminating Systems: Gender, Race and Power in AI, from the AI Now Institute at New York University. They include facial-recognition software used by Uber that fails to recognize trans drivers; sentencing algorithms biased against black defendants; health-management systems that allocate resources to wealthier patients; chatbots that begin to spout racist and sexist language once they’re launched.

These biases matter because, as systems become more automated, they’ll affect all aspects of our lives, from education to transportation to health care. Right now, there’s little oversight into how and when these systems are deployed – and, crucially, who develops them.

The current state of women’s employment in AI fields is “dire,” the report warns – and it’s even worse for black and Latino people, whose employment in major tech companies is in the low single digits. The report cites the experience of one researcher, Timnit Gebru, who attended a machine-learning conference in 2016 and discovered she was one of only six black delegates – out of 8,500 participants.

Diversity among researchers and academics in the AI field is only one problem. As the AI Now report explains, much of the research that will ultimately transform our world is being conducted by a small, powerful group of companies operating under a cloak of proprietary secrecy, with little oversight or consideration outside of getting products to market quickly.

There’s reason to question whether some technologies – around surveillance, for example – should ever be rolled out at all. Yet, there’s very little discussion – at least not yet – about what role the public good should play in the development of these technologies. Expediency and profit are the only goalposts.

We should be having more of the types of public discussions that Yuval Noah Harari, a bestselling historian and philosopher, recently conducted with Fei-Fei Li, the co-director of Stanford University’s newly launched Human-Centred AI Institute. We need to start thinking differently, Dr. Harari said, when we build the tools that will shape the future: “What could be the cultural or political implications of what we’re building? It shouldn’t be a kind of afterthought that you create this neat technical gadget, it goes into the world, something bad happens and then you start thinking, ‘Oh, we didn’t see this one coming. What do we do now?’ “

In other words, it’s nearly impossible to catch the horse that’s bolted from the barn. Dr. Harari proposed a couple of solutions: One, people should engage in deep self-study so that algorithms don’t make better decisions for us than we do, and two, ethics should be a fundamental part of creating AI tools, which means actually putting ethics onto the curriculum for developers and engineers (I’m not sure which of these is going to be more difficult.)

Dr. Li, who said she “wake[s] up every day worried about the diversity, inclusion issue in AI,” echoed those thoughts. To perform better, she said, algorithms need to be developed by people with different backgrounds, with input from historians and philosophers, legal scholars and psychologists. Otherwise, they’ll end up replicating the narrow world view of the tiny group that created them.

The time to have these conversations is now, because the future is here, and it’s everywhere.

Source: AI must get smart about the public good: Elizabeth Renzetti

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , ,

A Political Scientist Defends White Identity Politics: Intv with Eric Kaufman

2019/05/03 Leave a comment

Good long interview with Kaufman who appears to be the most recent variation of multiculturalism critics. What is always interesting is that concern over immigration tends to be higher in areas where immigration is lowest, tending to undermine his main thesis. His denial of systemic barriers and patterns is also revealing.

But like others, I also agree with his call for lowering the tone and realizing that the issues are not black and white and the need to have a more open and respectful discussion of immigration and related issues, and reduced recourse to labels to shut down conversations (even if ironically, his work is being cited or used by some to that end):

In his new book, “Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities,” Eric Kaufmann—a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London—examines the response of many white people in the West to the increasing racial diversity of their countries. “Today’s populist earthquake has little to do with economics,” Kaufmann writes, instead attributing that earthquake to cultural and racial factors. But, unlike many of the scholars who have attributed events such as Brexit and Donald Trump’s election to racial grievances, Kaufmann is opposed to what he calls the “anti-white ideology of the cultural left.” He believes that “ethnic majorities need a future, and civic nationalism can’t offer it.”

For all these reasons, Kaufmann—whose book has been hailed by intellectuals such as Andrew Sullivan and Tyler Cowen—believes that politicians must accept and even accommodate white grievances. “If politics in the West is ever to return to normal rather than becoming even more polarized, white interests will need to be discussed,” he writes. “In an era of unprecedented white demographic decline it is absolutely vital for it to have a democratic outlet.” Kaufmann says that “politicians should set [immigration] levels that respect the cultural comfort zone of the median voter,” and he is open to the possibility of long-term refugee camps and a border wall to placate native majorities. He also thinks that liberals should be more tolerant of those who openly express pride in their whiteness.

I recently spoke by phone with Kaufmann. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether structural racism still exists in the U.S., whether the left is too reliant on racial explanations for political trends, and whether there are double standards when it comes to evaluating the behavior of ethnic majorities.

You call whiteness “an ethnicity like any other.” What is whiteness, in your definition?

The term “white” can refer to an ethnic majority group like white American, or it can refer to a racial category, which is a piece of the color spectrum or the phenotype spectrum. Those two are pretty aligned right now. They’re not perfectly aligned, but they weren’t very aligned in the past. In the future, I don’t think they’ll be that aligned, either.

Why?

I think that the ethnic majority will ultimately become transracial or beige, to use Michael Lind’s terminology, simply because of the admixture of non-racially white groups into that group, who I’m suggesting will identify still with the ethnic majority.

This is the thesis of your book. Can you explain more what the title means?

“Whiteshift” has two meanings. One is a more immediate meaning relevant to our lifetime, which is the decline of white ethnic majorities before they blur and expand to absorb those of mixed race. They’re in decline, which creates the conditions, I would argue, for the rise of right-wing populism and polarization. Then the second meaning of whiteshift is this longer-term one. You’re going to get this very rapidly rising mixed-race population that will become the majority and will take over the consciousness, memories, and myths of that current ethnic majority.

Sometimes you talk about race or “racial self-interest” among whites. So you’re using it as both an ethnicity and a race in some sense, correct?

I guess what I’m getting at there is the ethnic self-interest of the majority. Now, on ethnicity, that’s to do with a community that believes itself to be of shared ancestry, but note that you just have to share one lineage. There can be other lineages in there that differ between the members, but they focus on the common one. Like the Jews, for example, have different DNA in them.

Most Italian people and most Irish people are considered white in America at this point. How would something like that operate?

These groups have intermarried a lot, so much so that almost everyone is mixed. There’s also this European supra-ethnic, if you like, level.

You write, “If politics in the West is ever to return to normal rather than becoming even more polarized, white interests will need to be discussed. I realize this is very controversial for left-modernists. Yet not only is white group self-interest legitimate, but I maintain that in an era of unprecedented white demographic decline it is absolutely vital for it to have a democratic outlet.” Can you say a little bit more about what specifically you’re arguing for?

Yes. Part of this comes from a view that what’s ultimately behind the rise of right-wing populism are these ethnic-majority grievances, particularly around their decline, and that ultimately this is about nostalgia and attachment to a way of life or to a particular traditional ethnic composition of a nation. Wanting for that not to erode too quickly is the motivation. I think the survey data show that it’s much more about that than about material things, for example, or even fears. It’s about attachment to one’s own group rather than hatred of other groups. This is an important distinction. The survey data from the American National Elections Study show that whites who feel very warmly toward whites are not any more cold toward, say, African-Americans, than whites who aren’t very warm toward whites.

When you say that “white interests” will need to be discussed in politics, I presume you acknowledge that the interests of white people are generally taken into account as much as any group, if not more than other groups. Do you mean explicitly discussed?

There should be an equal treatment of groups in the cultural sphere. There’s no question whites are advantaged economically, politically. I’m not going to dispute that. But in the cultural sphere, on immigration, the group whose numbers have declined, or who experienced a more rapid sense of change and loss due to migration, are the white majority. If, for example, they’re saying, “We would like to have a slower rate of change to enable assimilation to take place,” I think that’s actually a legitimate cultural interest. It doesn’t mean that it should drive policy. I think a moderate group self-interest is fine.

This is seen as toxic, as expressed by a majority group, but when minorities express these interests, that’s seen as quite normal. I think that when it comes to white liberals, there tends to be a double standard, as there is with white conservatives, by the way, when it comes to groups expressing their self-interest.

Are you saying that it is in the “self-interest” of white people to have lower immigration rates, or are you saying that if white people perceive that it’s in their interest, they should be able to express that without being shamed for being racist? Or both?

I’m saying that for the conservative members of the white majority who are attached to their group and its historic presence, I think that sense of loss and wanting to slow down that sense of loss is an understandable motivation. The problem is when you bar that from the discussion. It then gets sublimated and expressed in what I think actually are more negative ways, when it comes to racism. I think it’s not very different from African-Americans in Harlem not wanting Harlem to lose its African-American character. It’s a similar cultural loss-protection argument, which is actually not that different from wanting to preserve historic buildings or ways of life. The problem is that then they go toward fear of criminals and terrorism, and immigrants putting pressure on services, and all the things which there’s very little evidence for, and I think are more negative because they actually stigmatize an out-group, which is closer to the definition of racism than simply being attached to one’s own group. Not that that doesn’t carry some risks as well, but I think that it’s more problematic to suppress it for the majority and not for minorities. I think that’s creating a quite negative situation.

You write that “diversity falls flat for many because we’re not all wired the same way.” What do you mean by “wired”?

This gets at political-psychology literature on authoritarianism and conservatism, which shows that between a third and a half of people have a hereditary disposition toward preferring order and security to novelty and change. What that means is that you’ve got members of both the majority and minorities who have that more conservative, order-seeking disposition. The problem we’re in is that when multiculturalism enjoins the majority to be individualistic and post-ethnic, and not to be attached to its groups, and minorities conversely to be attached to their groups, this doesn’t really fit. If you are wired in the conservative, order-seeking member of a majority psychologically, that’s not going to work for you. This is really where I think populism is coming from.

It seems like you’re making two arguments. One is that people are different from one another. The other is that the group whom you call in your book “left modernists,” in the way they talk about race on college campuses, on social media, are driving white people mad, and making them feel more besieged, and making them even more nationalist than they otherwise would be, or pushing them into that corner. Would that be a fair way to say it?

Left modernism has two sides to it. One is a banal, quiet side, which is political correctness—there are things that you do which are polite and things you don’t say because they’re impolite. Then it has this louder campus-antics stuff. I actually think that louder stuff on campus is less important. I mean, it’s more important in the U.S. because of the right-wing media picking up on it and circulating it, but I would say it’s that quieter political correctness which ultimately is more important in society as a whole.

For example, if the definition of racism comes to include campaigning to reduce immigration, then mainstream politicians aren’t going to be able to touch that issue without being attacked in the media or by their own parties. I use the analogy of the black market, where, if the mainstream market won’t supply a political good, the black market will step in. On the immigration front, for example, Donald Trump was the black marketeer who, because of the strictures on what is deemed acceptable to campaign on, because anti-immigration was seen as kind of racist, had a marketplace that he could fill.

Trump arose after eight years of the Obama Administration, which deported more people than any previous Administration, and during a time when immigration rates had actually been falling from the Clinton and Bush Administrations. At the same time that Obama was pushing for a deal on comprehensive immigration reform, he was also beefing up border security. What makes you think that the conversation was such that people had no choice but to turn to Donald Trump?

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. By the way, Obama was much tougher on immigration than the numbers. If you look at what was going on from about the mid-two-thousands, in terms of grassroots congressional activism, and even the local and anti-immigration ordinances that were popping up from that period, this issue was gaining a higher profile then. Actually, if you looked at Republicans—if you were asking, “What’s the most important issue facing the country?”—immigration was never more than a few percentage points from the time our records start, in the nineteen-thirties to the nineteen-nineties. And then, in about 2014, with the Central American mothers and children, the issue spikes up to fifteen per cent of Republicans saying that’s the most important issue facing the country, and stays up. What’s really important, what’s really unprecedented, is this issue has a profile from 2014, with about ten to fifteen per cent of Republicans saying that’s their No. 1 issue.

If you look at Gallup polls of how people feel about immigration, on the whole, the country is actually more pro-immigration than it’s been in the past. But you would say that there’s this small chunk of the Republican Party that is more passionate about it than they’ve ever been, and so that would explain that discrepancy. Is that right?

Right. The key is really in the primaries. What explains voting for Trump in the primaries? If you look at the 2016 American National Election Studies pilot survey, from January, it’s very clear that views on immigration are the No. 1 discriminator between, say, Trump and a voter for [Ted] Cruz or [John] Kasich or anyone else.

I guess the question is why that’s happening. You could say, “Well, Republicans are getting more conservative for various reasons.” You could say, “The Republican Party as an institution is cracking, and so these more populist forces from below are rising up.” You could say, “Conservative media and its increasing anti-immigration stance has an increasing hold on voters.” It seems like your focus is more on the fact that there are people on the left who sometimes say that people are racist, and that’s what’s responsible for it.

No. Well, O.K. That is important only because it prevents a mainstream Republican candidate, I think, from campaigning on that issue and making it a centerpiece of their campaign, rather than a maverick who says all kinds of nasty things about Mexicans and Muslims. If you actually had a more measured individual who said, “We’re going to take this more seriously, even build a wall, perhaps,” that would have taken the real estate, I think, where Trump emerged.

We’ve had fascist and authoritarian leaders all throughout history. We have them now in Brazil and India, and Israel, Turkey, and China are trending that way. I’m trying to understand why, in the U.S. and Europe in 2019, we should believe that there’s some specific reason having to do with the cultural left’s hold on power or white decline.

It’s not the cultural left’s hold on power. Really, what it is is the correlation at the level of the individual in survey data between views on immigration and how high you prioritize immigration issues. It’s been by far the strongest thing predicting voting for the populist right. That’s the core, if you like, of why it’s centrally about immigration, and that class and economic stuff is much, much weaker in all these models.

Now, the question about the left: this is really about the supply issue and why mainstream parties weren’t supplying the rhetoric or policies on immigration that so fire up these voters. I think that, to get there, you do need to explain the normative strictures that were there.

You write in the book, “Arguments based on critical race theory, history or income differences do not constitute rigorous evidence of a structure of white privilege. Too often proponents make unfalsifiable claims which intimate that white privilege is engraved into the soul of society.” It seems like you think the left has collectively lost its mind a bit about identifying things as racist. Is that fair?

The left is a broad label. I don’t mean the center-left. I think the radical left is where critical race theory is. I don’t think someone like Barack Obama or someone in the center-left has lost their mind, but I think if you look at the academic-critical race theory, yeah. It’s not evidence-driven. It’s not falsifiable. Constructs like power are not measurable. Something like structural racism, I think that’s certainly a possibility, but I think structures are measurable.

You don’t think structural racism exists? You think it’s a possibility?

I would need to see evidence of these structures. For example, if you have separate bathrooms, if you have laws on the books, if you have minutes of meetings of people saying, “We should put the hospital in this area because it’s a white area,” something like that.

What about red-lining policies?

Yeah, these structures were certainly there. I don’t deny that they were there in the past, but I think, again, a lot of this was individual-level racism. When African-Americans tried to move into white neighborhoods in Philadelphia, they had their windows broken. They were intimidated out of the areas. This is very much at the level of individuals. Similarly, in racist police departments, the government was actually trying to integrate, to solve this issue. It was the individuals in these communities who were resisting that.

So with things like schools still being segregated, or racial and ethnic minorities receiving lower-quality health care, or minority job applicants being denied more often, you’re saying this is not coming from the government, it’s coming from individual people, and so the racism is not structural?

Yeah. For example, a lot of those individual measures, like I don’t want my kid marrying an African-American, or I’m against interracial marriage, or I don’t want a black boss, in the survey data, it’s very low now. It’s not perfect. It will take a little bit more time before we get rid of it entirely.

Just a bit, yeah.

“Structure” is a word that’s sometimes chucked out there. O.K., people are not individually racist anymore, but the structures are there. Well, which structures? I can be convinced. If you can’t get insurance if you live in an area even though other indicators are identical to another area, and the only difference is the ethnic composition, then that’s an argument. It could just be you’ve got a stingy government, and people don’t want to be taxed to pay for these services.

Also the fact that these structures existed for a very long time.

Right. That’s often the argument. People will go back to the history, and I say, “Yeah, and there were anti-Semitic structures in Europe, and in the U.S., there were anti-Catholic structures, and no one would talk about them today, because they’re not existing anymore.” If something existed in the past, there are at least a couple of possibilities: No. 1, it could still exist. No. 2, it could not exist, or, No. 3, even the reverse could exist. Those are three hypotheses that need to be tested to see which one holds up.

But you were aware of all these studies about trying to get jobs, quality of health care, how much schools are still segregated?

Right. The question with school segregation is, again, how much is that is down to an individual decision about where to live. It’s not people having their windows broken and kept out of white areas. I think that I would see this as individual choices about where to live, and, yes, there is, I’m sure, white avoidance of diverse areas and we know that exists, but this is a sort of ethnic preference. It’s not clear to me that that is the same as, you know, “separate but equal.”

You write, “The underlying premise is that whites are incurable oppressors.” This comes in a discussion about the opinions of the cultural left. But your book is arguing that if politicians don’t talk about this in just the right way, white people are going to start voting for fascists. So it seems like you’re also saying the racism is pretty damn close to the surface. Or am I missing something?

No, no, I’m not saying that they’re going to suddenly hate minorities, or going to be racist.

They will just vote for people who do?

Yeah, exactly, they may vote for people who are noxious or say nasty things about minorities, like Donald Trump. Yeah, that could be a negative effect. Whereas if a mainstream, civilized individual took on these concerns, and said, “You can’t have everything you want; no one can have everything they want; you will get part of what you want”—I think that would be a better way of going about it. People would feel, “O.K., I am not such a bad person; I have been listened to.”

But to essentially not have this group be allowed to express interests while other groups are, in a situation where this group is shrinking, I don’t think this is a sustainable situation. There are identity politics on all sides, but I would like to see it be a moderate form where each group goes for less than what it really wants and accepts a compromise. Whereas I sometimes find that on the radical left they are encouraging minority groups to go for a maximal group interest.

It seems like we have talked about the possible effects of hundreds of years of slavery and segregation continuing to manifest themselves today, and you seemed open to that possibility but also skeptical of it. And we have also talked about politicians in the West not being sympathetic enough to white interests in some of their rhetoric and how that could lead to people voting for authoritarians. It feels like you are thinking about cause and effect in a much more forgiving way in one case than the other one. Or do you think I am being unfair?

No, no, I would like all of these claims to be evidence-based, first of all. Are groups being treated equally? I think the reason it is coming across as favoring the majority is that the narrative has been framed in the high culture in so much the other way. It is not the minorities themselves, who are actually more centrist; it is more this white liberal group that has this world view.

You are also making somewhat of a cause-and-effect argument about people talking this way having an effect on the white majority, correct?

What I think has happened is that these norms which arise from the nineteen-sixties—these limits on the boundaries of discourse, the Overtonwindow, the definition of racism—they are linked to a set of ideas that have more recently gone into a quite extreme form of expression on university campuses. I don’t think that form of expression on university campuses is actually the driver, but it is more the strictures on what can be politically debated. It is that that has given space to the populists.

Now, it is also the case in the United States that hostility to political correctness is also a driver of voting for Trump in the polls, especially in the primaries. But I still don’t think it’s as important as these red lines and limits on what can be debated, which, by restricting what can be politically debated, open up space. However, I don’t say that in every case the mainstream parties should go there. Like George Wallace, for example, on segregation.

You do acknowledge “red-lining” about the cultural stuff.

Right.

There was a National Review piece on your book and it offered a bunch of possible restrictions for immigration skeptics to get behind, from awarding green cards based on points such as earnings potential and more border security. But the writer concluded, “I would do all of this long before embarking on a project to normalize openly racial arguments for limiting immigration.” What’s your response to that?

I’m not talking about racial arguments. What I was simply talking about was a desire to keep numbers low to limit the rate of change. So this idea of slowing down a rate of ethno-cultural change is, in my view, not a racist thing to do if it’s motivated by attachment to one’s own. If it’s motivated by hatred of other groups, then it is racist. I don’t deny that some of that exists.

You say in the book that a policy like building the wall is not inherently racist; it’s not like segregation or something. How do we deal with a substantive issue like that when the person pushing to get it on the agenda is clearly using it in a racist way?

Clearly, Trump is the worst person to put forward that argument, because of all the racist things he said. But people might be in favor of a particular Middle East policy because they are anti-Semitic, for example, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the policy itself is the wrong policy.

O.K., but we can all agree that when saying things like money from Jews has some effect on Middle East policy, even if that is objectively true, we need to find careful ways of saying it, because it plays into stereotypes or racial things, right?

Right.

And so it seems to me that with something like the wall, which we have knowledge certainly plays into racial stuff, it’s not so easy to say, “Oh, let’s just talk about that, because you can make an argument for a wall.”

Yeah. I think there’s a couple of problems. One is you’ve got Trump, who’s a problem, but you’ve also got the other side, which, even if it wasn’t Trump and even if they were trying to be measured, I think would probably jump on this and accuse the architect of this of being racist. I think there are risks that come from both of those—the overreach and overpolicing on the left, and also the kind of racism coming out of the right. So I think the object is to be able to talk about immigration policy or immigration rates as calmly as tax rates.

I agree. But I also think that we’re never going to be able to talk about this as calmly as tax rates because, when you’re talking about who gets to stay in the country or doesn’t, or who gets separated from their parents or doesn’t, the idea of talking about it calmly seems much more difficult. We can try it, but it’s very hard.

Right, but I think there is an issue when you have a black/white view of the world where there’s the good and the bad. I think that it should be a shades-of-gray thing about slower, faster, and not so moralized; granted that there are these difficult decisions around. I mean, I don’t think you should be separating kids, but that’s a small number that we’re talking about. The overwhelming debate is really going to be about a wall or E-Verify or other things. So it’s all about kind of lowering the tone and having a more civilized debate, really.

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

We can’t fight what we fail to label correctly: Phil Gurski

2019/05/03 Leave a comment

Agree. Fuzzy wording is not helpful and one can label in an appropriate, focused manner:

If you have never heard the comedy routine ‘The 2,000 year old man” by Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, you are really missing something. The original dates back to 1961 but it is still very, very relevant and very, very funny.

In one part, Mel Brooks, playing the 2,000 year-old man, says that WWII lasted longer than it should have and that was all Winston Churchill’s fault. Here’s what Mr. Brooks’ character had to say about that: “‘Ve must conquer da Narjies!’ Now, we were fighting and killing Nazis. We all left and went looking for Narjies!” Or another way to put it is that Churchill extended the war because he told everyone to defeat “the Nar-zis” and the troops stopped fighting the Germans and started looking for Narzis.

Sometimes I wonder if Public Safety Canada would be better run by Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner (full disclosure: I worked as a senior policy advisor there, on secondment at CSIS, from October 2013 until my retirement from the civil service in April 2015). The department cannot seem to get the annual 2018 Terrorist Threat to Canada public report right. It has been changed at least twice since it came out and I am not so sure that more changes are not forthcoming.

What, then, has changed? Well, nothing more crucial than the way the department has chosen to describe the terrorist threat to Canada. Under pressure from certain groups – first Canadian Sikhs then Canadian Muslims (gee, is an election coming up perhaps?) – the phrases ‘Sikh extremism’, ‘Sunni Islamist extremism’ and ‘Shia extremism’ have been excised and replaced by anodyne phrases that are only partially reflective of the actual threat. In their place are ‘ extremists who support violent means to establish an independent state within India’ and ‘individuals or groups who are inspired by violent ideologies and terrorist groups, such as Daesh or al-Qaida (AQ).’

Why the change? Clearly, in order not to offend Canadian Sikhs and Muslims by lumping them together with the very small number of their fellow co-religionists who have opted to use violence to get what they want, and use religion to justify their actions. What is the harm in that?

A lot as it turns out. These phrases are highly inaccurate both for what they say and what they fail to say. Let’s start with ‘extremists who support violent means to establish an independent state within India.’ What is wrong with that? To put it bluntly, they are all Sikhs – nary a Jew or a Seventh-Day Adventist among them. So, calling them ‘Sikh extremists’ is correct. Note that by doing so there is no intent, explicit or implicit, that all Sikh Canadians support this use of violence.

What about ‘individuals or groups who are inspired by violent ideologies and terrorist groups, such as Daesh or al-Qaida (AQ)?’ Aside from the ridiculous insistence on ‘Daesh’ rather than Islamic State (Minister Goodale: Daesh is Arabic for ‘Islamic State’ by the way), this phrase is only partially accurate. I know from my days at CSIS that yes some Canadians are inspired by these terrorist groups but there is also a huge swathe that radicalise to violence in the name of greater Sunni Islamist extremist thought (Shia Islamist extremists are a different beast altogether) that has little or nothing to do with AQ or IS or any other terrorist group. Oh and guess what else? They are all Muslims – nary a Buddhist or an animist among them. Again, using the term ‘Sunni Islamist extremism’, which is what we called it when I was at CSIS, does not mean all Canadian Muslims are terrorists.

To my mind this is just political correctness and electioneering gone mad. Just as ‘trigger warnings’ seem to be everywhere these days, it seems that if any group of 3-5 Canadians say they are offended at something the government caves to their demands.

The inability to call a threat what it is makes it harder to identify and neutralise it. I sure hope that my former colleagues at CSIS are not swallowing this political pablum. And I sure hope that Public Safety doesn’t make more changes to the Public Terrorist Threat Report or before you know it we’ll all be chasing neo-Narzis while the real far right neo-Nazis run free.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with , , ,

Employment Equity in the Public Service of Canada for Fiscal Year 2017 to 2018

2019/05/02 Leave a comment

My updated charts reflecting the latest government EE report. Most noteworthy is the small downtick in visible minority and Indigenous executive numbers.

The report does not provide an explanation for this decline. This may be due in part to the greater use of non-advertised processes (see Non-advertised appointments on the rise in the public service, PSC data show).

I am awaiting for the release of  PSC data contrasting advertised/non-advertised/unknown staffing processes for 2018-19 to ascertain whether two-year data suggesting this impact of the new appointment policy is confirmed with three years data:

Source:  Annual Report Publication

Filed under employment equity, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

The Hollywood Diversity Officer’s Dilemma: “Everybody’s in a Different Place”

2019/05/02 Leave a comment

Some change:

The industry has moved quickly to hire and elevate executives focused on diversifying teams and content — in a changing landscape, the complex role “is tiring, but it’s rewarding.”

When DreamWorks Animation executives wanted a fresh perspective on character designs for one of their TV shows recently, they sent the illustrations to Janine Jones-Clark, senior vp of parent Universal’s global talent development and inclusion department. “They were creating an African American character,” Jones-Clark recalls. “My suggestion had to do with authenticity in hairstyle and texture.”

Her note is one of the small ways in which Jones-Clark — and others in Hollywood with the word “diversity,” “inclusion” or “multicultural” in their job title — are increasingly making an impact on not only who their companies hire but also the content they create. Chief diversity officer (CDO) is a relatively new job title; 47 percent of companies in the S&P 500 index have a CDO or equivalent, and 63 percent of those have been appointed or promoted to the role in the past three years, according to a recent study by executive search firm Russell Reynolds Associates. It’s a job with growing prominence in a Hollywood rocked by such social movements as #MeToo and Time’s Up, not to mention evolving audience demographics, and it’s one that requires a unique kind of emotional ambidexterity. Publicly, CDOs cheer on their companies’ progress and tout their inclusion programs, while privately they must nudge the most powerful people inside their organizations toward uncomfortable conversations about workforce and creative decisions.

“In any organization, everybody is in a different place when it comes to inclusion, and you have to meet people where they are,” says Julie Ann Crommett, vp multicultural audience engagement at Disney. “You build trust with a leader or employee that you are a safe person to have a conversation with. Then you can get on the real-real and hear something that they might not express in a wider room. It’s tiring, but it’s rewarding.”

The role has evolved, says Tina Shah Paikeday, one of the Russell Reynolds study’s authors and leader of the firm’s global diversity and consulting services practice. “Historically there was a focus on compliance [with federal laws],” she explains. “But today the successful CDO is able to chip away at the problem, to use data to tell the narrative within an organization.”

CDOs rely on a bag of tricks to get their perspectives across. Tiffany Smith Anoa’i, executive vp entertainment diversity, inclusion and communications at CBS Entertainment, has given dozens of her colleagues copies of the book The Hidden Brain, a data-driven exploration of unconscious bias by Shankar Vedantam. Once a publicist at CBS, Smith Anoa’i pitched the idea of her current role to former CBS executive Nina Tassler with a PowerPoint presentation featuring data on who’s watching TV and who’s buying the products advertised. “At the end of my pitch, Nina said, ‘We would be crazy not to make his happen.’ ”

There are triumphs in the job — Crommett points to Disney’s hiring of more women directors and directors of color, Jones-Clark to Universal’s creation of a program for female composers, one of the moviemaking roles in which women are especially scarce. But there can be disappointments, particularly, CDOs say quietly, when virtually the only people of color in a company are those working in the diversity and inclusion departments.

Whitney Davis, who recently wrote for Variety about her decision to leave a diversity-focused role at CBS, says she grew tired of fighting what felt like a losing battle, particularly when inclusion initiatives discovered talent like Tiffany Haddish, KiKi Layne, Kate McKinnon and Hasan Minhaj, but the company ultimately did not hire them. “It became taxing,” Davis says. “I was working to try to introduce my colleagues to these creatives and they weren’t getting jobs at CBS. I started to question my taste. And then I’d see them go to other networks and be very successful.” Davis sees the value of CDOs’ efforts. At CBS, for example, two of last fall’s new scripted series, God Friended Me and Magnum P.I., feature people of color in the lead roles. “I can’t imagine how far back we’d be without inclusion and diversity departments,” she adds. “But just having people in these departments, that’s not cutting it. Not if your board isn’t inclusive. Not if the people in power aren’t inclusive. If that’s the case, what’s the point?”

Source: The Hollywood Diversity Officer’s Dilemma: “Everybody’s in a Different Place”

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With lives at stake, Canada’s misguided vision of China demands a careful reboot: David Mulroney

2019/05/02 Leave a comment

Another good column by Mulroney. His reference to the naiveté of diaspora politics, highlighted, particularly relevant given recent instances of Chinese government activity in Canada (e.g., Student groups call for Ottawa to investigate alleged interference by Chinese officials on Canadian campuses):

Canada’s primary foreign-policy challenge with China has been clear for months now. We have to secure the freedom of detained Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, and save the lives of fellow Canadians Robert Schellenberg and Fan Wei, who face death sentences from a murky Chinese legal system that takes instruction from the Chinese state. Our message to allies is clear, too: we all have a stake in pushing back against a China that uses hostage diplomacy, economic blackmail and even the threat of execution to achieve its objectives.

But there’s another equally challenging China task on the horizon. We need to start thinking about what we’ve learned from this terrible episode, and how it should shape our future relationship with China.

We’re not very good at this. The natural inclination of every bureaucracy in times of crisis is to restore the status quo ante. This happens for a variety of reasons, among them the fact that reviving an old strategy is a lot easier than thinking up a new one. But we’re also still in the grips of a misguided vision of China, one especially dear to the Canadian governing and business classes, that naively embraces almost everything that Beijing has on offer.

The current government refers to this as “comprehensive engagement,” something former ambassador John McCallum rendered more descriptively for Chinese audiences with the phrase geng duo, meaning “even more.” Just about any idea was worth considering, was the implication – as long as it lived up to our Olympian ambitions.

Few former diplomats, including this one, can claim to have entirely resisted the geng duo impulse to substitute promotion for policy. But given the undeniable evidence of China’s hostility to core Canadian interests, starting with the safety of our citizens, we urgently need to reconsider our approach.

There is no shutting the door to China, which is increasingly central to our prosperity and to solving threats to the environment, global health and food safety. But we will have to be much more thoughtful about how we do this, moving from comprehensive engagement to something smarter and more tailored to our objectives and vulnerabilities.

The days of indiscriminately encouraging China-bound travel and pumping Canadian delegations into China, a state that capriciously detains foreigners, are over. We should start by skipping events dedicated to China’s boundless appetite for international self-promotion or the delusion that China is a democracy in the making.

We also need to think carefully about trade and investment promotion, particularly in sectors like canola, where China’s immense demand gives it leverage over us. We need to work even harder at finding new markets, and doing more processing here in Canada to add value to what we sell. China seems to find economic blackmail easiest with commodities.

It’s also time to re-examine the received wisdom that shapes our China strategy, purging it of a sort of malware encouraged by China to delude the naive. This includes such fictions as the idea that China is inherently peaceful and has no territorial ambitions, that it abides by a policy of non-interference in other countries, that trade is a favour it bestows on friendly nations, and that access to its leaders is an end and reward in itself.

The idea that our China policy tends to be highly corrupted by these falsehoods is proven by our enduring gullibility on two important counts. The first is the idea that Canadians of Chinese origin are something of a shared bilateral resource, and that members of this community have a responsibility to help their fellow citizens better understand China. This fits hand-in-glove with the Canadian penchant for diaspora politics, and opens the door to Chinese interference.

The second powerful myth is that China is so uniquely sensitive that, no matter what it does, any response other than abject silence is hurtful and dangerously counterproductive. This has contributed to persistent Canadian passivity in the face of outrageous behaviour.

Getting China right will be particularly difficult for a Liberal government that has, to put it charitably, struggled with foreign policy. The government approaches the world beyond our borders with the inexplicable conviction that other countries are either as progressive as Liberal voters or aspire to be. This is wrong, and dangerously so.

We simply can’t postpone a rethink of our approach to China, and we must finally be open to the idea that, when it comes to engaging Beijing, smarter is better than comprehensive – and less is almost certainly better than more.

Source: With lives at stake, Canada’s misguided vision of China demands a careful reboot David Mulroney May 1, 2019     

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Roger Scruton is a friend, not a foe, of Islam

2019/05/02 Leave a comment

Ed Husain on the recent and less recent controversies regarding Scruton (Government sacks Roger Scruton after remarks about Soros and Islamophobia):

I am not a right-winger. I am ashamed to say that I discovered Sir Roger Scruton only four years ago when an argument in a Washington DC think-tank led to a search for contemporary philosophers who took a long view of civilisation, history, ideas, and implications of philosophy. 

It happened when I was an advisor to Tony Blair and visited Washington DC for a think-tank meeting representing Tony. There, left-wing Muslim activists, who put their community’s interests before their country, accused me of being a ‘neoconservative’ because I argued that the national security of our countries and peoples mattered more than any Muslim community identity. A safer country, logically, meant a safer Muslim community.

The attacks from them kept coming that I was a ‘neo-con’. To better understand what was really meant by ‘neo-con’, I started to read Leo Strauss, the so-called founder of neo-conservatism. This German Jewish philosopher worked wonders for my growing appreciation and learning of how the West was built on the ideals of Athens and Jerusalem; his own struggles as a Jew with the modern West were instructive for me.

I discovered, through Strauss, the great Muslim philosophers, particularly al-Farabi (d.950) and Avicenna (1037). I was hooked. Here were renowned Muslim luminaries who honoured Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and merged early Islam with the classical West. Knowledge was not limited to the Quran or the Bible, but came from the great Greek pagans too.

This encounter and subsequent discovery drew me to seek out Sir Roger as the supervisor for my doctoral research for six reasons.

First, he is fair to the contributions made by Muslim philosophers to the West. He is not dismissive of God and divinity, as is fashionable among too many Nietzschean academics. In his seminal A Short History of Modern Philosophy he writes how al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes ‘all of them Muslims’ ‘systematised and adapted’ Aristotelian thought. Where others sought to downplay or ignore Muslim contributions to the emergence of the modern West, Scruton was true to the historical record.

In his book on Spinoza, among the greatest of the Enlightenment thinkers, Scruton repeatedly emphasises that Spinoza was reading the Muslim philosophers of Andalusia before Spinoza read Descartes or Hobbes. Commenting on Spinoza’s Spanish Jewish ancestry, Scruton writes:

‘For several centuries such people had lived relatively securely in the Spanish peninsula, protected by the Muslim princes, and mingling openly with their Islamic neighbours. Their theologians and philosophers and scholars had joined in the great revival of Aristotelian philosophy […]’

In The Soul of the World Scruton admiringly quotes Muslim mystics and heaps praise on Ghazali and Rumi, quoting from the latter’s verses and shows a grasp of the Muslim mystical mind.

For me, it was clear that Scruton’s objection was not to the Islam of beauty, co-existence, spirituality, poetry, civilisation, art and architecture. But like millions of Muslims, his fight was with the literalists, the supremacists, the Islamists and Salafists. Islam of the philosophers and mystics belongs firmly in the West and is part of the West’s heritage.

Second, sitting in class I was taken aback by his polymathic mind. In addition to his mastery of an array of disciplines, not a single tutorial has passed to date where he has not referenced the Quran in Arabic or Avicenna’s thoughts, Ghazali’s writings, Rumi’s poetry or others. Even when discussing the Austrian genius Ludwig Wittgenstein, Scruton could see and identify parallels with Islamic Sufism, the immersion in God. It is often Scruton evoking verses from the Quran on the soul, the Sun, the galaxy, and I am left catching up trying to match my Arabic recall with his.

Third, leading Muslim theologians in the West understand and respect Scruton. Here is Shaikh Hamza Yusuf, described by the Guardian as ‘arguably the West’s most influential Islamic scholar’, in deep and detailed discussion with Scruton on ‘sacred truths’. Then here is Scruton and Yusuf discussing ‘What Conservatism Really Means’. Shaikh Hamza’s admiration for Scruton has directed many Muslim influencers around the world to better understand conservatism as explained and advanced by Scruton: identify what we love in civilisation and then protect these virtues and values from current threats so that our children can also find a beautiful world. 

Fourth, Arab Muslim princes and scholars are asking questions about how they can reform, and what went wrong with the Arab spring that led to Islamist revolutionaries taking over in Egypt, and to this day angling in Damascus, Gaza, Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, Kuwait, Bahrain, even Saudi Arabia. What is the way forward to head off Marxism-influenced Islamist revolutionaries, but still make political reforms? Like Scruton, they wish to take the long view and in that I have seen them reading Scruton’s Fools, Frauds and Firebrands to better understand the dangers to civilisation. If the kids are reading Chomsky and Zizek, the grown-ups are with Scruton.

Fifth, he cares deeply for the values informing architecture and aesthetics in the Muslim world. It was from Scruton that I heard about Marwa al-Sabouni, an architect, hijab-wearing Muslim, trying to rebuild her native Homs in Syria. Not only has Scruton mentioned her book to every willing audience, he has invited her to think-tank events in London, including here at Policy Exchange. Here was a philosopher who applied his thinking and worked with Muslim women to build and bolster places and identity in the most difficult parts of the world.

Finally, Scruton does not shy away from the tough questions, the true hallmark of a philosopher with a philosophy. I liked his courage and the fact that the mob could not silence him. For me, yes, anti-Muslim hatred exists and must be uprooted but ‘Islamophobia’ is an oxymoron: Islam seeks peace and how can people have a fear of peace?

The Muslim Brotherhood, their naïve acolytes, and their left-wing allies have used accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ to try to silence criticism of Islam and Muslim practices. Scruton often tells me that Islam and Muslims need to remember the spirit of the witty and wise 13th century Molla Nasreddin Hodja, who laughs at himself. Scruton is right to say that we Muslims take ourselves too seriously, too mired in victimhood narratives and need to re-embrace the Greek spirit of comedy and mockery.

Scruton is not a binary thinker: he admires Islam, but is critical of it too. Scruton is asking tough questions: can Muslims learn to put country before faith community? Do away with notions of blasphemy and accept liberty? Those questions need answers. For all of our futures depend on it.

If Muslim countries and communities make progress towards liberty, pluralism and peace, it will be because their conservative instincts were helped, understood, and respected by an Englishman fond of wine and hunting, music and aesthetics. And long may he live.

Source: Roger Scruton is a friend, not a foe, of Islam

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That Netanyahu cartoon wasn’t anti-Semitic

2019/05/01 Leave a comment

A contrary view by the Israeli comedian, Zeev Engelmayer:

The New York Times’ cartoon of Benjamin Netanyahu as a guide dog for Donald Trump that angered the “Jewish world” is actually a clichéd cartoon, though well-designed and certainly not anti-Semitic. It describes two leaders, one blind being led by the other. It’s a caustic image with a vicious tone, exactly what a political cartoon should be.

Netanyahu is depicted as a dachshund, which maybe is a compliment because these dogs are great hunters, and despite their natural suspiciousness, they boast an innate ability to make friends. Behind Netanyahu the dachshund walks his good friend Trump, sullenly, a kippa on his head, symbolizing the strength of his ties with Netanyahu. Trump has been photographed wearing a skull cap — near the Western Wall, for example — so it’s not something an artist has put on him without any justification.

The choice to illustrate Netanyahu and Trump walking with determination, and even against a blood-red background, hints that they’re not just taking an innocent morning walk. They’re on a survivalist hunting trip. What are they hunting? Foreigners? Leftists? The hostile media?

The media said Netanyahu was drawn with an unusually large nose, but a very superficial look confirms that Netanyahu’s nose hasn’t been distorted, certainly not in a way reminiscent of anti-Semitic cartoons, as has been alleged. The complaint that the illustration is anti-Semitic reinforces the feeling that the Foreign Ministry looks for every possible justification to play the victim to silence critics.

Images depicting politicians as blind people with guide dogs is as old as the advent of political cartoons. James Akin’s infamous one from 1804 shows Thomas Jefferson with the body of a dog. Richard Nixon has also been drawn as a dog, and Tony Blair as a dog wearing an American flag as his collar. American patriots have been depicted as a herd of blind horses.

Meanwhile, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been portrayed as a wild dog biting Barack Obama’s hand. His nose was made to look a lot longer than Netanyahu’s in this week’s cartoon. Was there any outcry against the Ahmadinejad cartoon or demands to outlaw it as anti-Semitic?

Theresa May was depicted by the graffiti artist The Pink Bear Rebel this year, was she not? She’s seen blindfolded being led by a blindfolded bulldog wearing a British-flag doggie jacket. You can only guess what the Foreign Ministry would say about a cartoon of a bulldog wrapped in an Israeli flag.

Under pressure from the Israeli consul general in New York and the Foreign Ministry, the Trump-Netanyahu cartoon was removed from the internet. The newspaper published a clarification, a half apology, and described the cartoon as offensive and an error in judgment.

A cartoon is by definition an exaggeration that looks for weak points. Sometimes it’s a warning sign: It provides strong, exaggerated images to shock and awaken. That was the case this time, a moment before this duo drags us along with them on a leash on a nighttime stroll.

Source: That Netanyahu cartoon wasn’t anti-Semitic | Opinion

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Nanos: Liberals, Conservatives playing in politically ‘dangerous field’ by using racism as tool to mobilize their support bases, says Nanos

2019/05/01 Leave a comment

More commentary encouraging the parties to cool the language:

The governing Liberals and opposition Conservatives are playing in a politically dangerous field by using the divisive issue of racism as a tool to mobilize their support bases for the next election, which could backfire resulting in “mutually assured destruction” for both federal parties, says a leading political analyst.

“We’re seeing an increase in weaponization of racism as a political tool to mobilize voters in Canada,” said Nik Nanos, chief data scientist and founder of Nanos Research in an interview with The Hill Times.

“If we stick with our analogy, if they weaponize this, like in the old Cold War, basically, it’s mutually-assured destruction, where if either or both of those parties go too far, not only could they destroy their enemy but they could destroy themselves in the process. So, it’s a very dangerous field to play in.”

Mr. Nanos said both political parties are using this issue as a “dog whistle” where, by implication, Liberals are saying that anyone who disagrees with their stance of open immigration, including “irregular” immigration, is a “racist.” And the Conservatives are using this to tap into Canadians’ anxiety about the impact of new immigrants on their economic security, jobs, and personal security. The “subtle implication” from the Conservatives, he said, is that anyone who disagrees with them doesn’t care about Canadians and Canadian jobs. He said social media platforms have made the politically-polarized situation even worse, where now people have numerous outlets where they can express their frustrations by using racist language, openly or by remaining anonymous.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been blasting Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer, not pictured, accusing him of not being tough enough on racism issues. But, pollster Nik Nanos says, both the Liberals and the Conservatives should be careful not to play politics with racism. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade

Mr. Nanos said the best way to address the issue of racism is by making a case to Canadians that more immigrants are good for the future strength of the economy. Also, he said, the political leadership needs to create an environment where hard-working Canadians can earn a decent living to take care of their families.

“The reality is that probably the best policy is somewhere in the middle, where we can balance Canadian economic interests and anxiety with our needs of the country,” he said.

…

Source: Liberals, Conservatives playing in politically ‘dangerous field’ by using racism as tool to mobilize their support bases, says Nanos

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Record number of anti-Semitic incidents in Canada fuelled by online hate: B’nai Brith

2019/05/01 Leave a comment

The lated B’nai Brith report. Waiting for the 2018 police-reported hate crimes report (Statistics Canada re-released the 2017 report www150.statcan.gc.ca/…ticle/00008-eng.htm):

Online hatred is fuelling a rise in anti-Semitism that saw a record-breaking number of Jewish Canadians harassed and assaulted in 2018, according to a new report from B’nai Brith Canada.

Western Canada, in particular, saw anti-Semitic incidents skyrocket last year. The number of incidents in British Columbia more than doubled to 374 from 165 in 2017, just behind Saskatchewan and Manitoba, which together had a 142.6 per cent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in 2018 compared to 2017, to 131 from 54.

British Columbia had the third highest total number of anti-Semitic incidents behind Quebec, with 709, and Ontario, at 481.

The countrywide total topped 2,000 incidents of hatred toward Jews in 2018 for the first time in more than 35 years, marking the fifth straight annual increase and the highest number of incidents the organization has recorded since it began tracking such data in 1982. The report suggests the federal government needs to address legislative gaps that allow hateful rhetoric to flourish and spread.

The report comes just two days after a gunman opened fire on Jewish worshippers at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Southern California on Saturday — an attack that was prefigured by a threatening social media post, according to the FBI. The online screed said the alleged attacker was inspired by the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh in October, a tragedy that was preceded by virulent anti-Jewish comments posted online by the suspected shooter.

During the Poway attack, one woman was killed and three others were wounded, among them a child and the synagogue’s rabbi.

“Anti-Semitism has real-world consequences,” Ran Ukashi, the national director of B’nai Brith Canada’s League for Human Rights, writes in the report’s introduction. Pointing to the murder of 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue, Ukashi suggests anti-Jewish harassment is not only deeply troubling; its sharp rise in Canada fuels the fear here of violence of the kind seen internationally in the past year.

According to the report, online harassment on social-media platforms including Facebook and Twitter — or through electronic communications such as email — accounted for 80 per cent of total incidents.

“Of particular concern is the rise of anti-Semitic harassment on social media, including death threats, threats of violence and malicious anti-Jewish comments and rhetoric,” Mostyn said, echoing Ukashi’s warning.

Steven Slimovitch, the national legal counsel for B’nai Brith Canada, said online hate has a much larger reach and can have a bigger impact than direct, one-on-one incidents.

“Now what’s happening is you can easily reach thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people via the internet,” he said. “You can do it quietly, you can do it in your basement and that’s a very, very serious problem.”

The report defines harassment as “verbal or written actions that do not include the use of physical force against a person or property,” including: promotion of hate propaganda via social media, the internet, telephone or in print; verbal slurs, hate speech or harassment, or systematic discrimination in public spaces; and verbal threats of violence in cases where “the application of force does not appear imminent, or no weapon or bomb is involved.”

And while physical violence represents only 0.5 per cent of the incidents cited in B’nai Brith’s Monday report, Canada is no stranger to real-world intimidation, violence or threats of violence against Jews. (B’nai Brith only includes incidents in the report where a victim’s Jewish religion was the explicit reason for the attack).

On Monday, the York Region police hate-crime unit reported investigating an incidentinvolving the spray-painting of anti-Semitic graffiti on the front of the garage of a Vaughan home on Friday.

In November, four 17-year-old Jewish boys wearing religious garments were assaulted in north Toronto by another group of teenagers, who prefaced their attack by making derogatory comments about the boys’ religion. In February, two Saskatchewan schoolchildren were beaten by their classmates for being Jewish.

And a Montreal man was charged with inciting hatred toward Jewish people and threatening to cause death and bodily harm to Jews after allegedly writing online posts in October in which he threatened to kill “an entire school full of Jewish girls,” according to the Montreal Gazette.

Mostyn said there is no reason to believe there is an elevated threat of an attack in Canada, but the amount of online hatred targeting Jews is having an impact. This, he said, is why B’nai Brith is pushing for protections that go beyond adding more security officers outside synagogues and Jewish schools.

“We have to start at the start, and the start is incitement,” Mostyn said. “And too often nowadays this incitement is taking place on the internet and it is influencing others that unfortunately take violent and drastic actions, and that’s what really needs to stop.”

B’nai Brith’s recommendations include instituting a dedicated hate-crime police unit in every major city and providing enhanced training for hate-crime officers, and co-ordinating between the federal government and social media platforms to develop a plan to counter online hate.

Facebook recently began deleting pages belonging to white supremacist individuals and groups, but has faced significant backlash for not doing more to stop hatred advanced on its platform.

Source: Record number of anti-Semitic incidents in Canada fuelled by online hate: B’nai Brith

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