Malaysia’s government spots a vote-winner: ‘defending’ Islam

2019/03/21 Leave a comment

Not encouraging:
As Malaysia’s ruling Pakatan Harapan government contends with a marriage of convenience between the two largest opposition parties, pressure is mounting on it to show it can defend the interests of Malay-Muslims, who make up 75 per cent of voters.

Enter a new initiative to crack down on insults against Islam. On March 7, the Department of Islamic Development (Jakim), the country’s most powerful Islamic affairs agency, set up a special unit to police insults against Islam on social media and other platforms.

Each complaint would be scrutinised and legitimate ones reported to the police or the communications regulator, said Deputy Minister Fuziah Salleh, who is overseeing the unit.

In just a week, the complaints body received 10,000 reports and as of Wednesday, it had 13,498 reports.

In Mahathir’s new Malaysia, a perfect storm for Pakatan Harapan?

The agency’s creation came soon after a 22-year-old Malaysian, whose details were withheld by the authorities, was given an unprecedented sentence of 10 years for posting content online that insulted Islam and the Prophet Mohammed, a decision that lawyers said went against the rule of law.

And police are investigating the organisers of the International Women’s Day March under the colonial-era Sedition Act, on the back of public accusations that the presence of LGBT activists at a Women’s Day parade on March 9 glorified behaviour not in accordance with Islamic teachings.

In Muslim-majority Malaysia, same-sex relations are banned, and sedition laws have been used against those who express dissent or excite disaffection against state institutions.

Observers such as Oh Ei Sun of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs have pointed out the irony of these developments. Pakatan Harapan, led by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, won office on promises of legal reform and improved human rights for all Malaysians.
But it is now moving to stem the growing appeal of an alliance between former ruling party the United Malays National Organisation (Umno) and the Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) – the former championing Malay rights and the latter milking pro-Muslim sentiments.
Umno-PAS’ attractiveness to voters has been heightened by the government’s struggle to realise its election pledges of higher salaries and a lower cost of living.

“The Malay parties in Pakatan Harapan have to pander to the conservatives by regressing to religio-racial supremacy in order to maintain a foothold in the Malay vote bank, especially in view of their successive crushing defeats in recent by-elections,” Oh said.

Political economist Terence Gomez, along with prominent local activists, also criticised this political “trend” of political parties capitalising on perceived insults to religion to gain popularity.

“In the application of laws prohibiting insulting religion, we must strive for a rational and liberal balance with the protection of the freedom of expression while being mindful of the religious sensitivities of our multi-religious communities. Hence open mindedness and moderation should be the norm in the interpretation and application of the existing laws,” the group said.

It added that criticising issues such as child marriage or female circumcision – permitted under Malaysia’s sharia laws – was “perfectly defensible”.

Fuziah said the complaints received by the unit regarded insults to Islam and the Prophet.

“One touches on insulting the Agong,” she said, referring to Malaysia’s ruler and head of state. She did not comment on whether any police reports had been filed.

Where does Malaysia stand on gay rights? Nobody knows

But so far only 28 links had been sent to the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, which is supposed to take them down. Another 15 complaints were being investigated, Fuziah said.

The commission told the South China Morning Post it had not received any reports as of Wednesday, but would “provide assistance to Jakim as required”.

When the new Jakim unit was launched, Fuziah told local media she was aware some insults online were published by those with fake accounts. Some were also “unhealthy retaliations”, she said, sparked by comments by opposition politicians against non-Muslims.

Source: Malaysia’s government spots a vote-winner: ‘defending’ Islam

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

Young, Canadian and Jewish: The shift from religious to cultural identity

2019/03/21 Leave a comment

Some interesting insights from the survey in terms of generation, Canada/US comparisons, and the experience of discrimination:

Jewish” used to be considered a religious category. However, for many Jews, that is changing. Increasingly, people who live outside of Israel and identify as Jewish think of themselves as members of an ethnic or cultural group.

For years, researchers have expressed concern that Jewish communities would assimilate and dissipate as religious identification waned. They pointed to intermarriage as an indicator of declining community cohesiveness. For example, they found that in the U.S., half of Jews who are married or in a common law relationship are partnered with non-Jews.

….A recent survey reveals that something different is happening in Canada.

A shift from religious identification toward ethnic and cultural identification is taking place. However, the expected assimilation and dissipation of the community is less evident. The intermarriage rate in Canada is less than half that in the United States.

Last year we conducted a survey based on a representative sample of 2,335 Canadian Jewish adults in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver — home to 84 per cent of the Canadian Jewish population of about 392,000. Several surprises awaited us.

A strong community

The biggest news coming out of the survey is that the Canadian Jewish community remains highly cohesive. A much higher percentage of Canadian Jews than American Jews make financial donations to the Jewish community, send their children to full-time Jewish school, belong to a synagogue or other type of Jewish organisation and are strongly emotionally attached to Israel. Yet a smaller percentage of Canadian Jews than American Jews believes in God or a higher spirit and thinks that Jewishness is solely a matter of religion.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/KounG/3/It is especially among young adults that the religious basis of Jewishness seems to be weakening.

When asked to report whether being Jewish is, for them, mainly a matter of religion, culture or ancestry, young adults are less likely than older adults to choose religion alone.

For these young people, Jewishness is often expressed in their community involvement. Younger Jews are about as active as older Jews on most indicators of community involvement. They are more likely to belong to a Jewish organisation other than a synagogue, light Sabbath candles weekly and donate to Jewish causes.

However, for them, such practices seem to be chiefly a means of achieving conviviality in the family and, beyond that, solidarity with the larger Jewish community.

One interpretation of these findings is that Canadian Jews, particularly young adults, are finding ways of remaining Jewish that are not principally religious. A shift away from religious identification is taking place in other Jewish diaspora communities too, but its replacement by community involvement does not seem to be happening to the same extent.

Canadian exceptionalism?

There are three main reasons why community involvement is substantially stronger in Canada than in the United States.

First, immigration has been proportionately stronger in Canada than in the U.S. since the Second World War. Consequently, 30 per cent of Canadian Jews are immigrants compared to just 14 per cent of American Jews. Canadians therefore tend to have stronger ties to “old country” traditions and languages than do American Jews.

Second, Americans Jews developed a stronger national identity than Canadians did, partly because the U.S. was settled earlier and therefore had more time for a national identity to crystallize. In addition, American national identity was forged in an anti-colonial war (always a great unifier), while Canadian national identity emerged gradually with the peaceful evolution of independence from Great Britain.

Zionism, the movement to establish a Jewish homeland, appeared on the scene in the late 19th century. It conflicted with American patriotism, particularly for Reform Jews, members of the country’s largest Jewish denomination. Most Reform Jews thought Jewishness should be based on religion, not a national movement.

Not so in Canada, where the Reform movement was weak. By the beginning of the First World War, Zionism was a core element of Jewish identity for the great majority of Canadian Jews. It thus helped to keep the forces of assimilation at bay. It did so by providing a new basis for Jewish identification that became even more compelling after the Holocaust.

The third main reason for Canadian-Jewish exceptionalism is that, out of political necessity, fostering the growth of ethnic institutions has been Canadian public policy since the British conquest of New France in 1760.

Part of the British strategy for dominating the French population was not to quash French Catholic culture, but to help the conservative Catholic Church maintain religious, educational and cultural control.

Two centuries later, shortly after Canada was proclaimed a bilingual and bicultural country, numerous ethnic groups objected that they, too, deserve official recognition and funding. The era of multiculturalism had arrived. For the past half century, strong state support for ethnic institutions has helped all Canadians, Jews among them, to ward off assimilation.

American and Canadian Jews do not differ in all respects. One similarity is the tendency for older Jews in both countries to be more likely than younger Jews to say that caring for Israel is an essential part of being Jewish.

A similar difference between young and old shows up in both countries when Jews are asked about the legality of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Younger Jews are more likely to regard them as illegal by international law. If younger North American Jews are less emotionally attached to Israel than are older members of the community, that may be because they are more likely to disagree with Israel’s policy on the construction of West Bank settlements.

One in three often experience discrimination

Finally, we note a discontinuity of outlook between Canadian Jews and non-Jews.

One in three Canadian Jews believe that Jews often experience discrimination in Canada. In contrast, just one in eight members of the Canadian population at large shares that opinion.

This difference may be due largely to the tendency of non-Jewish Canadians to think of discrimination as mainly a socio-economic phenomenon, while Jewish Canadians tend to think of anti-Jewish discrimination as an ideological matter.

Canadian Jews are not underprivileged. About 80 per cent of Jewish adults between the ages of 25 and 64 have at least a bachelor’s degree. That compares to about 30 per cent of people in that age cohort in the population at large.

However, when Jews think of anti-Jewish discrimination, they have in mind being called offensive names, being snubbed in social settings or being criticised for supporting the existence of a Jewish state.

Of course, we cannot be completely certain of the validity of our findings.

For example, although our generalizations about the relationship between age and community involvement apply across the entire age range, we found it comparatively difficult to recruit 18-to-29-year-old respondents.

It is therefore possible that the youngest cohort in our sample overrepresents highly involved individuals. In that case, the most important relationship we discovered may be a bit weaker than we report. Only more research can discover whether that is the case.

Source: Young, Canadian and Jewish: The shift from religious to cultural identity

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

diversityvotes.ca – Bringing riding level data with ethnic media coverage

2019/03/20 Leave a comment

Following the pilot of matching riding level data with ethnic media coverage for the February 25 by-elections, MIREMS (Multicultural International Research in Ethnic Media Services) and I have launched the diversityvotes.ca website to outline the project, share the coverage and data for the Burnaby South, Outremont and York Simcoe by-elections and provide additional background information.

The objectives of our project for the upcoming federal general election are:

  • Education: More in-depth understanding of riding demographic, economic, social and political characteristics, and how these interact with electoral strategies;
  • Discussion: Wider awareness of how national and local issues are portrayed in community and regional ethnic media to increase accountability of ethnic-oriented media strategies;
  • Connection: Allow for more informed discussion regarding ethnic voting patterns and issues; and,
  • Accountability: Greater responsibility of candidates and political partiers of their messaging to different groups.

We will be presenting at Metropolis later this week in Halifax.

Check out diversityvotes.ca for the background data and weekly ethnic media reports for these three ridings (see the demo and what’s new tabs).

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Noah Rothman: Where is comparing the violent white supremacy that inspired the New Zealand murderer to radical Islam valuable, and where is it not?

2019/03/20 Leave a comment

Thoughtful and nuanced distinctions by Rothman:

The racist terrorist who took the lives of at least 49 Muslims in the attack on two New Zealand mosques last week wanted to start “a civil war that will eventually balkanize the US along political, cultural and, most importantly, racial lines.” The attacker wrote those words in a deranged white-nationalist manifesto, and he will surely be delighted by the exposure his ramblings are receiving.

For days, the press has pored over this despicable document. Experts have analyzed it, and influential figures have been questioned about it. Though it risks publicizing the semi-literate thoughts of a deluded racist with a messiah complex, some of this was done for good reasons. Most of it, however, was an effort to affix blame to people and institutions closer to us than the monster who executed them—in particular, one Donald Trump, whom the terrorist named as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose” but a terrible executor of white nationalist policy. White House advisor Kellyanne Conway recommended that “people should read” the manifesto “in its entirety” because, in her view, it exonerates the president. This is, to put it mildly, bad advice. An artificial exegesis of a blinkered mass murderer’s incoherent meanderings will not clarify the nature of the threat he and his ideological allies pose. But nor should observers ignore the ideology that compelled this attacker to massacre Muslims in their houses of worship. To do so would contribute to the appearance, perhaps even the reality, that there is a double standard for combating terrorism.

Source: Where is comparing the violent white supremacy that inspired the New Zealand murderer to radical Islam valuable, and where is it not?

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‘The New Germans’: Far-right AfD forms immigrant supporters’ group

2019/03/20 Leave a comment

Immigrants and minorities are not monolithic and while odd, it is not surprising that a few may be drawn to far-right groups and that far-right groups try to recruit them to claim that they are not xenophobic or racist.

A small group of Alternative for Germany (AfD) politicians and party members have come together to rally up support for the far-right party from a seemingly unlikely demographic — migrants and those with immigrant backgrounds.

“Die Neudeutschen” or “The New Germans” group was formed over the weekend by AfD politicians who all have immigrant roots, and was presented at a press conference in Berlin on Monday.

For Anton Friesen, an AfD lawmaker from the eastern state of Thuringia, the formation of the group was “overdue.”

“Since the AfD was founded, many German citizens with immigrant backgrounds have voted for us,” Friesen told DW. “Now there is finally an association that gives these people names and faces,” he added.

Friesen, who helped initiate the new AfD association, was born in Kazakhstan and moved to Germany with his parents when he was nine years old.

His fellow group spokesman is Alexander Tassis, the son of a Greek migrant worker who is an AfD state lawmaker in Bremen. He is also heads the “Alternative Homosexuals” — an AfD-aligned group for LGBT members.

Currently, the group has 20 members who are German citizens with Polish, Iranian and Colombian roots, as well as ethnic Russian-Germans and Romanian-Germans, Friesen said.

With European Parliament elections coming up in May, as well as several key state parliament elections in eastern German states in the fall, “The New Germans” hopes to win over potential voters by holding events on German-Polish relations and what Friesen describes as “the new, imported anti-Semitism.”

Targeting ‘patriotically-minded migrants’

Numerous political parties and rights groups in Germany have criticized the AfD for the xenophobic remarks of the party’s leaders, who have repeatedly depicted refugees and asylum-seekers as dangerous and violent.

The party has also sparked controversy over campaign slogans such as “Burka? We like bikinis” and a poster depicting a white, pregnant woman with the words: “New Germans? We’ll make them ourselves.”

With the new group, Friesen hopes to “correct” what he views as an incorrect public image of the party. “The AfD isn’t xenophobic,” he said. Rather, the party is focused on people who are already in Germany.

This includes “patriotically-minded migrants” who advocate for “the protection of our western culture and our values,” Friesen adds.

Manifesto calls for ‘de-Islamization of Germany’

“The New Germans” may be targeted towards people with immigrant roots — but it doesn’t compromise on the party’s stances concerning immigration.

Members must agree to the group’s manifesto, which advocates for “harsh action against all forms of anti-Semitism” but also calls for “a comprehensive de-Islamization of Germany,” news agency DPA reported.

It also urges for an “end to illegal mass migration, which undermines the opportunities in life for socially worse off Germans.”

Jewish AfD group sparks controversy

“The New Germans” isn’t the first AfD-aligned group to raise eyebrows.

Last October, a small number of Jewish people formed “Jews in the AfD” (JAfD), despite a number of scandals in which leading AfD politicians questioned Germany’s culture of remembrance about the Holocaust.

While the members of JAfD contend that the part is not anti-Semitic, numerous Jewish organizations condemned the creation of the group. Other German politicians accused the party of using the Jewish group as a way to mask its anti-Semitism scandals.

Source: ‘The New Germans’: Far-right AfD forms immigrant supporters’ group

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Andrew Coyne: Why does Andrew Scheer find it so difficult to say the right thing?

2019/03/18 Leave a comment

Coyne nails it:

Hours later, Andrew Scheer said the things he should have said the first time.

Responding to the horrific massacre of Muslims at prayer in New Zealand, the Conservative leader issued a statement Friday afternoon expressing his “profound condemnation of this cowardly and hateful attack on the Muslim community” along with “the type of extreme and vile hatred that motivated this despicable act of evil.” He added: “To the Muslim community around the world and here at home in Canada, we stand with you.”

It was spot on: straightforward, fitting and right. It was also about 15 hours too late, coming as it did only after Scheer had come under intense criticism for the inadequacy of his first response, which spoke vaguely of an attack on “freedom” and unspecified “worshippers.” The appositeness of the second only highlighted the strange, withholding coldness of the first.

We cannot know exactly what explains that initial, catastrophic choice of words. But neither is Scheer automatically entitled to the benefit of the doubt. Politicians are in the business of being politic, of saying the right thing at the right time, and nothing goes out over their name without a great deal of thought, not to say calculation.

Other party leaders managed to name the victims — Muslims — and the beliefs — white supremacism, Islamophobia, the familiar, toxic mix of racism, xenophobia and hatred that so often finds Muslims as its target — involved in what was self-evidently an act of terrorism. Why on earth couldn’t Scheer?

The suspicion that this was no accident is not unreasonable, given Scheer’s past statements and actions. Perhaps he truly did not hear the questioner at a recent town hall who invoked “pizzagate,” the lunatic conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was connected to a child sex ring supposedly operating out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria.

But nothing required him to speak at last month’s “United We Roll” rally on Parliament Hill, whose stated purpose — to protest federal environmental policies on behalf of unemployed workers in the oil industry — may have been legitimate, but which had clearly been infiltrated by anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant elements. At the very least, he might have taken the opportunity of his appearance to denounce these views. He did not.

Just as disturbing was Scheer’s recent endorsement of conspiracy-minded interpretations of a United Nations document called the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, an unenforceable statement of good intentions with regard to the handling of immigrants and refugees to which most of the world’s nations agreed last year.

This, on top of his party’s unceasing alarmism on the subject of the asylum seekers entering Canada illegally via our southern border — a legitimate issue, to be sure, and one on which the government may deserve criticism, but nothing like the existential “crisis” of so much Conservative rhetoric.

And before that there was the hysteria over M-103, a non-binding motion — not a bill — condemning Islamophobia that was somehow elevated, via the panic mills of the populist right, into an assault on freedom of speech worthy of a police state. The motion passed two years ago. Not one person has since been carted off for criticizing Islam or faced sanctions of any kind because of M-103.

And before that there was the gratuitous ban on face-coverings at citizenship ceremonies. And the “barbaric practices” snitch line. The federal Conservatives are not by any means the only party to pander to racial and religious intolerance — Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals won an election in Ontario in 2007 on a coded anti-Muslim fear campaign, while the government of Quebec’s baiting of the province’s religious minorities enjoys near all-party support — but they are surely the most consistent. Or were, until Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party came along.

And it seems to be growing worse: as xenophobic and anti-Muslim rhetoric is normalized by repetition on social media and other online sites — most notoriously The Rebel — so a certain section of the public has been radicalized, persuaded that only “globalists” and other elites could oppose such disgraceful sentiments. Exploiting public fears of immigrants and minorities has a long and dishonourable tradition in this country. But exactly what kind of voter did Scheer worry would be put off by explicitly naming the sole victims and declared targets of a mass murderer?

That all of this is happening in the wake of the 2017 murders at a Quebec City mosque — the New Zealand attacker cited it as a model — makes this winking indulgence of the worst elements of the populist right particularly reprehensible.

Obviously neither Scheer nor The Rebel is responsible, in themselves, for the actions of terrorists. But they can be held to account for their part in creating the climate of opinion in which extremists flourish and madmen find inspiration. After Christchurch, after Quebec City, after Brevik and other atrocities, this is hardly a theoretical concern.

None of this is to justify further limits on free speech: we lack the kind of certainty about cause and effect that would even begin to make a case for legal restrictions, and we know from long experience how such laws can be abused. But all of us are morally responsible for the things we say, or do not say. Each of us is part of a moral order it is our duty to sustain — political leaders most of all.

This isn’t about censorship, or political correctness. It’s about judgment, and choices. Scheer has been too eager to appease, or too afraid to offend, a section of opinion that is at best filled with fear and at worst filled with hate. Now would be a good time for him to stop.

Source: Andrew Coyne: Why does Andrew Scheer find it so difficult to say the right thing?

Filed under Multiculturalism

Our Brother, Our Executioner

2019/03/18 1 Comment

Good commentary by Aziz:

Whenever someone used to ask me if I was Muslim, I often gave an evasive answer, something like, “I was born Muslim” or “My parents are Muslim.”

It was a strange way to phrase it. I told myself that the purpose of this hairsplitting was intellectual clarity, despite the fact that I had attended a mosque my entire childhood, that I had read the Quran in both Arabic and English, and that I felt personally connected to the history of Islam. Perhaps this was the natural recourse for someone who came of age after 9/11 and was taught to retreat into invisibility because of the dangers of being Muslim. I knew, in my heart, that I was drawing the distinction only to appear safer to white people, to show that I was one of the good ones, worthy of belonging.

This was not just respectability politics: It was an act of self-erasure.

On Friday, nearly 50 of my fellow Muslims were massacred in cold blood in New Zealand. Not murdered but lynched, their deaths live-streamed to the sound of laughter. I long ago ceased to feel shocked at the violence directed against my community. But the heartbreak still comes.

The killer knew which day to pick. Friday is the Islamic Sabbath, when Muslims gather in the mosque to bow their heads in devotion to the divine. As they prayed, they might have been thinking about their children at school or what to make for dinner, unaware that soon their loved ones would be washing their bodies in accordance with Islamic tradition, preparing for the funeral prayer, the only one in Islam that has no Athan, or call to prayer, because the Athan was recited into their ears when they were born. When these Muslims saw the white stranger enter the mosque, they would have had the Islamic greeting on their tongues: “Assalamu alaikum.” Peace be upon you.

We know from the terrorist’s recording that one of his first victims welcomed him with the words “Hello, brother.” Muslims have long been depicted as an uncivilized, warlike people, but the opposite is true. We want to belong, to be good neighbors, to call the white man who enters our place of worship our brother. Instead he turned out to be our executioner.

The Muslims at the two New Zealand mosques were liquidated not just by a man filled with hatred, but by the ideas that he clung to, ideas about racial superiority and who his country belonged to. This was true in Quebec, when Muslims were gunned down in their mosque in 2017. It was true in Pittsburgh, when Jews who had been helping Muslim refugees were murdered in their synagogue in 2018. It was true in Norway, when 77 people were killed by a white bigot. It was true in Charleston, when black churchgoers were mowed down by another radicalized white man. A pathology of hatred has spread around the world, and it has put all our lives at risk.

Islamophobia is not a fringe problem: It is embedded in much of Western society. For over two decades now — the span of an entire generation — the whole Muslim community has been forced to accept collective guilt and punishment for every act of terror or violence committed by one of its members. Never would, or should, this standard be applied to white people, who seem to have kept the privilege of individual differentiation for themselves.

This is what those who are suspicious of Muslims cannot grasp: that the definition of racism is an inability to discriminate between the old man with the skullcap and beard before you and the suicide-bomber you saw on TV.

And yet people with millions of online followers have been incessantly preaching that Islamophobia is not the problem; Islam is. The Canadian intellectual Jordan Peterson has said that Islamophobia is a “word created by fascists.” The neuroscientist Sam Harris called it an “intellectual blood libel” that serves only to shield Islam from criticism. After I wrote a series of articles critical of Mr. Harris, a young white man from California emailed me to tell me he carried a gun — what kind did I carry? he asked.

If Islam is the problem, perhaps we should keep an eye on these Muslims. Send patrols into their neighborhoods. Make them prove that they are not terrorists. Ban them, as President Trump wanted. Ideas are not harmless: They are taken seriously by thousands of people. If only one person applies these deranged ideas about the other to the real world, we get a mass-murder like the one we just witnessed.

I greet a neighbor; he smiles and wishes me a good day. How do I know that once he turns on his computer, he isn’t pumping himself full of hatred of me and my people, raging in the dark cesspools of the web, venting his frustration that we even exist, and how dare we try and belong? Racism begins with ideas. It ends with violence.

When I saw the news from New Zealand, and thought of the number of times I have erased my Muslim identity, I shook with anger. When I thought of the number of times I have let casual racism toward Muslims slide, so not to come off as threatening, I shuddered in anguish. There was a time when I was ashamed of my religion, ashamed of my heritage. Now I am ashamed only of having once felt this way.

“If one is attacked as a Jew,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “one must defend oneself as a Jew.” When you are attacked as a Muslim, you must respond as a Muslim. And today, we are all Muslims — all of us who are committed to the light of our civilization, to peace, to saving our society from the primitive barbarism of such poisoned, inadequate minds.

Omer Aziz is the author of the forthcoming “Brown Boy: A Story of Race, Religion, and Inheritance.”

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with ,

In Australia, Anti-Immigrant Racism Is Everywhere

2019/03/18 Leave a comment

While we often, in immigration and citizenship policy, compare ourselves with Australia, the political culture and overall dynamics are quite different, even if we also see mainstream Canadian politicians flirting with the far right or presenting their positions in a somewhat xenophobic manner:

Words from a vile manifesto, written by an Australian, have been floating around the internet following the New Zealand terrorist attack that saw 49 people killed at mosques during Friday prayers.

It calls Islam a “savage belief” and the “religious equivalent of fascism.” “Worldwide, Muslims are killing people in the name of their faith on an industrial scale,” it reads. “The entire religion of Islam is simply the violent ideology of a sixth century despot masquerading as a religious leader, which justifies endless war against anyone who opposes it and calls for the murder of unbelievers and apostates.”

But it wasn’t written by the alleged shooter, Australian citizen Brenton Tarrant. It was written by an Australian politician.

Sen. Fraser Anning also tweeted, even before Friday’s death toll was public, “Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?” That link is Fraser Anning, and people like him.

Anning—the Aussie Steve King, perhaps—is a now-independent senator who is too racist even for the extremely racist party that elected him. Elected in 2017 as a One Nation party replacement candidate (after “free speech” crusader Malcolm Roberts was caught up in the citizenship debacle), Anning chose to sit as an independent, then opted to join another fringe party, until he was kicked out of that one too, for his infamous speech calling for a “final solution” to the Muslim immigration problem.

His latest comments have been roundly condemned by everyone in Australian politics—by the prime minister, the recent ex–prime minister, the soon-to-be prime minister. Prime Minister Scott Morrison tweeted that Anning’s comments were “disgusting” and “have no place in Australia, let alone the Australian Parliament.”

Anning and Tarrant may be extremists, but they are extreme representatives and undeniable products of a racist Australian culture—one that is at best quietly tolerated and at worst wildly stoked by politicians, not to mention a Rupert Murdoch–fueled mass media. Whether it’s demonizing asylum-seekers, demonizing African youths, demonizing Indigenous Australians, or demonizing Muslims, racism is insidious in the mainstream culture.

Note that while Anning’s 2018 final solution speech was condemned, he wasn’t removed from Parliament over it. A man who made an approving Hitler reference remains an Australian senator, a tacit endorsement of his bigotry. Politicians are falling over themselves to condemn Anning now, amid another open show of racism, but there seems to be no rush to condemn the dog whistle kind going on in the media every single day.

The alt-right has a strong presence Down Under, inviting figures like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak and holding fascist rallies—one of which Anning defended attending earlier this year. (Anning was also expected to address a meeting of neo-Nazis with Hitler fan Blair Cottrell later this weekend.) It’s alive and thriving online, a community that Tarrant was reportedly a part of. This report dives into one of the favorite memes of the Australian far right, one recently used by Tarrant both on the forum 8chan and on Twitter. It shows a highly stereotypical Aussie bloke, wearing Outback get-up, brandishing the bottle of a popular Aussie beer, with the caption “hold still while I glass you.” The same meme is frequently used by the Dingoes, an online group known for anti-Semitic views. Lest you think this is a murky subculture, a onetime Labor Party leader has appeared on the Dingoes’ podcast. That leader, Mark Latham, is now a One Nation candidate.

Latham, admittedly, has fallen far in the years he has been out of politics. But this excellent tweet thread from Guardian columnist Jason Wilson, who covers the far right, chronicles the horrific racism even mainstream figures have engaged in. “Remember when the Australian Senate almost passed a literal white nationalist meme?” he tweeted. “Remember all the free media Milo and Lauren Southern got? Remember ‘African Gangs’? Remember ‘white farmers’? Remember the Soros conspiracy theories during the SSM referendum?”

I don’t speak for all Aussies when I say I was not surprised to learn the shooter in the mosque attack was an Australian—but I do speak for many. Tarrant may have been radicalized online, but he was emboldened by the words surrounding him on national platforms, by right-wing commentators writing in major newspapers that a “tidal wave of immigrants sweeps away our national identity” (this from one of the most well-known “journalists” in Australia). His article was called “The Foreign Invasion.” Tarrant’s manifesto is called “The Great Replacement.”

Other parts of Tarrant’s manifesto echo words by other public figures. Australia, you may recall, is not in Europe, but Tarrant refers to himself as European and treats Australia as an outpost of Europe. One recent former prime minister seems a little obsessed with Australia being part of “the Anglosphere,” while Anning was ultimately kicked out of his second party for continuing to distinguish between “European” and “non-European” migration.

The nationality of the other suspects has not yet been revealed, so it’s hard to speculate on any extent to which New Zealand’s own alt-right was involved. I often tell Americans that New Zealand is Australia’s Canada, a better, more progressive version of Australia with a reputation as a welcoming place. The relationship between white and indigenous New Zealanders is much better than that of many colonial societies, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. Ironically, the National Front, a far-right group with only about 1,000 members, is said to have been influenced by the Canadian alt-right—the Lauren Southerns and Stefan Molyneuxes and Jordan Petersons—to adopt a “pseudo-academia, clean-cut appearances.” New Zealand journalist Paula Penfold spoke to i24 on Friday, saying that while New Zealand is not known for hate crimes or mass violence, “there has been knowledge of white supremacy in Christchurch for some decades now. We’ve never seen violence like this, but there is a sense now that this is a situation that has been building.”

As Joshua Keating noted Friday, “New Zealand has had one of the fastest-growing immigration populations among developed countries in recent years, much of it from Asia. This has led to at least some political backlash, with [Winston] Peters’ New Zealand First party calling for immigration restrictions and accused of fomenting racism. Police clashed with right-wing nationalists who rallied outside the Parliament in Wellington in 2017.”

The world is again in shock, but it’s no surprise that Tarrant was Australian. After all, as he wrote in his manifesto, he was a “regular white man from a regular family.” So true.

Source: In Australia, Anti-Immigrant Racism Is Everywhere

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with

Why Is the Vatican Opening the Files on ‘Hitler’s Pope’?

2019/03/15 Leave a comment

Interesting analysis of this major and overdue decision:

When Pope Francis announced that he’d be opening the Vatican’s secret archives from the World War II papacy of Pius XII, many wondered, “Why now?”

Papal archives traditionally are opened at least 70 years after a pope’s death, meaning no one expected the secrets of Pius XII, who died in 1958, to be made accessible until 2028.

By deciding to open them on May 2, 2020, Francis seems to be sending a message, though no one is quite certain just what that is.

— Plaque on a building where Jews were held in sight of the Vatican walls

In his announcement, Francis acknowledged that the archives of Pius, who is often dubbed “Hitler’s Pope,” may not be entirely favorable, but he claimed the Church is “not afraid of history.” He said Pius had “moments of grave difficulties, tormented decisions of human and Christian prudence, that to some could appear as reticence.”

Whatever might be revealed in the secret archives, it remains an indisputable fact that thousands of Jewish people were pulled from their homes in Rome and taken to the concentration camps under the shadow of the Vatican. A poignant plaque on the Via Lungara, just a stone’s throw from the gates of Vatican City, still commemorates one of the most horrific incidents: “On 16 October 1943 entire Jewish Roman families were ripped from their homes and brought to this place and then deported to concentration camps. Of more than 2,000 people, only 16 survived.”

Rabbi Abraham Skorka, an Argentine rabbi and professor at the St. Joseph’s University Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations in Philadelphia, is a longtime friend of the pope from the pontiff’s days as Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio in Buenos Aires. The two co-authored the 2000 book on contemporary theology On Heaven and Earth.

Skorka told The Daily Beast he is “not sure opening the archives will substantially modify the polemic” that still rages regarding the wartime actions of Pius XII, who some Catholics claim may actually have helped save Jewish lives by notcondemning Hitler publicly.

But Skorka says the simple answer is: promises made, promises kept. “He said he’d do it. It is that simple. This is further evidence of the commitment Bergoglio has with the truth itself, more than with the results that may emerge from any investigation of the material.”

Francis, who met with a delegation from the American Jewish Committee the day after announcing the opening of the archives in Rome, lamented recent incidents of anti-Semitism as part of a “climate of wickedness and fury, in which an excessive and depraved hatred is taking root.”

According to Skorka, “What Bergoglio says is, ‘We have to open the archives and see what really happened and the truth must flourish in all its aspects.’ He’s saying, ‘Let us move ahead and learn from history.’”

Francis said he is sure that upon further study, scholars would find “during periods of the greatest darkness and cruelty, the small flame lit of humanitarian initiatives, of hidden but active diplomacy.”

But Lorenzo Cremonesi, a member of the Vatican-appointed commission of Catholics and Jews that, in 2000, revealed that Pius XII knew about the Holocaust as early as June 1942, cautioned against giving the Catholic Church credit for “the initiatives of local churches in many countries who on their own took action to save Jews.”

“Church machinery,” he said, was something else.

Pius has been stalled on the Vatican trajectory towards sainthood since Pope Benedict XVI, a German, endorsed him in 2009 and thus made him “venerable.” Benedict was just 12 years old when Pius was elected, and he often has referred to him as “my first pope.” Benedict has been a long-time backer of Pius’s innocence during the war, and instead has consistently said that the pope worked behind the scenes to protect Jews.

Some believe the opening of these archives early is a special favor to the retired pope, whose health has been failing since he resigned in 2013. If the archives prove that Pius did work to protect Jews, his cause for sainthood would surely advance–he already has several miracles credited to him. A Vatican source told The Daily Beast that Benedict would love to be alive for the beatification of Pius, but that won’t happen until the archives of his papacy are opened.

For the old group of Argentine friends that remain in close contact with the current pope, Pius’ reputation seems of lesser interest than that of Francis. And Benedict’s legacy is of even less interest.

Another of Bergoglio’s old friends from Buenos Aires, Alberto Zimerman, head of interreligious dialogue for the umbrella association of Jewish organizations in Argentina (DAIA), said that Francis had decided upon this “risky course for the church” not having seen any of the classified documents himself.

“We could find anything there,” Zimerman told The Daily Beast, invoking the pope’s willingness to “undertake any challenge.”

For decades, scholars studying the World War II pope’s actions have argued that the Vatican did nothing to stop the atrocities, and while some Catholics tout Pius’s “secret diplomacy,” many Jews see it quite differently.

Rabbi David Rosen, the International Director of Interreligious Affairs for the American Jewish Committee, who has advocated for the archives’ opening for more than 30 years, and who met with Pope Francis last week, said that there was only “the greatest respect and collaboration” between Jewish groups and the Vatican team now cataloging the documents. But “in the end,” he told The Daily Beast, “there is a debate between the church and the Jewish people regarding what Pius XII did.”

“For the Catholic Church, he made a tactical decision he thought would be best,” Rosen says. “For Jews, the very thought that anything could be worse than the Holocaust means we will never have a shared historical view of this moment.”

Rosen specified that there are questions of historical fact still “lacking in clarity,” including “instructions emitted from the Vatican, areas where Pius XII may have been directly involved, and information transmitted and actions taken, not necessarily by the pope but by other agencies of the Vatican.”

The same Jewish group that met Francis in Rome last week has, for years, pressured the Vatican to reveal what many assume will be Pius XII’s blind eye to the atrocities that unfolded under the reign of both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini during his papacy.

In a recent radio interview, David Kertzer, author of The Pope and Mussolini, likened the church’s approach to the atrocities of the Holocaust to those of the clerical sex abuse scandal now ravaging the church’s reputation.

“In this case maybe there’s some parallel to the more recent pederasty sex scandal in the Church,” Kertzer said. “The perspective of the Vatican was largely ‘the first priority has to be to protect the institutional Church and everything else comes second.’”

Kertzer told The Daily Beast that he would be among the first to visit the archives. He believes Pius was concerned that the Nazi regime would work against the church and so did what they could to work against its power base without taking into account the helpless victims caught in the middle. “I think we may well find more documentation that will show that this is exactly the kind of consideration that was overriding the Pope’s decision making at the time.”

Opening the archives will not satisfy everyone.  I think they will hide a lot of things,” says Cremonesi, a special envoy for the Italian daily Corriere della Sera and an expert on Vatican-Jewish relations. “We know that Pius XII was very open to the German cause—not to Hitler—but to Germany, because he saw the Germans as a bastion against the Communists, and the Communists were the primary concern of the Vatican.”

Explaining the church’s indifference to the genocide of European Jewry, Cremonesi said, “Pius really believed that the only good Jew was a converted Jew.”

Rabbi Israel Zolli, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, who famously survived the war under Vatican protection and later converted to Catholicism, “was the paragon for Pius,” Cremonesi says. “Perfection.”

While it will take a year for the Vatican to catalogue the hundreds of thousands of documents, there is still worry that the Vatican won’t be entirely up front. The entire archives are already indexed, a librarian with the Vatican archives told The Daily Beast on background. There would, in essence, be no way to cover up huge gaps since many historians are going to be checking the files against already available documents–unless those record were destroyed long ago.

Many countries that had diplomatic relations with the Holy See during World War II have already made those documents available. Now scholars want to know what internal memos the Vatican attached to notes it received at the time concerned that the Vatican was not doing enough.

“We know the attitude of the church,” Cremonesi said, using as an example the 1904 encounter between Pius X and Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, who described the meeting in a detailed diary entry.

“When you go to the Vatican to look it up, there’s nothing,” Cremonesi said, chuckling. “No little note like you find in British archives saying ‘document classified,’ or even a line saying ‘this morning his Holiness held meetings.’ There is nothing.”

“I put my hands in fire,” he says: “If there is anything annoying in those papers, the Vatican will not reveal it.”

Skorka noted that Francis, 82, the first non-European pope, grew up in the melting pot of Buenos Aires, with Jewish friends from childhood. He recalled that during the conversations that led to the publication of their book, Bergoglio said that of the “many genocides in the 20th century”—he mentioned the Armenians—”the genocide of the Jews is singular. It set about to eliminate the Jewish people and the spirituality that transcended from its history.”

“For people like him and me, who believe in the God of Israel, it means the Holocaust was an attempt to destroy this God on earth,” Skorka said.

Pope Francis’ decision to open the Vatican archive, Skorka implied, is an attempt to restore that God for humanity.

Source: Why Is the Vatican Opening the Files on ‘Hitler’s Pope’?

Filed under Holocaust Tagged with ,

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