40 years and growing for Nanaimo based immigrant aid group

2019/04/23 Leave a comment

Some background to the upcoming Nanaimo by-election: 14.6 percent are immigrants, 8.2 percent visible minority, and 8.3 percent Indigenous:

Helping well north of 1,000 immigrants a year in the Nanaimo area represented the will of the community to make life easier on new arrivals to the mid island.

The highly regarded Central Vancouver Island Multicultural Society (CVIMS) is celebrating its 40th anniversary of helping people acclimatize to their often vastly different realities.

Jennifer Fowler, the agency’s executive director, said it was 1979 when a volunteer led task force explored how to make life easier for local immigrants.

“They wanted to see how we could best help an influx of newcomers that were coming here 40 years ago,” Fowler said. “It was a community initiative that grew us to where we are now.”

Fowler said volunteers of the non-profit agency have long drove their success, which she said would not survive without the incredible support provided to their nearly 40 employees.

Fowler said their one-stop re-settlement hub including language classes, on-site childcare and employment services enriches the entire communitiy, not just directly impacted.

She said despite the supports provided by the CVIMS immigrants face many hurdles while attemping to contribute to the local economy.

“We’ve got a lot of immigrants that are under-employed looking for work in there areas. We need to find ways to utilize these people and resources in a better way.”

Fowler said overall the people of Nanaimo have been incredibly welcoming to those adjusting to life in the Harbour City.

She said Nanaimo is doing its share to pick up the slack of some 64 million people around the world who are displaced.

“From the just over 200 refugees that we welcomed to Nanaimo last year, I like that we’re doing our part in bringing people here.”

Source: 40 years and growing for Nanaimo based immigrant aid group

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Tony Blair: migrants should be forced to integrate more to combat far right

2019/04/22 Leave a comment

While counter intuitive to place the blame of far-right bigotry on the communities being targeted by such bigotry, and Blair, like many Europeans (and some Canadians) never understood or communicated that multiculturalism is about civic integration and participation, some of the specific recommendations have merit (i.e., more effective civics education, tougher enforcement against hate speech, increased funding for language training).

And of course, beyond obeying the laws, defining the specific “norms” and values remains challenging:

Migrant communities must be compelled to do more to integrate to help combat the rise of “far-right bigotry”, Tony Blair has warned.

The former prime minister said that successive governments had “failed to find the right balance between diversity and integration”, while the concept of multiculturalism has been misused as a way to justify a “refusal to integrate”.

Blair makes the pointed intervention in a report by his Institute for Global Change, which backs forcing schools to have an intake that reflects local diversity, creating a compulsory citizenship programme for teenagers and toughening enforcement against the perpetrators of hate speech.

It also calls for compulsory citizenship education, a ban on segregated shift patterns and the creation of a new cabinet post created to oversee integration.

“Over a significant period of time, including when we were last in government, politics has failed to find the right balance between diversity and integration,” Blair writes in a foreword to the report. “On the one hand, failures around integration have led to attacks on diversity and are partly responsible for a reaction against migration. On the other hand, the word multiculturalism has been misinterpreted as meaning a justified refusal to integrate, when it should never have meant that.

“Particularly now, when there is increasing evidence of far-right bigotry on the rise, it is important to establish the correct social contract around the rights and duties of citizens, including those who migrate to our country.”

The report backs a new form of “digital identity verification” – a return to Blair’s support for ID cards that caused huge divisions when the idea was pushed by his government and later abandoned. It also backs the idea of increased funding for language tuition and handing asylum seekers earlier access to work.

It comes following an increase in religious or racially motivated hate crimes. According to Home Office data, such crimes increased from 37,417 in 2013-14 to 79,587 in 2017-18. MPs such as Labour’s Naz Shah have linked the increase with support for extreme far-right groups.

However, in remarks likely to attract criticism from migrant rights groups, Blair warns that enforcing greater integration by new arrivals is a crucial part of solving the issue.

Blair writes: “In this report, we make it clear that there is a duty to integrate, to accept the rules, laws and norms of our society that all British people hold in common and share, while at the same time preserving the right to practise diversity, which is fully consistent with such a duty.

“Without the right to, for example, practise one’s faith, diversity would have no content; but without the duty to integrate, ‘culture’ or ‘faith’ can be used as a way of upsetting that basic social contract that binds us together.

“Government cannot and should not be neutral on this question. It has to be a passionate advocate and, where necessary, an enforcer of the duty to integrate while protecting the proper space for diversity. Integration is not a choice; it is a necessity.”

In government, Blair pushed the idea that all communities had a “duty to integrate” into British society, adding that no one could override the values of democracy, tolerance and respect for the law.

“Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain, Britain,” he said in 2006. “Conform to it; or don’t come here.”

Source: Tony Blair: migrants should be forced to integrate more to combat far right

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Ahead of federal election, imams at 69 Canadian mosques deliver message that every vote counts

2019/04/22 Leave a comment

Similar to 2015:

When Canadians go to the polls in October, a non-partisan group hopes Muslim voter turnout will be higher than ever — and seized one of the year’s most-attended days of prayer to mobilize the community with a single message: every ballot counts.

“As believers, every single one of us has social responsibilities that our very faith is contingent upon,” Imam Faraz Rabbani told congregants at the Bosnian Cultural Centre in Toronto. Voting, he said, is one of those responsibilities.

“The very basis of religion is that the believer is concerned about maximizing the good for themselves and others, and striving to diminish harm.”

Friday’s effort was part of a larger project by the non-partisan, non-profit group Canadian Muslim Vote. It sprang up in 2015 with the aim of breaking what had been a cycle of poor voter turnout among Muslims in Canada — something it says had a tangible impact at the polls.

65 ridings where demographic could make a difference

Good Friday isn’t a religious holiday for Muslims, but being a legal holiday in Canada, it typically sees one of the biggest turnouts of the year for Muslims who hold congregational prayer.

According to the last national household survey in 2011, Canada is home to some one million Muslims. This year, CMV estimates the number of eligible Canadian Muslim voters is closer to 1.6 million.

By 2030, one in 10 Canadians are expected to identify as Muslims, meaning Muslims stand to become one of the largest voting populations in the country, Statistics Canada estimates.

Muslims had historically been less likely to vote compared to other religious groups, according to research by Elections Canada. A 2007 working paper by the elections agency put Muslim voter turnout in the 2000 federal election at 67 per cent, compared with 85 per cent for voters who identified as Jewish, 82 per cent for Catholics and Protestants and 78 per cent for Hindus. Total voter turnout in that election was 61.2 per cent.

That changed in 2015. A post-election poll by Mainstreet Research pegged Canadian Muslim voter turnout at 79 per cent. National turnout in that election was 68.5 per cent.

This year, based on research by Canadian Muslim Vote, there are some 65 ridings where the Muslim voting population is larger than the margin of victory for the 2015 incumbent MP. [Note: The 2011 NHS (the 2016 Census did not include religious affiliation) showed 24 ridings where Muslims formed 10 percent or more of the population, with an additional 45 ridings with between 5 and 10 percent of the population.]

‘A populist movement taking hold’

One area where the Muslim vote could prove decisive is the riding of Milton, Ont. Its incumbent won by 2,438 votes in the last election. And while Muslims don’t vote as a block, the riding has a Canadian Muslim population of approximately 8,000, enough to have a direct impact on the result, CMV’s executive director Ali Manek told CBC News.

So what are the issues of greatest concern to Canadian Muslim voters?

“What we find in the Canadian-Muslim community through our surveys and community consultations is that the majority are concerned with the same things as the rest of Canadians: jobs, economy, taxation, immigration and foreign aid usually top the list,” Manek said. Islamophobia is another big concern, he said.

The group has been working to survey voters heading into the 2019 election and expects to have results on their key issues of concern this May.

Aziza Mohamed, a volunteer with the group, was among those who attended Friday’s event. She said the coming federal election is especially important.

“When we have political parties in our country that are actively courting racists and Islamophobes, it’s really important that we be engaged to fight against that,” she said.

“We have a populist movement taking hold … putting forth ideas that are completely contrary to what Canada stands for and to what Muslim Canadians stand for.”

Among the sermon’s key messages: that Muslims vote not only with themselves in mind, but consider the impact on the wider communities in which they live.

“Think much bigger than your local politics,” Rabbani said.

It’s a message that hit home for Oguz Sarkut, who regularly attends the Bosnian centre with his daughter.

His takeaway from the sermon: “If we don’t vote, we don’t have any right to complain.”

Source: Ahead of federal election, imams at 69 Canadian mosques deliver message that every vote counts

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Why Jason Kenney’s workaholic style may not work when he’s premier [diversity numbers]

2019/04/22 Leave a comment

The numbers:

I pointed out on Twitter that Kenney’s UCP caucus contains a record-setting five Jasons. Yet, this change of government does bring in more ethnic diversity to Alberta’s legislature, as the NDP previously struggled to recruit non-white candidates. The new MLAs include 16 visible minority candidates (five NDP, 11 UCP) up from 10 elected overall in 2015. Say what you will about the racists who were exposed in the UCP ranks throughout this long campaign—and please do, it’s an important discussion—but Kenney has clearly brought with him from Ottawa an aptitude for bringing multicultural leaders and activists into the Conservative fold.

This legislature will have one openly LGBTQ member—rookie New Democrat Janis Irwin in Edmonton—down from three in the previous term. There was nobody from the community running as a UCP candidate. Should Edmonton–West Henday flip to Williams, who self-identifies at Métis, she will be the lone Indigenous MLA.

While Canada now has no female premiers for the first time in more than a decade, the legislature’s gender makeup didn’t suffer tremendously. There stands to be 26 or 27 female MLAs, just behind the record of 28 set last election—still far from parity in the 87-seat assembly.

Source: Why Jason Kenney’s workaholic style may not work when he’s premier

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ICYMI: Why is conservative politics such a natural home for white supremacists?: Neil Macdonald

2019/04/18 Leave a comment

This article by Neil Macdonald provoked considerable discussion on social media:

Interesting how the term “white nationalism” has somehow begun to supplant the more honest phrase “white supremacy,” both here and in the United States.

Everyone seems to be using it now. It will be an election campaign topic in our general election this fall, and the American one late next year.

And let’s be clear, it’s a euphemism. The word nationalism, to most people, has a virtuous whiff; historically, it’s been conflated with terms like patriotism and loyalty and solidarity with one’s civic tribe.

When the word is modified with a racial adjective, though, any distinction dissolves. A white nationalist stands with white people, advocating for white prerogatives and the protection of white governance.

A white nationalist would claim that flying the confederate flag on a state building is an expression of cultural history, rather than racial sentiment. A white nationalist would claim, as the television host Megyn Kelly once did on Fox News, that Jesus was white, and, by implication, God, too. (Jesus would have been a dark-skinned Sephardic Jew, not a blue-eyed, bland-faced fellow with wavy brown locks).

And before someone raises it, because people do, there is no comparison between white nationalism and assertions of solidarity, or even superiority, by minorities. They haven’t been in charge for centuries on this continent. White nationalism is about keeping power white. Yes, yes, there are minority groups represented among Justin Trudeau’s ministers, but they were all given jobs by a white guy.

Supremacy by another name

White nationalism is in fact white supremacy. It’s understandable that white supremacists would want to be called nationalists, but that doesn’t make them any less supremacist.

Which is why, presumably, conservative politicians here and in the U.S. are expressing such anger at having the label applied to them. They accuse their liberal opponents of planning attack ads and messaging portraying them as racists, or, at the very least, opportunists chasing racist votes.

They’re right about that. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his ministers are making a concerted effort to bind Conservative leader Andrew Scheer to the so-called alt-right scene (another euphemism) in this country, and Democrats, newly in control of the House of Representatives, have convened hearings on the threat of white nationalism.

The fact that Republicans obsequiously excuse President Donald Trump’s boorish rantings, of course, makes it easy for Democrats.

He eagerly hits Twitter every time an act of extremism is committed by a Muslim or a brown-skinned immigrant, but takes comparatively incidental notice when hate crimes are carried out by white Christians or non-Muslims, something that’s been happening far more often in recent years.

When the man arrested for the mosque murders in Christchurch left a manifesto praising Trump as a “symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose,” Trump, who has said he doesn’t believe his rhetoric inspires violent white extremists, further declared that white extremism isn’t really a threat, despite ample evidence to the contrary, including the assessment of his own justice department.

This of course is also the president who said there were some “very fine people” in the white mob carrying torches in Charlottesville, Virginia a few years ago. He proudly calls himself a nationalist, without specifying what kind: “Use that word,” he tells his angry, overwhelmingly white base. “Use that word.”

‘Hate hoax’

Candace Owens, a conservative American activist cited by the New Zealand murderer as his greatest influence, told Congress recently that the whole “white nationalism” thing is nothing more than a Democrat re-election strategy. (She also once said Hitler wasn’t such a bad fellow, at least until he started trying to conquer the world).

Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Trump fanboy, was suspicious when YouTube, which was live-streaming the hearing, took down hundreds of racist and anti-Semitic viewer comments, musing about whether it was all just more Democrat “hate hoax.”

Rep. Steve King, who has rhetorically asked what’s wrong with being a white nationalist or white supremacist, remains a proud Republican.

And even if extremists do applaud Trump, ask his supporters, what can he do about it?

Never do they ask, or attempt to answer, the obvious question: Why is it that white supremacists, from the neo-Nazis who threw celebratory salutes the night of his election, to former KKK leader David Duke, to the Charlottesville torchbearers, to the New Zealand murderer, or Cesar Sayoc, the Florida bodybuilder who sent explosives to Trump’s critics in 2018, gravitate right, rather than left? Why is conservative politics such a natural home for white supremacists?

Canadian conservatives might ask themselves the same question. Rather than whining about how unfair it is that Liberals are associating Andrew Scheer with Faith Goldy — an obvious white supremacist (a label she rejects) who proudly advocates for “European identity” and “white identity,” and who has contributed to a neo-Nazi podcast — they could instead reflect on why in heaven’s name he appeared on her online diatribe show two years ago.

Or why Scheer chose to address the “United We Roll” yellow-vest gang in Ottawa this year, where, yes, Faith Goldy also spoke to the crowd. (And former Conservative MP Maxime Bernier). Or why he would hire as his campaign manager a former director of the far-right shock talk site Rebel Media, where Faith Goldy worked until she became too much even for them. Rep. Steve King, incidentally, endorsed Goldy’s recent bid for mayor of Toronto. Somehow, she still lost.

Conservatives in Canada might also ponder why there have been so many racist and anti-gay bozo eruptions in Alberta’s United Conservative Party, rather than in, say, the governing NDP. Or why a small-c conservative senator’s racist posts remain online (yes, Lynn Beyak was expelled from the Conservative caucus for the posts, which were denounced by Scheer. But how does the party attract characters like her in the first place?)

Or why a conservative government in Quebec, a place where a giant illuminated cross overlooks the province’s biggest city (an expression of cultural history, of course), would be willing to suspend the constitution to pass a law clearly aimed at keeping religious Sikhs and Muslims out of the public service.

The answer is that somehow, over the decades that have passed since the ’60s, and as North American cities have become much less white, it’s become more okay in some circles to be a white supremacist.

Changing the label to white nationalist obscures nothing.

Abraham Lincoln, according to legend, used to ask his cabinet members how many legs a dog has if you consider a tail to be a leg. His answer: four. Because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.

Source: Why is conservative politics such a natural home for white supremacists?: Neil Macdonald

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On racism, elections and the media: Paul Adams

2019/04/18 Leave a comment

Good commentary on the need for more informed media discussion of the substantive issues, and less discussion of the political aspects:

Other than climate change, which is an existential threat to all of humankind, arguably the biggest threat to Western democracies is racism. Politically, liberal democracy is built on the idea of fundamental human equality and the further it strays from that precept the less it is recognizably democratic. Sociologically, societies that are racially complex but racially divided by law or harsh custom are unhappy places where violence lurks and often explodes.

In the United States, the president is the most openly racist in at least a century. He came to political prominence as an Obama birther, launched his campaign smearing Mexicans as rapists, has separated brown mothers from their brown children as a matter of policy and is seemingly intent on winning another minority victory in 2020 by stoking the flames of racial fear among white Americans. In the United Kingdom, a Brexit referendum victory driven in part by fears of outsiders is now also threatening the historic bonds that fasten England to both Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Here in Canada, you do not even have to go to the issue of racist intent to see that Quebec’s Bill 21 — which would ban the wearing of religious symbols such as the turban, the hijab and the kippah for many public servants — would be racist in its effect, hitting mainly people of colour and Jews. And in the last few days, the pollster Frank Graves has released data suggesting that opposition to the immigration of visible minorities is rising in Canada.

At one level, this might not seem very different from the other controversial issues journalists cover as a matter of routine: economic inequality, tax levels, education spending and so on. However, I think it presents unusual challenges that the media may not be entirely prepared to cope with.

It is the conceit of modern mainstream journalism that it stands outside of ideology. It is neutral, balanced, objective. If someone wants higher taxes to fund social programs and someone else wants lower taxes to stimulate the economy, reporters quote both sides of a debate, excavate some relevant data, and leave it to the readers to decide the argument. This is a powerful idea and has some merit. Many of us consume the news to inform us as citizens and not to be told what to think or do.

On the other hand, it can lead to the laziest conjuring trick in the journalist’s kit: what is sometimes called false balance. For a couple of decades, this was most obviously a problem with the coverage of climate change. Even as the evidence of human-caused climate change grew and the scientific consensus became close to complete, many journalists ran back and forth, got quotes from credible scientists, balanced them with a quotes from increasingly isolated and eccentric, often industry-backed “climate skeptics,” threw in a little data and let the readers decide. And in this way they failed the journalist’s responsibility not just to be fair, but to be rooted in evidence (as indeed scientists should be). Only very recently has this trend been significantly corrected.

In the case of racism the challenge is further complicated by the way in which it is being metabolized politically. Frank Graves’ most interesting finding was not that opposition to non-white immigration has recently risen. In fact, as he points out, it has sometimes been this high in his data in the past. What’s most striking is the degree to which it has become a partisan issue. Just six years ago, roughly half of Conservative supporters said too many immigrants were visible minorities; today the figure is over two-thirds. Meanwhile, among Liberal supporters, the trend has been the opposite. Six years ago about a third of Liberals were concerned about visible-minority immigration. That figure has now fallen to less than one-in-seven.

The supporters of our two main parties are polarizing around the issue of race and we are in an election year.

I don’t think even his harshest critics would claim Andrew Scheer is a Trump-style racist. In the immediate aftermath of the New Zealand massacres a few weeks ago, his first reaction (or that of his staff) was to tweet out condolences, somehow neglecting to mention that the murders took place in a mosque and the victims were Muslims. After some hours of barracking for those omissions on social media, including from some prominent conservatives, he did a very un-Trump-like thing and issued a new statement that got it right.

Scheer does not appear to be personally racist, but he needs the votes of people who are. He is not a white nationalist, but he shared the “yellow vest” platform on Parliament Hill with Faith Goldy, who was let go by The Rebel for her sympathetic coverage of the anti-Semitic and anti-black Charlottesville demonstrations, has given an interview to the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, and who was recently bounced from Facebook — not an easy thing to accomplish — for her views. Let’s just say she is not the sort of person in whose company Preston Manning would have wanted to be seen when he was a party leader.

Naturally, the Trudeau Liberals, mired in political troubles of their own making, and with a political base that may be getting more liberal on race according to Graves’ numbers, is using this as a cudgel. Trudeau has taunted Scheer to denounce white supremacists. Scheer’s reaction has been rather delicate, denouncing the sin of white supremacy but appearing reticent to name the specific sinners.

The danger in all this is that it invites journalists to rely on another bit of professional sorcery: that is, converting any matter of substance into a political issue. Instead of trying to understand the place that race and racism has in our society, our discourse, our policy and our laws, we are tempted to convert it into a political spectator sport. At best, that means running back and forth between Trudeau and Scheer chronicling jabs and counterpunches. At worst, it means that any serious discussion of race and racism with be replaced with public disgust at “smears,” “name-calling” and “negative campaigning.”

We need much more journalistic work to understand the roots of more overt racial hostility in Canada, and their connection to economic conditions, patterns of immigration and embedded cultural impulses that may have been dormant or suppressed. We need to understand the role of the internet and social media culture. We need to distinguish between overt racists, unconscious racists, and those who are not actively racist themselves but who are willing to tolerate those who are. More than anything, we need to understand the experiences and perspectives of those who are the targets of racism.

We need to understand better how our political system has allowed people like Goldy to walk onto a political (and media) stage where not long ago they would have been unwelcome. We need to be careful about unthinkingly labelling Scheer a racist, but also to understand the political dynamics that are shaping his party, its policies and its rhetoric.

We also need to pry apart the Trudeau government’s rhetoric and its policies (most notably on refugees). We need to understand better why the Liberal party’s supporters have grown so quickly so much more liberal on race, and to what extent this is real and to what extent just an artifact of partisan polarization.

And finally, those of us in journalism need to examine our own role. Journalism should not be indifferent to the health of our democracy; when journalism is done well it is a pillar of democracy as well as dependent on its liberties to thrive. We are still far from the point where we have an open racist sitting and chiming in on the “At Issue” panel with Rosie, Andrew and Chantal. But Ann Coulter, the American commentator who sees non-white immigration as a form of genocide, has often been interviewed on Canadian television. Gavin McInnes, founder of the sometimes-violent “Proud Boys,” has appeared on the CBC News Network to defend a bounty on the scalps of Mi’kmaq people in the 18th century as reasonable public policy for the time.

Racism raises complex journalistic issues that are not as simply solved as banning people from the airwaves. It may be that in the world of the internet and social media, journalists no longer have the ability they once did to police who inhabits the public square. They need to report on racism without fuelling it or giving it a platform. But with racism, as with climate change, journalists should not be confused about which side they are on.

Source: On racism, elections and the media

For tthe full Ekos report: click here

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism, Polling Tagged with , , ,

Terror report could trigger seismic shift in Sikh political leanings, impact next election

2019/04/15 1 Comment

Good piece by Tom Blackwell. In the end, unfortunately the government blinked (cbc.ca/…/trudeau-gurdwara-sikh-extremism-reference-removed-1.5097408):

It’s touted as the largest celebration of its kind outside India, drawing almost 500,000 people to mark the Sikh religion’s new year.

For politicians eager to tap into an electorally powerful ethnic group, the huge version of Khalsa Day in Surrey, B.C., is a veritable gold mine.

But barring a significant change of tune by the federal government over the next week, this year’s edition will impose an unprecedented policy. Unless certain demands are met, Liberal MPs will be barred from speaking from its stages on April 20, says organizer Moninder Singh.

“We’ve never had to take steps like this,” said the B.C. Gurdwara Council spokesman. “But we can’t be giving platforms where half a million people are out walking around, when we don’t see a genuine relationship being formed with the community.”

The threatened ban was over an issue causing growing consternation in the Sikh community: an annual Public Safety Canada report on terrorism that for the first time this December contained a small section on the alleged threat of Sikh extremism.

Community activists insist that violent support for the independence of Sikh-dominated Punjab state from India ended in the years after the 1985 Air India bombing, Canada’s worst-ever terror act — and call the report a smear job.

Critics see the hidden hand of India, allegedly manipulating Canada to malign a diaspora fixated on Punjab separation. The government says that’s hogwash, while others warn against politicians meddling in a report penned by independent security agencies. Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale has apologized for language that he says inadvertently disparaged Sikhs.

Regardless, community activists say the issue could have major implications for Canadian politics, setting off a potentially seismic shift in a minority group with wildly disproportionate political muscle.

At stake are nine Sikh-dominated ridings – in the Toronto-area suburbs, Calgary and lower-mainland B.C. — all of which went Liberal in the 2015 election, many flipping from the Conservatives.

Another eight, mostly Liberal seats across the country could be decided by the Sikh vote if the races are “competitive,” says Jaskaran Singh Sandhu, executive director of the World Sikh Organization (WSO), while 18 more are susceptible to Sikh influence if particularly close.

“Nine seats make or break their (Liberal) majority,” said Sandhu. “Sikhs can decide that.”

There are already signs of trouble for the party: a slate of candidates tied to the fathers of two Liberal MPs was roundly defeated in a recent election for the board of North America’s largest Sikh temple. The winners contend Ottawa’s terror report was a factor; the losers say it was just about religion.

About 400 people crowded into a round-table meeting on the issue in Brampton, Ont., Sunday, grilling the lone Liberal MP — Ruby Sahota — who attended.

And more Khalsa Day parades and gurdwaras — Sikh temples — are considering bans of their own on Liberal politicians speaking if the report is not changed, said B.C.’s Singh.

Other Sikhs, though, question whether there is a movement afoot, or just some very vocal leaders concerned about a niche matter.

“My sense is that it is a dead issue,“ says Ujjal Dosanjh, a former Liberal cabinet minister who has long crossed swords with the Punjabi separatist — or Khalistani — movement.

Shinder Purewal, both a political scientist at B.C.’s Kwantlen Polytechnic University and now a Conservative federal candidate, believes the south Asian community generally is souring on the Liberals, and shares others’ misgivings about the terror report. But he doesn’t expect it to play a big role in the Oct. 21 election.

“I don’t think that is one of the burning issues,” Purewal said. “People have the impression that immigrant communities have a separate agenda from other Canadians. They don’t. They care about the same issues.”

No one can question, though, that the Sikh community has some considerable political weight to throw around.

Recent elections have produced 18 Sikh MPs, including four cabinet ministers and a party leader. All from a minority community of 500,000 — barely one per cent of Canada’s population.

Canadians of Hindu Indian descent actually outnumber them, but Hindus and other south-Asian subgroups have not had the same influence politically.

That out-sized activism and clout stems partly from Sikh Canadians’ concentration in a relatively few ridings. But there may be another, more philosophical explanation, too. The religion melds the spiritual and secular in a way that encourages political service as an extension of the community-giving expected of followers, argues Sandhu.

Purewal says such an intersection of godly and earthly is common in many religions, and suggests that Sikh history — including a need to repulse a succession of invaders who targeted the Punjab — may be a better explanation for high levels of political engagement.

Whatever their reasons for getting involved, Sikhs have traditionally voted Liberal, the party they see as generally more friendly to immigrants and immigration, said Singh, though he adds they are becoming more discriminating. Purewal says the wave of Sikh support for Liberals in 2015 was largely a reaction to the Conservatives’ legislation stripping citizenship from dual citizens convicted of terrorism.

Regardless, the terror report in December was, for some Sikh leaders at least, a rude awakening after a spate of political victories.

“We thought we’d finally arrived,” Balpreet Singh, legal counsel for the World Sikh Organization, told Sunday’s town hall. “(But) what we’ve seen in the last year has been a wound to the Sikh community we haven’t seen in decades.”

The complaints centre around the document’s reference to “Sikh (Khalistani) extremism” — seen as defaming an entire, peaceful community rather than singling out a specific entity — and the lack of any evidence to support the claim of present danger. The report mentions the Air India bombing 33 years ago and two terror groups critics say have long been inactive.

Singh believes the passage stems from a counter-terrorism co-operation agreementsigned between Canadian and Indian national-security czars last year, as well as the government’s desire to improve fractured relations with New Delhi.

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh suggested the report is having a “massive” effect on Sikh politics, and warned it could spark hate crimes.

“This is the type of report by the government … that is going to result in people saying, ‘Well, if Sikhs are terrorists, then maybe we should take action,’ ” he told the town hall. “That is deeply offensive.”

Conservative Garnett Genuis, though an MP from Alberta, also attended the Brampton meeting and earned generous applause when he defended the right to peacefully advocate for Punjab independence.

Sahota voiced her own concerns about the report’s language, and the lack of clarity on why Khalistanis were suddenly included after years of silence. But in a spirited defence of her government, she stressed the document was the product of independent security services, not the party.

“We can’t take it to a point where we are politically interfering with our intelligence agencies,” the Brampton North MP said. “This didn’t wind up in there by accident … Obviously there is a reason.”

Goodale has said future iterations would not reference Sikh extremism but only “extremists who support violent means to establish an independent state within India.” He has not, though, disavowed the issue’s inclusion in the report.

Asked about the lack of backup evidence, a spokesman for the minister said: “Intelligence can precede criminal charges or other law enforcement action that would result in further public disclosure.”

Meanwhile, Dosanjh says he’s appalled by the Liberal MPs of Sikh background who publicly talk down the report’s Khalistani section.

“It’s horrifying to see,” he said. “Politicians have to rise above pandering and look to the national interest.”

Organizers of the Surrey Khalsa view things rather differently. They say the government must commit to re-issuing December’s report without the mention of Sikhs as a menace — or forget about politicking at the April 20 parade.

This being 2019, opponents of the report have made their demand clear, in a Twitter slogan: #ProveitorRemoveit .

Source: Terror report could trigger seismic shift in Sikh political leanings, impact next election

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A choice for Indonesia’s voters: tolerance … or Islamic statehood

2019/04/13 Leave a comment

Good in-depth read about the upcoming elections and the tensions between moderates and fundamentalists:

When Indonesians head to the polls next Wednesday for what is expected to be the world’s biggest direct presidential election, 70 per cent of its 193 million registered voters are expected to cast their ballots in a single day.

Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, wears its hard-fought democracy with ease. I witnessed this during each of its previous three presidential elections – in 2004, 2009 and 2014 – and again in recent weeks as I journeyed across rural and urban Java – the country’s main island – to speak to voters, understand their views, and gauge what their choices might be, come election day.

Direct presidential elections were first held in 2004, six years after student protests and mass riots in several cities ended the 32-year rule of Indonesia’s authoritarian leader Suharto.

Until this year, polling for local councils, regional assemblies and the national parliament were held three months before the presidential election.

Generally, I have emerged largely optimistic from my on-the-ground, straw-poll research expeditions.

Indonesians cherish the opportunity to vote; it’s something they would not readily sacrifice. Whether in east, central or west Java, an island with a population of more than 140 million, I have met people eager to discuss the merits or failings of their leaders, and conscious of the responsibility they have to register their hopes and concerns at the ballot box.

Yet, over time, I have noticed that competitive politics increasingly divides the country socially, though not so obviously along class lines, as in Europe. In Indonesia the electoral divide is, alarmingly, along religious lines – between Muslims and non-Muslims.

The story of Indonesia’s 2019 election is one of two countries. In one, an aspiring, mostly urban middle class worries about the erosion of tolerance and diversity; in the other, growing numbers of pious and conservative Muslims, many of them educated in rural religious schools, want laws that put Indonesia on the road to Islamic statehood.

These divergent visions sit uneasily alongside each other, and when Indonesians go to the polls this time round, those fearing the erosion of tolerance will largely vote for the incumbent Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi, a former city mayor with a common touch and an unthreatening manner; those who want the country to veer towards Islamic statehood will vote for Prabowo Subianto, a gruff former special forces commander who fought and almost won the election against Jokowi in 2014.

31 organisations urge Indonesians to abstain from voting in presidential polls

I saw these two Indonesians two weeks before the election in the west Java capital of Bandung, where a gathering of nervous middle-class millennials at a modern sculpture park worried about the decay of diversity; and at an Islamic teaching complex not far away, where the conviction of disciplined faith had thousands of devotees hanging on to every word of charismatic preacher Abdullah Gymnastiar. After the preaching was over, AA Gym, as he is known, sat patiently on an elevated office chair while the faithful lined up for selfies or to kiss his hand.

Such an unquestioning and disciplined following presents an obvious opportunity to politicians in search of votes. Prabowo doesn’t come from a devout Muslim background: his mother was a Catholic, his brother, Hasyim Djojohadikusumo, established a charismatic Protestant church. Yet Prabowo presents himself as a champion of conservative Islam.

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“They call me a radical,” Prabowo told thousands of supporters at a rally in the west Java town of Ciamis on April 6. “Yet I believe in Islam as a religion of peace that tolerates other religions.”

But that’s not what the conservative Islamic lobby supporting him wants.

At a religious school on the outskirts of the west Java town of Purwakarta, the head of security punched the air and claimed himself to be the only person with the guts to support the incumbent president.

“Everyone around here supports Prabowo because they believe he’ll promote their religious agenda of a caliphate,” said Asep, a wiry man who practises a Sundanese martial art.

Outside, a large poster for the Prabowo campaign portrayed the candidate and his running mate, Sandiaga Uno, against the image of hardline Islamist Rizieq Shihab who lives in exile in Saudi Arabia to avoid facing criminal charges under the Anti-Pornography Act (Rizieq is accused of sending explicit WhatsApp messages to a woman who is not his wife).

To enhance his appeal to the conservative Islamic groups, Prabowo promises to bring Rizieq home, and presumably the charges will go away too.

“They believe Prabowo will bring [Rizieq] back, but they don’t understand the law in the country,” said Asep waving towards Al Artoq school, which he claims has 4,000 followers from around the area.

THE MUSLIM LOBBY

Equally alarming is President Widodo’s response, which has been to try to win support from the conservative Muslim quarters by choosing a conservative Muslim cleric as his running mate.

My findings in west Java suggest this strategy has not worked. Prabowo still draws strong support from the devout Muslim population of west Java, where he won over 40 per cent more votes than Jokowi in 2014.

What is worrying, though, since Jokowi is likely to win the election at the national level, is how much leverage the Muslim lobby will now have on the president during his second term.

This makes many Indonesians who support Jokowi feel uneasy.

“Why do state schools and offices need to have mosques?” asked a Muslim mother who claims that her Buddhist son was denied promotion because he wasn’t a Muslim. She was attending a discussion for millennials led by the Minister of Religion Lukman Hakim at a modern sculpture gallery in a swanky north Bandung neighbourhood. Lukman’s response, to explain that the constitution and a battery of laws guarantee religious freedom, did not sound convincing.

“What about the recent incident in Bantul? Where Muslim residents refused to accept that non-Muslims could live among them?” asked another member of the audience.

The flustered minister shrugged off the incident, arguing that dialogue helped to repair these “misunderstandings”.

It is hard to misunderstand the signals that Prabowo’s supporters are sending. At the rally in Ciamis, a group of young men mounted the stage shortly before the candidate arrived. “We are the ‘Two-One-Two mujahideen’,” one of them cried. “Under our command, God willing, we will pursue our goal of the caliphate,” one of the young men shouted. Two-One-Two refers to the broad coalition of conservative Islamic groups who mounted mass rallies at the end of 2017, forcing Jokowi’s concession to demands to prosecute his former deputy on a charge of blasphemy.

In what many Indonesians consider a turning point for the country’s respect for religious diversity, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, popularly known as Ahok, was accused of blasphemy after a doctored video was submitted as evidence that he was insulting the Koran. A court later sentenced him to two years in jail.

The crucible of this vision of Indonesia under Islamic law can be found a few kilometres down the road from Ciamis. Set in verdant rice fields, the Miftahul Huda school is the largest of its kind in west Java. More than 4,000 students come here to study the Koran. After surrendering my ID I was permitted to drive up to the executive office, where after a while a pair of surly youths dressed in black invited me to sit on the floor.

“Who are you and where are you from?” the younger man asked suspiciously.

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The conversation was sparse. No, they do not engage in politics; students are not even allowed outside the school perimeter without special permission. Yet it was from here in 2017 that the first march on Jakarta was organised to demand Ahok’s arrest.

Back in Bandung, I caught up with Jalaluddin Rakhmat, a member of parliament for Jokowi’s main party platform, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP).

“Both Prabowo and his Muslim supporters suffer from delusions,” he said in his humble home situated just north of the regional capital. “Prabowo thinks if he wins he can dump the Muslims. The Muslims in turn are using Prabowo to come to power.”

It’s a bit like the way Christian evangelicals think they are using US President Donald Trump.

Jalaluddin, who is from the small Shiite minority, is among those who fear the erosion of tolerance for diversity. “We Muslims who are with Jokowi stand for a different Islam: we don’t want to take Islam as the basis of the state.” For people like us, he said, “if we go to Prabowo we will find monsters”.

EROSION OF TOLERANCE

The problem for Jalaluddin, and like-minded Indonesians anxious to shore up pluralism, is that Jokowi is widely regarded as having failed to deliver as a moderate. He has been soft on human rights and has pandered to the Islamic right. Many young people living in the Indonesia of tolerance and pluralism are too scared to vote for Prabowo but dislike Jokowi. They might spoil their ballots, or not vote at all.

Is there a way to reconcile these two Indonesias? While canvassing views I came across an interesting experiment in social development. A group of Muslim activists at Salman Mosque, which sits next door to Bandung’s Institute of Technology, were looking for ways to harness Islamic teaching to progressive change.

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“We’re looking for local champions,” said Salim Rusli, who runs Al Wakaf, an NGO attached to the mosque, which has a long history of student activism. These can be local ulamawho use Islamic teaching to promote innovative thinking about mundane issues such as marketing vegetables or who foster constructive communication with local government.

This kind of grass-roots societal approach could also begin to build bridges across the religious divide that has opened in Indonesian society. But it will require political leaders like Prabowo to stop using Islam as a political weapon, or Jokowi to strengthen his leadership by framing a national narrative that more actively and effectively defends the tolerance of minorities.

Source: A choice for Indonesia’s voters: tolerance … or Islamic statehood

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Why giant statues of Hindu gods and leaders are making Muslims in India nervous – The Conversation

2019/04/12 1 Comment

Not encouraging:

Statues – big statues, the largest in the world – are being built all across India.

Like many public monuments, they attempt to convey history in a concrete form. But India’s new statues convey something else, too: the power and vision of one dominant group – and the vulnerability of others.

That’s because India’s biggest new public monuments all pay tribute to Hindu gods and leaders.

As a scholar of social change in India, I see statues as a projection of a nation’s values at a particular moment in time. For many Muslims and other religious minorities, then, these hulking public monuments of Hindu icons send an ominous message about their status in society.

Rising Hindu nationalism

The mammoth public shrines to Hindu nationalism are a pet project of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party.

Since taking office in 2014, Modi has used his power to promote Hindu nationalism, a polarizing ideology that sees Hindus as India’s dominant group. Yet India is a constitutionally multicultural country with the world’s second largest population of Muslims – comprising over 170 million people.

Twenty percent of its 1.3 billion people are Muslim, Christian or another religion.

By 2021 India, which is already home to the tallest statue in the world – Gujarat state’s 597-foot-tall “Statue of Unity,” commemorating Indian independence hero Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel – plans to unveil two more record-breaking monuments, both portraying icons idolized by Hindu rightists.

A 725-foot bronze likeness of the god Ram planned for Uttar Pradesh state will soon surpass the Statue of Unity in size. And in Mumbai construction has been halted on a 695-foot-tall likeness of the medieval Hindu warrior Shivaji, pending the results of an environmental review.

Guinness World Records also recently judged Tamil Nadu state’s 112-foot depiction of the face of the Hindu god Shiva as the world’s largest bust statue.

All this is happening under Modi, who is up for re-election in monthlong general elections that start on April 11.

He was voted into office in 2014 on a platform of “development for all.” Promising to boost the economy in a country where nearly 22% of people live in poverty and millions go hungry, Modi and the BJP won an historic parliamentary majority over the center-left Indian National Congress, its main competitor.

Since then, India has improved in international “ease of doing business” rankings, passing regulations that improve commerce and the protection of property rights.

But some of Modi’s boldest moves to improve cash flow and boost public revenues, including a 2017 tax reform initiative and a ban on saving in certain high-value currencies, have failed. Unemployment has risen under BJP rule, particularly in rural areas, and the national economy suffered during the “demonetization” process.

Over the last five years, under Modi’s administration, India has also seen a startling rise of Hindu vigilante violence.

Indian vigilante ‘cow killings’

The attacks – often called “cow protection” – are sometimes deadly assaults that target Muslims and other Indians who, unlike many Hindus, do not consider cows to be sacred.

Hindu militants killed at least 44 Indians and injured 280 in about 100 attacks between May 2015 and December 2018, according to the international not-for-profit Human Rights Watch. Most of the dead were Muslims in states run by Modi’s political party.

The prime minister and his BJP have faced criticism for being slow to condemn anti-Muslim violence and for prioritizing legislation to safeguard cows, not the victims of vigilantism. Cow protection violence has also crippled India’s beef and leather industries, since they are primarily Muslim-run.

Muslim men who date Hindu women are another common target of vigilante violence, as are students, journalists, academics and artists perceived to be critical of Modi’s leadership.

The Hindu nationalists’ crusade against pluralism takes place even as the Modi administration cracks down on civil liberties. Between 2014 and 2016, 179 people were arrested on charges of sedition for protests, critical blogs or anti-government posts on Facebook, according to government crime statistics.

Fears of religious minority groups

This is the cultural context that has Muslims worried over India’s statue-building spree.

The BJP is not the first party to build public monuments celebrating only one segment of Indian society.

From 2007 to 2012, a top politician named Mayawati built numerous memorials and parks across Uttar Pradesh state commemorating leaders from India’s marginalized Dalit class, formerly known as the “untouchables.” Mayawati, a Dalit, commissioned statues of herself, her political mentor Kanshi Ram and other Dalit icons who fought against India’s caste system.

It was the first time such grand homage had been paid to the Dalit leaders who crusaded against India’s deep-rooted caste system.

But the US$800 million price invited scrutiny, and the courts have asked Mayawati to repay some of those funds.

India’s election commission also insisted that Mayawati’s statues be shrouded ahead of state elections in 2012, saying the visibility of the then-chief minister and her party symbol might sway voters.

In contrast, resistance to India’s giant new statues has been muted. And Hindu nationalists are pushing for more public commemoration of their faith.

In November 2018, tens of thousands of Hindus gathered to demand the construction of a Hindu temple in the Indian city of Ayodhya – at the same spot where, in 1992, Hindu zealots demolished an ancient Muslim-built mosque.

The proposal to build instead an enormous statue of Ram in Ayodhya is widely seen as an effort to placate Hindu nationalists in their decades-long quest for a Ram temple.

Fearing a repeat of the deadly violence that destroyed the ancient mosque, some local Muslims fled the city last November.

Indian elections

Indians will decide whether to give Modi another five years when they vote this spring in the world’s biggest election.

Recent polls show Modi and his BJP leading in a race in which several competitor parties have allied to defeat him.

The prime minister’s public approval got a 7% boost, to 52%, after India’s brief but sharp escalation of recent tension with neighboring Pakistan, a majority Muslim state.

Border disputes are a classic move for a strongman leader during election season. Paying homage to Hindu nationalist icons in the form of giant public monuments, however, is something different. Modi is transforming secular India, one statue at a time.

Source: Why giant statues of Hindu gods and leaders are making Muslims in India nervous – The Conversation

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Scheer denounces white supremacy after Conservative senator questions threat

2019/04/12 Leave a comment

An improvement:

Andrew Scheer condemned “anyone who promotes racist ideology” after a Conservative senator questioned whether white supremacy was a significant threat to Canadian communities.

Scheer told reporters Wednesday that he “100 per cent” denounces anyone who “promotes white nationalism, promotes any type of extremism.”

“I do believe it’s a threat in Canada because we have seen, tragically, people lose their lives because of people who subscribe to these views,” Scheer said.

“I understand that the senator has issued a clarification … And I absolutely do believe that these types of threats are important for governments of all levels to protect Canadians.”

Scheer was responding to a question about Quebec Conservative Sen. Leo Housakos, who suggested Tuesday that white supremacy is not a significant “threat to our way of life, to our communities, to our democracy.”

In a question to Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland at the Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Housakos asked Freeland to clarify her position that white supremacy is a significant risk to western democracies.

“With all due respect minister, I think that flies in the face of reality over the last two decades. I think over the last two decades western liberal democracies around the world would tell you that the biggest threats we’ve faced are extremist fundamentalism,” Housakos said.

“I can’t identify a single country in the world where governments are supporting white supremacist movements. I can’t identify governments around the world, democratic governments around the world, that are supporting that type of behaviour, certainly not in Canada.”

“I absolutely do think white supremacists and white supremacists movements are a very real, very grave threat to western liberal democracy. I think they are a grave and real threat here in Canada,” Freeland responded.

“The shooting in the Quebec City mosque is a tragic Canadian example of the same threat that we face here at home. So I absolutely believe we need to name that, we need to be aware of it, and we need to work hard to find ways to protect our societies and our people from it.”

In question period Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau demanded Scheer denounce white supremacy, which the opposition leader had publicly done only hours before in a press conference.

But the exchange makes clear that white nationalism and far-right extremism — once a fringe issue in Canada’s political debate — will likely remain front and centre in the lead-up to the 2019 election. In March, Trudeau accused unnamed politicians of exploiting racism for political gain.

In a statement on Twitter Wednesday, Scheer shot back.

“Racism and white supremacy are threats in Canada and I condemn them unequivocally,” Scheer’s statement read.

“It is pathetic and disgusting that Liberals are inflaming these threats to divide Canadians and score cheap points.”

An aide for Housakos declined the Star’s request for an interview Wednesday afternoon, pointing to the senator’s comments on Twitter.

“No western, democratic politician condones extremism of any kind, including white supremacy,” he wrote Wednesday after Freeland released a video of their exchange.

“Extremism in all forms is a threat to our way of life, not just one (form) or the other.”

Source: Scheer denounces white supremacy after Conservative senator questions threat

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