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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Diaspora calls on Ukraine to consider introduction of dual citizenship

2019/04/11 Leave a comment

Call by Canadian Ukrainian diaspora (consideration):

Ukrainian diaspora calls on the authorities to consider a possibility of the introduction of dual citizenship.

“We call on the Ukrainian authorities to consider the introduction of dual citizenship and to listen to the diaspora’s thoughts while balancing security aspects,” President of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress Alexandra Chyczij said in an interview with Ukrinform.

At the same time, she acknowledged that dual citizenship posed certain security risks. “On the one hand, there are just concerns about possible Russia’s interference through the issuance of passports in the border areas. On the other hand, a large Ukrainian diaspora cares about the fate of Ukraine, wants to participate in solving its problems and strives to preserve Ukrainian citizenship,” the UCC President said.

Chyczij added that the Congress had not yet formed its clear stance on this issue since it “is aware of the difficulties arising from such a step.”

As a reminder, Foreign Minister of Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin supports the official recognition of dual citizenship in Ukraine provided that certain “criteria” are introduced.

Source: Diaspora calls on Ukraine to consider introduction of dual citizenship

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Stoning Gay People? The Sultan of Brunei Doesn’t Understand Modern Islam

2019/04/11 Leave a comment

Akyol on blind literalism:

At a time when Islam’s place in the modern world is a matter of global contention, Brunei, a small monarchy in Southeast Asia, has offered its two cents. By April 3, the nation, which is predominantly Muslim, had begun adhering to a new penal code with harsh corporal punishments. Accordingly, gay men or adulterers may be stoned to death, and lesbians may be flogged. Thieves will lose first their right hand, and then their left foot.

Understandably, these bits of news brought outcries from the United Nations, human rights organizations and celebrities like George Clooney. In return, the Brunei government dismissed all criticisms, reminding the world that the country is “sovereign” and “like all other independent countries, enforces its own rule of laws.”

As a Muslim, I should first tell my coreligionists in Brunei that their argument is not very good. Of course every country can enforce its own laws, but the content of those laws isn’t immune from criticism when it violates human rights. Otherwise, we would have no basis to criticize China’s totalitarian persecution of Uighur Muslims or the illiberal bans on “religious symbols,” including the Islamic head scarf, in France and, more recently, Quebec.

However, the real issue isn’t Brunei. It is Islamic law, or Shariah, the penal code from which law is applied not just in Brunei but in about a dozen other nations as well, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan. It includes brutal corporal punishments that shock the rest of the world. It also criminalizes acts that shouldn’t be crimes at all — such as consensual sex, loss of faith in Islam (“apostasy”) and the right to criticize it (“blasphemy”).

Muslims who insist on keeping or reviving these measures have a simple logic: Shariah is God’s law, and enforcing it is a religious duty. But their blind literalism is wrong for three reasons.

First, the corporal punishments in the Quran — amputation of limbs and flogging — may simply be related to the context of the Quran. In seventh-century Arabia, where the Prophet Muhammad lived, there were no prisons in which to incarcerate and feed people for a long time. For the same reason, corporal punishments — much cheaper and easier than imprisonment — were the universal norm until a few centuries ago. The Hebrew Bible commanded many of them, as did pre-modern European laws.

Second, much of the Shariah is actually man-made. Islamic scholars expanded jurisprudence based on debatable reports about the words and deeds of the Prophet, as well as the norms of their time. That is how blasphemy, apostasy and drunkenness, none of which is penalized in the Quran, became crimes.

Third, Islamic jurisprudence was developed for Muslims only, whereas Christians and Jews had their own laws. But all modern nation-states, including Brunei, are both centralized and diverse. So imposing Shariah as the law of the land will go against the rights of minorities, in addition to unorthodox Muslims.

All of those arguments are persuasively made by reformist thinkers in Islam. But I doubt that conservative authorities in Brunei will have much heart for them. So let me call on them to check an authority they can’t dismiss that easily: the Ottoman Empire, the last Islamic superpower of the world and the last seat of the Sunni Caliphate.

The Ottomans, who followed the flexible Hanafi school of jurisprudence, were pragmatic about law from the beginning. Decrees issued by sultans introduced fines or prison sentences instead of corporal punishments, rendering the latter often practically obsolete.

Moreover, in the mid-19th century the Ottomans initiated a major Reform (Tanzimat) era, which included the Imperial Ottoman Penal Code of 1858. The French-inspired law was designed to be valid for all Ottoman citizens, regardless of their religion, and remained in practice until the end of the empire with some modifications. It replaced all remaining corporal punishments in Ottoman law with prison sentences or forced labor. It also decriminalized apostasy and penalized blasphemy, or “interference with religious privileges,” with only “imprisonment of from one week to three months” (Article 132).

The penal code’s section on sexual crimes is worth a look, for it is much more liberal than the laws Brunei just began implementing 161 years later.

According to Article 200, for example, “an abominable act” with “a girl who has not yet been married to a man” was an offense — but only when done “by force.” In other words, consensual premarital sex was not a crime.

Extramarital sex, or adultery, was an offense under Article 201 — but to be punished with a prison sentence of “three months to two years,” not stoning to death.

What about homosexuality? The Ottoman penal code didn’t say anything about it. John Bucknill and Haig Utidjian, who translated the law into English in 1913, noted, “It will be observed that unless committed with force” or upon a minor, “sodomy is not a criminal offense under the Ottoman Penal Code.”

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What right-wing violent extremists and jihadists have in common

2019/04/08 Leave a comment

Seeing more and more articles outlining the similarities and the differences between the two forms of extremism:

The parallels between the extreme ideologies of the violent far right and the global jihadist fringe are too striking to ignore. Both believe that they are in a cosmic war between good and evil. Both look back to an imagined glorious past that has been derailed by an imagined inglorious present. Both think that their way of life is under existential threat and that only extreme violence can save their souls. Both want to polarize and create division. Both want to make their respective tribes great again, even if it means the genocidal destruction of other tribes. And both believe that the media can be weaponized to serve their aims.

Just as striking, however, are the parallels between the psychological profiles of those who adhere to these two opposing, yet structurally similar, ideologies.

Anyone who has ever met and engaged an extremist in conversation feels this in their bones. It is the trenchancy with which your interlocutor articulates his views. It is his unwillingness to listen to the other side of the argument. It is his cast-iron certainty that he is right and you are wrong. It is his conviction that the end justifies any and all means.

Drawing on a large body of research in political psychology, sociologists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog note that individuals on the violent far right exhibit a number of distinct psychological traits. One is a proneness to be easily disgusted: a special sensitivity to objects that are felt to be polluting or corrupting. Another trait is the need for closure: that is, “a preference for order, structure and certainties.” A third trait is a “rigid in-group preference,” and a fourth is “simplism,” which is “a penchant to seek simple and unambiguous explanations of the social world and its ills.”

People with left-wing views, by contrast, according Gambetta and Hertog, are more likely to be tolerant of disorder, uncertainty and complexity.

Because so little is publicly known about the perpetrator of the Christchurch massacre, it is hard to be sure whether he fits into Gambetta and Hertog’s profile of a right-wing extremist. But the 74-page manifesto he uploaded to the internet before his rampage certainly provides some suggestive evidence of a fit. The manifesto, titled “The Great Replacement,” is saturated in irony and booby-trapped with false-flags. But it also expresses beliefs, sentiments and anxieties that are clearly genuinely felt and that cast a sharp light on the mindset of the person who wrote it.

There is much disgust expressed in the document, all of it aimed at non-white “invaders,” particularly Muslims, who are reviled as dirty and contaminating. Cities are particularly distasteful to its author: sewers of “cultural filth.” Turkish people are dehumanized as “roaches,” while “Antifa/Marxists/Communists” are castigated in hollering capitalizations as “ANTI-WHITE SCUM.”

Sex isn’t a big theme in the manifesto, but a few stringent paragraphs are devoted to the sexual defilement of “European Women.” In a reference to the Rotherham child sexual abuse case, in which seven Pakistani-British men were found guilty of grooming young girls, the author of the manifesto writes, “Rotherham is just one of an ongoing trend of rape and molestation perpetrated by these non-white scum.”

The manifesto also reveals a mind fixated on in-group/out-group distinctions. These are rigidly hierarchical. At the top of the hierarchy are “European people,” whose traditions, achievements and very survival are perceived to be under grave threat. This is the in-group. At the bottom of the hierarchy are “invaders living on our soil,” which also stands for Muslims in the West. This is the main out-group. But the manifesto’s author reserves his most visceral hatred for what he calls “blood traitors to their own race.” “The only muslim I truly hate,” he writes, “is the convert, those from our own people that turn their backs on their heritage.” This is the subsidiary out-group.

Another insistent theme in the manifesto is simplism — what political scientists Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab called “the unambiguous ascription of single causes and remedies for multi-factored phenomenon.” For the author, the problem is clear: it is the gradual erasure of the culture of white Europeans at the hands of invading non-Europeans. The solution, in his mind, is equally clear: “Radical, explosive action is the only desired, and required, response to an attempted genocide.” The solution is also heavily gendered: “The people who are to blame most are ourselves, European men. Strong men do not get ethnically replaced … weak men have created this situation and strong men are needed to fix it.”

If all of this has a familiar ring to it, it is because, for the past two decades, it has been wearing Islamized clothing. In the most original part of their analysis of extremist mind-sets, Gambetta and Hertog discuss the parallels between the two extremisms currently wreaking havoc around the globe.

Islamic radicals, just like those on the far right, are rigidly Manichean, framing the world as a battlefield between “dirty kuffars” on one side and pure and true defenders of the faith on the other. Revealingly, they reserve their most potent contempt not for unbelievers, whose ignorance they pity, but for those who have known the true path but chosen to reject it (i.e. apostates).

They are also notoriously disgust prone, displaying a particular squeamishness about women’s bodies and sex. Related to this is a deep concern about the sexual purity of women — or rather, their defilement by non-Muslim men. Like the Christchurch terrorist, Islamic radicals are intensely preoccupied by the rape of “their” women by unclean, alien “Others.” And, just like him, they share his arrogant conviction that their own revered methodology is the perfect solution to all the world’s problems, which they attribute to the West.

It is often pointed out that jihadists and far-right violent extremists feed off each other, cynically exploiting the outrages of their enemies as a spur and justification for further retaliatory bloodshed. Earlier this month, for example, ISIL released a statement promising revenge for the Christchurch atrocity.

For all their mutual enmity, however, these two warring factions have far more in common than they would like to admit.

Source: What right-wing violent extremists and jihadists have in common

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Laïcité: la CAQ «erre gravement», selon Gérard Bouchard

2019/04/08 Leave a comment

Speaks for itself (as did Charles Taylor’s similarly critical take):

Gérard Bouchard, coprésident de la commission sur les «accommodements raisonnables» il y a une douzaine d’années, affirme que le gouvernement Legault «erre gravement ou cède à la démagogie» en voulant interdire aux enseignants de porter des signes religieux à l’école.

M. Bouchard est le coauteur du rapport de 2008 qui est abondamment cité comme source d’inspiration pour le projet de loi 21 du gouvernement de la Coalition avenir Québec sur la laïcité de l’État. Le projet de loi vise à interdire à plusieurs catégories d’employés de l’État de porter des signes religieux dans l’exercice de leurs fonctions, notamment les enseignants du primaire et du secondaire du secteur public et les directeurs d’écoles.

Dans une lettre d’opinion parue vendredi dans La Presse, l’historien et sociologue Bouchard se demande si le premier ministre François Legault ne cède pas à la démagogie avec son projet de loi interdisant les signes religieux.

À la suite d’audiences publiques tenues dans tout le Québec, la commission présidée par M. Bouchard et le philosophe Charles Taylor proposait en 2008 d’interdire les signes religieux aux employés de l’État «détenant un pouvoir de coercition»: les policiers, les juges, les procureurs de la Couronne et les gardiens de prison. Mais pour tous les autres «agents de l’État» – enseignants, fonctionnaires, professionnels de la santé et autres-, la «commission Bouchard-Taylor» estimait que le port de signes religieux devrait être autorisé.

M. Bouchard affirme aujourd’hui que le gouvernement Legault «erre gravement (ou cède à la démagogie) en assimilant le pouvoir extraordinaire de coercition» aux enseignants. Il estime que l’ajout des enseignants dans cette catégorie constitue une «restriction ou une suppression» d’un droit fondamental.

Il considère aussi que le recours par le gouvernement à la disposition dérogatoire pour bloquer toute contestation judiciaire «engage ainsi le Québec sur une voie périlleuse».

M. Taylor, qui s’était déjà dissocié de son propre rapport, a dénoncé cette semaine le projet de loi «clairement discriminatoire» du gouvernement Legault; il a déclaré à La Presse canadienne qu’il le combattrait par tous les moyens.

Source: Laïcité: la CAQ «erre gravement», selon Gérard Bouchard

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Sheema Khan: Quebec’s religious-symbols ban is stranger than fiction – but the pushback from society must be real

2019/04/06 Leave a comment

Another good column by Sheema Khan:

In a cold open for a 2017 episode of the ABC comedy Black-ish, protagonists Bow and Dre walk into a bakery to buy a gender-reveal cake. The bakery has every type of cake, the employee says – but not for gay weddings. Bow and Dre leave in disgust. At the next bakery, they cut to the chase: “You don’t discriminate against people based on race, gender or sexual orientation, do you?” To which the stern-looking baker replies: “Do not like French-Canadians.” Initially stunned by the random reply, Bow and Dre quickly indicate they can live with that, and proceed with the order.

What passed for laughs in America would never fly up here. But the mention of French-Canadians in juxtaposition with fundamental civil rights was downright prescient, if not ironic. In this fictitious TV show, everyone’s fundamental civil rights are worthy of protection – except if you’re French-Canadian.

The reverse is true in one major part of French Canada – and the Quebec government’s rhetoric and actions would be comedic, too, if they weren’t so tragic.

The Coalition Avenir Québec’s Bill C-21 seeks “religious neutrality” – that is, legalizing employment discrimination based on an individual’s religious expression. Civil servants, along with judges, police officers, prison guards and teachers, will be forbidden from exhibiting any religious affiliation while on the job. According to Premier François Legault, observant Sikhs, Jews and Muslims should look for another line of employment. Where else in the world has an elected leader told constituents to find another job because of their beliefs?

Recently, a councillor in the Montreal borough of Anjou, Lynne Shand, expressed her outrage at being treated by a doctor wearing a hijab, posting on Facebook: “If it hadn’t been an emergency, I would have refused to be treated by her. I’m angry because it’s really the Islamification of our country.”

While she later apologized, she clarified that she is against “visible” religious symbols, alluding to the proposed bill. It was irrelevant that the doctor’s service – according to Ms. Shand – was excellent.

This follows on the heels of similar outbursts by other Quebec politicians. CAQ Minister for the Status of Women Isabelle Charest unequivocally stated that the hijab is a sign of oppression, thereby proving that she is unfit to serve all women in her province. Gatineau deputy mayor Nathalie Lemieuxresigned after telling a French-language newspaper that Muslim immigrants don’t integrate, adding they “do bad things with their trucks … it’s normal to be afraid of them.”

First and foremost, the dangerous bill creates two tiers of citizens: those with full rights and opportunities, and those without. Since it uses the Charter of Rights and Freedoms’s notwithstanding clause to preclude any court action, the bill invites civil disobedience as the only means to fight against laws that deny fundamental freedoms. Furthermore, the bill gives licence to xenophobes to stigmatize and berate fellow Quebeckers. While Public Security Minister Geneviève Guilbault has backtracked on her warning that police would enforce C-21, it harked back all the same to the federal Conservatives’ proposed “snitch line” in the 2015 election.

And while it may be civil servants and employees in positions of authority today, who will it be tomorrow? Doctors providing service? Students at public schools, as was the case in France? Will the private sector follow the government’s lead? Finally, what other encroachments will there be on religious freedoms? Will Muslim students be barred from fasting during Ramadan, as was proposed by certain Quebec schools in 1995?

Before the rest of Canada gets smug, it should reflect on its own attitudes. Georgetown University’s comprehensive study on Islam, Muslims and Islamophobia, compiling Canadian data between 2004 and 2018, paints a glum picture. While the majority of Canadians acknowledge that anti-Muslim sentiment is a growing problem, most hold unfavourable views about Islam and Muslims. For example, last year more Canadians were worried about “homegrown radical Islamic terrorism” than violence from white-supremacist groups. In 2017, roughly half of all Canadians believed that Islam is the most “damaging” religion in the public sphere – even after six people were killed in a Quebec City mosque.

Now that there’s been a legislative assault on religious freedoms, will Anglo-Canadians stand up, too?

In the days since C-21 was introduced, there has been active opposition to it within Quebec, giving the lie to Mr. Legault’s Orwellian promise that the bill would bring Quebeckers together. Quebec civil society’s actions are reminiscent of the inspiring acts of solidarity by New Zealanders in the wake of the attacks at two mosques in Christchurch.

The difference in political leadership between Quebec and New Zealand, however, is like night and day.

As Martin Luther King Jr. once said: “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Looking at Quebec today, where reality is stranger – and far more dangerous – than fiction, and where a government works to effectively sanitize bigotry against its own people, his words ring too true.

Source: Quebec’s religious-symbols ban is stranger than fiction – but the pushback from society must be real Sheema Khan

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Why Narendra Modi has an enduring Muslim problem in India

2019/04/06 1 Comment

Interesting article on some of the underlying and long-standing tensions with and prejudices regarding Muslims in India and how PM Modi has increased them:

Lucille Eichengreen was a school girl in Hamburg. Like most children she had many friends and a carefree childhood. Her world changed overnight. “Hitler came to power in January 1933. The children that lived in the same building…no longer spoke to us. They threw stones at us, they called us names, and that was maybe three months after Hitler came to power, and we could not understand what we had done to deserve this…And when we asked at home the answer pretty much was, ‘Oh it’s a passing phase, it won’t matter, it will normalise.’ What that actually meant we did not know. But we could not understand the change.”

“Well, Levine, have you got your ticket to Palestine?”

She was not alone.  Eugene Levine used to study in a mixed religion school where, one day, he was taunted by a non-Jewish boy, who was his friend, “Well, Levine, have you got your ticket to Palestine?” Eugene was shocked. “But, you see, anti-Semitism’s always there beneath the surface.” These incidents are a part of a history that even the Germans don’t want to remember any longer. Both the statements, together, hint at a fact that is distasteful, dangerous and apocalyptical.

…

It is a lesserknown fact of history that Hindenburg who appointed Hitler as chancellor, had refused twice before to appoint him to the post. He had said in November 1932, that a presidential cabinet headed by Hitler would inevitably develop into a party dictatorship with all its consequences, resulting in a worsening of the antagonisms within the German people.

Unlike Hindenburg, Indian president Pranab Mukherjee did not have any choice but to obey the will of the people; and at that time if he had any reservations about the turn of events, he did not share it with anyone. But it is to be noted that a section of the intelligentsia had always viewed Modi as a polarising figure who unabashedly pursued Hindutva and did not hide his views vis-a-vis minorities. His image as a Hindutva icon was one of the major reasons for his success and he did not flinch in exploiting it to the hilt, though he did marry it with the utopia of development and the idea of making India great again.

He could succeed only because like in Germany prejudice against Muslims had been lying dormant in a section of Hindus for long. To be fair to Modi and the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), this prejudice against Muslims existed even before the RSS was formed in 1925.

…

The problem with the RSS is that it has failed to understand, that in independent India, two incidents—the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992 and the 2002 Gujarat riots—have majorly impacted the Muslims’ collective psyche, scarred them emotionally, and shaken their belief in the Indian legal system.

Modi’s identification with Gujarat riots is too overwhelming in the Muslim community. And his rule since 2014 has not helped lessen the burden of history; rather it has created new fissures in their minds, inflicted much deeper emotional wounds and constructed a regime of alienation, helplessness and betrayal.

Modi’s identification with Gujarat riots is too overwhelming in the Muslim community.

The killing of Akhlaq, Pehlu Khan, Junaid and others by cow vigilantes; the subsequent collaboration of state machinery to save the perpetrators; no urgent and unequivocal condemnation of these incidents from Modi and Bhagwat; felicitation of mob lynching accused and convicted Hindutvavadis by central ministers; provocative statements by BJP/RSS leaders targeting Muslims; sudden closure of abattoirs in UP and other states without any opportunities for alternate ways of livelihood; forced ban on beef in northern and western states by BJP governments at a time when India is the leading beef exporter in the world; the arrest and brutal beatings of Muslim youth in the name of love jihad; insulting and intimidating Muslims who tried to offer namaaz in an open space; regular violations of the symbols of Muslim identity; a nonstop attempt to portray and lampoon them as terrorist and anti-national by the Hindutva Brigade on TV Channels and social media; the Modi government’s effort to abrogate instant triple Talaq and through that to build a narrative that the community is regressive, and so on, has built a perception in the community that the Indian state has become anti-Muslim in its ethos and practice.

Since 2014, a section of Hindus have rediscovered their Hindutva which if scratched a bit, reveals an anti-Muslim point of view. Flaunting an anti-Muslim attitude is definitely massively on the rise. The stereotyping of Muslims has increased manifold. The present status of Muslims in India, reminds me of Silvia Vesela, a Slovakian Jew, who was held in a temporary camp in 1942, where death was staring her in the face. She said, “It hurt, it really hurt when I, for example, saw many schoolmates shouting with fists raised, ‘It serves you right!’ Since that time I do not expect anything of people.”

…

Since Modi took over the reins of the government a paradigm shift has taken place. Muslims have started feeling that the state had now started interfering in matters of their religion and culture. Anwar Alam writes, “It is the religio-cultural alienation which might strengthen the process of radicalistion among Indian Muslims. The demolition of Babri masjid was a jolt to the faith of the Muslim community. Since 2014 when the present NDA government came into power at the Centre, it has initiated a series of policy measures including the issue of criminalising instant triple talaq and keeping a distance from sharing Muslim/Islamic symbolism in the public domain that deeply concerns the Muslim community: whether they are any longer free to practice their religion freely in this nation.”

“Hindus are not seen as religious enemies. The problem is the RSS and Hindutva.”

During research for this book I met many Muslim intellectuals and leaders. I could sense that there was a definite unease in the Muslim community vis-a-vis the Modi government, guarded by a rather deceptive silence. The present crisis is being perceived as an existential crisis. Therefore a lot of internal churning is going on. It has been acknowledged by the community that the traditional leadership of the Muslim community has let them down. Now, young and educated leaders are taking the lead and trying to organise the community. Older leaders are extremely cautious in articulating their views on issues related to politics, and it has been communicated to all, especially the youth to not get provoked, whatever be the nature of the provocation. Anand Vivek Taneja, assistant professor of anthropology and religious studies at the University of Vanderbilt, USA, had been touring areas such as Aligarh, Lucknow, Kolkata, Patna, Hyderabad and so on, across the country for his research on Muslims. During an interview with me, he said, “[The] Muslim community is definitely in a self -reflective mood and there is an extraordinary amount of restraint but (the) community also makes a clear distinction that the present problems it is facing is because of the current politics. There is no ill feeling against Hindus per se. Hindus are not seen as religious enemies. The problem is the RSS and Hindutva.”

Source: Why Narendra Modi has an enduring Muslim problem in India

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