E.J. Dionne: Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are equally wrong

2019/03/14 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

The polling is imperfect, but it’s fair to say that more than 70 percent of American Jews and Muslims vote Democratic.

They do so, in part, because Democrats have spoken out strongly against both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. And now, both groups are horrified by Trumpism’s embrace of discrimination against Muslims and its trafficking in anti-Semitism.

Just watch the Trump campaign ad attacking what it claims is “a global power structure that is responsible for economic decisions that have robbed our working class,” while flashing images of prominent Jews.

And you can’t help but cheer the fact that Jews and Muslims across the country have stood in solidarity when local institutions of either group have been defaced or attacked.

Bigotry is bigotry. It must always be opposed.

This is why the dangerously careless use of language by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) about Jews and Israel — she spoke of people who “push for allegiance to a foreign country” — has been cause for both heartbreak and anger.

I get that some readers will see my use of the word “careless” as too soft because the dual-loyalty charge has historically been so poisonous. But in refraining from stronger language I’m putting my bet on hope. I’m wagering that Omar’s personal history ought to mean that she understands the dangers of prejudice better than most.

In November, many of us celebrated her breakthrough election. She won strong backing from the Jewish community in her district. Maybe I’m also giving her a break because she’s progressive. Anti-Semitism is utterly antithetical to anything that deserves to be called liberal or progressive. Surely Omar doesn’t want the Democrats ensnared in the sort of left-wing anti-Semitism now haunting the British Labour Party.

Opposing anti-Semitism should be axiomatic for everyone. And for me, it’s also personal.

My observant Catholic parents moved to our city’s most Jewish neighborhood shortly after I was born, and my sister and I were raised to see anti-Semitism as sinful. My very first friends in the world were Jewish, and my mom regularly sat down with our next-door neighbor to compare notes on Catholic and Jewish views about the nature of God. As I’ve written before, my informal second father was Jewish. A dear man named Bert Yaffe informally took me into his family after my dad died when I was a teenager, and his kids welcomed me as a brother.

Partly because of this history, but also in common with almost all liberals and social democrats of a certain age, I have always — and will always — support the existence of Israel as a democratic Jewish state.

I spent a month in Israel in the spring of 1974, as the country experienced searing existential anxiety after its close call in the Yom Kippur War, and I visited Kiryat Schmona, a development town in the north that suffered under regular Palestinian attacks. It was an enduring lesson in the constant fear that haunts Israelis over the prospects of their country’s survival.

But Israel’s commitment to democracy is also an important reason for my admiration, which is why I support a two-state solution and oppose continued settlements in Palestinian areas. Israel will not remain democratic if it continues to occupy the West Bank and Gaza, and justice requires Palestinian self-determination.

When I covered the war in Lebanon in the 1980s, a Palestinian friend underscored for me the cost of being stateless. All he wanted, he would say, was the legitimacy that citizenship and a passport confer. It did not seem too much to ask.

Thus, my sympathies have always been with the beleaguered peace camps on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. This has led to deep frustration with Palestinian rejectionists, but also with the politics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu has done enormous damage to Israel’s standing with young Americans who did not grow up with my gut commitment to Israel’s survival. His appearance before Congress in 2015 to trash President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran greatly aggravated this problem. His alliance with a virtual fascist party leading into next month’s elections is unconscionable and a gift to anti-Israel propagandists.

So, yes, I know full well that you can love Israel, be critical of its current government and truly despise anti-Semitism, all at the same time. What you cannot do is play fast and loose with language that cannot help but be seen as anti-Semitic. I pray Omar now realizes this. At this moment, opponents of bigotry must be able to rely on each other.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Source: E.J. Dionne: Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are equally wrong

Filed under Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

TTC officers have collected more than 40,000 records on riders who weren’t charged. A disproportionate number in the database are Black

2019/03/13 Leave a comment

I would be interested in a comparative study to see for any differences between those given cautions and those charged.

There is a certain paradox in race-based (visible minority) data collection: if collected, perceived as intrusive but yet data may indicate singling out certain groups, if not collected, we will only have anecdotes to rely on.

Hard to see the justification for keeping the “field information cards” for 20 years rather than just the aggregated data:

For years, the TTC has been quietly maintaining a database that includes thousands of records detailing personal information collected from transit riders who weren’t formally charged with any offence — records it keeps for 20 years and, at times, will share with police.

In the course of their daily duties, the agency’s fare inspectors and enforcement officers stop people on the transit system who, the TTC says, they believe have committed fare evasion or other offences. If the officers decide not to issue the person a ticket, they can record sensitive information such as the person’s name, address, driver’s licence number, physical appearance and race on “field information” cards, and then enter those details into a database that transit officers access daily but which most transit users aren’t even aware exists.

Data obtained by the Star through a freedom of information request shows that TTC officers filled out more than 40,000 of the cards between 2008 and the end of 2018. Once a rider’s information is in the system, the TTC says city bylaws dictate the agency must retain it for 20 years.

TTC officers recorded the race of the person they stopped on about three-quarters of the cards. An analysis of that information performed by the Star suggests a disproportionately high number of cards, 19.3 per cent, were filled out for interactions with Black people. Black residents make up about 8.9 per cent of Toronto’s population.

Civil rights experts say the practice sounds a lot like carding, the controversial tactic police have historically used to collect citizens’ personal information, and warn it could amount to racial profiling and a widespread invasion of privacy.

The TTC and the union that represents the officers firmly reject that characterization. Transit agency spokesperson Stuart Green said officers will use the form “as a formal caution in lieu of charges,” and will only fill one out if he or she has “reasonable and probable grounds that an offence has been committed and then uses their discretion to caution rather than lay a charge.”

Green said the purpose of the database is “to assist (the TTC enforcement unit) in its daily functions.” For instance, TTC officers can check the database to determine whether someone they’ve stopped for suspected fare evasion or another offence has been stopped before, which helps determine if they should receive a ticket or merely a warning.

Green said the TTC is not engaged in any form of carding.

“We do not random stop customers and investigate them,” Green said, and Black riders are “absolutely not” targeted, intentionally or otherwise.

Jake Mahoney, secretary of Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 5089, which represents TTC officers, also strongly rejected the idea its members are performing discriminatory carding.

He said the field information cards are “a useful investigative tool” that officers only use “in a scenario where we observe an offence committed.”

“The union members that are out there doing this job, they don’t have any control over the race of the person,” he said. “I go back to the fact that everyone we stop and talk to, we have a legal authority to do so.”

Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s equality program, said the database raises serious concerns about racial profiling and privacy.

“Any database that’s retaining information about people for no justified reason could be seen as carding. And where there’s a disproportionality of personal information being stored unjustifiably about racialized and marginalized people (that) certainly sounds like carding to me,” she said.

According to Mendelsohn Aviv, while the TTC is entitled to enforce its fare policies, there’s no justification for collecting and storing a rider’s personal information if they haven’t been issued a ticket.

“For a $3 fare, to record somebody’s personal information seems completely out of proportion,” she said.

She described the 20-year period for which the TTC retains the information as “outrageous.”

“The very fact of it being obtained, and then the added problem of it being retained, is certainly a violation of privacy,” she said.

The TTC database isn’t secret. But nor is it widely known to the public. The transit agency publishes voluminous data about its operations, but regular reports about how it’s collecting information from people on the transit system are not among them.

Even those riders who provide their information to TTC officers can be unaware of where it goes or how it could be used.

Although the TTC says the cards are used to issue warnings to people suspected of breaking the rules on the transit system, the person receiving the caution isn’t given a copy of the card, meaning they have no official record of the interaction and no easy way to identify the officer involved.

The TTC says officers aren’t required to provide a copy because a caution isn’t a formal charge, and that transit users can request information the agency may have on them by filing a freedom of information request.

Septembre Anderson was on her way home one sweltering evening in July 2016 when she was pulled off a streetcar by a fare inspector for not paying for her ride.

Anderson says she had a TTC token in her hand at the time, but she boarded the car by the back doors and it was too crowded for her to get to the fare box at the front.

Anderson, who is now 36 and works as a front-end web developer, recalls that the officer was going to write her a ticket for fare evasion, but decided to let her off with a warning instead.

To her surprise, she says he began asking her for personal details, such as her name, address and health card number. She asked what he would do with that information, and reacted with concern when he told her it would be put into a database.

“I wanted to know why my information was being put in a database if I wasn’t actually being given the ticket. How do I remove it from the database? Where does that information go?” she told the Star.

“There was no information given to me at all about my rights, or what my personal information was being used for.”

She didn’t want to give her information, but says she did because she felt she had no choice. “He was just like, ‘well ma’am you can get a ticket instead,’” she says.

To Anderson, who is Black, the experience felt like a form of carding.

“If he was giving me a warning, he just could have given me a verbal warning … If someone can stop and detain somebody and collect their personal information, yes that falls under carding,” she said.

Legal experts who spoke to the Star said the law can be unclear on what information officers, including those working for the TTC, can request from citizens.

Mendelsohn Aviv of the CCLA said she believed that officers shouldn’t ask for a person’s name unless “at a minimum” they’ve witnessed the person committing an offence.

Green, the TTC spokesperson, said that “depending on what (transit users) are being investigated for, they do have a legal obligation to identify themselves.”

There are two types of TTC officers who interact with the public on the transit system: fare inspectors and enforcement officers. Inspectors are tasked with ensuring riders pay the proper fare, while enforcement officers patrol the system for security purposes. Neither are full-fledged police officers, but transit enforcement officers have been designated special constables under an agreement with the Toronto Police Services Board and have limited police powers on the network.

Both inspectors and enforcement officers can fill out field information cards about members of the public.

For years, TTC officers used the same Toronto Police Service “208” forms to collect information about people on the transit system that police used for their street checks, before switching to their own “718” forms that were identical in many ways.

The Star obtained nearly 11 years worth of data the TTC recorded on the cards, which is not the complete set of records the transit agency has on file. The data didn’t include entries for people who were ticketed for an offence on the transit system, which the transit agency keeps in the same database. The data provided to the Star was also redacted to remove any information that could risk identifying an individual.

It showed that between January 2008 and December 2018, the TTC enforcement unit filled out 41,833 of the cards. Officers recorded the race of the person they stopped roughly 33,000 times, or in about three quarters of the interactions.

Of the cards on which the person’s race was recorded, 19.3 per cent were identified as Black.

Black residents make up only about 8.9 per cent of Toronto’s population, according to the 2016 Census. And while the TTC says it doesn’t have data indicating the racial makeup of its ridership, the census shows Black people constitute just 10.7 per cent of those in Toronto who commute by public transit. That figure doesn’t include trips for noncommuting purposes, and does include journeys on other transit agencies such as GO.

The proportion of card entries that Black transit users accounted for varied from year to year, and generally trended downward over the 11-year period. The figure was highest in 2011 when it reached about 27 per cent, and by 2018 had fallen to about 16 per cent.

Black residents’ personal information was more likely to be recorded if they were young and male. Males between the ages of 15 and 25 made up about 35 per cent of all Black people whose information was recorded on the cards. Males of the same age made up roughly 24 per cent of white residents recorded on the cards.

Green, the TTC spokesperson, said that in many cases the person’s race recorded on the card is based on officers’ observations.

“So if a person does not offer a race association, the officer will use best judgment,” he said.

Green couldn’t say why Black people appear to be disproportionately represented on the cards. “However, the TTC’s customer base is wider than just Toronto residents and almost half of Toronto residents identify as racialized,” he said.

He said the transit agency “is fully committed to treating all customers equally and without prejudice,” and officers receive training on diversity, inclusion and preventing discrimination.

Green acknowledged that the TTC sometimes shares information collected on the cards with police. He couldn’t say how often that had happened between 2008 and 2018, but said police “rarely” request the information and the TTC would only provide it if served a court order.

Nigel Barriffe, president of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations, said the TTC data is “very representative of what we saw with carding and the police,” and shows Toronto’s public institutions “are constantly pushing away our young Black males in our society and making them feel as if they don’t belong in our city.”

He said if Black people are being stopped by TTC officers at higher rates than other groups, it sends the message to Black residents that they have no place in public spaces like the transit system.

“It’s like you have to think twice if you’re a Black male taking public transit in this city,” he said.

He called for the TTC to improve its anti-bias training and make hiring decisions to ensure its enforcement unit reflects Toronto’s diversity.

Some people who used to work for the agency’s enforcement unit say they were uncomfortable with the use of the field information cards.

A former member of the TTC’s transit enforcement unit contacted the Star to raise concerns about the database after the Star published unrelated allegations of misconduct by transit officers.

The former officer, who agreed to discuss the issue on the condition of anonymity out of concern for future employment prospects, said there were “no checks and balances” on the use of the database and he believed riders should be made aware of it.

“There’s no real oversight really,” he said, adding he was concerned the TTC’s practice was akin to police carding.

Ann Cavoukian, who was formerly Ontario’s information and privacy commissioner between 2007 and 2014, said the TTC should consider suspending the collection of riders’ personal information, or at least provide the public and riders with more information about their rights and how the agency is using the data.

“In my view, I think they should stop collecting this information. At the very least, if they must continue collecting it, they should start by giving notice, clear transparency about what they’re doing, how long they’re going to retain the data, and in what form,” she said.

“I’m just really disturbed by this … I had no idea they had a database or they keep this information.”

The Star’s investigation into the database follows separate incidents that have raised concerns about the TTC enforcement unit’s conduct related to issues of privacy and alleged racial profiling.

A 2018 TTC report determined a fare inspector had used information he collected from a female rider to contact her later and ask her on a date, an incident that caused the woman to “fear for her safety.” The inspector kept his job.

The TTC is also being sued by a young Black man who was pushed and pinned down by transit officers as he exited a streetcar in February 2018, in what he alleges was a case of racial profiling. The allegations haven’t been proven in court.

In part as a result of the Star’s questions about the database, the TTC said it is reviewing the forms and how officers used them.

However, at a TTC board meeting last month agency officials said they planned to make greater use of the database to help get a handle on the network’s costly fare evasion problem, which the city auditor general recently reported cost the TTC $61 million in foregone revenue last year.

The agency is also hiring an additional 45 fare inspectors and 22 enforcement officers this year, bringing their total complement to 186 officers and meaning interactions between officers and riders will likely become more frequent.

Source: TTC officers have collected more than 40,000 records on riders who weren’t charged. A disproportionate number in the database are Black

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

‘Good curling’: Calgary play uses iconic sport for message on new Canadians

2019/03/13 Leave a comment

In the spirit of Little Mosque on the Prairie, Kim’s Convenience Store and other cultural events that feature Canada’s diverse communities:

An iconic Canadian winter sport serves as the vessel for a Calgary play telling the story of new Canadians dealing with adversity and finding a way to become a part of their new community.

Alberta Theatre Projects is presenting “The New Canadian Curling Club,” a comedy that follows four new Canadians resettled in a small Alberta town.

They include a Chinese medical student, a widowed Tim Hortons manager from Jamaica who gave up her dream of being a fashion designer, a father of triplet boys from India seeking a better job, and a 17-year-old recent immigrant from Syria worried about the safety of her brother back home.

The community offers a ‘learn to curl’ class and when its instructor gets injured, the club’s ice custodian and former champion curler has to step in.

The instructor unfortunately has some negative views on Canadian immigration and refers to the team as “The International House of Pancakes,” and shows disdain for their lack of knowledge about curling.

“You start each game with a handshake. Wish the other team good curling. You don’t cheer, you don’t heckle. You call your own fouls,” growled curmudgeonly Stuart MacPhail, played by Saskatchewan actor Duval Lang, at a recent rehearsal.

“I start out as a crusty old fart and then gradually change into someone who is more accommodating and begins to enjoy life a little bit more,” Lang said with a laugh.

Lang has curled for decades and also serves as the show’s curling consultant.

“It’s come along. Everything from how to sit in the hack to how to extend yourself when you make a shot…how to sweep.”

The group eventually comes together to become a true team on a stage fitted with an authentic curling ring, complete with rocks, set in a small curling club.

“I think it combines the quintessential idea of curling with the other thing that Canada is know for, which is multiculturalism,” explains Toronto’s Richard Young, who plays Anoopjeet Singh.

“I’ve always wanted to be part of curling and I was just too scared to do it.”

There’s a lot of sight gags including Young’s difficulty in standing on the ice and being cautioned by his coach to throw the stone “nice and easy” and “not all the way home to India.”

“Thank God,” Young’s character retorts. “The postage on this thing would be a nightmare.”

Sepidar Yeganeh Farid was drawn to play the part of recent Syrian immigrant Fatima Al-Sayed.

“When I read the script it was obvious that I had to audition and my life story is very similar to the character Fatima so I have a very close connection to her,” Farid said.

Farid was born in Iran and her family eventually ended up in Montreal — sponsored by a church, like the character she portrays.

“As I see the interactions between Fatima and another character, Charmaine, I definitely see those characteristics in the relationships I had with the people that sponsored us.”

For Jenni Burke, playing the Jamaican-born Tim Hortons manager was natural.

“My parents were from Jamaica. I feel like I’m doing an homage of what happened to them,” she said.

“It’s a great Canadian story and it supports multiculturalism and everyone bringing their own colour to the mosaic.”

Jonathan Ho, who moved to Toronto from Hong Kong before his first birthday, plays medical student Mike Chang who’s also dating the granddaughter of the curling coach.

“It does speak to aspects of the immigrant experience particularly with interracial relationships and the difficulties of the culture clash there.”

Young managed to try the sport thanks to a friend who was a curling coach in Pickering, Ont.

“The first time I was slipping and sliding on the ice just like my character does here, but I was able to throw some rocks and to understand,” he said.

“So I got to learn a lot about the game and it is, as the play says, like chess on ice.”

Farid remembers her first impressions when moving to Canada.

“The first time I saw curling on TV with my family and we had no idea what it meant and we thought, ‘Oh, they’re sweeping, that’s very interesting,'” she said.

“It is super fascinating and now that I’ve watched curling it’s like ‘Oh my God I understand.'”

Source: ‘Good curling’: Calgary play uses iconic sport for message on new Canadians

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Study Finds Racial Gap Between Who Causes Air Pollution And Who Breathes It

2019/03/13 Leave a comment

Another interesting disparity but one that makes intuitive sense given income disparities:

Pollution, much like wealth, is not distributed equally in the United States.

Scientists and policymakers have long known that black and Hispanic Americans tend to live in neighborhoods with more pollution of all kinds, than white Americans. And because pollution exposure can cause a range of health problems, this inequity could be a driver of unequal health outcomes across the U.S.

A study published Monday in the journal PNAS adds a new twist to the pollution problem by looking at consumption. While we tend to think of factories or power plants as the source of pollution, those polluters wouldn’t exist without consumer demand for their products.

The researchers found that air pollution is disproportionately caused by white Americans’ consumption of goods and services, but disproportionately inhaled by black and Hispanic Americans.

“This paper is exciting and really quite novel,” says Anjum Hajat, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study. “Inequity in exposure to air pollution is well documented, but this study brings in the consumption angle.”

Hajat says the study reveals an inherent unfairness: “If you’re contributing less to the problem, why do you have to suffer more from it?”

The study, led by engineering professor Jason Hill at the University of Minnesota, took over six years to complete. According to the paper’s first author Christopher Tessum, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, the idea stemmed from a question at a conference.

Tessum presented earlier research on how blacks and Hispanics are often more exposed to air pollutants than whites. After he finished, someone asked “if it would be possible to connect exposure to air pollution to who is doing the actual consuming,” says Tessum. According to Tessum, no one had ever tried to answer that question.

It’s a big, complicated issue, but studying it could address a fundamental question: Are those who produce pollution, through their consumption of goods and services, fairly sharing in the costs?

What kind of data could even answer such a multifaceted question? Let’s break it down:

For any given area in the U.S., the researchers would need to know how polluted the air was, what communities were exposed to pollution, and the health effects of that level of exposure.

Then, for the same area the researchers would need to identify the sources of that exposure (coal plants, factories, agriculture to name a few), and get a sense of what goods and services stem from those emissions (electricity, transportation, food).

Finally, whose consumption of goods and services drives those sectors of the economy?

“The different kinds of data, by themselves, aren’t that complicated,” says Tessum. “It’s linking them where things get a little trickier.”

The most relevant air pollutant metric for human health is “particulate matter 2.5” or PM2.5. It represents the largest environmental health risk factor in the United States with higher levels linked to more cardiovascular problems, respiratory illness, diabetes and even birth defects. PM2.5 pollution is mostly caused by human activities, like burning fossil fuels or agriculture.

The EPA collects these data through the National Emissions Inventory, which collates emissions from specific emitters, like coal plants or factories, measures of mobile polluters like cars or planes, and natural events like wildfires, painting a detailed picture of pollution across the U.S.

The researchers generated maps of where different emitters, like agriculture or construction, caused PM2.5 pollution. Coal plants produced pockets of pollution in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, while agricultural emissions were concentrated in the Midwest and California’s central valley. “We then tied in census data to understand where different racial-ethnic groups live to understand exposure patterns,” says Hill.

Tessum then used previous research on the health effects of different exposure levels to estimate how many premature deaths per year (out of an estimated 102,000 from domestic human-caused emissions) could be linked to each emitter.

“We wanted to take this study further by ascribing responsibility of these premature deaths to different sectors [of the economy], and ultimately to the consumers, and maybe consumers of different racial and ethnic groups,” says Hill.

To do that, the researchers actually worked backwards, following consumer spending to different sectors of the economy, and then ultimately to the main emitters of air pollution.

Consider one major contributor to emissions: agriculture. Consumer expenditure surveys from the Bureau of Labor Statistics provide detailed data on how much money households spend in various sectors of the economy, including food.

These data gave the researchers an idea of how much blacks, Hispanics, and whites spend on food per year. Other expenditures, like energy or entertainment, are also measured. Taken together these data represent the consumption patterns of the three groups.

To translate dollars spent on food into air pollution levels, the researchers traced money through the economy. Using data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the researchers can estimate, for example, how much grocery stores or restaurants spend on food. Eventually, these dollars are linked back to the primary emitters — the farms growing the food or the fuel that farmers buy to run their tractors.

The researchers have now completed the causal chain, from dollars spent at the grocery story, to the amount of pollution emitted into the atmosphere. Completing this chain for each source of pollution revealed whose consumption drives air pollution, and who suffers from it.

After accounting for population size differences, whites experience about 17 percent less air pollution than they produce, through consumption, while blacks and Hispanics bear 56 and 63 percent more air pollution, respectively, than they cause by their consumption, according to the study.

“These patterns didn’t seem to be driven by different kinds of consumption,” says Tessum, “but different overall levels.” In other words, whites were just consuming disproportionately more of the same kinds of goods and services resulting in air pollution than minority communities.

“These results, as striking as they are, aren’t really surprising,” says Ana Diez Roux, an epidemiologist at Drexel University who was not involved in the study. “But it’s really interesting to see consumption patterns rigorously documented suggesting that minority communities are exposed to pollution that they bear less responsibility for.”

Diez Roux thinks this is a good first step. “They certainly make assumptions in their analysis that might be questioned down the line, but I doubt that the overall pattern they found will change,” she says.

Tessum points to some hopeful results from the study. PM2.5 exposure by all groups has fallen by about 50 percent from 2002 to 2015, driven in part by regulation and population movement away from polluted areas. But the inequity remains mostly unchanged.

While more research is needed to fully understand these differences, the results of this study raise questions about how to address these inequities.

Tessum stresses that “we’re not saying that we should take away white people’s money, or that people shouldn’t be able to spend money.” He suggests continuing to strive to make economic activity and consumption less polluting could be a way to manage and lessen the inequities.

Diez Roux thinks that stronger measures may be necessary.

“If want to ameliorate this inequity, we may need to rethink how we build our cities and how they grow, our dependence on automobile transportation,” says Diez Roux. “These are hard things we have to consider.”

Source: Study Finds Racial Gap Between Who Causes Air Pollution And Who Breathes It

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Opinion: EU immigration policy is grist to the far-right mill

2019/03/12 Leave a comment

Would appear to be a similar dynamic at play in the U.S.:

Seven different EU immigration policy reform bills have been on the table for the last three years. And for three years, the bloc’s interior ministers have been fighting over them. They have been unable to come to an agreement, and they end each negotiation with the same lament: Something has to happen. Yet, nothing ever does.

The old Dublin Regulation, which stipulates that the country of first arrival is responsible for an immigrant, is still the law. Although almost all of the EU’s 28 interior ministers agree that the rule no longer works —  although they give very different reasons for why they think this is — they have yet to come up with a better solution.

A joint immigration and asylum policy that is somehow carried by all has failed to materialize.

Italy and Greece insist that new arrivals be distributed across the bloc. Hungary and Poland don’t want to take anyone. France and Germany see the countries of first arrival as bearing responsibility.

Now, at the last meeting of interior ministers before May’s European parliamentary elections, national representatives have officially admitted that they cannot come to an agreement. And with that admission, they are giving right-wing populists highly welcome campaign ammunition.

Far right will exploit the EU’s weaknesses

These will happily exploit the emotionally charged topic of immigration when making their plea to voters, as well as pillorying the EU’s inability to find a solution to this so-called crisis ahead of the May ballot. Italy’s radical right-wing interior minister, Matteo Salvini, will use that inability to justify closing Italian ports to refugees rescued at sea.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban will use the collapse of negotiations to prop up his abstruse theory that Brussels seeks to flood his country with Muslims to “replace the people.”

Far-right parties across Europe, from the AfD in Germany and the FPÖ in Austria to the EKRE in Estonia, will no doubt spew similar nonsense.

German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU), who last year used immigration policy to instigate a coalition crisis in Berlin and promised to deliver a European solution to the issue, also went down in flames — having achieved absolutely nothing.

His immigrant repatriation agreement with the populist government in Italy has yet to come about  in fact, the opposite is now the case. Contrary to Germany’s wishes, Italy is threatening to put an end to Operation Sophia, the EU’s naval rescue mission in the Mediterranean. And despite having happily shaken hands with far-right radical Salvini over a done deal in June, there is not a thing Seehofer can do about it.

Empty hands

Now it will be easy to make the case for closing oneself off entirely, for borders, higher fences, and walls. The utterly divided EU has nothing to offer on immigration policy. The migration crisis that the right is always talking about does not exist at the moment; the number of arrivals to Europe has dropped dramatically.

But the EU is woefully unprepared for another rush like that of 2015. Europeans are not prepared for the next civil war, the next famine, or for immigrants fleeing their homes due to climate change. It is a scandal that this is the case just 11 weeks before European parliamentary elections. And it should surprise no one if the populists and anti-EU parties gain seats.

The real test, however, will come at the end of the year, when the EU negotiates the distribution of grant money for the next decade. Will states that take more immigrants get more money? Will those that take none be penalized by receiving less? The showdown has the potential to paralyze the EU, or even worse, destroy it entirely.

Source: Opinion: EU immigration policy is grist to the far-right mill

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Douglas Todd: Female foreign students endure harassment, exploitation

2019/03/12 Leave a comment

Of note:

Female foreign students from South Asia are experiencing sexual harassment by landlords, exploitation by bosses, and ethno-cultural double-standards, all the while dealing with their own fears of being deported.

Metro Vancouver community workers are warning about the particular vulnerability of the increasing number of young women coming to Canada from the Punjab region of India and other parts of South Asia, whose often-modest families have sold off much of their property and assets to get them to Canada.

Stories are emerging that some female international students — desperate to make enough money to avoid returning to their homelands — are resorting to offering sexual services to landlords and are even getting involved in the drug trade, says Kal Dosanjh, a police officer who runs a Surrey-based support program called Kids Play.

The young women are frightened, especially when exploitative employers in the underground economy, including at some restaurants, threaten to report them to immigration officials and have them deported, said Dosanjh.

“When these kids, who don’t know the law, hear about deportation, they get scared, because they’ve already spent so much money coming to Canada, and so much money surviving here, that the last thing they need is to be sent back to their country,” Dosanjh said.

There are more than 500,000 foreign students in Canada. After a jump of almost 50,000 additional students from India in 2017, one quarter of Canada’s international students now come from there.

“It’s a source of shame if they get sent home. They fear they’ll never get the chance to come back to Canada,” said Dosanjh, who also works with male foreign students whom he says tend to get exploited by under-paying construction companies or become low-level participants in the drug trade to pay high student fees and rents.

Being able to fly into Canada on a student visa is seen as the “ticket out of India, out of poverty” for many students, said Dosanjh. “For them to be able to stay here means everything in terms of future job prospects, monetary wealth, sanitary conditions, a significant change in lifestyle.” Many will put up with a lot of hardship to avoid going home.

MOSAIC, a large B.C. settlement service for migrants, this year began training teachers and other education officials about what they could do to support women among Metro Vancouver’s 110,000 foreign students, who the agency maintains are generally “more likely to be sexually assaulted and less likely to be helped” than native-born students.

“New research confirms that international students reported more sexual assault than domestic students and experience more intense fear, helplessness and horror after victimization,” says a statement from MOSAIC, whose 350 staff members are led by CEO Olga Stachova.

“Some perpetrators of sexual violence see international students as easy targets — too ashamed to report sexual assaults, unaware of where they can get help and influenced by different cultural norms.”

MOSAIC highlighted the case of Maham Kamal Khanum, an international student from Pakistan at UBC, who said sexual violence against women is “normalized” in her home country. “It was almost a culture shock to learn how unacceptable sexual violence was here,” Khanum said.

Dupinder Kaur Saran, Kal Dosanjh, Kiran Toor. Saran and Toor are volunteers with Kids Play, which helps youth in Surrey who are getting into trouble. Kal Dosanjh is a police officer and head of the non-profit group.

Many international students “don’t have a place to belong” when they come to Canada, says Kiran Toor, who, along with Dupinder Saran, has volunteered to work with international students through Kids Play, a large Surrey-based non-profit organization devoted to supporting young people, particularly South Asians.

Many foreign students are under a great deal of financial, social and academic pressure, including to learn English.

A recent article in Desi Today, an Indo-Canadian magazine in B.C., said it’s common for male and female foreign students to work more than the 20 hours a week permitted under a Canadian study visa.

The magazine quoted South Asian community workers who know of intimidated young women being sexually harassed in the workplace by employers, because they have worked many hours over their allowed limit and don’t want to be reported to border officials.

The young women especially feel shame about admitting to something that might hurt their reputations.

In 2017 there was a sudden jump of 48,000 more students from India. (Source: Canadian Bureau for International Education)

While Dosanjh said many female students from India are “liberal, open-minded and sophisticated,” Desi Today quoted community officials who said some traditional Indo-Canadians are “talking bad about the girl students from India.” Some Indo-Canadians don’t like that the young women are often see in public with males. Most officials cited in Desi Today did not respond to The Vancouver Sun’s messages.

At the worst, Dosanjh said, some Indian foreign students who are desperate for cash are getting involved in prostitution and the drug trade. The young men, says the longtime Vancouver police officer, are generally serving as “mules” and the women are agreeing to hold drugs for their male friends.

The effort to help schools provide more support to female foreign students who arrive in Canada without support networks is hampered, MOSAIC’s Stachova said, by the under-reporting of difficult incidents. “The students always think they have the worry: What will happen to my status in Canada?”

Even though the problem of exploitation of female foreign students is real in Metro Vancouver, Stachova said it has to be put into perspective. “I don’t want to sound alarmist,” Stachova said, “because we are generally a safe country.”

Still, the stakes are exceedingly high for the students.

As Dosanjh says, many families in India, particularly in the Punjab, see Canada as a kind of heaven on earth. “So the young people think of it is a land of rich amenities, where they can have a better life, become permanent residents and eventually sponsor their family to come over. That means that once these students come here the last thing most of them want to do is return to India.”

All of which make them more susceptible than most to exploitation.

foreign students from South Asia are experiencing sexual harassment by landlords, exploitation by bosses, and ethno-cultural double-standards, all the while dealing with their own fears of being deported. Metro Vancouver community workers are warning about the particular vulnerability of the increasing number of young women coming to Canada from the Punjab region of India and other parts of South Asia, whose often-modest families have sold off much of their property and assets to get them to Canada.

Source: Douglas Todd: Female foreign students endure harassment, exploitation

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Black RCMP officers say they endured racism ‘on a regular basis’

2019/03/12 Leave a comment

Not a new issue:

Current and former black RCMP officers say they’ve regularly endured racist treatment from their colleagues and are calling for Canada’s national police force to improve its treatment of visible minorities.

Alain Babineau, who retired from the RCMP in 2016 after a 27-year career and now lives in Ottawa, told Radio-Canada one of his bosses nicknamed him “black man,” and that racial slurs were common.

“The word n–ger was used on a regular basis,” he said.

One example he shared occurred in Quebec City in 2008 at the Sommet de la francophonie, a meeting of representatives from French-speaking nations.

“There were a lot of African countries visiting Quebec City, and a group of RCMP members were talking about their VIPs from Africa and using the N-word and making jokes and so on,” he said.

“I told them, ‘First of all, I’m extremely offended by what you’re saying. And, number two, these are our clients.

“Of course [they said], ‘We’re just joking around’ … their jokes are not always the funniest.”

‘I had so much pride for the RCMP’

Radio-Canada spoke to other black RCMP officers, including two who agreed to speak anonymously because they fear reprisals from their employer.

CBC and Radio-Canada have agreed not to name them or say where they work.

“Over the years, members have called me ‘black bastard,’ ‘uneducated black man’ and again recently ‘n–ger,'” one officer said.

He added that after working in several communities across Canada for over 15 years, he’s tired of the racist treatment.

“I had so much pride for the RCMP,” he said. “Now, if someone asks me what I do, I say I work for the government.”

The other officer said he wished his colleagues would stand up to defend him, but the RCMP workplace culture is not friendly to people who complain about racism.

“I heard the word ‘n–ger’ more often in the RCMP than in the general public,” the officer said.

While CBC and Radio-Canada have chosen not to disclose the details of these incidents to protect the officers’ identities, the events have been corroborated with documents and witnesses have confirmed what happened.

Other officers who had agreed to talk to Radio-Canada changed their minds at the last minute.

Allegations ‘deeply troubling,’ RCMP says

In a statement to Radio-Canada, the RCMP called the allegations of racism “deeply troubling” and said all forms of discrimination will not be tolerated.

Both the RCMP and Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said they’re taking steps to address the situation.

The police force said it routinely uses what’s known as “gender-based analysis plus,” or GBA+, to “assess how men, women and gender-diverse people experience policies, programs and initiatives.”

“The ‘plus’ in GBA+ acknowledges that this analysis goes beyond biological sex and gender differences and also examines the impact of other identity factors such as race, ethnicity, religion, age and mental or physical disabilities,” the RCMP said.

Watchdog board created

Goodale’s office brought up a new interim civilian watchdog board his government created for the RCMP to help rid it of bullying and harassment.

Its members will be named by April 1, and Goodale’s office said it’s aiming “to appoint members who represent the diversity of Canadians.”

The officers who spoke to Radio-Canada want the RCMP to do an in-depth study of visible minorities in the RCMP, citing a recent Ottawa police diversity audit as one example of something the RCMP could adapt.

The RCMP declined to comment on whether it would take a similar step.

In 2015, the RCMP’s then commissioner admitted there were racists in the force.

“I understand that there are racists in my police force. I don’t want them to be in my police force,” Bob Paulson told a group of First Nations leaders.

Visible minorities underrepresented in RCMP

Babineau now works as a volunteer adviser for the Montreal-based Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations.

He said, while he believes individual acts of direct racism have decreased in the RCMP over the years, systemic racism is still a problem.

Visible minorities, excluding Indigenous people, make up 22 per cent of Canada’s general population, according to the 2016 census — but only 11 per cent of the RCMP’s workforce as of 2018.

In this sense, the RCMP is more representative than the typical Canadian police force. In 2016, the most recent year this national data was available, eight per cent of all Canadian police officers were visible minorities.

However, while there are now more women and visible minorities in the RCMP’s leadership, visible minorities remain absent from the three highest ranks.

“There are now many women in the highest ranks of the RCMP. That’s a good thing,” Babineau said. “The same thing should be happening for racialized people.”

Source: Black RCMP officers say they endured racism ‘on a regular basis’

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with

Identity politics, Israel style: Treat Israeli Arabs As People, Not Things

2019/03/12 Leave a comment

Good post on Ottomans and Zionists:

If there was a silver lining to the deal brokered by Prime Minister Netanyahu between Bayit Yehudi and Otzma Yehudit to run as a joint electoral list and the immediate furor that ensued, it is that it focused a spotlight on the most abhorrent prejudice and racism that is exhibited toward Israel’s Arab citizens. What made Meir Kahane, his Kach party, and his Kahanist followers so repugnant and led to Israel outlawing Kach was its advocacy for discrimination and glorification of violence toward Israeli Arabs. Kahane’s heirs in Otzma have continued in his footsteps, calling Arabs a fifth column with whom there can be no coexistence, proclaiming that less than one percent of Israeli Arabs are loyal to the state, advocating that Arabs who “speak out” against Jews be executed, working to prohibit Arabs from public life, and attempting to criminalize relationships between Jews and Arabs. It is evident – or should be – to anyone with an ounce of moral fiber that this type of incitement should not be welcome anywhere in Israeli society. But the new focus on Otzma has a downside in that it threatens to obscure a much bigger problem, which is the routine delegitimization of Israeli Arabs that takes place as a matter of course.

The most familiar example of this constant message that shunts one fifth of Israeli citizens into a rhetorical leper colony is Netanyahu’s infamous 2015 election day warning that Arabs were being bused to the polls in droves. The clear implication was twofold; first, that there was something untoward or dangerous about Arabs having a say in the composition of Israel’s next government, and second, that true Israeli patriots should come vote in order to counter Arab influence. It not only portrayed actual full citizens of Israel as being ominous but did it on the basis of their ethnicity alone. After all, Netanyahu did not say that his political opponents were going to the polls in droves, nor did he call out any individual parties. His message was straightforward: Arabs are voting, and no good result can possibly come out of that because they are Arabs.

In the current campaign, this same message is alive and well. But it is not just Netanyahu who is utilizing it. Across the political spectrum, there is a rush to assure Jewish Israeli voters that nobody is looking to form a government that includes Arabs; not Likud under Netanyahu, and not Kachol Lavan under Benny Gantz. Netanyahu, naturally, has made this pledge a centerpiece of his campaign. In the Likud party campaign kickoff on Monday, Netanyahu repeatedly trotted out the catchphrase “Tibi or Bibi,” referring to Ta’al chief Ahmad Tibi, who has been an MK for two decades. Netanyahu argued that the only way for Gantz to form a coalition is by including Arab parties, making the choice for voters one between Bibi – the current prime minister running for reelection – or Tibi – who is not running for prime minister and is not even the top person on the Hadash-Ta’al list but is Israel’s most recognizable Arab politician. It’s an effective rhyming catchphrase, and despite the fact that its logic is absurd, it works precisely because it plays on this notion that Arab parties, which overwhelmingly garner Israeli Arabs’ votes, are inherently non-kosher.

There are now two Arab party lists with very different politics, and the one that includes Tibi is the one that is more moderate, endorses a two-state solution (inherently accepting Israel’s legitimacy), and is a willing participant in Israeli institutions. But in singling out Tibi rather than the actual Arab extremists in the Balad party – whose representatives have called for Israel’s dissolution, have supplied intelligence to Hizballah, and have been convicted for smuggling cell phones to imprisoned terrorists – Netanyahu is purposely casting a wider circle of aspersions on Israeli Arabs as a group.

Sadly, Netanyahu is not alone, though he stands out in his bluntness and willingness to embrace the most extreme position. Gantz on Monday ruled out forming any coalition with Tibi as well, and lumped him in with Kahane, which is an unfair comparison by any measure. Unlike Netanyahu, Gantz and Yair Lapid have not explicitly ruled out using Arab parties to form a blocking coalition, as Yitzhak Rabin did, and it is to their credit – factoring in the soft bigotry of low expectations – that they have not definitively closed that door. But they are also obviously trying to walk a tightrope in their avoidance of directness on a host of issues so as not to be cast as leftists, and making any overtures that legitimize Arab participation in Israeli political life is a quick route to the dreaded leftwing moniker.

Politicians have not come up with this strategy out of nowhere. It is an unfortunate reality that Jewish Israeli society prioritizes the Jewish aspect over the Israeli aspect in this regard, and politicians understandably believe that their voters will respond to using Arabs as an electoral foil. It is certainly the case that there are Arab parties, such as Balad, that are anti-Zionist in a genocidal way, and there have been Arab MKs who are not only anti-Zionist but have actively committed treason against their country. Much as Kahane violated Israel’s Basic Law on racist incitement and was banned from serving in the Knesset and his party outlawed, I have no problem with that standard being used on Balad – which yesterday was banned from running by Israel’s Central Elections Committee – or on MKs like Hanin Zuabi (who is not running for the next Knesset but has been the subject of disqualification petitions in the past). But portraying Israeli Arab participation in governing Israel as something that shocks the conscience in its extremity should itself shock the conscience in its extremity. That it does not is a poor statement about Israel’s commitment to its Arab citizens, who should not be delegitimized as a category of people.

One of the most familiar pro-Israel talking points is that Israel is the country in the Middle East where it is best to be an Arab, since they are full citizens who not only vote but serve in the Knesset and on Israel’s High Court. There is a popular formulation of this idea that the strength of Israel’s democracy can be demonstrated by an Arab justice (Salim Joubran) sending a Jewish president of Israel (Moshe Katsav) to prison. But it is hollowly cynical to use Israeli Arabs’ participation in political life to tout Israel’s greatness, and in the next instance portray Israeli Arabs’ participation in political life as something that must be negated and combated. The entire spectacle of using Israeli Arabs as props, raising them up for geopolitical benefit and keeping them low for domestic political benefit, is ugly and should stop. The best thing that Israel’s current election campaign could accomplish would be to demonstrate that this tactic does not work.

Source: Treat Israeli Arabs As People, Not Things

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Finding a Place in Women’s Mosques

2019/03/11 Leave a comment

Of interest:

These are heady times for Kahina Bahloul, organizer of a women’s mosque in France, a country that is home to the largest Muslim population in Europe. Practical considerations dominate the spiritual — a search for an affordable location, a flurry of radio and television interviews marking the rise of a vanguard of women imams leading pop-up mosques from Berlin to Berkeley, Calif.

Ms. Bahloul, 39, who was trained as a lawyer in Algeria, said she stopped attending formal prayer services in Paris about three years ago because “I didn’t feel respected.”

She said she was taken aback by mosques that isolated women, steering them to back doors and relegating the worshipers to basements or seats hidden behind screens. She gave up after one mosque directed the women to pray in a nearby garage.

“I felt excluded by the mosques,” said Ms. Bahloul, who is earning a doctorate in Islamic studies from France’s École Pratique des Hautes Études and intends to be one of two imams leading prayers at the mosque. “I felt excluded by my community — and a lot of other women felt the same way.”

Together with Faker Korchane, 40, a high school philosophy teacher and a freelance journalist, she is developing the Fatima Mosque while searching for rental space in the Paris region. Their concept is a liberal mosque that will host weekly prayers led alternately by a female and male imam with worshipers of both sexes separated on either side of the same prayer hall.

Ms. Bahloul is building on an evolving tradition of women imams with history dating from the 19th century in China among the Hui Muslims. There, women lead mosques exclusively for women. But in the last three years, women imams elsewhere have begun to organize women’s mosques with varying styles in Denmark, Germany, Canada and the United States.

In 2016, the Mariam mosque opened in central Copenhagen, with the call to prayer sung by women. A year later, Seyran Ates, a Turkish-born German lawyer and activist, founded the Ibn Rushd-Goethe mosque in Berlin. To great fanfare and speeches, a women’s mosque started in Berkeley, Calif., in 2017 at Starr King School for the Ministry, a graduate school and Unitarian Universalist seminary.

Rabi’a Keeble, a Muslim convert and graduate of that seminary, founded the Berkeley mosque, Qal’bu Maryam. But she quickly faced challenges. It was not easy to attract Muslim women, who were wary of the organizers, she said.

“You assume there must be other like-minded people all over the place,” Ms. Keeble said. “What woman wants to continue to sit behind, walk behind, listen to men interpret scripture to their benefit? There must be a bunch of women waiting for someone to step up and kick those doors down. Well, that’s just not true.”

The Berkeley mosque’s location was always tenuous. After a year occupying free space, the group moved to a temporary home, she said, and recently found new quarters at First Congregational Church of Oakland.

Real estate is the critical issue that determines the strength of reform mosques. In 2012, Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed opened a mosque in Paris designed to be inclusive to women and welcoming to homosexual Muslims. Faced with insults and some hostility, Mr. Zahed said members preferred to be discreet, moving locations every three months to avoid being targeted. The mosque closed after three years, and Mr. Zahed has since resettled in Marseille in the south of France to run an institute to train reform imams.

“We had threats and people identified the places,” Mr. Zahed said of the Paris mosque. “Then owners didn’t want us to stay any longer. They were very happy to have us in the beginning, but they had so much political pressure that they wanted us to leave. It was always like this.”

Ms. Bahloul has not faced that kind of pressure for the Fatima Mosque, a concept she has openly promoted since January with a series of television interviews in France that have provoked hundreds of comments. She has also drawn coverage in Brazil, Italy and Canada, and in Northern Africa in Morocco, which characterized her concept as revolutionary.

“Among Muslims there are two reactions,” she said. “Most are very favorable — ‘finally a breath of fresh air. We have been waiting for this for a long time.’ There are others who are insulting and accuse us of trying to change the real Islam. But what is real Islam? Those critics have a very simple approach and have a superficial understanding of Islam.”

Ms. Bahloul’s views are shaped by her eclectic background, divided between France and Algeria, where she grew up in northern Kabylia, the child of an Algerian father and French mother. Her maternal grandmother was a Polish Jew and her grandfather French Catholic.

“Since I was young, I have always posed questions,” Ms. Bahloul said. “What really struck me was the evolution of the practice of Islam of my paternal grandparents, who were very traditional, cultural and spiritual. And after that I watched the spread of the conservative Salafist movement and the first veils worn by women in the 1990s.”

For now the organizers are preoccupied with practical concerns — renting a location, eventually organizing a crowdfunding campaign, reaching out to city officials who could aid in the search for space for Friday prayers and community meetings.

In the meantime, Ms. Bahloul teaches about Islam online through her association, Parle-moi d’Islam, with lectures on how to read the Quran or prosaic themes such as: “Does the Quran say to hit wives?”

Mr. Korchane, the co-founder, also says they must work to reach another pivotal group. He wants to create special videos to attract young Muslims, who he says sometimes lack deep knowledge of Islam. “They think, for example,” he said, “that eating halal or wearing a veil are part of the pillars of Islam.”

Source: Finding a Place in Women’s MosquesOrganizers of reform mosques are building on an evolving tradition of women imams that dates back centuries. But some Muslim women remain wary.

Filed under Religion Tagged with , , ,

Anti-BDS laws are more than words. They are a legal attempt to punish a passive act: Neil Macdonald

2019/03/11 Leave a comment

I would distinguish between boycotting products and services from the occupied territories (legitimate) from Israel proper:

Back in January, the publisher of a tiny newspaper in Arkansas, standing on journalistic principle, defied the dead hand of government, the way a publisher is supposed to. Publisher Alan Leveritt’s scorching article, posted on the website of the American Civil Liberties Association, gladdened the journalistic heart.

Or at least it should have. But we don’t know whether it did; the institutions of American journalism, impoverished and increasingly frightened of their own audiences, are mostly maintaining a courageous silence. You’d think they’d be concerned.

Dozens of relatively recent state laws now require anyone who does business with government, including media organizations, to effectively make a pro-Israel pledge, and in some cases, sign one.

The signatory must promise not to in any way limit business activities with Israel or its settlements in the occupied territories, which even the United States considers illegal under international law.

Risking ad revenue

Last year, Leveritt was told to sign the pledge or lose badly needed ad revenue from the Arkansas university system. He told the state of Arkansas to go jump in a lake.

“We really needed the business,” Leveritt wrote, but at what price?

“Since when do American citizens have to pledge to act in the interest of a foreign power in order to do business with their own government?”

“As an American, I say it is none of their damn business what political beliefs we hold. We’ll see them in court.”

On the phone this week, Leveritt said his newspaper is actually unconcerned with Israel and its occupation, and has taken no editorial view on it: “We are concerned about the 20,000 people in this state who have been kicked off Medicaid. We focus on local issues.”

He in fact regards the demand to sign the pledge as the state forcing his paper to take an editorial position against its will.

“I wouldn’t sign a pro-Palestine pledge, either.”

Other newspapers across the country must have been asked to sign similar pledges, he notes (“If they have signed, they should be ashamed of themselves”), but there has been precious little support of the Arkansas Times.

“I have not received a single call. Nothing.”

Leveritt’s only ally seems to be the American Civil Liberties Association, which regards the right to boycott as a “McCarthy-era loyalty oath,” and is helping him sue. The writers’ organization PEN has expressed support, too.

But that sort of free-speecher view is not widely shared in America, at least where the boycott involves Israel.

Since 2015, 26 other states have passed laws similar to the one in Arkansas. The United States Senate just passed a federal version. Basically, these laws are an attempt to punish entities or individual Americans who choose not to do something – in this case, choosing not to invest with, buy from or otherwise economically support Israel.

It’s all an attempt to combat a strategy chosen by Palestinian leaders and their supporters roughly 13 years ago. After decades of being told by Israel and the West to abandon armed struggle and choose a non-violent path to oppose Israel’s occupation and settlements, the Palestinians and their allies decided to do just that: they founded the so-called BDS movement, standing for boycott, divest and sanction, using economic levers to pressure Israel.

BDS counterattack

At first, Israel brushed off BDS as trivial, but as the movement began to gain traction worldwide (BDS is supported in whole or in part, by, among others, the United Church of Canada and the Quakers, and the corporate world has taken notice), the Israeli government and its supporters organized an aggressive counterattack, using everything from lawsuits and public shaming of individual BDS supporters to lobbying efforts aimed at persuading other countries to outlaw boycotts. BDS, they proclaimed, is not just anti-Semitic, it’s “economic terrorism.”

Nowhere has Israel found greater support than in the United States, which is unsurprising. America has the largest population of evangelical Christians in the world. Their support for Israel is as absolute as their opposition to abortion, and they understand how to exercise political power. The anti-boycott laws generally pass with healthy bipartisan support.

“Anti-Israel policies are anti-Texas policies,” declared Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, signing his state’s anti-BDS law.

Elsewhere, nations are choosing sides, many of them coming down on Israel’s. Governments in France, Germany and the UK have all denounced BDS. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has effectively called the movement anti-Semitic, accusing it of singling out and delegitimizing Israel.

Ultimately, though, denunciations by politicians or governments or political parties are just words – a declaration of a political position to voters. BDS supporters in Canada probably couldn’t care less what Trudeau thinks of them, and in any case, politicians are hardly consistent on such matters. Politicians are constantly singling out, delegitimizing and sanctioning other nations for bad behaviour.

Washington, for example, was furious when Venezuelan troops blocked foreign food shipments and shot protesters, but regards Israel’s blockade of foreign food aid to Gaza and its troops shooting Gazan protesters — which Israel defends on security grounds — as completely justified.

The anti-BDS laws in the United States, though, are more than words. They are a legal attempt to punish a passive act, which is a form of speech. There are powerful politicians who would actually criminalize BDS.

Leveritt, the Arkansas Times publisher, puts it this way:  “As an American citizen, I say I can not buy whatever I don’t want to buy and it’s none of the state’s damn business.”

So, ultimately, it will be the courts in America, and perhaps elsewhere, to decide how far this can all go.

Already, federal courts in Kansas and Arizona have blocked anti-BDS laws in those states as illegal suppression of speech. A speech pathologist fired from a university in Texas for refusing to sign the pledge is also suing. In Britain, the country’s high court dismissed charges of discrimination levied against local councils that supported the boycott. A high court justice, compared BDS to boycotts of South Africa’s apartheid regime, ruling: “There is legitimate scope for criticism of Israel without that implying anti-Semitic attitudes” (precisely the opposite of what Israel and its supporters argue).

Other British judges have sided with pro-Israel groups. And in the U.S., comparisons have been drawn to the boycotts of discriminatory white-owned businesses during the civil rights era. The Arkansas Times made precisely that argument.

But when Alan Leveritt got his day in court, he lost.

Arkansas Federal Judge Brian Miller, in late January, ruled that a boycott is not protected speech, and that the state has the right to force businesses to sign the pledge.

Leveritt has filed an appeal: “I’m not signing anything.”

Well, good for Alan Leveritt. He has guts. But the Arkansas Times was just forced to go from weekly to monthly publication, and principles can be expensive.

Source: Anti-BDS laws are more than words. They are a legal attempt to punish a passive act: Neil Macdonald

Filed under Antisemitism Tagged with ,

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