France Has Millions of Muslims. Why Does It Import Imams?

2019/01/29 Leave a comment

Valid question and reveals some of the straitjackets of French history and policies:

What to do about Islam in France? Considering Islamist terrorist attacks, communalism and the international manipulation of Muslim communities, the matter is pressing. But it’s contentious, because managing Islam seems to go against laïcité, France’s staunch version of state secularism, and a 1905 law that mandates the separation of church and state.

Wouldn’t revising that law be an admission that secularism is bowing to Islamism? On the other hand, if the law isn’t revised, or if the French state cannot find other ways of monitoring and steering Islam, then Islam in France risks falling under the control of foreign states or the influence of radicals. That is already the case, actually: Since laïcité prohibits the French authorities from using public funds to build mosques or train imams, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have stepped in. According to the newsmagazine L’Express, 70 percent of imams practicing in France are not French.

In an attempt to overcome these paradoxes, President Emmanuel Macron recently convened at the Élysée Palace the country’s various Muslim leaders and then representatives from all religions. The order of the day for the broader meeting, held on Jan. 10, was old emergencies: how to punish radicalism, control the financing of mosques and make Muslim authorities accountable. The news daily Le Monde, which obtained the note that the president handed to attendees, reported that the government was proposing to revise the 1905 law while “confirming” “its principles.”

It was an attempt to square a circle, a malaise, so very French. And the narrower question of what to do about imams — their origins, their trainings, their salaries — summarizes it well.

Here is a first hurdle: It’s virtually impossible to tally imams in France. No one really knows how many there are, partly because the collection of data based on ethnic or religious grounds is prohibited. The last available estimates from the interior ministry — which date back to 2012 — put the number of mosques in France at around 2,500. (A 2016 report by the Senate said it was closer to 3,000.) But those figures are as outdated today as they were imprecise in the first place: What even counts as a “mosque” when so many Muslim believers gather in the basements of low-income building complexes or other improvised prayer halls? And there being 2,500 mosques doesn’t mean there are 2,500 imams: In Sunni Islam, the version of Islam most prevalent in France, anyone can declare oneself an imam and volunteer to lead prayers or the Friday Sermon.

There is no central authority overseeing Islam in France. Anyway, how do you supervise the mosques you don’t fund or imams you can’t pay?

For the time being, France, for lack of its own theological schools, has favored filtered immigration: It brings in imams from abroad, mostly from the home countries of its main immigrant communities, either for long stretches or just for Ramadan. Paradoxically, one of the justifications for this policy — though rarely admittedly publicly — is security: It seems less risky to rely on an official imam from Algeria than to let a self-proclaimed imam emerge in a Paris banlieue, or suburb.

For example, Algerian imams wishing to go to France must first undergo investigations. And as the Algerian government puts it, modestly, the “Algerian expertise” in internal security matters ensures quality vetting. The government has also offered its services to the United States, Belgium and Italy.

In 2018, Algeria sent approximately 100 imams to officiate in France. Morocco and Tunisia contributed about as many each. In 2017, L’Express ran the headline “Morocco, the factory of French imams,” with an article on imam-apprentices, some sent from France, whom the kingdom was training in how to dispense “middle-ground” Islambefore dispatching them abroad. According to the news weekly Le Point, Turkish “consular structures” oversee more than 250 mosques and about 200 official imams seconded by Turkey to France.

The filtered import of foreign imams may look like a good practical solution; in fact, it’s an ideological trap. These imams, even if acting in good faith, can only reinforce communalism in France and work against integration, because they are not French. In the name of laïcité, France is dangerously delegating its Islam to other states.

Those states benefit. For the Algerian government, the export of imams seems to confirm the country’s return to stability. Saudi Arabia sees proselytizing as a form of soft power. So does Turkey, which appears invested in maintaining a religious lobby abroad.

The stakes are high, apparently. When last year the Austrian government expelled about 60 Turkish preachers to counter, it said, the creation of “parallel societies” and “political Islam,” Turkey called the move “racist” and “Islamophobic.” When the French government said it wanted to create a distinct “Islam of France,” Algeria — speaking indirectly, via an expert’s op-ed in state media — accused it of “arrogance tinted with ignorance.”

The import of imams, the foreign financing of mosques — these delegations of power by the French authorities are a dead end: They won’t do enough to stem radicalism in France, and they will do even less to nurture the emergence of, precisely, an Islam of France.

The president’s office seems to want to overcome all this. But some of the participants in that first meeting convened by Mr. Macron at the beginning of the year reacted with calculated anger before accepting the invitation. Members of the French Council of the Muslim Faith decried the “colonial administration of Islam.” It’s a clever conflation: By invoking colonialism, they can leverage guilt as a bargaining chip while maintaining Islam’s communal valence. Why do that? For fear of losing power if France develops a sui generis form of Islam. Harping on Muslims’ status as a once-colonized group is a way of highlighting their ties to their countries of origin, over those to their host country.

Past attempts to create Muslim councils — the Great Mosque of Paris, the Federation of French Muslims, the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (also known as Muslims of France) — that could effectively represent France’s various Muslim communities have failed. One reason is the rivalry among the groups’ leaders, different confessional strands and foreign governments with ties to immigrant communities.Algeria competes with Morocco, and both of them compete with Turkey and Saudi Arabia: As the journalist Henri Tincq has pointed out on Slate.fr, the Paris Mosque is “loyal to Algeria,” the Federation of French Muslims has “ties to the Muslim World League and Morocco” and the Union of Islamic Organizations in France is “close to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

It’s difficult to separate Islam from its community and the community from its country of origin without being accused of interference. Whenever the French government tries to manage Islam in France, Algeria says it’s meddling, when in saying so, it is Algeria that is meddling in France’s affairs.

So what can be done? One solution has been put forward by Hakim El Karoui, an international consultant close to Mr. Macron and the author of the recent report “The Islamist Factory” and, in 2016, of “A French Islam Is Possible.”

First, he recommends strictly supervising external financing or informal funds collected in mosques, neighborhoods or local associations. He also suggests creating an independent fund for training imams by taxing halal businesses, money collected through the Muslim alms known as zakat and commerce around the pilgrimage to Mecca. Those are good ideas for trying to keep state and church, or cult, separate while integrating French Muslims into France.

But just what should be uniting is proving divisive: Mr. El Karoui’s proposals are controversial, notably for the French Council of the Muslim Faith. One of the organization’s vice-presidents called them an “insult” to Islam and accused Mr. El Karoui of conflating Islam and Islamism. That reaction sums up well the endless-seeming debate between those who want to maintain a monopoly over Islam in France and those who wish to develop an Islam of France.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

School boards push back on ‘witch hunt’ as government seeks data on staff religious symbols

2019/01/29 Leave a comment

Very intrusive vs the self-declaration approach of the census and employment equity (which do not capture the degrees of religiosity in the census or religious minority status in EE). The 2011 NHS provided the following numbers for Quebec education Muslim employees (not only teachers) – 2.3% in schools, 1.9 % in CEGEPs, 5.3% in universities:

The head of Quebec’s largest school board says she was outraged by a request from the province’s Education Department last week seeking to know how many board employees wear religious symbols.

Catherine Harel Bourdon, who oversees the Commission scolaire de Montreal, says the request received Friday could be seen as contravening the rights and freedoms of its employees.

Harel Bourdon says the board was not told why the department was seeking such information. She said the board’s response was that it does not collect such information and would not engage in what she called a witch hunt.

The controversy comes as the new Coalition Avenir Quebec government prepares legislation that would prohibit public servants in positions of authority — including teachers — from wearing religious symbols such as the hijab, kippa or turban at work.

Francis Bouchard, a spokesman for Education Minister Jean-Francois Roberge, says no formal request for a tally was made — rather a number of school boards were called to determine whether such information exists. Bouchard accused the boards of manufacturing a scandal.

Relations were already strained between the province’s school boards and the new government, which was elected on a promise to eliminate the boards in favour of new service centres.

Source: School boards push back on ‘witch hunt’ as government seeks data on staff religious symbols

More extensive reporting in French:

Le ministère de l’Éducation a causé toute une commotion en demandant à des commissions scolaires de dénombrer les enseignants et les membres de la direction des écoles qui portent un signe religieux au travail, a appris La Presse.

Leur fédération s’est aussitôt rebiffée, mandatant ses services juridiques de vérifier la légalité d’une telle manoeuvre, selon un courriel envoyé à tous ses membres.

Des sources sûres indiquent qu’au moins trois commissions scolaires de la région métropolitaine ont reçu une demande du Ministère visant à divulguer des statistiques sur le port de signes religieux. Il s’agit des commissions scolaires de Montréal (CSDM), de la Pointe-de-l’Île (CSPI) et de Laval (CSDL).

Malaise

La demande aurait été faite verbalement, et non par écrit, vendredi dernier. Le ressac a été immédiat. Les commissions scolaires visées ont exprimé leur malaise devant une telle demande.

La Fédération des commissions scolaires du Québec (FCSQ) s’est mêlée du dossier, selon un courriel envoyé à l’ensemble de ses membres. « Certaines commissions scolaires ont reçu une demande du bureau de la sous-ministre de l’Éducation et de l’Enseignement supérieur pour dénombrer le personnel des commissions scolaires et des écoles qui portent des signes religieux au travail », peut-on lire.

« Dans l’éventualité où vous auriez reçu une demande semblable, nous vous prions de nous en informer dans les plus brefs délais. »

La FCSQ suggère de ne pas répondre au Ministère pour le moment, toujours selon ce courriel. « Nos services juridiques évaluent présentement cette demande. Des instructions supplémentaires vous seront transmises le plus rapidement possible », écrit la fédération.

« Aberrant ! »

La présidente de la CSDM, Catherine Harel Bourdon, confirme que le Ministère a demandé des statistiques sur le nombre d’employés portant des signes religieux. On lui a répondu que de telles statistiques n’existent pas et ne seraient pas produites non plus. « J’ai trouvé ça aberrant ! », a lancé Mme Harel Bourdon en entrevue. Une commission scolaire qui ferait un tel dénombrement irait à l’encontre de la Charte québécoise des droits et libertés de la personne, selon elle.

« Ça fait plusieurs mois que des journalistes me demandent combien il y en a. Ce que j’ai toujours répondu, c’est que nous, quand on fait des embauches, autant de nouvelles embauches qu’au niveau de notre personnel qui est déjà à notre emploi, on ne demande pas s’ils portent des signes religieux », a-t-elle affirmé.

« Je verrais mal un employeur faire une demande comme ça. »

L’article 18.1 de la Charte stipule que « nul ne peut, dans un formulaire de demande d’emploi ou lors d’une entrevue relative à un emploi, requérir d’une personne des renseignements » relatifs, entre autres, à sa religion.

Certes, il existe des statistiques, par exemple, sur la proportion d’employés du secteur public qui appartiennent à une minorité visible. Mais elles sont le résultat d’un exercice encadré par la Charte. Il s’agit du programme d’accès à l’égalité en emploi. À cette fin bien précise, tous les employés sont appelés, de façon volontaire, à remplir un questionnaire et à déclarer s’ils sont membres d’une minorité visible. La démarche du ministère de l’Éducation ne se fait pas dans ce cadre. Il n’est jamais question de port de signes religieux dans ces questionnaires.

Toutes les sources consultées font un lien entre la demande du Ministère et la volonté du gouvernement d’interdire le port de signes religieux chez les enseignants (mais aussi chez les représentants de l’État dotés d’un pouvoir de coercition : juges, procureurs de la Couronne, policiers et gardiens de prison).

Le premier ministre François Legault affirmait avant les Fêtes qu’il n’y aurait pas de clause de droits acquis pour les employés actuels, communément appelée clause grand-père. Pour éviter des congédiements, Québec a évoqué l’idée de déplacer les récalcitrants à d’autres fonctions. Un projet de loi est attendu bientôt.

Du « profilage » ?

Pour la porte-parole du Parti libéral en matière d’éducation, Marwah Rizqy, la demande du Ministère revient à faire du « profilage ». « Une fois qu’on a répertorié le nombre, c’est quoi, la suite des choses ? Est-ce que c’est pour venir en quelque sorte banaliser en disant : “Écoutez, ça ne touche pas tant de monde que ça ?” Et si c’est ça, l’objectif, est-ce qu’il est aussi en train de nous dire que les droits fondamentaux, si vous êtes un petit nombre, vous n’en avez pas ? C’est de l’improvisation. »

Le gouvernement Marois, qui voulait interdire aux employés de l’État de porter des signes religieux, n’avait pas demandé un dénombrement aux commissions scolaires, a confirmé une source impliquée dans le dossier à l’époque. Elle est surprise de la démarche faite par le ministère de l’Éducation.

Le cabinet du ministre de l’Éducation, Jean-François Roberge, n’a pas donné de réponses aux questions que La Presse lui a posées hier.

***

LES COMMISSIONS SCOLAIRES VISÉES PAR LA DEMANDE DE QUÉBEC

Commission scolaire de Montréal

– Plus de 8200 enseignants

– 127 écoles primaires

– 26 écoles secondaires

Commission scolaire de la Pointe-de-l’Île

– Plus de 4300 enseignants

– 40 écoles primaires

– 7 écoles secondaires

Commission scolaire de Laval

– Plus de 5000 enseignants

– 56 écoles primaires

– 14 écoles secondaires

Source: Signes religieux chez les enseignants: Québec veut des chiffres

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Andrew Sullivan: The Abyss of Hate Versus Hate

2019/01/29 Leave a comment

While it doesn’t excuse the wearing of MAGA hats – after two years of President Trump, hard to deny that it has become a symbol of racism – does provide needed calling out of the Black Hebrew Israelites and the risks of tribalism:

One of the advantages of taking Saturdays off the web entirely is that I wasn’t aware of L’Affaire Covington until it was almost over. It’s one of those occasions I’m deeply glad I quit blogging 24/7 four years ago and disengaged from Twitter last month. I’m not going to dunk on the multitudes who badly misjudged a moment in time. We’re all fallible. But I did make time to watch the full 100 minutes of YouTube footage that covered the scene in front of the Lincoln Memorial long before, during, and after the smirk that was seen across the world.

What I saw was extraordinary bigotry, threats of violence, hideous misogyny, disgusting racism, foul homophobia, and anti-Catholicism — not by the demonized schoolboys, but by grown men with a bullhorn, a small group of self-styled Black Hebrew Israelites. They’re a fringe sect — but an extremely aggressive one — known for inflammatory bigotry in public. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated them a hate group: “strongly anti-white and anti-Semitic.” They scream abuse at gays, women, white people, Jews, interracial couples, in the crudest of language. In their public display of bigotry, they’re at the same level as the Westboro Baptist sect: shockingly obscene. They were the instigators of the entire affair.

And yet the elite media seemed eager to downplay their role, referring to them only in passing, noting briefly that they were known to be anti-Semitic and anti-gay. After several days, the New York Times ran a news analysis on the group by John Eligon that reads like a press release from the sect: “They shout, use blunt and sometimes offensive language, and gamely engage in arguments aimed at drawing listeners near.” He notes that “they group people based on what they call nations, believing that there are 12 tribes among God’s chosen people. White people are not among those tribes, they believe, and will therefore be servants when Christ returns to Earth.” Nothing to see here, folks. Just a bunch of people preaching the enslavement of another race in public on speakers in the most inflammatory language imaginable.

Eligon actually writes: “Whatever tensions are sparked by Hebrew Israelite teaching, some adherents chalk that up to people being unwilling to accept uncomfortable doctrine.” The Washington Post ran a Style section headlineabout “the calculated art of making people uncomfortable.” In a news storyentirely about the Black Israelites, the Washington Post did not quote a single thing they had said on the tape, gave a respectful account of their theology, and only mentioned their status as a “hate group” in the 24th paragraph, and put the term in scare quotes. Vox managed to write an explainer that also did not include a single example of any of the actual insults hurled at the Covington kids. Countless near-treatises were written parsing the layers of bigotry inside a silent schoolboy’s smirk.

Here’s what I saw on the full tape: a small group of aggressive, hateful men using a bullhorn to broadcast the crudest of racial slurs, backed up by recitations of Bible verses. I saw a young Native American woman make the mistake of engaging them. When she stood her ground, she was suddenly interrupted: “You’re out of order. Where’s your husband? Where’s your husband? Let me speak to him.” On the tape, you can hear the commentary from another member of the Black Israelites: “You see this? This is the problem, Israel. It’s always our women coming up with their loud mouth, thinking they can run and bogart things, thinking they can come and distract things with their loud-ass mouth, because they’re not used to dealing with real men. You think we’re supposed to bow down to your damn emotions when you come around here and run your mouth and distract what we’re doing instead of coming here with order … She’s coming around here being wicked.”

Wait, there’s more. Hollering through a bullhorn at a group of Native Americans, the speaker boomed: “You ain’t no child of God. You are the Indian. You are a blue-eyed demon. That’s the last Mohican.” Then: “You’re still worshipping totem poles. You out of your mind! You have to repent. You worship the buffalo. You worship the eagle. You worship the phoenix. These are the idols you’ve been worshipping. A damn buffalo ain’t gonna save you. You worship the creations and not the creator … That’s why you’re drunkards in the casinos and the damn plantation.” Another: “Dumb-ass niggers. Bunch of demons. You’re a bunch of Uncle Tomahawks.” They snarled the word “savages” at Native Americans. The yelling was deafening, aggressive, vile, and threatening. But an inscrutable smile by a white teen was enough for some elite liberals to urge punching a schoolboy in the face.

Here is how the Black Israelites verbally assaulted the schoolboys: “Bring your cracker ass up here. Dirty ass crackers, your day coming. We can give a hell about your police. No one’s playing with these dusty-ass crackers.” Another: “Don’t get too close or your ass gonna get punished … You crackers are some slithery ass bastards. You better keep your distance.” And this, surveying the scene: “I see you, a bunch of incest babies … Babies made out of incest. If you’re the great damn nation, get rid of the lice on your back. … You’re a bunch of hyenas. You outnumber us but you keep your distance. You couldn’t touch us if you wanted to. You worship blasphemy.”

Then they took it up a notch: “Look at these dirty-ass crackers. You’re a bunch of future school-shooters. You crackers are crazy. You crackers have got some damn nerve …” And again: “When you guys gonna shoot up another school? You all gonna shoot up a school.” Yes, the man was accusing a bunch of schoolboys from Kentucky of wanting to murder their classmates — solely because they’re white.

Once the Israelites figured out the kids were Catholic, they offered this about what appeared to be a picture of the Pope: “This is a faggot child-molester.” And this about Donald Trump: “He’s a product of sodomy and he’s proud. Your president is a homosexual. … It says on the back of the dollar bill that ‘In God We Trust,’ and you give faggots rights.” At that homophobic outburst, the kids from the Catholic school spontaneously booed.

The boys — stuck waiting for a bus — decided to respond to this assault by performing school chants. Most look a little bewildered, as one might imagine. Some even tried to engage. Here are the spoken words I heard, in response to the abuse: “That’s racist, bro.” “That’s rude.” “Why are you being mean? Why do you call us Klansmen?” “We don’t judge you.” One of them offered to shake hands, and was rebuffed. Another offered some water from a plastic bottle. The response? “You got some Trump water? What does it taste like? Incest?”

Yes, the boys did chant some school riffs; I’m sure some of those joining in the Native American drumming and chanting were doing it partly in mockery, but others may have just been rolling with it. Yes, they should not have been wearing MAGA hats to a pro-life march. They aren’t angels; they’re teenage boys. But they were also subjected for quite a while to a racist, anti-Catholic, homophobic tirade on a loudspeaker, which would be more than most of us urbanites could bear — and they’re adolescents literally off the bus from Kentucky. I heard no slurs back. They stayed there because they were waiting for a bus, not to intimidate anyone.

To put it bluntly: They were 16-year-olds subjected to verbal racist assault by grown men; and then the kids were accused of being bigots. It just beggars belief that the same liberals who fret about “micro-aggressions” for 20-somethings were able to see 16-year-olds absorbing the worst racist garbage from religious bigots … and then express the desire to punch the kids in the face.

How did this grotesque inversion of the truth become the central narrative for what seemed to be the entire class of elite journalists on Twitter? That’s the somewhat terrifying question. Ruth Graham on Slate saw a 16-year-old she’d seen on a tape for a couple of minutes and immediately knew that he was indistinguishable from the “white young men crowding around a single black man at a lunch counter sit-in in Virginia in the 1960s” or other white “high school boys flashing Nazi salutes.” Even after the full context was clear, Graham refused to apologize to the kid, or retract her condemnation: The context didn’t “change the larger story” which, she explained, was bigotry toward Native Americans. She cited Trump’s use of the name “Pocahontas” for Elizabeth Warren as evidence. But using a bullhorn to call Native Americans “savages” and “drunkards at the casino” to their faces a few minutes earlier on the same tape was not worth a mention?

Graham was just one media voice among countless others, and I don’t mean to single her out. The reason I do is because her argument about the fuller context is now the norm in elite media, and it’s the underlying reason for the instant judgment. “Racism” now only means “prejudice plus power,” so what the adult Black Israelites yelled was nowhere near as bad as what a white teenager didn’t say. No empirical evidence could ever deny that underlying truth, as a piece at Deadspin insisted, after admitting that, well yes, there were “four black men who seem to belong to the Black Israelites … yelling insults.” No mention of the content of those insults, of course.

Across most of the national media, led by the New York Times and the Washington Post, the narrative had been set. “I’m willing to bet that fifty years from now, a defining image of this political era will be that smug white MAGA teen disrespecting a Native elder and veteran. It just captures so much,” Jessica Valenti tweeted. “And let’s please not forget that this group of teens … were there for the March for Life: There is an inextricable link between control over women’s bodies, white supremacy & young white male entitlement.” This is the orthodoxy of elite media, and it is increasingly the job of journalists to fit the facts to the narrative and to avoid any facts that undermine it.

There’s a reason why, in the crucial battle for the legitimacy of a free press, Trump is still on the offensive. Our mainstream press has been poisoned by tribalism. My own trust in it is eroding. I’m far from the only one.

The other night I was having a drink with a friend who said he believed that the Trump threat was essentially over, as the shutdown took its toll. He noted what might become an inflection point in the polling. He was heartened by the midterms. He might be right. But I think that misses the core point about this presidency. From my perspective, the Trump threat to liberal democracy is deepening, largely because its racial animus and rank tribalism are evoking a response that is increasingly imbued with racial animus and rank tribalism, in an ever-tightening spiral of mutual hostility.

“The red MAGA hat is the new white hood,” tweeted Alyssa Milano. In his debut Times column, Jamelle Bouie describes a border wall thus: “You can almost think of the wall as a modern-day Confederate monument, akin to those erected during a similar but far more virulent period of racist aggression in the first decades of the 20th century.” Charles Blow insists that “We have to stop thinking of the symbology of Trump’s presidency — the MAGA hats, the wall, etc — as merely physical objects. They have long since lost their original meaning and purpose. They are now emblems. They are now the new iconography of white supremacy … In much the same way that the confederate flag became a white supremacy signalling device, the MAGA hat now serves the same purpose. It is tangentially connected to Trump, but is transcends him also. It’s a way of cloaking racial hostility in the presentable form of politics.” A campaign slogan for a candidate who won the votes of 46 percent of the country in 2016 is to be seen as indistinguishable from the Confederate flag. This is not the language of politics. It is a language of civil war.

I can understand this impulse emotionally as a response to Trump’s hatefulness. But I fear it morally or politically. It’s a vortex that can lead to nothing but the raw imposition of power by one tribe over another. There can be no dialogue here, no debate, not even a State of the Union in which both tribes will participate. And none of us is immune.

What was so depressing to me about the Covington incident was how so many liberals felt comfortable taking a random teenager and, purely because of his race and gender, projected onto him all their resentments and hatred of “white men” in general. Here is Kara Swisher, a sane and kind person, reacting to the first video: “To all you aggrieved folks who thought this Gillette ad was too much bad-men-shaming, after we just saw it come to life with those awful kids and their fetid smirking harassing that elderly man on the Mall: Go fuck yourselves.” Judging — indeed demonizing — an individual on the basis of the racial or gender group he belongs to is the core element of racism, and yet it is now routine on the left as well as the right. To her great credit, Kara apologized profusely for the outburst. The point here is that tribal hatred can consume even the best of us.

And this is what will inevitably happen once you’ve redefined racism or sexism to mean prejudice plus power. It’s reasonable to note the social context of bigotry and see shades of gray, in which the powerful should indeed be more aware of how their racial or gender prejudice can hurt others, and the powerless given some slack. But if that leads you to ignore or downplay the nastiest adult bigotry imaginable and to focus on a teen boy’s silent face as the real manifestation of evil, you are well on your way to creating a new racism that mirrors aspects of the old.

This is the abyss of hate versus hate, tribe versus tribe. This is a moment when we can look at ourselves in the mirror of social media and see what we have become. Liberal democracy is being dismantled before our eyes — by all of us. This process is greater than one president. It is bottom-up as well as top-down. Tyranny, as Damon Linker reminded us this week, is not just political but psychological, and the tyrannical impulse, ratcheted up by social media, is in all of us. It infects the soul of the entire body politic. It destroys good people. It slowly strangles liberal democracy. This is the ongoing extinction level event.

Source: Andrew Sullivan: The Abyss of Hate Versus Hate

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

1 in 5 Canadian youths not sure what happened in the Holocaust, survey suggests

2019/01/28 Leave a comment

Whenever one asks a question about historical events, no matter how important, the level of ignorance is depressing:

One in five young people in Canada either hasn’t heard of the Holocaust or isn’t sure what it is.

That’s the conclusion from a new survey released ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Sunday.

Historians believe the new data should be a wake-up call on how the systematic murder of six million Jews in Europe is taught in Canadian schools — and remembered more broadly.

“One of the surprising things was the awareness gap between millennials and older respondents …it’s shocking,” said historian Naomi Azrieli, CEO of the Azrieli Foundation, the charity behind the survey.

“I think older Canadians are more likely to have known a survivor or been around in World War Two,” she told CBC News. “With each generation, it becomes less living history and more remote.”

In Britain, a new survey by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust found that one in 20 adults in Britain do not believe the Holocaust took place.

The survey of more than 2,000 people released Sunday also found that nearly two-thirds of respondents either did not know how many Jews had been murdered or greatly underestimated the number killed during the Holocaust.

Chief executive Olivia Marks-Woldman described the results as “widespread ignorance and even denial.”

While there are debates among historians about exactly when the Holocaust began, the mass killing of Jews in the Second World War started in 1941 with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, according to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, and continued until the Nazis were defeated in 1945.

Held on Jan. 27 annually following a United Nations resolution, International Holocaust Remembrance Day coincides with the day Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest complex of Nazi death camps, was liberated by Soviet forces in 1945.

Among other points, the Canadian survey found:

• Nearly six in 10 Canadians (57 per cent) said fewer people seem to care about the Holocaust than they used to.

• 15 per cent of Canadian adults and more than one fifth of Canadians under age 34 (22 per cent) haven’t heard about or are not sure if they have heard about the Holocaust.

• Nearly half of Canadian respondents (49 per cent) couldn’t name a single concentration camp. That’s roughly equal to the U.S., where 45 per cent couldn’t name one in a similar survey last year. There were over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos in Europe during the Holocaust.

A crew member walks toward the National Holocaust Monument before the official opening in Ottawa on Sept. 27, 2017. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)

• Nearly one quarter of all Canadians (23 per cent) believe substantially fewer than six million Jews were killed (two million or fewer) during the Holocaust, while another 24 per cent were unsure of how many were killed.

• Few Canadians believe there are many neo-Nazis in Canada today, while nearly half think there are many in the U.S. In fact, on a per capita basis, the two countries have roughly the same number of neo-Nazis, Azrieli said.

Reasons for optimism

With offices in Toronto, Montreal and Israel, the Azrieli Foundation commissioned Schoen Consulting to carry out the survey based on 1,100 interviews with Canadians over age 18 in September 2018. The margin of error was plus or minus three per cent.

While Azrieli was disappointed by the lack of knowledge about the Holocaust, especially among younger Canadians, she said the survey also offered plenty reasons for optimism.

More than 80 per cent of respondents believe all students should learn about the Holocaust in school and 85 per cent said it’s crucial to keep teaching about the Holocaust so it doesn’t happen again.

Azrieli wants to see a more comprehensive approach to how the Holocaust is taught in schools, potentially involving special professional development days for teachers to become more acquainted with its history.

With only around 5,000 Holocaust survivors alive in Canada today to tell their own stories about the mass killings, she said it’s more crucial than ever that schools and other institutions develop strong programs to teach the subject.

False beliefs

The need for better Holocaust education is especially intense due to rising anti-Semitic sentiment in much of the world, said Azrieli, whose father survived the Holocaust.

Since last year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, an 85-year-old French Holocaust survivor, Mireille Knoll, was fatally stabbed in Paris and 11 Jews were gunned down in a Pittsburgh synagogue during Shabbat services, the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history.

Human Rights First, a U.S. organization, recalled those killings and warned that “today’s threats do not come solely from the fringe.”

“In places such as Hungary and Poland, once proudly democratic nations, government leaders are travelling the road to authoritarianism,” said Ira Forman, the group’s senior adviser for combating anti-Semitism. “As they do so, they are distorting history to spin a fable about their nations and the Holocaust.”

In Canada, hate crimes rose to an all-time high in 2017, according to a Statistics Canada report released in November. For hate crimes based on religion, Jews were the most targeted group in Canada, with more than 300 incidents reported to police.

Nearly one-third of survey respondents believed Canada had an open immigration policy for Jewish refugees fleeing Europe.

In fact, Canada had “one of the worst immigration records in the world” related to Jewish people, “worse than the U.S. or U.K.,” Azrieli said.

Canada allowed only 5,000 Jewish refugees into the country while allowing nearly 2,000 Nazi war criminals to immigrate to Canada after the Second World War, the Azrieli Foundation reported.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Canadian border guards had a saying about Jewish refugees, she said: “None is too many.”

Survey respondents thought Canada had been more welcoming toward Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis, as they considered Canada to be generally more open toward immigrants than other nations, given the country’s current policies.

“That was a very interesting finding of this survey,” said Azrieli, “And an important indication that our own history is not well known to most Canadians.”

Source: 1 in 5 Canadian youths not sure what happened in the Holocaust, survey suggests

Filed under Holocaust, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Amazon Is Pushing Facial Technology That a Study Says Could Be Biased

2019/01/28 Leave a comment

Of note. These kinds of studies are important to expose the bias inherent in some corporate facial recognition systems:

Over the last two years, Amazon has aggressively marketed its facial recognition technology to police departments and federal agencies as a service to help law enforcement identify suspects more quickly. It has done so as another tech giant, Microsoft, has called on Congress to regulate the technology, arguing that it is too risky for companies to oversee on their own.

Now a new study from researchers at the M.I.T. Media Lab has found that Amazon’s system, Rekognition, had much more difficulty in telling the gender of female faces and of darker-skinned faces in photos than similar services from IBM and Microsoft. The results raise questions about potential bias that could hamper Amazon’s drive to popularize the technology.

In the study, published Thursday, Rekognition made no errors in recognizing the gender of lighter-skinned men. But it misclassified women as men 19 percent of the time, the researchers said, and mistook darker-skinned women for men 31 percent of the time. Microsoft’s technology mistook darker-skinned women for men just 1.5 percent of the time.

A study published a year ago found similar problems in the programs built by IBM, Microsoft and Megvii, an artificial intelligence company in China known as Face++. Those results set off an outcry that was amplified when a co-author of the study, Joy Buolamwini, posted YouTube videos showing the technology misclassifying famous African-American women, like Michelle Obama, as men.

The companies in last year’s report all reacted by quickly releasing more accurate technology. For the latest study, Ms. Buolamwini said, she sent a letter with some preliminary results to Amazon seven months ago. But she said that she hadn’t heard back from Amazon, and that when she and a co-author retested the company’s product a couple of months later, it had not improved.

Matt Wood, general manager of artificial intelligence at Amazon Web Services, said the researchers had examined facial analysis — a technology that can spot features such as mustaches or expressions such as smiles — and not facial recognition, a technology that can match faces in photos or video stills to identify individuals. Amazon markets both services.

“It’s not possible to draw a conclusion on the accuracy of facial recognition for any use case — including law enforcement — based on results obtained using facial analysis,” Dr. Wood said in a statement. He added that the researchers had not tested the latest version of Rekognition, which was updated in November.

Amazon said that in recent internal tests using an updated version of its service, the company found no difference in accuracy in classifying gender across all ethnicities.

The M.I.T. researchers used these and other photos to study the accuracy of facial technology in identifying gender.

With advancements in artificial intelligence, facial technologies — services that can be used to identify people in crowds, analyze their emotions, or detect their age and facial characteristics — are proliferating. Now, as companies begin to market these services more aggressively for uses like policing and vetting job candidates, they have emerged as a lightning rod in the debate about whether and how Congress should regulate powerful emerging technologies.

The new study, scheduled to be presented Monday at an artificial intelligence and ethics conference in Honolulu, is sure to inflame that argument.

Proponents see facial recognition as an important advance in helping law enforcement agencies catch criminals and find missing children. Some police departments, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have tested Amazon’s product.

But civil liberties experts warn that it can also be used to secretly identify people — potentially chilling Americans’ ability to speak freely or simply go about their business anonymously in public.

Over the last year, Amazon has come under intense scrutiny by federal lawmakers, the American Civil Liberties Union, shareholders, employees and academic researchers for marketing Rekognition to law enforcement agencies. That is partly because, unlike Microsoft, IBM and other tech giants, Amazon has been less willing to publicly discuss concerns.

Amazon, citing customer confidentiality, has also declined to answer questions from federal lawmakers about which government agencies are using Rekognition or how they are using it. The company’s responses have further troubled some federal lawmakers.

“Not only do I want to see them address our concerns with the sense of urgency it deserves,” said Representative Jimmy Gomez, a California Democrat who has been investigating Amazon’s facial recognition practices. “But I also want to know if law enforcement is using it in ways that violate civil liberties, and what — if any — protections Amazon has built into the technology to protect the rights of our constituents.”

In a letter last month to Mr. Gomez, Amazon said Rekognition customers must abide by Amazon’s policies, which require them to comply with civil rights and other laws. But the company said that for privacy reasons it did not audit customers, giving it little insight into how its product is being used.

The study published last year reported that Microsoft had a perfect score in identifying the gender of lighter-skinned men in a photo database, but that it misclassified darker-skinned women as men about one in five times. IBM and Face++ had an even higher error rate, each misclassifying the gender of darker-skinned women about one in three times.

Ms. Buolamwini said she had developed her methodology with the idea of harnessing public pressure, and market competition, to push companies to fix biases in their software that could pose serious risks to people.

Ms. Buolamwini, who had done similar tests last year, conducted another round to learn whether industry practices had changed, she said.CreditTony Luong for The New York Times

“One of the things we were trying to explore with the paper was how to galvanize action,” Ms. Buolamwini said.

Immediately after the study came out last year, IBM published a blog post, “Mitigating Bias in A.I. Models,” citing Ms. Buolamwini’s study. In the post, Ruchir Puri, chief architect at IBM Watson, said IBM had been working for months to reduce bias in its facial recognition system. The company post included test results showing improvements, particularly in classifying the gender of darker-skinned women. Soon after, IBM released a new system that the company said had a tenfold decrease in error rates.

A few months later, Microsoft published its own post, titled “Microsoft improves facial recognition technology to perform well across all skin tones, genders.” In particular, the company said, it had significantly reduced the error rates for female and darker-skinned faces.

Ms. Buolamwini wanted to learn whether the study had changed overall industry practices. So she and a colleague, Deborah Raji, a college student who did an internship at the M.I.T. Media Lab last summer, conducted a new study.

In it, they retested the facial systems of IBM, Microsoft and Face++. They also tested the facial systems of two companies that were not included in the first study: Amazon and Kairos, a start-up in Florida.

The new study found that IBM, Microsoft and Face++ all improved their accuracy in identifying gender.

By contrast, the study reported, Amazon misclassified the gender of darker-skinned females 31 percent of the time, while Kairos had an error rate of 22.5 percent.

Melissa Doval, the chief executive of Kairos, said the company, inspired by Ms. Buolamwini’s work, released a more accurate algorithm in October.

Ms. Buolamwini said the results of her studies raised fundamental questions for society about whether facial technology should not be used in certain situations, such as job interviews, or in products, like drones or police body cameras.

Some federal lawmakers are voicing similar issues.

“Technology like Amazon’s Rekognition should be used if and only if it is imbued with American values like the right to privacy and equal protection,” said Senator Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has been investigating Amazon’s facial recognition practices. “I do not think that standard is currently being met.”

Source: Amazon Is Pushing Facial Technology That a Study Says Could Be Biased

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Diversity Votes — February By-elections: Matching Census Data with Ethnic Media Coverage (16-23 January 2019)

2019/01/28 Leave a comment

For background data on the riding demographic, economic, social and political characteristics, see: February By-elections: Matching Census Data with Ethnic Media Coverage (1-18 January 2019).

Ethnic Media Coverage

In contrast to coverage in the previous weeks, which included coverage of the general by-election announcement by more different language ethnic media, the past week was almost exclusively focused on Burnaby South and the ongoing controversy over the divisive remarks by former Liberal candidate Wang and overall issues related targeting ethnic votes, with only 41 media items compared to the 97 earlier in the month  .

Media coverage was overwhelmingly in Punjabi (39 percent) and 43.9 percent in Chinese, Cantonese and Mandarin language media. There was only one tangential media reference to Outremont in the context of NDP prospects.

The focus of candidate specific coverage was former Liberal candidate Wang and her efforts (unsuccessful) to distance herself from her comments on WeChat that basically said vote for the Chinese Canadian candidate, not the Indo-Canadian candidate. Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel’s revealing that Wang had sought being nominated and being rejected as a Conservative candidate was covered, as were Rempel’s press conference criticizing the Liberal government immigration record, including her statement that poor vetting had resulted in the killing of Burnaby teen Marrisa Shen by a Syrian refugee (charged, not yet convicted). The announcement of Wang’s replacement, Richard Lee, a former provincial politician was covered in summary fashion.

While NDP leader Singh’s housing, immigration (withdrawal from the Safe Third Country Agreement with the US)  and other policy proposals were covered, there was still some lingering coverage of his apparent unawareness of the implications of the Canadians detained in China in retaliation for the extradition proceedings against Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou.

Svend Robinson’s nomination as the NDP candidate for Burnaby North-Seymour after an 11 year absence was covered in Chinese media (the largest visible minority group in the riding). 

In terms of commentary (including analysis and opinion pieces), Punjabi media predominated with seven items and Chinese three. 

While most of these were neutral in tone, there were three critical pieces. Two of these were in Chinese media, which were highly critical of Wang and how ethnic politics was playing out among Chinese Canadians, and one in Punjabi media, making similar points with respect to Canadian Sikhs. There was one more positive piece on ethnic politics, noting that all candidates seek support from their ethnic group and that the Wang controversy was  “not a big deal.”

Related issues such as the ongoing dispute between Canada and China over the extradition request of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou and the inappropriate comments regarding her possible extradition by Canada’s now former ambassador to China have not seen much by-election related coverage but are being covered by ethnic media separately.

See the MIREMS blog for some of the stories being covered: MIREMS blog.

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Race or class irrelevant in intelligence of babies, groundbreaking Oxford study finds

2019/01/26 Leave a comment

The basics make the difference – medical care and nutrition:

Babies born in similar circumstances will thrive regardless of race or geography, Oxford-led research has found, quashing the idea that race or class determines intelligence.

In a scientific first, the team of researchers tracked the physical and intellectual development of babies around the world from the earliest days after conception to age two.

“At every single stage we’ve shown that healthy mothers have healthy babies and that healthy babies all grow at exactly the same rate,” said Professor Stephen Kennedy, the co-director of the Oxford Maternal and Perinatal Health Institute. “It doesn’t matter where you are living, it doesn’t matter what the colour of your skin is, it doesn’t matter what your race and ethnicity is, receiving decent medical care and nutrition is the key.”

The INTERGROWTH-21st Project, jointly led by Prof. Kennedy and Prof. Jose Villar at Oxford, involved nearly 60,000 mothers and babies worldwide, tracking growth in the womb, then followed more than 1,300 of the children, measuring physical growth and development.

The mothers – in locations as diverse as Brazil, India and Italy – were chosen because they were in good health and lived in similar environments. Their babies scored similarly on physical and intellectual development: in fact, researchers found more variation within racial groups than between them.

The study should help settle the ongoing debate genetics as a determination in intelligence which has been rumbling since the publication of Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve in the 1990s. The book argued that a “cognitive elite” was becoming separated from the general population.

“There’s still a substantial body of opinion out there in both the scientific and lay communities who… believe that intelligence is predominantly determined by genes and the environment that you’re living in and that your parents and grandparents were living in and their nutritional and health status are not relevant,” said Prof Kennedy. “Well, that’s clearly not the case.”

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Yes, a MAGA hat is a symbol of hate: Domise

2019/01/26 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Andray Domise:

A few years ago, a very close friend of mine was hailing a cab off Spadina street, in downtown Toronto. He, a tall and broad-shouldered Black man, was on his way to a social event with an acquaintance, a blonde white woman. They were both well-dressed for nightlife, which is a normal sight for that neighbourhood on a Friday evening. What was not normal, however, was the gaunt white man approaching them wearing Doc Martens boots, a bomber jacket, and a clean-shaved scalp. My friend registered danger just before the skinhead opened his mouth twice, first to shout “Don’t trust that nigger” at the blonde woman, and again to spit in my friend’s face.

Being a dark-skinned man whose personal experience with hate crime stretches back to his childhood (when he was introduced to that ugly word right after being shot in the head by a white teen armed with a pellet gun), my friend didn’t need to have a conversation to assess the character of the man before the assault happened. He knew right away he’d just encountered a skinhead, a self-ordained social enforcer who believes the human species can be ordered by a racial hierarchy—one which places Black people like us below the cutoff.

If the man hadn’t given the game away with the racial slur, it would be ridiculous to try and convince my friend that was, perhaps, not a hate crime. When a person wearing the visual markers of a neo-Nazi passes every other human being on a busy street without incident, but singles out a Black man and a white woman for violence, there aren’t many questions to be asked.

And yet, supposedly sensible people and media outlets are willing to debase themselves by proposing that the Make America Great Again hat, that bright red beacon of racialized aggrievement, is somehow not a hate symbol. The perennial conversation bubbled to the surface again this week after an altercation between members of the Omaha nation (led by longtime activist Nathan Phillips), and a mob of students from now-infamous Covington Catholic high school.

In a nearly two-hour video shot at the Lincoln Memorial, students wearing MAGA hats shouted at the elders, danced mockingly, and pantomimed tomahawk chops. One of them, Nick Sandmann, made his way to the front of the crowd to stand almost nose-to-nose with Phillips and smirk in his face as the elder drummed and sang the American Indian Movement (A.I.M.) song.

By now, nonwhite groups are all too familiar with hate groups and what they’re about. The similarity in their tactics is not an accident. Hate groups typically construct an extremist kinship through shared values, language, and an aesthetic that serves a twofold purpose: to visually signal themselves to allies, and to let their enemies know they intend harm. The skinhead aesthetic—black boots, weathered denim, suspenders, and shaved heads—is one of these. Proud Boys—khakis, beards, and Fred Perry polo shirts—are another.

These aren’t political organizations that happen to attract the occasional radical, or unpolished community groups that happen to have a large platform. There is no driving sociopolitical force behind these movements outside of white nationalist ideology, which is why they’re designated hate groups. And they understand this, which is why they’ve spent so much time lately cultivating an everyman aesthetic. Even David Duke famously tried to rebrand the Klan with a kinder, gentler image before leaving in frustration that the message wasn’t catching on. His movement had long passed beyond plausible deniability of their motives.

We know this, yet when people quite logically connect the people who wear MAGA hats with the white supremacist ideology of Donald Trump, this is considered painting with too broad a brush. The same Donald Trump who egged on violence against Black protesters at his rallies, stereotyped Mexicans as rapists, referred to African and African-descended nations as “shithole countries,” referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas,” and for years has rattled off a near-endless litany of ad-libbed comments that place him squarely in the white nationalist camp – that is the Donald Trump with which a person openly signals kinship when they put on that garish red hat in public.

So when a restaurant manager refuses to serve a MAGA hat-wearing patron, or Omaha elders confront a crowd of MAGA hat-wearing students to try and diffuse an escalating conflict before it gets out of control, they’re not making assumptions out of whole cloth. Neither is Alyssa Milano, who tweeted “The red MAGA hat is the new white hood.” They’re justifiably responding the way that my friend responded to that skinhead, moments before that skinhead spat in his face, and the way decent people should be expected to respond to those who publicly align themselves with hate movements. If the people who wear the hat feel unfairly maligned, that’s just plain unfortunate for them. Maybe they should examine their politics, and their own hearts.

In other words: if the hood fits, wear it.

Source: Yes, a MAGA hat is a symbol of hate

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Laïcité: des professeurs se posent en censeurs

2019/01/26 Leave a comment

Group think without allowing for discussion of other perspectives. And it should be possible to have respectful discussion of different perspectives:

À quelques semaines du dépôt probable d’un projet de loi sur les signes religieux, la laïcité reste un sujet « explosif » qui divise profondément les enseignants. La professeure Nadia El-Mabrouk, bien connue pour son opposition au port de signes religieux, a été bannie d’un colloque syndical auquel elle avait pourtant été invitée à livrer son point de vue.

Selon ce que Le Devoir a appris, la direction de l’Alliance des professeures et professeurs de Montréal a annulé l’invitation faite à Mme El-Mabrouk après l’éclatement d’une controverse chez les enseignants. La simple présence prévue de la professeure de l’Université de Montréal au colloque de l’Alliance a provoqué un « malaise » au sein de la profession, et même des « commentaires violents » dans un groupe de discussion Facebook.

L’assemblée des délégués du syndicat a voté à la majorité l’annulation de la conférence de Nadia El-Mabrouk sur la laïcité au colloque de l’Alliance, prévu les 18 et 19 février 2019. La professeure a aussi été bannie d’une table ronde sur le féminisme où elle devait prendre part avec la journaliste Pascale Navarro.

Ce colloque, qui célébrera le 100e anniversaire de l’Alliance des professeurs, doit regrouper une quarantaine de conférenciers de renom, dont Françoise David et le Dr Jean-François Chicoine. Ils aborderont une série de thèmes plutôt consensuels, comme l’école de demain, la gestion de classe, les jeux vidéo, le déficit d’attention, et ainsi de suite.

Les deux événements auxquels devait participer Nadia El-Mabrouk ont cependant mis le feu aux poudres. Cette expulsion de la conférencière sur fond de désaccord idéologique soulève la grogne au sein de l’Alliance. Des enseignants dénoncent cette « censure » digne des curés du siècle dernier. D’autres se réjouissent de ne pas être exposés à des idées contraires aux positions officielles du syndicat.

Des sujets « assez sensibles »

« Je vous écris pour vous faire part du malaise que certains profs ont ressenti en recevant le programme du colloque, hier matin, dans leur milieu. En effet, dans le résumé de votre conférence, il est question de sujets assez sensibles chez les profs ; port de signes religieux, cours d’ECR [éthique et culture religieuse], cours à la sexualité, bref, tout cela est assez explosif en ce moment. Nous n’avions évidemment pas prévu que la CAQ serait portée au pouvoir au moment où nous vous avons demandé votre intérêt à participer à ce colloque », indique l’Alliance dans un courriel à Nadia El-Mabrouk daté du 11 décembre 2018.

La présence de la professeure au colloque a été annulée le soir même par l’assemblée des délégués. Le conseil d’administration du syndicat s’est plié à la décision des délégués, même s’il avait recommandé de maintenir la conférence et la table ronde où Nadia El-Mabrouk était invitée.

« Le conseil d’administration a expliqué que cette personne-là avait été choisie même si elle n’avait pas nécessairement les mêmes opinions et orientations que notre organisation syndicale », explique Catherine Renaud, présidente de l’Alliance.

« On n’est pas toujours obligés d’entendre des gens qui pensent comme nous. Ça permet d’échanger et de faire progresser notre réflexion, ajoute-t-elle. On n’a jamais l’unanimité sur des sujets comme ça qui sont polarisants. Il y a des pour et des contre, et pour certains, c’est viscéral. Ce n’est pas différent de ce que pense la population de ces enjeux-là. »

Les syndicats d’enseignants, dont l’Alliance, s’opposent officiellement à l’interdiction du port de signes religieux que le gouvernement Legault a promis d’étendre à la profession enseignante. « On ne veut surtout pas que ces personnes-là soient congédiées non plus », précise Catherine Renaud.

« Censure » syndicale

Luc Charlebois, enseignant de francisation à l’école secondaire Louis-Riel, dans l’est de Montréal, est fâché. Il s’insurge contre ce qu’il considère comme de la « censure ». « La proposition [de retirer l’invitation à la professeure El-Mabrouk] a été amenée sur le plancher à la dernière minute, sans consultation des membres. Il y a un gros problème de démocratie syndicale », dit-il.

La professeure a été officiellement mise au ban à cause de ses positions sur l’identité des genres. Dans une chronique dans La Presse +, elle a déjà dit craindre que les cours d’éducation à la sexualité enseignent « l’idéologie queer ». Elle estime que ce phénomène devient une véritable « religion ». Elle déplore que cette seule mise en garde lui vaille d’être traitée de transphobe.

« Une accusation de transphobie, c’est une attaque à ma réputation. Ces gens n’ont sûrement pas lu mes articles », dit Nadia El-Mabrouk au Devoir.

« La vérité, c’est qu’on me censure. Si ma vie n’est pas en danger en allant au colloque, il n’y a pas de problème à ce que j’y sois. Il y a un débat sur la laïcité qui s’en vient [avec le dépôt promis du projet de loi du gouvernement Legault], et là, on est en train de faire de l’intimidation. Les gens n’osent pas s’exprimer sur les signes religieux par crainte d’être taxés de racisme », dit la professeure d’informatique.

Source: Laïcité: des professeurs se posent en censeurs

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Why are we paying people to sue the government? [court challenges program]

2019/01/25 Leave a comment

The group that managed the court challenges program reported to me when I was at Canadian Heritage 2007-8. It was essentially managed as a arms-length G&C program but, like many other Canadian Heritage programs, with considerable assistance by program officers in the preparation of submissions. If I recall correctly, submissions were approved at the official level, unlike multiculturalism which required ministerial signature.

It always was controversial and my tweeting this story provoked considerable reaction, most opposed but not all. Personally, I felt somewhat ambivalent. While I recognized the role that it could play in supporting groups with limited resources to bring these before the courts, it did seem paradoxical to be funding challenges that government lawyers would be obliged to fight.

When the Conservatives cancelled the program, they faced a backlash, in particular by official language minorities, where they had to back track and reinstate that aspect of the program.

But the issue is less the social change and partisan charges made in this article but whether or not such a program does result in a more equal capacity to bring challenges to government policies and laws:

When a Muslim woman decided to challenge the Harper government’s policy forbidding face-coverings during the oath of citizenship, a feminist non-profit group called Women’s Legal Action Fund (LEAF) sought to intervene on her behalf.

When the Harper government cut extended health-care benefits like drugs and dental to refugee claimants, LEAF argued that the change had a “discriminatory effect upon refugee women.”

When homelessness advocates claimed that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was being violated unless the government implemented policies to “eliminate homelessness and inadequate housing,” LEAF supported the fight against lawmakers.

This week, LEAF is in court fighting a group of Christian doctors who oppose a policy by their regulator requiring them to refer patients who seek abortions or euthanasia.

There’s nothing wrong with groups of citizens pooling their money to intervene in court cases. That’s healthy in a democracy. But these kinds of activist legal groups shouldn’t be getting taxpayer funding.

Yet that’s what’s happening under the Trudeau government. The new Department of Women and Gender Equality (formerly Status of Women Canada) just awarded LEAF $880,000 to develop a new five-year plan for “strategic litigation.” The project “will undertake a needs assessment with feminist groups and other key stakeholders to identify intersectional gender equality issues that can be effectively addressed through feminist strategic litigation.” It’s a big boost to their budget.

The Liberals have also restored funding to the Court Challenges Program that will hand out grants to groups who claim their human rights or minority language rights have been violated. The committee doling out the money is stacked with prominent left-wing advocates, including former LEAF director and Ottawa law professor Joanne St. Lewis, labour activist and McGill law professor Adelle Blackett, and University of Windsor francophone services proponent Emmanuelle Richez.

Harper had scrapped the program, created in 1978 by Pierre Trudeau, as one of his first acts. John Baird, then president of the Treasury Board, argued that it didn’t make sense for the government to pay people to fight its own laws in court. Indeed, it did not.

So, why are the Liberals eager to use taxpayer dollars to fund these legal challenges?

University of Waterloo political scientist Emmett Macfarlane suggested at the recent Law and Freedom conference in Toronto that Canada has a growing “culture of deference to courts,” in which politicians would rather wait for judges to make law than work to build consensus on controversial issues.

If so, then giving money to lawyers to sue the government is a backdoor way for Liberals to force the policy changes they want without the political risks. Assisted-death is a good example. It was popular with Canadians at large but many Catholics were opposed, which made it difficult for the Liberals to support legalization without risking seats in Quebec … until a successful Charter challenge allowed the Liberals to say that the courts forced their hands.

This type of funding may be particularly concerning to those with strong views on abortion. The Liberals wouldn’t dare legislate a right to abortion but they do like to claim it’s a Charter right. It’s easy to imagine someone seeking to firmly establish abortion as a Charter right through the Court Challenges Program or the newly bolstered LEAF. This type of funding should also concern those who support abortion. If the practice of funding activist legal groups becomes normalized, a future Conservative government could conceivably hand out grants to anti-abortion groups to do their bidding.

Canadians shouldn’t put up with this. If our politicians want social change, they should campaign on making those changes and introduce bills to make it happen. Funding activist groups risks becoming a backdoor way to have politicized lawyers doing their dirty work.

Source: Why are we paying people to sue the government?

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