Improve, then use, name-blind recruitment to boost Senate staff diversity: committee – The Hill Times

2018/07/05 Leave a comment

Ironically, the Senate staffer numbers are not too bad — out of 354 employees, there were 54 people who identify as visible minorities (15.3 per cent, about the same percentage who are also Canadian citizens), 20 people with disabilities (5.6 per cent), 12 Aboriginal people (3.4 per cent), and 209 women (59 per cent) as of March 31, 2016. However, the point on under-representation of Indigenous staff at more senior levels is of note:

A name-blind recruitment project could help improve Senate staff diversity, but only if done properly, according to the head of a Senate group studying employment equity in the Upper Chamber’s administration.

In a report tabled June 21 with the Senate’s Internal Economy, Budgets, and Administration Committee—a powerful group of Senators that handles the Chamber’s legal and financial matters—its Subcommittee on Diversity said the administration should “consider implementing a name-blind recruitment pilot project and evaluate whether name-blind recruitment could be expanded for hiring by the Senate administration and potentially by individual Senators’ offices.”

The recommendation was one of 10 made by the subcommittee chaired by Liberal Senator Mobina Jaffer (British Columbia) following a study of a 2016 report on diversity among the 354 members of the Senate administrative staff—authored by high-ranking officials in the Senate bureaucracy—and diversity in the Senate workforce more generally, including in Senators’ offices.

The subcommittee—which also includes Conservative Senator Elizabeth Marshall (Newfoundland and Labrador) and Independent Senator Raymonde Saint-Germain (De la Vallière, Que.)—was struck in late 2016and began its study the following spring, holding five meetings between March 1, 2017 and May 8, 2018.

But there should be major improvements to the name-blind recruitment project tried out in the federal public service before it gets used in the Senate, said Sen. Jaffer, who told The Hill Times she first wants Senate staff to study where the public service pilot project went wrong.

Run between April and October 2017, the goal of the name-blind recruitment pilot run by the Public Service Commission and Treasury Board Secretariat was to “determine whether concealing personal information…which could lead to the identification of a candidate’s origin from job applications, had an impact on the screening decisions made by reviewers when compared to the traditional assessment method where all personal information was presented.” The idea was to see if a hiring manager is biased by the name they see on the resume, or other such personal information about the potential new recruit.

The analysis, limited to those who self-declared as visible minorities, ultimately concluded that there was “no net benefit or disadvantage with the NBR assessment method for visible minorities,” though there were some problems identified with the method itself.

During a March 20 appearance by Treasury Board President Scott Brison (Kings-Hants, N.S.) at the Senate’s Question Period, Independent Senator Ratna Omidvar (Ontario) raised the methodology issues with him.

“First, the hiring managers who were recruited for this project volunteered. I would suggest that creates a certain lack of purity, if I can use that word. The second is that the hiring managers made their decisions knowing that their decisions and the comparative results would be subject to review,” she said.

Mr. Brison acknowledged there were problems with the pilot project’s method, and said he has told Treasury Board, a central agency that acts as the employer of the public service, that he wants “to actually continue to apply the name-blind hiring pilot and to potentially apply it in departments or agencies wherein there is less diversity, to apply it in certain departments and agencies and in regions, to actually continue to work to this.”

Of the results themselves, Mr. Brison said: “The good news is that the pilot came back and said that they did not find, necessarily, a bias or discriminatory hiring practices within the government of Canada.”

Sen. Jaffer said Mr. Brison’s response was disappointing.

“So to say there is no bias, he was happy to see there is no bias, that’s stretching it. There is,” she said, pointing to her years as chair of the Senate’s Human Rights Committee where she used to hear about people not wanting to voluntarily self-identify as belonging to a minority or marginalized group because they didn’t want to be seen as different.

“I am concerned that the public service has not done a good job [with the project], and I’m hoping that the Senate will show the way.”

Setting the tone and setting the example is a key tenet for Sen. Jaffer in her work to improve diversity in the Senate, after experiences in the halls of Parliament that she describes as “soul destroying.”

Sen. Jaffer is the first South Asian woman to be appointed to the Senate and, among other incidents, said she has been stopped from using entrances to Parliamentary Precinct buildings, even while wearing her Senate pin showing that she is a Senator.

And if these things can happen to her, as a Senator, she said it worries her what those lower in the pecking order experience.

“If it happens to me, what is happening to people who work here? I represent them too. If I don’t speak up, then I let them down, too, [and] they have much more to lose.”

Despite it not being in her nature to rock the boat, she said it’s important that she speak out and do things to make changes, drawing on experiences dating back to being the first South Asian woman to practise law in Canada.

“It’s not because I think that’s my role in life. I don’t go looking for it, because I don’t have time for it. It destroys you, it kills a part of me every time,” she said. “Anyone working in the Senate or in the House who feels that they have not been treated fairly, they should know they’re no longer alone. There are services, there are structures that can help and they shouldn’t suffer in silence.”

Senate needs to reflect Canada, says Sen. Jaffer

Sen. Jaffer said the Senate administration has been putting in a genuine effort to improve the diversity of its staff over the years.

Back in 2005, then-Conservative Senator Donald Oliver called the Senate out for “glaring” and  “problematic” systemic racism after a report foundthat there had been no visible minorities appointed to senior and middle management positions between 2000 and 2004 and that visible minorities made up only 6.8 per cent of the Senate’s 425 employees.

Throughout years of upheaval and change in the Senate, it’s remained an administrative priority to act on recommendations Senators have made in response to subsequent diversity reports, Sen. Jaffer said.

In 2014, the Senate’s Internal Economy Committee adopted a two-year Diversity and Accessibility Action Plan for the administration to act on, which included measures to ensure that representation of designated group members was monitored, along with the Senate’s “employment systems to identify systemic barriers and eliminate adverse impacts on the designated groups.”

According to the fifth report of the Senate’s Advisory Committee on Diversity and Accessibility, as of March 31, 2016, among the Senate’s 354 employees (which doesn’t include staff in Senators’ individual offices) there were 54 people who identify as visible minorities (15.3 per cent), 20 people with disabilities (5.6 per cent), 12 Aboriginal people (3.4 per cent), and 209 women (59 per cent).

“We had the auditors here, we had huge changeover, we had independent Senators—those all cause issues for the staff, the administration. Even then they were loyal in implementing, so I have lots of gratitude for that,” she said.

In the House of Commons, as of June 2017, 48 per cent of the House administration’s 2,234 employees were women, two per cent were Aboriginal persons, 10 per cent were visible minorities, and four per cent were people with disabilities.

The most recent report on employment equity in the core public service, covering the 2016-17 fiscal year, said that of the 181,674 employees tallied in March 2016, 54.4 per cent were women (compared to an estimated workforce availability of 52.5 per cent), 5.2 per cent were Aboriginal persons (against an estimated workforce availability of 3.4 per cent), 5.6 per cent were people with disabilities (compared to 4.4 per cent workforce availability), and 14.5 per cent were visible minorities (compared to 13 per cent).

But more work needs to be done, especially in encouraging and emphasizing the hiring of Aboriginal Canadians and veterans, the Senate subcommittee said.

It recommended that the Senate create an Aboriginal Young Interns program, expand its efforts to recruit staff from outside of the National Capital Region, and explore ways to target veterans in its recruitment efforts.

As of March 31, 2016, there were no Aboriginal people in the Senate’s manager occupational category and their representation in the professionals occupational category was below their national workforce availability.

The Senate, and all of the country’s institutions, need to reflect Canada, Sen. Jaffer said, or risk becoming irrelevant, and hitting the benchmark of workforce availability—the estimated availability in designated groups as a percentage of the entire workforce population—is not good enough.

“We’ve got to have people from different groups in management,” she said. “And until people get into management, we will not arrive at a proper goal because it’s the management that makes the decisions for hiring; it’s the management that sets the tone.”

The Senate administration has until June 13, 2019 to report back to the Senate Internal Economy Committee on steps it has taken to put in place the subcommittee’s recommendations.

via Improve, then use, name-blind recruitment to boost Senate staff diversity: committee – The Hill Times

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What to Know About Denmark’s Controversial Plan to Eradicate Immigrant “Ghettos”

2018/07/04 Leave a comment

No recognition that a significant part of integration lies with the host society, and too much emphasis on sticks rather than carrots:

Pupils in 24 Danish schools will be “guinea pigs” for a new policy aimed at integrating non-Western immigrants into Danish society. From 2019, it will become law for schools that take more than 30 percent of their students from “ghetto” areas to force their students to take language tests.

Denmark‘s government currently lists 22 areas as “ghettos,” areas with social problems where more than 50% of residents are non-Western immigrants.

According to the Copenhagen Post, Students from those 24 schools will undergo Danish tests in the coming months—making them some of the first to be affected by the Danish government’s new sweeping laws aimed at eradicating immigrant “ghettos” by 2030.

“There are a number of parents who come from the Middle East who have a totally different understanding of pedagogy, childhood and school than their Scandinavian counterparts,” said Merete Riisager, the Danish minister of education, according to the Post.

Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen had previously announced in his New Year speech that the government intended to take measures to “end the existence of ghettos” completely. That was followed by an announcement in March that the government would pursue a new set of laws to will “deal with parallel societies.”

While it’s not the first time the government has tried to abolish “ghettos,” the latest raft of laws mean the government will specifically target these areas—proactively enforcing rulesaimed at integrating non-Western, predominantly Muslim immigrants into Danish society.

Many of the country’s 500,000 non-Western immigrants—largely from Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan and Somalia—live in these so-called ghettos. There, politicians say, “Danishness” is threatened by the prevalence of other languages and cultural traditions.

To many immigrants, the plans feel like a thinly-veiled way of telling them they are not welcome in Denmark. Hardline policy on immigration has become the new political consensus; even the typically pro-immigration Social Democrat party, Denmark’s largest opposition party, has supported the government’s anti-ghetto plans in an effort to win back voters deserting the party over immigration concerns.

Here, more on exactly what the new policies involve.

Obligatory daycare

One of the most contentious aspects of the plans is the forced enrolment of children from “ghetto” areas in classes from the age of 1 that teach “Danish values” and the Danish language. Such classes would run for a minimum of 30 hours per week, according to government plans.

While Danish parents are not obliged to enrol their own children, parents in “ghettos” who fail to do so could have their child benefit payments stopped by municipalities.

Demolition and redevelopment

The new laws allow the government to instruct certain ghettos be demolished. “For certain ghetto areas,” the plans say, “the challenges of parallel society, crime and insecurity are so massive that it is both practical and economical to [demolish] the ghetto area and start over again.” The government has set aside more than $1.8 billion for the demolition or conversion of ghetto areas until 2026.

The plans assert that part of the reason for social problems in ghettos is the prevalence of “family homes,” and that private investors should be allowed to construct “new housing types” in struggling areas to address this. The plans also make it easier for landlords to evict tenants, in order to speed up the government’s regeneration strategy.

Tougher criminal punishments in certain areas

Under the new plans, crimes such as vandalism or theft will be punished twice as harshly if they occur within ghetto boundaries as opposed to outside them. For crimes that already have high penalties, the punishment will be increased by one third. And if a crime is normally punished with a fine, imprisonment can be levied if it occurs inside a ghetto. The plans also state that more police will be deployed to the streets of the areas under most pressure.

Lowering benefits within ghettos

Immigrants who settle in Denmark can claim benefits with few strings attached. But one of the new laws states that immigrants who live within ghetto boundaries should receive lower benefits—thereby making it “economically less attractive” to live in ghetto areas.

Incentives for reducing unemployment

Unemployment is a serious problem in these areas; the government says a third of non-Western immigrants have been out of work or school for four of the last five years.

To tackle this, the government has announced that municipalities which succeed in getting immigrants into employment will be rewarded financially, to the tune of nearly $8,000 per worker.

Source: What to Know About Denmark’s Controversial Plan to Eradicate Immigrant “Ghettos”

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Judge suspends Quebec face-covering ban, says it appears to violate charter

2018/06/30 Leave a comment

Not a major surprise:

The portion of Quebec’s religious neutrality law that dictates when Quebecers must leave their faces uncovered in order to receive public services has been suspended for a second time, only days before it was slated to go into effect.

Quebec Superior Court Justice Marc-André Blanchard issued the ruling Thursday, handing another victory to civil liberties groups that argue the law discriminates against Muslim women who wear niqab​s or burkas.

Blanchard said Section 10, which pertains to face coverings, appears to be “a violation” of the Canadian and Quebec charters, which “provide for freedom of conscience and religion.”

The judge concluded that “irreparable harm will be caused to Muslim women” if the relevant section of the law had gone into effect on July 1.

He ordered Section 10 suspended until a challenge to the law is heard in court.

The same portion of the law was suspended in December.

In that ruling, another Quebec Superior Court justice ordered the provincial government to produce accommodation guidelines dictating how the restrictions on face coverings would work in practice.

Those guidelines are slated to go into effect July 1, but the sections on face coverings will now no longer apply.

The civil rights groups challenging the law argued the guidelines place a greater burden on the individuals affected.

“We’re very happy with the decision,” said Catherine McKenzie, who was part of the legal team that challenged the law’s constitutionality on behalf of Warda Naili, a Quebec woman who wears a niqab.

“This law has an important impact on women who cover their faces for religious reasons. Women were going to be potentially cut off from very basic services so it was important for us to ask for the law to be stayed again.”

‘Confusion and uncertainty’

In his ruling, Blanchard also noted there is still “confusion and uncertainty” about how the process will work.

The guidelines, released in May, state that exemptions to the law, previously known as Bill 62, can only be granted to individuals on religious grounds if the demand is serious, doesn’t violate the rights of others and doesn’t impose “undue hardships.”

The Quebec government left it up to individual public bodies, however, to decide how to handle accommodation requests, and requires each body to appoint an official to make those decisions.

The office of Justice Minister Stéphanie Vallée, who has been the point person on the law, said it is analyzing the judgment and that it is still within the 30-day appeal period.

When the guidelines were announced in May, Vallée said each request needs to be taken in its own context.

“If a person wearing a burka or a niqab wants to make a request, that request will be processed,” said Vallée.

“It would be determined on a case by case [basis], following a request. Is this someone who has a sincere belief who is wearing this piece of clothing regularly, in their daily life, or if the request is being put forward with the aim of getting an advantage.”

Source: Judge suspends Quebec face-covering ban, says it appears to violate charter

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Minister Joly Launches New Funding for Community Support, Multiculturalism, and Anti-Racism Initiatives

2018/06/29 Leave a comment

Press release on the implementation of the increased funding in the 2018 Budget. Interesting that they have kept part of the Conservative approach of having an events stream, not just projects, along with a new stream supporting on-line capacity building. Also of note the use of “radicalized” rather than “visible minorities”:

Diversity is Canada’s strength and a cornerstone of Canadian identity. We are a stronger and more successful country because of our diversity. Unfortunately, too many Canadians face barriers and challenges that prevent them from fully participating in society and the economy. The Government is taking action to fund community-led projects and events that address these challenges, such as the elimination of racism and discrimination, in order to build a stronger and more inclusive society.

Today, the Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Minister responsible for Multiculturalism, announced three new funding streams that will strengthen diverse communities and support anti-racism initiatives across the country. The government is investing a total of $51.9 million over 3 years, which includes $21 million in new funding for community-led projects, events and capacity building initiatives.

The Projects component will fund community-led activities that work toward the elimination of discrimination, racism and prejudice, with a priority for those supporting Indigenous Peoples and racialized women and girls.

The Events component will fund local events that promote intercultural and interfaith understanding as well as celebrations of a community’s history and culture, such as heritage months recognized by Parliament.

The Community Capacity Building component will fund projects that will help recipients promote diversity and inclusion by strengthening the online and social media presence of organizations, establishing their communication strategies as well as enabling them to recruit and train volunteers.

Quotes

“Although Canada is a welcoming and diverse country, our government knows that we can always do better. That’s why we are proud to launch funding for initiatives that will celebrate our diversity, embrace our differences and address issues of racism and discrimination. By encouraging mutual understanding between all Canadians, programs like this will help build a society where everyone feels a true sense of belonging and can fully participate in their communities.”

—The Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Minister responsible for Multiculturalism

“This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Multiculturalism Act. To mark this occasion, we are renewing our commitment to the principles of pluralism and inclusion contained in this important statute. By supporting projects, events and initiatives that combat racism and discrimination, we are reinvesting in our communities and fostering Canada’s diversity, which is our greatest strength.”

—Arif Virani, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage (Multiculturalism)

Quick Facts

Those interested in applying for funding under these new initiatives are encouraged to contact Canadian Heritage at pch.soutienauxcommunautes-communitysupport.pch@canada.ca.

In Budget 2018, the Government of Canada announced $23 million in new funding over two years to tackle racism and discrimination, with a focus on Indigenous Peoples and racialized women and girls. This funding included $21 million to support funding resources for anti-racism and community support, and $2 million to engage Canadians on a new anti-racism approach.

The government is investing a total of $51.9 million over 3 years, which includes the $21 million in new funding for community-led projects, events and capacity building initiatives.

The Government of Canada remains committed to meaningful, evidence-based and community-involved whole-of-government initiatives in the pursuit of equality and growth for all Canadians.

Canada is continuing to combat the inequity and exclusion that prevents some Canadians from participating fully and equitably in our society.

Source: Minister Joly Launches New Funding for Community Support, Multiculturalism, and Anti-Racism Initiatives

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Netherlands Approves Partial Ban on Face Coverings – The New York Times

2018/06/29 Leave a comment

Good overview of the state of various face covering (niqab, burqa) laws:

The Dutch parliament’s Upper House has approved a partial ban on face coverings in some public areas, a spokesman said, making the Netherlands the latest European nation to pass a law that directly affects the lives of Muslim women.

The law, approved on Tuesday, puts the Netherlands, a country of about 17 million people, in company with France, Belgium, Denmark and other countries in Europe and North America that penalize Muslim women who either partly or fully cover their faces in public.

Supporters of such bans say they are necessary to protect public safety, defend Western values or encourage migrants to assimilate into their new societies.

But rights groups say they discriminate against Muslim women, some of whom view garments like niqabs, which cover a woman’s face but for a narrow slit left for the eyes, and burqas, which cover the entire face, as a religious obligation.

Here is a look at efforts in Europe and North America to restrict the wearing of face-covering garments in public.

The Netherlands

The law, which was passed by the Upper House by a 43 to 32 vote, according to the body’s press officer, Gert Riphagen, on Wednesday, prohibits wearing face coverings at schools, government offices and hospitals. The rules about facial coverings also apply to people covering their faces with ski masks and full face helmets, he said, but they do not apply to the street.

The law could take effect on Jan. 1 after the internal affairs ministry has discussions on how to enforce it, said Mr. Riphagen.

The vote was backed by eight parties, Mr. Riphagen said, some of which have embraced anti-Islam rhetoric, including the Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, the far-right politician, who first proposed the idea in 2005 and tweeted his support of the passage. Four parties, mostly progressive liberals and left-wing Democrats, voted against it, Mr. Riphagen said.

Annelies Moors, a professor of anthropology and sociology at the University of Amsterdam, studied the impact of the ban before it was passed and watched the vote proceedings on Tuesday via live stream. She said that backers of the ban had defended it by saying full-face veils hinder communications and impede government service. But she said the action disproportionately affected women in the country’s population of less than a million Muslims. Dr. Moors said she and other researchers had estimated there were fewer than 500 Muslim women who wear the full face coverings.

“It is harmful to one particular group,” Dr. Moors said. “It excludes them from being able to participate in society. They can’t even take public transportation.”

Switzerland

Switzerland’s cabinet said on Wednesday that it opposed a campaign pushing for a nationwide ban on facial coverings in public spaces, saying such decisions about public space should be made by individual cantons.

“The cantons should decide for themselves whether or not to ban facial coverings in public places,” the statement said. “The initiative would make it impossible to take into account the individual cantons’ differing sensitivities, in particular removing their ability to determine for themselves how they wish to treat tourists from Arab states who wear facial coverings.”

The cabinet was responding to an initiative called “Yes to a ban on full facial coverings,” which has collected more than 100,000 signatures to demand provisions in the law making it illegal for people to cover their faces anywhere in public, according to the statement.

The push includes some of those who led a 2009 ban on building new minarets, Reuters reported. About 5 percent of Switzerland’s 8.5 million residents are Muslims, the news agency said.

Denmark

On June 2, The Times reported that on May 28:

Parliament approved a law to ban the wearing of full-face coverings in public, mostly seen as directed at the Islamic veil. And the immigration minister recently stirred controversy by suggesting that fasting Muslims were a danger to society.
The Associated Press reported in May that Justice Minister Soeren Pape Poulsen said law enforcement officers should use “common sense” when they see possible violations before the law goes into effect on Aug. 1.

Last year, The Times examined efforts to restrict the wearing of face covering garments. Here is a version of that breakdown.

Canada

In October, the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec made it a crime to wear a face-covering garment in public, a move that critics derided as discriminatory against Muslim women.

The law was the first of its kind in North America. It barred people with face coverings from receiving public services, such as riding a bus, or from working in government jobs, such as a doctor or teacher. They also cannot receive publicly funded health care while covering their faces.

Quebec’s minister of justice, Stéphanie Vallée, said the law fostered social cohesion. Ihsaan Gardee, the executive director of the National Council of Canadian Muslims, called it “an unnecessary law with a made-up solution to an invented problem.”

Austria

Austria’s ban on wearing full-face coverings in public — including in universities, on public transportation and in courthouses — also took effect last October. Though aimed at women wearing burqas or niqabs, the law applies to everyone, with exceptions for artists and people wearing scarves in cold weather. Violators can be fined 150 euros, or about $175.

The measure was part of a legislative package passed before Austria’s national election last year, which was dominated by debate over immigration. The election saw the far-right Freedom Party enter into government under a new conservative chancellor, Sebastian Kurz. In the first six months after the law was enacted, the police reported 30 violations, only four of which involved Muslim women, Austrian news media reported.

France

In 2011, France became the first country in Western Europe to ban face-covering garments like the burqa or niqab in public, although the law did not explicitly mention Islam. The move made it illegal to cover one’s face in public places, including streets and stores, as a security measure. Those who break the law face fines of up to 150 euros.
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The law has been divisive in France, which has long been rived by tensions between its Muslim population, Europe’s largest, and those who support the state ideology of secularism.

In 2016, a string of beach towns went one step further, driven in part by a string of deadly terrorist attacks, and banned the burkini, a full-body swimsuit worn by some Muslim women.

Belgium

A law that banned face-covering garments in public also went into effect in Belgium in 2011. Violators could be sentenced to seven days in prison and face a fine of 137.50 euros.

The law was quickly challenged in court by two Muslim women who said it violated their right to privacy and freedom of religion.

But in July, the European Court of Human Rights ruled against them. It said it agreed with Belgium’s argument that the law was meant to “guarantee the conditions of ‘living together’ and the ‘protection of the rights and freedoms of others.’”

Germany

A law banning face coverings while driving took effect in Germany last year, coming on the heels of legislation prohibiting anyone in the civil service, military or working for an election from covering their faces.

Bavaria took the measure one step further, barring teachers and university professors from covering their faces.

Bulgaria

Bulgaria banned face-covering garments in government offices, schools and cultural institutions in 2016.

Lawmakers who supported the measure denied it was discriminatory. They said it was intended to help the country respond to potential security issues posed by the migrant crisis.

via Netherlands Approves Partial Ban on Face Coverings – The New York Times

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Poland’s ‘Holocaust law’ caused an outcry. Now, surprisingly, it’s being largely reversed

2018/06/29 Leave a comment

Better late than never in removing the most egregious aspects. But the fundamental denial remains:

When the Polish government pushed ahead with a controversial Holocaust speech law at the beginning of the year, the outcry was so swift and intense that even Polish lawmakers themselves appeared surprised. Besides Israel’s strong rejection of the Polish legislation, U.S. condemnations hit Warsaw policymakers especially hard.

And yet, for months, there were few signs of backtracking, even as the issue emerged as a key obstacle to Poland’s desire to bolster its security ties to the United States. But after an unexpected intervention by Poland’s prime minister on Wednesday, the law that was never enforced is now being largely walked back.

After the country’s right-wing governing party submitted a new draft, the lower house of parliament voted to remove criminal provisions Wednesday morning. This would stop courts from being able to use the law to impose prison terms of up to three years.

In caving in to international and domestic pressure, Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice party is taking a political gamble. While the changes are meant to soothe tensions with strategically important allies such as the United States and the European Union, Law and Justice also appeared eager to limit the political fallout among the party’s more extreme right-wing supporters.

At least rhetorically, the Polish government stood by its arguments that led to the law’s passage earlier this year.

“Those who say that Poland may be responsible for the crimes of World War II deserve jail terms,” Prime Minister said Wednesday. “But we operate in an international context, and we take that into account.”

The Polish government, Morawiecki emphasized, would continue its “fight for the truth” about the Holocaust regardless of possible changes to the legislation.

In this file photo taken on April 12, 2018 participants are wrapped into an Israeli flag as they arrive to the memorial site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in Oswiecim to attend the annual “March of the Living.”

The bill’s international critics had long argued that it violates freedom of expression by essentially banning accusations that some Poles were complicit in Nazi crimes committed on Polish soil, including in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where more than 1.1 million people died. Germany operated six camps in Poland where Jews and others whom the Nazis considered enemies were killed.

Polish officials emphasized early on that artistic and historical research work would not be affected by the ban, but critics cautioned that the law provided courts with too much room for interpretation and may silence debates on the issue, even though some scholars agreed that the Polish government was right in emphasizing that crimes were committed by individuals rather than the Polish state and that the term “Polish death camps” was wrong.

Poland was invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany in 1939, but unlike in other European countries, there was no collaborationist Polish government. About 6 million Polish citizens were killed during the Second World War, about half of them Jews.

Throughout years of Nazi occupation between 1939 and 1945, a number of Polish underground movements resisted the Nazis. It is that chapter of history that the Law and Justice Party wants to emphasize.

But historians have long argued that it is not the full story: Some Poles, they say, were complicit in the Nazi crimes. Historians have pointed to incidents, including a 1941 atrocity in the town of Jedwabne, in which Poles rounded up and killed their Jewish neighbors. Critics also said that the legislation was mainly intended to fuel nationalistic sentiments in the country.

In an early response to the law in February, the State Department similarly said that the phrase “Polish death camps” was “inaccurate, misleading, and hurtful.” But it also cautioned that the bill “could undermine free speech and academic discourse.”

In Israel, the reaction was even fiercer. “One cannot change history, and the Holocaust cannot be denied,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement in February. Other Israeli officials even compared the legislation to Holocaust denial.

The strong reactions eventually resulted in less outspoken Polish defences of the law itself, even as the government has stood by its reasoning to pass it.

Source: Poland’s ‘Holocaust law’ caused an outcry. Now, surprisingly, it’s being largely reversed

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Opinion | The Illuminations of Hannah Arendt – The New York Times

2018/06/28 Leave a comment

Good and reflection provoking piece by Richard Bernstein on Hannah Arendt’s relevant messages for today:

In the preface to her 1968 collection of essays, “Men in Dark Times,” Hannah Arendt wrote: “Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination.” Today, in our own dark time, Arendt’s work is being read with a new urgency, precisely because it provides such illumination.

Born in Germany in 1906, Arendt studied with prominent philosophers of her time, but fled the country in 1933, living for a time in Paris, and later, in the United States. She is best known for her major works, including “The Human Condition,” “On Violence,” “Truth and Politics,” “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and especially “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” which grew out of her coverage of the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker.

She was remarkably perceptive about some of the deepest problems, perplexities and dangerous tendencies in modern political life, many of them still with us today. When she speaks of “dark times” and warns of the “exhortations, moral and otherwise, that under the pretext of upholding old truths degrade all truth in meaningless triviality” we can hear not only a critique of the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism, but also a warning about forces pervading the politics of the United States and Europe today.

Arendt was one of the first major political thinkers to warn that the ever-increasing numbers of stateless persons and refugees would continue to be an intractable problem. One of Arendt’s early articles, the 1943 essay “We Refugees,” based on her personal experiences of statelessness, raises fundamental questions. In it, she graphically describes what it means to lose one’s home, one’s language and one’s occupation, and concludes with a more general claim about the political consequences of the new mass phenomenon — the “creation” of masses of people forced to leave their homes and their country: “Refugees driven from country to county represent the new vanguard of their peoples … The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted.”
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When Arendt wrote this she could scarcely have realized how relevant her observations would be in 2018. Almost every significant political event during the past 100 years has resulted in the multiplication of new categories of refugees, and there appears to be no end in sight. There are now millions of people in refugee camps with little hope that they will be able to return to their homes or ever find a new one.

In her 1951 work, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Arendt wrote of refugees: “The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion, but that they no longer belonged to any community whatsoever.” The loss of community has the consequence of expelling a people from humanity itself. Appeals to abstract human rights are meaningless unless there are effective institutions to guarantee these rights. The most fundamental right is the “right to have rights.”

By dwelling on the horrors of totalitarianism, and grasping that the aim of total domination is to destroy human spontaneity, individuality and plurality, Arendt probed what it means fully to live a human life in a political community and begin something new — what she called natality. She also sought to probe the threats to the dignity of politics — the type of politics in which individuals confront each other as political equals, deliberate and act together — a politics in which empowerment can grow and public freedom thrive without violence.

Her essay “Truth and Politics,” published in 1967, might have been written yesterday. Her analysis of systematic lying and the danger it presents to factual truths is urgently relevant. Because factual truths are contingent and consequently might have been otherwise, it is all too easy to destroy factual truth and substitute “alternative facts.”

In “Truth and Politics,” she wrote: “Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.” Unfortunately one of the most successful techniques for blurring the distinction between factual truth and falsehood is to claim that any so-called factual truth is just another opinion — something we hear almost every day from the Trump administration. What happened so blatantly in totalitarian regimes is being practiced today by leading politicians with great success — creating a fictional world of “alternative facts.”

According to Arendt, there is an even greater danger: “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.” The possibilities for lying become boundless and frequently meet with little resistance.

Many liberals are perplexed that when their fact-checking clearly and definitively shows that a lie is a lie, people seem unconcerned and indifferent. But Arendt understood how propaganda really works. “What convinces masses are not facts, not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably a part.”

People who feel that they have been neglected and forgotten yearn for a narrative — even an invented fictional one — that will make sense of the anxiety they are experiencing, and promises some sort of redemption. An authoritarian leader has enormous advantages by exploiting anxieties and creating a fiction that people want to believe. A fictional story that promises to solve one’s problems is much more appealing than facts and “reasonable” arguments.

Arendt was not a doomsayer. To counter her warnings about political dangers, she elaborated a detailed conception of the dignity of politics. Because of our natality, our capacity to act, we can always begin something new. The deepest theme in Arendt is the need to take responsibility for our political lives.

She warned against being seduced by nihilism, cynicism or indifference. She was bold in her description of the lying, deception, self-deception, image-making and the attempt of those in power to destroy the very distinction between truth and falsehood.

Her defense of the dignity of politics provides a critical standard for judging the situation many of us find ourselves in today, where the opportunity to participate, to act in concert and to engage in genuine debate with our peers is being diminished. We must resist the temptation to opt out of politics and to assume that nothing can be done in face of all the current ugliness, deception and corruption. Arendt’s lifelong project was to honestly confront and comprehend the darkness of our times, without losing sight of the possibility of transcendence, and illumination. It should be our project, too.

via Opinion | The Illuminations of Hannah Arendt – The New York Times

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How Police Killings Lead To Poor Mental Health In The Black Community

2018/06/26 Leave a comment

Yet another example of the effects of systemic racism on African Americans:

A recent study published in The Lancet Medical journal shows that police killings of unarmed black men leads to poor mental. NPR’s Michel Martin talks with study co-author Dr. Atheendar Venkataramani.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Now we’re going to talk about a subject that has become one of this country’s flashpoints – police shootings of unarmed black men. It happened again last Tuesday in Pittsburgh, where Antwon Rose Jr. was shot three times as he ran away from police during a traffic stop. A neighbor caught it all on camera. The video was widely shared and inspired three straight days of protests in Pittsburgh.

But the negative effects of that shooting won’t end whenever the demonstrations stop or the reporting ends – this according to a study published in The Lancet medical journal. That study looked specifically at states that had a police killing of an unarmed black man in the three months leading up to the survey. And it found that these violent encounters have a direct effect on the mental health of black Americans living in communities that have experienced police violence. The telephone survey asked respondents how many days their mental health was not good. Black respondents in states with recent police shootings were found to have significantly more of those not good days.

Dr. Atheendar Venkataramani is one of the study’s authors. He’s an assistant professor in medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. He joined me from member station WBUR in Boston, and I started our conversation by asking him why he and his fellow researchers wanted to look into the link between police killings and mental health.

ATHEENDAR VENKATARAMANI: My co-authors and I were very struck by the images of police killings of unarmed black Americans, and we had seen in some small, local studies, as well as through our social networks and on social media, the kinds of things that black Americans who weren’t directly part of the event but had heard about it or read about it or seen it through the videos that were released – the kinds of things they were saying about how they felt – what it made them feel and what their mental state was after viewing or hearing about such an event. And for us, it made us wonder do events like this cross the line from just being upsetting to being something that make us sick? And that’s what really motivated our study.

MARTIN: The facts are that black Americans, as you point out in the study, are nearly three times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police. They are five times more likely than are white Americans to be killed unarmed. I just think that’s important to point out because it’s important to note that white Americans are also killed by the police, but it is far more likely that an African-American male particularly will be unarmed when that occurs.

So part of the reason that I raised that is to ask whether you saw any similar effects of other groups? Like, did, for example, killings of white Americans stimulate a similar effect? Do we have any comparison that we can draw upon?

VENKATARAMANI: Absolutely. So we looked at the police killings of armed black Americans and the police killings of unarmed white Americans, which don’t necessarily have that same kind of salience to people as far as their relationship to structural racism. And when we looked at the impacts of those kinds of events, we didn’t find any impact on mental health nor did we find any impact on mental health of white Americans who were exposed to police killings of unarmed black Americans.

MARTIN: And you know, the survey focused on people and communities where these shootings occurred. But we live in a time when many of these deaths were caught on camera. They’ve been widely shared. Do you feel comfortable extrapolating that this effect may be broader than the people who actually lived in the places where these incidents occurred?

VENKATARAMANI: Yeah, I think we do. And so for example, Eric Garner’s killing was seen by everybody in the country. And for the purposes of our statistical design, we considered people in New York State exposed. So one of the things we think is striking is that we find these large population-level effects even when we know that we are likely to be underestimating the true burden.

MARTIN: The summary says that, you know, the interpretation is that, you know, police killings of unarmed black Americans have adverse effects on mental health among black American adults and the general population. And it suggests that programs should be implemented to decrease the frequency of police killings and to mitigate adverse mental health effects.

What would that look like? I mean, what do you hope people will do as a result of this study which validates what, frankly, has been sort of widely discussed informally among many people for some time?

VENKATARAMANI: We don’t believe we’re telling people in the black American communities something that they don’t know. I think what this study does is provides a public health rationale to further try to understand why police killings occur of unarmed black Americans. And it further motivates policies and programs that would try to reduce those events.

And from the clinical side, as a physician, these events really kind of show you that when something happens in a community that there is a trauma that is a pathology, meaning it’s a true illness, and that health systems – community health centers, public health organizations – can try to rally around people to make sure that people are OK and that we’re treating the burden of disease that’s there.

So I think that’s why it’s useful to put numbers around something that many people have noted anecdotally because it sharpens the case for action, and it also lets us know the scope of the problem and potentially how we would need to address it.

MARTIN: That’s Dr. Atheendar Venkataramani. He’s one of the authors of a study published in The Lancet which looked at the mental health effects of police shootings on black Americans.

Thanks so much for speaking with us.

VENKATARAMANI: Thank you.

MARTIN: I also want to mention that the study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The latter is also a supporter of NPR.

Source: How Police Killings Lead To Poor Mental Health In The Black Community

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ICYMI: Multicultural children face discrimination at South Korean schools

2018/06/25 Leave a comment

Not surprising but the impact on educational outcomes worrisome:

Children with multicultural backgrounds face discrimination at school, reflecting the prejudices against biracial people in the wider Korean society. To make Korea accommodating to them requires a change in Koreans’ attitudes, according to experts.

Kim Hye-young, 32, a Korean language teacher at Guro Middle School, says multicultural children at her school often face discrimination from classmates.

“Children from multicultural backgrounds are treated as second-class citizens by their peers,” Kim told The Korea Times on Tuesday. “Some of the students call their classmates with a Chinese parent jjang kkae.” Jjang kkae is a demeaning term Koreans use to refer to Chinese people.

Park Sung-choon, an ethics education professor at Seoul National University, said he made similar observations while interviewing multicultural children.

“One child with a Mongolian parent that I interviewed said it happened everywhere, whether it was in the classroom, the sports field, or a playground,” Park said at a multicultural family forum hosted by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, Tuesday. “They made fun of him and ignored him for his family background and accent.”

Due to such circumstances, the school dropout rate is four times higher for children with multicultural backgrounds than their peers, according to 2014 data from the Ministry of Education.

Park says this discrimination of children with mixed heritage is fuelled by a faulty understanding of multiculturalism in Korea.

“Koreans approach minority cultures here as something on the receiving end, as something that requires paternalistic aid,” Park said. “There needs to be more multiculturalism education programmes that teach people to regard countries like Vietnam as equal partners with just as much development potential as Korea.”

Changing demographics

As more children of international marriages enter the public education system, schools are becoming the first testing ground for a multicultural Korean society.

Guro Middle School is feeling this change most acutely. It is in Guro-gu, western Seoul, which has a large Chinese population. About 20 per cent of its students have a Korean-Chinese parent.

“The number has increased twofold since I first started teaching here four years ago,” Kim said.

There are about 1 million multicultural children enrolled in the public education system. About 90 per cent are children from marriages between a Korean and a foreigner.

The number of multicultural children increased most steeply in elementary schools, with one in 50 students now having multicultural backgrounds.

Experts forecast that about 20,000 multicultural children will enter elementary school every year.

Kim says these multicultural children have big potential due to their bilingual abilities.

“These children have the potential to become global leaders and build bridges between Korea and other nations on the international stage,” Kim said. “But there needs to be more institutional support for multicultural children at school, especially those who cannot speak Korean well because they lived abroad first.”

Source: Multicultural children face discrimination at South Korean schools

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ICYMI – The Saudi-Moroccan spat: Competing for the mantle of moderate Islam

2018/06/25 Leave a comment

Interesting:

Lurking in the background of a Saudi-Moroccan spat over World Cup hosting rights and the Gulf crisis is a more fundamental competition for the mantle of spearheading promotion of a moderate interpretation of Islam.

It’s a competition in which history and long-standing religious diplomacy gives Morocco a leg up compared to Saudi Arabia, long a citadel of Sunni Muslim intolerance and ultra-conservatism.

Saudi Arabia is the new, baggage-laden kid on the block with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman asserting that he is returning the kingdom to a top-down, undefined form of moderate Islam.

To be sure, Prince Mohammed has dominated headlines in the last year with long-overdue social reforms such as lifting the ban on women’s driving and loosening restrictions on cultural expression and entertainment.

The crown prince has further bolstered his projection of a kingdom that is putting ultra-conservative social and religious strictures behind it by relinquishing control of Brussels’ Saudi-managed Great Mosque and reports that he is severely cutting back on decades-long, global Saudi financial support for Sunni Muslim ultra-conservative educational, cultural and religious institutions.

Yet, Prince Mohammed has also signalled the limits of his definition of moderate Islam. His recurrent rollbacks have often been in response to ultra-conservative protests not just from the ranks of the kingdom’s religious establishment but also segments of the youth that constitute the mainstay of his popularity.

Just this week, Prince Mohammed sacked Ahmad al-Khatib, the head of entertainment authority he had established. The government gave no reason for Mr. Al-Khatib’s dismissal, but it followed online protests against a controversial Russian circus performance in Riyadh, which included women wearing “indecent clothes.”

The protests were prompted by a video on social media that featured a female performer in a tight pink costume.

In a similar vein, the Saudi sports authority closed a female fitness centre in Riyadh in April over a contentious promotional video that appeared to show a woman working out in leggings and a tank-top. A spokesman for the royal court, Saud al-Qahtani, said the closure was in line with the kingdom’s pursuit of “moderation without moral breakdown.”

Saudi sports czar Turki bin Abdel Muhsin Al-Asheikh said “the gym had its licence suspended over a deceitful video that circulated on social media promoting the gym disgracefully and breaching the kingdom’s code of conduct.”

Mr. Al-Sheikh’s sports authority moreover apologized recently for airing a promotional video of a World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc., event that showed scantily clad female wrestlers drawing euphoric cheers from men and women alike.

To be sure, the United States, which repeatedly saw ultra-conservative Islam as a useful tool during the Cold War, was long supportive of Saudi propagation of Islamic puritanism that also sought to counter the post-1979 revolutionary Iranian zeal.

Nonetheless, Saudi Arabia’s more recent wrestle with what it defines as moderate and effort to rebrand itself contrasts starkly with long-standing perceptions of Morocco as an icon of more liberal interpretations of the faith.

While Saudi Islamic scholars have yet to convince the international community that they have had a genuine change of heart, Morocco has emerged as a focal point for the training of European and African imams in cooperation with national governments.

Established three years ago, Morocco’s Mohammed VI Institute for Imam Training has so far graduated 447 imams; 212 Malians, 37 Tunisians, 100 Guineans, 75 Ivorians, and 23 Frenchmen.

The institute has signed training agreements with Belgium, Russia and Libya and is negotiating understandings with Senegal.

Critics worry that Morocco’s promotion of its specific version of Islam, which fundamentally differs from the one that was long prevalent in Saudi Arabia, still risks Morocco curbing rather than promoting religious diversity.

Albeit on a smaller scale than the Saudi campaign, Morocco has in recent years launched a mosque building program in West Africa as part of its soft power policy and effort to broaden its focus that was long centred on Europe rather than its own continent.

On visits to Africa, King Mohammed VI makes a point of attending Friday prayers and distributing thousands of copies of the Qur’an.

In doing so Morocco benefits from the fact that its religious ties to West Africa date back to the 11th century when the Berber Almoravid dynast converted the region to Islam. King Mohammed, who prides himself on being a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, retains legitimacy as the region’s ‘Commander of the Faithful.’

West African Sufis continue to make annual pilgrimages to a religious complex in Fez that houses the grave of Sidi Ahmed Tijani, the 18thcentury founder of a Sufi order.

All of this is not to say that Morocco does not have an extremism problem of its own. Militants attacked multiple targets in Casablanca in 2003, killing 45 people. Another 17 died eight years later in an attack in Marrakech. Militants of Moroccan descent were prominent in a spate of incidents in Europe in recent years.

Nonetheless, protests in 2011 at the time of the popular Arab revolts and more recently have been persistent but largely non-violent.

Critics caution however that Morocco is experiencing accelerated conservatism as a result of social and economic grievances as well as an education system that has yet to wholeheartedly embrace more liberal values.

“Extremism is gaining ground,” warned Mohamed Elboukili, an academic and human rights activist, pointing to an increasing number of young women who opt to cover their heads.

“You can say to me this scarf doesn’t mean anything. Yes, it doesn’t mean anything, but it’s isolating the girl from the boy. Now she’s wearing the scarf, but later on she’s not going to shake hands with the boy . . . Later on she’s not going to study in the same class with boys. Those are the mechanisms of an Islamist state, that’s how it works,” Mr. Elboukili said.

Mr. Elboukili’s observations notwithstanding, it is Morocco rather than Saudi Arabia that many look to for the promotion of forms of Islam that embrace tolerance and pluralism. Viewed from Riyadh, Morocco to boot has insisted on pursuing an independent course instead of bowing to Saudi dictates.

Morocco refused to support Saudi Arabia in its debilitating, one-year-old economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar but recently broke off relations with Iran, accusing the Islamic republic of supporting Frente Polisario insurgents in the Western Sahara.

Moroccan rejection of Saudi tutelage poses a potential problem for a man like Prince Mohammed, whose country is the custodian of Islam’s two holiest cities and who has been ruthless in attempting to impose his will on the Middle East and North Africa and position the kingdom as the region’s undisputed leader.

Yet, Saudi Arabia’s ability to compete for the mantle of moderate Islam is likely to be determined in the kingdom itself rather than on a regional stage. And that will take far more change than Prince Mohammed has been willing to entertain until now.

Source: The Saudi-Moroccan spat: Competing for the mantle of moderate Islam

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