‘A very critical clash of cultures’: Plea deal over honour killing threats saves Syrian couple from deportation

2018/05/18 1 Comment

Interesting case and judgement and some of the integration challenges. On balance, reasonable deal.

Hopefully, lesson learned, both for the family concerned and more broadly:

A Syrian refugee couple who threatened their adult daughter with an honour killing for dating a Canadian man have made a plea deal with New Brunswick prosecutors that will save them from possible deportation back to their war-ravaged homeland.

Ahmad Ayoub, 52, and his wife Faten, 48, were freed this week after 72 days in jail, after pleading guilty to uttering threats as a summary conviction offence, and being sentenced to time served.

If they had been convicted of the more serious indictable offence of uttering threats, for which a trial was scheduled in the summer, they would have faced a sentence in the range of six months to a year, up to a maximum of two years.

More importantly, they would have faced the possibility of also being sent back to Syria, from which they escaped through Jordan, eventually settling in Fredericton in 2016, sponsored by the federal government.

“That’s the main thing that we gained,” said David Lutz, Ahmad’s lawyer. “Nobody who is a refugee wants to be convicted of any indictable offence, because it’s going to bring them under the purview of deportation.”

Lutz called the case a “very critical clash of cultures” that has sent a clear message to the Syrian community in Canada that even empty threats are taken seriously by the police and courts.

“Their words were taken literally instead of figuratively,” Lutz said. “In my interaction with the entire family, I came to the conclusion that this is a manner of speech that they never really intend to carry any of this out, but they do it so to say, ‘You should mind me, because this is what I think’.”

The Ayoubs have one adult child who remains in Jordan, and five others, one as young as 10, in Fredericton. Both have post-secondary education. Ahmad has worked in business, and Faten as a cook, but neither are employed yet in Canada.

No one answered the phone at their home on Wednesday. George Kalinowski, Faten Ayoub’s lawyer, declined to comment.

The threats were made against their daughter Bayan, 25. They were spoken in Arabic, once face to face, otherwise on the phone, and they only came to light when Bayan told her Canadian boyfriend, who encouraged her to go to police. She soon recanted, however, and was described in court by prosecutor Claude Haché as a reluctant participant in the prosecution.

“Throughout the time from which her parents were arrested and detained, (Bayan) was recanting and saying ‘All this is my fault.’ But of course, just like in domestic assaults, the police — and rightly so — don’t take the recanting seriously,” Lutz said.

Or, if they take it seriously, they see it as a symptom of the same problem, he added.

Bayan went to police in February. This prompted the threat by her mother, who urged her to tell police she lied, otherwise she would be killed. This threat was made on a phone call that Bayan recorded.

According to reporting by Don MacPherson of The Fredericton Daily Gleaner, who was in court for the sentencing, the first threat was made in April 2016, soon after the family arrived in Canada. Ahmad was angry that his daughter won an iPad in a contest, and threatened to poison her food. He also said he wanted to limit her contact with local men.

The second threat came last summer, when Bayan’s parents learned she was communicating with a Canadian man on social media, and her father said that “for his own dignity, it would be better to slaughter her,” the prosecutor said.

A third threat from Ahmad was prompted by her use of a smartphone, and his concern she was communicating with people she met at a work placement at a food bank.

Lutz said the more serious indictable offence of uttering threats is generally used in cases where there is evidence the offender had the ability or means to do it. In this case, he said their words were hyperbolic, exaggerated and non-literal.

He said the Ayoubs’ threats were “careless, bordering on reckless, and they have learned from this experience that his kind of language may be acceptable in Syria and Afghanistan, but now they know, better than most, that it’s not acceptable in Canada. And the entire Syrian community in New Brunswick knows it too.”

MacPherson’s report noted that the parents embraced their daughter outside court, and Ahmad shook her boyfriend’s hand. They will be on probation for a year.

Source: ‘A very critical clash of cultures’: Plea deal over honour killing threats saves Syrian couple from deportation

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Data disproves the idea that Central American immigrants in the US don’t assimilate

2018/05/17 Leave a comment

Some good and revealing data:

The Trump administration has cited a variety of reasons to justify its drive to stop illegal immigration. The latest, as explained by White House chief of staff John Kelly in an interview last week: The immigrants who are coming to the US these days are too uneducated and poor to successfully integrate into society.

Kelly, who was speaking to NPR, was referring to Central American immigrants, whose numbers have swelled in recent years as conditions in their home countries have deteriorated. “They’re overwhelmingly rural people. In the countries they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English; obviously that’s a big thing. … They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills,” he said.

Many have pointed out that Kelly could have been speaking about his own ancestors, who came to the US from Ireland and Italy. Like the recent Central American arrivals, members of previous immigrant waves to the US were poor and had low levels of education. Many did not speak English. Kelly is a testament to their eventual assimilation.

Data compiled by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, show that Central Americans, too, have integrated into the US. And they are doing so despite facing harsher immigration restrictions than their predecessors.

“Integration of Central American immigrants is occurring despite the best efforts of the United States government to prevent it,” Cato policy analyst David Bier wrote in a report outlining the data.

“They don’t speak English”

It’s true that most Central American immigrants don’t speak English when they arrive to the US, but they tend to learn over time. The share of immigrants who don’t speak English well shrinks with each passing year in the US, as the chart below shows.

https://www.theatlas.com/embed/HklDgcuAM

“They don’t have skills”

For people with no skills, Central American immigrants get jobs relatively quickly. In 2016, about half of those who had been in the US for less than a year were working. Those who had been in the US for a year or more were working at nearly the same rate or higher than the country’s overall adult population, according to the Cato report.

https://www.theatlas.com/embed/BJgBLcO0z

“Fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations”

About half of the Central American immigrants in the US in 2016 did not have a high school diploma, supporting Kelly’s claim. But the US-born descendants of Central American immigrants had similar years of schooling as other Americans.

https://www.theatlas.com/embed/Bk5LOo_RG

And despite their low education levels, many are able to go up the socioeconomic ladder over time. The poverty rate for Central Americans declines the longer they are in the US.

https://www.theatlas.com/embed/HJkcV9_AG

“They don’t integrate well”

It’s hard to measure “Americanness,” but voluntarily enlisting in the military arguably is a telling sign of a person’s commitment to a country. The Cato report shows that Americans of Central American descent are more than twice as likely to be active duty members than other US-born people.

https://www.theatlas.com/embed/SJqDTYu0z

It’s a commitment that should resonate with Kelly, a retired four-star general.

Source: Data disproves the idea that Central American immigrants in the US don’t assimilate

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Against #ResistanceGenealogy: Digging up information about the immigrant ancestors of Trumpsters is doing more harm than good.

2018/05/17 Leave a comment

Thoughtful critique, both substantively and in terms of effectiveness.

While I too share her initial like of Mendelsohn’s work, in the end, is it meaningful to compare previous immigration periods and patterns when the workforce was less dependent on skilled labour than today’s labour market needs? And does it resonate with those who are on the fence on immigration-related issues?:

I want to love #ResistanceGenealogy, the hashtag and project started by Jennifer Mendelsohn. The journalist and researcher digs up genealogical information on prominent Trumpsters, especially those who are architects and cheerleaders of the administration’s restrictive stance on immigration. Tomi Lahren’s great-great-grandfather forged citizenship papers; Mike Pence’s family benefited from “chain migration”; James Woods’ ancestors fled famine and moved to Britain as refugees. Plenty of liberals applaud Mendelsohn’s finds; others have joined in the project and contributed to the hashtag with their own family stories. She’s gotten coverage everywhere from Politico to Wonkette to CNN.

But #ResistanceGenealogy is fundamentally flawed. Its popularity showcases the left’s inability to recognize how deeply racism is embedded in the Trump administration’s approach to immigration, and to see clearly what the effects of that racism are.

Starting in the 1830s and 1840s, some American abolitionists advocated for a tactic called moral suasion, arguing that surely white Americans who truly knew about the full horrors of slavery would change their minds and fight for its abolition. They tried to promote fellow feeling, telling stories of separation and sexual abuse to play upon Victorian idealization of family togetherness and womanly virtue. This worked for some listeners, but not for others, whose racism and complicity in the system deadened any natural empathy they might have had. Ending slavery took a war.

It feels like we’re making a similar mistake here. Mendelsohn has tweeted that her project is about compassion, and strives for the awakening of empathy. But no extremely moving information about John Kelly’s or Mike Pence’s families from decades ago will make immigration hawks rethink the way they perceive a story like the one about ICE taking an 18-month-old child from his Honduran mother—telling her to strap him into a car seat, and then driving away without allowing her to say goodbye. From an immigration hawk’s point of view, that’s not anyone like their mother, not anyone like their family.

The chasm between the life and experiences of a white American, even one who’s descended from desperate immigrants of decades past, and the life of this Honduran mother is the entire point of racist anti-immigration thought. Diminishment of the human qualities of entering immigrants (“unskilled” and “unmodern” immigrants coming from “shithole” countries) reinforces the distance between the two. People who support the Trump administration’s immigration policies want fewer Honduran mothers and their 18-month-olds to enter the country. If you start from this position, nothing you hear about illiterate Germans coming to the United States in the 19th century will change your mind.

We need to get past the idea that immigration hawks simply don’t know the immigration history of this country.

Besides giving people who rally against immigration too much benefit of the doubt, this comparative approach is ahistorical (purposefully so, since it’s making an argument for the connection between human experiences across time). This, like our reliance on the invocation of the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty, flattens everything out in a way that does nothing to enhance a pro-immigration argument for 2018.

We need to get past the idea that immigration hawks simply don’t know the immigration history of this country. In an influential 1992 article in the National Review, anti-immigration hard-liner and white (excuse me, “civic”) nationalist Peter Brimelow wrote that the restrictive decades between the enactment of restrictive quotas in the 1920s and the 1965 Immigration Act—a time he called “the Great Immigration Lull”—gave the country time to absorb and assimilate the immigrants who came in the early 20th century. (In one surreal passage, he writes, “the American nation was just swallowing, and then digesting … an unusually large and spicy immigrant meal.”)

That 1920s decision to install quotas based on racist pseudoscience, which historians on the left view as a damning episode in American immigration history, was, to Brimelow, a positive story: “[O]nce convinced that their nationhood was threatened by continued massive immigration, Americans changed the public policies that made it possible.” (Jeff Sessions is a fan too.) Brimelow’s 1995 book Alien Nation got positive coverage from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Atlantic Monthly, and so on. Brimelow, and those who think like him, know very well what the history of American immigration was like. They just draw different lessons from it than liberals do.

What about the idea that Americans who benefited from immigration in the past should not “pull up the ladder” after themselves—that they should, knowing their family’s history of struggle and success, give others the chance their ancestors were accorded? Liberals, animated by a sense of fairness, can’t believe that somebody descended from Italian peasants can live with the idea of excluding Syrian refugees today. But what looks like the most galling hypocrisy to liberals seems, to immigration hawks, like self-protective common sense. In one passage, Brimelow mocked the core of the very argument animating #ResistanceGenealogy: “How can X be against immigration when the nativists wanted to keep his own great-grandfather out?” This concept is illogical, Brimelow writes: “This, of course, is like arguing that a passenger already on board the lifeboat should refrain from pointing out that taking on more will cause it to capsize.”

It’s not possible to overcome today’s racist thought on immigration with reminders about past discrimination. The Irish and Italians and Germans weren’t “white” back then, as resistance genealogists like to remind people like John Kelly, but they sure are white now. Since it’s a stated belief of many on the right that a history of discrimination, even a horrific one, shouldn’t matter to a person living in 2018 (see: “Why are black people always talking about slavery?”), it makes little sense to expect that this information about past oppression would move any immigration hawk to defend today’s huddled masses.

One mistake that the left tends to make in engaging in historical fights is to believe the right is simply ignorant and that exposure to more history will change their minds. Liberals do this again and again: writing pieces about Andrew Jackson’s horrific treatment of the Cherokees, issuing correctives about the cause of the Civil War (slavery—it was slavery), telling Kanye to read a book. We seem to hope, all evidence to the contrary, that the real information will get through—and once it gets through, it’ll meet minds that share our moral values and will change accordingly. #ResistanceGenealogy makes all of these assumptions. It gravely underestimates the gulf between these two belief systems. I wish it would work. It won’t.

via Against #ResistanceGenealogy: Digging up information about the immigrant ancestors of Trumpsters is doing more harm than good.

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How violent U.S. rally outed key players in Montreal’s alt-right

2018/05/15 Leave a comment

Good long read (abridged here):

They didn’t want to show up to the white nationalist rally empty-handed.

The Unite the Right march in Virginia would be the largest white supremacist gathering in a generation and the small, militant crew of Quebecers were eager to make an impression.

A few days before the long drive south, one of their leaders logged onto an American alt-right forum with a request.

“We are about 20 guys driving through the border from Canada and we obviously will not be able to bring protective gear like shields and so on through the border agents,” wrote Date, a prominent Montreal white nationalist. “If you’ve got extra ones, some of our members are interested in buying them from you over there.”

The following night, on Aug. 10, 2017, one of the group members withdrew $850 in Bitcoin to help cover expenses. Activists in the alt-right use the online currency because it’s unregulated and difficult to trace.

They left for Charlottesville a few hours later.

On Aug. 11, the Montrealers would participate in a torch march through Charlottesville, blending into a crowd that chanted “Blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.”

The next day, they faced off with a crowd of anti-fascists in the southern college town. As the rally wound down, a white supremacist drove his car into a mass of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Charlottesville resident Heather Heyer.

Within an hour of the attack, users of an encrypted white supremacist chat room in Montreal began posting memes congratulating the attacker and describing his vehicle as a “car of peace.”

Last month, the Montreal Gazette obtained roughly 12,000 closed messages from the closed “Montreal Storm” server on Discord, an encrypted chat service. Those documents, combined with information from sources close to the group, indicate that the initial thrill of Charlottesville quickly gave way to a culture of paranoia within the group.

Those days in Charlottesville were meant to be a sort of coming-out party for the alt-right. The torch march, the shields, the clubs, the guns, the beatings — these were meant to show the world that the white nationalist movement was a force to be reckoned with. Charlottesville was going to be their Kristallnacht.

It didn’t go as planned.

In the backlash that followed Heyer’s death, the alt-right began to implode. Waves of men who participated had their identities revealed, lost their jobs and friends, and dropped out of the movement.

….

The evolution of Generation Identity Canada’s branding is reflective of a shift in strategy for various alt-right groups. As the term “alt-right” became toxic after the violence in Charlottesville, the groups which organized under its umbrella attempted to rebrand.

The switch from Generation Identity to ID Canada reflects the push, exemplified by Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer, for groups to adopt “patriotic” positions as cover for their white supremacist ideology.

ID Canada, whose membership seems to be mostly drawn from the Montreal Storm crew, appears to be an attempt to bring such a strategy to life. The group refers to itself as “identitarian,” drawing on the European far-right theory. They frame their actions specifically in the language of patriotism, and reverence for (white) Canadian history.

On its frequently asked questions page, ID Canada even denies harbouring racist views. “We do not see ourselves as superior to others on the simple basis of our skin colour. … We are an identitarian movement that seeks to preserve our culture, customs, traditions and values etc.”

One of the lasting effects of the violence in Charlottesville was its blow to the far-right’s ability to raise money and spread propaganda online. In late August 2017, PayPal began cracking down on groups that use its site to fund hate groups. The Daily Stormer, one of the largest white nationalist news sites on the internet, was kicked off American, Chinese and Russian servers before being pushed onto the dark web, a network of websites that are only accessible through a special internet browser.

“Charlottesville marked the beginning of a sharp downturn for the [far-right],” Balgord said. “Their ability to move money around was severely constrained. Their ability to operate on social media and use chat platforms was severely constrained.”

Shutting down the alt-right’s main platforms of communication hampered its ability to recruit, spread propaganda and radicalize new people, Balgord said.

“By exposing them, we contain them. By driving them off these platforms, we contain them. They never fully go away but we minimize the damage they do.”

Source: How violent U.S. rally outed key players in Montreal’s alt-right

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Mukhbir Singh: Sikhs have earned their place on the political stage

2018/05/15 Leave a comment

In terms of numbers of MPs in relation to population, 16 Sikh Canadian MPs form 4.7 percent of Canada’s parliament, compared to 1.5 percent of Canada’s population, reflecting in part their relative greater concentration in ridings compared to other groups such as Black Canadians (5 MPs compared to 2.9 percent of the population) as well as their activism:

A few short months ago, as Sikhs in Canada grappled with media coverage rife with unfounded claims of “Sikh extremism” in Canada, some commentators posed a question that would have caused a massive uproar had “Sikh” been replaced with “women”, “Indigenous” or “black” — by asking the question “are Sikh over-represented in Canadian politics”?

All Canadians — Sikhs, women, Indigenous, black, LGBTQ — have the right, responsibility and privilege to engage politically and serve their communities without having this right questioned on the basis of their race, religion and gender.

For 50 years, after their arrival on Canadian soil, Sikhs did not have the right to vote and no representation in government, making even the most basic and mundane of tasks — owning or even renting a house, going out in public without verbal attacks or physical violence, a challenge. There was rarely a politician to help or speak out on behalf of the community.

In the early 1900s, senior government officials came up with a scheme to expel the entirety of Canada’s Sikh population to the British Honduras (now Belize).

Incoming migrants from Asia, including Sikhs who had the same status as Canadians as subjects of the British empire, were required to possess $200 — an inconceivable amount — while European migrants were only required to have $20 in their possession.

In 1914, a boat of Sikhs entered British Columbia via the “continuous passage” journey which required a direct journey to Canada from India and were still refused entry. After months of living on the boat, the 376 Sikhs were forced to return to India, resulting in the deaths of many of these Sikh men.

While this was happening, Sikhs from the same families and villages as the men on the Komagata Maru were shedding blood in key battles in the First World War, including the battles of second Ypres, Somme, Vimy, Passchendaele, Cambrai and beyond. Sikh soldiers were reinforcing a weakened Canadian division on Flanders Fields as the first gas attack was illegally used by German forces. Sikhs and Canadians defended the line, shoulder to shoulder as brothers in arms, while the Canadian government and public was instituting racist policies.

Sikhs joined the Canadian British forces even as they faced racist policies and while they protested discriminatory treatment through the efforts of Teja Singh and Hari Singh who presented their case on the restrictions of South Asian migration in England. Average South Asian community members took to the streets in order to publicly protest their conditions and tried to create change through petitions to the Canadian, British and Indian governments.

Activism is an important tool to achieve affect change and work for positive outcomes. In democratic countries, we have the privilege to carry that activism forward by being involved in the process of governing and challenging and changing the unfairness and inequality in our political systems.

Sikhs believe strongly in the principles of service and creating positive change for everyone in society. An important way to do that is through politics.

In 1993, the first Sikh was elected to the House of Commons. In 2015, a record 16 members of the Sikh community became MPs and four were named to Cabinet. In 2017, Jagmeet Singh became the first visible minority and Sikh to be elected as the leader of a major political party.

Such progress and such a Canadian success story should make Canadians proud, but there has been a backlash. A short reading of the comment sections on articles relating to Sikh politicians or the replies on Twitter shows that many Canadians are deeply resentful about what they see as a “takeover” of their country. Some commentators have published opinion pieces that include warnings about an ethnic takeover of Canada, claims that Sikhs in Canada are “over-represented” in politics and the suggestion that Sikhs, including NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, carry “blood hatreds” that they have brought with them to Canada. Among the mainstream media, there has been nary a voice condemning these examples of race-baiting.

The charge that Sikhs are over-represented has been particularly jarring. Such allegations feed the type of tribalism and communalism that we see consuming other places around the world. What should be the right amount of representation? Is white over-representation the only acceptable form of over-representation in politics? Such allegations are a clear attempt to marginalize Canada’s Sikh community and seeks to diminish their role in defending, building and contributing to this country.

Source: Mukhbir Singh: Sikhs have earned their place on the political stage

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The core Isis manual that twisted Islam to legitimise barbarity | The Guardian

2018/05/14 Leave a comment

Horrific:

The jihadist manual behind the brutality that underpinned Islamic State has been revealed for the first time in new analysis of a 579-page text, written by the Isis ideologue Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir.

The text attempts to legitimise the barbarous acts of the jihadist group, including the mutilation of corpses, the trade in human organs, beheading, the killing of children along with “scorched earth operations” and global terrorist attacks.

After two years examining and transcribing the document, experts at the counter-extremist group Quilliam have completed a meticulous appraisal of the extremists’ core textbook along with a robust theological rebuttal of its “twisted” interpretation of Islamic teachings. Used by Isis and its supporters to validate a large range of horrific acts, the “bible for jihadists” provided the theoretical and legal framework for the violent terrorist group.

“There is a startling lack of study and concern regarding this abhorrent and dangerous text in almost all western and Arab scholarship,” says the report. “We hope to expose and deconstruct this unprepossessing yet deeply insidious and pernicious text.”

Known as the Fiqh al-Dima (or The Jurisprudence of Blood), the book is the key Salafi-jihadist text. It attempts to justify the use of weapons of mass destruction, perpetrating genocide, the murder of non-combatants, the taking of sex slaves and hostages.

Researchers for Quilliam managed to acquire a copy of the manual online in 2015, after researchers spotted the Fiqh al-Dima being used to teach new recruits to Isis’s caliphate in Syria. Back then, Islamic State’s self-styled caliphate encompassed vast swaths of Syria and Iraq and a population of up to eight million. Since then the group has lost 98% of territory in the two countries and is now largely confined to a strip of desert straddling the Iraqi-Syrian border.

The manual offers the group guidance on “military retreat” with a chapter devoted to “surrender vs fighting to the death” that says jihadists should choose death instead of handing themselves over to the enemy.

However, Sheikh Salah al-Ansari, a senior Quilliam researcher who translated the manual from Arabic and wrote the rebuttal, said no religious requirement existed to “fight to the death” and that the Islamic tradition of warfare encouraged the humane treatment of prisoners of war. “Our work comprehensively debunks and rejects Isis’s proto-Islamic arguments, demonstrating their ignorance and disregard for traditional Islamic scholarship as well as for the basic humane and Islamic values of mercy and compassion,” said Ansari.

The titles of the text’s 20 chapters include “Beheading, decapitation and mutilation”, “Kidnapping warring infidels” and “How to kill spies”.

Another chapter, titled “Indiscriminate killing of warring infidels”, opens with an inflammatory message that calls for force to be used against unbelievers: “Kill them, fight them by every means that may snatch away their souls, drive their spirits from their bodies, cleansing the earth of their filth and removing their scourge from mankind, whatever that means may be.”

A separate chapter documents attempts to justify the use of weapons of mass destruction. “The central aim for which we strive – and we do so with all available strength – is the acquisition of weapons, weapons of mass destruction, for there is no escaping the obligation to defend against these defiant perverters of faith and end the aggression of the malodorous filth against Islam and its people,” writes Muhajir, the Isis author.

Each point he makes is theologically rebutted by Quilliam using the Qur’an, Islamic teachings and reference to acts prohibited by Islamic warfare ethics and Islamic morality. “This text offers intricate details on the use of jihad in its traditional Sunni discussion, and misuses these features to provide Islamic legal cover to terrorist operations,” said Ansari.

Among one of its central strands is the distinction between the “lands of Islam” and the “lands of unbelief (kufr)” and the notion that jihadists are entitled to fight the unbelievers.

“This entire binary construct is a later invention of Muslim theologians that is now obsolete, and so the justification of excommunication (takfir) and military attacks against civilians on this basis is completely absurd,” says the Quilliam report. Even so, Ansari said history had proved that some were swayed by the text, even chapters 11 and 12, which attempt to provide an Islamic sanction for the mutilation of bodies, the cutting of body parts and beheading.

“A susceptible and vulnerable reader who has no previous training in Islamic jurisprudence might easily become seduced by this book because it is written in a way that gives the impression that it has religious weight. While the text is somewhat based on traditional readings, it does not reflect the diverse and pluralistic complexities of Islamic rulings,” said Ansari.

The jihadis’ interpretation of jihad – the text has also been used by al-Qaida and Nigeria’s militant Islamist group, Boko Haram, to justify and commit atrocities – would have been core teachings to Isis’s 6,000 European Muslims who travelled to the calpihate, of which about 850 were British.

“They would have been introduced to this book, it is their bible, their most important text,” said Ansari.

via The core Isis manual that twisted Islam to legitimise barbarity | World news | The Guardian

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Nazi Salutes and Fascist Chic Put Ukraine’s Jews on Edge

2018/05/14 Leave a comment

Worth noting:

At the Bingo nightclub, a few hundred Ukrainian music fans were celebrating the anniversary of their favorite very white ultra-nationalist metal band, Sokyra Peruna. Some were teens, some looked like they were in their 40s. They were dressed up and tatted up with Nazi symbols, pagan spirit designs and emblems from the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine.

Some fans brought their children along. Smoke wafted over the stage, guitars rocked, and dozens of right hands straitened up in Hitler salutes as the band’s leader, Arseny Klimachev, roared out neo-Nazi lines he’s made famous in Ukraine’s capital: “Heroes of my race! Heroes of your race!”

The fans will tell you these rants and symbols, banned in Ukraine by law, are really just fashion statements, a part of their sub-culture. But the Jewish population of Ukraine, estimated to be more than 200,000, is more than uneasy about such demonstrations. To them, Hitler’s fans are not just lovers of heavy metal music, but one more manifestation of a hostile, increasingly powerful movement.

For decades both Russians and Ukrainians referred to their enemies as “fascists,” and caricatured enemies as Hitler. During Moscow’s conflict with Tbilisi in 2007 and 2008 Russian propagandists painted Hitler-style mustaches on the face of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. Today millions of Ukrainians refer to Russian President Vladimir Putin as to “Putler”–you can even buy souvenir toilet paper that says that. But if Putin is as bad as Hitler, what are Ukrainian Hitler fans thinking?

Meanwhile, Kremlin officials insist that the pro-European Maidan movement was “fascist,” and that Ukraine is now ruled by neo-Nazi government. And, as if to confirm the Moscow line, dozens of far-right movements, groups, bands use Nazi symbols and praise Hitler’s violence against Bolsheviks, “the occupants of Ukraine.”

Just a few days before the 73d anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazism in World War II, Ukraine saw a march of ultra-nationalists who proclaimed that Odessa should be cleansed of Jews. At the rally, the head of the Right Sector in Odessa, Tatiana Soikina, said: “We are sure that we can put things in order, so Ukraine will belong to Ukrainians and not to Yids, not to oligarchs, glory to Ukraine!”

The march took place several days after the U.S. Congress sent a letter to the State Department describing the  “unacceptable” situation with anti-Semitism in here (PDF). It noted that Ukraine was “glorifying Nazi collaborators and made it a criminal offense to deny their ‘heroism.’” Among those Nazi collaborators the American members of congress cited Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych, and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) for killing Jews and Poles in the years from 1941 to 1945.

In fact, all those historical figures mentioned in the letter are seen by many in Ukraine as heroes, even though today Ukraine gets more support from Washington than ever.
Washington is selling Javelin anti-tank systems to Kiev to reenforce the Ukrainian army in the war against Russia-backed rebels in Donbas. The four-year-long conflict has taken more than 10,000 Ukrainian lives.

Far-right activists insist that every single anti-Semitic action has the Kremlin’s agents behind it, while representatives of the Jewish community want to see the conspicuous fans of Hitler put in jail.

“Anti-Semitism is rapidly growing all over Ukraine: Holocaust memorials are vandalized every week, while the opposition say President Petro Poroshenkois ‘a Jew,’ when they want to say that the president is bad,” says Eduard Dolinsky, the head of Ukraine’s Jewish Committee.

Dolinsky, a prominent public figure in Ukraine, monitors incidents of anti-Semitism. The Jewish Committee has demanded that the government and law enforcement agencies push for punishment of those professing Nazi ideology, but so far there has been none.

Dolinsky says he is upset that both Russian propaganda and some Ukrainian media outlets use his name and voice for political agendas as each tries to put the fascist brand on the other. “Our main intention at the Jewish Committee is not to allow history to repeat itself. Today in public opinion Jews seem to be to blame for political failures, just as it happened in Germany in 1930s,” Dolinsky told The Daily Beast.

Earlier this month, the deputy director of Lviv school Number 100, Mariana Batyuk, was fired after posting photographs of herself and her school students lined up and saluting, “Heil Hitler.” The teacher also posted Hitler’s portrait on her Facebook page with a caption: “He was a great man, whatever you say.”

A Ukrainian nationalist, Sergei Parkhomenko from the “Anti-Putin Information Front” insists that real Ukrainian patriots could not attack Jews. “Both Odessa activists and the Lviv teacher and those who vandalized Holocaust memorials must have been paid by either the Kremlin’s agents or those who want to discredit Ukraine,” Parkhomenko told The Daily Beast.

Far-right militia units recently marching across Kiev and promising to bring “order” to Ukraine sounded threatening, and not many people wanted to get in the way of muscled-up guys with black masks covering their faces.

“The other day I was invited to a round table at a TV show to debate with far-right politicians, I had the opportunity to bring two people with me, but all my friends were too scared to go,” Dolinsky told The Daily Beast.

Reporters of the Zaborona media (translates as “banned” media) group of Ukrainian journalists covering forbidden, censored and sensitive news, took photographs of young men slamming during the concert, pushing each other, showing off Nazi and Ku Klux Klan symbols tattooed on their naked torsos.

One of the fans went from one corner of the club to another unfurling his big Nazi flag. Anna Belous, a Zaborona reporter, told The Daily Beast.

“It is stupid to blame everything on the Kremlin. Officials should admit that we do actually have guys using Nazi symbols in Ukraine,” Yekaterina Sergatskova, the founder of the Zaborona project, told us. “Every year  thousands of people with far-right views participate in Povstanets festival, this is not a news.”

Last week President Petro Poroshenko condemned the increasing anti-Semitism as “unacceptable” in a post on his Facebook page. But the dance goes on.

Source: Nazi Salutes and Fascist Chic Put Ukraine’s Jews on Edge

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Jordan Peterson’s Hitler And Holocaust Obsessions – The Forward

2018/05/14 Leave a comment

Interesting and I find nuanced profile of Peterson. But equally true, fairly or unfairly, one is judged by the company one keeps and one’s supporters:

Jordan Peterson is a public intellectual adored by neo-Nazis, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists. The neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer called Peterson, a Canadian psychology professor-turned-self-help-guru, “The Savior of Western Civilization.” Paul Joseph Watson, a prominent conspiracy theorist for Infowars, has tweeted, “Jordan Peterson for Canadian Prime Minister.”

Part of why people on the far right like Peterson is because he is not afraid to talk about the Jews, and he has a lot of people to talk to. Peterson is on a 50-city tour of North America and Europe to promote his best-selling new book, “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.” His YouTube channel has over a million subscribers. He has answered questions about global Jewish influence several times, in person and online. In an April blog post, he attributed that alleged influence to Jewish intelligence —an old anti-Semitic dog whistle.

Yet Peterson rarely speaks about anti-Semitism itself, even though he says he’s been obsessed with the Holocaust since he was a teenager and lectures on it frequently. Critics say this omission may encourage anti-Semitism among Peterson’s followers, who range from avowed neo-Nazis communities like the Daily Stormer to frustrated young men looking for a scapegoat. In an interview, Peterson told the Forward he feels that he is battling anti-Semitism through his work.

“Part of your responsibility when you have a platform like that, especially when you present yourself as an academic, is to make sure that you’re giving those audiences the full truth,” said Jared Holt, a researcher for People for the American Way who studies far-right media. If Peterson were to be more forthcoming about the importance of anti-Semitism in the Holocaust, it “might allow some of his viewers to think about course correcting,” Holt added.

Peterson, 55, used to be an ordinary academic at the University of Toronto. His first and only other book, published in 1999, was a 600-page tome chiefly about Jungian psychology. He taught at Harvard in the 1980s before moving to Toronto; back then, his “audience” was his students. Now, he posts lectures on everything from Palestine to parenting, the Book of Genesis to psychobiology, on YouTube. Supporters gave him $70,000 through the website Patreon in April 2017, compared with $700 in April 2016. “12 Rules For Life” has sold over 700,000 copies since its publication in January, the Washington Post reported.

Peterson didn’t reach these heights because of his discourses on Jewish topics. His primary preoccupation is healing broken masculinity, and his main following is the young men with whom such a focus resonates. Peterson is nowhere near as toxic as various other internet cultures, like the “incels” who blame women — and sometimes murder them — because they’re not having sex. Yet behind the father figure role he affects lie darker preoccupations with Hitler, Marxists and the “radical left” on college campuses. That’s where his teachings can provide fodder for conspiracy theorists and bigots.

Peterson opposes Jew hatred, he says, and claims that leftist members of the media tried to hurt him by linking him to white supremacists. He has accused white supremacists of having a “pathology of racial pride,” and written that “identity politics” –- the idea that drives white nationalism — is “misguided.”

Peterson told the Forward he felt he had to answer the question of Jewish influence in order to undermine the far right’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Other scholars don’t think that’s a sound strategy.

He has addressed the subject several times in public and online, most recently in a blog post published on his website, when he talked about Jewish IQ. It’s higher than average, he said, and that’s true also for people in power. Therefore Jews are accurately represented among the cultural and financial elite of the world. Peterson didn’t mention anti-Semitism directly in this lecture, but he was thinking about it, he said.

“You can assume that they [Jews] are intelligent and have a culture of learning, or you can think that there’s some kind of cabal,” Peterson told the Forward. “So if I’m gonna hit the hornets nest, I might as well hit it on the side that takes the wind out of the sails of far-righters and their idiot anti-Semitism.”

Peterson’s willingness to answer questions about “Jewish success” and his interest in IQ literature is “suspicious” said Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of history at Emory University and author of “Denying the Holocaust,” who won a libel case in Britain against prominent Holocaust denier David Irving.

Lipstadt said that Peterson’s statements on Jewish intelligence reminded her of Kevin MacDonald, a professor of psychology who the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as “the neo-Nazi movement’s favorite academic.” MacDonald has written several books criticizing Jewish intellectual culture. (Peterson links to a critique of one of MacDonald’s books at the end of his blog post on Jewish intelligence.) Lipstadt said that MacDonald’s academic language obscures the anti-Semitism behind his opinions. She worries the same is true of Peterson.

“It’s not [Holocaust] denial, but when people start asking questions like that, I begin to get leery,” Lipstadt said. “The question is, is he a self-help guru who find the Holocaust a convenient way of attracting attention, or is there serious thought going on here?”

Likewise, Lipstadt wonders why Peterson rarely mentions anti-Semitism in his work on the Holocaust. Peterson more often attributes the cause of the Holocaust to human nature.

“Anyone who really diminishes the importance of anti-Semitism — who says, ‘Oh it was an afterthought, a cover’ — I think has got it wrong,” she said.

Peterson says he has been preoccupied with the Holocaust since he was a teenager. He once told an audience that he wrote an essay about Auschwitz at age 13. In “Maps of Meaning,” his 1999 book, he writes that he based his career on trying to understand what drove fascist regimes like the Nazis. “I could not make sense of the human propensity for belief-inspired violence,” he wrote.

Peterson thinks that peer pressure is nearly always stronger than one’s inner moral compass. Anyone has it within them to be Hitler if given enough power, he claims.

“If you think that you wouldn’t be tempted by having 20 million people worship you, then you don’t know yourself at all,” Peterson told the Forward.

He also believes almost anyone would have become a Nazi if they were a German living under Hitler — that “everyone participated” in the Holocaust.

“His audience is without a doubt a large chunk of people in the ‘alt-right,’ and that’s the kind of signaling that would appeal to them,” said Heidi Beirich, the director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “If you play fast and loose with the issue, you’re going to be seen as a possible ally in Holocaust denial.”

Peterson admits he has a dim view of human nature. But he has a much rosier picture of humanity’s potential to learn from its mistakes. He believes that sufficient Holocaust education is the key to preventing genocide. In fact, he says, the reason genocides continue to happen is that Holocaust education is not good enough. People don’t understand that it was a feature, not a bug, of human behavior.

“It hasn’t been transformed into deep and practical psychological knowledge,” Peterson added. “You can tell by the rise of publicly accepted anti-Semitism in the last five-to-10 years. Whatever we understood of that education, it wasn’t enough.”

Holocaust education is not a silver bullet, according to Sander Gilman, a professor of history at Emory University who has written extensively about anti-Semitism. Teaching about Nazism and the Holocaust is extremely important, Gilman said. But it doesn’t explain – and can’t prevent – modern anti-Semitism.

“If you have a fantasy that that is going to be a kind of vaccination against hate, that’s wonderfully naïve,” Gilman said. “The rise of anti-Semitism today has to do with situations today.”

Joe Flanders, an assistant professor of psychology at McGill University who was mentored by Peterson as an undergraduate, says that Peterson is “bizarrely preoccupied” by the Holocaust, along with the Cold War. But he pushed back against the possibility that Peterson’s views were evidence of any anti-Semitic feeling.

“He’s interested in how it’s possible for something so evil to manifest in the world,” Flanders said. “It’s an expression of the darkest part of humanity, which we don’t have access to now in the news cycle we consume these days.”

Peterson has repeatedly said that instead of being suspicious of Jews, the world should be grateful that there are so many Jewish geniuses.

“They’re a resource you don’t want to squander,” he said.

via Jordan Peterson’s Hitler And Holocaust Obsessions – The Forward

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Ethnic Chinese in Malaysia are celebrating China’s rise – but as multicultural Malaysians, not Chinese

2018/05/12 Leave a comment

Interesting:

In 2015, China’s then ambassador to Malaysia, Huang Huikang, visited Kuala Lumpur Chinatown just ahead of a planned pro-Malay rally. Huang’s walkabout, during which he spoke out against racism and extremism, defused a potential ethnic showdown. But it earned the ambassador a summoning to the foreign ministry to explain his perceived meddling in Malaysia’s domestic affairs.

The Kuala Lumpur incident is a portent of things to come as China steps up efforts to connect as well as protect overseas Chinese communities. During the 19th Communist Party congress, last year, President Xi Jinping reaffirmed China’s strategic policy of co-opting the Chinese diaspora into Beijing’s grand push to internationalise the “Chinese dream”.

Xi’s overture is hitting some wrong notes. In the United States, lawmakers have complained that mainland Chinese students there have come under pressure from Beijing after criticising China. In Australia, Canberra is proposing countermeasures for alleged interference by the Communist Party in the country’s internal affairs and in the Chinese Australian communities.

The Chinese diaspora is a global phenomenon unlike others because immigrants from China have, over the centuries, planted roots in almost every continent. More crucially, the crisis-stricken homeland they left behind generations ago is today a rejuvenated, self-confident modern nation-state. And this re-emerging superpower is eager to re-enter the world stage and shape the existing international order.

For this reason, Beijing’s harnessing of the overseas Chinese population could have far-reaching global ramifications.

In Malaysia, the complexion of the Chinese diaspora bears certain distinct features. Numbering about 7 million, Malaysia’s ethnic Chinese community is one of the largest concentrations of overseas Chinese in any country. And nearing 25 per cent of the population, they exert considerable economic sway and, to a lesser extent, political leverage.

Perhaps what is unique is the pristine preservation of the Chinese heritage, a legacy of Malaysia’s acclaimed multiculturalism. One example is the national vernacular school system, where ethnic minorities can learn and sustain their mother tongues. This has enabled the Chinese communities to keep alive their culture and beliefs in a manner unmatched anywhere else – even to the envy of mainland Chinese whose traditional way of life was decimated during the Cultural Revolution.

Yet Malaysia’s celebrated diversity is a double-edged sword, as it has slowed assimilation. The country is trapped in a race paradigm where racial dynamics dictate public policy and colour national discourse. Intended to protect the rights of the Malay majority, the bumiputera policies continue to draw a wedge between the races.

Discontented, some have chosen to leave, precipitating a brain drain, chiefly to Australia and neighbouring Singapore. In fact, Malaysians are the biggest group of overseas Chinese to re-migrate.

Fortunately, these setbacks do not round up the Malaysia story. There are alternative narratives, where the aspired “1Malaysia” is a lived reality. Malaysians do come together as one, especially when engaging the world at large. Successes by international sports stars, such as diver Pandelela Rinong, badminton player Lee Chong Wei and squash player Nicol David, have fired up patriotic displays of emotions that transcend race.

One way to explain this seeming anomaly is that most Malaysians at the personal level do experience genuine friendship across racial lines. Interpersonal contacts such as these have slowly but steadily fostered mutual respect and goodwill.

There are alternative narratives, where the aspired ‘1Malaysia’ is a lived reality

Regrettably, this grass-roots bonding is often undermined and overshadowed by racialised national politics. Even so, under certain favourable conditions, these contained but enduring feelings of kinship do break to the surface, showcasing to the world the true 1Malaysia spirit.

It is within this broader context that we see the Chinese in Malaysia wrestle with their own conflicted devotion to past memories and present realities.

Firstly, like Irish Australians’ love for all things Ireland, Chinese Malaysians, too, follow with keen interest China-related developments. The miraculous turnaround of the People’s Republic in recent decades, for example, has thrilled overseas Chinese.

At the same time, Chinese in Malaysia are unreservedly Malaysian, just as the Irish in Australia are true-blue Aussies. And there is no better demonstration of this than the Chinese Malaysians’ impassioned support for Lee Chong Wei, even when he faces off against his arch-rival, Lin Dan of China.

Powered by its ambitious “Belt and Road Initiative”, China’s inroads into Malaysia are expanding by the day. And this is inducing some shocks to the country’s rich yet fragile social landscape.

Indeed, when ambassador Huang stepped into the Chinatown fray, he also waded into a long-standing controversy surrounding insinuations of Chinese Malaysians’ divided loyalty. The ambassador’s intervention was manipulated by some as proof of China acting as a protector of the Chinese minority in Malaysia, casting further aspersions on these Malaysians’ national allegiance.

To Chinese Malaysians, this was a most unfair and unjustified accusation.

True, the Chinese still embody the civilisational inheritance of their ancestral land. But these multigenerational Malaysians have also been indelibly transformed by the land of their birth. Like descendants of immigrants everywhere, they are turning into cultural hybrids, metamorphosing from a mono-cultural Chinese towards a more pronounced multicultural Malaysian. To use an agricultural metaphor, the born-and-bred-in-Malaysia ethnic Chinese are now the fruit of the land – sprouting and flourishing with textures and flavours unique to the Malaysian ecology. With time, these Chinese have become truly Malaysian, exuding the cultural DNA of their new homeland.

Thus, as China rises, like most overseas Chinese communities, ethnic Chinese in Malaysia are revelling in spontaneous flushes of cultural pride. But they do so not as Chinese, but as Malaysians. Or, to put it in the phraseology familiar to Beijing: as proud “Malaysians with Chinese characteristics”.

Source: Ethnic Chinese in Malaysia are celebrating China’s rise – but as multicultural Malaysians, not Chinese

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A Sudanese teenager killed her rapist, and Muslim women are fighting for her life

2018/05/12 Leave a comment

Noteworthy:

Violence against women does not discriminate. One in three womenacross the globe experience physical or sexual violence in their lives, regardless of race, age or income. Intimate partner violence is the most common form, with physical violence occurring to as many as two out of three women who have ever been in an intimate partnership.

This is not news, and yet, the difference in how this violence is discussed is stark, depending on where and by whom it has been perpetrated. When the violence occurs in majority Muslim countries, pundits are quick to blame Islam itself, instead of noticing the army of Muslim women who are fighting for their rights within the faith, and defending women – and themselves – at all costs.

Noura Hussein, a young woman from Sudan, provides an instructive and urgent example. At the age of 16, Noura was forced into a marriage by her father. She refused and escaped from her family home near Khartoum to stay with her aunt in Sennar, around 250km away. She lived there for three years, determined to finish her education, when she received word that the wedding plans had been cancelled, and she was welcome to come home.

On her return, it became apparent that she had been tricked. The wedding ceremony was underway, and Noura was duly “given” to the groom. Distraught, the 19-year-old refused to consummate the marriage for a number of days. Within the week, her husband’s tactics became increasingly aggressive. Noura’s husband raped her, with the help of relatives who pinned her down during the act.

When the husband returned the next day to repeat the crime, Noura retaliated. She stabbed her husband a number of times, ultimately killing her rapist. She thereafter returned to her family, who reportedly then disowned her and turned her over to the police.

Over a year later, on 29 April, 2018, Noura was convicted of murder. On 10 May, she was sentenced to death. His family was offered the choice of either accepting monetary compensation for the crime, or execution. They chose the latter. Now the family and community have 15 days to appeal the sentence. They are hoping to overturn the decision to execute Noura for defending herself against physical and sexual violence, and navigating an impossible situation that no young woman should ever face.

Noura’s story is perhaps not unusual in a world where intimate partner violence is rife. However, there is something about Noura’s case that is indicative of a wider truth. The majority of people involved in raising awareness about this young woman’s case are other Sudanese Muslim women. The lawyers working on the case in Washington DC are members of the Sudanese diaspora, and word of the case reached me through another Sudanese writer’s Instagram and blogposts. The majority of people fighting for Noura are women, Muslim women.

This reality flies in the face of those who claim that Muslim women are oppressed, submissive or believe in a religion that takes away their rights. It also stands in complete opposition to men who try to use a warped version of sharia to justify any part of such a situation – the forced marriage, the rape, the sentencing. The women arguing on Noura’s behalf point to both law and theology: to be wedded without consent is forbidden in Islam. Child marriage is still practiced, although women continue to fight the laws and traditions that allow it.

However, as happens so often in cases like this, the story becomes an opportunity for the airing of grievances and prejudices about Islam, through the argument of advocating for women’s rights. Islam is violent, people will say, because of how they treat their women – and look, here is an example that reinforces that argument!

Let the women who are advocates for #JusticeForNoura be an example of how that is fundamentally incorrect. The burden on Muslim women is impossibly heavy – to defend themselves against both the ignorance of non-Muslims with an Islamophobic agenda, and the deeply patriarchal norms that exist within interpretations of sharia around the world. To paraphrase Dr Susan Carland, Muslim women forever face a catch-22. However, when the fight truly is on, as in the case of Noura, they are the first to step up to fight for each other’s rights and protection. Tell me, how is that oppression?

Source: A Sudanese teenager killed her rapist, and Muslim women are fighting for her life

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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