Quebec’s cultural milieu demonstrates its utter hypocrisy in defending SLĀV

2018/07/16 Leave a comment

Martin Patriquin in another of his controversial posts, a bit over the top but with an insightful closing paragraph:

In Quebec lore, few historical events remain as damaging as La Conquête. When British general James Wolfe defeated his French counterpart Louis-Joseph de Montcalm at the Plains of Abraham in 1759, it precipitated not just the end of French power in North America, it also birthed the narrative of the Québécois as a conquered people, living in virtual enslavement under a foreign power.

Quebec directors, keenly aware of the its historical trauma, have largely eschewed from committing La Conquête (The Conquest) to film or the stage.

So the fact that Quebec stage director Robert Lepage could depict on stage someone else’s infinitely more enduring wound — the one of actual slavery — is indicative of his power and sway over Quebec’s cultural milieu. That he would do so with a nearly all-white cast, then scream censorship when the ensuing show is cancelled, shows how utterly hypocritical and disconnected from reality this milieu remains.

Lepage’s SLĀV, which was to have a two-week run at Montreal’s Théâtre du nouveau monde, is a pastiche of slave songs reworked and sung primarily by Quebec singer Betty Bonifassi. The source material is drawn entirely from the figurative works of American slaves; songs such as “Chain Song” were sung to keep time and avoid the master’s whip. SLĀV’s aesthetic is similarly drawn for the experience of black slaves, right down to the slave boat set pieces and gritty picture of train tracks on the promotional materials.

Despite the subject material, SLĀV featured only a smattering of black skin, with white actors in the principal roles — Bonifassi included. Protests erupted outside the venue. Musician Moses Sumney cancelled his gig at Montreal’s Jazz Festival, SLĀV’s sponsor. Organizers then nixed the Montreal run of the production.

Several French-speaking pundits frothed at the mouth, as if on cue. “We live in a world subjected to the emotional tyranny of certain crybaby minorities who constantly play the victim,” sniffed Journal de Montréal’s Mathieu Bock-Côté. Parti Québécois culture critic Pascal Bérubé called it “a defeat for artistic liberty.” For his part, Lepage delivered his ire via press release, claiming to have been “muzzled” and a victim of “intolerant speech.”

Lepage and his defenders have nothing if not a taste for hyperbole and sensitivity to the pinprick of real or perceived slights. In defending a demonstrable abuse of history, they are also hypocrites.

After all, Quebec is a land where history isn’t just alive, it screams. La Conquête is taught as a mantra in its schools — as is the Quiet Revolution, in which the Québécois wrestled from underneath the thumb of the English some 300 years later. Its language laws are a bulwark against the rising English seas on its borders, ensuring the survival of the French language. If the more than 350 years since La Conquête has shown anything, it’s Quebec’s collective will to keep its own folklore intact.

Over the years, this has led to unspoken rules and near-satiric levels of self-regard. The Canadiens, Stanley Cup-less for 25 years, still cannot avail itself of a unilingual English coach. Pundits and columnists, Bock-Côté very much included, consistently bemoan the lack of Quebecois players on the team, as well as the English music blared at the Bell Centre during games. (Thankfully, this last fit of pique put an end to U2’s “Vertigo” as the Habs’ go-to goal song.)

Protesters staged vigils outside La Caisse de dépôt headquarters when the province’s pension fund hired Michael Sabia, its first English president. A few months ago, provincial politicians passed a unanimous motion urging merchants to cease using “Bonjour/Hi” when greeting a customer. And before he turned his attention to the cancellation of SLĀV, the PQ’s Bérubé was busy decrying a new law allowing for personalized license plates in the province. Such things would violate Quebec’s French language charter if they display English words, Bérubé said.

As with slavery for America’s Black population, La Conquête sits at the headwaters of Quebec’s modern history, shaping its people and fuelling its continued ire. Trifling with it is fraught, if not outright dangerous; Robert Lepage, who isn’t used to anything but public adoration, has certainly learned as much. One can only imagine how he or his fellow defenders of Quebec history would react if an imagining of La Conquête were cast with an English-speaking ensemble — or if this cast was almost entirely black.

Source: Quebec’s cultural milieu demonstrates its utter hypocrisy in defending SLĀV

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The Worst Form of Affirmative Action: Sullivan on legacy admissions

2018/07/16 Leave a comment

Hard to argue:

The Worst Form of Affirmative Action

I’ve long believed that affirmative action is unjust, immoral, and racist. Open discrimination with racial bias is always poisonous and when it comes to access to critical institutions of higher learning, it’s a piece of social engineering that has been extended way past its expiration date.

I’m talking, of course, about legacy admissions: the open discrimination that favors the dumb rich over the bright poor and wealthy whites over the brown and black poor, as well as the permanently assaulted Asian-Americans. It’s how Jared Kushner — the dimmest of dim bulbs — walks around with a Harvard degree, thereby devaluing everyone else’s. Because his dad went there first and threw in what was effectively a bribe of an alleged $2.5 million.

ProPublica reports: “Overall, across six years, Harvard accepted 33.6 percent of legacy applicants, versus 5.9 percent of non-legacies, according to Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono, an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff challenging Harvard’s affirmative action policies.” This is therefore not a minor injustice; it’s a major scandal. And it has a manifest racial tilt: over a fifth of accepted white candidates are legacy admissions, recipients of a de facto white affirmative action program. In the 2019 class, 11.6 percent of incoming students are white legacy, more than the entire 11 percent who are African-American. It’s a boost that exceeds that given to Hispanics, Native Americans, and the poor. It’s giving the actual super-privileged more privilege, while narrowing the spaces available for truly deserving applicants.

Of course, I take the terribly naïve view that those most gifted intellectually should get into the best colleges, and that test scores are the most objective measure, with some credit for extracurriculars and personality. But if you hold this view, and oppose the use of race as an admissions tool, you simply have to concede that using money and family is just as noxious. I’d go further and make any abolition of racial affirmative action contingent upon the simultaneous abolition of legacy admissions. And I have no doubt that the places freed up could well increase minority representation in a way that requires no engineering, condescension, or left-racism.

If race-based affirmative action is to be abandoned — and it sure might with the new shape of the Supreme Court — it seems to me that conservatives, liberals, and even the left should unite, for once, against actual, tangible privilege and injustice. The Ivy League can take the financial hit, it seems to me. And a small effort to weaken our increasingly deep caste system in America in favor of meritocracy would be a huge benefit for us all. Plus: no more Kushners. What’s not to like?

via Did Trump Just Help Stop Brexit?

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Evolutionary Psychology Grapples with Racism and Anti-Semitism

2018/07/14 Leave a comment

Interesting:

When I published my book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (2004), I had no idea that white nationalism and neo-Nazism would become more fashionable in the coming years. At that time white nationalism was a fringe movement that one heard very little about, and the term “alt-right” had not even been coined yet.

Some of my critics informed me that the historical links I drew between Darwinism and racism or Darwinism and Nazism were misguided, because most Darwinian biologists today are firmly anti-racist and anti-Nazi. I never quite understood why the views of current Darwinian biologists were relevant to my argument, however, because I was not arguing that Darwinism inevitably produces Nazism. I was making a more modest and less assailable historical point: Nazis embraced Darwinism and used it as a foundational principle of their worldview. (I proved this in even greater detail in Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress.)

Recycling Racial Ideas

However, ironically, the recent upsurge of white nationalism and the alt-right has actually made my historical case more plausible. Not only do many of the leading figures in this movement, such as Richard Spencer, embrace Darwinism with alacrity, but they recycle many of the racial ideas of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that I discuss in From Darwin to Hitler.

They argue that races are unequal, because they have evolved differently. Of course, conveniently they have discovered that their own ancestors — white Europeans — have evolved greater intellectual capacities than other races.

These racist ideas are still taboo in mainstream academe — as they should be. When the Nobel Prize-winning biologist James Watson suggested in 2007 that some racial groups, such as black Africans, had lower intelligence because of their evolutionary history, he faced outrage and sustained criticism.

Worrying Signs

However, some worrying signs are emerging that the taboo may be cracking. The journal Evolutionary Psychological Science, which has eminent evolutionary psychologists, such as Harvard’s Steven Pinker, on its editorial board, recently carried an article defending the anti-Semitic, racist views of Kevin MacDonald, a white supremacist and emeritus professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach.

MacDonald’s views are eerily similar to those of scientists I examine in my historical scholarship: racial groups are in a human struggle for existence, behavioral traits are biologically innate, and stereotypical Jewish traits are evolutionary strategies for beating other races in racial competition. MacDonald claims that anti-Semitism is a defensive strategy to help white Europeans and their descendants triumph over the Jews.

Darwin and many early Darwinists saw racism and human inequality as part and parcel of their theory. MacDonald is trying to resurrect this troubling legacy of Darwinian theory.

Source: Evolutionary Psychology Grapples with Racism and Anti-Semitism

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What Justin Trudeau had to say at the NATO summit (immigration and diversity)

2018/07/13 Leave a comment

Not new, but again belies those who believe that he does not believe Canada has an identity:

At a moderated discussion held on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Brussels today, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fielded questions on a wide range of issues related to Canada’s membership in the defence alliance—from the level of Canadian military spending, to how the European Union complements NATO, to his expectation of future migrations of people fleeing hardship.

On immigration and diversity as a foundation of Canadian foreign policy.

Trudeau: “We have learned from people who come to Canada [from] everywhere around the world, whether it’s Afghan refugees, whether it’s Syrian refugees recently, or whether it’s some of the previous generations of people fleeing from Uganda in the Idi Amin years, the boat people from Vietnam, or the wave of migrations we got in the post-World War II years from Europe, we understand tangibly how things could be worse and where things have been bad around the world.

And being able to remember that, or reflect on how we can do better, how we can create a society that is based around values and not identity, based around principles and rights, and opportunity, real and fair chances for everyone to succeed— those kinds of principles, I think, are going to be extraordinarily important in the 21st century as we get flows of migrations of people looking for better lives, people fleeing resource depletion, environmental calamities and conflicts.”

Source: What Justin Trudeau had to say at the NATO summit

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Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen spoke at venue known as criminal hangout: Staff need to do Google check

2018/07/12 Leave a comment

Memo to department and ministerial staff: Google the name of locations and persons (I learned this lesson when former Minister Kenney’s staff Googled the name of proposed recipients of G&Cs with some embarrassing results). Need to shift from “Do we google every restaurant that the minister gets invited to speak to? We do not.” to “We routinely Google”:

Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen provided a briefing to members of the African-Canadian community at a Toronto barbecue establishment but the department hadn’t advised him that court documents have identified it as a known hangout for members of the notorious Black Axe criminal syndicate.

The owner of the The Suya Spot restaurant has denied any affiliation with the Nigerian-based criminal organization that has set up operations in Toronto and Vancouver.

Mr. Hussen’s spokesperson said the minister was unaware that The Suya Spot, located just outside his York South-Weston riding, has been frequented by members of the Neo Black Movement – also known as the Black Axe organized-crime group.

Police say Black Axe has been exerting growing influence over the Nigerian diaspora in Canada as well as engaging in organized crime – everything from fraud, money laundering and intimidation.

Press secretary Mathieu Genest confirmed the Immigration Minister went to the The Suya Spot restaurant on March 30 to speak about the risk of Nigerians trying to cross illegally into Canada from the United States. The majority of people entering Canada between legal border crossings in 2018 have been Nigerians carrying valid U.S. travel visas.

“This was a 20-person event at a local African restaurant where he would have an opportunity to connect to a very specific group we have been reaching out to in the context of the irregular migration phenomenon,” Mr. Genest said in an interview. “Whether the restaurant was or wasn’t linked to criminal activities, we were not aware of anything.”

He stressed the owner of The Suya Spot did not host the event, although the restaurant did post pictures of Mr. Hussen on its Instagram page and declared ”Honourable Ahmed Hussen Minister of Immigration, Refugees & Citizens of Canada is officially Suyarized.“

Mr. Genest said no one in either the minister’s office or the Immigration department checked to see whether the venue should be a place to avoid. He said it was too much trouble to check out possible links to criminal activity.

“Keep in mind that the minister does like 10 events a day on weekends,” Mr. Genest said. “Do we google every restaurant that the minister gets invited to speak to? We do not.”

Mr. Genest said the minister would avoid going to the restaurant if he is invited again.

According to the Immigration and Refugee Board, The Suya Spot has advertised in Uhuru Magazine, which is the official publication of the Neo Black Movement, and is frequented by gang members.

Immigration and Refugee Board judge Christopher Marcinkiewicz cited The Suya Spot in a ruling last year involving a Nigerian member of the Black Axe who was ordered deported back to Nigeria. In his ruling, Mr. Marcinkiewicz said there had been several violent incidents at the establishment involving members of the Nigerian crime group.

“One such incident occurred in December, 2013, when a patron at the restaurant got into a verbal altercation which ultimately resulted in a beating of four individuals later identified by police as members of the Neo Black Movement,” the judge wrote. In June, 2015, an individual was the “victim of a kidnapping, forcible confinement and torture at the hands of persons identified as known Neo Black Movement Canada zone members.”

The Suya Spot owner, Taiwo Ajala, is aware of the allegations in the IRB court documents but denied his restaurant is affiliated with the Black Axe.

“It’s bad for business. It’s not fair,” Mr. Ajala told The Globe and Mail. “We’re not affiliated with any kind of group whatsoever.”

A sister restaurant in Ottawa was closed in 2016 after four gang-related shootings outside its doors over a three-year period. Ottawa police said there had been more than 100 calls to the Nigerian barbecue establishment.

“They were giving us a lot pressure from the people in the community,” Mr. Ajala said.

The Neo Black Movement originated at the University of Benin in the mid-1970s with the focus on reviving African culture but morphed into a criminal organization. Members are known for wearing black pants, long white shirts and black coats with the axe insignia on the front and back.

Detective Constable Chad Nickels of the Toronto Police financial crimes unit said the gang mostly engages in fraud, such as phone and e-mail scams asking people for their financial information.

“They’re sending out these robocalls or these mass e-mails, where they’re putting out ten thousand a day,“ he said.

via Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen spoke at venue known as criminal hangout – The Globe and Mail

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Kim’s Convenience actor deserves a giant round of applause: Teitel

2018/07/12 Leave a comment

Agree. Offence was reported to the employer (Toronto Police Force) but with social media and the press, while not identifying the officer involved to avoid doxxing:

Everyone has the capacity to be extremely confused driving through a downtown Toronto crosswalk on the day of a Blue Jays game — be they an urbanite who lives in a condo overlooking Rogers Centre or a tourist visiting from far-off lands like Tasmania and Thornhill.

Toronto traffic invites confusion. Not to be confused in the noise and smog on a sweltering day in the city is, well, extraordinary. Unfortunately, racism isn’t. So it went that this past Saturday a Toronto police officer allegedly reprimanded a confused driver as they hesitated to pull through the busy intersection of Lake Shore Blvd. W. and Rees St., not by giving them a stern lesson about the rules of the road but by telling them, “If you can’t drive, go back to your country.”

According to Andrew Phung, the pedestrian who allegedly saw this go down and who immediately tweeted about it, the driver in question was a person of colour. Phung, an actor on the CBC comedy Kim’s Convenience, was on his way to the Rogers Centre to catch the Blue Jays game when he alleges the incident took place. He posted the following to social media:

“I literally just witnessed a Toronto police officer shout ‘go back to your country’ because they were confused at the crosswalk,” he wrote. “To which two white dudes then shouted “amen, go back to where you f—ing came from.” THIS IS NOT MY CANADA!” (The hyphens are the Star’s.)

Phung took a photo of the offending cop (and pressed the strangers about their xenophobia), but he didn’t post the photo of the officer to Twitter. Instead, he sent it to the police and tweeted the following:

“Thanks to everyone for their support and kind comments. I’ve sent an email to the @TorontoPolice. They reached out and I provided photos and details. I’ll continue to follow up. Racism isn’t cool, I saw it and had to say something. Let’s all do the same if we see it happen.”

Indeed, let’s. But let’s also give Phung a giant round of applause because he handled an allegedly awful scenario in an unusually graceful, responsible way. He reported the cop’s alleged racism not only to TPS, but also on social media and in the press, ensuring it won’t simply go away. (There will undoubtedly be a followup or two to this story.) But just as admirably, Phung chose not to share the photo of the allegedly racist police officer on social media, ensuring that the guy and more crucially, his family, will not be doxxed, harassed and who knows what else.

It must have been tempting to share that photo. I know that I would have been tempted. But Phung’s restraint makes sense when you read what he told this paper following the incident. “I hope this is an opportunity for that police officer to reflect on his behaviour, his words,” Phung told the Star. “And to remember why he became a police officer in the first place. Maybe it wasn’t to direct traffic at a Jays game on a Saturday, but it was to help people.”

This statement reminds me of a sign hanging in a store near my house. It reads “Racist, homophobic and an a-hole? Come back when you’re not.” The implication here is that people can and do change for the better. Being a bigot is not necessarily a fixed state. That Phung chose to deliver such a generous message when he really didn’t have to is proof in my mind that he is a thoroughly decent guy and, at the risk of coming across as painfully corny, a great Canadian role model.

And yet, despite the actor’s admirable handling of the situation, racists have emerged on social media accusing him of staining the good name of the TPS. Their argument goes that one bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole bunch. And besides, maybe Phung misheard. Maybe he’s a liar. Maybe he was the bad driver. Maybe he wasn’t there at all.

This has always been true and perhaps it’s just more obvious in the Trump era, but holy cow: there are lot of white people in this world, and in this country particularly, who cannot admit that racism exists. Racism, to this type, is a thing of the distant past. It’s dead. And any claim by people of colour that it’s alive and well is brushed off in the same way an adult dismisses a kid who thinks she’s seen a ghost.

“You must have been confused.” “Maybe you’re tired and you misunderstood.” “Maybe there’s a logical explanation.”

Racism in Canada is not an illusion. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a fact. Like traffic at a Toronto crosswalk it lingers big time. If you can’t admit it, you’re part of the problem.

via Kim’s Convenience actor deserves a giant round of applause | The Star

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Racial resentment is the biggest predictor of immigration attitudes, study finds

2018/07/12 Leave a comment

Not a surprising correlation:

White Americans’ negative attitudes toward immigrants are driven overwhelmingly by racial prejudices, not “economic anxiety,” according to a working paper by political scientist Steven V. Miller of Clemson University.

Immigration hard-liners, including President Trump, often frame their arguments with ostensibly race-neutral appeals to public safety or economic interest. As Trump said in July 2015, Mexicans are “taking our jobs. They’re taking our manufacturing jobs. They’re taking our money. They’re killing us.” This has led many commentators to conclude that the attitudes driving Trump and his supporters on questions of immigration are primarily economic, rather than racial in nature.

Political scientists have subsequently tested this theory, at least as it applies to Trump support overall, and found it lacking — over and over and over again. But Miller’s paper is extremely useful because it removes the question from the specific context of 2016 and places it in a more general policy realm.

To do this, he draws on nationally representative survey data from the American National Election Studies and the Voter Study Group, two well-established surveys of voter attitudes and behavior. To measure views on immigration, the surveys ask respondents whether levels of immigration should be increased, decreased or left the same.

The surveys measure racial attitudes using a well-established battery of questions on “racial resentment.” Political scientists generally define this as something like “a moral feeling that blacks violate such traditional American values as individualism and self-reliance.” It’s measured via agreement with statements like, “It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites” and “Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.”

The surveys also include a number of ways to measure what’s come to be known as “economic anxiety”: evaluations about the country’s economic health, as well as respondents’ employment status and job market conditions in their communities, counties and states of residence.

Miller also controlled for a number of common economic and demographic variables, such as income, education, age, political party and gender. Respondents’ race wasn’t included as a control because the study looked at the views of only white respondents.

Miller essentially ran a number of statistical tests to determine how white Americans’ economic and racial attitudes correlated with their immigration beliefs: Does being unemployed make white voters more or less likely to support decreasing immigration? What about belief in the strength of the economy? As respondents’ racial resentments increase, what does that do to their views on immigration?

All told, the analyses were “unequivocal that racial resentment is reliably the largest and most precise predictor of attitudes toward immigration,” Miller found. As the chart above shows, “racial resentment has the largest magnitude effect” on the odds that a white respondent will express a preference for less legal immigration. The effect of racial resentment has “nearly six times” the impact as a belief that the economy has gotten worse on respondents’ propensity to favor less immigration.

The racial resentment questions ask only about attitudes toward black Americans. They don’t mention Hispanic immigrants at all. And yet, Miller found, white Americans’ attitudes toward blacks were a powerful predictor of how they felt about immigration. “The familiar racial resentment toward African-Americans is part of a bigger syndrome in which ethnicity/race filters perspectives toward policy, more broadly,” he writes.

Miller cautions that the paper is still in its early stages and has not been peer-reviewed. But his findings do comport with much of the prior research on racial resentment and Trump support, and it makes sense that those attitudes would spill over into more general policy areas as well.

In the end, this should come as no surprise — the empirical case for restricting immigration is a poor one. Studies have consistently shown no link between immigrants and crime, for instance, and the net effect of immigration, legal or otherwise, on the economy tends to be positive, particularly in the long run.

Moreover, a country with a falling fertility rate needs immigration to offset population decline, fill job vacancies and contribute to government coffers.

In the end, Miller writes, “an ounce of racial resentment is worth a pound of economic anxiety.”

Source: Racial resentment is the biggest predictor of immigration attitudes, study finds

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

Germany’s Jewish community issues appeal for anti-Semitism funding oath

2018/07/11 Leave a comment

Echoes of the Canada Summer Jobs attestation:

  • “Both the job* and my organization’s core mandate* respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, colour, mental or physical disability or sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression;”

Curious to see if the ewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism (JFDA) proposal generates similar opposition within Germany:

Just last week, a man wearing the Star of David was beaten down and kicked right in the center of Berlin. Some weeks earlier, a similar incident in Germany’s capital caused public outrage and sparked a nationwide debate on anti-Semitism when a 19-year-old Syrian attacked and Arab Israeli and his companion with a belt in broad daylight. Both victims wore kippahs (traditional Jewish head coverings) in what was an allegedly anti-Semitic attack.

Call for an oath

Enough is enough, according to more than 30 Jewish organizations and communities, who have now issued an appeal to the German government. In a declaration published on Monday, Germany’s Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism (JFDA) called on the authorities to crack down harder against anti-Semitic agitation and attacks. The organization is demanding that in the future, public funding for civil and religious groups should be granted only if those groups have publicly distanced themselves from all forms of anti-Semitism — a kind of pro-democracy oath.

The authors of the declaration stressed that this applies to Muslim organizations as well. Lala Süsskind, chairperson of the JFDA, warned against playing down anti-Semitism among Muslims out of misconceived concern. “Of course, anti-Semitism also exists on the Muslim side,” she told DW. Denying that does not prevent the exploitation of Muslim anti-Semitism by the enemies of Islam, but it is detrimental to combating anti-Semitism effectively and makes a mockery of the victims, Süsskind said. The German government should, therefore, examine very carefully which organizations benefited from public funding, she explained, and whether said organizations were, in effect, adhering to Germany’s Basic Law, or constitution.

As an example, the JDFA cited the controversial debate surrounding the Berlin Institute for Islamic Theology, which is scheduled to open its doors in 2022 as an affiliate of the city’s Humboldt University. It remains a controversial issue to this day how much control should be given to the three representatives of traditional conservative Islamic associations on the institute’s advisory board. They include the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, the Islamic Federation and the Islamic Community of Shiite Parishes. These associations are among those which, according to the Jewish organizations’ representatives, should make some kind of public commitment to democracy.

Even Jewish students in Berlin have been subjected to anti-Semitic harassment

‘Committed to this fight’

The president of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, Aiman Mazyek, does not think of himself as a direct addressee of the Jewish organizations’ initiative. “I take note of the appeal, and I believe it’s correct and important to highlight painful issues, to make every necessary effort to fight anti-Semitism, and that we remain committed to this fight with all the social power that’s available to us,” he told DW, adding that was all he could say about the matter.

Mazyek says his organization is committed to fighting anti-Semitism

After the interview, Mazyek sent DW a newspaper article detailing how he — as president of the Central Council of Muslims — visited the former Buchenwald concentration camp with a group of Syrian refugees in April. Mazyek’s message, which he wants to be understood by DW and by the public, is that his organization is actively campaigning for reconciliation between Muslims and Jews in Germany. He, therefore, said he doesn’t care to comment on appeals, pro-democracy oaths or any other such demands.

Süsskind said she found that response regrettable, and that it reminds her of previous dialogue between Jewish and Islamic organizations on the thorny issue of anti-Semitism. “There are few Muslim associations to which you can speak openly,” she claimed. What’s more, Süsskind added, the appeal was to be explicitly understood as an invitation to all religious groups, political parties and social associations — after all, not only Jewish life in Germany was at stake. “If people are not ready to stand up for their democracy, it goes down the drain,” she said.

An anti-Semitic attack in April prompted a show of solidarity from Berlin’s Jewish community

More financial support

The German government has not yet responded to the appeal issued by the country’s Jewish community. Interior Minister Horst Seehofer had already announced on July 6 that the government plans to extend financial support for the Central Council of Jews in Germany. The annual subsidy will rise from €10 million ($11.75 million) to €13 million, both sides confirmed. The reason behind this was, according to Seehofer, the growing threat to Jewish life in Germany. “Those who threaten our Jewish citizens threaten us all,” he said.

Read more: Anti-Semitism in German schools to be tackled with anti-bullying commissioners

Süsskind stressed that the social climate has changed considerably with respect to Jews. She said she frequently receives hate mail, including one message that read: “In goes the knife, out goes the knife, the Jew’s dead.” When she tried to report the authors of those hate messages to the authorities, she was repeatedly informed that they were protected under freedom of speech legislation. In response, Süsskind asked: “Is that really possible?”

Source: Germany’s Jewish community issues appeal for anti-Semitism funding oath

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

ICYMI: Anne Frank’s Family Was Thwarted by United States Immigration Rules, New Research Shows

2018/07/11 Leave a comment

Not that surprising (Canada was no more welcoming):

Attempts by Anne Frank’s father to escape the Nazis in Europe and travel to the United States were complicated by tight American restrictions on immigration at the time, one of a series of roadblocks that narrowed the Frank family’s options and thrust them into hiding, according to a new report released on Friday.

The research, conducted jointly by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdamand the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, details the challenges faced by the Frank family and thousands of others looking to escape Europe as Nazi Germany gained strength and anti-refugee sentiment swept the United States.

Otto Frank, Anne’s father, was never outright denied an immigration visa, the report concludes, but “bureaucracy, war and time” thwarted his efforts.

In order to obtain a visa, Mr. Frank would have had to gather copies of family birth certificates, military records and proof of a paid ticket to America, among other documents, and be interviewed at the consulate.

In one instance, an application that Mr. Frank said he submitted in 1938 languished in an American consulate in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, amid a swell of similar applications and was lost in a bombing raid in 1940. Mr. Frank wrote to a friend that the extensive papers he had gathered as part of a visa application “have been destroyed there.”

In 1941, as Mr. Frank was again attempting to navigate the matrix of paperwork and sponsors necessary to immigrate, the United States government imposed a stricter review of applications for visas, grew suspicious of possible spies and saboteurs among Jewish refugees, and banned applicants with relatives in German-occupied countries.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned at the time that Jewish refugees could be “spying under compulsion,” and the report states that “national security took precedence over humanitarian concerns.”

Mr. Frank had sought help from an influential friend, Nathan Straus Jr., who was the head of the United States Housing Authority, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s and the son of a Macy’s co-owner. Despite Mr. Straus’s connections, Mr. Frank wrote to him that “all their efforts would be useless” given the immigration climate, the report states.

“We wanted to learn more about the process in itself and what documentation an applicant (e.g. Otto Frank) had to produce,” said Gertjan Broek, a researcher with the Anne Frank House who worked on the latest findings. “In the report, we point out how complex and tedious the process was and how the bombing of the Rotterdam consulate disrupted things.”

The report was released 76 years after the Frank family went into hiding on July 6, 1942. Researchers drew on dozens of pages of correspondence between Mr. Frank and friends, much of which was first made public in 2007, as well as records involving United States immigration policy.

Anne Frank’s diaries describing her time in hiding gave a voice to millions who died at the hands of the Nazis. She was eventually discovered and she died in a concentration camp in 1945, when she was 15.

Mr. Frank was the only member of the immediate family to survive the concentration camps.

News about the Frank family continues to captivate the public, despite challenges in educating younger generations about the Holocaust.

“She has allowed millions of people, maybe hundreds of millions of people, to identify with persecution at the worst level,” said Richard Breitman, a professor emeritus at American University who has written about the family’s attempts to immigrate to the United States. “Any time there is a glimmer of new information, it’s a big story.”

The new research comes at a time when President Trump’s attempts to curb immigration have been likened to those in the World War II era. Mr. Trump has repeatedly sought to justify letting fewer people into the country by arguing that criminals and terrorists could be among the immigrants and refugees seeking to enter.

Mr. Breitman underscored those similarities, pointing to debates over immigration policy today and after Sept. 11. Mr. Breitman said that as Mr. Frank was trying to get to the United States, the country was instituting an “extreme cutback” on immigration.

“It wasn’t just extremists and wackos who believed that there was a serious threat to the security of the United States in 1940 that justified an immigration cutback,” Mr. Breitman said. “You can fill in the rest of it after 9/11 and today.”

Mr. Broek said the researchers did not intend to highlight parallels.

“The Anne Frank House researches into the life of Anne Frank and her family, to tell her story as accurate as possible,” Mr. Broek said. “The attempted immigration is a part of that story too.”

Filed under Holocaust, Immigration Tagged with ,

ICYMI – Shree Paradkar: Whataboutism is just a trolling tactic — and it deserves to be shut down

2018/07/11 Leave a comment

While parallels and comparisons can be useful in providing perspective, excessive use is more to divert rather than engage in conversation:

This much is for sure: there’s no dearth of injustices around the world. But just when you tackle the proverbial elephant, up pops this logical fallacy: “What about that other bit here, what about that bit there?”

When I, as a Canadian from India, write about racism and white supremacy, the predictable question is, “But what about the caste system?”

Well, what about it? And what is the commenter doing to dismantle it, or any set of unjust hierarchies?

The caste system has astounding parallels to white supremacy, except it’s even older. It’s the same violent and heritable hierarchy that enforces the creation of an impoverished class, builds societies and prosperity for some on the backs of those it stamps down and then blames them for their own marginalization.

I am a beneficiary of this system. These are the complex contradictions that some of us hold as we navigate and nudge a system towards genuine egalitarianism.

A new survey, the first of its kind, shows caste discrimination playing out among South Asians in the U.S. I have no reason to believe it wouldn’t in Canada.

But its existence has little bearing on the truth of white supremacy. People who throw up the caste apartheid in response to racial apartheid don’t really care about the oppressed Dalits and Adivasis; they’re using them to score points in a verbal argument.

In the bargain they show a few things: That they are unable to look past the fact that a non-white Canadian (“the other”) is critiquing Canadian systems, that they are defensive, conflating white supremacy with white people, which is telling, that they are indulging in a whataboutism, a tactic that has seen a recent upswing in usage.

According to Merriam-Webster, “whataboutism” is a rhetorical device that “is not merely the changing of a subject (‘What about the economy?’) to deflect away from an earlier subject as a political strategy; it’s essentially a reversal of accusation, arguing that an opponent is guilty of an offence just as egregious or worse than what the original party was accused of doing, however unconnected the offences may be.”

Another predictable whataboutism is, “What about Black crime?”

Well, what about it? And what are the commenters doing beyond looking at crime stories, Black skin and going one plus one equals the same old tired tropes?

It’s an ahistorical view that discounts the root causes of the violence and is usually raised to suggest Black people are inherently criminal, or that they are architects of their own oppression.

Like as if, since the end of slavery, Black people in the U.S. and Canada have been given job opportunities, quality education, access to housing, equitable health services, and fair treatment by law makers and lawkeepers.

Given that background, what we should marvel at is the ongoing resilience of Black people who excel despite these conditions.

There are many more convenient whataboutisms.

Some create false equivalences: “What about the Indigenous people who were killing each other?” As if internecine warfare is the same as the violence of colonization.

Others are irrelevant. “What about how women are treated in the Middle East?” As if that should impact how Canada treats its women from different backgrounds. “What about FGM?”

“What about slavery in Africa’s past?”

“What about Irish history here?”

All these topics can be addressed in detail — many have been on these pages and elsewhere — but it’s never enough to satisfy the next person who doesn’t care to educate themself but feels entitled to answers to the same questions, again and again.

Sometimes, however, legitimate questions on context, holding the powerful to account and challenging falsehoods can be falsely labelled as whataboutism.

Waging international war on the pretext of rescuing local populations from human rights violations, for instance: “What about the human rights violations you will enact there? What is your accountability?”

A political party claiming to be a friend of Indigenous people: “What about your record on pipelines or policies on access to drinking water? What about your leader asking Indigenous people to leave their reserves?”

A person who uses “race is a social construct” as a tool to dismiss the existence of racism: “What about” — and there is literally an embarrassing richness of data to pick from to show the real life, detrimental, even fatal effects of racism.

True whataboutism, however, is just a trolling tactic, a means to deflect from the original point and dictate the terms of discussion.

To stay on point, the best answer to such a “what about” is: “Don’t change the subject.”

Source: Shree Paradkar: Whataboutism is just a trolling tactic — and it deserves to be shut down

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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