How Cheddar Man shatters accepted views of immigration | Shree Paradkar

2018/02/10 Leave a comment

The complexities of migration, history and identity:

You’ve got to confess it’s worthy of chuckles and cackles.

A made-for-Internet scientific discovery that at the same time strikes at the core of modern racial strife. An announcement Wednesday that DNA tests on the oldest complete skeleton in Britain, that heart and ancestral home of many white people around the world, suggest that the first modern Briton was blue-eyed, yes, but very dark-skinned and curly-haired.

The Cheddar Man, named thus for the English village of Cheddar where his skeleton was discovered in 1903, is about 10,000 years old.

To add salt to a supremacist’s wound, scientists said that the genes for lighter skin likely came from, you got it, immigrants from the Middle East.

Oh snap.

Dark-skinned native Britons and light-skinned immigrants.

It’s like reaching into the eye of a storm and fitting it with sunglasses.

Disorienting.

Those brave lads and fair maidens on glorious historical British dramas on TV — descendents of immigrants.

The image of God himself, majestic, kindly old white guy in white robes with flowing white beard — fashioned on immigrants.

Imagine being Nigel Farage, the former leader of the U.K. Independence Party, who proudly stood in front of a Nazi-era-like poster with the slogan, “Breaking point: the EU has failed us all,” and a photo of a winding lineup of migrants of colour.

Now he would have to change that slogan to “Breaking point: I come from them. I am them.”

Such horror.

No wonder there were hopeful comments online about Cheddar Man such as, “Who’s to say the person’s not a foreign visitor” or a call to index this as “fake news,” or the insistence that this was a finding driven by a social justice agenda to force poor victimized British people into accepting mass migration.

The Cheddar Man, 10,000 years old though he may be, absolutely has bearing on contemporary debates on race and migration.

This discovery of a dark-skinned original Briton doesn’t put the race genie back into the bottle in an equalizing “we’re all immigrants” kind of way.

On the contrary, in exposing the racial fluidity of Britons, Cheddar Man delivers a sucker punch to toxic ideas that drive the white power mobs who in turn fuel xenophobic policies. It reveals the basis of their quick codes equating skin colour to valour or danger as nothing but fear-based fiction.

Scientists have long argued that race is not a biological concept. People of one race — or at least people who can be grouped together with similar physical traits — are not genetically homogenous.

The concept of races evolved as a way of justifying slavery and to maintain an economy founded on slave labour; it was easier to rationalize the brutalization of the “savage” than to face the unconscionable alternative.

From then on, it continues to be a favoured tool to demonize “the other.”

Around the world, oppressor groups have always found identity a useful tool with which to assert themselves as inherently superior, as “natural” holders of power, be it on the basis of race, gender, sexual identity, religious identity, tribal identity or caste.

That race isn’t real does not mean racism isn’t real.

Anti-Black racism is so widespread and global in scope, that I wish scientists would hurry up and create a bust out of the fossils of the 750,000-year old Peking Man, for instance, and in keeping with the Out of Africa theory, definitively establish Blackness as the root ancestry of Chinese people.

Such knowledge might have given the Hubei Provincial Museum in Wuhan pause before it displayed a photography exhibit that juxtaposed wild African animals with Black African people.

I wish they were able create a bust that would depict an original “Indian Man,” one who existed before the Aryans and Dravidians did 5,000 years ago, as black-skinned — darker the better. Such knowledge might inject a modicum of humility before privileged Indians wreak racist violence on African students and caste-related violence on Dalits.

When nations look to figure out where they’re going next, it makes sense sometimes to turn back and look at the past for clues.

Being reminded of a shared heritage with people they consider coming from “s—hole” countries, might give Western leaders, including a certain U.S. president, a few pointers as they ponder immigration policies.

These leaders might read data helpfully put forward by Arvind Magesan, associate professor of economics, University of Calgary, in The Conversation. That might help them discover that although their own policies play a part in making those countries “s—holes,” those immigrants continue to be better educated, better employed (although lower-paid) than those of, shall we say, “Norway-like” countries.

This is one way the discovery of Cheddar Man’s skin colour could have the power to force aside the ahistorical lens with which we view our fellow humans.

At least for a few days.

via How Cheddar Man shatters accepted views of immigration | Toronto Star

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‘Weaponization’ of free speech prompts talk of a new hate law

2018/02/10 Leave a comment

One to watch:

The climate for hate speech regulation in Canada appears to be shifting.

Traditional free speech advocates are reconsidering the status quo they helped create, in which hate speech is only a Criminal Code charge that requires political approval, and so is rarely prosecuted. There is even talk of resurrecting the defunct and much maligned ban on internet hate speech, Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

The latest example was a lecture this week by Omar Mouallem, an Edmonton journalist and board member of free expression group PEN Canada, in which he argued online racists have “weaponized” free speech against Muslims, and Canada should consider a new anti-hate law to stop them.

Mouallem told a University of Alberta audience that public discourse is “fatally flawed,” and overrun with hate propagandists who traffic in lies and provocations in order to pose as censorship victims.

The far right has “co-opted” the issue of free speech, and their activism is not a principled defence of a Charter value, but “a sly political strategy to divide opponents on the left, humiliate them and cast them as hypocrites and unconstitutional, to clear a way for unconstitutional ideas,” Mouallem said in an advance email interview.

The traditional liberal response of public censure and rebuttal is no longer effective because it just “devolves into a pissing match that goes nowhere and only makes people double down on their opinions,” he said. “Given that Facebook groups and social media are the meeting point for hate groups to organize, and that online hate speech has a great ability to spread wider and faster, I think special regulation is worth considering.”

It is striking to hear that from a board member of PEN Canada, which is devoted to fighting censorship and defending freedom of expression, and was instrumental in the legislative repeal of Section 13, a law in the Canadian Human Rights Act that banned repeated messages, by phone or internet, that were “likely to expose” protected groups to hatred or contempt.

The lecture follows news that the federal Liberal government is openly mulling bringing back Section 13, which was repealed by Parliament in 2014, but later found by courts to be constitutionally valid. It allowed for legal orders banning offenders from engaging in further hate speech, on pain of criminal contempt charges, and provided for fines of $10,000.

It also follows the backtracking of another press freedom group, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, which launched a petition for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to “disinvite” U.S. President Donald Trump from a G7 Summit on the grounds that his administration’s attacks on press freedom have harmed American democracy. That petition was deleted soon after it was announced, amid criticism that it hypocritically also violated the principles of free expression.

Even libraries have illustrated the shift. A memorial held in a Toronto library last year for Barbara Kulaszka, a prominent lawyer for Canadian hate propagandists, led the Toronto Public Library to change its room-booking policy, allowing officials to refuse bookings that are “likely to promote, or would have the effect of promoting, discrimination, contempt or hatred of any group.”

Tasleem Thawar, executive director of PEN Canada, said she encourages diverse perspectives on the board. There has been no change to the group’s official position “that an educated, thoughtful, and vibrantly expressive citizenry is the best defence against the spread of hateful ideologies,” she said.

“If the federal government were to propose a new law (against hate speech), we would certainly comment on the specifics and its possible effects,” she said. “However, PEN is also committed to dispelling hatreds, as stated in the PEN International Charter, including on the basis of identity markers like class, race, gender, and nationality. And it is true that hateful, marginalizing and even demonizing speech can chill the freedom of expression of the groups who are being subjected to such public bigotry.”

All this might be evidence that the culture war over Canada’s uniquely balanced approach to hate speech is set to flare up again. Old arguments are being repurposed to fit modern media. Laws that were written in the age of telephone hotlines and printed newspapers are being reconsidered in the context of Twitter, Facebook and Google.

As ever, religion — especially Islam — is at the core of the debate, according to Richard Moon, the University of Windsor law professor who authored an influential 2008 report for the Canadian Human Rights Commission that urged it to stop regulating online hate via Section 13.

In his forthcoming book Putting Faith in Hate: When Religion is the Source or Target of Hate Speech, Moon describes the traditional distinction between speech that attacks a belief, which is typically protected by law, and speech that attacks a group, which can rise to the level of banned hate speech. He argues that our understanding of religion complicates this distinction, because religion is both a personal commitment and a cultural identity. Hate speech, then, often works by falsely attributing an objectionable belief to every member of a cultural group.

“Most contemporary anti-Muslim speech takes this form, presenting Islam as a regressive and violent belief system that is incompatible with liberal democratic values. The implication is that those who identify as Muslims – those who hold such beliefs – are dangerous and should be treated accordingly. Beliefs that may be held by a fringe element in the tradition are falsely attributed to all Muslims,” Moon writes.

Mouallem, who does not identify as Muslim, is a former rapper, freelance writer, and co-author of a book on the Fort McMurray wildfire. He said he does not advocate the return of Section 13 exactly as it was. It often worked, he said, but it is “too tainted.”

Section 13 was a “messy, if not farcical process,” he said, made more so by the “manipulation” of Richard Warman, the lawyer and former Canadian Human Rights Commission staffer who effectively monopolized the law, filing nearly every case and eventually winning them all, sometimes after posing online as a neo-Nazi to gather evidence. It was also “misused,” he said, by Canadian Muslim leaders on the “wishy-washy” case of alleged anti-Islam hate speech in Maclean’s magazine.

But Canada should have some kind of “online clause” that addresses both the “uniqueness of online content” and this current historical moment in which there is “widespread vilification” of Muslims and “rapid mobilization of extremist groups.”

Now there are “flagrant” examples that would be caught by such a law, he said, such as Ezra Levant’s use of the term “rapefugees.”

“Allowing hate speech to remain in the public sphere actually signals that it’s socially acceptable, which gives licence to perpetuate it, and eventually can make it mainstream,” Mouallem said.

The expression that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” meaning hate speech is best countered by more and better speech is “ineffective when you’re dealing with majority tyranny and certain discrimination is widely accepted. This is the unique moment of hate speech in Canada and much of the ‘West’ right now,” he said. “Society has made an exception for Islam.”

Source: ‘Weaponization’ of free speech prompts talk of a new hate law

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Taking Back the Language | Noah Rothman

2018/02/09 Leave a comment

Nice reminder that language can but both ways by Rothman:

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stumbled into controversy this week, although it was perhaps unwarranted. Trudeau became the subject of derision and mockery when he interrupted a woman at a town hall to correct her use of the term “mankind,” suggesting that she replace this dated designation with the more inclusive “peoplekind.” He only offered his proposal after enduring several minutes of a rambling new-age monologueregarding the chemical composition of “maternal love.” Trudeau’s interjection was probably flippant, but neither his interlocutor nor his critics seemed to notice. It’s hard to blame them.

When it comes to subservience to the many demands that identity politics makes on language and behavior, Canada’s prime minister takes a back seat to no one. It’s only prudent to assume Trudeau’s mawkishness is earnest. What’s more, the fact that “gendered” nouns and pronouns, including “mankind,” find themselves in the censors’ crosshairs isn’t exactly news. The popular grammar-checking program Grammarly flags “mankind” for “possible gender-biased language” and suggests more neutral substitutes like “humankind” or “humanity.” Learning to love unidiomatic expressions and consigning gender-specific language to history is a fixation of political activists posing as academicians, even if legitimate etymological scholars cannot support these arguments by citing linguistic corpora. Those who resent an increasingly overbroad definition of what constitutes offensive language are primed for a fight.

Language policing has been the stock-in-trade of a particular type of activist for decades, much to the consternation of both conservatives and liberals interested more in clarity than conformity. Recently, though, the intramural debate on the left over the limited utility of scrutinizing potentially objectionable speech rather than the ideas conveyed by that speech has been relegated to the back burner. That’s for a good reason.

Donald Trump’s presidency, much like his candidacy, is a brusque counterattack against “PC culture.” Often, what Trump and his supporters call “politically incorrect” language is just plain rudeness. The value of the kind of speech they find delightfully provocative isn’t its concision but its capacity to offend the right people. Thus, some self-styled arbiters of linguistic enlightenment might be tempted to dismiss Trump’s campaign against ambiguous semantics as nothing more than a brutish primal scream. If so, they would have failed to properly appreciate the threat Trump and the presidential pulpit he commands represent to their capacity to shape the terms of the debate through language. Trump isn’t limited to displays of rhetorical brute force. Sometimes, he and his speechwriters are capable of compelling eloquence.

Amid a blizzard of FBI texts, dueling intelligence committee memos, and legalisms regarding the oversight of America’s necessarily secretive espionage courts, the State of the Union address has all but been forgotten in Washington. It’s less likely, though, that a well-received speech watched by at least 46 million Americans will be so quickly forgotten across the country. And that should concern liberals because if there was any single line in that speech that won’t be overlooked, it was one that cuts at the heart of the Democratic Party’s ability to lay claim to the moral high ground. “My duty and the sacred duty of every elected official in this chamber is to defend Americans, to protect their safety, their families, their communities and their right to the American dream,” Trump said. “Because Americans are dreamers, too.” This was a masterful line. Its potency has been underestimated, and not just by those who resent the restrictive immigration policies it was designed to advance.

The name of the bipartisan 2001 “Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act” transgressed a little in order to achieve a lot for the children of illegal immigrants brought into the U.S. as minors. Referring to this demographic as “alien” is taboo, and an offense against modern sensibilities. But to describe them as “DREAMers” yields a windfall of sympathy for this already deserving group of largely naturalized non-citizens. Trump’s turn of phrase spreads the dreaming around, thus diluting the designation DREAMer of much of its unique sympathy.

Democrats might have missed the significance of this expression amid their irritation over another set phrase in that speech: “chain migration.” Trump’s use of this term during the State of the Union Address to describe the process by which legal immigrants sponsor members of their extended family to become American citizens elicited boos from Democrats. Many implied the phrase is a new invention with racist connotations, but the term has been used by policymakers (including some of these same Democrats) for decades. Maybe it was the self-evident hypocrisy, or maybe it was the contrived effort to move the goalposts. For whatever reason, the Democrats’ campaign to label “chain migration” a racist term landed with a thud. Time was that the left could dictate the terms of a debate by controlling the language of its participants, but their grip on the national dialogue may be slipping. The power of the presidency—you’ll forgive the expression—trumps the braying of the pedantic opposition.

The energy expended by political activists on policing speech is not wasted; dictating the boundaries of what constitutes acceptable discourse is a profitable and productive enterprise. If the right is getting into the game, they’re only following a course forged by their political adversaries.

via Taking Back the Language | commentary

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For women of colour, there’s a gap within the pay gap: Melayna Williams

2018/02/09 Leave a comment

Have been working through some of the Census data and the gender gap works both ways depending on the group as the above chart indicates.

Given Williams’ focus on the Black community, which the data supports, her perspective is understandable but the data shows a more complex reality among the different minority groups and gender:

The gender wage gap remains a pertinent issue in Canada, despite how long women have been lending their labour to the workforce. And we often hear statistics that contrast two categories: men and women. On this, the numbers are stark.

But that data doesn’t incorporate filters around identity and background of women, an omission that effectively erases the compounding discrimination faced by non-white women in Canada. A lens that compares only men and women sets up women’s rights as a replica of patriarchy, where one group is favoured over everyone else; in doing so it reinforces the rigid power structures that have brought us to this point. But including race in the analysis reveals a different kind of gender gap that’s perhaps even more alarming than the broader issue.

In a 2011 Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report examining census data from 2006, Sheila Block and Grace-Edward Galabuzi found dire income disparities for racialized Canadians. They earn 81.4 cents for each dollar white Canadians make, and the jobs are typically less desirable: low wages, precarious, non-permanent. Add the filter of gender, though, and a much wider, more worrisome gulf appears: “Racialized women earned 55.6 cents for every dollar non-racialized men earned in 2005 . . . Racialized men made 77.9 cents for every dollar non-racialized men earned,” wrote Block and Galabuzi. “The gap narrows even further when comparing racialized and non-racialized women. Racialized women earned 88.2 cents for every dollar that non-racialized women earned.”

Research has been done to identify the core issues and advance solutions around the position of Indigenous and Canadian women of colour in the work market. “Inequality, discrimination and a segmented labour market have left women of colour with earnings at just 64 per cent of men’s, and Aboriginal women’s earnings at just 46 per cent of men’s,” wrote Lisa Lambert in a 2010 paper titled “Gender wage gap even more pronounced for Aboriginal women.” For women of colour and Indigenous women in Canada, she writes, “the earnings situation is inexcusable.”

How are we closer to gender parity in Canada when the gender gap we often think about ignores the unique struggles of women of colour and Indigenous women? If white men are still making more money than white women, can this be acknowledged while addressing the fact that women of colour fall far below both? If we actually believe in the principles of equality with which Canada so proudly associates itself, we must acknowledge both crises: the gap between men and women, and that between racialized women and everyone else.

Source: For women of colour, there’s a gap within the pay gap

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How the Australian Constitution, and its custodians, ended up so wrong on dual citizenship

2018/02/07 Leave a comment

For those interested, a good analysis of how Australia ended up in this mess regarding dual citizenship and political qualifications by Hal Colebatch of University of New South Wales:

The final session of the constitutional convention was held in Melbourne early in 1898. There was no further discussion of what became the now-infamous section 44, and a drafting committee took over to prepare a final draft.

Edmund Barton – soon to become Australia’s first prime minister – was the chair and dominant figure. He insisted on working till 4 or 5am, even though the other two members of the committee had gone to bed and only Robert Garran, the secretary, was left to maintain the illusion of a committee.

After four days of drafting, Barton presented the convention, on its second-last day, with 400 amendments. He proposed a three-hour break for the delegates to study them, after which they could be put to the vote en bloc.

Barton assured the convention that there was only one amendment of substance – to section 44(ii). What he did not say was that section 44(i) had been completely rewritten, changing it from an active voice (“done any act whereby”) to a passive voice (“is a subject or citizen … or is entitled to”).

No attention was drawn to this change, there was no explanation of it, and there was no time for debate on any clause unless someone objected to it. The constitutional text that proved so significant more than a century later was a last-minute change, drafted in private and accepted out of weariness.

In his history of the convention, J.A. La Nauze points out that, by this stage, the delegates “had had enough”, but muses:

it may one day interest a curious lawyer to inquire whether judicial review has lingered with significant consequences on new words approved on trust and intended … merely ‘to put the wishes of the convention in more complete and concise form’.

As it turned out, it interested more than the curious lawyer, and created a problem which has yet to be adequately managed.

Appealing to the umpire?

The constitution was rather unclear about how these provisions would be enforced. It said both that questions about qualification could be settled by each house, but also that “any person” who believed that an elected representative was disqualified by section 44 could sue them in “any court of competent jurisdiction”.

In any case, there was little call for either until the High Court decided in 1999 that the UK was a foreign power.

Even then it refused to hear a case calling for Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard to produce evidence they had renounced their UK citizenship, on the basis that they had declared that they were qualified, and so the court should presume that they were. To do otherwise would be a vexation and an abuse of the court’s time.

But when the court did deign to interest itself in the matter, it took the traditional High Court view that it was not interested in the problem, or what the writers of the constitution were trying to do, but only with the possible meaning that a black-letter lawyer could squeeze from these words, irrespective of its impact on the governing of Australia.

Where does this leave us?

The situation now is that the qualifications for candidature for the Australian parliament are set by the parliament, but the disqualifications are largely set by foreign governments via the High Court. This diminishes the ability of electorates to choose the representative they want (though, when given the chance, electorates show what they think of the High Court’s action by returning the ousted members in the ensuing byelection).

And the High Court’s escapade in the china shop is not yet over, for it has yet to rule on the disqualification of those who are “entitled to” foreign citizenship, even if they have not applied for it. If the court applied the same logic that it has used in the cases already decided, this would disqualify not only any Jew, but also anyone with a Jewish parent, grandparent or spouse, all of whom are entitled to Israeli citizenship under the Israeli Law of Return.

The best course would be to start with recognising the problem, rather than searching for a preferred solution. In contemporary Australia, identities are often complex, and citizenship entitlements may be multiple and overlapping. How these are to be recognised in the qualifications for candidature demands a period of public discussion culminating in political action.

The only way we could get this is to take the matter out of the hands of the High Court and foreign governments and return the task of defining qualifications and disqualifications for candidature to parliament. This could be done by adding to section 44 the phrase “until the parliament otherwise provides”, which is used in section 30 on qualifications, and at a number of other points in the constitution.

This would be a logical and constitutional response to the political problem that has landed on us. If the five main parties in the parliament (all of which have had their parliamentary representation threatened by the High Court’s actions) supported a referendum to achieve this change, it would probably be carried.

The voters, too, as they showed in New England and Bennelong, have had enough. They want the political leaders to lead.

via How the Australian Constitution, and its custodians, ended up so wrong on dual citizenship

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A reckoning on Black people and marijuana is a long time coming: Paradkar

2018/02/07 Leave a comment

Important aspect with compelling arrest stats:

As the banned substance begins to burgeon into a multi-billion-dollar industry, the once-petty crooks, many of them Black, with the grassroots know-how of how to run the business and who could become contributing members of society, are once again being shut out because they have criminal records.

The government has talked about amnesty for past marijuana crimes that would mean erasure of those records. But it is unlikely to take any action until after legalization — and already, others with money have plunked their grubby fingers in this pie to make more money.

This includes, of course, that shameless hypocrite and former chief of multiple police forces Julian Fantino, who helped passed into law Bill C-10 that included mandatory minimum sentences on people for having as few as six plants.

On Friday, The Canadian Press reported that a group of frustrated lawyers in Toronto is considering a class-action lawsuit against the government to push it into granting cannabis amnesty.

They should just do it.

Some advocates are also seeking an apology.

A reckoning of the unfairness with which anything related to marijuana has been treated is a long time coming.

Even the usage of the word marijuana — which comes from Mexico—came into being during the Prohibition Era to warn off Americans by appealing to their xenophobic sensibilities with the suggestion that it could lead to the intermingling of races.

In Canada, too, marijuana has proven handy as a system of racial control. In July last year, the Star published an analysis of 10 years of Toronto police data — including two years when Fantino was police chief — to show that Black people with no history of criminal convictions were three times more likely to be arrested for possession of small amounts of marijuana than white people.

The users are Black and white at about equal rates, but the people behind bars are disproportionately Black.

More recently, the American experience shows that even in states where the plant is legalized, while overall numbers of arrests have plummeted, Black people are still arrested at higher rates.

Four times higher in Washington, D.C., 10 times higher in Alaska.

From Richard Nixon’s so-called “war on drugs” to Ronald Reagan’s drug war to Bill Clinton’s “tough on crime” laws, the crackdown on drugs has always been an assault on race.

The scholar Michelle Alexander points out in her seminal book The New Jim Crow that Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman recalled that Nixon “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

The Reagan administration created an indelible link between drug abuse and Black people, she wrote in HuffPost. It hired staff whose responsibility it was “to publicize inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores, and drug-related violence.”

Clinton’s policies wrought the highest increase in number of people imprisoned.

But a change was coming. The face of drug users in the public imagination was getting lighter-skinned. Think Breaking Bad. Ozark.

“Changing attitudes and policies became possible in large part because the media was no longer saturated with images of Black and brown drug dealers,” Alexander said at a Drug Policy Reform conference in 2017. “The colour of drug users and dealers got whiter in the public imagination, and so we, as a nation, got nicer.”

Nicer in Canada would mean erasing criminal records without a fight, the flawed structure of the RCMP’s national criminal record database notwithstanding. That database can show whether someone has a record for possessing an illegal drug, but not necessarily which one, according to a report in Global News.

“That means that erasing marijuana possession (or trafficking) records could turn into a painstaking, manual process, involving searches in court and police archives across the country.”

No reason why people imprisoned for petty crimes should pay for the carelessness of those trafficking in power.

via A reckoning on Black people and marijuana is a long time coming | Toronto Star

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How political Islam is gaining ground in Southeast Asia despite the fall of Islamic State | South China Morning Post

2018/02/07 Leave a comment

More on Southeast Asia and the risks of political Islam:

The religious insurgency in the southern Philippines, which saw the capture of Marawi by fighters aligned to Islamic State last year, revealed the violent power of political religiosity. Given that Southeast Asia is home to a large proportion of the global Muslim population, transregional alliances formed between Southeast Asian terror groups and IS represent the possibility of religious warfare in the Middle East spilling over into Southeast Asia. The battlefield defeat of IS should not lull anyone into complacency. As a guerilla group, its scattered warriors remain a threat to nations, particularly the home states to which they are expected to return.

The growth of political Islam is undermining the very vocabulary of the public sphere in Southeast Asia

What unites the different manifestations of political Islam, ranging from electoral participation and street politics to outright terrorist war, is the idea of the capture of state power and its use to implement religious law. If there is a tussle, it is between the parliamentary and insurrectionary paths to power. However, the political outcome would be similar in both cases: the establishment of confessional states that could be expected to disenfranchise not only non-Muslims but also Muslims who owe national allegiance to secular democratic polities.

Indeed, what is frightening is how the growth of political Islam is undermining the very vocabulary of the public sphere in Southeast Asia. Words such as “liberalism”, “pluralism” and “democracy” have become suspect among even mainstream politicians, to say nothing of “secularism” or “socialism”. Liberals, pluralists and democrats are finding themselves in the defensive position of having to work their way delicately around the discursive space that the religious right has captured.

The rise of political Islam has generated countervailing forces in other religions. The popularity of a Thai Buddhist monk is a case in point. He rose to prominence after urging Buddhists across Thailand to burn down a mosque as punishment for every monk killed in the insurgency in the country’s south. He has made common cause with a monk in Myanmar famous for his anti-Muslim views. Given the violent dispossession of Myanmar’s Muslim Rohingya population last year, the potential of religious intolerance to dismantle the known order is immense.

In a far cry from the notion of Southeast Asia being a mosaic of religious identities, the chief threat to the region today comes not from foreign predators or new global ideological wars, but from the agency that religious dissension is gaining as a marker in regional relations.

Religions do not pass, but their violent politicisation can. Southeast Asian Muslims must understand that, while they belong legitimately to the global Islamic community or the ummah, they exist as well among other communities. China to the north and India to the west – both largely non-Muslim-majority countries – constitute a major segment of the world’s population. Europe and the Americas are largely non-Muslim as well. It is only the Middle East, Central Asia and a small part of South Asia which are demographic partners of Muslim Southeast Asia.

That partnership cannot challenge the economic, military and ideational heft of the rest of the world. Even if the non-Muslim sphere were to be riven by conflict between its two foremost players – the United States and China – it would pull together to resist any encroachment into its religio-political identity.
Support for Islamic State? In Indonesia, there’s an app for that

Equally, however, global powers cannot wish political Islam and its extremes away. The ability of terrorist groups to disrupt everyday life reiterates an old truth: it is not superiority of numbers and power that matters but what even a handful of people can do to disrupt peaceful political processes and change. After all, the essentially guerilla tactics employed by al-Qaeda and IS drew out nothing less than the concerted efforts of much more powerful states.

A moment of hiatus has appeared in the tired militarisation of global affairs. That moment will not last long. Political Islam’s Manichean division of the world into the spheres of believers and infidels is being felt keenly in Southeast Asia.

Indonesia, home to the largest number of Muslims on Earth, will be the test case of how that division plays out. A violent showdown will be avoided if most Indonesian Muslims subscribe to the idea that they can be faithful to their religion while owing political allegiance to a non-religious state. If the Indonesian state gives way to the demands of the PKS, the stage will be set for more intensive great-power intervention in Southeast Asia.

Unlike economic systems, which promise salvation in the present, religions do so in a hereafter that can destroy the present on the way to its fulfilment.

Political Islam is a danger.

via How political Islam is gaining ground in Southeast Asia despite the fall of Islamic State | South China Morning Post

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Immigrants are largely behind Canada’s status as one of the best-educated countries

2018/02/05 Leave a comment

The difference among visible minority groups, including gender, is one of the more interesting aspects of this study:

Canada can credit immigrants for making it one of the best-educated countries in the world.

Not only do many newcomers arrive with university degrees, their high expectations for their children’s academic achievements also appear to lead to the pursuit of higher education among their children, according to a new internal government analysis.

The Immigration Department report, obtained through an access to information request, found 36 per cent of the children of immigrants aged 25 to 35 held university degrees, compared to 24 per cent of their peers with Canadian-born parents.

Among the top immigration source countries, more than 50 per cent of the children of immigrants from China and India graduated from university, while one-third of those born to Filipino immigrant parents finished their degrees.

By comparison, between 30 and 37 per cent of children to immigrants from Western Europe completed university, followed by those from Latin America and the Caribbean at a rate ranging from 23 to 28 per cent — about par with children with Canadian-born parents, the report said.

“The educational attainment of the parents matters; children with highly educated parents are more likely to be highly educated themselves. And immigrant parents in Canada tend to have higher levels of educational attainment than Canadian-born parents,” said the report by researcher Garnett Picot for the department’s research and evaluation unit.

“Parents’ expectations regarding education matters, and immigrant families, particularly Asian families, tend to have higher educational expectations for their children, on average, than families with Canadian-born parents.”

Picot, who declined the Star’s interview request, said family income did not seem to play a role in the gaps in educational attainment.

“This is important because many immigrant families struggle economically,” he wrote in his article, titled The Educational and Labour market Outcomes of the Children of Immigrants: A Success to be Preserved.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ranked Canada second only to Korea as the highest educated nation in the world in 2016, with over 60 per cent of Canadians with a post-secondary education.

An Immigration Canada spokesperson said Picot’s study was part of the government’s attempt to monitor the long-term performance of immigration policies and programs by looking at how the children of immigrants are doing in terms of their educational and economic outcomes.

via Immigrants are largely behind Canada’s status as one of the best-educated countries | Toronto Star

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

M-103 report makes few recommendations about Islamophobia

2018/02/03 Leave a comment

One of the relatively few articles to date on the committee report (L’islamophobie divise encore le Parlement canadien being another). Have only glanced at the report but this article provides a reasonable summary.

Amused that the Committee advocated restoration of Canada’s Action Plan Against Racism. Apart from funding the collection of police-reported hate crimes data by StatsCan, most of the other initiatives were of limited utility (during the evaluation of CAPAR, I stated that it was too small in scope and impact and it would be no great loss if it was not renewed – save for hate crimes).

The policy and program capacity of the multiculturalism program has been greatly reduced so it will be interesting to see whether the government response is serious or, as previously with CAPAR, largely symbolic:

The report arising from the Liberals’ anti-Islamophobia motion, M-103, was made public on Thursday, and calls for a national action plan on racism and religious discrimination, better data collection on hate crimes and cultural sensitivity training for law enforcement.

But the report, titled “Taking Action Against Systemic Racism and Religious Discrimination Including Islamophobia,” makes almost no recommendations that specifically target Islamophobia, despite months of controversy over the use of the term in the motion tabled by Liberal MP Iqra Khalid in December 2016.

The report does recommend that Jan. 29 “be designated as a National Day of Remembrance and Action on Islamophobia, and other forms of religious discrimination,” in response to requests from Muslim groups after six Muslim worshippers were killed in a Quebec City mosque shooting on Jan. 29, 2017. On the one-year anniversary of the attack, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a statement about the shooting and the importance of fighting Islamophobia, but did not declare the day a national day of action. Last week, the heritage department told the Post the government “has received and noted the proposal” from the National Council of Canadian Muslims.

Of the 30 recommendations, only one other specifically mentions Islamophobia, and only to say that the government should “actively condemn systemic racism and religious discrimination including Islamophobia.”

The report does not recommend the creation of any new laws. M-103 itself is a motion, not a law.

The original motion, which called on the government to conduct a study and come up with an approach to eliminate racism and religious discrimination “including Islamophobia,” generated a firestorm of controversy last year. Conservatives claimed the motion would restrict free speech because, they felt, the term Islamophobia is poorly defined. During committee hearings, several witnesses expressed concern that the motion would effectively stifle criticism of Islam.

But the recommendations outlined in the M-103 report target racism and religious discrimination in much broader terms. The report suggests the government should update the Canadian Action Plan Against Racism, published in 2005, and broaden it to include religious discrimination. Other recommendations call for the government to establish uniform guidelines and a national database for the collection of hate-crime data.

The report also recommends that federal, provincial and territorial governments take a closer look at the comparability of education and credentials obtained outside Canada, to combat employment barriers. Other recommendations call for more funding for research and for law enforcement to investigate Internet hate speech.

The report notes that the committee heard “differing views on the use of the term Islamophobia,” but does not offer an accepted definition of the term.

In a dissenting report, the Conservatives cast doubt on the premise of the whole exercise, calling into question whether Canadians are actually living in an “increasing public climate of hate and fear,” as the motion states. Their report suggests the per capita rate of hate crimes has declined since 2009.

The Conservatives also listed 26 different definitions of the term Islamophobia provided by different witnesses who appeared before the committee. “The concerns raised, regarding the dangers of an over-broad definition, or of attempting to condemn ‘Islamophobia’ without defining which thoughts and actions are thereby also being condemned, were widespread,” reads the Conservative report.

In their own list of recommendations, the Conservatives called on the government to “cease using the term ‘Islamophobia,’” and reiterate its support for freedom of speech and religion.

In an interview, Conservative MP David Anderson said communities and faith groups want to tackle issues of discrimination themselves, without government interference. “We don’t need the government to be overseeing every part of Canadian life,” he said. But he said the Conservatives agree with some of the report’s recommendations, including the need for better data collection. “No one is denying that (discrimination) exists.”

In a supplementary report, the New Democrats accused both Liberals and Conservatives of “political posturing” that diminished the committee’s work to tackle racism and religious discrimination. The report argues the government should have been more open to changing the language of the motion to include “an agreed-upon definition” of Islamophobia, but that “partisan politicking” got in the way.

“People wanted to know, in the context of the motion, what the term Islamophobia meant and what was the intent behind it,” NDP MP Jenny Kwan told the Post. “We could have all worked together to dampen the fear and the misinformation.”

Kwan said it made sense to include the term Islamophobia in the motion, because of the documented rise in hate crimes against Muslims. She believes the parties could have come up with a definition of the term that would have let all parliamentarians agree unanimously to the motion. But in an attempt from Liberals and Conservatives to appear to be on opposite sides of the issue, she said, that didn’t happen.

M-103 was passed by the Liberal majority last March, in the wake of the Quebec City mosque shooting. Throughout the hearings last fall, Liberal committee members frequently expressed frustration at the focus of some witnesses on the wording of the motion, and tried to steer the focus away from Islamophobia and onto racism and religious discrimination more broadly.

Anderson said the Liberals “misunderstood” how strongly Canadians would feel about the issue.

Source: M-103 report makes few recommendations about Islamophobia

Link to report: Committee Report No. 10 – CHPC (42-1) – House of Commons of Canada

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Marketed Multiculturalism Makes Canada A Hostile Homeland: Sarah Beech

2018/02/03 Leave a comment

Some valid points but a bit over the top in words and rhetoric, and too general with few concrete and implementable suggestions:

On January 30, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the Government of Canada will officially recognize the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent, which began in 2015 and runs until 2024. The objective of this recognition period is to highlight and celebrate the contributions people of African descent have made to Canada. But, what does that actually mean for black Canadians?

According to Trudeau, “This means learning more about the issues that affect black Canadians, including improving research and data collection, so we can better understand the particular challenges they face.”

In some respects, additional data is needed, but the collecting of more data will not necessarily produce new ways of thinking about historic problems, like anti-black racism.

Overall, Trudeau’s remarks were lackluster, peppered with symbolism to validate Canada’s selected brand of nationalism without explicitly delineating a strategic plan or any course of concrete action. I do not expect that he or his government would have been able to release a 10-point plan, but to make an address without any definitive next steps is futile in the fight against anti-black racism. His speech, the topic and the timing (two days before Black History Month, and three years late,) appear contrived and symptomatic of marketed multiculturalism.

Marketed multiculturalism occurs when racial and cultural diversity are used by social, political and economic discourses to validate state sponsored messages, amplified by news media, that Canada is a post-racial multicultural society. This marketed myth preserves the status quo, tokenizes racialized people and obfuscates the existence of racism and anti-black racism in this nation.

Within the marketed multicultural framework, when an acknowledgement of racism is made by institutions responsible for the systemic oppression of racialized people, the surreptitious ways in which racism operates become more nuanced. The prime minister’s announcement was a representation of this phenomenon. The particulars of his speech reinforced multiculturalism in Canada more than they declared a commitment to combatting anti-black racism. While the two are not mutually exclusive, in order for either to be fully realized the commitment has to be more than just promised.

For multiculturalism to be legitimately realized in Canada, the policy needs to go beyond the page. Acknowledgements need to be met with action. Cultural inclusion, equity and other principles upon which authentic multicultural ideology is premised must not conflate performance with progress. The absence of this distinction makes Canada a hostile homeland for black Canadians, Indigenous people, racialized immigrants and other people of colour.

As politicians make (more) policy, they both have a propensity to succumb to the effects of marketed multiculturalism, where acknowledgement and accountability are systemically destined to never meet within the status quo. While accountability is not impossible, it does require all Canadians to interrupt the political performance, forgo the politeness and promote political progress for racialized people in Canada.

via Marketed Multiculturalism Makes Canada A Hostile Homeland

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