The French Origins of “You Will Not Replace Us” | The New Yorker

2017/11/28 Leave a comment

Good long read:

The Château de Plieux, a fortified castle on a hilltop in the Gascony region of southwestern France, overlooks rolling fields speckled with copses and farmhouses. A tricolor flag snaps above the worn beige stone. The northwest tower, which was built in the fourteenth century, offers an ideal position from which to survey invading hordes. Inside the château’s cavernous second-story study, at a desk heavy with books, the seventy-one-year-old owner of the property, Renaud Camus, sits at an iMac and tweets dire warnings about Europe’s demographic doom.

On the sweltering June afternoon that I visited the castle, Camus—no relation to Albert—wore a tan summer suit and a tie. Several painted self-portraits hung in the study, multiplying his blue-eyed gaze. Camus has spent most of his career as a critic, novelist, diarist, and travel essayist. The only one of his hundred or so books to be translated into English, “Tricks” (1979), announces itself as “a sexual odyssey—man-to-man,” and includes a foreword by Roland Barthes. The book describes polyglot assignations from Milan to the Bronx. Allen Ginsberg said of it, “Camus’s world is completely that of a new urban homosexual; at ease in half a dozen countries.”

In recent years, though, Camus’s name has been associated less with erotica than with a single poignant phrase, le grand remplacement. In 2012, he made this the title of an alarmist book. Native “white” Europeans, he argues, are being reverse-colonized by black and brown immigrants, who are flooding the Continent in what amounts to an extinction-level event. “The great replacement is very simple,” he has said. “You have one people, and in the space of a generation you have a different people.” The specific identity of the replacement population, he suggests, is of less importance than the act of replacement itself. “Individuals, yes, can join a people, integrate with it, assimilate to it,” he writes in the book. “But peoples, civilizations, religions—and especially when these religions are themselves civilizations, types of society, almost States—cannot and cannot even want to . . . blend into other peoples, other civilizations.”

Camus believes that all Western countries are faced with varying degrees of “ethnic and civilizational substitution.” He points to the increasing prevalence of Spanish, and other foreign languages, in the United States as evidence of the same phenomenon. Although his arguments are scarcely available in translation, they have been picked up by right-wing and white-nationalist circles throughout the English-speaking world. In July, Lauren Southern, the Canadian alt-right Internet personality, posted, on YouTube, a video titled “The Great Replacement”; it has received more than a quarter of a million views. On great-replacement.com, a Web site maintained anonymously, the introductory text declares, “The same term can be applied to many other European peoples both in Europe and abroad . . . where the same policy of mass immigration of non-European people poses a demographic threat. Of all the different races of people on this planet, only the European races are facing the possibility of extinction in a relatively near future.” The site announces its mission as “spreading awareness” of Camus’s term, which, the site’s author concludes, is more palatable than a similar concept, “white genocide.” (A search for that phrase on YouTube yields more than fifty thousand videos.)

“I don’t have any genetic conception of races,” Camus told me. “I don’t use the word ‘superior.’ ” He insisted that he would feel equally sad if Japanese culture or “African culture” were to disappear because of immigration. On Twitter, he has quipped, “The only race I hate is the one knocking on the door.”

…Such revolutionary right-wing talk has now migrated to America. In 2013, Steve Bannon, while he was turning Breitbart into the far right’s dominant media outlet, described himself as “a Leninist.” The reference didn’t seem like something a Republican voter would say, but it made sense to his intended audience: Bannon was signalling that the alt-right movement was prepared to hijack, or even raze, the state in pursuit of nationalist ends. (Bannon declined my request for an interview.) Richard Spencer told me, “I would say that the alt-right in the United States is radically un-conservative.” Whereas the American conservative movement celebrates “the eternal value of freedom and capitalism and the Constitution,” Spencer said, he and his followers were “willing to use socialism in order to protect our identity.” He added, “Many of the countries that lived under Soviet hegemony are actually far better off, in terms of having a protected identity, than Western Europe or the United States.”

Spencer said that “clearly racialist” writers such as Benoist and Faye were “central influences” on his own thinking as an identitarian. He first discovered the work of Nouvelle Droite figures in the pages of Telos, an American journal of political theory. Most identitarians have a less scholarly bent. In 2002, a right-wing French insurrectionary, Maxime Brunerie, shot at President Jacques Chirac as he rode down the Champs-Élysées; the political group that Brunerie was affiliated with, Unité Radicale, became known as part of the identitairemovement. In 2004, a group known as the Bloc Identitaire became notorious for distributing soup containing pork to the homeless, in order to exclude Muslims and Jews. It was the sort of puerile joke now associated with alt-right pranksters in America such as Milo Yiannopoulos.

…The United States is not Western Europe. Not only is America full of immigrants; they are seen as part of what makes America American. Unlike France, the United States has only ever been a nation in the legal sense, even if immigration was long restricted to Europeans, and even if the Founding Fathers organized their country along the bloody basis of what we now tend to understand as white supremacy. The fact remains that, unless you are Native American, it is ludicrous for a resident of the United States to talk about “blood and soil.” And yet the country has nonetheless arrived at a moment when once unmentionable ideas have gone mainstream, and the most important political division is no longer between left and right but between globalist and nationalist.

“The so-called New Right never claimed to change the world,” Alain de Benoist wrote to me. Its goal, he said, “was, rather, to contribute to the intellectual debate, to make known certain themes of reflection and thought.” On that count, it has proved a smashing success. Glucksmann summed up the Nouvelle Droite’s thinking as follows: “Let’s just win the cultural war, and then a leader will come out of it.” The belief that a multicultural society is tantamount to an anti-white society has crept out of French salons and all the way into the Oval Office. The apotheosis of right-wing Gramscism is Donald Trump.

On August 11th, the Unite the Right procession marched through the campus of the University of Virginia. White-supremacist protesters mashed together Nazi and Confederate iconography while chanting variations of Renaud Camus’s grand remplacement credo: “You will not replace us”; “Jews will not replace us.” Few, if any, of these khaki-clad young men had likely heard of Guillaume Faye, Renaud Camus, or Alain de Benoist. They didn’t know that their rhetoric had been imported from France, like some dusty wine. But they didn’t need to. All they had to do was pick up the tiki torches and light them. ♦ 

via The French Origins of “You Will Not Replace Us” | The New Yorker

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Kaleidoscope: How a Ukrainian dance ignited a debate on cultural appropriation

2017/11/28 Leave a comment

Latest cultural appropriation debate but one leading to conversations:

Six young men dance arm-in-arm, stomping as they move in a tight, precise circle.

The men kneel and clap as a dozen female dancers float and swirl and kick across the stage at a recent rehearsal in their Saskatoon studio.

This Ukrainian folk dance is called the Holubka. It’s familiar territory for the dancers and their bouncing, gesticulating choreographer, Serhij Koroliuk.Some have said it’s never OK for Ukrainians to dance powwow. Pewapsconias, founder and CEO of Neeched Up Games, doesn’t go that far — her point is that this particular performance was disrespectful to Indigenous people.

That August night at Folkfest, Pewapsconias and her sister had enjoyed the dances and food at other pavilions, and hoped to do the same at the Ukrainian.

When Kaleidoscope began, Pewapsconias, an active member of the Indigenous Poet’s Society, said everything changed.

Pewapsconias noticed when a blanket containing flags of many immigrant nations was unfolded on stage, neither flag for Treaty Six nor the Métis Nation — the Indigenous jurisdictions on which the City of Saskatoon sits — was represented. The Indigenous dance costumes were partly plastic.

​Pewapsconias noted that for decades, First Nations people were banned from dancing powwow and performing their spiritual ceremonies.

It was part of a massive effort to eradicate Indigenous culture that included residential schools, the pass system and the Sixties Scoop.

She and her family are finally reclaiming their culture, so she was shocked to see non-Indigenous people taking liberties with their traditions.

“It just immediately went from having a fun, OK night to feeling powerless, feeling angry,” she said.

“I feel this way. The people I’m with feel this way. I need to share this on social media and call this out. So that’s what I did.”

Some on social media accused the dance group of using Indigenous culture as entertainment. But others defended the dancers saying critics were too sensitive.

A love letter to Canada

 Koroliuk hasn’t spoken publicly about this controversy until now.

He created Kaleidoscope as a love letter to Canada on his 10th anniversary of becoming a citizen. His dancers have performed this same routine several times in Saskatoon and around the world to standing ovations. He said people of all cultures including Indigenous have thanked the group for reaching out to their culture.

Koroliuk calls himself “a made in Ukraine Canadian.”

He was born just one generation after a genocide called the Holodomor in which millions of Ukrainians were intentionally starved to death by Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

So he was particularly hurt to see the online comments calling him a colonizer and accusing him of cultural appropriation.

“Shocked. The simple answer is I was shocked. So were my dancers,” he said.

“I thought I was contributing in this way and expressing my gratitude but I felt like I was outcasted and saying ‘This is not your place.'”

‘Coming from a place of goodness’

Caught in the middle of the controversy was Don Speidel of Buffalo Boy Productions.Speidel, who has spent his life trying to bridge the gap between Indigenous cultures and the rest of society, offered advice to Koroliuk when the dance was first created more than a decade ago.

Many criticized Speidel for “approving” the dance, but others say Koroliuk took liberties and should have consulted more. Still others saw the dance as imperfect but applauded the effort to honour Indigenous cultures.

Speidel, who has travelled the world conducting ceremonies, including a recent honouring of late-singer Gord Downie in Ottawa, said he doesn’t want to point fingers at anyone — he’d rather figure out ways to bring people together.

He said he understands the frustration of young Indigenous people who are often finding their voice through social media. He also sees the efforts being made by non-Indigenous people, even if the execution doesn’t match the intent.

He said the key is for everyone to respect each other.

“When you want authentic engagement, you might be prepared to take that relationship to a whole other level.”

“It’s really about that idea of coming from a place of goodness.”

Reconciliation begins with conversation

That relationship-building has already begun.

Koroliuk and Pewapsconias met earlier this fall and agreed to take the stage together in Saskatoon on Wednesday.

Koroliuk has put Kaleidoscope on hold. He said he didn’t intend to cause pain but knows that the dance did.

He wants to work with Indigenous experts and hopes they can find a way to honour First Nations people.

“I’m puzzled and definitely I will have to address it differently,” he said. “Many hurt was done to First Nations people. I recognize that. We all live side by side. Let’s be good friends and neighbours. Let’s build this great country together.”

Pewapsconias also wants to learn more. She said she never meant to hurt anyone, but knows the Facebook posts did.

She said reconciliation begins with conversation — sometimes those are awkward, sometimes painful.

“I hope good things come from this and we’re able to leave the table being able to shake each other’s hand and give each other the respect they deserve,” she said. “because we’re all human.”

via Kaleidoscope: How a Ukrainian dance ignited a debate on cultural appropriation | CBC News

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What should Canada do about returning jihadists? Lorne Dawson interview

2017/11/27 Leave a comment

Good interview with Dawson, whose work I continue to find impressive.

Nice contrast with some of the shallower pieces on the issue of returning extremist fighters (e.g., ‘Canada does not engage in death squads,’ while allies actively hunt …, BONOKOSKI: Kill them before they come home? Too un-Canadian):

What to do about Canadians who joined the so-called Islamic State when they come home—now that ISIS has been routed on the battlefield in the territory in Iraq and Syria that it used to call its “caliphate”—has emerged as a challenge for Justin Trudeau’s government.

The return of battle-hardened ISIS terrorists is a disturbing prospect. Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale’s office says the number of individuals shouldn’t be exaggerated, though, telling Maclean’sthat Canadian intelligence agencies are aware of about 60 terrorist travellers who have returned to Canada from conflict zones in the past decade, including a small number from Syria and Iraq.

Even lumping them together under the heading “foreign fighters” isn’t entirely accurate, since some were involved in financing terrorism or generating propaganda. An estimated 180 to 190 terrorist travellers with ties to Canada have not come back, but a spokesman for Goodale said in an email, “We don’t expect many to return with the number of casualties and the challenge of leaving those areas.”

Still, figuring out how to handle any who do make their way to Canada is now a pressing concern. Lorne Dawson, a professor in the University of Waterloo’s sociology and legal studies department, has a unique perspective on what might work—and what likely won’t. Dawson is part of a team of academic researchers who have systematically interviewed dozens of foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria over social media, trying to formulate a picture of their motivations and backgrounds.

He’s also closely familiar with programs in Europe that tried to prevent radicalization of young men in the first place—approaches that have been adapted to cope with former ISIS fighters when they straggle back from the conflict zones. Dawson spoke with me earlier today about what Canada should be doing, including what the federal government might learn from Britain and Denmark, where the scale of the problem is much larger.

Q: Given how bad ISIS is, shouldn’t returning fighters just be arrested?

A: It’s going to be almost impossible under most legal jurisdictions to find enough solid evidence to really convincingly prosecute them. So you could waste your time prosecuting them and have about half your cases fail in the courts, which no government wants to do on terrorism issues because it just looks bad, politically bad, and it’s sets all kinds of bad precedents.

That’s true in Canada, too. You do not want to prosecute unless you think you have a really strong case. Trying to get that kind of evidence, legally viable evidence, out of places like Syria and Iraq, so you could prosecute someone, the challenges are just unbelievable.

Q: So what do you do when the fighters come back? Someone returns who looks to have been involved with a terrorist group in Syria or Iraq, but you don’t have enough evidence to arrest them. What should you do?

A: You need to sit down and have a conversation with these people. They need to enter into these programs for countering violent extremism. But it has to be voluntary, or relatively voluntary, everyone knows that, or it won’t work. But, of course, you make it only somewhat voluntary by saying, “Look, your options are either you enter into this program or we’re going to continue to do a full-court press on you to prosecute you.” And most of them are aware they could end up in prison. So there is a strong incentive.

Q: And what does the program they’ve signed up for look like?

A: You have panels of experts that gather and they are supplied with all the information that can be found on the person. These experts are from multiple backgrounds. So social working, community working, educational specialist, occupational therapist, religious leaders from the community—anyone who’s thought to be relevant.

Q: So you’ve assembled experts. What’s their job?

A: First you do assessment. What is this person’s situation? Well, they’re not going to be able to reintegrate into our society because they didn’t even finish their high school. Right away, let’s start finding a way for this person to complete their educational requirements. They’re going to need some subsidy to do that. They’re going to need some assistance in getting into a program. Provide that.

They then also initiate family counselling and try and get the person, if there’s strained relations with the family, reconnected to the family and reintegrated in the community in that way. Now, through this whole process they have to report to the police regularly. They’re being monitored, they’re not being surveilled, that would be way too expensive. People are making sure they’re not associating with other known jihadists and things of that nature.

Q: Is there any evidence this sort of approach works?

A: We don’t have exact numbers, but the Danish government basically is saying they’ve now dealt with dozens of such individuals and that there’s not a single case yet where they’ve encountered someone going through one of these programs who then went and committed a terrorist act. Doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.

Q: What would you say to people who’ll respond to all this by saying, “Oh, come on, professor—these are hardened, horrible people, who are implicated in all kinds of atrocities. How can you talk about a rehabilitation?”

A: I recognize the resistance to these ideas. But, from the best studies we have available—which admittedly do not deal with people coming from Syria and Iraq and from ISIS, where we have a much more extreme circumstance—but from all of the real studies done of the people who fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia and elsewhere in the world, involved in jihadist struggles, the numbers show that about a third die in the fight, about a third never come back because they want to go live in a Muslim-majority country and they disappear into Morocco or wherever, and about a third come home.

Of the ones that come home, the vast majority are either disillusioned or they’re to some extent traumatized and feel they done their bit—”I did my service to fight for the Muslim people against their oppressors, but I’m done.” A tiny fraction of them will be coming back actually still radicalized and interested in engaging in some kind of, you know, further terrorist action. And so this is why you have to have a really careful debriefing process, an assessment process, and of course our security officials know how to do that. That’s their job.

Q: Are you still in contact with active foreign fighters? Are you talking to them, the way you’ve done in the past through social media?

A: Yes and no. Our channels are still open, but there’s nothing happening. Because ever since the major assault on Mosul, almost all the presence and social media of the individuals we were talking to, or watching on Twitter and other social media, they just disappeared.

Q: Do you think they are dead?

A: Many I think are dead. And I think what happened is, of course, once full military activity happened, they were just told, “You do not use your phone.” Obviously phones can be tracked in various ways. All communications stopped. We haven’t had an actual live conversation with anyone in Syria and Iraq in a couple of months.

Q: Do you get called by CSIS and RCMP regularly about what your online contact with jihadists in Iraq and Syria? Do they ask you for information?

A: No. Our funding is from the government. It’s through competitive programs. Our current funding is from the community resilience fund, through this new Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence. So of course they recognize, and it’s always stipulated in there, that we have academic freedom.

It’s arm’s length, independent, all subject to normal ethics procedures through the universities. And so they know the only way we got ethics clearance to do this research was to have extremely high guarantees around confidentiality. They recognize, in the end, they will get our results, which are beneficial to them, but they don’t get details.

Filed under Radicalization Tagged with ,

For LGBTQ People Of Color, Discrimination Compounds : NPR

2017/11/27 Leave a comment

More on challenges among visible minority LGBTQ, both internal and external:

Nancy Haque’s parents understood discrimination — after moving to the U.S. from Bangladesh, they endured threats, even glass under the tires of the family car. But Haque says the discrimination she faces as a queer woman is different.

“As the child of immigrant parents, it’s not like I had to come out as being South Asian,” Haque laughs. “But I think that we didn’t talk about discrimination.”

She talks about it now. Haque is co-director of Basic Rights Oregon, an LGBTQ advocacy group based in Portland. She is committed to bringing civil rights issues to the forefront of LGBTQ organizing.

In 2017, Haque says, “if you’re an LGBTQ organization that hasn’t taken on racial justice as a key part of who you are and what you do, then you’re irrelevant.” That is because the discrimination that LGBTQ people of color experience and the resources they have to combat it are compounded by their intersecting identities.

According to a new poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, LGBTQ people of color are more than twice as likely as their white counterparts to say they’ve been discriminated against because they are LGBTQ in applying for jobs and interacting with police.

The National Black Justice Coalition focuses on the intersection of racial justice and LGBTQ rights. Isaiah Wilson, the coalition’s director of external affairs, says LGBTQ people of color are “the most impacted communities” when it comes to discrimination, “be it trans military service, be it access to health care, or if you look at employment.”

And according to demographic data collected by the Williams Institute, black LGBTQ people are more likely to live where other black folks live — many of them in the South, says Wilson, “where we don’t have state and local protections to be out.”

Wilson says given this compounded discrimination, LGBTQ people of color need support. But they don’t always get it — because the LGBTQ movement at large has had different priorities. Namely, organizing around the fight for marriage equality that culminated with the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

“When you’re continuing as a community to face discrimination, harassment, even violence,” Wilson explains, “marriage is a luxury. Surviving, being able to participate in community, being able to provide for our families — if I can’t do that, who’s thinking about a marriage certificate?”

And while communities of color come together around the discrimination and harassment they face, they may not always see LGBTQ issues as part of the same struggle.

In the Latino community, for example, “the perception … is that it’s always been a conservative community,” says Ingrid Duran, founder of Familia Es Familia, a group that aims to increase LGBTQ acceptance among Latinos.

And, she adds, “that conservative element comes along with religious beliefs” — primarily those of the Catholic Church, which regards homosexuality as a sin.

But Duran says that is changing. The U.S. Latino population is very young, and young people are increasingly moving away from organized religion — and the Catholic Church itself is changing. And, Duran says, the Latino community is changing on queer issues, especially when there has been outreach and education from groups like Familia es Familia, because of the cultural priority on family.

“Nine times out of 10, a grandparent or a parent is going to accept their child. Because it is their family,” Duran says. “And they still hold the same values that they held five minutes before they came out to you.”

via For LGBTQ People Of Color, Discrimination Compounds : NPR

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If there’s a war on Christmas, it’s being led by the most zealous Christians: Coren

2017/11/25 Leave a comment

Another good and relevant column by Michael Coren on much of the nonsense about a “war against Christmas”:

…. there is not and never has been a war on Christmas, whether it’s the appearance of Happy Holidays cards (so what?), multicultural television commercials (surely a good thing), or carol singers allegedly being banned from shopping malls (they aren’t). But the sausage roll reveals a sorry irony. If there is a religious war, it is not on the season we have somewhat arbitrarily and relatively recently chosen as the date of Jesus’s birth. Rather, it is an attack against the Christian, egalitarian virtues that the child and the event are supposed to epitomize—a charge led by some Christians and churches themselves.

Truth be told, some of the loudest and most active Christians tend to be socially conservative and harsh in their opinions of what is new, novel, and challenging, often obsessed with issues such as abortion and homosexuality. The latter is a subject I myself wrestled with for a long time, and I once accepted—albeit somewhat reluctantly—that same-sex marriage was forbidden in Scripture. A deeper reading of the Bible, however, and a less anachronistic grasp of its meaning, led me to question what I had considered self-evident. I also saw firsthand the love and commitment of so many same-sex couples, often Christian same-sex couples, that must lead God to smile with delight.

We must remember, however, that these are not issues that Jesus explicitly mentioned in the Bible. Yes, he did respond to the Pharisees’ question about divorce by noting that marriage was between a man and a woman, but we also read of his dealings with a Roman centurion and a slave whom the said Roman loves—a romantic love, according to some textual readings. St. Paul does mention homosexuality—a word not used as it is today until the 19th-century—but this is more about heterosexual men using boys than loving, adult relationships. And while some of the stories in the New Testament are certainly up for debate, Jesus’s emphasis on refusing to judge others, especially where sexual sin is concerned, is not.

What is expressed repeatedly in the Gospels, however—with a virtual monomania—is love for neighbour. Christ teaches that authentic devotion to God can only by demonstrated by this love, this fraternal romance, and such a love demands social justice, a passion for the poor and marginalized, and a revolutionary understanding of power and morality. If Jesus does condemn anyone, it is the reactionaries, those who have authority, who obscure love under law, and who disguise the kingdom behind formalities and regulations. Instead of opening the doors wide, they close them and bolt them tight.

I have no doubt that those Christians who complain about the ostensible war on Christmas and have such right-wing attitudes about so many subjects still believe in their religion, and I certainly have no right or ability to look into their souls. But it has all reached a crisis point now, particularly for those of us who embrace a more progressive but nevertheless committed belief in Christianity. Quite frankly, the antics of the Christian right also turn people away from Christianity, and understandably so. If that’s what Jesus is about, some people say, I want nothing of it.

Don’t forget that one of the leaders of the battle against this chimerical war on Christmas, and a powerful leader of North American Christianity, is Franklin Graham, the son of Billy. He believes that Islam is “very evil and wicked,” admires Vladimir Putin, and demanded that LGBTQ people be barred from churches because Satan“wants to devour our homes.” He also claimed that the election of Donald Trump was due to the “hand of God” at work. Imagine putting all that on a card for Santa.

What he and his friends seem to consider as Christmas is the stuff of tinselled nostalgia mingled with the self-prescribed absolute right of Christians to dominate the public square and dictate the private conscience. And if anything should anger followers of Jesus at Christmas time, it shouldn’t be some irrelevant commercial for food, but rather the fact that millions of people go without food altogether; it shouldn’t be that Jesus’s name is taken in vain but that His teachings are taken in vain; it shouldn’t be that we don’t say “Merry Christmas” as often as we did, but that we so seldom say “I forgive you,” “You are loved,” and “All are welcome in church.” After all, per the once-ubiquitous question, “What would Jesus do,” the answer would probably be, “tell everyone to grow up, re-read what the New Testament says, and then go and turn the world upside-down”—not just at Christmas, but every day of the year.

via If there’s a war on Christmas, it’s being led by the most zealous Christians – Macleans.ca

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The SRO [police in Toronto schools] program is over. What happens next? Phillip Dwight Morgan

2017/11/25 1 Comment

The activist view:

In 2008, without community consultation, the Toronto District School Board and Toronto Police Service agreed to place police officers in select high schools around the city. The result was a program where some Black and Brown students said they felt targeted, harassed and intimidated, and where some undocumented students reportedly feared for their safety.

Since its inception, the School Resource Officer (SRO) program has faced allegations of racism and discrimination as community members and organizations have questioned how a program that placed police in the schools of largely racialized communities could possibly improve circumstances for youth already being pushed out by academic streaming, increased suspension rates and low teacher expectations. As time passed, the picture became clearer: SROs largely intimidated, harassed and criminalized Black, Brown and Indigenous youth, and allegedly threatened the safety of undocumented students.

That program is now over. At a Nov. 22 meeting, after a six-week review process, trustees from the largest school board in Canada voted overwhelmingly to terminate the program.

Make no mistake: the landmark decision is the result of years of pressure from students, parents, youth workers and concerned citizens. These people repeatedly reminded the board that it was utterly unacceptable to accept Black, Brown, Indigenous and undocumented youth as collateral damage in the push to improve Toronto’s schools. “It is time for school boards across the province and country to acknowledge the ways in which educational policies and practices continue to be shaped by ongoing histories of colonialism and racism,” says Gita Rao Madan, who studied policing in schools for her master’s thesis at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

Still, how did a program with such a terrible track record continue for nearly a decade? The sad fact of the matter is that the people most affected by the program were those at the intersection of two deeply oppressive institutions—policing and education—that routinely worked to silence them. Those people, who faced harassment and profiling both inside the classroom and out on the street, had little access to the levers of change.

In response to community concern in the past, the TDSB and TPS had deflected criticism by pointing to so-called “success stories” from the program—accounts of students who loved the baking club being run by Officer Jane or the volleyball team coached by Const. Jim. These are the narratives and images that the TPS and TDSB offered to the public whenever the program faced scrutiny. Now that the program has been terminated, its supporters will likely evoke these images with even greater verve.

But a line of reasoning that asks communities to ignore the experiences of children being pushed out of schools and to instead celebrate the child who loves Officer Jim betrays a failed understanding of the history of community policing in Toronto on the part of those in positions of power. It shows a reluctance to concede that carding, police harassment, intimidation and violence do not stop at the school’s entrance. It is not rooted in equity. Earlier this May, Police Chief Mark Saunders responded to concerns expressed about the program at a Toronto Police Services Board meeting by noting that a 2011 evaluation of the program showed 58 per cent of students felt safer with SROs. In response, TPS Board member Dhun Noria injected an important reminder: “You mentioned, chief, that 58 per cent of the respondents felt safe [with SROs]. This leaves 42 per cent who do not feel safe. Do we have a report about that? Why do they not feel safe and what have we done about that?”

via The SRO program is over. What happens next? – Macleans.ca

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Holocaust-denying prof reinstated at University of Lethbridge – The Canadian Jewish News

2017/11/25 Leave a comment

Questionable decision but appears that investigation ongoing (B’nai Brith appears to have been overly political in their initial reaction compared to CIJA):

The University of Lethbridge has reinstated a professor who had been suspended more than one year ago for questioning the Holocaust and suggesting there was a Zionist connection to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Anthony Hall, a tenured professor in the university’s globalization studies program, was reinstated following a hearing before a labour arbitrator.

Published reports stated that the university’s board of governors and the faculty association issued a joint statement saying that issues concerning Hall’s activities will be addressed in a faculty handbook.

Contacted by The CJN, the faculty association stated that, “It’s a personnel matter and its confidential.”

Hall was originally suspended in October 2016 over his Holocaust denial and conspiracy theories. At the time, the university issued a statement saying, “From the findings of that assessment, the board has decided to proceed with a complaint to the Alberta Human Rights Commission against Dr. Hall for publishing statements, alone and in collaboration with others, that could be considered hateful, contemptuous and discriminatory.”

The faculty association contested the suspension and, following a court decision in September, an arbitrator was appointed and a hearing was held earlier this month.

B’nai Brith Canada slammed Hall’s reinstatement and blamed the government of Alberta for passing legislation that brought faculty under the province’s labour-relations laws.

“Premier (Rachel) Notley and her government bear direct responsibility for placing a discredited conspiracy theorist back in a university classroom,” said Michael Mostyn, CEO of B’nai Brith Canada. “We repeatedly warned the government of the likely outcome of its actions, but they sadly chose to ignore our warnings and expose Alberta university students to anti-Semitism and discrimination instead.

“Despite this setback, we expect the University of Lethbridge to continue fighting anti-Semitism on campus, and to do whatever it takes to ensure that Hall has no podium for his unhinged anti-Semitic nonsense.”

In an email cited in a news release by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), Premier Notley stated, “There is no question that the views of this individual are repulsive, offensive and not reflective of Alberta. Our classrooms are a place for freedom of speech and expression but that does not mean individuals get to stand at the head of the class and spread lies and conspiracy theories. I am terribly disappointed to learn that this individual has been reinstated, but let me be clear that legislation that our government introduced did not give him his job back. I can confirm that this individual is now under investigation by a committee at the university.”

For its part, CIJA stated that Hall’s reinstatement was “a direct result of an agreement between Hall, the faculty association and the university. We have also confirmed that Hall will not be teaching or interacting with students. He is continuing to be investigated by the university and his future is far from certain.”

via Holocaust-denying prof reinstated at University of Lethbridge – The Canadian Jewish News

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Ottawa library cancels planned screening of controversial ‘Killing Europe’ doc

2017/11/25 Leave a comment

Viewing the trailer, appears to be the right call as it crosses the border into hate speech (Mark Steyn on steroids):

The Ottawa Public Library has cancelled this weekend’s screening of a controversial documentary, Killing Europe, after complaints the film was thinly disguised hate speech against Muslims and immigrants.

“I am letting you know that I have been working with the city solicitor about concerns brought forward by the Ottawa district labour council, unions, residents, board members and friends,” Coun. Tim Tierney, who is chairman of the library’s board of directors, said in an email. “I had asked the CEO to review and address the concerns expressed.”

“I can now report that the rental of the room will not take place.”

The documentary was to have been screened Saturday afternoon at the library’s main branch on Metcalfe Street. The screening was to have been hosted by the group ACT! for Canada, a group dedicated “to speaking out about the clear and present dangers emerging from those who do not embrace Canada’s values …”

Killing Europe, by Danish ex-patriate Michael Hansen, purports to warn of the dangers of the “Islamification” of Europe.

But even a “30-second Google search” by the library would have revealed it to be hate speech, says human rights lawyer Richard Warman, who was one of the people to complain to the library about the screening.

Screening the film is “in clear violation of the library’s own rental policy prohibiting the use of space for discriminatory purposes,” Warman wrote in an email to the library and its board members, Mayor Jim Watson, and others.

“When I looked at the three-minute trailer, it was clear it was going to be an all-out assault on immigrants and the Muslim community,” Warman said Friday.

“The messages contained even in just the trailer is that ‘immigrants are coming to swamp and devastate Europe and that Muslims are engaged in perpetual massacres of the white populations.’ Obviously, it set off alarms.”

Warman received confirmation the screening had been cancelled in an email Friday morning from library deputy CEO Monique Désormeaux.

Coun. Catherine McKenney, another library board member, said Friday she “wholeheartedly” supported the library’s decision to cancel the screening and promised better discussion in the future about what the library chooses to allow.

But where to draw the line between suppressing free speech and stifling hate speech?

Warman said the screening clearly violated the library’s obligations, stated on its website, to not provide public space for individuals or groups that “are likely to promote discrimination, contempt or hatred to any person on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, marital status, family status, sexual preference, or disability, gratuitous sex and violence or denigration of the human condition.”

“As a human rights lawyer, I’m firmly in the camp of defending freedom of expression under Section 2B of the Charter,” Warman said. “The library board is absolutely right to defend freedom of expression, while at the same time complying with their parallel obligation under Ontario human rights law not to discriminate against people on the basis of race and religion.”

In the case of Killing Europe and ACT! for Canada’s own newsletter, which Warman said includes claims of gang rapes and “grotesque caricatures of pakis, blacks and illegals,” there is “no grey area.”

“This is hate propaganda that is clearly directed toward recent immigrants and members of the Muslim community,” he said.

“The main thing is that we ensure public venues aren’t used as amplifiers of the message of hate-mongers … Public, taxpayer-funded facilities cannot be used to engage in hate propaganda. The library board has the obligation, when we know that these groups will attempt to misuse public facilities, that they engage in a sort of rudimentary 30-second Google check: ‘Who are you again? And what’s the movie you want to show?’ The 30-second Google check would have come up with the answers and set off alarm bells.”

ACT! for Canada did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

via Ottawa library cancels planned screening of controversial ‘Killing Europe’ doc | Ottawa Citizen

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Can white male CEOs bring diversity to corporate Canada? Interview with Frank Vettese, CEO Deloitte Canada

2017/11/24 Leave a comment

Worth reading:

Q: How long have you been Deloitte’s “chief inclusion officer”? 

A: Almost two years. I’ve been CEO since 2012, prior to that going back to 2006 I co-founded our “women’s initiative.” I have been heavily involved in all things diversity-related at Deloitte. I was executing the CEO role and at same time looking to make deliberate shifts in the organization—from an emphasis on diversity to an emphasis on inclusion. Inclusion really is about creating the conditions for success within the organization within the widest scale. I needed to be the individual setting the tone and the execution plan and linking it to our strategy. Hence, it was an incremental role I took on.

Q: For decades we’ve been hearing white men in powerful positions discuss the value of diversity—and more recently “inclusion.” And yet business remains dominated by white men. The link to Deloitte Canada’s leadership team on your website is broken. But from what I can see, the top three positions are held by white men and only one of six regional managers is a woman. What has Deloitte done, or is it doing, to establish greater diversity/inclusion?

A: In terms of looking at those roles—CEO or chair—you’re correct, they’re men. We’ve got between 20 and 30 per cent of our leadership team as women and 30 and 40 per cent of board as women; I would concur with your point that what we’ve been dealing with, certainly in our organization, and it’s no different than corporate Canada, is a significant under-representation of women and visible minorities and other forms of diversity. We’ve recently appointed our CFO, which you could argue is the third most significant position in the organization, as a female. And when you look at broader leadership team, our vice-chairgroup, we have a number of women within that group.

We’ve had a long track record of hiring at the Canadian representation of our population at the entry level—women, visible minorities, all forms of diverse communities. The challenge has been at the most senior levels and one step back, entry into partnership. To me, this has been the real telling tale of whether the firm is getting this right. In the first few years we were struggling with getting representation  in partnership ranks at Canadian population levels. I’m proud of the last two admission years have approximated the Canadian population—last year 45 percent of new partners were women. We’re still not where we need to be.

Q: Deloitte’s report talks in terms of the need for revolutionary change. Yet as Thomas Kuhn wrote in in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigm shifts rarely happens from within. You are ensconced in corporate Canada. What makes you confident you can create radical change from within?

A: The thing that gives me great confidence is that there is a clear mandate for this. The whole notion about inclusion for our firm is entirely embedded in the strategy of the firm….Go back less than 10 years, and we’d talk about the most significant issue, the topic of inclusion was something that might have come up episodically. Today it is very rare when I go and exchange at the external marketplace that this isn’t at the forefront at least around awareness and recognition of the business case and the moral imperative. I subscribe that there’s a big difference between that and the “how” and “What do we do to get it done?” As we’ve transformed, we’ve engaged our people, our Millennials, Gen X, they have informed what it is we’re doing. We’ve removed hierarchy…They are the ones telling us this is needed for success. I’m confident this has moved from conversation into real action.

Q: On the point of removing hierarchy, you’ve talked about having no formal offices at Deloitte.  So you don’t have an office?

A: I have no office whatsoever; today I’ve probably operated on six or seven floors.

Q: Yet hierarchy is measured in lots of ways in a corporation, mostly by compensation. What are you doing to flatten that out? 

A: A few things. We used to put more of an emphasis on roles, management jobs that had a value assigned to them. Today the measure is very simple: contribution and impact. It’s determined one person at a time; there’s goal-setting. I think that has dramatically changed the way we share the financial rewards and benefits of the firm. We’re working hard at reviewing our compensation policies and approaches to make sure that we’re removing bias, certainly around gender parity but it goes beyond that to ensuring that what people do, functions they perform, impact they drive is being measured in as an objective way as possible. We’re even looking at introducing things like artificial intelligence into our processes to remove bias.

Q: In  your Globe and Mail op-ed you admitted you were guilty in the past of hiring people who looked like you. The report refers to “deep underlying cultural sources of exclusion.” Is that one of them?

A: At time I was launching women’s initiative in 2006, I put in place measures to address the concern, “How do we assure having top talent female managers invited into our partnership?” We saw good progress I stood back after a couple of years and looked at the overall numbers and they moved, but didn’t move as much as I thought. When I went to assess the root cause, we were providing support and tailored development to the people we had. But looking to build the business and fill gaps, I was disproportionately hiring people who had similar attributes to me. It was an unconscious bias I did not identify at the time. And once we  identified it, we could put measures in place. So instead of going to the usual suspects and going to the regular places, how do we change practices to widen the aperture to ensure we look at all qualified candidates?

Q: The report refers to the “diversity industry” which began in the 1960s, noting that diversity training in corporations doesn’t improve diversity. Why not?

A: A lot of the training I made reference to was diversity training—it was awareness of differences, it was spotlighting and putting an emphasis on differences. To some extent, a lot of that training was around representation; the measure of success was the numbers, the fact we were looking at measures of diversity as the outcome. And although diversity is important, and I would say that inclusion without diversity is hollow, the flip is true: diversity in itself does not mean the organization is inclusive. If we’re having certain numbers you’re counting doesn’t mean you are creating a workplace where people can bring their whole selves to work; where there is that flexibility, tailoring to how people operate to thrive and succeed on their own basis. A lot of diversity training has failed because it’s still focused on the need to hit certain targets, as opposed to that underlying culture.

Q: The last of the report’s five “action” recommendations is “Own inclusion inside and outside the office”—meaning to call out inequalities and bias when you see them.  You sit on the Dean’s Advisory Council at the Schulich School of Business, which is 56 men and 15 women. And you sit on the advisory board of Catalyst Canada [a non-profit that promotes advancement of women in the workplace];  it’s composed of 11 men and seven women. Last September, CIBC chief executive Victor Dodig, a white man, replaced Bill Downe, a white man, as the board chair at Catalyst. Don’t you have a responsibility to speak out about inequities on corporate boards? Or do you agree that the board of an organization devoted to promotion of women in business should be headed by white guys?

A: First of all, the CEO of Catalyst is a woman. Victor is someone who at the core represents the ideals and what we’re trying to accomplish. I look at it as “Who is in the best position and most qualified at that time to advance what is core to the strategic objectives of the organization?” I do believe it’s important that we don’t get caught up in the notion that in any way starts to approach tokenism—rather that we look at each unique person and how they align against the needs of the role. Having said that, I’m not trying to dispel the underlying point that you’re making which is, “Are there some things we have to deliberately do and deliberately make to ensure our boards represent the broader constituent group and actually execute against the ideals we espouse?” So our Deloitte Canadian board, for example, when we first set up, it was making sure we could sign up for 30 per cent representation by this year. We’re past that number.

Q: Why a 30 per cent target? Why not 50 per cent?

A: There’s no question that what we hope to achieve in our organization is that we get to the [statistical equivalent of female representation in the] Canadian population in the partner group and in our most senior roles. But in a board situation we don’t simply get, with the stroke of a pen, to construct a board. With our bylaws, we have to have partners who vote. We work through a deliberate process to determine we could achieve 30 per cent. We’re continuing to push boundaries. In our global [Deloitte] board, we had a real deficit in female representation and some of the larger countries had two board seats, one for their sitting chair and one for the CEO. So myself and four other stepped out of our seats years ago and put a top female leaders. Where we have the latitude we’re looking for creative ways to do that. The discourse and effectiveness of our global board has moved up a clear notch.

via Can white male CEOs bring diversity to corporate Canada? – Macleans.ca

Filed under gender, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

A vote — from anyone — is a terrible thing to waste: Regg Cohn

2017/11/24 Leave a comment

Good profile by Regg Cohn on the Muslim community’s successful effort to increase political participation and voting (Liberals won a massive majority of the Muslim vote in the 2015):

Every political party gets out the vote on voting day.

Their vote. And only their vote.

GOTV, as it’s called, is an axiom of democracy. And yet the better that parties get at GOTV, the less democratic the turnout tends to be. From one election to the next, a political movement masters the technique or musters the technology to outhustle all rivals on voting day. But do we really want elections decided on the strength of a well-oiled electoral machine rather than a well-honed democratic impulse?

What if we got out the full vote (GOTFV) with a full pull — motivated not by partisanship but participation?

That’s what the Canadian Muslim Vote tried in the last federal election — and plans again for the coming provincial ballot. Mindful that Muslims vote far less than others, the group’s volunteers focused on their own faith group — but without trying to divine anyone’s partisan loyalties.

“We didn’t care who they’d vote for,” said Seher Shafiq, part of the leadership team at the non-partisan, non-profit organization.

As long as they voted for someone. For too long, too many of Canada’s 1.3 million Muslims voted for no one, she told a panel on democratic engagement that I moderated at Ryerson University on the weekend because this issue is crucial for me. Her group tried to understand how Muslim participation in the 2011 election was a mere 35 to 45 per cent in key ridings, compared to the national turnout of 61 per cent.

“We were shocked by this research . . . and we wanted to know why,” Shafiq told a couple of hundred democracy activists at the conference sponsored by Ryerson’s Leadership Lab and the Open Democracy Project.

The reasons were both banal and discouraging; people didn’t know who to vote for, how to vote, how to master the issues, and how to get engaged. In short, how they could make a difference.

Focused mostly on ridings in the Greater Toronto Area — where most volunteers, and most Muslims, happen to live — the group attended hundreds of grassroots events, paid for robocalls, mounted a social media push, and knocked on thousands of doors. Celebrity endorsements were part of the campaign, including Maple Leafs forward Nazem Kadri.

The bigger stars, however, were influential imams at local mosques. Her group persuaded them to praise the virtues of civic engagement and democracy in their regular sermons.

“For the first time ever, people saw the Muslim community was organizing politically,” she told the audience. “We really felt the buzz.”

It added up to a dramatic increase in the Islamic turnout — 79 per cent in the 2015 election versus 45 per cent in the previous vote, according to public opinion research commissioned by the group. In nine GTA ridings targeted by the group, the Islamic turnout averaged 88 per cent.

The Canadian Muslim Vote doesn’t take full credit for the improvement. Community concerns were bubbling up over perceived anti-Islamic rhetoric after the Stephen Harper government talked about banning religious face coverings, and proposed a “barbaric cultural practices” snitch line.

But I asked Shafiq if lessons learned from the Muslim mobilization could be transferable to other groups in the next provincial election. She is already comparing notes with Black Vote Canada and other organizations that motivate voters.

“Without talking to them — and having people who look like them talk to them — I don’t think they will be as engaged as they could be.”

Fellow panelist Dave Meslin, a grassroots activist trying to reform the electoral system, dismissed traditional GOTV as “a scam” that merely harasses people on election day, with little evidence that it improves democratic outcomes.

“Are we really building these lists (of supporters) to make sure we increase engagement, or are the lists designed to make sure we don’t pull the wrong people — that the Liberals don’t pull Conservatives, that Conservatives don’t pull New Democrats” he asked rhetorically.

Our third panelist, ex-MP and mayoralty candidate Olivia Chow (full disclosure: like me, she is a visiting professor at Ryerson), talked about the power of motivation in democratic engagement. Participatory movements are fine in theory, but a top-down approach may leave the grassroots as unmoved — and unmotivated — as ever.

“We talk about winning hearts and minds, not minds and hearts,” Chow reminded the activists. “Hearts come first.”

But Shafiq won a round of applause when she projected an image onscreen of her grandmother voting for the first time in the 2015 election at age 85. And then came a public confession from Shafiq about herself — the great persuader.

It turns out that she had never taken an interest in politics before she took on the role with the Canadian Muslim Vote. But at the age of 25 she finally joined her 85-year-old grandmother in focusing on the election, figuring out the issues, and making up her own mind.

Because a vote — from anyone, of any persuasion — is a terrible thing to waste.

via A vote — from anyone — is a terrible thing to waste | Toronto Star

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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