CSIS faces $35-million harassment, discrimination lawsuit

2017/07/15 Leave a comment

Of the three – CSIS, Canadian Forces and RCMP – CSIS has the best visible minority  numbers:

Canada’s spy agency is being sued by five employees who are looking for upwards of $35 million in damages over allegations of years of harassment and discrimination based on their religion, race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation.

A statement of claim filed in Federal Court alleges that harassment, bullying and “abuse of authority” is rife within the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and that managers condone such behaviour.

The allegations are based on the experiences of five employees, none of whom can be legally identified within the document.

They allege that the harassment they have faced over years has caused them embarrassment, depression, anxiety and loss of income. They also allege that their complaints were ignored or dismissed by senior managers, some of whom suggested they should keep quiet out of fear of reprisal.

None of the allegations in the 54-page document have been tested in court.

In a statement, CSIS director David Vigneault says the agency does not tolerate harassment under any circumstance, which is reflected in the employee code of conduct.

Any allegations of inappropriate behaviour are taken seriously, he says.

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale have yet to respond to a request for comment.

Source: CSIS faces $35-million harassment, discrimination lawsuit – The Globe and Mail

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Young Islamists have ′very scant′ knowledge of Islam, study finds | DW | 11.07.2017

2017/07/15 Leave a comment

Interesting analysis of texts among young radicalized Muslims:

Young Muslims who become radicalized often invent a patchwork, imagined version of Islam that has little or nothing to do with the Koran. That’s the conclusion drawn by scholars at the universities of Bielefeld and Osnabrück. They’ve just published a book analyzing 5,757 messages from a WhatsApp group of 12 young men ahead of a spring 2016 terrorist attack.

The messages came from a mobile phone, seized by police, that had belonged to one of the young men involved in the attack. The researchers say that the chat offers unique insights into the radicalization process and mindset of Islamists in Germany.

The messages also illustrate the enormous differences between Islamism and Islam. Many of the self-styled “true Muslims,” the experts found, themselves have little valid knowledge of the Koran or the rest of their religion.

“The result is a kind of ‘Lego Islam’ that can be continually adapted to new requirements and in practice has nothing to do with the forms of traditional Islam practiced by the majority of mosque communities in Germany,” write co-authors Becem Dziri and Michael Kiefer.

The authors omitted the names of those involved in the chat and didn’t specify the attack, although the time reference strongly suggests that it was the bombing of a Sikh temple in Essen in April 2016. At the time it was reported that the young people involved in that attack were radicalized via social media, and three of them, all teenagers, were later convicted of attempted murder and conspiracy to murder.

Deutschland Anschlag auf Sikh Tempel in Essen (picture-alliance/AP Photo/M. Kusch)Luckily no one was killed in the temple bombing

Budding Islamists mix jihad and genies

The conversations leading up to that act of violence suggest that the youths were willing to kill for a faith of which they had only a rudimentary understanding.

“The religious education within the group is very scant,” writes co-author Rauf Ceylan. “Often they didn’t even know the simplest Islamic theological basics. The members of the group are laymen and autodidacts who pick and choose information from the internet and communicate it to the rest of the group.”

Excerpts from the chats often seem like comedy sketches sprinkled with sometimes misused Arabic words and phrases and English slang. In one, a participant responds to a self-appointed leader’s call for a meeting to discuss the jama’a (group) by saying he didn’t have any Islamic clothing. The leader responds: “You can also were sweatpants or something like that. If you want I can loan you something for the day.”

Another message reveals that the author doesn’t even own a copy of Islam’s main religious text.

“I need a Koran,” he writes. “I’ll get one soon from lies [a Salafist group that gives away Korans on the street in Germany]. If I see abu nagi, I’ll tell him he’s a kafir [infidel] because he thinks erdogan [sic] is a Muslim.”

When asked what the most absurd detail of the chats was, Ceylan told DW that participants interwove the belief in magical genies in their pseudo-theology.

“Over the course of the chat protocol, you can see how a religious world gets invented in which supernatural beings can have real effects on the young men,” Ceylan said. “They take fragments of the Koran and cobble them together. That’s why we call it ‘Lego Islam.'”

Salafisten verteilen Korane (picture-alliance/dpa/B.Roessler)Salafists pass out free Korans on German streets

Careers as ‘pop preachers’

Scholars also say that the chat illustrates the process by which young Muslims get radicalized. Key is the role of the “amir,” the self-appointed leader, who “instructed” the others despite lacking any theological credentials himself.

“He’s an alpha male like you have in school,” Ceylan told Deutsche Welle. “The people who act as Salafist preachers aren’t theologians. They’re people who have sometimes failed in life, but if they have a gift for being alpha males, they can become superstars overnight. This shouldn’t be underestimated. You can make a whole career of being a pop preacher.”

The second ingredient in the making of a radical Islamist, the scholars explain, is a young person with the right biography. Emancipation from parents – becoming an adult – gets conflated with emancipation from the mainstream community as one of the “chosen ones.” Ceylan cites the example of a young man who became radical after discovering that his father was having an affair and telling his mother, which led to a divorce.

“These are fundamentally young people who are trying to overcome a crisis in their lives or a biological ruptures,” said Ceylan. “The timing is crucial. Who do I meet in this phase?”

Social media platforms often play a role in radicalizing young people

The importance of language

Ceylan says that although bogus theology is part of the problem, religious instruction is not enough to combat radicalization. He calls for more money for German language imams, psychological therapists in prisons, where many young people get radicalized, and interventions in schools.

“These young people don’t get radicalized secretly, as the chat protocols show,” Ceylan said. “Their teachers see that something’s not right. A kid grows his beard out or starts saying more and more radical things. And the parents see it before everyone else.”

Above all, Ceylan says, those who do intervene with young people susceptible to Islamism need to speak the right language.

“The characteristics of the charismatic ‘self-made’ preachers…are that they speak German, use young people’s slang, make a theatrical impression, display street credibility and present themselves cleverly. That, together with the simplicity of what they teach, makes them attractive to young people.”

Source: Young Islamists have ′very scant′ knowledge of Islam, study finds | TOP STORIES | DW | 11.07.2017

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Kiff: Disproportionate funding goes to media linked to Falun Gong | Ottawa Citize

2017/07/14 Leave a comment

Interesting analysis and valid questions. Given that Kiff is a principle of a lobbying firm (Solstice), this may not be a completely altruistic commentary which does not detract from the evidence presented:

While most of Canada’s conventional media have endured shrinking audiences and revenues in recent years, segments of the ethnic media have seen significant growth thanks to a constant influx of immigrants from all over the world.

In the Greater Toronto Area alone, there are about 120 ethnic media channels targeting various audiences. The number of Chinese daily newspapers has grown from about five in the 1990s to more than 50 in 2015.

According to Statistics Canada, in 2011, 13 ethnic communities had populations of more than one million, and others had sizeable and growing populations. Demographic projections indicate that by 2031, nearly half (46 per cent) of Canadians aged 15 and older could be foreign-born, or could have at least one foreign-born parent, up from 39 per cent in 2006.

With those numbers, the ethnic media sector in Canada is bound to keep on expanding.

The Canada Media Fund (CMF) helps to support this growth. It was created by the Department of Canadian Heritage back in 2010 with a mandate to foster, promote and finance the production of Canadian content and relevant applications for all audiovisual media platforms. Various CMF programs support productions reflecting Canadian diversity.

A closer look at the projects backed by the Canada Media Fund reveals some surprising funding patterns going back to 2010. Several production companies affiliated with New Tang Dynasty TV (NTDTV) have received close to $18 million in funding over six years compared to the combined total of about $13 million for other ethnic media outlets.

Studios with ties to NTDTV have received 43 per cent of the funding allocated through the Diverse Languages Program and have produced the near totality of funded projects in the Mandarin and Cantonese languages.

According to Wikipedia, NTDTV is a television broadcaster based in New York City with correspondents in more than 70 cities worldwide. The station was founded in 2001 as a Chinese-language broadcaster by practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice banned by the Chinese Communist Party.

NTDTV’s Canadian operation, with offices in North York, officially launched on March 28, 2012 on Shaw Cable. It is also available on Novus Entertainment in Vancouver and on Bell Fibe TV and Rogers Cable in Eastern Canada. It is unclear how many viewers NTDTV reaches in Canada.

So why does this relatively unknown broadcaster outside of the Chinese community, and its affiliated production companies, get what seems to be a disproportionate amount of funding compared to other ethnic broadcasters? Why are almost all funded Chinese-language projects produced for this broadcaster?

And what is known about the content of the material produced for a broadcaster with clear ties to a religious sect? Why, for example, are at least three funded projects linked to Shen Yun, the huge performing arts arm of Falun Gong that tours extensively throughout the world? Many critics have noted that this production’s overtly political content and proselytizing supersede its artistic merit.

When I spoke to the Canada Media Fund to confirm these figures, they pointed out that CMF is an independent non-partisan body and that CMF does not intervene in the subject-matter of funded projects, recognizing each production’s creative value and freedom of speech.

That is fine, as far as it goes. But, in this case an unexpected result is occurring.

Canada takes pride in its pluralistic and nonsectarian society. In spite of the CMF’s explanations, it seems odd and most un-Canadian that so much public funding is being allocated to a fringe religious group.

It is time for a bit more sunshine on what is occurring here.

Source: Kiff: Disproportionate funding goes to media linked to Falun Gong | Ottawa Citizen

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George Soros: Hungarian government posters ‘anti-Semitic’ – BBC News

2017/07/14 Leave a comment

Sad:

Financier George Soros has accused the Hungarian government of using “anti-Semitic imagery” in its poster campaign against him.

Mr Soros has been vilified in a campaign costing the right-wing Fidesz government an estimated 5.7bn forints (£16.3m; $21m).

Many Hungarian Jews fear that open or concealed anti-Semitism lies behind the campaign, which the government denies.

This is the first time US-based Mr Soros, 86, has echoed that fear.

However, he also thanked those who had made it their mission to tear the posters down.

The most recent series of posters – many of which have had anti-Semitic graffiti scrawled on them – show a grinning Mr Soros beside the words, “Don’t let Soros have the last laugh”.

The slogan is a reference to the government’s claim the philanthropist is working to settle a million migrants in the EU.

A poster showing George Soros, on which someone has written Image copyrightAKOS STILLER
Image captionA poster showing Mr Soros, saying “Let’s not allow Soros to have the last laugh!” Someone has written “dirty Jew” on his forehead

In a statement, Hungarian-born Mr Soros said: “I am distressed by the current Hungarian regime’s use of anti-Semitic imagery as part of its deliberate disinformation campaign.

“Equally, I am heartened that together with countless fellow citizens the leadership of the Hungarian Jewish community has spoken out against the campaign.”

Mr Soros has spent $12bn, mostly through his Open Society Foundations, on civil initiatives to reduce poverty and increase transparency, and on scholarships and universities around the world, especially in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, since the 1980s.

It has seen him come up against Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has declared war on liberalism.

Most recently, the university Mr Soros founded has come under attack after MPs passed a bill which could force it out of Hungary.

The posters have also drawn anger from outside the country.

Guy Verhofstadt, the chief Brexit negotiator at the European Parliament and leader of the Parliament’s liberals, wrote on Facebook: “The Hungarian regime’s xenophobia and demonization of refugees are anti-European. The claim that Soros is promoting a scheme to import a million illegal immigrants into Europe is Victor Orban’s fantasy. Darkness falls in Hungary. We cannot let this happen.”

Source: George Soros: Hungarian government posters ‘anti-Semitic’ – BBC News

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Jagmeet Singh’s Quebec problem: Paul Wells

2017/07/14 1 Comment

There have been a series of articles on the problems posed by Singh’s candidacy in Quebec. This one by Paul Wells goes into more detail than most, other good ones are by Konrad Yakabuski ( Singh complicates the NDP’s Quebec quandary ) and John Ibbitson ( In Jagmeet Singh, a unifying figure with divisive potential ):

The second most-popular story on Le Devoir‘s website as I write this is about mounting anxiety in the Quebec wing of the NDP over Jagmeet Singh’s candidacy for the party’s leadership. “Several activists are panicking” at the thought, the story says.

The problem? Singh, a practicing Sikh, wears a turban and kirpan. “To have a leader who’d wear ostentatious signs” of his religious affiliation, “we are not ready,” Pierre Dionne Labelle, who was an NDP MP from 2011 to 2015, says on the record. “Would I be at ease with that? I don’t think so.”

This is the first time Le Devoir has found a New Democrat willing to speak on the record about concerns over Singh’s candidacy. Several others seem willing to share similar concerns off the record. The story also adds two cases where Singh’s positions in provincial politics could arguably have been influenced by his religious beliefs: a private member’s bill that sought to exempt Sikhs from having to wear motorcycle helmets, and a member’s statement over the provincial Liberal government’s controversial changes to the primary-school sex-education curriculum.

I could quibble with the latter of these examples. Singh’s statement on the sex-ed curriculum could have been made by Patrick Brown, the province’s Conservative leader, who is not Sikh. “The lack of inclusive consultation before announcing the curriculum was disrespectful to parents in my constituency,” part of Singh’s little speech, is a stock line in much of the opposition to the curriculum change.

But it’s less interesting to debate these points than to note that the anxiety Le Devoir chronicles exists, that it’s a challenge to the Singh candidacy, and to try to understand why these concerns are being expressed most loudly by the NDP’s Quebec wing.

Luckily we have a recent poll to guide us.

On June 26 the Angus Reid Institute published the results of surveys in the United States and Canada on attitudes towards diversity in political leadership. The Canadian results come from a randomized sample of 1,533 members of Angus Reid’s online panel; full methodology can be found here. Respondents were asked whether they would vote for a party led by a woman, a gay man, a man or woman wearing a religious head covering, and so on. This produced all sorts of fun cross-border comparisons—68 per cent of Canadians expect an atheist Prime Minister in the next 25 years, against only 37 per cent of Americans who expect an atheist President. But the internalsfrom the poll suggest other useful comparisons. Here’s the Canadian regional table showing responses for various questions that begin, “Would you yourself consider voting for a party led by a person who is…”

 

Screenshot 2017-07-11 13.20.30

Support for a Sikh-led party is only 46 per cent in Quebec, the lowest regional score in the country by eight points. On the generic “…man who wears a religious head-covering,” support is lowest in Quebec by 12 points. Support is also lowest in Quebec for parties led by Muslims, by Jews, and indeed by evangelical Christians.

This would probably be a good time for this Maclean’swriter to say the Angus Reid data don’t show a generalized inability among Quebec respondents to show “openness” to “difference.” No, the results are way more interesting than that. In fact, Quebec respondents were markedly more likely than respondents in the rest of Canada to support parties led by a gay man, a lesbian or an atheist. And there was no marked difference between Quebecers and other respondents when the hypothetical party leader was transgender, Indigenous, black or a woman.

In no other part of the country do the results line up as they do in Quebec: markedly less likely to support parties whose leaders wear some visible sign of their religious affiliation, markedly more likely to do so if their difference is expressed in some other way besides religion.

There’s an obvious explanation for this, but it rarely gets mentioned whenever the debate over so-called “reasonable accommodations” rears its head in Quebec or outside. It’s that Quebec has a markedly different cultural history with organized and visible religion than much of the rest of Canada.

Many older Quebecers, those whose memories stretch back before the mid-1960s at least, have personal memories of a time when the Roman Catholic church had a strong influence over public affairs. Even most younger Quebecers will have been taught, in great detail, about the period before the Quiet Revolution. And the Catholic church was pretty big on ostentatious displays of religious affiliation.

(You needn’t take my word on any of this. Marie McAndrew, a professor at the Université de Montréal’s faculty of education, has written often and thoughtfully on the “reasonable accommodations” debate and its cultural roots. In this representative piece, she writes: “…[W]e must remember that the people of Quebec who are of French-Canadian origin have a specific and usually more negative relationship with religion than people in the rest of Canada…. For most people born before the 1960s, in fact, the association between religion and public space evokes bad memories or at least memories that are incompatible with their democratic ideals.”)

The Quiet Revolution in Quebec was specifically a rebellion against religious influence. Progressive politics in many other parts of the country has been a politics of generalized tolerance; in Quebec progressive politics was often a politics of specific resistance. I lived in Quebec for five years and have written about its politics in instalments for nearly a quarter-century since, and I find this is one element of the debate over religion and politics that’s hardest for many non-Quebecers to grasp: suspicion of religion in politics is often a progressive impulse in Quebec politics. (Emphasis on “often,” as in, “of course not always, in Quebec or anywhere else.”)

Source: Jagmeet Singh’s Quebec problem – Macleans.ca

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When words become weapons, repression follows: Paris

2017/07/13 Leave a comment

Good column by Erna Paris – words matter:

It appears we can become accustomed to anything, provided it’s repeated often enough. What may have appalled us last year, or the year before, eventually loses its edge and is rendered normal. Think of the way highway speeding ratchets up as drivers accelerate to maintain the faster flow of traffic.

Something similar happens with language. Words accelerate. Without thoughtful restraint, they are like speeding cars, prone to accident.

Before Sept. 11, 2001, there existed a tacit consensus in Western pluralist societies that generalizations about race and religion might be destructive to the public good: the living memory of 20th-century atrocities largely sufficed to keep the most extreme animosities in check. These unspoken taboos were frequently breached, but racist speech was ordinarily frowned upon and usually did not sink deep roots. When the protective umbrella of taboo failed, as in the former Yugoslavia after the death of Josip Tito, for example, predictable violence ensued. Words matter, especially when they emanate from people in high places.

Since 9/11 and the advent of “the war on terror,” open, or dog-whistle, anti-Muslim rhetoric has increased exponentially as taboos have loosened. In the immediate aftermath, governments in Russia, China and elsewhere were happy to label their troublesome minorities “terrorists,” thus whitewashing repression. It became common to hear insinuating generalizations about Muslims.

Just last month, Statistics Canada reported that hate crimes against Muslims rose 60 per cent in 2015, alone. This is not surprising. That year encompassed Stephen Harper’s niqab and “barbaric cultural practices” initiatives. It was also the year of the failed Quebec Charter of Values that directly targeted Muslims.

With his darkly nativist rhetoric, U.S. President Donald Trump has upped the ante. He need not attack directly; in order to communicate his discriminatory message, he need only exact a travel ban on people from six predominately Muslim countries, or make atavistic speeches about the decline of Western civilization, as he recently did in Poland. We don’t yet know where his unfettered rhetoric will lead. What we do know is that he has opened Pandora’s Box – the place where we have historically guarded our protective taboos. From his White House perch, he has liberated people who used to keep their prejudices to themselves, if only for fear of social reprobation.

Citizens in liberal democracies expect their leaders to wield power responsibly and – excepting the rhetorical opportunism of Mr. Harper and others, such as Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch – Canadians in high places usually do. That’s why it was particularly troubling to see Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard fall into a trap last month when he said, with regard to a terrorist act perpetrated by a Quebecois: “Unfortunately, you cannot disconnect this type of event – terrorism – from Islam in general.” Since Mr. Couillard is said to be a history buff, it is odd that he did not understand the import of language that conflated the entirety of Islam with the acts of a few. Wouldn’t he have known that the biblical texts of all three Mosaic religions contain writings in support of both war and peace, depending on one’s preference? It is not a defence of violence to note that, across history, all three religions have traversed periods of extremism, such as the Spanish Inquisition (Christianity) and, more recently, the fanatic Jewish settlers in Israel’s Occupied Territories whose religious claims to the land eschew the rights of others.

Mr. Couillard claimed to be echoing a speech made by French President Emmanuel Macron, but the situation in France is not comparable. France has miles to go before there is trust enough to enable co-operation between its Muslim population and the country’s political leadership, while in Canada, mutual co-operation already exists to a high degree. When Mr. Couillard held Islam and the Muslim community responsible for the acts of some of its members, he accelerated the traffic on the rhetorical highway, encouraging bigotry.

My husband, Tom, likes to rail about the damage that’s been done across time by the little word “all” – as in “all Muslims are ‘X’” or “all Jews are ‘Y.’” He’s right; words are not innocent. We are each responsible for maintaining the civility of public discourse, but people in positions of leadership hold a special trust. They set the rhetorical standard. And they must be held accountable.

Source: When words become weapons, repression follows – The Globe and Mail

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Douglas Todd: Forgotten struggle for Canadian ‘unity’ leads to ‘silos’

2017/07/13 Leave a comment

The language-related tensions in Richmond have been simmering for some time, whether over Chinese-language signage only or this disturbing example of condo board proceedings (even if private bodies are not required to use English or French).

In terms of how widespread these kinds of issues are, Dan Hiebert’s various studies indicate Canada’s ethnic enclaves more diverse than you think, study finds. And overall, I don’t find the government’s message only being about diversity given the common values language that it also uses.

This may be more of an issue in Richmond (that should be taken seriously) than widespread, which is, accordingly to the 2011 NHS, 53 percent of East and Southeast Asian origin:

Andreas Kargut moved out of Richmond forever on the weekend that Canada marked its 150th anniversary.

The effort that Kargut, his immigrant wife and others put into fighting for the right to have their strata council meetings conducted in English, not Mandarin, had caused too much grief.

Kargut and six others filed a complaint last year with the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal because they couldn’t participate in the Mandarin-only meetings in their 54-unit complex.

Former B.C. premier Ujjal Dosanjh lamented how the strata council’s discrimination against Kargut illustrated the rise of ethnic and language “silos” in Canada. But Kargut said local politicians ignored their plight.

The language battle in Richmond, where half of residents are ethnic Chinese, is one of many challenges to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and many small-l liberals who proclaim that diversity can only be celebrated.

While creativity definitely can emerge within the many manifestations of diversity, liberal platitudes censor questions about the real tensions that can also be provoked by diversity, a word that means difference.

Trudeau is among those heading into dangerous territory because he is not following the example of his prime minister father, Pierre, in standing up for English and French — and for the ideal of unity.

“When my parents immigrated from Germany, they knew there was an expectation for them to learn English so they could join the workforce and earn a living to provide for their family,” Kargut said in a posting on a Facebook page called Richmond’s Changing Neighbourhoods.

“Why is it then if a person immigrates from China they don’t need to learn English and can discriminate against English-speaking Canadians to the point of causing financial hardship?”

Many Canadians are asking similar questions. The Pew Foundation discovered only 21 per cent of Canadians believe place of birth is important to whether one is an authentic citizen (one of the lowest rates in the world).

But Canadians do care about English and French. Three in five Canadians agreed “being able to speak our national language(s) is very important for being truly Canadian.”

The dispute over language barriers is not only worrying whites. Longtime resident Ken Tin Lok Wong told Richmond News many of the city’s controversial Chinese-only signs are in a dialect known mainly to newcomers from the People’s Republic of China, which Wong says signals many are not willing to integrate.

Yet it’s Kargus’s departure from Metro Vancouver that is one of the more stark illustrations of self-segregation in this city, in Toronto and in Montreal, which are becoming increasingly defined by ethnic and language enclaves, whether South Asian, Chinese or European.

The kind of frustration felt by Kargut is something liberals in the U.S. are finally starting to note — as they try to come to terms with why the diversity-celebrating Democrats are constantly losing election campaigns.

Atlantic magazine has two articles in this month’s edition exploring why Hillary Clinton alienated former supporters among the white suburban and working classes, while methodically wooing Hispanic and black voters.

In “How the Democrats’ Lost Their Way on Immigration,” Peter Beinart notes one of Clinton’s prominent campaign images showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.

“Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity,” says Peter Beinart, who credits Barack Obama with the ability to do both. Justin Trudeau doesn’t perform the balancing act, but his father stood up for ‘national unity.”

Barack Obama would not have done that, Beinart says. The former president once said he felt frustration when he’s “forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car.”

With the National Academies of Sciences recently reporting new immigrants to the U.S. are learning English more slowly than their predecessors, Beinart maintains Democrats should put teaching immigrants English at the centre of their immigration agenda.

“Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact he — a black man with a Muslim-sounding name — twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Forgotten struggle for Canadian ‘unity’ leads to ‘silos’ | Vancouver Sun

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The never-ending argument over what is “real Islam”

2017/07/13 Leave a comment

Good piece and advice from The Economist:

IN THE commentariat, the world of higher learning (religious and otherwise) and the corridors of political power, the long-running, hot-tempered debate about the real nature of Islam shows no sign of reaching a conclusion. The temperature rises every time some ghastly act of violence is perpetrated by people who say they are inspired by their Muslim beliefs. Broadly it pits those who think that killers who practise violence in Islam’s name are traducing the faith and perhaps mis-stating their own motives, up against those who insist that Islam’s core beliefs (and not just some idosyncratic version of them) can easily prompt people to take up the sword.

Sam Harris, an atheist public intellectual, is among the best-known advocates of the second view. Despite the change of guard at the White House, and the apparent conversion of Donald Trump to a slightly more emollient view of Islam, Mr Harris is still pouring scorn on Barack Obama for insisting that Islam was at heart a religion of peace. Another person whose views Mr Harris excoriates is Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim thinker who combines leftist political ideas with fairly traditional religious ones. Mr Ramadan incurs the American writer’s contempt when he argues that political, economic or geopolitical grievance, rather than any Muslim beliefs, motivate the terrorist group known as Islamic State (IS).

In a new twist of the argument, Mr Harris has published a podcast, lasting nearly two hours, in which he discusses these matters with Graeme Wood, an author and reporter who has travelled the world interviewing prominent members or supporters of IS and probing their motives and intentions. Both broadly agree that some widely held Muslim beliefs, especially those connected with the world’s end times and the battles portending that era, are important drivers of violent behaviour. But this emphasis has been dismissed as “deeply wrong” by Phil Torres, author of a book entitled “The End: What Science and Religion Tell Us About the Apocalypse”. His book argues that apocalyptic ideas could easily become self-fulfilling. But he also observes that bloodshed (and other dramatic events) in the here-and-now are the real reasons why people suddenly start to think about the final acts in history.

All participants in this discussion merit a hearing. Mr Harris and Mr Wood do a decent job of demolishing some of the more simplistic arguments used to support the views they dislike. For example, the point is often made that many of the people who become jihadis, whether they are converts or Muslim by birth, lack theological sophistication. Indeed, at least one was found to be studying a book with the self-explanatory title, “Islam for dummies”. So, the argument goes, being extremely Muslim and being extremely violent do not seem to go together.

The point about non-sophistication may be true as far it goes, but as both Mr Harris and Mr Wood agree, a person can be very passionate about a belief system without fully understanding its details. And there is no guarantee that even if those details were fully mastered, they would prompt the learner to behave in more peaceful ways. To put it bluntly, jihadis may indeed be theologically ignorant, but that does not prove that a sound theological education would make them more peaceful. (That said, there may be plenty of other reasons for encouraging nuanced theological awareness.)

Mr Wood’s research has reinforced his view that IS is much more apocalyptic in its mentality than earlier jihadi movements such as al-Qaeda. IS propagandists take seriously the notion that Dabiq, a location in northern Syria, will witness a titanic battle between Islamic forces and those of “Rome”—which might mean anything from NATO to the Christian world to the constitutionally secular republic of Turkey. Also widespread is the expectation that an Antichrist figure known as Dajjal will emerge (possibly from an island in the Red Sea) and kill Muslim fighters until Jesus returns to earth and leads the faithful to victory. (Jesus is the second-most-revered prophet in Islam after Muhammad.)

Mr Torres agrees that these beliefs are widely held and significant, but also asks why this is now the case. It was the 2003 assault by America and Britain on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq which turned many Sunni Muslims to end-time thinking, he notes: “prior to the US invasion, Sunni Muslims were uninterested in apocalypticism.” He points out that apocalyptic thinking is most widespread in the two countries where American-led armies have entered in force, Iraq and Afghanistan. As Mr Torres sees things, apocalyptic obsessions can be both a result and a cause of real-world violence.

So how can the “true nature” of Islam, or any other religion, be determined? It might be helpful to divide statements about this into two categories. First, there are value judgments, usually made from inside the boundaries of one’s belief system. This includes statements from religious authority figures such as: “Having studied and reflected on the matter, I believe the real message of our religion’s founder(s) is…” Such messages can have moral force even if they run completely counter to the way in which most followers of a religion have, in practice, acted.

In the second basket are historical or sociological statements, which can be made by any fair-minded observer. These are on the long lines of: “Whatever the prophets and scriptures of this religion may teach, it’s an observable fact that hundreds of millions of followers of this faith behave in certain ways, and that they root this stance in their religious world view.” You might call it a behaviourist approach. In the case of modern Islam, one would have to concede that a not-insignificant number of Muslims are, in some cases, prepared to condone religious violence. But they are far outnumbered by the hundreds of millions of Muslims who live peaceful, law-abiding lives and hope that others will do the same. These are statements which can be debated, investigated, affirmed or falsified in a way that religious statements cannot.

For figures of secular authority, be they American presidents, counter-terrorism officials or even opinion-makers, it is often best to stick to the second kind of statement. The “real” nature of a religion, if such a concept has any meaning at all, is hard for an outsider to determine, and certainly well beyond the remit of a more-or-less secular state.

Source: The never-ending argument over what is “real Islam”

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

Cimetière musulman: Saint-Apollinaire sous tension | Le Devoir

2017/07/13 Leave a comment

Hard to understand the nature of the opposition and we will know on Sunday the results of the referendum:

On saura dimanche si le projet de cimetière musulman de Saint-Apollinaire sera accepté ou non par référendum. Plongée malgré elle au coeur du délicat débat identitaire, la petite ville espère maintenant qu’elle n’en sortira pas trop désunie ou étiquetée.

« Dans n’importe quelle petite communauté comme la nôtre, tu aurais eu le même débat », a dit le maire Bernard Ouellet lors d’une rencontre à son bureau mardi. « J’ai reçu des courriels des quatre coins de la province là-dessus. »

Pour lui, le débat qui secoue la petite ville aurait dû se faire à une plus grande échelle. « Que voulez-vous, c’est nous qui sommes au bâton avec ça… »

Saint-Apollinaire se trouve dans la région de Chaudière-Appalaches, à une trentaine de minutes de Québec. La consultation a ceci de particulier que seulement 47 personnes sur 6000 habitants pourront voter, puisque les anciennes règles encadrant les référendums municipaux ne permettent qu’aux voisins immédiats de se prononcer.

Ces dernières semaines, les camps du «Oui» et du «Non» se sont succédé dans le rang de la Prairie-Grillée pour rallier les électeurs. « On est rendus à sept visites, sans compter les fois où on n’était pas là », a raconté un résidant favorable au projet qui a préféré taire son nom. Pourquoi rester anonyme ? « Parce que j’ai des voisins qui se sont prononcés contre, je ne veux pas brasser tout ça. […] Ma plus grande crainte, c’est pour Saint-Apollinaire. C’est une belle municipalité, et j’ai peur qu’on lui accole une étiquette. »

De l’autre côté du rang, un jeune homme nous a carrément envoyés paître. « Je ne veux rien savoir », a-t-il lancé sans préciser s’il ne voulait rien savoir du cimetière… ou des médias.

Rappelons que le projet vise à construire un cimetière musulman à côté d’un site funéraire multiconfessionnel déjà existant près de l’autoroute. Il est piloté par la grande mosquée de Québec, celle-là même qui a été frappée par l’attentat du 31 janvier.

« On se bat contre le racisme », affirme sans ambages le promoteur Sylvain Roy du centre funéraire Harmonia. « Ils sont contre l’implantation d’une culture dans un milieu qu’ils veulent conserver 100 % québécois. »

Photo: Francis Vachon Le DevoirSylvain Roy, du centre funéraire Harmonia, offre le terrain derrière lui pour la réalisation du cimetière musulman espéré depuis longtemps par la grande mosquée de Québec.

« Les gens ont véhiculé toutes sortes de faussetés, déplore-t-il. On a dit que les musulmans enterraient leurs morts sans cercueil, trop près de la surface du sol… Tout ça, c’est faux. »

Le voisin immédiat du complexe funéraire, M. Henri Baril, ne voit quant à lui aucun problème à cette cohabitation éventuelle. « Ça ne devrait déranger personne, on a tous droit à un enterrement respectueux », résume-t-il. « De toute façon, que ce soit des musulmans, des Anglais, des Italiens, des Russes, des catholiques ou des non-catholiques, on meurt tous un jour. »

Que voulez-vous, c’est nous qui sommes au bâton avec ça…

Bernard Ouellet, maire de Saint-Apollinaire

Le « Non » pressenti

Sur place, la plupart des gens s’attendent à une victoire du « Non ». « J’ai bien peur que ça ne passe pas, nous a dit le maire. Je serais agréablement surpris si ça fonctionne. »

Le propriétaire d’Harmonia est du même avis. « Si les gens favorables vont voter, ça risque de passer, mais d’habitude, les gens qui sont contre vont plus voter. »

M. Baril, lui, croit que les opposants ne sont « pas si nombreux », mais se font « plus entendre ». Il a aussi trouvé les partisans du « Non » très insistants lors de leur passage chez lui. « C’était presque du harcèlement. Ça ne finissait plus. »

De son côté, la représentante du comité du « Non », Sunny Létourneau, dit n’avoir aucune idée des résultats auxquels on doit s’attendre. Cette commerçante aussi a hâte qu’on passe à autre chose. « Ça crée un malaise terrible dans la municipalité. Ça crée des divisions, des tensions familiales. »

Si certains membres de son groupe n’ont pas hésité à tenir des propos ouvertement racistes dans le débat, Mme Létourneau se défend bien d’en être.

« On ne dit pas non aux musulmans, on dit non au projet actuel de la mosquée [de Québec]. » « Je ne veux pas qu’on associe le comité du “Non” au racisme, parce qu’il y en a seulement quelques-uns. On dit non à un changement de zonage, ce n’est pas juste pour une question religieuse. »

Elle-même dit qu’il ne faut pas « mettre tous les musulmans dans le même panier ». En entrevue, elle s’interroge sur l’expertise d’Harmonia à faire des enterrements et dit craindre que les gens de la grande mosquée de Québec négligent l’entretien de leur cimetière une fois qu’il sera installé.

La grande mosquée de Québec devrait selon elle s’insérer dans un cimetière multiconfessionnel comme à Saint-Augustin, où des familles ont acquis des lots dans un cimetière catholique. Elle a d’ailleurs pris part à l’inauguration du carré musulman à Saint-Augustin.

Or c’est complètement différent, rétorque M. Roy. « La communauté musulmane veut un cimetière confessionnel, une terre sacrée où ils peuvent déposer leurs morts selon les principes du Coran. » Le porte-parole de la mosquée, Mohammed Kesri, a d’ailleurs été choqué d’entendre que l’initiative de Saint-Augustin constituait un cimetière musulman.

Quand on fait remarquer qu’il aurait pu miser sur un lieu plus habitué à la présence d’immigrants que Saint-Apollinaire, M. Kesri rétorque qu’il n’avait pas le choix. « Ça fait 10 ans, 15 ans qu’on cherche. C’est la seule place où on a eu une offre ! » dit-il.

Les résultats du référendum doivent être dévoilés dimanche vers 20 h. Les terrains de ce genre son si ardus à trouver, assure M. Kesri, que même si le « Non » l’emporte, il est prêt à continuer à défendre le projet à Saint-Apollinaire. « Mais c’est sûr que si le 17 il y a un maire quelque part près de Québec qui nous dit que c’est possible d’établir un cimetière musulman ailleurs, ce sera avec plaisir ! »

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Canadian tech companies say they value diversity — but what are they doing about it? 

2017/07/12 Leave a comment

Good and needed reporting – particularly surprised with the lack of response of the larger companies (to be fair, Blackberry had bigger survival issues):

After U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January blocking citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S., a long list of Canadian tech companies signed a pledge opposing the ban.

Members of Canada’s tech community saw Trump’s move as a rejection of the diversity on which they felt their industry was built and decided to speak out.

“We believe that this diversity is a source of strength and opportunity,” read the open letter admonishing the ban, which was signed by executives and employees from some of the most well-known companies in the country — BlackBerry, Hootsuite, Shopify and more.

But when CBC News sought to gauge what this commitment to diversity looks like in practice, Canada’s tech community had remarkably little to say.

In May, we asked 31 Canadian technology companies if they collected data on the diversity of their employees, and if so, whether they would share this data with CBC News.

Only two companies — OTTO Motors, the commercial division of Waterloo, Ont.-based Clearpath Robotics, a maker of self-driving warehouse robots, and the Toronto-based investing app Wealthsimple — were willing to do so.

A third company, the Toronto-based online retail marketing startup Hubba, said it was preparing to conduct its first diversity survey and release the results in the coming month. It expects to publish a report on its progress every six months thereafter.

The sheer number of holdouts came as a surprise to Y-Vonne Hutchinson, founder of Oakland, Calif.-based diversity solutions firm ReadySet, in particular, given the number of U.S. companies that have published annual reports since 2014.

“It does make me question their commitment to diversity and inclusion,” said Hutchinson, who is also on the team behind Project Include, which guides tech startups toward more diverse and inclusive practices. The project’s founding members include well-known diversity advocates such as Ellen Pao and Tracy Chou.

“By publishing these numbers, you increase transparency and accountability around how the organization looks and the way in which it prioritizes diversity and inclusion,” Hutchinson said.

Mostly white, mostly male

Many companies in tech and beyond have realized the key to building successful products and services is to have a range of employees — ones who think and look differently from one another — working together to solve problems.

The idea is that employees with varying backgrounds and skills can bring unique perspectives that aren’t necessarily represented by the tech sectors white, male majority.

That’s where diversity reports can help. One way for a company to better understand the types of people it employs — and where the gaps are — is to quantify that information and use it to build more diverse teams.

But that’s not to say measuring the problem alone leads to change. As recently as 2016, we learned that just 145 of Facebook’s nearly 8,500 employees are black. We learned that 12 per cent of Apple employees are Hispanic, versus just four per cent at Google.

And we learned that Uber has an engineering department where only 15 per cent of employees are women — a telling statistic for a company still smarting from a searing indictment of its workplace culture by one of its former engineers and the sexual harassment investigations launched in its wake.

Among the industry’s biggest players, there has been little progress in recent years.

Diversity reports also don’t include as much information as some would like — for example, how long employees stay, which can tell a story of its own, or how many employees are disabled or identify as LGTBQ. In their most basic form, they typically provide a snapshot of how tech’s most-influential companies are doing across job categories in terms of gender and race.

Yet in Canada, there have been no comparable public efforts to date.

Little to say

The companies approached by CBC News ranged from some of the largest and well-known in the country — including BlackBerry, Shopify and Hootsuite — to up-and-coming players such as ecobee, Thalmic and Breather.

We sent each company the following questions:

  • Does your company collect data on the diversity of your employees?
  • ​How is this data collected?
  • Why do you collect this data?
  • Can you provide your company’s most recently collected diversity data to CBC News?
  • Can you offer any details about programs/initiatives to support diversity and inclusion at your company?

The overwhelming majority of companies declined to participate while two of the biggest names in Canadian tech, BlackBerry and Hootsuite, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Provided-Info.png

E-commerce company Shopify said it was still analyzing its employee data and was hoping to have more information to share by the fall “or early next year.”

Others, such as the messaging app Kik and the satellite imaging company Urthecast, said they didn’t have the resources to collect this sort of information and would not say how long it would take to do so.

Many more, including ecobee, Wave, WattPad, Vision Critical, Lightspeed, Bench, TopHat, Vidyard, Sandvine and Hopper, said they didn’t formally collect diversity information.

Source: Canadian tech companies say they value diversity — but what are they doing about it? – Technology & Science – CBC News

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